So, oppinions people? Was it Riff in one of his more lucid periods? Was it the plumbers? Was it the room's previous occupant (which may have been Alt-Rain Riff?)? Was it Rammer? Fredom Fighters?

Does anyone think Riff has taken this path before? After all, we did get to see Leo give him the box of flanges...

I think we've established that Riff responds well to the happy drugs, and when this arc started, he was decidedly unhappy. He's had 5 long mornings and he has cloudy memories of events we haven't seen over a several month long period. So, yeah, we've played this game before. The only difference is that this time we get to see what happens.

So, do you think Riff is the one who hijacked the robot, and left himself a note?

I wouldn't put it past him to leave himself a method of periodically breaking the cycle. He's also fixing his own pipes so its debatable how many would have access to that particular area. Its doubtful that he could have broken the first cycle on his own though, which is probably where Rammer fits in.

Who has access depends how far the pipe runs extend... Heck, there could be a whole underground society living in the bowels of the city....

If the happy drugs are laced into thw water, then whomever controls the pipes controls the city.

So, Leo is involved with the (hopefully) nascent insurgency. He seemed like a pretty stand-up guy in Sluggy Prime, for the short time he was present.

He's also aware of how many long mornings Riff has had, and how long Riff has been in 4U City. That's a lot of knowledge for a plumber, working in a whole separate department than Riff.

Rammer is a leading figure in the insurgency, while Leo is more a footsoldier, monitoring Riff (and presumably others who are being slowly detoxed).

Otherwise, I'd go with Riff being the one who left the notes, the hijacked y-frame, and also for the absence of pie (besides, who else would know Riff would react so well to the mere promise of pie?). He's had 5 long mornings, over a four month period. There were 5 separate dailies of him getting doiked by Matty for insufficient happiness. Maybe those 5 days were slices of the five long mornings he had, during which time he managed to get lucid enough to make a plan, which is only now bearing fruit?

I am intrigued by the hijacked y-frame's reference to "Pendantech." Perhaps the necklace cannot exist in the same dimension as another version of itself?

New here, so please bear with me.

No problem with being new. We all were at one time or another. That's actually a very good spec, an along the same lines as what I was thinking. And I had not made the connection between "Pendantech" and the necklace...

Since this seems to be a nod to Portal, the person leaving the notes would correspond to the "Rat Man" from the game. Not that that would really tell us much, since the game doesn't really give much information on the Rat Man. Let's see if the weighted companion octahedron shows up...

Hmm, I apparently misread "Pendantech". When I read the strip last night I thought it said "Pedantech" . . . which made me wonder whether it was going to be a long winded know-it-all. :)

I'm going to be extremely vague, and say that I think "La Resistance!" is behind this, though I agree that Leo's a good candidate for a member. Riff's reaction to the pie message might not be unique though (remember the balloon-staring contest ^_^). It's possible that anyone with as much happy drugs in his system as Riff would go "Ooooh! PIE!" *fix*, so it might not be evidence of Riff setting that up.

Afterthought: <crazy> Maybe the plastic gaskets are the sign of "La Resistance!"?! </crazy>

EDIT: Weeelllll . . . I've been proved wrong :) IGNORE ME!!!

So at a guess, Riff is stuck in a sort of recursive Groundhog Day scenario, and each time he tries to figure out more tactics for dealing with his problem, passing them on to future-him for the next cycle.

Meaning that this could be a very long part of the arc.

But Pete wouldn't do that to us, would he?

Would he?!

Golly, I hate recursiveness, all that backtracking and figuring out, etc. At least we now know where the notes came from, and we can guess that Riff's got some mastery of the tech (he _did_ manage to put together the Infra-Hack gun, and managed to figure out that Matty had no innate code that detected and countered infinite loops). I wonder, is Pendantech and earlier version of Matty which Riff took apart and reprogrammed?

Hopefully, Riff is now at the stage to break the karmic-like loop he seems to be stuck in.

Or is this (technology, supplies, knowledge of how the Mattys work, etc.) coming from Rammer, who, other than during the long morning(s), hasn't showed up yet? I rather like Rammer, in all his alt-forms. He may be a self-centered, semi-sociopathic bureaucrat, but he does seem to have the best interests of humanity at heart.

Rammer always seems to play a soldier in a system that is corrupt trying to play the straight guy with cloak and dagger operations, while publicly playing his part. The corruptness varies, with the Aylee universe system being the least corrupt, and paradise being the most. I personally like him as a character, and find it interesting to see a recurring character that we never see in the same dimension twice, very interesting idea.

As to Riff, I think we'll either see him escape, or see him incapacitated and go into groundhog day style story telling. However, I expect things to change quite a bit every "groundhog day" and to see him get outta the loop fairly quickly.

I dunno. Now that Riff has disabled his keeper, think that might set off alarms? He may not be able to go back, even if he wanted to... Or this is how he got caught and wiped last time...

And yes, I like Rammer... But it was indicated he is Schlock's son... So does that mean Schlock comes back in all of these universes? Possibly for different reasons each time, but it is always running from a world of destruction... Hmmm.... Very interesting. This makes it more likely to me that we are going to see Schlock at the top of the food chain somewhere in this universe too....

Ooooh, so now we're getting a Greek tragedy/shades of Shakespeare in here? There's a lot of literature based around the perpetual idea of the son overthrowing his corrupt father. It goes back to the earliest Western legends -- think Zeus and Cronus, Oedipus and Laius, all sorts of references. I had missed the reference to Rammer being Schlock's son, so that had not occurred to me.

I think we will see Schlock again, soon (soon being a relative thing), at least, this dimenion's version. But Schlock has such a varying character in each dimension, in one he's mostly harmless, until he gets things set up to his liking (Sluggy Prime), in another he's a dead hero who helped save humanity, in this one he seems to have progressed from ruthless scientist/businessman to possibly a dictator. In all of them, he seems to take bad paths to good ends, though, doesn't he? I really think in Sluggy Prime he's trying to stop K'Z'K, though his methods are destructive (entirely logical, but destructive nonetheless).

And if Rammer is Schlock's son, then yes, he (Schlock) does track along with most of the dimensions occupied by humans. I'm still confused by the "time-travel" of Schlock, and I haven't looked it up again yet. But if Bun-bun killed the Sluggy Prime Schlock in his youth, and the old Schlock was unaffected, then did Schlock really travel in time, or did he travel from a dimension that was slightly out of sync with Sluggy Prime? You've probably already hashed that out, but it would be something to consider.

Maybe he used Crabtree's nanites, getting this dimension's Riff to fix the intergration and control problem, then eliminating that Riff for some reason (like, Riff was deceived about the work and threatened Schlock's plans in some way; Riff and his moral qualms would need to go, no?).

Or maybe Crabtree's nanites ate him, and she won, so Rammer is out for vengeance. Redemption is good, but plain old fashioned blood-spilling vengeance does have its place... ;-)

(This is all from memory, I'm too tired to do a full archive trawl.)

Dr. Schlock is from a point in time where/when K'Z'K was well on his way to destroying the world. At that time, he sent Berk back through time to stop Torg and Riff from freeing the demon from the Book of E-Ville. Berk didn't exactly fail since K'Z'K was thwarted. But he didn't succeed, either, since K'Z'K was released, and that's what he'd been sent back to stop. However, the the timeline was changed such that the future-Schlock's timeline was not that of Sluggy Prime. Some time after sending Berk back, Schlock time-travelled back to a point well before the freeing of K'Z'K and the release of Dr. Crabtree's nanites.

As a result, for a while there were two Drs. Schlock running around in Sluggy Prime. Note that Bun-bun did not kill Young Dr. Schlock. It was Dr. Crabtree who did that. (Ate his brain. Raw. Ick.) This had no effect on the Old Dr. Schlock because the timelines had already diverged.

Did that clear anything up? Or did I just make it muddier? :-)

--tll