‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 516

Colors by Audrey with edits and everything else by me.

References:

Wisps fleeing.

Similar tree face...

Jane takes off once again.

Road Trip

I'm traveling across the country again and am holding meet ups! I'll be the girl with a stack of NAV books; I'm pretty easy to find. One last stop!

Omaha, NE: Ted & Wally's (1120 Jackson St, Omaha, NE 68102) at 1:30pm on Tuesday, Aug 30th.

And then I'll skid into Salt Lake City, UT, just in time for Salt Lake Comic Con, Sept 1-3!

Salt Lake Comic Con

I'll be in the Artist Alley, table White 25, all three days. See you there!

25 Comments

Which choice?

Hey Jane, you screwed up. You missed the eyes on that one. That’s like proceeding along nicely with a heist/assassination, only to miss one of the security cameras because you were too lazy to double check your work.

if that one guy got turned into a tree for missing an attack and clipping one how is she getting away with carving everything she passes?

Because somebody in the control room thinks she’s useful?

The trees react to destructive Specials, but most likely not melee attacks.
I think that Jane is not dumb.

I very much think Jane is a h*lluva lot smarter than people think. She’s a ruthless predator and those sorts don’t let without wiles. She wiped her last party and then easily carved her way in again.

I think her weird ways, while partly some kind of tic or psychosis, is an act she uses to misdirect, and control perceptions. She uses it to unhinge people, but also make them misjudge her.

One of the more telling features to me was her special. It was terrifyingly effective and horribly written. Master class cyborg hacker Kleya struggled to glean insight into its function in a timely manner and I don’t think that was happenstance. That struck me as purposeful, a technique called code obfuscation. That suggests Jane is a better programmer than she lets on, and that she has the guile to arrange someone might peek at the source in this age of hacker witch hunts.

Good theory on the badly coded Special. I don’t know if that’s where Aneeka is going with the story, but I like it. 🙂

It’s an interesting theory, but unlikely. Jane’s special isn’t reliable, we’ve already seen that Kat was right in her assessment that Jane was lucky it worked at all. And Kat was able to identify the parts as being from at least four different programs…that means that as an obfuscation it was already a failure. When you want to make a program look like another program to keep the details from being examined too closely, you make it look like ONE other program, not four.

And hacking together bits from different programs isn’t hard, I’ve instructed people on how to do this and while I don’t know how well it worked for them I do know it’s requires less knowledge than coding something from scratch. You can basically do it without really understanding much of the language your using at all. Identifying the code as having come from different programs is harder, especially if you’re doing it by relying on sloppy use of the global space (which is what Kat seems to have been doing rather than having direct access to the private/local scope…I’m sure she could do that but probably it would be detected by the system, so she didn’t).

All speculation based on how actual computers work aside, this is a work of SF and we have no particular assurance that computers in this setting work according to the same general principles of anything we have now. I mean, we don’t have kido interfaces either, we’re only now approaching the headset and gloves interface.

Still, the game isn’t about coding. Yes, selecting for people with significant coding skill is one of the reasons TENka is running the game, but only one, and probably not the most significant. Jane doesn’t need to be a genius programmer to play a game that was originally designed to appeal to a general audience. She’d need to be a genius hacker if she were going to cheat without getting caught, but that’s not her play here. She’s here to influence a genius hacker, not to be one.

I still think that Jane is Mr. Lilly. As in, not the mother, but the father. And that he uses the avatar that his wife designed to confuse his identity and let his wife take care of their daughter.

Meant: daughters

There’s an AI that runs the island that periodically turns people into trees. He doesn’t do it all the time and definitely doesn’t do it to everyone who damages a tree or other person. However, if you launch a large scale demoli attack, you’re definitely going to attract attention and *that* might get you tree’d. I don’t know this, but I think that it may have to wait a certain amount of time before it can “tree” another player.

Possible, but I think we’d have already gotten that information from Bandit, what with his blasting everything in sight, including things in trees, with great abandon.

“Lucky I have n minutes before that special can trigger again” or words to that effect.

I think it is more likely that the special has multiple triggers, and probably blasting a tree isn’t a particularly important trigger. I’m guessing being under the influence of a Mani increases the danger, though, which makes me think that the other group’s Mani is the only one of them that isn’t an idiot.

Something’s going to happen with that tree. Not only did she just slash right through it (is it bleeding?) but left it’s eyes intact. Also, I’d like to know how she’s seeing through that mass of hair in the first panel…

What was your choice that you regret? Honestly curious here, it looks good to me. Unless it’s Jane talking for herself. 😛

I deleted a scene because I felt it wasn’t important enough, but it ended up making this page not as cool as I had initially envisioned. Oh well.

I wouldn’t put too much importance on the tree’s eyes being intact. That’s the case in one of the slashed trees in an earlier pannel as well.

Unless that was a mistake in the art, whatever Jane is doing to the trees isn’t connected to their eyes.

Looks like only large area demoli attacks trigger the tree transformation.

I’m curious about why Jane might be killing the tree’d players. What happens to a player when they are ‘tree’d to start with – can those players start another character/game or are they stuck. And then what effect does killing the tree have – does it free a stuck player to keep playing, or are they removed from the game and can then try to re-join or can they not rejoin.
And, of course, there’s always the question of *why* she’s doing this. I don’t think the simple answer of getting more kills really answers that.

I’d guess that characters that have been tree’d are controlled by the AI, and the players just lose their spot and have to start as a new character.

I imagine that players of characters with terminal popularity decline might do the same thing, just let an AI play their character while they focus on creating and entering a new character design with a more appealing concept. Bandit and Dude both seem to be new character designs, they don’t say what happened to their former characters, but I imagine they’ve quietly let them go (whether or not they were terminally unpopular).

The large scale attacks killed trees, destroyed a large swathe of area. Jane’s only tagging the trees. Maybe as warning? Maybe to mark where she’s been? If so, hash marks like that are what any good solo hiker in the woods would leave. And the added blood would just tickle her fancy.

I just read this comic from start to finish in a week and I’m SO dissapointed that I caught up! Now I have to wait for more story. Awesome comic, Aneeka! I’m impressed by how clean it is compared to most comics.

Aw, thanks! Glad to hear that 🙂

What’s that, Jane? Is it bad karma not only going around but coming around? It won’t be easy to take on a monster if you have to kill everything around, so you may very well be the next one to be slashed to ribbons.

I really liked her face and hair in panel 1. 🙂

The page looks awesome to me! I don’t see any problem with it. Very dramatic.

Not A Villain Webcomic

Webcomic of a semi- reformed hacker trying to redeem herself in a post- apocalyptic world she may have created.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 516

Road Trip

Salt Lake Comic Con