‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 338

Apparently Jake wasn't expecting that...

For the NPC+10s that participated in the October Hangout last weekend, this is the page I began to accidentally spoil before I remembered it hadn't gone live yet 😀

23 Comments

What does it mean that the virus spiked? Did it increase its CPU usage, maybe representing the amount of ‘thinking’ it was doing? Or did the number of files that it was accessing increase, maybe representing how much amount of damage that it was causing? Or is this intentionally vague and to be revealed later?

Possibly the bandwidth the Virus must take up, if it monitors everything going on.

He didn’t know?…
*goes back to reread*

Okay, this is weird.
Kleya, when she came, checked the individual alignments of everybody. After this she gasped, and Jane confirrmed they were a villain group. If that
s individually Kleya’s hack, how did Jane know that? Is there some sort of “official” indicator of the group alignment that, meanwhile, does not show individual alignments? Why did we not see it from Kleya’s POV? Does Jane have her own hack that she carelessly revealed? Was it not a hack and was Jake just inattentive?
…
???

Well, since Jane finished first, I guess she was able to watch the others finishing their tutorials.

And I’m guessing Jake would have been able to see it in a similar fashion to Kleya from his own Kido, as per the discussion here and the previous notes of him being able to read the code while playing.

They had just been talking about that – Jane assumed Kleya logged in a bit before she actually DID and simply overheard them talking. No need for hacking when a simple eavesdrop works just fine.

I can see two ways that Jane knew about it and Jake didn’t:

1 – Jane is the team leader. That might give her special notes about the team.
2 – Sandra and her husband (forgot his name) was watching it from the outside and so they would know what each person did and what the final score. Sandra could have informed Jane of this during the match or right after it.

There’s a third option – that his borrowed Kido wasn’t configured to show that data.

More seriously put:

Jane’s was probably a well known given, if she hadn’t revealed it. Jake could potentially guess Brandon’s as well, based on his personality. He knew his own, because…yeah – he knew what he did.

Danni ended up revealing hers when she was asking about what was going on and helped explained what was going on with the alignment system. If the others hadn’t mentioned theirs to him, which presumably they already did while waiting for Kleya, he should have a rough idea of how the team is going.

Kleya raged-quit before anyone could ask hers; presumably he could expect from her surprise that they’ve essentially voted to be a villain team, that she was in a hero alignment.

Now, if Kleya wanted to vote in for a hero team, and be a hero archtype:

– Kesti could’ve worked – would’ve helped mask her in a villain group because she’d be sharing that alignment with Saisuke, but…

– Cardista also could’ve worked – and from Jake’s previous explanations of how she played The Game in the past, probably more up her route – if she wasn’t going Demoli for massive explosions, Cardista’s cards presumably allow for the most capability to deal with opponents in the easiest, quickest, way – or in other words, to not allow her to lose, and always win, regardless of how boring just holding up a card to win every battle would be.

– Erbana, the one she chose…extremely rare, and while Kleya obviously is the type of person who could (And would) 100% just to win, has shown an in-L.I.F.E. tendency to want to avoid being in the spotlight – being one of the few Erbana users (*Especially* in a villain group, which was part of the risk; note that Kleya tried to nudge Danni down the Kesti path with the point about meeting the woman and doing her quests, but didn’t completely outline what she had to do in time.) would put her in the spotlight, even if, and most likely often considered, very limited and spiked popularity.

Evidently, Jake wasn’t expecting Kleya to be, despite changing her gameplay to being a hero character, *extremely* stubborn about winning with the *hardest* difficulty for to her win with, *because* she still wants to win, but she’s trying not to be a villain.

Or to put it another way, if the alignments were difficulties (Very Easy = Morto, Kesti = Easy, Cardista = Normal, Mani = Hard, Demoli = Very Hard, Erbana = Lunatic Maniac Supreme Classic Deluxe Difficulty Mode), Jake wasn’t expecting Kleya to go for Lunatic Maniac Supreme Classic Deluxe Difficulty Mode.

That’s a good point about alignments=difficulties, but are you sure that Kesti is easier than Cardista? And that Mani is easier than Demoli? I’d put those two pairs the other way round.
It’s also funny this way that 2/3 hero alignments are in the easier half and 2/3 villain alignments are in the harder part, but the easiest aligment is the villain one and the hardest alignment is the hero one. There’s something deeply right with that.
(I’d SO play Erbana)

@Liliet: indeed there is something deeply right about that.

@Alexander the 1st: while Kleya does not want to be in the spotlight, she also does want to show to everyone that she can be a hero. Either way I do not think this influenced her choice. She has almost never shown herself to be level-headed enough for that, and most often she seems to be oblivious as what attracts attention and not.

On what is what, note that some of the alignments very well can be equally hard to play. All we really know is that Morto is easiest to fall into and therefore we guess it is probably the easiest to play, and that Mani is hard (Jake said so). Also I do not think it really matters to Kleyas choice. Not only does she know the Game well enough to do anything, she also simply did not care about difficulty this time.

When she made her choice I think she did it with one single reason: “I WILL be a hero.” And more or less subconsciously she wants to take after her mother.

And I’m still thinking Jake should have expected this. If Kleya indeed wants to turn a new page, as we know and Jake suspects she does, she is the kind of person to do it dramatically. That she wants to take after her mother is pretty much a given as well. Her doing the Erbana route is a logical conclusion from there.

@Liliet: I put Demoli above Mani because Jake said Demoli was tricky – while Mani is about manipulating people to your end, Demoli is about (At least, from what we’ve seen), bringing events to the most demolition, which presumably would be more difficult to pull off – Mani users can be more subtle, Demoli…can’t really *subtly* bring about the most demolition to an area.

Cardista I put more difficult than Kesti because if Kesti is about quests, you can basically follow the quest text and get things done easily. Basically, at 100% game, you’d just be following Saisuke. Cardista is more about recognizing how the cards play out (Note how Brandon messed up with the card going from a Queen to a Pawn – and then remembered that there were 2 other cards to get.), and using them to basically use higher-level mechanics to their end, with a lot more variance than Kesti in how they’re used. Cardista would be more tactical than Kesti on the battlefield, most likely.

@08h7w: Yeah, I figure she chose it because she wanted to take after her mother. But note when she said that the route never had any explosions, and that she didn’t like it; it bored her after a while.

Jake made the point earlier as well that Kleya of the past never was interested in the battle system in terms of fighting in it, just in being able to be the one who won in the most interesting way (Usually explosions, via Demoli alignment).

Though considering how Kleya’s Nice Special was completely off her regular game, he probably should’ve made the connection that as dangerous to the user as it is, it *is* entirely suitable for a pacifist run. “I didn’t hit you, the hammer of the Be Nice smiley did.”

Once he realizes that, he should be able to fit the rest of the pieces together, and won’t even be phased by her 100% Erbana’ing.

Hm. Why did D’s activity spike after Jake finished his tutorial, and why were they expecting it? The shocked look on Jake’s face is fun, but the other hints are more interesting, at least to me. 🙂

I’m pretty sure D and the virus is not the same thing. D is Kleya’s AI guardian, and the virus is merely a tool for D to destroy data and/or crash servers. D itself is probably running in one of Kleya’s personal servers and nearly invisible from anywhere else.

D is the program that dealt with the hacker who attacked Danni during the pre-Game trials– Kleya decides she’ll “let D handle it.” While it’s possible that the Virus is a separate program being operated by D, this seems unlikely and unnecessary to me. I can’t think of any evidence that there are two separate programs.

The most compelling evidence for that is that the Virus has at least one important backdoor. This is too unsafe to be D. Also it is generally quite far from safe and stealthy, which is very important traits for D.

It is a very reasonable solution that the Virus is called upon by D for tasks such as shutdown, overloading, blackouts, data destruction – tasks that are nowhere near stealthy anyways.

It is also simply how I would program it, it just makes sense. I’m not much of a programmer, but I would probably have been killed in the hacker hunts…

You could be right, but I’ll be quite surprised, if so.

I would certainly have been killed in the hacker hunts, unless I was in TENka City at the time — looks like more programmers survived there.

I believe Kleya mentioned she wanted everyone to keep thinking D was ‘just’ a virus. So they are technically the same just named different based on speaker.

This could also mean that she wanted to keep everyone thinking that the manifestations of D’s activity were just Virus and not some other entity. I think that the security backdoor in Virus is proof enough that it’s not the same as D at least by security access level (it’s possible that D is just a more “core” part of the Virus, more sentient and less active and only avaliable to Kleya)

I was starting to write that I’m confused as to why Jake is surprised. I was expecting this to be confirming to him that Kleya did indeed turn regretful and is now trying to be as good a person as possible.

But I guess the reason is that he very much doubts that theory. I remember him saying something along the lines of “you can’t just change your personality like that”, which I previously read as one of his attempts to making those around him believe it is not her… now I think that is his honest view of the matter. He’s been certain it is her for quite a while, he’s not doubting that, but he is doubting her person.

Maybe he also firmly believes she actually did murder her mother in cold blood. I thought he was actually doubting that, but if not, his thoughts makes more sense. Then it seems reasonable that he is surprised now. If he makes the connection that this was her mothers favourite route… maybe it all will start to make sense to him now. Interesting, very much so 🙂

I don’t think Jake believes that Kleya is the same person she was before. If he did,he probably wouldn’t still be protecting her now. Honestly, I think his “theory” was also meant to protect Kleya, and Kim is just another person he is lying to to protect her. The reason he was confused is because, while he had suspicions that she’d changed, he didn’t expect it to be this dramatic.

Could her Theory be that the Virus has a mind of it’s own?
“It spiked even more” also says it spiked before that too. Was it reacting to Clea being visible publically in the game world? Is it reacting to her being famous?

Or! What if Jake’s surprised expression is because Erbana is the first step toward unlocking some hidden feature he knows about?

By spiking, the Virus (D), had an uptick in processor use and file access, looking back through you can see Kleya talking D down from doing anything as she notices the others starting to finish the tutorial, another uptick when she sees exactly how the group did over all, and then a massive surge when she lets loose a viral attack of her own and then calls D to stop it. Which D does by triggering a priority shutdown to interrupt all previous commands.

As for Jane knowing the group alignment, there’s some sort of posting system for the audience outside or Kleya wouldn’t have been mobbed when she logged out of the Game server, so it makes at least as much sense for those inside the staging server to see the end results and possibly completion percentages. Doesn’t hurt that Jake had enough time to explain the majority of the alignment system as well (exposition, yay) before Kleya arrived, so that could explain it if nothing else. If anything, Kleya was starting to tip her hand before Jane spoke up, as she wouldn’t have had time to review the others’ status through the normal interface.

The separation of the Virus and D does not track for me. Its been referenced a few times that D (the Virus) is actually TENKa’s pre-End anti-hacking security system (Kleya’s code, which is why she got irked that TENKa was claiming it as theirs in a much earlier page). The backdoor into it is Kleya’s own secret that she shared with her best friends, honestly, probably only Jake, there may have been others but I get the feeling we’ll never see them. It makes sense that everyone would call it a virus because no one has any control over it (except Kleya, that’s why its D to her and the Virus to everyone else). Its integrated into TENKa’s systems, so they can’t really remove it (D and Kleya wont let them), but they can monitor it. Most people are only familiar with its Deconstruct Me avatar, they don’t see the Dracoform avatar Kleya does.

On another note, really looking forward to more on the Hakido. Based on the last couple pages, I’m thinking that its a bit hotter than I thought.

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 338