'Not A Villain' Webcomic - Kleya checks up on things with D.

‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 204b

She is not in space.

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46 Comments

‘still in the Indian ocean’
‘the south pole hasn’t moved then?’

For me tbat implies her position is dependend on the poles position. I’d say she is in a submarine underneah the ice.

Also, moving geographic poles is pretty dramatic as apocalips. BUT since her world map is not oriented differently I’m guessing it’s the magnetic poles that are out of wack not the geographic ones. An unstable planetary magnetic field is also a bad, estimates for the duration of such an event range from a ‘few dozen years’ till ‘several thousand years’ before things stabalize again.

sort of like the movie 2013?

Submarines have a limited air supply. Hiding under the ice would all but guarantee her death.

“limiting her airsupply”? Only if she uses an ancient diesel sub. Modern (post 70’s?) subs have near infinite electricity from their nuclear reactor, and re-usable CO2 filters have been around some time now.

But I have changed my mind, since I now believe the magnetic poles have shifted -not the geographic ones- she probably hides from the gqlactic radiation in a super-shielded ship, while the rest of humanity lurks in underground compounds now known as cities.

Not necessarily; if they have a system for converting carbon dioxide back into oxygen on board they could keep a balance of air. So, basically if she has a large enough garden she’d be fine. It’d provide food as well. Though she would have to find a way to get fresh soil or fertilizer occasionally.

like going to the toilet? the real issue would be sunlight (for all except mushrooms)
also modern subs use electrolysis (not air filters) to split water to hydrogen and oxygen.
animal waste is basically what fertilizes soil on earth by the way.

Oh a boat, eh? :x?????? That would definitely make the process of moving into a city difficult.. and it seems to be really hightech!

Poles settled down? So it wasn’t a war but the pole reversal that is supposed to melt the ice caps?

oh, was there a pole switch in this comic? cause that would explain why the magnetic field went down.

Well, the magnetic poles occasionally switch on their own, but they don’t usually destroy the atmosphere in the process….

I hope that liquid food stuff has fiber in it…

Hey Elizabeth! I’m an astrophysicist and your statement is only partially true. In fact, the magnetosphere (the magnetic ‘force field’ that protects the Earth) is greatly weakened during a pole shift. During this time the Earth’s ozone layer in the upper atmosphere is more directly exposed to radiation from the sun. It possible (we’ve never actually seen this happen), that this radiation could ‘burn up’ large quantities of ozone and greatly harm the atmosphere as well as the rest of Earth’s environment.

I don’t know if the author is trying to imply that this is what happened, but it would explain a lot of the things that we’ve heard throughout the comic.

Well, since you’re a real astrophysicist and I’m an educational researcher with only half an undergraduate physics degree (switched to linguistics halfway through, but kept reading physics articles), I’ll go with your judgment. In my reading it looked like the magnetic field would be somewhat weakened during the switch, which has apparently happened numerous times already in the life of the earth, but no major extinction events such as I would assume would accompany the destruction of the ozone layer. But there seems to be some uncertainty about this, which makes it hard for a non-expert to weigh the different points of view.

I just wanted to clarify that I wasn’t trying to be snarky by writing “real astrophysicist”– I just couldn’t think of a more graceful way of putting it. Anyway, based on your comments, I did a bit more reading, and it looks like the last known short reversal, 41,000 years ago, may have been associated with increased volcanic activity, as well as the “mini ice age” affecting northern Europe. I’m not claiming that any one of these phenomena caused any of the others… But it’s tempting to read it as pole shift->volcanic activity->ice age->rise of homo sapiens, isn’t it?

Hopefully The Dude is wrong and Bandit is right, and Kleya had nothing to do with any of this. She’s got enough guilt going with what we know she *has* done by hacking.

Hello Elizabeth! As far as I know, your reading is correct. To be honest not much is known about the magnetosphere at all. We don’t even know for sure exactly what mechanism creates it or why it flips! It seems plausible that a pole flip could accompany major volcanic activity around the world, but like I said we’ve never actually seen it happen.

As for extinction events, I couldn’t say much about that. Paleontology is not really my thing. It wouldn’t surprise me if life struggled during this time, but life is also remarkably resilient. In other words, I couldn’t say if ozone depletion during a pole flip would cause a mass extinction event.

but it makes the story more meaningful if she IS guilty! 🙂

What are those weird blue things? Some sort of food, maybe?

My guess would be some sort of liquid food. My guess is, for whatever reason, she is unaffected by gravity in that vehicle (currently using magnetic shoes to stay on the floor) and need to use astronaut food stuff to eat properly.

To me it looks like the shoes flipped away from her feet, which would make them anti-grav shoes.

If the planet is so messed up that the poles are moving… why /isn’t/ she in space?

Lack of spaceship? Also, I heard, food is pretty hard to come across in space.

You just have to shoot a space cow and make space burgers. Geez, don’t they teach kids anything in school anymore?

Sure, just shoot and eat a space cow. How unrealistic is that?!

After all every fired shot attracts the space zombies.

And then you have to worry about space mad cow disease!

Space deer on the other hand are much safer.

Nah, then you have to worry about space Lyme disease.

I wonder how accurate that map still is? The continents haven’t shifted or been rearranged because of the disaster?

Well if it was an atmospheric disaster, it wouldn’t have moved Earth’s crust at all. (Unless you count sand flying in the storm winds. =P)

Just reread the archives recently. There was a reference to hacking the geomagnetic field, which is why hackers are so despised. That is rather terrifying.

I don’t think that she is on a boat, I think she’s inside a metal building/ship which is trapped above the south magnetic pole.
If the ship she’s in was too heavy to achieve escape velocity using the magnetic pole, Kleya could be trapped by the planet’s gravitational field above the pole.
She wouldn’t be in space, but would be too high up for the city folk to reach her. Kinda like a low pass satellite (assuming no available aerial travel to said satellite).

HAHAHAHAHA! I can laugh cause I know I am as obstinate as everyone else here. and boy, nobody wants to give up their pet theories XD
but on the matter of the magnetic poles shifting…if it was a gradual thing, the field prolly wouldn’t be affected very much and the atmosphere would likely be fine. but a sudden change could temporarily wipe out or cripple the field and thus our atmosphere’s protection from the solar winds.

I’m guessing a sub or semi submersible. If in flight I would have expected to hear above, but not only is food hard to come by, but so is fuel unless they have flying nuclear power plants.

As for not traveling while the poles are in active movement, that makes a bunch of sense. The computer system would probably be able to navigate best when there are fewer variables, and a moving reference point is not one I’d try to navigate with.

As for the cause, I’m guessing that a ‘limited’ nuclear exchange happened. in addition to whatever caused the drastic pole shift. It has been suggested that large areas of the planet are uninhabitable and that areas of rubble exist. As it is the magnetic poles drift right now. according to some data from an archive of a canadian website, in 2001 it was moving at approximately 41km/25mi a year. of course someone took down the relatively easy to understand page and replaced it with technical data that while more correct is harder to understand.

A couple of things to note based off of inferencing and reading other people’s comments:

– Kleya is in a ship or submarine in the Indian ocean, probably not under ice, and is definitely not in space (People, read the author’s note).

– The poles shifting could have been caused by The Ending (or the other way around) or by hackers.

– The former point brings up an grand question:
Was The Ending indirectly caused by hackers??
If this is true, then this could be the ultimate source of the hate against hackers. And Kleya probably wouldn’t cause the ending; she isn’t THAT stupid.

Forgot one thing to consider.
The Alt Text goes as follows:
“The screen is showing a captured video of the outside. Not sure if it came across like that…”

If the video was just based off of a GPS-like system (assuming it is still working), then the shifting of the poles didn’t alter the continents’ physical shape at all (as in the area of the continents).

Hackers could not shift the poles unless they can somehow stir the magma that flows though the mantle, I think that was a secondary cause for the end. I wanted mainly to mention that if you do a full read through you may pick up stuff from the beginning that you missed.

Gizmo: Hrrr I’d like a copy of that software.
Trinity: Gizmo, you don’t have hardware that can deal with this software.
(Kleya brings new meaning to Buns of steel!)

I think a good read through the speculation comments good help me realize some things.
It wasn’t made clear to me how hackers could shift the poles; and apparently, I missed the implication that it was nearly impossible for hackers to shift the poles (it was mentioned in the comic, I just forgot where)

I also need to stop rambling. 😛

My bad. Sorry about last sentence fragment on Kleya. o_o’ She really is quite clever, not at all stupid. : )

But space is awesome… 🙁

From what I can tell we are hearing only one side of a conversation she is having with D Which means she must have some neural connection to (I,m going to call it) him

So Magneto got Thor’s hammer and used it to shift the magnetic poles again didn’t he.
Except while that arc sucked a whole lot NaV is awesome.

there was a magnetic villain in the justice league comics that got afflicted with the joker’s insanity toxin and hooked up to the south pole and it moved with him which caused some bad stuff to happen. Plastic man was the only one able to stop him apparently because he had no metal.

I assume it is supposed to be dark where she is but I think there might be some sort of non websafe color issue going on here. To see many of the details that others apparently can see since they comment about it I have to save the image, load it in an editor and brighten it.

This isn’t a critique of the art work, assuming it’s supposed to be a low-lighting environment it looks great but this is the only way I know what half the comments are even about! It’s why I argued against the neural interface idea at first, I couldn’t see any of the stuff she has attached to her.

I don’t think it’s just my monitor being set to dark, everything else looks ok. I usually view it on a Windows 7 computer, sometimes on a Linux one. I remember from the old days of web development that Macs used to have slightly different color pallets and only certain colors looked the same across both. Could that be what is going on here?

I’m also using Windows 7 so I don’t think the operating system is the problem. Could be your LCD screen can’t handle darker colors. I’ve seen several computers and TVs with LCDs that worked great until a dark scene like a night scene in a movie came on. Then you could barely tell what was going on.

All I see is another copy of the previous page

Did you hit F5 a couple of times?

I hit refresh. I see the new page now

How about this for a crazy theory – Kleya’s mom predicted the pole shift and the resulting effect it’d have on both the atmosphere and electronics. In an effort to prevent this catastrophe, she proposed the construction of a device (D) much like you see in Sci-Fi channel ‘original’ movies in which the protagonists attempt to save the world from something like this. However, due to a miscalculation the event occured before D was ready. This led the hacker-fearing populace, including Kleya herself, to believe that D was actually the cause and not the cure. Kleya learned too late that her mother was innocent and in trying to clear her name ended up the scapegoat for everything.

Or take your idea and match it with what has been said by the author. Kleya’s mom made the device, it worked, then Kleya hacked it and turned it off, causing the disaster?

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 204b