‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 519

Colors by Audrey with edits and everything else by me.

Back to Kat.

45 Comments

Panel 4: No way, Sherlock, you really think so? 🙂 Did his attacking you directly tip you off?

No, actually think it was his smirk.

Well, obviously he attacked her intentionally. What she seems to be thinking however is that Jake had some deeper purpose behind it. Which he did.

and while we know his deeper (and imo misguided ) purpose was. Kat has no idea what is motive is and can only speculate, and it’s misunderstandings in times like these that can start wars, and the kind of war that would break out here well it could get rather bad rather fast.

I do hope that Kat does find something to clue her in that Jake had a good, or at least what he thought was good reason to do it.

Well, it could have been a diversion for him to kill the enemy.

Then I wouldn’t call it a diversion, but a prerequisite, what with Kat standing in the way of his kills. You don’t need to divert the enemy if everyone but Vize is either a tree or tied up on the ground. Unless inverse Ninja applies to him, but so far it doesn’t look like it.

Oh Kat.

She really does have it hard with the ‘failure’ thing. And it’s definitely her dad’s doing – this kind of thinking of YOURSELF as a failure upon minor setbacks is something that others condition into you, one way or another, not a natural product of high self-esteem (which Kat SO doesn’t have)

Oh no, being dead and useless means that you can’t possibly do anything to stop Jane from murdering absolutely everyone, and the system won’t be able to penalize that 100% while you aren’t physical probably.

Whatever will you do.

I’m assuming that, at the very least, Kat’s death counts against her Erbana 100%. She did die within the no-kill radius after all.

I really don’t think so. It’s the ALIGNMENT, not a winning streak or something. Getting killed while pursuing your ideas seems like something that would NOT tarnish them, particularly for the pacifistic Erbanas. I can see Mortos penalized for losing a fight, but the whole point of Erbanas is that they are not there to fight!

A good point, but the stated rule is that no one can die within a certain radius around a player with a high enough Erbana rating. I imagine that the route prefers avoiding combat and penalizes Erbanas for getting into fights they can’t end peacefully. Much like Morto penalizes players for letting an opponent escape, and benefits players that attack first.

In a pen-and-paper game, that’d work.

But video games are hardly ever so nuanced.

Hmm, so when you die you can resurrect? I had gotten the impression that when you die that is it for your character. Unless being able to come back to life is a special of Kat’s class?

The Game is an MMO, similar to WoW, so it’s not surprising there’s a resurrection mechanic. I think the real fatal blow of death is that your popularity plummets while you’re unable to interact with anything. Lose too many fans and Tenka will boot you from the game, which means dying of starvation for quite a few people in this post-apocalyptic world.

I’ve got the impression that you have multiple lives (esones). Each death takes away an esone until you have no esone. At that point, if you die, you are dead.

Which would mean that Jane has to kill the other group at least twice. Once to remove their esones and one more time to actually kill them.

There are very few games that lack an ‘extra life’ or ‘resurrect’ mechanic. Moria and similar games being the only exceptions I can think of offhand. In th story, there may be several processes for removing unpopular players from the game… But using death as a method to drop players doesn’t make sense to me – you might wind up cutting good players who simply got unlucky or singled out by other teams.

Well, my issue with the idea that people can just resurrect is that Jane killed off her entire party. If they can just resurrect then why did everyone get kicked instead of just Jane, for being a party killer?

The fact that she killed her party suggests that it’s not the popularity mechanic that boots players but just them simply being killed.

I think the problem was their popularity was below the cutoff before they died, and when they did get killed – *that* prevented them from being able to increase their popularity before the boot kicked in.

Well, it has been hinted at that Jane was kicked for a different reason and party killing was just the official justification. Or at least the most popular fan theory. Esones are also fairly rare in the game (you only get one from the tutorial/alignment mission and then you have to find others) making resurrection difficult if you fail to steal an esone from another player.

oh boy, unless danni finds kat soon to calm her down, jake is going to have a very angry erbana on his a**, one who knows all the erbana tricks and will use them to make is demoli run as miserable as possible

Not quite, actually. Kat can’t use specials without an Esone, which means she can’t do any Erbana things. All she’s got right now is physical combat.

Actually basic Erbana things are using plants. She doesn’t have a bag to store them in, but I’d imagine this game allows some kind of pockets/under shirt limited storage…

I wonder if she’ll figure out that she’s been discovered.

I think she knows that the cat is out of the bag, at least for Jake.

The Kat is out of the bag? 🙂

You do know that I am going to have to beat you mercilessly with the Pun Hammer for that one, right?

That’s right! Take your stance! Say know to bad puns!

That’s Write*!

VERY nice ghosting. I actually had to hunt to see her until the very last panel. : )

Yes, Predator-esque with the clear line art over the background. I like it but it is very hard to look at. In this case that is a big part of why I like it!

Good, Kat. Way to deduce the obvious. Now try to figure out WHY he might have done that. Pshaaa! She’s got no chance. All she’s ever known is herself against everyone else.
But wait! She *does* know that that is Jake – not just the Bandit. I was never sure if she knew that. Will that give her a clue? Probably not. Oh well. Poor Bandit. “No more nice-y virus for you. POW!”

This could either be very good or very bad for her, depending on whether she relapses or not. Hoping for the latter.

Kat shouldn’t see this as a failures@ at winning but a success at losing! There you go! All better No failures here! 😀

Holy crap, I see so much of the person I used to be in Kat’s self-recriminations, it’s uncanny.

I’m back from a long pause, so I have now read about 150 pages in one sitting. 150 AWESOME pages! 🙂

And sometimes the alt-text is saying they were even more awesome in your head. Your head is apparently a very special place, beyond any normal measures of awesomeness.

But I guess I do have to agree that the last panel on this page isn’t very menacing. Oh well, I don’t think much will come of it… Jake must be rather close to simply explaining to Kleya how the eyes are on her and she needs to be a bit less perfect, which should make revenge for this incident seem a lot less important.

I disagree a bit. I got the menacing eye right away. I was thinking, “Uh oh, looks like payback on Jake time,” when I read the comment about Aneeka not thinking that the menacing didn’t get through. It got through to me.

And sometimes the alt-text is saying they were even more awesome in your head. Your head is apparently a very special place, beyond any normal measures of awesomeness.

Yeah, it makes living in reality rather difficult sometimes >_<

I think this is the first time she explicitly referred to Bandit as “Jake”.

She assumed it might be Jake earlier in the storyline, but discarded it because “Jake always does the right thing”, and to her, she assumed that turning her in was “the right thing”.

Now, though? She has no doubts that he’s Jake.

It’s hard to be menacing when you’re translucent.

I think that we’re all feeling a bit relieved that, even if Kat has decided to blow her cover and lash out, at least now she’ll have a specific target rather than just killing everyone dependent on TENka City (presumably including everyone IN TENka City).

And while the look in her eye isn’t exactly friendly, it isn’t freaking out. She looks like she’s intent on coming up with a devious plan, and somehow I sense that “death is too good for her enemies”.

I bet she’ll figure out a way to absolutely crush Bandit’s popularity stats, possibly even by legitimately convincing people he’s a fat-headed jerk rather than simply hacking the votes.

I would almost feel sorry for Bandit/Jake…
But honestly, he was a hosebeast for what he did. He brought whatever she is going to eventually do to him on himself.

I hope she tweaks the game code to give him a permeant wedgie.

Kat shall have words.
Short ones.
With lots of pointy consonants.
So many words, so very many sharp bits.

The question… Will Kat be the hero or the villain? Will these words be said or will Jake have to find the words to say to himself?
Or will Kat do the cruelest/kindest thing possible and let Jake know he’s forgiven?

The thing to remember is that Kat’s way of thinking is very off-kilter from the norm, due to that h*llish upbringing where winning was the only thing that mattered. So her reactions to things will likewise be off-kilter. She tends to view things in very direct cause/effect manners. So in this case, her view is ‘I died – I failed – Jake killed me – he did so deliberately – I want to be a hero, so he therefore does not want me to be a hero – Jake is the enemy!’ I don’t think she’s particularly well equipped to delve deeply as to why Jake did what he did (aside from being a Trololol griefer). So assuming malice is almost certain.

This isn’t helped by the fact that this move on Jake’s part wasn’t particularly well thought out, more along the lines of when all he has is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Even when it is clearly marked ‘nitro glycerine’. The path he chose is too singularly destructive to be flexible in what he can do in a given situation (which means another not terribly well thought out act on his part).

Man, the complete lack of communication and comprehension makes things so much more difficult than it needs to be, eh?

Oooooh, she’s gonna be pissed!

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 519