‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 596

She's lucky she's even alive, really.

EDIT: Fixed a typo.

20 Comments

Spelling error in the last panel. “stared” instead of “started”.

I tend to look at such errors in character dialog as their accent or them mis-speaking…. really, after what some authors have thrown at me in works I’ve read, stared isn’t worth mention

Yes it is. NaV is a great work of love, and typos are mistakes that can be easily corrected. Like you I think, I’ve read and continue to read webcomics with poor grammar because they’re good, but I still wince at every typo and wonky sentence I can see. Those are not stylistic choices, they do not bring anything to the “flavor” of the narration and, for me at least, they actually detract the attention from it.

And again, they’re easy to fix.

This

D’oh! Thanks for catching that. I wasn’t able to fix it yesterday, but it’s fixed today!

🙁

Ouch – buying time for a miracle is about all they’re doing at this point. You can’t live underground and “forage” off left-overs from the world before for very long.

They need out, or they’re going to die. That kind of impending doom is hard on the psyche.

If they can’t get to the surface, they can’t get food drops from the Cities (or even from Kleya).

Except… I wonder if Kleya still has (or can find) any mechs that might be able to help dig the Lilys out? It would expose that “the cyborg” is still alive, but going around digging out survivors and getting them resources would be a lot more heroic than playing an online game.

I’m not sure how Kleya could keep the mech from scaring the Lilys to death without revealing her identity, though.

Good thought, I agree on that. It’s a miracle that they’ve survived for this long. Hurray for junk food I guess?
If it weren’t for the fact that the rescued people would talk about the mecha I don’t think Tenka would even notice.

But even if they noticed, they are just going to think it is another programmer in hiding. After all, why would The Hacker use mecha to help outsiders instead of continue her war on the cities?

Well, just so long as Kleya doesn’t immediately come to their rescue right after she talks to those people… but every second might be important. They might not make the connection “Kleya = Doomsdaygirl”, but they will know that she can hack mechas, so they might come to that conclusion.

+1 Internet to all on this thread…

Daniel here. I can see Kleya really wanting to help them out, but as mentioned, she has to be really careful with her Hack-Fu if she’s going to do it. The people “Jake” is with are looking for her, so if they sniff something with her “scent” (signature coding style) on it, they’ll hit the panic butting, tell the President & problems start popping up like crazy. Not to mention, like said above, there’s the chance anyone who sees the robot could freak out & panic, including the Lily family, potentially causing more problems.

Heck, if Kleya even gets a robot up & running, then sends it marching to the Lilys, only for Tenka to pick up her “scent”, forcing her to disconnect, there’s the chance the now solo robot could rampage, potentially starting with the Lily family! And pre-programming wouldn’t be an option cause I severely doubt it would be able to safely assess a path to their location & calculate the safest digging spot without her direct control. Even if she did manage to pre-program a safe navigation path for it (Sat-Nav?), then what? Have it ping her directly to say “I’m here”? Suicide!! Quiet ping into general webspace/Lily family’s connection? Possible, but it runs the risk it might get Tenka’s attention, which is a bad thing.

Possibly the safest option I can think of would be to work out the Lily Family’s location, track down any functional robots/rescue units nearby, then from a “dummy profile” through as many untraceable channels as possible, send the Lily family an “Anonymous” message saying something along the lines of “Hello, are you at location XYZ? I believe I may be able to help you with a robot I have nearby, but we need to work together on it. I need you to…” giving them some instructions, including describing their situation & specific location, but mostly on how to sure up the walls around them to prevent cave ins. Then make sure to add some “in case of signal interrupt, cease all actions” code into the robot, in case of Tenka snooping…

I also have to forage and never see the sky. Granted there is only so much cheetah dust in the couch and I could just walk outside, but those video games ain’t going to play themselves.

Yuck! 😛

So, they can’t reach the surface, they can’t produce food, but they have electricity and internet? Something about the logistics of that makes me raise an eyebrow.

Cables are long and thin – if there happened to be lines still live, then all is good on the electricity/internet front (as long as someone near-ish-by keeps them live).

Sure, it’s likely that they will also fail, but finding enough food for this long is MUCH more impressive, really.

Apparently, they have robust drone mail. Tiny drones carrying food pouches can reach deep in caves and twisted hunks of metal humans can’t climb through. Lots of humans survived the original disaster in “safe rooms” that then got locked in or buried.

The U.S. would do well to do more with switching to buried cables (instead of cables that are easily broken in storms, for example).

If the society uses buried cables, including to the dwellings, then it is not surprising at all that they would remain unaffected by disruptions above ground, including collapsing rubble.

I only just realized that the mouse-over doesn’t refer to sharing background information. My brain only reacted like “Oh, yes, and it’s sooooo nice to get a lot of background info at once for a while, because the questions have really been piling up!” 😀
And now that I think I know you’re referring to graphics I’m not sure whether that statement was ironic, because I’ve seen pages with a lot more of that. Did Jemma and Audrey do 100% of the backgrounds in the Game arc? Is the background really the hardest part of this page? O_o

Btw: If you sent any Email to me after 13.7., nothing got through. Is the problem still there?

In terms of physical safety nothing is safer than moving in to Kleya’s physical home…. not that Kleya is anywhere near ready for something that awkward.

My current prediction is that Bandit’s impending offer of “friendship” will be a lot more tempting if Bandit has the resources to help Kleya’s friends without attracting suspicion. I’m sure Tenka has the resources to dig people out of remote locations but usually doesn’t bother since 1: the cities are overcrowded and 2: any machines that break during a rescue attempt can’t be replaced.

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 596