‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 622

It's not fun being a parent during an apocalypse.

46 Comments

I really like how Kat looks on this page!

Also, it’s sad what Jane is going through, but that doesn’t mean no citizens are under extreme hardship as well. If you can’t pay the medical bills, your child still dies.

More to the point, Kat doesn’t know what it’s like. She is better off than probably anyone else on the planet. Sandra should have told Jane that Kat can fix things.

But maybe that’s Jane’s real play, here.

I’m not sure what you are getting at. Care to explain?

Kat’s in that weird chamber/machine place where she’s safe/protected and can even reroute whatever she wants to her location using D.

Yeah, apparently she’s high-jacked some kind of automated warship. But it really doesn’t matter where Kat is, as long as there are computers and bots around, she can control them…totally, unlike TENka and far indeed from what the people in the Cities can do.

She’s not the only hacker to survive the hunts, obviously. Hackers, unlike Citizens and other Outsiders, can hack. But nobody else can hack like Kat can.

It’s possible that MOST hackers escaped the hunts, in such a highly automated society, they’d seem to have a massive advantage. And while the Hacker Hunts evidently involved disabling a lot of bots and computer-controlled infrastructure, probably most of it is fixable by those with the right skills.

Heck, Kat probably has a bot factory or two up and running. She could probably save everyone herself if she could get anyone to accept her help.

That might be all she’s trying to prove, that she’s not evil and can help people if they’ll trust her.

Sorry, I meant the part about Sandra telling Jane, and Jane’s real play… The other bit was clear 🙂

(Also, yeah — I think it’s pretty much a given that she is trying to prove her good intentions, so people would accept her help…)

Oh, so maybe Jane knows that Kat doesn’t know what it is like, but she’s avoiding saying that Kat doesn’t know what it’s like, cause that would be off-putting. Instead she says “you know what it’s like” to get Kat thinking about how she doesn’t know what it’s like, but Jane doesn’t have to be the one that accuses her.

And Sandra knows (and should have mentioned to Jane) that Kat is the kind of person who can fix an old Kido that wasn’t working…and have perfect confidence of being able to do so (of course we know that’s not what she really did, but she almost certainly could have).

So Mina’s sister, is she still trapped in that cave in she was caught in and her parents are just feeding her to keep her alive? Cause if so that got to be one of the worst fates imaginable. No wonder bloody marry is mad if that’s the kinda thing outsiders deal with.

No. She’s not in the “cave” any more. The problem is that she’s still injured and her family don’t have much in the way of medical supplies.

Ahh I see well still its pretty miserable

D has been “arranging” for Mina’s family to get what they need – for example, the suspiciously convenient robot with medical supplies that burrowed down to where Mina could find it.

Shennannigan’s aside though, Mina’s family is certainly in rough shape.

You might be confusing order of events? I think the robot was before Kat knew who the Lillys were, and there’s no way D is arranging something like this worldwide for all Outsiders… unless he is and the rabbit holes goes deeper than we know 0.0

No, the robot was pretty recent, Mae tells Kat about it for the first time just before this meeting with Jane. She says that Minna discovered it last time she went foraging, which apparently is a fairly regular task for them. Kleya/Kat’s expressions are interesting, but don’t definitively prove anything.

She isn’t? I don’t remember if it was mentioned if they could move her…

They do move her, on occasion, but they try to avoid it because of the risk of injuring her further.

Thanks for the response. 🙂 Don’t burn yourself out again.

@comic: Kat just got burned in the last panel. 😀

So she doesn’t know who Kat is.

Hey, there’s three of them! Three kids.

Oh, hey, you’re right, that is too many legs to be two kids. Nice catch.

Who wants to bet “Jane” is one of the kids, and not the adult? It would explain the obsession with nursery rhymes. Heck, who says that “Jane” is one person? Being played by multiple people simultaneously would explain a lot.

That’s an interesting thought. It could be true, but will we ever find that out since it doesn’t appear to be relevant to the story. We’ll see.

That would be an interesting twist, but I think I like her better as a mom.

I love how the second panel looks!

Jane is a mother CONFIRMED!

I disagree @josnex Jane may indeed be a mother, however the only thing confirmed is she is in a small group with 3 kids…
Some or all of those kids might be hers, but her “special” does suggest she might more likely have had 2 kids before the ending.

She seems pretty bitter so she might have lost more then just a husband and lost one of her own kids as well…

All just speculation

Jane could also be the eldest of the three kids. She could also be played by more than one person.

Eh? Why would anyone *doubt* that she was? I don’t remember anything suggesting her being dishonest about that…

Some of them are, Jane. Some of them are.
Every day for the last who knows how long, Danni watched death coming closer and closer. At one point, it was *minutes* away. Only her parents supported her. The fear all but ruled their lives.
And right now, the Game is the only thing keeping all of that away.
Admittedly, that situation is artificial, in a sense. It doesn’t have to be that way; Danni could be granted an exemption to work in LiFe, since she can’t work any other way. But she can’t make that happen, so for now, this is all she has.

The Game and LiFe are the only reasons the city people even NOTICE outsiders. It’s the only thing bringing them into their community, since the cities aren’t capable of bringing the outsiders into the cities physically (even if they wanted to).

Just like how pointless sports (olympics, football) help bind countries together, the Game binds together what’s left of the world. Pointless entertainment like that is all that’s keeping society united in heart and mind.

Oh, I think that they could bring Outsiders into the cities, if they put the resources into it. That’s Jane’s point. The Game distracts them and keeps them from doing what’s right for the Human race.

They do bring Outsiders into the Cities…when they will be an asset rather than just a further drain on the City’s resources. That’s what all the stuff about “importing” is about. It’s clearly not easy or particularly safe, since apparently ‘rogue’ bots still pose dangers to transport, but it’s how it is.

*I say rogue, but it’s perfectly possible that they are security bots that are still following their original programming to try and protect national borders and airspace and such…it would be pretty important, with everyone living in high-tech cities, to secure against hacked transports flying through without proper authorization…and that’s that TENka’s assets are everywhere but near TENka City.

Saying she was minutes from death feels like a stretch. AIUI, the deadline was “only” for putting her offline… Ultimately, she would have faced her real-life end as well, since The Game was her last shot at proving “useful” — but that wouldn’t have been quite as immediate.

http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-186/
“They want to replace me with several imported Outsiders.”
“Please let our daughter keep living!”
“I just have the end of Reality’s day now.”
She wasn’t talking about staying in LiFe the virtual environment at that point. She was talking about staying in life as in *not dying*.
Maybe it was hours rather than minutes, we don’t know how much time was left in Reality’s day at that point. But she didn’t have long to live.

2nd panel background matches the panel in the previous page where Jane is talking about how her citizen teammates who she killed in the game aren’t really dead. I think Jane is well acquainted with death in Reality.

I get it now, she’s an outsider too. And that was something I was kinda wondering about. it seems a lot of outsiders aren’t just out there because they can’t afford to live in the city, or the places they are in that where urban at one time are now to far away from the remaining city centers to make it worth it. But instead many are trapped inside wrecked buildings while still somehow having power, internet access, and vr equipment. they are still trapped. and in some cases perhaps trapped in so badly they can’t even keep up the supplies they need to keep living. So at best it’s a gilded cage, but I would suspect after so much time with no one coming even the gilding is starting to tarnish and with the status quo as it is there seems to be no help in sight.
So that’s why Mary wants to Monkey wrench the game thinking that if the people in the city’s spent less time messing with the game they’d spend more of it digging out the outsiders from the wreckage’s they are trapped in. As even if they are still outsiders, if they are able to get to the real outside they can at least work on making their life’s better but trapped deep inside some partially collapsed high-rise and not knowing when or if it’ll fully collapse is not good for long term survival. And i’d bet Jane has either lost or come very close to losing someone she cared deeply about due to this.

It is a bit strange although they are “trapped” that they have power and internet and somehow receive shipments of that Goop they call food.
Come to think about it. It might not be that they’re trapped inside of something as much as they are alone in a remote area where there’s no way to get to a “city”. This would explain all of my stranger things I listed above.

I think the point is, those who were trapped with power, internet and routes for food to be delivered -are- the exceptions to the general rule. They’re just, uh, the only ones who survived. There are those who survived in big enough communities with enough available space to organize something self-sustaining at least with trade and to connect to other communities, and thats’ Cities. There are those who survived in small groups or alone with enough resources to connect with Cities and let them know about their situations and receive supplies, and that’s Outsiders. There are those who survived with enough resources to connect, but no means to receive supplies, and that’s Outsiders who die.
And then there are those who survived -without- the communication means… and we know nothing about them for this very reason.

No, this is taking place much further in the future, where almost all basic production and infrastructure was largely automated. Nearly all of the population would have been urban, and the telecommunications network is clearly far more extensive and robust than it is now. That’s exactly why the hacker attacks were able to do so much damage.

Transport and delivery are automated, so TENka just has to hack that system to do what they want. The problem is that they don’t control everything, even in TENka City and certainly not everywhere else. Also, the Hacker Hunts mean that most Cities drove away nearly everyone who actually knew how to program/reprogram/hack the bots, and they also destroyed a lot of the automated systems too. And with the radical changes in the environment, probably most of the existing farming bots are now futilely tilling barren desert.

A number of Cities have gone defunct, and it’s mentioned that they are only usable to hackers.

I wonder . . . could Jane be Kat’s mother?

I was wondering if Jane’s insistance of getting off the island was because her dead husband’s avatar is there . . . and followed that train of thought.

It could also be a tree but she was not actually killing them so that is unlikely.

As for morto – if Kleya can go from demoli to erbana . . .

I’m pretty sure mommy is dead. Supposedly the cyborg did “something” really nasty to her mother, so if she is alive, she’s at least severely crippled (though I suppose that would explain the insanity).

The hospital where her mom was got blown up.

You are not the first one to bring up that theory — but I don’t really understand what makes anyone think that? Jane has mentioned her kids before — and we actually *see* them right here on this page. “Kleya” was an only child. Not to mention that everyone — including “Kleya” herself, along with Jake, Kim, and the rest of the world — are all convinced her mom is dead.

(OTOH, there have been strong hints that reports of her *dad’s* death have been greatly exaggerated.)

first rule of fiction no body no death. the hospital was blown up but nothing was said about her body being found. the first time Kat saved Dani, Jane had a weird Smile on her face like she figured something out. Kleya was an only Child but I got the impression form Jake he was “part of the family”. the picture of the person and three kids doesn’t really prove anything particularly since for all we know she adopted them since

So the smile is the only actual trigger for the speculation? I’m sure we can find more likely explanations for that. Like for example, Jane realising that Dani gives her leverage over Kat?

one does not speak for all

I thought the “weird smile” was “Ima kill you now!” transitioning to “WTF just went up my nose?” Unless we’re talking about something other than this.

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 622