‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 624

Somebody looks familiar...

42 Comments

I have another vote incentive idea, and this time there is no excuse along the lines of “it takes too much time”:
I’d like to see Bloody Mary’s group from panel 2 in full resolution. 🙂
I know your originals are in #absurdres and that you’re scaling them down to less than 25%, so it’s quite a waste that we can’t get to see these characters in all their detail.

@panel 4: What sarcasm? Ooooooh, so THAT’S what the quotes mean. Man, I’ve been wondering about that for such a long time. 😛

“Somebody looks familiar…”
Let’s play “Who’s that Pokémon?”: I recognize Kim in panel 3, but just who could that person in the last panel be? Is it Paddy? I think it’s Paddy! ^^ No, wait: The hair says it’s Naruto! Because they need to get rid of Saisuke.

On a more serious note: High popularity equals “taking away a lot of time from a lot of people, some of which could be working instead”.

Also: Why are the two Dudes the ones with the highest popularity? Or, actually I can’t even tell the genders of the two left most people. I just assumed number 2 and 4 are the only dudes. But I’m starting to get doubts about the green-haired missy.

I am noticing similarities in the torso designs of witch-lady and Jane. Looks creepy on Jane (like an open wound) and cute on the witch-lady. Also I like pink hair of medium length and when someone wears a hat. 🙂 Hats have style.

it’s a jigglypuff viewed from above

The silhouette in the last panel looks like Bandit to me.

I’m near positive that the last panel is OG Bandit… and since Jane invalidated her entire group, they had to find an alternative method for getting Bandit inside. If that’s the case, then Jane is the reason Kat’s gaming in the first place.

… wait we already knew that didn’t we. Oh welp.

Male villain characters are generally more acceptable as straight villains, the complexity of motivation necessary for female villain characters to be popular makes them ambiguous villains (at best). As a villain group, the male characters would tend to be more popular (leaving aside that the visible cues of the characters in question are ambiguous as to sex).

Bandit is a good example, the character is so overtly and unabashedly villainous that painting Jake as not being a monster has been difficult.

Jane is also a good example, while her actual actions in-Game (we have no comparison in-L.i.F.e.) have had a similar quality, it’s harder to believe her irredeemably evil. Partly because I genuinely feel her motives are better…but would I feel that way if she were a he?

There are plenty of female straight villains… sexy femme fatal killers who prance around in tight fitting leather, witches like in “snow white” story, etc.

These days sometimes such stories are “retold” with villain instead the hero by feminists.

There are plenty of female straight villains. But they aren’t popular the way male straight villains can be. This ties into the fact that many of the qualities that make a straight villain effective are also considered virtues in men, like being able to kill (or risk the lives of subordinates) for calmly considered rational purposes. These things are just not widely considered good qualities in women (please, no argument over whether they should be, my personal preferences are idiosyncratic and merely matters of taste, not logic), so a woman with straight villain properties (like torturing a vulnerable woman to death just because it’s company policy) will simply be unattractive to most people.

I don’t see “Bandit” being evil as much as he is a prick. So really not that bad all things considered. He doesn’t on a whim go around slaughtering everything that moves. He’ll trick you, use you, and take you for everything your worth, but he won’t kill you. And if you’ve hired him to do a job, he’ll do that job. Not without snark and raising the price though.

I’m not forgetting Nanea. Not ever. And I’m not forgetting Danni either.

And I hardly think they just happen to be the only ones.

But leave that aside. I also don’t believe Jake was doing anything other than “just following orders.” That’s also the only reason he plays Bandit as such a prick, his natural inclination is to make everyone like him.

But the worst thing about Jake is that he doesn’t think anything is wrong as long as someone else told him to do it, and he’s not actually very discriminating about whose orders he’s following.

That’s the thing about “just following orders”, there is no such thing, following orders absolutely requires deciding which orders to follow.

Jake KNOWS that TENka is lying about what the cyborg actually did. He knows it as a matter of scientific fact, he knows it as a matter of personal technical expertise. He really has no excuse for believing any of their lies…but declines to accept responsibility for doing so. He also deflects responsibility for his efforts to hide Kleya from TENka, that also is “just following orders” even if I believe that it’s an order he probably should follow. But he should follow it a little more responsibly.

I have a much higher opinion of those who are outright evil.

Hm, it’s Bandit, you guys say? Not Naruto? ….. yyyyyeah, I can sort of see similarities now. But Jigglypuff from above is still my favorite. ^^

Jane is such a compelling character.

is panel 4 supposed to be from the side?
it seems weird, fit more for the simpsons, don’t you think?

teef. it neeths teef

Let me make sure I understand the economics of this world properly.

Cities are in bad shape. People in the city toil in heavy labor to stay alive. What the people in the cities need most of all is entertainment to distract them from the horrors of life.

City residents either work, or provide entertainment in the games. If your popularity goes down, you have work in the fields.

Outsiders provide entertainment; they basically exchange entertainment for food. Supplies are sent to those outsiders that provide entertainment.

Hence, a dancer who does not provide entertainment will not get the resources she needs to live. An outsider with children in a low popularity group will lose the resources needed to stay alive.

It was cool to see you leave a shout out to this on Darths the other day. Maybe some more people from there will come and discover this webcomic as a result. It seems you enjoy giving shout outs to multiple different webcomics in your role, there.

Well… I think what the people in the cities need most is some technical expertise to repair and expand their facilities. And as for entertainment, people are able to be entertainers in L.i.F.e. It’s a city rule that such entertainment doesn’t pay for city residence. Perhaps this also means that being a teacher, psychotherapist, graphic designer, etc. also doesn’t pay for city residence. This is why I think Jane is more right than wrong. The Game is an unnecessary expense. All the benefits it provides could be satisfied at lower cost in L.i.F.e., with the possible (unhealthy IMO) exception of the “ghost” avatars. The only justification I can imagine for keeping the Game running is that D won’t let them shut it down.

It isn’t clear to me whether Danni would die immediately if she were removed from the Kido unit, or even if she and her family had to leave the city (though it seems quite difficult for anyone outside a city to survive). Danni’s life was on the line in large part because she “refused to live in Reality,” which I always interpreted as a credible threat to suicide if forced off the Kido unit. In any case, Danni was able to dance in L.i.F.e., so her life can’t be used as an argument to support the Game.

LiFe provides -some- entertainment, but probably not enough entertainment. I doubt its programming is expansive enough to support, like, sports events – concerts need voice enhancers. Sure, dancing is possible, but could people, say, compete in running, or would their speed be programmed in?
You do have a good point, but I feel like you’re assuming too much. And Jane is clearly discounting the Citizens’ mental health altogether because their problems are not on remotely similar level with hers.

The cities are in a state of emergency, so the ancient greek concept of the tyrant probably best describes what type of leaders they have. The cities are not democracies, and what the people in the cities need most is decided by the people in charge, who are probably authoritarian. What the leaders will support will vary from city to city. Hence, Danni’s original city leaders viewed her as dead weight, since she couldn’t do anything in RL, while the new city leaders did find her abilities to dance in L.i.F.e. to be of great value. The new city leaders might have even known and admired Danni’s dancing before the crash, like Patrick.

As for economy, many outsiders receive food from the cities (as opposed to scavenging), but they can’t all be paying for the food by being entertainment. There simply isn’t going to be a high enough demand to support as many entertainers as there probably are outsiders. There are probably other resources that are traded. And cities may be exporting food simply to ensure that the outsiders don’t get together and attack the cities. In colonial times, 80% percent of people lived on farms, 20% lived in towns and cities, mainly because it was impossible to concentrate resource production to support a higher percentage in cities. There’s a similar problem here, so there is probably a substantial outsider population.

Is L.i.F.e. actually needed? Supporting the network and servers that L.i.F.e. runs on would take people and resources, and expose the cities’ computers to external threats. And, unless they have switched to a satellite wireless system, people would be needed to go outside the cities to keep the WAN operational; otherwise, outsiders wouldn’t be able to connect. L.i.F.e. would have to provide something worth that effort, and I don’t think entertainment would be a strong enough incentive. Especially not the effort to stay connected to other cities in L.i.F.e. Each city could even have it’s own L.i.F.e. server running with no connection to other cities (and no way for hackers in other cities to attack them). Certainly, the Game would not be needed. I suspect Tenka has a way to incentivise the cities to support the Game. We know the Game is key to Tenka’s plan to take control of the Virus.

People don’t need to go outside to do normal maintenance, that’s done by bots. What people are needed for is to reprogram (hack, persuade, whatever) the advanced technology to address the current situation, or to do work that the bots were never programmed/designed to do (like work agriculture that has been adapted to a destroyed environment).

I suspect that the setting may feature extremely low latency connection, possibly even FTL based on quantum tunneling behavior of photons going through solid matter. That’s a bit of a tangent other than that it would render satellites a legacy tech. Anyway, normal maintenance would be largely automated…giving the tendency of people to break things suspected of having been hacked a multiplier effect. Breaking bots doesn’t just break the bots you break, it breaks an entire interdependent system.

There are probably far more outsiders than ever connect to L.i.F.e. or the Game…mostly hackers (or people who would be suspected of such). Of course, we know that hackers still show up in L.i.F.e. and TENka doesn’t have the ability to eliminate them. But think about it, what exactly are the motives to be in L.i.F.e. at all if you can hack? You can get control of bots and even fix a defunct City well enough to support you.

Still, in this future urbanization trends will have increased dramatically, and with the environmental deterioration a LOT of the rural population will not have had any means of survival. Survival depends on technology and the ability to use that technology in a situation for which it wasn’t designed. The Outsiders who can hack probably used to mostly live in Cities before being driven out. Those who can’t…have a hard time.

As for the resource cost of having people do things in L.i.F.e. or the Game, it’s almost certainly far lower. Having possessions and private space and all that in Reality takes physical resources. Having those things virtually takes milligrams of processors. Doing things in Reality takes food that has to be grown using artificial light sources, kilowatts of energy. Doing things virtually takes milliwatts. The problem is that people will die if they don’t don’t eat in Reality, and they lack the expertise to reprogram the bots to work the fields for them. Otherwise the sensible thing to do would be live completely in L.i.F.e., like Mae does (Mae doesn’t even earn money, she just spends it).

^^^ this. Once you’ve set up the system, the cost per action / possession is miniscule compared to providing the equivalent in RL.

Actually as shown in the early comics being the entertainment for a living was exactly what Kat and her friend Mina where doing and had been doing for a while when we first join them. Mina would go sing and dance like some pop star, while Kat set up the backstage stuff for her. Plus that’s how the players of the game can spend as much time on it as they do. They are like the TV stars or that world. I do get that life outside of the LiFE is likely still in a catastrophic state of emergency. still though it also sounds like they have been in this state for a long time so people started to demand that some luxuries be afforded to them, such as entertainment after a while as it became clear that the current state of things is not the exception but the rule.

As for Danni there where pages detailing that she’s not just unable to live with what ever handicaps she has in the real world. I think she wouldn’t survive with her conditions outside of a city and is not able to help in the usual means an that’s why being outside of life would cause her to be as as good as dead,

Another thing I just thought of. is the Comic did mention how desperate her parents are to keep her in there and to what extremes they are going though to keep her in. if it was the case that Dani was able to function in Real life to at least some degree the parents would probably be making her least do what she can to help offset the work the rest of the family has to do for all of them to stay there. While the parents may be willing to put in some extra work to ease the suffering of their daughter. I doubt they’d be working themselves to death trying to keep her in if they knew she’d be able to come out and do at least some work outside.

Well, and it just doesn’t fit Danni’s character to sacrifice her parents like that if she had any choice. I mean, she didn’t want to sacrifice Kleya and she only barely got to know her.

I find it particularly poignant that she was so sorry about not being allowed to touch her fans before the Ending for fear she’d get sick.

ooh one other point someone else brought up that also supports this idea. Way back when Dani thought she had lost Kat the first time and was in the broken down university. She had mentioned that if they had a power fail and her mom wasn’t around at the time there would be a good chance she’d die. But since there’s no mention from anyone else who also uses the Kido’s that a sudden power-fail would be deadly or even dangerous. And I doubt that Dani’s family are the only people with unstable power. So this means that an unexpected Kido shutdown is not harmful. Which means then that then Dani is on some kind of life support.

That does seem to be the implication with the little EKG monitor line in some scenes.

Are you confusing LiFe with the Game? LiFe is most definitely needed just as something for new Outsiders to connect to, however -that- managed to get set up. I doubt anyone would argue LiFe is needed desperately, the question is whether the GAME is needed.

Zigraphix: can you point to the page where it talks about Danni “refusing” to live in reality? The impression I had was that she was a *medical* liability, ie, she is unable to work, and her parents are working extra hours to justify her continued care while others want to let her die and import several outsiders who could *all* be supported with the same amount of resources and each contribute more to the city, because they aren’t disabled. I’m thinking especially of this page: http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-186/

I really thought it was a quote from Danni, but I guess what I was remembering was a comment on this page: http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-347/ What we do know is that she’s paralyzed in Reality: http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-343/

I still think there are plenty of less resource-intensive ways for people to amuse themselves, and TENka is keeping the Game up for their own reasons.

She did at one point say she refused to stay in Reality, but with all the other implications it’s p clear that she’s paralyzed and probably needs expensive medical equipment to stay alive (makes the city leaders’ heartlessness make a little more sense)

“I refuse to stay in reality” was her exact wording, and it was here: http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-41/

Danni isn’t a dancer anymore, not in Reality. It’s not just that she can’t make a living dancing, it’s that she cannot dance except by being in a Kido. That, and she’s a costly liability.

Danni has never clarified exactly what her condition is, but the way she talks about other people needing help with their real body, it’s persistent and bad enough to compare to Mae, if not worse. I suspect something like ALS, or near-total paralysis.

So they agreed to let TENka replace Bloody Mary…and then logged out with her on watch? The sheer stupidity such a move would take justifies her actions even without all the sob story.

Unless Bloody Mary managed to get someone else (Sandra, perhaps?) to allow her unscheduled access to the Game, even then with someone else on watch she shouldn’t have had an easy time finishing them all off.

Yea it was a stupid move, though I think the group underestimated the effect getting kicked out of the group would have on her. Them all being city folk, while they figured she wasn’t going to be happy with it, I think they also thought the worst that would happen is she’d be bored until she manged to qualify for a different team. So to them it wasn’t a death sentence or anything on that level, to them it was more like she was going to be kicked out of a D&D campaign half way though type bad. And they figured if she did anything to drastic she wouldn’t get invited back in ever,which is way worse then being kicked out in this round, so in their mind they wheren’t in that much danger and for one reason or another everyone else had something they had to do instead of keep watch.

I also think it’s possible the only reason Jane’s rl group wasn’t doing worse is that she was an active player in the game so that kept enough attention thrown at them to keep the status quo going. But it would lead to more people having to draw the short straw again once that stopped, and she was just told it was going to stop all because, at least from Jane’s view point, Tekna’s attempt to mess with who’s in the game, and the city folk in her group being to scared of being inconvenienced to do anything to stop it.

I still think that she must have lost her husband before she got Kido access, otherwise it would be irrational to risk someone who could program custom Game specials, however badly. The amount that Kat made in her one game session suggests that having a player in the Game, with a programmer supporting her, would have avoided the group having to forage for supplies at such risk anyway.

It seems likely that Morto would be the go-to alignment for standing watch, if this is any indication. I guess they weren’t being any more stupid than Kat…lol.

Her husband’s the one who programmed her creepy doll special. He’d have had no reason to make her a special unless she were already playing the Game, or trying to qualify to get into the Game.

I’d say it’s more likely that Jane’s RL survivor group has difficult or limited accessibility to the City supply drop/run/delivery locations. Remember, playing the Game can get you immigration access to a City … if they can viably get to you.

It’s also unclear just what Jane’s husband drew the “short straw” for/in relation to. Was it something actively hazardous, or just something nobody in the group really wanted to do?

Well Jane did say that those who drew the short straw and went off to do the thing, haven’t returned so I would think it’s actively hazardous.

as for When Jane lost her husband, it would have to be after she got kido access. I would guess some point during the qualifying rounds or just after it. we can see that in Kat’s situation it took her a long time to get paid, She had to complete the qualification rounds and the tutorial and spend a day in the game itself before she got anything. I think it’s a fair assumption it takes this long for everyone from when they enter to when they get anything back. Jane and her husband worked on getting her in knowing that once they started getting paid they would have a much less risky means to get supplies. But fate was not kind and at some point after the doll special was made for her, but before she got paid, things got to the point where they couldn’t wait and had to make at least one last high risk run and her husband got the short straw that time.

Jane could have played the Game before the Ending. It’s evident that her husband did, at least. She mentions that he was a Dead One in the Game.

And it doesn’t make sense that her group would have sent someone out to look for help because their supplies were running out if they already had Kido access to L.i.F.e. and a successful player in the Game along with a guy who could program custom specials (however ineptly). They would already have all the help that was available to them. Survival 101, you don’t leave the place where you can communicate with civilization to “look for help”. You especially don’t risk the person who has the highest potential value to the civilization you’re in contact with to do so.

Of course, I don’t know for sure that he even survived the Hacker Hunts and the Ending. That silhouette could be someone else, though I’m not sure who. But given that Jane’s husband played the Game before the End, it seems plausible that she did, and that he programmed her custom special back then.

She wasn’t a player in the begging and especially not a successful one. as for your survival 101 quip well you still do if despite the fact you can call them from there it’s clear no one’s listening. I think they realized that despite the fact they can use the kido to get into the game, no one on the inside is willing to send out any kind of help. what help resources where still usable by general public where so overloaded as to be effectively useless to them. And getting help from other sources where out as they wheren’t important enough to anyone else who either needed the help themselves, or worried that if they got spotted helping one stranger then everyone would be after them and thus putting them back into that spot where they needed help. So thus while they could contact civilization from there just fine, it wasn’t really that useful as it got clear the Calvary isn’t coming. Which is what that survival tip is assuming would happen, that once you can let other people know your in trouble they can send help and staying put makes it easier for the help to find you.
so once that became clear they had to figure out some other way to get help. and that’s when they noticed the people flocking to the game and decided to try that route. but it took a long time for it to work as they where not seasoned players. it’s even shown as much that she was the lowest ranking player in a rather low ranking group. So like I said it took a long time before they could convince any one to send any kind of support their way. And what help they got when they finally did get it still didn’t amount to any kind of rescue as she’s still an outsider.

And so at some point while this is going on, their supplies run out, and even know they know there’s likely more coming soon, they got to a point where if they waited any longer it wouldn’t matter, so they had to take the risk and gather at least a few supplies to hold them over. until they could actually get the supplies from town that they where only recently granted despite how long they have been asking for them.

But still why the husband right? if he’s so important; it would seem silly to send out one of the two key people in setting up the supply line on an almost certain suicide mission as you mentioned

But what if the others in the group didn’t know about his programing abilities and how he’s a key person in this. and it could be that with the dynamic of the group he felt that if he tried to play that card that he had that unique skill to help Jane then he’d have other problems with the group freaking out about him being a “hacker” and causing some other terrible problem to befall the group. Thus he was stuck between a rock and a hard place and he honestly believed his odd’s of coming back alive from the gathering mission where better then surviving the fall out of everyone worrying that he might cause some evil robots or something to finish them all off.

or another possibly is he did try to play that card and someone else claimed they could also work on the specials and perhaps had some other reason they where more needed to the group so thus he needed to go. But it turns out he wasn’t as good which is why the dolls sorta work as there was a good start to the dolls code but the rest was a bodge job from less competent programmer.

Not sure why you think Jane definitely wasn’t a player before the Ending.

Even if the group mismanaged Jane’s income so badly that they were going to starve because she was suspended for a short time (by the way, 359 is almost two weeks of food suggesting maybe 10 a meal, while Game sessions get paid thousands), her husband could still have sold custom Specials to aspiring players, or someone could have gotten some other job, and they could have looked for other nearby Outsiders through L.i.F.e., which would seem a better bet than just wandering the surface.

I suspect that what TENka really did with the custom Specials was mostly removing a tool or wizard that allowed people to put one together without a deep understanding of how the underlying rules worked (something like the smart modeling/skinning tool that turns a hand drawn image into an avatar), I’m guessing Kat never used that tool anyway (neither of them, from her troubles drawing in the beginning).

It would explain Jane having a custom Special without her husband having to have any real skills at all, and maybe also why the code looked like disparate bits stuck together rather than an organic whole…to Kat. Of course, something must have broken it since, but what is unclear. Jane might be relying on a local copy that got corrupted somehow (such as by interference from the Mani-trees), or it could have been broken by some update to the Game.

Still, that would require Jane’s custom Special to be made before TENka changed the system to exclude people with no coding skill, which apparently happened well before Kleya joined L.i.F.e., and seems to have been an issue for a while now.

In addition, if the power goes out and there’s not someone there, she dies.

http://navcomic.com/not-a-villain/page-353/

BTW, I’m curious about whether there is an existing comic page guide on the wiki. Like something with simple summaries of the content of each page. There doesn’t appear to be one, but something like that could help expedite a lot of discussions about what has and hasn’t happened.

If there isn’t one, I’d like to start one.

By the way, in the process of rereading through the comic (for purpose of making a the page by page summary) I’ve been struck by some things that people are commonly misunderstanding.

One thing is the difference between IRL economics and the L.i.F.e. economy. The food that TENka and other Cities provide (crappy as it is) apparently goes for about 10 a meal. On the other hand, it’s already been established that things like cheap Game practice, authorizing a custom avatar, and signing up for the DeathMatch run in the hundreds or thousands. Kleya gets hit with a 3500 fine for napping in a public area on page 03.

This is not sloppy storytelling, it reflects a wide and intentional disconnect between the economics of reality and the virtual worlds (we haven’t actually seen the Game economy, despite some references to money, it seems like alignment and stats are more important). Molly is right to characterize the food shipments from the Cities as “very generous”. It’s clear that if Citizens were allowed to make money in L.i.F.e. rather than by working the fields, there would be no food at all or food shipments would have to be way more expensive.

What is also obvious is that the vast majority of the surviving population (at least those in the Cities and dependent on food from them) have extremely limited technical literacy. They don’t understand the difference between hacking and magic, so they believe things like TENka being all-powerful when in Reality we see they’re pitiful, or that the geomagnetic field was “hacked”, or whatever. This brings out a more subtle point. A lot of how TENka maintains control is through artificial scarcity of virtual resources. It is in their interests to hide, as much as possible, the relative IRL costs of the things they provide to make it seem that they are giving everyone a great deal. And this smoke-screen is largely effective with most characters.

But we shouldn’t be fooled. TENka likes to make it seem that there are all kinds of abstruse technical reasons they “can’t” do things they’d rather not do. Part of this is to obscure a lot of the things that they really can’t do. Part of it is to make what they can do seem more heroic. And part of it is to avoid having people get too addicted to virtual reality, given how necessary it is to have them function IRL.

Of course, part of the problem is that we don’t really know that much about how the economics of the science fictional Reality work. We know their technology has elements that are several decades in the future relative to us, but we don’t know what still works. The setting is “Singularity threshold” or “failed Singularity”, and includes things like robots programmed to do everything from military to medical to maintenance work. Probably the buildings in which isolated Outsiders survive are highly automated, with independent ability to maintain their functions and generate their own power and life support, and probably automatically handle small package delivery by a “smart” dumbwaiter system, given that the Lillys can’t escape their building but still get food shipments. This implies that computational resources should be extremely cheap…except that as a post-apocalyptic setting they clearly lack the ability to produce new computers and thus shift the type of computational resource production to meet demand. For all their computers, the choices are to use it “as is”, don’t use it at all (and maybe break it to make sure nobody else does either), or hack. The computers that run the power generation, life support, package delivery, and communication access for the Lilly’s collapsing building probably would qualify as supercomputers by our standards, they might have raw power to run the Game…but they don’t have the programming.

My guess is that L.i.F.e., which appears to be largely a post-Ending creation, actually costs more IRL than the Game, which was created and largely perfected before the Ending. All the programming, environment design, and physical servers for L.i.F.e. had to be made/adapted by people with Survival issues. Meanwhile the Game only needs tiny tweaks, many of which I expect are removal or limitations of features (for instance, I expect that “complicating” the Specials was accomplished by removing a software tool that let non-programmers make them). But the Game is far too addictive to let everyone play it to escape Reality. So TENka has carefully restricts access to it.

Even when that means killing some people to keep them out. Note, I’m still not saying that’s right. I despise liars, and killing to keep up a lie horrifies me even when the lie serves a “noble” purpose. I’m just saying that this is how far TENka is willing to go to mislead people about what they can (and can’t) do.

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 624