‘Not A Villain’ Webcomic – Page 705

Please note: NAV is updating only on Tuesdays until the end of June.

And Bandit talks to Kat.

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what a wholesome conversation

So… neither of them really know each other?

Jake: “She’s going to kill me. I must stay perfectly still and do nothing at all.”

Kat: “He’s going to broadcast my secret everywhere. I must run away!”

They both know how they used to be. During the apocalypse

“Before” The Apocalypse. The Apocalypse supposedly started because Kleya… left home.

I love this so much. They both are living in fear of phantom of the other person they created in their absence from each other, instead of realizing who the other person really is. Such a great scene.

I am not sure those are phantoms instead of memories.
It is heavily implied on page 14 that Kat considers herself responsible for 248970 human deaths. That is easy too low for the apoclypse, and there was apparently good evidence that she killed a significant portion of an army at one point. The idea that Kat might kill someone is not a stretch. More to the point, she was, when Jake knew her, obsessed with winning and willing to hack to do so. Combine this with being spoiled, her parents being… well she has never been the most stable or trustworthy(in terms of whether she’ll backstab for a win. She might be very good for other forms of trust?) person. I suspect that Jake has been “killed” more than once while playing as an “ally” to Kat…

Kat meanwhile has recollections of Jake being a stickler for the rules. Her parents were paying him to be her friend, and were somewhat controlling, so probably questioned him on their activities. She has personal experience that he will follow the rules no matter what and reveal everything he learns to her father.

It is how they have changed more than how they misread each other that makes their understanding of one another inaccurate. Jake… well mostly Jake is just terrified because his life is on the line, D has killed loads of people and he probably knew some of them, but he genuinely doesn’t know how years of isolation and guilt have changed Kat. Kat meanwhile… well, Jake DID explicitly hunt her down, to the point where his N.P.C.s pressured people to death. But she remembers a child who was paid to be her friend and report on everything and doesn’t know how years of keeping a failing city functional and working in an actual community have toned down his willingness to obey proper procedure. He has had to learn to compromise and “look the other way” for the sake of practicality because they just don’t have the resources to do everything “by the book”.

They genuinely were worse people when they last met “in the flesh”.

Jake also understands that if he reports that she is alive that that will mean whatever power is left in the world will be turned to killing her.

He and Dr. Whatsist are about the only two people who don’t want that to happen, for similar but not exactly the same reasons.

I agree that they are basing their ideas of the other on their childhood and their impressions of each other then.
But I also think their impressions of each other were heavily clouded by their expectations and assumptions more than normal kids.

We still know virtually nothing about what caused and happened in the Apocalypse, other than a lot of people died, D infected a LOT of systems, and that cities were heavily dependent on those systems. Which of course only got worse due to the decay and lack of repairs since the public went out as a frenzied mob and murdered most of the people that could fix or maintain them.

Kat feels guilty about a lot of people that died, but it doesn’t mean that she’s responsible for it, no matter how she feels. I still think she did something that wasn’t that big a deal, except someone else used it as a trigger or way in and did the real damage. It may even be that the systems that survived were those that were isolated, or maybe even protected by D.
This is of course just speculation and ideas I like.
Why? I have two reasons.
First is because it would be rather too straightforward and boring for my tastes if she really did virtually wipe out all of civilization and possibly humanity.
The second is because she was just a kid. Even a super talented kid with access to a AI supervirus is limited. Unless the entire network had a single point of potential failure that would bring everything down, in which case everyone that was part of that should be removed from the gene pool for genocidal incompetence, but also it seems that very specific attempts were made and succeeded at crippling vital infrastructure almost everywhere. That’s not the activities of a child, even a true genius with malicious intent. Now as to a government or other world power type entity that has contingency plans and a secret M.A.D. protocol, that’s a different story.
MAD stands for Mutually Assured Destruction. For those that don’t know, it’s the mexican standoff of world wide devastation. It came about between the US and the USSR. They haven’t used nukes on anyone since this happened because to do so would mean the other side would also launch their nukes, and within 20 minutes both countries, and pretty much all other strategic installations and resources would be glowing rubble.
In the world of Not A Villain, it would seem that MAD would be some kind of attack on the computerized infrastructure.

If you think about that kind of thing, it could be as simple of a situation as Kleya/Kat did something that unexpectedly spooked a MAD watcher, human or automatic response system, and it went off, which would likely then set off any others out there. Maybe she uploaded a tag to the military insignia displays, and so people saw that and blamed her.
Somebody definitely blamed her, otherwise there would likely never be a specific name associated with it, other than a military or political figure.

But whatever the exact situation that happened, I’m betting TENka has it’s dirty corporate hands in it all the way up to the shoulders. They came out of the mess in far too good of a position, when they should have been the epicenter of ground zero. They definitely had some kind of defense against this exact thing active before the event. The current decay being a result of the rest of the infrastructure of the world being thrashed and their own shortage of programmers due to the lynch mobs.

I know, I’m thinking about it too much and babbling too much, but it’s been a boring week.
Thanks for reading my pet guesses on what’s going on behind the screen.

If they automated MAD systems then a hacker could purposefully set them off and then focus on deactivating protocols that would have kept people alive, like emergency response.

Why else would th TENka higher-ups be so keen to find and kill Kleya? The best way to keep the scapegoat from spilling the beans IS to get rid of them after all.

Maybe she only considers herself actually responsible for a part of the apocalypse?

That is my thinking. The number is 248970, which is far too high to be her running around with an axe, but far too low to be, well, what happened. Also, nobody has much idea of what exactly the death-toll is, because the survivors are scattered like mad, and it seems as though the great outdoors isn’t consistently habitable so no large-scale surveys are happening.

My guess? It is mostly, uhh, what Dude survived. Singapore? The thing where the robots went and killed everyone. Shanghai! Mostly because that was brought up in-story and there is that fantasy that stories should aim to be entirely relevant, so you know that every single gun is Checkov’s and are never surprised again… so it “could” just be Dude’s backstory, but it is even odds that Kleya pulled the trigger for that one, even if someone else was aiming… like the speech-giver from 304 who seems to have ridden the blame train all the way to the top.

I wonder if he preemptively said to no one in particular “I’m not telling anyone”

Dani would think the comment was directed at her, but he could really be talking to Kat. That would have thrown Kat for a loop.
And if she followed up with what why not he could say “you’ve only avoided one,” or something along those lines. That would help get Kat to not hack them. I mean they are on his server, no injuries should pass over to the mains

He has no way to know what she was thinking. He just knows she noticed and left because of it.

This is all happening really fast. None of them are really thinking or planning, they’re mostly just reacting. Both Jake and Kleya know what happened and did their best to not exchange guilty looks – and all the while Dani is just exuberant over her success, completely missing it.

The shading makes it look like Kleya is already ‘out’ – if she’s able to stop at this point then great. Otherwise it’ll be Dani alone with Bandit, juggling a mixture of anger, confusion, and worry. At which point it’ll be up to Bandit to give Dani some kind of message that’ll convince Kleya to not vanish for good. Or we could go with the whole trope of Kleya exposing herself on the premise of “He already told you didnt he?!?”

Well this just got awkward for Danni.

Awkward, yes, but I actually have little sympathy for her at the moment. I’m actually terrified of Danni.

I don’t know if it was ever said how she became paralyzed, but I bet it happened directly or indirectly due to hackers. (Remember, hackers are also blamed for the super volcano and the earth’s magnetic fields failing) And even if she wasn’t paralyzed by the initial hacking, the resulting global crash left her in the hands of a system that couldn’t justify spending resources on keeping her alive.

Danni has every reason to hate hackers. So what do you think will happen when she finds out she’s best friends with the queen of hackers? And this situation is the prefect opportunity for the wrong sentence or the wrong action to happen right in front of her and reveal everything.

The nightmare Kat fears from Jake may just come from Danni instead.

I am not sure how she would know that Kat is The Cyborg unless Jake says something(Keeping secrets is one of his primary defining features and occupations.) or Kat to say something, when she appears to be logging off. Still possible though, tensions are high and anyone can slip.

On Danni’s attitude? From pages 229 and 343/344 I get the impression that Danni is not someone with personal experience on the issue. She has the general “hackers are terribly evil” attitude from society, but no knee-jerk horror reaction. She was even talked down from Bandit’s issue. I don’t see her hatred of hackers overriding her love for Kat. It IS possible that she would have some ideological or peer thing where she chooses to do the right thing because it is The Cyborg and that overrides personal feelings.

Finally, if Danni was put into a position to choose between her friend or betraying her friend, I would have sympathy for her being in that position…

I’m almost sure I have *never* had such intense feelings of anticipation for the next page of a comic before as I have right now. I think the previous record holder was… this page, of course, after reading last week’s! This is awesome. When each page is less than a second, yet full of action… next page could not come “fast enough” if I was reading it in print – I don’t turn pages fast enough to measure up to the suspense here! Drawing it out doesn’t really diminish it, it just makes it last longer, so not really a bad thing to me.

But I do hope it doesn’t continue like this for too long or I might become just a little too crazy 😀 On the other hand, some say I’m not crazy enough…

I wonder what Annie is up to.

Wow, I didn’t expect that Kat’s weakness was this much of a weakness. I understood when she almost hacked under pressure, like in the tournament finals or when Bandit was about to kill her in the game, but in a harmless mini-simulation, too? That Keiko must’ve been such a full-scale “winning-Yandere” during the Ending.

So, on the next page we’ll see that she knows that he knows that she knows that he knows that she hacked. A few iterations later their brains will be fried just like he predicted. 🙂

Objection – this page, were it played as a moving picture, would be best without any music whatsoever. That utter quiet as you _get_ what just happened is better than any dramatic cue.

Hmm, she really can’t just pretend nothing happened eh? I mean, if you think it’s suddenly all over, might as well stick around and make sure it really is… not like anyone can hurt her.

It’s getting super intense.. and.updates once a week? Noooooo
/cry

looking forward to next week

I keep wondering if the Ending – with her as an invincible cyborg girl – wasn’t Kleya thinking she was playing a video game of some sort; if she wasn’t tricked into doing that by whoever saw themselves as the benefitor from the chaos. And that once she realized what was going on, she took advantage of the solar flare to shut all the rogue machinery down. Only the solar flare was worse than anyone expected, and along with a supervolcano (that might’ve been just Really Bad Luck, a coincidence) ended life as we know it.

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 705