A Ghost of a Chance (Worm v1 CYOA, Alt-Taylor)

[cliffc999]

This fic started out on my snippets thread as an experiment in writing something other than Jumpchain, which is all I've done up until now. It was originally going to be your bog-standard Worm v1 CYOA but as I was writing it it started evolving under me, to the point I was notably more deeply inside my alt-Taylor's head than I was inside the head of the SI it was intended to be about.

So I decided to change course and roll with that instead. You'll know it when you get there.

For those expecting a curbstomp fic, this is going to be the opposite of a curbstomp fic. In fact, I'm trying to do a serious exploration of how someone would really react if they were suddenly given vast power and even vaster responsibility, in a human rather than a video game character fashion. And part of that thinking is 'They would react by kinda freaking out a little.'

The fic mentioned below that inspired me to write this? I'm actually going to go wildly divergent from that. Not because I didn't like it, but because the author of the other fic and me are two very different people who write two very different ways.

So there will not be a rationally optimizing powerleveller as the MC. There's going to be a main character who starts with the memories of and struggles with possessing all the emotional issues and scars that canon Taylor Hebert possessed at the start of her journey, even if they're going to evolve with different power in a very different direction. The Being Taylor Is Suffering Drawback will not be handwaved away, even by Invictus. Because my MC is going to concern themself with trying not to become something that, in the process of saving the planet from Scion, would lead them down a road where later on the planet would have to beg to be saved from them.

My creative process is erratic, as anybody who follows my work already knows. The fact that occasional health problems sneak up on me and steal my spoons from time to time certainly doesn't help. In fact, this particular story was once abandoned in my snippets thread when my muse ran out after a couple chapters, and the fact that my muse eventually returned months later is a first for me.

As is, I still can't and won't guarantee that this will reach its eventual ending, or even what that ending will be given how my story outlines often evolve inside my head as I go along. But having built up five chapters' plus an interlude's worth of content its now crossed the threshold of 'five chapters and going' where I told myself I'd move it out of my snippets thread and give it its own story, so, here we are.

I would like to thank the fanfic "Technology Will Win The Day" by sun tzu for providing so many ideas on how to minmax Inspired Inventor, which I will try my best to at least be moderately polite about ripping off taking inspiration from.

The Worm v1 CYOA, for reference purposes. (imgur link)

Taylor's CYOA build and list of Inspired Inventor charges will be maintained here in the OP as an ongoing thing, for convenience.

Spoiler: Worm v1 CYOA build

Reincarnation
Hard Mode (3 pts)

Powers:

Inspired Inventor (2 pts) (1) - You are the world's first Tinker-12. Each day you have ten (counting Shattered Limiter) charges which can be spent to improve your tinker abilities within a specific area or theme. A single charge would make you a good tinker within an area, roughly around Tinker 4-5. Each additional charge after this doubles your abilities (around a two point bump in rating), with no limits to how many times you can spend a charge on a certain area. As a tinker you have superhuman scientific knowledge, understanding, and skill at applying it, able to make or do things that modern science would consider impossible within your theme. Spend a charge on Augmentation and start crafting cybernetics out of scrap. Spend some on medicine and cure cancer in an hour. Should your different themes overlap then they stack, building off of each other and integrating perfectly. All fields of knowledge are viable for this. Spending charges on martial arts would let you design and teach unbelievable fighting styles, and a political science tinker could design forms of government that function better than anything we have today. As long as you have time and resources, there isn't anything you couldn't do. This power does not come from an entity shard and is not subject to shard limits, regardless of any similarities. This includes allowing your Tinkertech to be easily mass-produced. You never have to worry about power use having negative side effects, and it may be toggled on and off at will.

Perks:

Blank (1 pt) (0) - Knowledge is power, and that means that an opponent who knows what your every move will be is an unbelievable threat. By taking this you are completely immune to being perceived by Thinker abilities. Your future and past cannot be observed, clairvoyants cannot detect you, and even danger senses cannot warn their users of an incoming attack by you. This is pervading enough that you cannot even be perceived by noticing blind spots in their sight, such powers simply acting as if you didn't exist. This applies only to uses of such powers that are hostile to you. Other thinker abilities that do not rely on directly perceiving you with the power itself are unaffected. Enhanced senses pick you up just as easily, Tattletale can still read you like an open book, and Coil is still able to perceive you in his split timelines.

Shattered Limiter (1 pt) (-1) - The factors that kept your power's growth and ability in check are completely done away with. At a base this doubles the number of slots and charges you have available. Your power growth skyrockets, with your power doubling in strength every year if you do nothing but live a normal life. Actively fighting on a regular basis drops this down to half a year. Each such interval also increases the number of slots and charges your power provides by one. Your powers refuse to be kept in check, rendering you immune to Trumps who would try to affect your abilities.

Invictus (1 pt) (-2) Your will is absolute, boundless, and unbreakable. By taking this factors such as distress, suffering, and difficulty mean nothing to you. You are capable of undergoing any disaster without batting an eye, ignoring any amount of pain, remaining mentally untouched by even the most terrifying events, and even the most fearsome odds will not give you pause. Abilities that would affect your mind or control you are useless, you shrugging these off as nothing more than an irritant. You will never break, never bow, and even come a thousand apocalypses you will stand as tall and resolute as ever. Being torn in half, locked in a time loop of endless agony for thousands of years, or facing the most hopeless odds are nothing to you.

Complications:

Being Taylor Is Suffering (+2) (0) - Instead of choosing a new life you wake up as Taylor Hebert in the hospital a few days after the locker incident. While before reincarnating woudnd't have any negative effects, Taylor's life has left you with severe depression, trust issues, and in general a very damaged mental state. Your previous life memories combined with having your powers and perks will help, but will still require time and effort to properly recover.

Spoiler: Inspired Inventor charges

Adaptation (1 charge)
Basic Science (1 charge)
Chemistry (3 charges)
Communications Engineering (2 charges)
Computer Hacking (3 charge)
Computer Programming (3 charges)
Dimensional Engineering (3 charges)
Endbringer Physiology (3 charges)
Entity Physiology (2 charges)
Efficiency (3 charges)
Electrical Engineering (3 charges)
Forgery (3 charges)
Lawyer (1 charge)
Martial Arts (2 charges)
Mathematics (3 charges)
Mechanical Engineering (3 charges)
Medicine (1 charge)
Modular Design (2 charges)
Physics (3 charges)
Prana-Bindu Disciplines (3 charges)
Primary and Secondary School Curriculum (1 charge)
PRT Agent Training (1 charge)
PRT Bureaucracy (1 charge)
Psychology (1 charge)
Quality Control (3 charges)
Quantum Physics (3 charges)
Resource Management (3 charges)
Ruggedization (3 charges)
Safety Engineering (3 charges)
Salvaging (1 charge)
Shard Physiology (3 charges)
Sleight of Hand (2 charges)
Social Interaction (1 charge)
Stealth Technology (2 charges)
Strategy (1 charge)
Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (3 charges)
Tactics (1 charge)
Temporal Physics (3 charges)
User Interfaces (2 charges)
Visual Design (1 charge)
Weapons of Mass Destruction (3 charges)


Unspent Charges: As Taylor has dozens of unspent charges accumulated at this point, is banking more at the rate of +10 a day, and is spending them at a rate of less, we've stopped keeping exact track. Simply assume she has enough on hand to cover spending as she goes.

Please note that the CYOA specifically exempts Blank from working on Tattletale or Coil.

Some clarifications on how I interpret Inspired Inventor when charges are put into non-Tinkering specialties such as martial arts.

 

[cliffc999]

Prologue

I woke up in a pitch-black room and feeling like my head had been packed full of cotton wool. The last time I'd been this out of it was when I'd been delirious with fever from an ear infection when I was seven… no, wait, that was totally wrong, I'd never had an ear infection. Why did I remember being sick like that if I'd never been?

As I pondered that problem I noticed that I was softly giggling to myself, amused at how my thoughts were not only moving in slow motion and looping around and around inside drunken sailors. Wait, what was that thought? Drunk. No, I never drank. Drugged. I'm on drugs. Why am I on drugs?

This was about the time I noticed my eyes were shut. Well, no wonder it was so dark! I opened my eyes, squinting against the glare of the overhead lights, and tried to focus…

… and with that thought suddenly my mind snapped into total focus, my veins flooding with ice-water as I went from high off my ass on prescription-strength anti-psychotic meds to 100% alert and awake in zero seconds flat. Which was biologically impossible.

In the several minutes of time before the duty nurse entered the room to check on me, having been summoned by the sudden change in my vitals as measured by the machines I was hooked up to, I'd had time to finish reviewing my recent memories and working out the basics of what was going on.

I was Taylor Hebert. I was waking up in the hospital after having been shoved into my own locker at school after the bullies had first packed it full of used feminine hygiene products and then locked in there for hours and left to rot. The staff had had to sedate me because I'd been incoherent and freaked out on the prior occasions I'd roused to semi-consciousness, which psychiatric protocol was also why I'd woken up strapped to the hospital bed by wrists and ankles. It was January 5, 2011, and I was in Brockton Bay on Earth-Bet.

And I really shouldn't be here.

---

Author's Note: Being Taylor Is Suffering.

 

[cliffc999]

Initiation 1.1

"Miss Hebert?" the nurse asked, with that particular vocal and facial emphasis on 'reassuring' that I'd learned to associate with psychiatric orderlies. "How are you feeling?"

I tried to put a reassuring smile on my face. "Better," I replied, figuring that sticking to short answers would be a good strategy. "Was I on medication earlier? Everything before now was really… fuzzy."

Since I already knew that I should still be heavily medicated, I wasn't surprised at the nurse's slight hesitation on answering. My sudden return to lucidity was probably not reassuring. "Your father gave us permission to sedate you," she said. Probably trying to keep me from freaking out by invoking parental authority. "How much do you remember?"

My newfound mental focus almost tripped me up there. I was about to reply to her question in a completely objective manner when I had a hunch that being too matter-of-fact would probably alarm her further. I was supposed to be a hot mess right now, after all. So, I stopped myself mid-word and deliberately hesitated before I continued on in a lower tone of voice. "I remember the locker."

She nodded. "You were under extreme stress when the paramedics got you out of the locker," the nurse continued. I decided to save her from having to soft-pedal the issue and myself some time by pre-empting her.

"That's why I'm in restraints?" I asked.

"Yes," my nurse agreed with mild embarassment. "They needed two people to hold you down before you could be sedated, and the protocols for that mean patient restraints until they can be evaluated." She paused and continued. "You said you were feeling better?"

"Whatever you gave me must have worked," I agreed with her. "I'm not great, but I don't feel… out of control."

"That's very good, Taylor," she agreed. "You don't have to talk about what happened right now, if you don't want to. The doctor will be in to see you shortly."

"Can you untie me now?"

"That's your attending physician's decision, I'm sorry."

"Well, I kinda need to-" I trailed off.

Man, bedpans are so humiliating.

* * * *​

Out of all the damn CYOAs I've ever filled out, why did ROB have to pick this one to use? I'd done a lot of other CYOAs that I'd much rather have had come true than Worm v1 CYOA.

Totally OP ones like Living Hyperion or Last of the Omega Lords. Comfy ones like Time-Stop Chill Zone. I'd even used the Worm CYOA for other builds than this one. I mean, it would have been a lot less worrisome if I was a World Breaker right now. I suppose it was at least a mild saving grace that I wasn’t stuck with one of my Skitter Mode builds. So thanks at least for that much, ROB.

Still, Hard Mode was going to be rough enough, especially combined with Being Taylor Is Suffering. And I didn't have one of the 'easy' powers like Kaleidoscope or Eidolon or Power Manipulation. No "kill Scion on day one" for me. No, I'd taken Inspired Inventor. Which was admittedly very nice at the top end, but had perhaps the slowest ramp-up to the top end out of them all.

Well, at least I'd remembered to get the Blank-Shattered Limiter-Invictus survival kit that all the better builds used. And my Complication was at least a sort of blessing in disguise too, given that it meant I wasn't a homeless person with $100 right now. The Hebert household guaranteed me three hots and a cot, and a chance to get through the most vulnerable stage in the Tinker Cycle before I was on anyone else's radar. If I kept my head down and didn't do anything stupid I'd have months of time to spend Inspired Inventor charges and start scrounging for parts. Even in canon I'd gone all the way to April from now before my first outing as Skitter…

Damn it! There I go again!

Even with Invictus, simultaneously being Taylor Hebert and John Mueller was confusing as hell. And the problem wasn't 'two separate minds fighting it out inside one skull'. That would actually be easier than what I was going through right now. No, I was getting the literal wording of the CYOA doc – being born into Earth-Bet, living out the life of Taylor Hebert, and then gaining all the memories of the me who'd filled out the CYOA. So I had two separate lifetimes' worth of memories but both of them were in first-person. I was simultaneously a nervous wreck of a teenaged girl who'd been driven into a nervous breakdown by a protracted campaign of psychological and physical abuse, and a disabled veteran who had spent over half a lifetime recovering from the nervous breakdown that had gotten him discharged from the Navy even before his injuries caught up with him. I simultaneously had never eaten rice before and remembered it as a staple part of my diet, was both the kid who'd never experienced any serious childhood diseases and the one who'd almost gotten a burst eardrum at age seven from a bacterial infection, was the one who had almost suffocated to death inside a pile of rotting waste in a school locker and the one who'd almost drowned to death in a flooding incident onboard a supply ship in the Indian Ocean…

Okay, thank God for Invictus or else the duty nurse would be back in here injecting me with the Thorazine again after that one. Bad thoughts. Baaaaad thoughts.

So, yeah. The identity crisis from two separate minds overlaid into one would have been hard enough in two perfectly healthy and well-adjusted people, let alone one where a recovering hot mess had been forcibly injected into an ongoing hot mess. And according to the exact wording of the CYOA, I would "still require time and effort to properly recover" even with everything my powers and perks could do for me. Normally it wouldn't be that way, but Being Taylor Is Suffering. So while my conscious thinking would be perfectly fine thanks to Invictus, my likes and dislikes and unconscious biases and whatnot were probably going to be even more jangled up than they already were. So I'd have to keep an eye out for that.

Well, in the category of 'turning that frown upside down' at least being under restraints as a potential psychiatric patient in the hospital and waiting God only knows how long for the duty psychiatrist to get around to interviewing you meant you had time to sort out your thoughts. Which is what I'd just gotten through doing. And another potential benefit of having been put into psychiatric evaluation is that you had a ready-made excuse for any sudden changes in your behavior patterns in the future.

I decided to hold off on putting any Inspired Inventor charges into medicine or psychiatry or self-help techniques just yet. I still had to get through the upcoming interview -- if not series of interviews -- if I ever wanted to get these damn straps taken off. And my experience as John prompted me that telling a psychiatrist all the things the diagnostic checklist said was 'all right' only worked if you weren't already under suspicion. If you were, doing that instead became a warning sign that 'this guy has read the checklist, is parroting it back to you, and is trying to hide something'.

No, wait. I was going to spend a charge right now, given that I was already doing it. Besides, I wanted to see how this power actually worked. Time for a test run on something that I can actually work with right now, seeing as how I don't have parts, tools, or the ability to move any of my limbs. But I was already working out how to adapt best to my situation, so…

Adaptation, 1 charge.

Whoa. So this is what Inspired Inventor does.

My mind skimmed along the surface of an endless sea of information for a single indivisible instant, and concepts and data rolled into me. Now, since the amount of useful knowledge given you by Inspired Inventor went deeper and deeper as the concept you spent the charge on got narrower and narrower and the concept of 'adaptation' was so broad, I wasn't going to be building any wonder devices just on this one charge alone.

Still, I felt the knowledge that Inspired Inventor had just given me seamlessly slot into place and integrate with everything I already knew about and knew how to do, giving me new ways of looking at it all. Dimly glimpsed concepts and algorithms seemed to shift deep in my subconscious, prompting me with new habits for evaluating and categorizing objects and phenomena. Things as diverse as how the human immune system adapted to bacterial exposure to how to repurpose a salt shaker as an improvised blinding weapon in a bar fight all seemed to resonate with my mind as I thought about them, even if I couldn't actually hope to design any immune-system boosters or win any bar fights without spending charges on the related subject matter as well. Still, even with this alone my mind now felt like it had a slight new edge, a way of looking at the world that was a little more… resourceful.

And a good thing to. Because with all that was yet to come, I was going to need all the resourcefulness I could get.

* * * *​

Turns out that all I needed to do to get the straps taken off was to convince the attending psychiatrist that I was not actually going to be biting people in the immediate future. I suppose it helped that I had a clear and present reason for being so irrational at the scene, so the trauma was understandable. And even more reassuringly, while I was still going to be held for observation for a few days I would get to do it as a recovering surgical patient instead of as someone in the neuro ward.

Much less reassuring was me finding out exactly what kind of "surgery" I was recovering from. Not that any of the doctors would discuss it with me except in the vaguest terms – apparently there was still a 'Do Not Stress Out' notation on me, plus as a minor they could put off health questions with 'That's for your dad' – but now that I had freedom of movement back, I could just snag the chart off the foot of my bed.

Medicine, 1 charge.

And now that I could read it, having magically gained the knowledge of an experienced physician and surgeon, I could… oh dear God that is a lot of notations in red.

The short version is that they'd had to call in Panacea to keep me alive, let alone leave me still attached to all four of my limbs. That biohazardous waste that the Bitches Three had put into my locker had apparently been festering there since before Christmas. By the time Sophia had shoved me into it, it had festered into something worse than the stuff that was in the medical waste dumpster downstairs out behind the Pathology lab. At least nobody left that one sitting unattended for over a week. So, between being literally soaked in that… stuff… for several hours, as well as all the gashes and cuts I'd given myself thrashing around in there, by the time they'd gotten me out I was beyond terminally infected with the everything.

Wait, if it was this bad then how the heck did they get away with- I mean, in the story, nobody seemed to care that I'd almost died- but this looked like outright attempted murder here-

Ohhhhh, right. I hadn't told anyone anything. In fact, if I remembered my reading of Worm correctly I'd basically been out of it for an entire week during my psych evaluation and then barely talking to anyone after that. I hadn't even told my dad. So, while the doctors were still very upset over what had been done to me from a medical point of view, from a "the authorities" point of view they weren't- they weren't…

… they weren't going to be able to fully investigate anything where the victim refused to even confirm that there had been a crime. I mean, my total not saying anything meant that they couldn't even prove that I'd been forced into that locker. Oh, sure, anybody not brain-dead could infer that I hadn't entered that of my own free will, but officially? How could they establish that I hadn't gone temporarily insane and jumped in myself? I'd certainly been temporarily insane enough when they finally cut the lock off to get me out! And of course there'd be an entire school full of students willing to tell anyone who asked that I was a crazy loner weirdo, and thanks to the Trio's best efforts a look at my school transcripts would show a massive slide in grades and classroom participation over the past year and a half…

So there would be, as they say, a reasonable doubt. A reasonable doubt that in hindsight Emma and Sophia and Madison had sailed right through with flying colors. The overworked and underpaid Brockton Bay PD still wouldn't turn a blind eye to attempted murder, but my own refusal to cooperate had left them without the pieces they'd need to actually hope to call it attempted murder and not get laughed right out of the office by even a divorce lawyer like Alan Barnes, let alone an experienced criminal attorney.

Taylor Hebert, you were stupid. You were an idiot. You were Miss Thick Thickety-Thickface from Thicktown, Thickania. And so was my dad, for not getting the full story out of the doctors instead of apparently just stopping at 'Panacea healed all the damage, she's fine now. Physically.'

At least John's point of view was from someone old enough to know better about this kind of thing. Which is why my future mistakes were now so obvious in hindsight-

Ugh. There I went again with the confoozled verb tenses.

Yet again pushing aside the whole 'memories of the story of my life yet to come that was from the memories of someone reincarnated into my earlier life and changing the whole thing' issue to where it belonged – i.e., for later – I focused back on the immediate issue. Okay, Taylor. Let it be resolved. The first official-type person with a badge that I see, I am telling them everything about the bullying. Let's see those bitches get away with it now, now that their victim has finally figured out that just pretending its not happening and hoping it goes away is not going to work.

A resolution that was then immediately tested when said first official-type people with badges turned out to be not the police, but the PRT.

---

Author's Note: Taylor was indeed in psychiatric evaluation for a week after waking up in the hospital in canon, likewise her refusing to tell anybody anything about what actually happened. Likewise, the PRT showing up to investigate is canon (reread your Shell 4.3), but Taylor was too out of it to even speak to them so they went away.

The remainder is all stuff that was inferred, or fanon. If my particular interpretation of Worm fanon is not yours, well, that's what happens in fanfic.

 

[cliffc999]

Initiation 1.2

Why the hell was the PRT here?

This didn't happen the last time- the time that I read about in that web serial… aggggh! Why didn't I pay more attention to Worm when I was John? As is, I knew the outline of the story, and a lot of the more popular stations of the canon that made it into all the fanfics, and even some wiki research as to which ones were and weren't fanon. But I didn't know everything, and I certainly didn't know this. You'd think something as important as a visit from the PR-freaking-T this soon after her trigger would stick in - hell with it, call her "story-me" from now on for convenience's sake - stick in her mind?

… no, it wouldn't, because I was completely out of it for a week in the story-timeline. Now I have Invictus and am operating at full efficiency on day one. So story-me probably did talk to these guys, but didn't even register it.

"Do I have to speak to them? Am I in trouble?" I asked the nurse, who'd come in to inform me that the PRT wanted to talk to me and had been standing there patiently waiting for me to reboot my brain and answer. Well, being taken aback was normal enough under the circumstances I suppose.

"I… the interview is required, yes," said the nurse. "Given the circumstances under which you were admitted…"

"Do I have to talk to them before my dad gets here?" I asked the nurse, trying to stall for time. Meanwhile my thoughts were racing, trying to estimate how fucked was fucked here. Having read the story I already knew that Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker, even if story-me hadn't found out until the worst possible time. So if their their master computer had pinged off 'Sophia Hess' turning up in my incident report and the cover-up squad was already here… no, that doesn't make sense. "Nobody saw anything" at Winslow, and I damn sure haven't told anyone who pushed me in yet, so how could Sophia's name be in any reports? God damn, I wish I'd gotten a power that could let me know what the hell these guys wanted before I had to start answering their questions…

Wait. It can't be that easy, can it?

PRT Agent Training – 1 charge.

I barely heard the nurse telling me that the PRT had called my dad and he was on his way over from his office even now, as the skills and knowledge of a trained PRT field operative melded themselves into my consciousness. I already knew some things from my general cape geekdom online, such as all the power classifications, but now I understood the PRT Threat Rating scale in detail. I understood that the numbers didn't measure the magnitude of the powers so much as they measured how threatening a particular cape was in a particular category and what preset tactics from the SOP should be used.

But Inspired Inventor gave you not just knowledge but also "skill at applying it". I felt an entire new library of motions, of techniques and skills, settle into my muscle memory as if they'd always been there. I could field-strip and re-assemble an assault rifle and then take it out on the combat course and shoot an "Expert" qualification score with it, throw confoam grenades like a champ, coordinate movements with the rest of an agent squad, search and clear a building, evaluate and respond to hostile capes…

And given that Inspired Inventor let the first charge into a power leave you at PRT Rating 4-5 whenever possible, and PRT Rating 4 is "one full squad of trained operatives should be able to deal with this situation alone but exceptional circumstance, context and environment may bias things one way or the other" that meant I'd instantly gone from a teenaged girl who barely knew how to make a fist to someone skilled enough at it to take on an entire squad of PRT agents. Solo. Or at least I would be once I was in fighting shape and got my hands on something at least equivalent to their combat gear, because right now I was an unarmed hospital patient. So there would be no dramatically escaping Agent Smith out there just yet.

Still, depending on what you asked Inspired Inventor for some charges returned better dividends than others. And this charge had just come packed with all kinds of stuff. It wasn't just the combat training I'd gotten. I'd asked for "Agent Training", not just "Agent Combat Training". So I'd gotten the full package, every professional skill a veteran PRT field agent was expected to have in the normal course of their duties. How to do search-and-rescue work, how to stabilize and evacuate wounded, how to fill out PRT paperwork, how to conduct eyewitness interviews…

… oh. That's why they're here. The PRT investigates trigger events, too. They have Tinkertech-programmed and Thinker-designed algorithms continually searching news and emergency services incident reports, set to flag moments of extreme trauma that fit certain profiles. And according to my medical chart it's now officially on-record that I have a corona pollentia, because being admitted as a critical trauma patient with a possible psychiatric hold on top of that meant that they did an MRI on my head looking for possible tumors or brain damage. And if someone who's already flagged as a possible trigger event also had a corona pollentia on their medical record then the PRT would try to be right on top of them, to make sure that some unstable new cape isn't being left alone in a hospital bed to fester into the next Damsel of Distress without anyone noticing. So, call it 95 out of 100 that they're not here because of Sophia. They're here for me. And they're not here to threaten me or try to silence me.

As the nurse turned and left to go fetch my dad and the PRT agents, I began to relax a little. I could work with this. But I'd have to be very careful.

* * * *​

"Dad!" I cried, as my father entered the room. He looked the same as he always did, tall and thin like me, glasses balanced on his nose, a bald spot… I blinked and felt a momentary confusion, when did he get so tall and thin? When did he look so defeated? Oh, right. That was John's father, the large heavyset man with a confident attitude- I felt a phantom pain, an imagined shadow of the migraine this dual identity crap would have been giving me without Invictus.

"Taylor," he said diffidently, as if he was afraid I was about to break. "How are you feeling?"

"I got shoved in a locker and almost died is how I'm feeling," I said angrily. "How should I be-" I stopped myself on seeing my dad's flinch. Where had that come from? Focus, Taylor!

The nurse and the PRT agent entering immediately on my dad's heels stopped before they crashed into him. Being on an investigation rather than a potential combat mission he was wearing a dark suit with a discreet earbud and slightly oversized suit jacket to better hide his hip-holstered sidearm, as opposed to the normal PRT assault gear of Kevlar-backed chainmail mesh, assault rifle, and confoam grenade launcher. A part of my mind automatically noted which side of his hip the very discreet bulge was on and noted that he was right-handed.

"Someone pushed you into the locker, Miss Hebert?" he asked me, interrupting what my dad was going to say. "You were assaulted?"

"Yes," I answered firmly. "I damn sure didn't fill it up and crawl in there by myself."

"I don't imagine you did," the agent said, involuntarily quirking his lip despite himself.

"Taylor, this is Agent Jordan of the PRT," my dad broke in, turning to face him even as he introduced him. "And they're here to ask you questions about-?" he finished warily, almost challengingly.

Having been put on notice Agent Jordan sighed and showed me his credentials - photo ID as well as badge, anybody can have a badge saying anything but it’s the photo ID that's the important part – identifying him as a field agent of the Parahuman Response Team. He began his pitch in a bureaucratically matter-of-fact voice. "Miss Hebert, it's standard procedure in certain situations for the PRT to interview-"

"It's only a PRT matter if parahumans are involved," I interrupted. "And I haven't had a chance to say anything to anyone yet about who shoved me in. So either they've already been found and arrested and one of them's actually a parahuman, or you think I'm one." Wait, why did I say that? Does Invictus remove the brain-to-mouth filter? Mouth shut ears open Taylor!

Agent Jordan stopped and cocked his head a little, looking at me with a renewed eagerness. "You put that together on very few clues. Yes, Miss Hebert. Situations involving extreme emotional stress under certain conditions have been known to be causes of 'trigger events', the events during which parahumans gain their powers."

"If that happened to every girl who'd ever been attacked, Brockton Bay would have more parahumans than the Birdcage," my dad cut in sarcastically. Hah!

"Yes, but in your daughter's cause her medical records also show that she has a corona pollentia." Agent Jordan held up his hand to forestall the obvious questions. "Which is a particular organ found only in the brains of those who have the potential to undergo a trigger event."

"My daughter got brain scanned and nobody even told me?" my dad demanded angrily.

"Mr. Hebert, please!" the nurse cut in urgently. "Your daughter was admitted to the emergency room as a very serious patient with a head injury as well as… possible neurological damage. An MRI is part of the standard admission protocols for such situations." Which I supposed was a polite way of telling an upset parent 'She was temporarily loco in the coco.'

Taking the hint that he couldn't sue the hospital for something that was officially part of immediately necessary lifesaving treatment on someone being wheeled into the ER because that didn't need parental permission, and completely missing the hint that the PRT had already looked at my medical records without asking for said permission, my dad turned back to Agent Jordan. "That's it? She was stressed and she has something in her brain so you're automatically assuming-?"

"No, sir. Based just on what I've seen so far, your daughter is likely enough to be a parahuman that I would recommend her for powers testing and evaluation."

"So far?" I asked quickly, both to figure out how far they'd already gotten and to head off a possible eruption of Mt. St. Hebert.

Agent Jordan turned back to me with a relieved smile. "Are you aware of the powers classification system, Miss Hebert?" Stupid conversation redirection. Fine, I'll play along.

"Mover, Shaker, Brute, and Breaker. Master, Thinker, Blaster, Tinker. Striker, Changer, Trump, and Stranger," I completed the familiar chant.

"Yes," he agreed. "And Thinkers in particular are people with abilities related to enhanced perception, cogitation, or mental focus. Such as your ability to remain perfectly calm and lucid despite being very recently off an extreme psychological ordeal and recovering from sedatives. Or that masterful piece of deduction you pulled off a minute ago as to why I was really here."

Oh joy. Invictus plus having read the PRT playbook before he entered the room equals me being far enough ahead of where I should be that he's mistaking me for Tattletale. No wonder he's so eager, the PRT can never get enough Thinkers on their side. Except that I'm not one so, whoops.

"I don't feel any more intelligent than normal," I replied. "I mean, yeah, I'm not freaking out right now and I'm sort of willpowering through the meds but I don't need parahuman powers for that. I mean, just ask my dad about how stubborn I can get when I'm trying to push through something."

"Oh, can she ever," my dad readily confirmed.

"And to be honest," I said, cutting Agent Jordan off before he could start the lecture about Thinkers, "what I really want to talk about right now is how to press charges for being shoved into that locker." I focused my attention on him as intently as I could without being obvious about it, looking for the smallest reactions to my next calculated statement. "But I probably need to talk to the Brockton Bay PD about Sophia Hess, not you." And despite Agent Jordan's best professional poker pace, I saw him momentarily twitch when I dropped that name.

Yes!

* * * *​

I was a little surprised and upset that Agent Jordan didn't immediately leap into a storm of curiosity at that name. As a Probationary Ward, not a regular Ward, Sophia's secret ID would be more loosely kept around the office because her life both in and out of costume should have been under a higher level of monitoring, even if the system had cataclysmically failed in her case. Yet despite his twitch having indicated that Agent Jordan was in the loop regarding "Sophia Hess is Shadow Stalker", he didn't try to follow it up! Instead he just rushed through the rest of his 'potentially a cape' interview with me as perfunctorily as possible.

I was inwardly fuming at how little anybody seemed to care about doing their job until as a 'professional courtesy' Agent Jordan pulled out his cell phone and called 'a friend' at the Brockton Bay PD himself, just 'to save my father a trip to the police station'. Wait, if he wanted to bury this then why-? Oh, right.

After having used a conversational opener of 'The PRT only investigates parahuman-related cases' and then not confirming that I was a parahuman, Agent Jordan couldn't show any obvious interest in Sophia Hess without outing her as one. So he got just enough out of me to make sure that I wasn't talking about any other Sophia, then very helpfully gets the BBPD onto the case to finish getting the rest of it out of me as if it was just routine juvenile crime. Then all the PRT has to do is yoink a copy of the police report for themselves and then they have my statement without me knowing that they got it.

The part where I'm still at least halfway-suspected of being a Thinker is probably contributing to their extra helping of discretion here… if they really do think I'm Tattletale 2.0 then they won't want to be in the same room with me, let alone trying to recruit me, until after they've checked out the whole Shadow Stalker thing.

So I resolved to patiently wait for the police like a good little girl, and give them my eyewitness statements, and a copy of my diary with all the log entries about all the various bullying incidents of the past year, and everything. And then I'd wait to see what they did about it. This time I'd give them a chance to do the right thing before I gave up on them.

One chance.

Of course, going this route also meant that I had to tell my dad everything.

Oh well, good thing I'm doing it now while I'm still in a hospital bed. At least here there's only so loud he can yell at me.

---

Author's Note: So far this thing is moving like molasses in January trying to flow uphill. I mean, three sections and I'm not even out of the hospital room yet. My muse is, as ever, doing exactly what it wants and ignoring me. Let's just hope it has follow-through this time.

And dialing in exactly how Taylor's identity issues plus Invictus are going to express themselves is very much a thing of 'I'll intuit this as it goes', so far.

 

[cliffc999]

Initiation 1.3

After Agent Jordan left and I'd wrapped up the awkwardness with my dad, I'd been left alone to get to work with Inspired Inventor for real. And while I knew I needed to get my feet under me as quickly as I could I didn't want to end up like the proverbial absent-minded handyman who owned an entire basement full of specialized tools - but his basement was so badly organized that he couldn't find anything when he needed it and so just kept using the same old hammer, screwdriver, and wrench set that he kept right next to the bottom of the stairs. Or in my case, dumping so many separate fields of knowledge into my head that I focused only on the most obvious tricks that could be done with them and never took any time out to stop and think of more subtle applications. Now, maybe Inspired Inventor didn't work that way… but maybe it did. And so if a little patience might help keep me mentally organized better then okay, I could be patient.

It helped that my naval service had been in the engineering department, so I understood something of what a proper technical education should be like. And like in "A" school, it started with an overview of the fundamental principles underlying the mechanisms of what you learning how to build or fix. You didn't start doing maintenance on a steam boiler until you had enough basic physics to understand that the pressure of X mass of gas was in inverse proportion to the volume of the container and in direct proportion to its temperature, you didn't start working on electrical gear until you understand that the current between two points equaled the voltage across the conductor measured in volts divided by the resistance of the conductor measured in ohms, et cetera et cetera. And while Tinkertech apparently broke many of the laws of physics, I had a hunch that I could do a lot worse than to start out my quest for knowledge by understanding exactly which laws I was working with, and which ones I was working around, and which ones I was straight-up ignoring. And it was also time to test what would happen if I spent more than one charge on something, so…

Physics – 3 charges. …holy shit!

That particular download of knowledge left me staring at the hospital ceiling for several hours. Not that there'd been any problem with the number of charges spent – I hadn't taken any Skitter Mode limitations and three charges went down as easily as one did. Its just that I suddenly knew so much. The first charge gave me a mental chart of all the various sub-discliplines that comprised the entire field known as "physics", from astronomy to special relativity, and what their syllabus was and how they all interacted, and then a solid working knowledge of and reference library about each and every single sub-field. That first charge alone made me the equivalent of an entire conference room full of physics professors at a university.

And then the next two charges… well, the formal definition of physics is "the natural science that involves the study of matter and its motion through spacetime, along with related concepts such as energy and force". And you can already see that that covers a tremendous amount of ground. Even three charges wouldn't give me total knowledge of it all – hell, ten charges might not. In fact, I had a feeling that no matter how many charges I kept putting into this there would always be new revelations, new applications and synergies and subtleties, always coming into view as my mental horizons expanded farther and farther. I could imagine some other fields of knowledge that eventually ran out of new things to discover, but I just had to make my first serious Inspired Inventor charge dump be into 'how the multiverse fundamentally works', which would almost certainly be a limitless expanse. Ambitious much?

At any rate, even the one big bite I'd taken out of the physics pie left me in an afternoon-long nerd rapture. At three charges I not only knew essentially everything that modern science had discovered but had gone on to download a ton of spoilers for things we hadn't discovered. For things that no instruments on Earth even existed to discover. For example, the Higgs boson had only been theorized about in 1965 but the particle accelerator needed to confirm its existence hadn't even finished construction yet. But I now knew it existed, not just as a theory but as a fact, and could rattle off its exact properties and interactions in full confidence that when physicists finally caught up to where I was now standing, their experimental results would jibe with everything I'd just downloaded. But it wasn't just weird particles, even if part of my head was absently noting how the Higgs boson's interaction with mass along with several of the equations for spacetime curvature could theoretically be adapted for a Tinkertech gravity generator if a suitable projector could be designed and built…

Having an exponentially increased understanding of how and why stuff worked meant that these principles would underlay everything I designed and built from now on. Tinkertech was still bullshit, but by knowing what was possible under the mundane physical laws of our universe I could optimize any devices I built so that bending or breaking said laws could be saved only for those functions where such was essential and not waste any of the device's efforts on reinventing any wheels that didn't need to be reinvented…

Hrm. There's a thought. Spending charges not on 'how to build amazing gizmos' right away (although the amazing gizmos would come soon enough!), but instead on meta-knowledge fields, things that aren't about directly making Tinkertech but instead underlay and shape the way I design and build Tinkertech. For example, I already knew that not only would any devices I built be at least slightly more adaptable to different operating conditions unless I deliberately made zero effort to put that functionality in, because of my Adaptability charge, but having a vast and deep knowledge of the foundations of physical science also meant that my devices would be less 'eldritch abomination' and more 'ultra-refined futuretech' in their approach whenever possible.

So, hrm. Four charges left for day one. I decided to spend three and leave one deliberately unspent to test whether or not unspent charges rolled over into the following day or were just lost. If I can save them up that will take some pressure off my mind. Without needing to worry about 'wasting' charges I could manage the rate at which I was dumping entire new bodies of knowledge into my mind, as well save unspent charges for use in an emergency. Otherwise, I'd have to be dumping all ten charges into new things every day and that could rapidly result in the 'too much library, not enough card catalog' problem I was trying to avoid.

So, what's most important to keep in mind when building a gizmo? Rhetorical! The answer is "making sure the damned thing doesn't blow up in your face". So, Quality Control – 1 charge and Safety Engineering – 1 charge. And my gizmos will already be adaptable so what's the converse to those two? Making sure it isn't a delicately adaptable hangar queen. And so, Ruggedization – 1 charge.

There we go. I may be doing miracle science from now on, but it won't be mad science. It will just be really really awesome science. That doesn't blow up, have nasty side effects, or break down at the first opportunity. Things like Ruggedization synergizing with Physics meant that I really understood how friction and thermal shock and vibration and resonance could all cause accumulated wear and tear on a mechanism and what design principles and material characteristics would best minimize that…

Wow, that is a lot of concepts and processes and laws and axioms and everything floating around up there. Hopefully this new knowledge rapture will start slowing down the more I learn and so the more I already understand things related to what I'm learning next.

But then the nurses started to wonder at my whole 'staring at the ceiling all afternoon' routine, so I mentally pushed it all to the side and ate my dinner and then started at least pretend to do something normal like read a book or watch the TV. Soon enough it was time for Taylor to go to sleep – hey, Invictus to power through mentally or not, physically I was still pretty damn weak and exhausted -- and so I drifted off, waiting to see if my single unspent charge would be there in the morning and if sleeping on this whole mass of stuff I'd inspired into my brain would help sort it out better.

* * * *​

Seeing your life as a story written by someone else is so weird. Especially when you haven't actually lived through it yet.

The situation was complicated by the fact that while I was John I hadn't actually read Worm cover-to-cover. I'd originally gotten into the franchise via the fanfics showing up all over my favorite message board, and followed that to the web serial itself. However, the web serial was really long and depressing and so after a while I just started skimming and using the wikia and absorbing information via osmosis via all the forum threads to fill in the gaps. So I had an overview of the entire plot, knew all of the big reveals, and had a mostly complete outline of events. But my not having read everything in detail meant that I lacked context for a goodly amount of this stuff. And most of all, I lacked context on what had been going on in my own head during the storyline.

Seriously. Just because I remembered having read all this stuff in a story didn't mean I'd actually been there or done it yet. So even if I knew that in one particular timeline I would do all these things, I could barely understand why I'd done some of them. I abandoned my lifelong dream of being a hero to go villain? I took over Brockton Bay as some kind of warlord? I killed Alexandria? I took over the world as some kind of Master-12? Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, over?

But even worse than that were the parts of the story where I did understand what I had been thinking.

It was the reincarnation memories that had tipped the scale for me, of course. When I was John I'd gotten invalided out of the service after a massive nervous breakdown, and had been through all the outpatient therapy at the VA for that. So getting all those memories as Taylor meant that I could use the benefit of that reincarnated hindsight plus the support of Invictus to look back on the patterns I'd already been falling into, and which according to the Worm serial I would fall into even harder. The exhausting, depressing, borderline suicidal patterns that I hadn't even noticed at the time.

The first mental faculty to start being eroded by exhaustion and stress is your judgement. All those PSAs about 'getting help' and 'learn to recognize the systems', that we all got in school and all laughed at, turned out to have a lot of sense to them. Sure, you'd think it would be obvious to you if you were starting to go off-center but ahahahahaha, nope. The way the human mind worked you were almost always the last person to notice that you weren't OK. Our brain's own ability to adapt to stress worked against us after a certain point, with the stubborn insistence that "I’m fine." drowning out the physical and emotional warning signs that no, you were not fine. The mental quality that was useful for getting through the normal slings and arrows of outrageous fortune stopped being good for you after a certain point, the point at which prolonged stress and danger reached a level where your body simply didn't have time to physically and emotionally recuperate before the next trauma came along. Every finite number could eventually be reduced to zero, and that included human fortitude. Even for the best and the bravest humans.

So despite a stubborn adolescence insisting that winners never quit and whiners never won, having already lived through it once as an adult and a military veteran was enough of a cluebat to get through and force me to admit that no, Taylor Hebert was officially hitting the end of her rope. Zero support system plus the most vulnerable period of adolescence plus a year and a half of constant gaslighting and emotional torture had used up 99.9% of all the endurance I had, and if I hadn't triggered and then escaped into the new life of a cape I'd have been lucky to go six more months without jumping off a bridge. Even then, it was practically Worm canon that jumping straight into that first fight with Lung in the story had been as much an unconscious suicide attempt as it had been an attempt to save people. And that my leaping to 'infiltrate' the Undersiders had been as much a desperately lonely girl leaping at the chance to make a friend with the first person to not act like an apathetic authority figure or a total asshole to me in months, even if she'd been a manipulative Thinker-7 combining a – I'd give Tattletale this much credit – genuine desire to stop a suicidally lonely girl from killing herself along with a self-serving scheme to try and improve her own position.

Seriously, according to the story me and Lisa had become pretty much sisters – and right now I wouldn't even know her from any other blond girl I bumped into on the street unless the other, more visually distinctive Undersiders were with her. I mean, I still felt bad for the almost-suicidal period of her own life and how Coil was basically enslaving her at gunpoint, but only in the way that you feel bad about hearing that a perfect stranger is being the victim of a serious crime. Not remotely like how I'd feel if my dad was kidnapped right now or suchlike.

But even without the soap opera elements of that story-life to mull over it was obvious now that all of my decision-making, however brilliant parts of it may have been, still were skewed heavily by starting from such a period of exhaustion and stress. Looking at some of the choices I would have made in the story with a clear head while I was calm left me feeling almost bizarrely disassociated, like I was looking at an Echidna clone wearing my face but doing all the wrong things. Bizarrely I remembered the time I'd a serious fondness for Terry Goodkind novels shortly after having been discharged from the Navy, only to look back several years of rest and therapy later to be shocked at how shitty they were and utterly confused as to why I'd ever liked them in the first place. That was what prolonged nervous exhaustion and stress did to you - the mental sabotage was not just in the obvious ways but also in invisible shifts and distortions to your likes, your dislikes, and your reactions to things which you felt were entirely rational at the time but when looking back on them later left you going '… was I possessed?'

So yeah. That was the scary, scary revelation I woke up to the next morning. That only an extremely unlikely set of circumstances had saved me from killing myself before I was sixteen, and that my self-inflicted cure for that problem had been almost worse than the disease.

Of course, those circumstances and decisions had also led directly to the saving of the entire world vs. Zion and the Endbringers, so I'd still have to pull that off somehow. Despite the fact that I wasn't the same Taylor, didn't want to make remotely the same decisions, and didn't have the same powers. And worst of all, when I dealing with the fact that underneath the Invictus support system helping hold me up, it was almost certain that my underlying good judgment was still significantly compromised in ways that I only partially knew about and thus could only partially compensate for.

No pressure, right?

* * * *​

Well, at least there was some good news too. Unspent charges for Inspired Inventor did roll over into the following day. I celebrated by immediately dumping the unspent charge into Safety Engineering and then adding 1 more charge each to Quality Control and Ruggedization, bringing them all to 2 charges each. The newly expanded knowledges 'clicked' neatly into place and I felt entirely confident that from now on anything I built would be safe, reliable, and built to last. Unless I deliberately chose to build it otherwise, of course.

It also left me looking around at the various bits of medical equipment in the room and absently noting where some redesigns would make them more disaster-proof and less prone to wear and tear, and my fingers twitched idly with the desire to actually get out and get my hands on some tools. Sadly, that would have to wait until I'd had more rest and recuperation from the whole 'almost dying' thing so despite the best Panacea could do I was still looking at two or three more days in here.

First thing after breakfast I put into Basic Science to give me an overview of all the existing scientific fields and how they interrelated, even if my knowledge of any individual one barely topped out at freshman college courses. With the knowledge I gained from that I then did a big dump of Mathematics - 3 charges, because now I was aware that the discipline of mathematics underlay practically all of the hard sciences and, via statistics, a lot of the soft ones too. There was even an XKCD comic about various scientists bragging to each other about how their discipline was the 'purest' one, sneering that psychology was merely applied biology was merely applied chemistry was merely applied physics, with the physicist busy celebrating being "on top" while way ahead of him a mathematician was going "Oh, hey, I didn't see you guys all the way over there."-

Aaaand that webcomic doesn't even exist on Earth-Bet. I didn't know whether to be happy or alarmed that the memories of both my lives were starting to integrate so well that unless I paid conscious attention I would sometimes not even consider which memory came from which life… on second thought, we'll go with 'alarmed'. Not that I felt my identity fragmenting or anything, but it was going to make it a lot harder to keep anyone from noticing I'd changed if I kept doing and saying things that pre-change me wouldn't have because she didn't have memories of the lifetime of a 53-year-old disabled veteran along with that of a teenaged girl.

Great. I'd download a psychology degree right now except that I already knew enough about the topic to know that trying to formally diagnose or treat yourself was the stupidest idea in the world, even for the most skilled of therapists. Objectivity is a must in formal psychiatric treatment and that degree of objectivity is impossible to aim at yourself without a Thinker ability that I didn't have. So for right now we'd try to get along with common sense and what self-help and monitoring techniques I'd already learned the hard way from the VA.

At any rate, having crammed my head full of more pure mathematical knowledge than Newton, Gauss, Leibniz, Descartes, and all those other guys all put together, I then settled down to spend the rest of the morning consciously digesting it, integrating it, and pondering possible uses of it. And in the process I also began to discover some of the limitations of Inspired Inventor.

Specifically, it was not a superhuman thought engine. It was an access to a supernatural, quite possibly unlimited database of knowledge and techniques, but I still had to actually apply that knowledge and execute those techniques with my unaugmented human physiology and neurology. Well, at least until or unless I designed and installed some augmentations but let's not digress. The point is, I wouldn't be able to just spend a few charges on 'Super Deduction' and then start being Tattletale 2.0 for real, not in the same way she could.

I learned this by finding out that there was a sharp upper limit on exactly how large or complex a mathematical problem I could number-crunch in my head. Oh I got boosted, don't get me wrong. Before spending those Mathematics charges my mental arithmetic skills topped out at 'memorized the times table up to 20 times 20' and now I could easily do calculus in my head. Between my intuitive understanding of mathematical algorithms and the precomputed lookup tables that had apparently been part of the download I was pretty much independent of scientific or even graphing calculators now. But all of these things had been known even in pre-parahuman history in various gifted human savants, and when I tried scaling up from there I rapidly hit the wall. Even with all the mastery and techniques I'd assimilated my brain simply had an actual physical limit as to how large and how many numbers it could simultaneously keep in mental registry, and a finite amount of computational capacity to manipulate them with. So while someone with an actual Thinker shard for mathematics would think nothing of brute-forcing a 32-bit cryptographic key in their head in nothing flat, I couldn't so much as try a 16-bit crypto hack in my head without my brain simply going 'nope!'.

So after spending most of the morning mentally experimenting with my new number-crunching skills and where the boundaries were, I put that aside and decided to face up to the elephant in the room I'd been mentally avoiding ever since I woke up to realize that I was in Earth-Bet.

How, exactly, was I going to save the world?

---

Author's Note: I'm getting a firm grasp on the limits, whys, and wherefores of my own interpretation of Inspired Inventor. I'm also starting to get a handle on my Taylor's character right now -- which is really complex when you consider that not only is she dealing with the agglomeration of her personality and the SI to the point that she doesn't even mentally separate the two anymore, but also that this Taylor has an academic knowledge of what canon Taylor did and thought while not being that Taylor yet. As her internal narration above points out, the only thing weirder than getting future spoilers about your life is barely being able to recognize the person the spoilers are about.

So her thought processes are not only being informed by a weird merger of two people with a lot of similarities and a lot of differences, but are also informed by her knowing but not feeling about canon Taylor and her current desire to not be canon Taylor, plus the effects of Invictus, plus her self-knowledge that underneath the Invictus she's still a mentally and emotionally exhausted teenaged girl who has yet to recover from a lot of trauma. Try running that through your head and not being a little weirded out.

Remember Kirk Lazarus in Tropic Thunder and his 'I'm the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude!' issues? Sorta like that.

 

[cliffc999]

Initiation 1.4

I had no idea if spending a charge on this latest idea would even do anything useful, given the entire 'Inspired Inventor does not actually give Thinker powers' limitation I'd just worked out. Still, I'd be getting several hundred charges a month to play with indefinitely and I'd already spent my first couple of days focusing on immediate needs and background material, so might as well start experimenting…

Strategy – 1 Charge

And, whoa.

What was strategy, really? Was it the ability to make plans? The ability to make a useful pattern out of a stream of separate decisions? The ability to choose between alternatives to deliver a unique mix of value? The art of shaping the future? All of the above and none of the above, and more.

The Inspired Inventor download finished settling into my memories and my subconscious, providing a slightly different context to everything I saw. Just like my 1 charge in Adaptation had made me look at the ordinary objects and events around me in slightly new ways, so did my 1 charge in Strategy. My first step would have to be to clarify my objectives.

One: Destroy Zion.

Two: Destroy the Endbringers.

These were both the must-have essentials of all the potential tasks awaiting me, priorities more important even than living to enjoy a long and happy life. Left unchecked, Zion would destroy billions of parallel Earths – including the one me and Dad lived on. Left unchecked, the Endbringers would ultimately destroy human civilization. Both of these were certain facts from John's meta-knowledge of the Worm setting, and so they had to be what was ultimately focused on above all else. I didn't necessarily have to do them first, but if I didn't do them then they wouldn't happen.

Beneath these two overriding goals floated a series of other priorities in varying, inexact order – become prosperous and secure, clean up Brockton Bay, bring Cauldron to justice, get Emma and Sophia and Madison what they deserved, keep Dad alive, don't die, maybe do something kind for the Undersiders (even if I certainly wasn't going to go join them now, ugh!), all swirling around jockeying for position. But I focused on the big two for now, because if I couldn't pull those off than nothing else mattered.

Still, while the scope of the problem was immense the clarity of the problem was as simple as it got – they needed to die. Only the Endbringers were even a mild moral dilemma because in canon their attacks were stopped by the death of Eidolon, and expedience suggested that killing one cape would be less difficult than-

- no, that's absurd. There was no ambiguity in the death of Zion, no option other than Tinkering together enough gun and then using it. If I couldn't do that then ultimately nothing else I did mattered. And if I built a weapon capable of destroying an Entity then I would certainly have already solved the problem of building a weapon capable of destroying an Endbringer.

So… could I build a weapon capable of destroying an Entity?

Weapons of Mass Destruction – 3 charges.

Gulp.

* * * *​

I spent the remainder of my stay in the hospital both working out and rejecting tentative outlines of plans and trying to come to terms with the fact that I now had the power to destroy the entire universe.

No, I wasn't being hyperbolic. Three charges in WMD Tinkering by itself made me at least as bad as String Theory, the woman who had almost crashed the Moon into the Earth – and that was as her sole Tinker specialty and while working on a countdown timer. Me? With 3 charges each in Mathematics and Physics as well as WMDs, composing the schematics for a device that could trigger False Vacuum Decay on a desktop was as easy as diagramming a sentence in grade-school English class had been.

One little Higgs boson tickled with quantum tunneling in exactly the wrong place at exactly the wrong time and it collapses out of a false vacuum into a true vacuum, releasing enough potential energy in the process to trigger vacuum collapse in all the atoms around it, and then so and so on. A sphere of anti-existence spreading omnidirectionally at the speed of light and stoppable by absolutely nothing in the universe. Any more mass or energy thrown at it would simply fuel the reaction more, dimensional shenanigans would simply be benignly ignored as the very fabric of this dimension's space-time unraveled around and underneath whatever warp or portal you threw at it, and even Zion would have no choice except to get out of the universe before he died with it. No conceivable natural phenomenon or parahuman power could possibly stop it once it started, unless somebody had a parahuman power for going back in time and shooting me before I turned it on.

And I could build one out of spare parts almost as soon as I got home, or still in my hospital bed if I could somehow borrow a set of microelectronics tools and disassemble the blood pressure monitor and the TV before anyone noticed, because it wouldn't require any more power than a watch battery and inducing quantum tunneling on a micro-scale event could be done by Tinkering with a couple of microchips and diodes as easily as Bakuda could build a time-stop bomb out of scraps. You know, if I hadn't had Invictus then they'd never have taken the straps off after the freakout I would have thrown after realizing this. How the hell do you even relate to the idea that you could literally end the universe in a basement with a box of scraps?

At least that answered the question of 'could I kill Zion'. Yes, yes I could. Oh, not with False Vacuum Decay – I had no way of restricting the size of the devastation to a manageable area except by dumping the target and the FVD bomb both into a separate pocket dimension before launching it, and while I could possibly do that with an Endbringer-sized target in theory even I didn't want to try with the Warrior's entire body. Dumping an entire planet into a hammerspace would be ridiculous even for me, and that's before we even begin to factor in the Entity's active resistance. Still, even without that if I could come up with this kind of insanity right now then what kind of weapons could I hope to build after having worked on it?

So, assured that with a few more charges in relevant fields and some time to Tinker I could build a Zion-killing device of some kind, I turned my mind away from muon-based devices that could turn the Sun into a supernova – Zion would certainly have depopulated the Solar System of whatever timeline he chose to hide his true body on, even if I couldn't guarantee the rest of the universe equally as free of collateral damage – and on to the earlier, if smaller, goals and steps of my plan.

The first one I could work on would be neutralizing the Trio. OK, it was hardly the most important thing I could be working on but damn it, I was not just a cosmic weapon, I was a teenaged girl! I was allowed to have feelings!

More practically, out of all my future goals it was the one with the most limited time-window. As the Worm canon had proved, if I didn't press charges right away then nobody would care. As is, it was distinctly possible that people still might not care but I had to at least try it. Especially since I had to find out whether or not the PRT would actually act on the information I'd given them… or if they'd had it all along and just didn't care. Because if I couldn't trust them at least this minimally then I couldn't trust them at all, which would be vital for me to know before I tried to do anything such as 'join the Wards'.

The plan for doing that would be what I'd already started – giving the Brockton Bay PD my full cooperation in investigating this as an actual felony assault/attempted murder, instead of never actually telling the authorities anything and letting Principal Blackwell be the only person entering anything about the incident in the official record ever.

And when I noticed that my second follow-up interview by the police had had a 'Social Services observer' along who said nothing but kept looking at his cell phone throughout, a tall dark-haired man with a neatly-trimmed goatee, I was almost entirely certain that that had been Armsmaster in civilian clothes checking out everything I said with his lie detector. Well. That looked hopeful, at least.

Another early goal would be to get out of Winslow.

Even if the Trio were all gone, it would still be an incredible waste of my time and a daily reminder of a period of my life that I never wanted to revisit ever. Unfortunately, you had to be 16 or older to take the GED in New Hampshire and I was only 15. But assuming that my police report was successful then I would have sufficient leverage on Winslow to get them to agree to almost anything that didn't involve them actually paying more in settlements, such as authorizing me for 'home school to prepare for the GED'. Since so much as 1 charge in Primary and Secondary School Curriculum – which I spent even before leaving the hospital -- would qualify me to teach any and every course offered in a contemporary American grade school or high school, let alone pass them, then I could spend all day Tinkering at home and still test out perfectly on every one of my required educational milestones.

This would lead ideally into fulfilling my next goal, which would be to start quietly ramping up through the early stages of the Tinker Cycle on my own. Independent Tinkering was a hell of a risk to take anywhere and most especially in Brockton Bay, what with everybody from the Empire 88 to Coil out there drooling for the chance to press-gang any new, unprotected Tinker. However, my PRT Agent Training gave me a good solid outline for all the classic mistakes of newbie Tinkers that made them so easy to catch before they were able to defend themselves, and so I had a solid blueprint for avoiding them. No happily charging out to stop (or commit) street crime the instant I successfully kit-bashed together my first Tinkertech weapon, no going all 'Verified Cape' right away on PHO, no immediately unplugging your house from the utilities grid or going to the opposite extreme by hooking up an entire basement factory to it (you'd be amazed at how many new Tinkers the PRT finds simply by looking for suspicious electricity usage), and so forth, and so on.

Furthermore, if I ended up needing to join the Wards at any point I wanted them to at least see me as 'a hot young prodigy who might be the next Hero', and not 'Kid Win 2.0'. Not to be unkind to Kid Win, everything I'd read about Worm suggested he was a very nice boy, but he was pretty much the archetype of 'street-level Tinker' and I was already designing cosmic destruction engines in my first week. So the faster I could get through the baby steps of the Tinker Cycle and on up into building the good stuff, the better.

Especially since I couldn't waste time. By the time I was ready to get out of the hospital it would be January 10th, and that would leave me exactly five months and five days before Leviathan attacked Brockton Bay. So I had that long and no longer to already scale up to the Endbringer threat level. Endbringers, really, because if I managed to kill Leviathan then that would trigger the same kind of Endbringer zerg rush that Scion's destruction of Behemoth managed in the original Worm story.

So even if I had wanted to join the Wards – which to be honest, wasn't an idea I was thrilled about -- the answer was 'No'. Even assuming best-case scenario regarding the whole Shadow Stalker situation there was still the review process and bureaucracy that Protectorate-affiliated Tinkers had to put up with. Sure, they let Armsmaster pretty much run loose but that was after decades of him building up good credit with his bosses.

I wouldn't have decades. I wouldn't have years. I'd have five months and five days, and with all the static they gave Kid Win about his Alternator Cannon they certainly wouldn't let me try building quantum bombs or quark deconfiners or anything else that could actually destroy Leviathan's core. So yes, I would try to make it as an independent Tinker as my first option.

I would eventually have to come to terms with the Protectorate at some point, but there would be a huge difference between the sort of terms I would get as a 'Wards recruit' and as 'the potential new recruit who'd already destroyed one Endbringer'. So ideally I would make it to and through the Leviathan battle before actually signing on the dotted line. And if that battle were somehow butterflied away… well, Endbringer fights would always keep happening somewhere. Until someone like me killed them.

But on the way there I would still have to be very careful to not alienate the Protectorate or the PRT, because if there's one thing my strategy training emphasized repeatedly its that you always needed a fallback position. If my independent Tinker plans failed and the press gangs came for me anyway then for my safety and my dad's I would have to go into the Wards right then and there, whether I wanted to or not. Because the original Worm story, where I ended up pinning all my hopes on the Undersiders? On thinking I could take on the entire world with nothing more than a group of teenagers with attitude and a million bugs?

That was stupid. I'd been stupid.

And I don't care that it worked, it was still stupid. "If it's stupid but it worked, then it wasn't stupid," was the most wrongheaded notion ever. The proper pronunciation was "If it's stupid but it worked, then you were luckier than you deserved."

Which train of thought was leading me, reluctantly and the long way around, to a conclusion that I'd known pretty much since I'd woken up but didn't ever want to reach. Something that the greater life experience of the man whose memories I'd woken up with reincarnation-style, John Mueller, had been insisting all along that I should have done the first time. Something that I needed Invictus to keep me from retreating into hysteria and panic and teenaged angst fits so I could continue to live in denial of it. Something that as much as I didn't want to do it I might as well do anyway, because story-Taylor's plan of 'Run away from home' would still be an option if this went pear-shaped.

As soon as we got home I was going to have to actually talk to my dad, and fess up that I was a parahuman.

* * * *​

Of course, I put it off as soon as we got there and went to tinker in the basement instead.

I had dozens of charges saved up from the days I'd spent in hospital and now that I could actually do things with them, I could finally spend them freely. I bumped up Ruggedization and Quality Control to 3 charges each, dropped two charges each into Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Efficiency and Modular Design (because the two Tinkers in town with those specialties had done well for themselves by it), and Computer Programming, and even took a brief two-charge detour into Quantum Physics to augment and specialize my already prodigious physics knowledge. All this plus my dad's collection of electronics tools and all the clutter I could scrounge down there let me finally scratch my Tinker itch that I'd been aching to get out for days in that hospital bed. I know I didn't have a shard to drive me to conflict or anything like that, but I still had powers! And I wanted to use them! To just feel the accomplishment of actually doing something, making something with my hands! And on some level, to reassure myself that I actually was a Tinker now and that this wasn't just some delusion brought about by the medication I'd been on.

So, after I got busy with some diode-repurposing tricks on the same order of things that Bakuda had done to break physics with hand grenades and using an applied knowledge of quantum physics generations in excess of Earth's, I was able to breadboard my jury-rigged 8-bit quantum computer into an obsolete graphics card for our old PC. Which completely ruined its actual function as a graphics card (I'd have to plug the monitor into the motherboard's own baby video jack) but meant that I now had an auxiliary quantum-computational unit that I could slap into the one motherboard slot that could be used for offloading computational tasks from the CPU to the card.

I then had to go to bed, but running out to the electronics store the next morning after Dad had left for work got me an old CD of an outdated Linux distro, and formatting the hard drive and its entirely outdated Windows install was a snap to my new computer-genius brain. It took until well past lunch day to use those tools to bash together my own custom Linux kernel complete with drivers for offloading computational tasks to the GPU… and thus neatly getting around my inability to actually design, build, and install a quantum CPU until I could get my hands on the facilities necessary to make microprocessors from scratch.

Having thus turned an obsolete IBM PC into a desktop-mounted tiny god, I spent the remainder of the afternoon until my dad came home hand-coding my own custom programming environment complete with ultra-efficient code library. 1 charge into User Interfaces to make the programming tool as easy to use as it was efficient and from now on all the coding I'd have to do for all the various gizmos I would be making would be infinitely easier as I could do the vast majority of it simply by assembling prefab bits from my custom code library. Sweat now to save time later.

Which helped with what came next because by the time my Dad came home from work, I actually had something to show him.

* * * *​

Having built the super-PC, I was now committed to confessing that I was a Tinker. Even though Dad hadn't so much as switched it on in over a year, what with everything that had gone on since Mom died, the fact remains that it was his computer I'd just torn apart and rebuilt. He'd certainly notice that it wasn't in his study anymore, let alone that it was now clean and dust-free and running a completely different operating system and substantially faster. (Yes, I'd saved all the useful and necessary and personal data – which wasn't much – from the hard drive before I formatted it. I'm not that careless.)

So, he came home from the Dockworkers Union – a couple hours earlier than he normally did, in fact, because his sick daughter was still recovering at home – to find me armpit-deep in coding some custom-made anti-malware and anti-tracking utilities that I hoped would let me start doing some online datamining without immediately being traced and burned back to this house. Which of course forced me to explain what was going on.

"Taylor?" he asked me tentatively, already mostly sure of what he was seeing but having to make sure.

My answers, already preplanned, stuck in my throat. What was I so afraid of?

"Yes dad I'm a Tinker," I finally coughed out. "I… started rebuilding the graphics card last night, and…"

He sat down at the kitchen table alongside me and the new custom workstation. "Tinker fugue, I think they call it?"

"More like adrenaline rush," I said, grinning weakly. "I didn't blank out and wake up with a whole finished gizmo in front of me like the stories, I was just… two weeks ago I could barely change a tire and now I can build supercomputers. But I wouldn't believe it until I actually did build a supercomputer…"

"So you… had to actually do it to see if it was real, and you weren't just dreaming?" he said inquiringly.

"I… think that would be the best way to put it, yes." I said, still worried by his completely mild-mannered approach. I mean, where was the reaction?

Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. Nothing in either life I could remember made me good at social interaction!

Hell with it, rip the band-aid off. "Dad… are you mad at me?" I asked, not needing to use acting to put a quaver in my voice.

"What?" he said, his face collapsing into shock. "No! Taylor, no, I am not mad at you at all." he said as reassuringly as he could. "I was worried as soon as you said 'Tinker' because of the things I've heard about what can happen to new Tinkers especially, but we can talk about that later. For right now-"

Well, if I ever wondered if Invictus meant I couldn't have normal human emotions, doubt solved. Because I sagged in my seat like a limp noodle at hearing that. "Then I'm not…?", I interrupted him.

"You're not going to disassemble my things again without asking permission, but I wasn't using that old junky thing anyway. And I get that the first time using powers can be like what you said. That you had to actually do it before you told me about it, so you could be sure it was real."

"That's… why I used the kitchen table, yeah. So you had to see it when you walked in. I mean… if you didn't see anything, if it had all been in my head, then I'd have… had to go back to the hospital…" I said, trailing off in shock at myself as I realized where my thoughts had been going. Had waking up as a possible psych patient really made me doubt my sanity that much? Or had the 'John' part of me doubted it all along?

And the next thing I knew I was receiving my first Dad hug in longer than I wanted to or could remember. And for the first time since I'd woken up, part of me started to believe that it was going to be okay.

---

Author's Note: For more on False Vacuum Collapse consult this Youtube.

Also, while I'll still keep updating Taylor's build on the first post, we won't be counting exact charges now because she's accumulating them at the rate of 10 a day and already has several dozen unspent from the hospital timeskip. So unless I start blowing dozens at a time she'll just be presumed to have enough charges to cover her needs.

 

[cliffc999]

Interlude 1-A: Miss Militia

I entered the office directly behind Armsmaster and stayed behind to close and lock the door as Armsmaster took his seat. As soon as I sat down alongside him, Director Piggot began without preamble:

"Did you find additional confirmation of Miss Hebert's allegations other than what your lie detector gave you at the interview? And are they useable as evidence?"

"Yes to both questions," Armsmaster said matter-of-factly. "We could not tap the communications of the other two girls without a surveillance warrant, but Shadow Stalker's are an open book to us both because of her Wards membership and her probation status. There is an ongoing pattern of e-mails and texts between her, Miss Barnes, and Miss Clements regarding their bullying and harassment of Taylor Hebert, and they are admissible in any court cleared for the knowledge of Shadow Stalker's civilian identity."

"Damn," I swore softly. Not that Shadow Stalker had been liked by any of her co-workers or superiors – which in hindsight should have been a greater hint than it was – but she had been a highly effective combat asset that we were now going to lose. In addition to the inevitable effect on discipline and morale, both internal and external, that the revealing of such crimes occurring on what was supposed to be our watch would have. "Is it still possible to handle this internally, Director?"

"No," Piggot said flatly. "Shadow Stalker violated the terms of her probation and there is only one penalty in law proscribed for that, a penalty I do not have the authority to set aside. Not that I'd have the slightest willingness to show her any mercy even if I did have that authority. She lied to us, not just once but repeatedly, systematically, and without hesitation. And I have no use for anyone who does that in my command."

"Forgive me, I was unclear," I continued. "I agree that Sophia Hess must be returned to juvenile detention immediately. What I meant was, is it possible for this mess to not become public?"

"Dear God I certainly hope so," the Director agreed with me. "Which would mean sealing Shadow Stalker's resentencing and not allowing the evidence recovered in her case to be used against the other two girls in court. Armsmaster, what would that do to the Brockton police's investigation? Because if either of those two brats walks scott-free it will be almost impossible to keep their mouths shut about this, especially given that Barnes at least knows that Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker."

"Very little, actually," Colin replied surprisingly. "My latest knowledge is that both the Barnes and Clements girls are racing to be the first to sell each other out for a lighter sentence. Given Barnes' status as both the primary instigator and the organizer, Clements is almost certain to win."

Director Piggot's mouth quirked up in a thin, cruel smile. "Rats fleeing the sinking ship. Fitting. And they certainly can't refuse to sign our NDAs if the court makes it a condition of their sentencing. So, Hess forfeits her probation and her accomplices get what they deserve. What do we tell the Wards?"

"The truth," I said immediately. "Even without being told anything they would figure out much if not all of what is going on anyway, and if we are caught lying to them about their own teammate then they wouldn't trust anything their chain of command ever said to them again."

"Our discipline problems with them are bad enough as is!" Armsmaster said loudly.

"Makes sense," the Director nodded. "The police will obviously know the truth as well, of course. But the public story?"

"To the best of my recollection it has never become public knowledge that Shadow Stalker was a probationary Ward…" Armsmaster said inquiringly.

"No, it was not." I said.

"Withdrawing from the Wards to concentrate more on her educational opportunities and we look forward to her one day soon having an honorable career with the Protectorate, standard boilerplate," Director Piggot pronounced and we all nodded.

"And Taylor Hebert?" I asked. "She originally came to our attention as part of a potential parahuman screening. If that was positive, then she's very likely to be our next Wards recruit. Which given her prior interaction with a Ward…"

"The Ward we just sent back to jail the instant her report reached us? I don't see what she'd have to complain about there," Armsmaster continued.

"One moment," the Director said, reaching for her terminal and pulling up the status of the Hebert file. "Hmm… cooperative on all parts of the interview regarding what was done to her but closed-mouth and evasive otherwise… Agent Jordan noted possible Thinker abilities… referred for Watchdog group consult on a possible Thinker recruitment… evaluation returned inconclusive?" her voice trailed off puzzledly. "Granted that it was a very brief look by their standards given the low priority, but HQ's Thinker tank got back a result of 'we don't know'? That's unusual."

"Thinker powers often return mixed or partial results against other Thinkers," Armsmaster said with a touch of excitement. "It fits a pattern."

The Director rubbed her chin. "It does, but they didn't note that. You're the one who's actually spoken to her… well, listened to her speak when you sat in on one of her police interviews. Did the detectives put in the questions we asked them to for your lie detector to pick up on?"

"They did manage to insert the question that indirectly probed whether or not Taylor Hebert knew that Sophia Hess was Shadow Stalker," Armsmaster confirmed. "Her denial registered as being substantially evasive."

"Meaning that we have to take it as given that she does know or at least strongly suspects," the Director said. "Thank God Hebert seems to understand that she'd only hang herself by not keeping her mouth shut about it. Couldn't that damned idiot Hess even keep her own secrets?" She sighed and continued. "I'll have to think about what we can do to make sure that pattern of silence continues on Hebert's part, but given the circumstances we can't come on with the threats. All right, go on."

"Unfortunately, the flow of the interview was such that they could not directly ask her if she was a parahuman without making it too obvious who they were asking for," Armsmaster said. "They did manage to work in the question about noticing anything unusual about herself afterwards, but her answer was so vague that even my lie detector was of little use."

"Either she knew who you were and what you were doing, which leans to Thinker, or else she's just naturally uncooperative with authority figures except when she's trying to get what she wants out of them," I said. "That latter might be a potential problem."

Piggot shook her head. "According to what Internal Affairs turned up when looking into Hess' caseworker, Hebert's bullying had been going on for over a year in full view of most of the staff at Winslow from Principal Blackwell on down and the only person who was ever disciplined for any of the incidents was her. Doesn't surprise me a bit that she wouldn't trust any authority figure any further than Clockblocker could throw them. While they were frozen." she finished, in what for her was an exceptionally rare touch of humor. "Which means that yes, if she does turn out to be parahuman and thus our next potential Wards recruit, we're going to have… potential problems," the Director finished in a more serious tone of voice, nodding to me.

"No use in borrowing trouble before it happens," Armsmaster said stolidly. "Should we maintain surveillance on Hebert?"

"Surveillance on a suspected Thinker who already has trust issues?" I said. Everybody shook their heads in agreement with me as to how foolish that idea sounded once it was said out loud.

I continued on. "I think… we should concentrate on her father. In the event she turns out to be a parahuman then it's ultimately his decision if she joins the Wards, not hers. We… send Agent Jordan around for a 'follow-up interview' that's actually a 'here's why young parahumans could really use the Wards' speech, but structured so that we aren't acting like we know she is one but just doing a routine 'In case it turns out that your daughter is, like we mentioned might be possible in the hospital.' Likewise, during that conversation Agent Jordan can be instructed to emphasize 'in passing' just how secure cape IDs are kept and how security is maintained around them, in the process of 'reassuring' them that Taylor's identity would be preserved rigorously should she be a parahuman."

"Good idea," the Director agreed. "We kill two birds with one stone by emphasizing the identity security, and using Jordan should work because he's already met them. All right, that seems to be a wrap. Any other questions or concerns?"

We both shook our heads.

"Dismissed."

---

Author's Note: Just a brief bit clarifying things I'd already worked out while composing 1.4, re: what's going on in the background.

 

[cliffc999]

Initiation 1.5

Two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

That was the out-of-court settlement that Winslow offered us, in addition to special permission for home schooling until I could take my GED at age sixteen and "voluntarily" cooperating with a comprehensive state education board audit of policy and staff. They'd begged for the chance to give me more money in return for my easing up on that last requirement but I was hardly going to let them off that easily. And between the horror factor of my story and the part where one of the malefactors had already confessed to everything in criminal court and so they'd have zero chance of surviving the civil suit, the city would have sold me both of Principal Blackwell's kidneys if need be to keep this from going in front of a jury and hearing what their idea of punitive damages might be.

I'd honestly thought about going that route anyway and letting my dad have the millions of dollars to try and restart the Dockworkers with, but he pointed out that the city would just get their money back by raising next years' property taxes on everyone and gutting the municipal budget elsewhere,and the Bay was in enough of an economic depression with overworked and underfunded city services as is. Heck, a quarter-million by itself was going to do not-nice things to the city's education budget but we took it anyway because they owed us at least that much.

School disciplinary measures for Emma and Madison were rendered basically irrelevant by Madison's turning state's evidence and giving up all three of the Trio in return for being tried as a juvenile. As it turned out, in the state of New Hampshire you could potentially be tried as an adult at as low an age as fifteen if your offense fell within certain categories, and while they hadn't quite gotten attempted murder for the Locker incident despite my needing Panacea intervention to avoid dying they had gotten second-degree assault, criminal restraint, and for the piece de resistance, kidnapping. Apparently none of them had had the brains to realize that deliberately confining someone and taking action to conceal her whereabouts was a class A felony if any one of several circumstances were met, and "with intent to terrorize" and "victim was under 18" were two of them. So right there they were looking at a maximum possible sentence of almost 30 years as adults, and that's before the conspiracy to commit charges or Sophia's own special legal status were taken into account.

Yes, I'd put a charge in Lawyer to make sure we weren't going to be screwed on the fine print.

So both Mr. Barnes and the lawyer that Madison's family had hired had seen that coming right away and had advised their clients to take a dive immediately for the privilege of getting their precious little snowflake back out of juvenile detention when she was eighteen, instead of seeing her go to the state penitentiary and stay there God only knew how long. So the only choice the prosecutor needed to make was who took the fall and who got to skate. And since Emma was the unquestioned ringleader the whole time, they gave the easy out to Madison.

If a fresh-faced cutesy little girl like her being in juvie for three years and completely blowing her chances of being admitted to anything above community college could be considered 'easy'… which I suppose it could be compared to doing hard time as an adult for over twice as long. Even with the plea bargain her father's law firm had pulled off – prior insanity and whatnot -- Emma would still be looking at prison bars from the inside until she was at least twenty-five, plus mandatory therapy while she was in there.

Sophia Hess had already vanished back into juvenile detention, of course. I knew the real reason from having read Worm, but the public version that was being put out was that she'd been on probation for an earlier, minor offense so her case was being tried separately and under a gag order as she had an additional charge of violating probation and there were privacy concerns from her earlier case. Of course, Madison's testimony would work just as well against her as it did against Emma even without whatever evidence the PRT would have dug up on their psycho Ward and be presenting quietly in her sealed trial, so on top of already being doomed to be stuck back in juvie until she was eighteen just from violating her earlier probation she was looking at being in wherever they kept hardened parahuman criminals that wasn't the Birdcage for the next few decades. I also caught in passing an obscure press release from the Brockton Bay PRT office that Shadow Stalker had 'resigned from being a Ward to concentrate on her educational opportunities'. Hah. I'm sure her life would be very 'educational' for her from now on… not that she'd learned anything from the first time she got busted.

* * * *​

So, I'd won. The Trio had been brought to justice and utterly ruined, getting what they deserved. Even with Emma's plea-bargain things had gone so well that I was legitimately shocked. I honestly wondered if the PRT had deliberately intervened behind the scenes to throw the book at everyone and not just to cover up their own embarrassment, and was at a loss as to why they would possibly have done that if it turned out they really had.

It didn't feel remotely as satisfying as I'd always imagined it would. Oh, its not that I pitied them. Not even Emma, who should have been at least a little pitiable given that her father's neglect and the system's blindness had let her get so lost in her own insanity following that ABB attack that Sophia could basically Charles Manson her into becoming some kind of mental abomination wearing an Emma suit. However battered and beaten I'd been left by the system's neglect of me, I had at least survived as some kind of Taylor Hebert. But the cheerful young best friend I remembered, the Emma Barnes of yesteryear, was gone. Her identity had been allowed to fragment so thoroughly and have the fragments twisted so deeply that recovering Emma Barnes as she used to be might as well have been impossible.

Oh. That's why I'm not feeling any triumph. Thinking about this means I get to musing on identity and human souls and how far you can twist them before they stop really being the person they used to be any longer…

… you know, like what happened to me when the past life of another person from another universe was jammed inside my head alongside my new Tinker superpowers. Which I reaaaally didn't want to think about.

Come on, me. You know what happens when you repress and deny and pretend that fixes things. The last time you ran your whole life on that brilliant plan you got yourself stuffed in a locker.

For that matter, on top of whatever identity crisis Taylor Hebert might be having what about Petty Officer John Mueller? The CYOA he filled out said it was supposed to be him driving the bus and being influenced by my memories, not vice versa.

Had whatever mysterious being done this decided to change the rules without telling us? That would put this whole situation from scary into Simurgh-level scary, given that if you couldn't trust a being who already had nigh-omnipotent potential influence over your everything from sticking to its own contracts then you were existentially boned.

Had something gone wrong because Taylor Hebert had psychologically fragmented like Emma had and just not noticed? Had the story-Taylor been put back together around her Shard, and without that I'd been put together back around John Mueller's identity? Was I really Taylor dominating over him, or was I actually him but so mindscrewed by the Taylor-memories that I thought I was Taylor? When this CYOA ended at the death of Zion, assuming we lived so long, would we even separate back into the people we were? Or would we have irreversibly changed each other to where we couldn't survive apart? Or would one of us survive and the other one simply *poof* out of existence like a soap bubble?

Had 'ROB' killed a man to give me his memories? Had he killed Taylor so that John could live on in her body thinking he was her? Was I a man dreaming I was a butterfly or a butterfly dreaming I was a man?

"Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content."

The Robert E. Howard quote from the Conan story 'Queen of the Black Coast' came up from the depths of John's memories, unprompted. And there was something to be said for the plan of simply ignoring my identity crisis. Oh, not denying it, but simply accepting that there was nothing I could do about it either way and so I should concentrate on what I could and must do, such as stopping Zion. And accepting that whoever I might have been that the me in the now, in the here, was a me and had a life to live and responsibilities to be met and hopefully, one day, rewards to collect and peace to be enjoyed.

No. I wouldn't do that. I had to know.

Prana-Bindu Disciplines – 3 charges

And so I made my first experiment at trying to use Inspired Inventor to request charges in fictional sciences, things I'd read out in novels and stories, to see what would happen. Also because I couldn’t think of a 'real-world' science or art that would be suitable for doing what I was hoping to do here, which would be to go so far into my own subconscious that I could access memories I'd long since repressed. Memories of prior lives.

And so I asked for a slightly 'genericized' version of the Bene Gesserit arts from Dune, both to avoid the various memetic and conditioning traps that they left in there to shape new acolytes into the proper B.G. mold and to allow for the fact that things like mélange did not exist here. I knew my Inspired Inventor power had a certain amount of flexibility and interpreting my intent built into it, so asking it for 'whatever parts of the the Bene Gesserit experience will actually work under current-universe physics and with my biology' should give me something at least. And while I was primarily concentrating on the past-life regression techniques for now, the rest of that stuff beyond just meditating and recall would also be very useful later. And even with dozens of charges banked, why waste them?

And so, in-between one breath and the next, I went from having the physical and neuro-kinetic abilities of a teenaged girl into one who had mastered the full mind-over-body control and other associated disciplines of a veteran Bene Gesserit Reverend Mother, or at least the closest analogues to such techniques that could actually exist in Earth-Bet.

Wow, I was so pathetically out of shape by prana-bindu adept standards. I'd really have to work on that.

But first, helping figure out my head. I assumed a lotus position with a little painful stretching (definitely would have to work on that), closed my eyes, let my breathing fall into the proper pattern, and dove into my memories. Seeking for the boundary between Taylor Hebert and John Mueller, and the moments immediately before John Mueller had been taken from his native world and reincarnated into Taylor Hebert. The moments after actually filling out that CYOA but before waking up in the hospital, the moments I hadn't been able to remember…

* * * *​

"Mr. Mueller? It's time." the nurse said. I looked up from my Kindle Fire where I'd just finished filling out a build for the Worm v1 CYOA, one of my favorite ones to idle around with my off time. I was in the VA hospital, waiting to go in for my latest knee surgery.

"Thank you," I said, clicking my tablet into sleep mode and leaving it on the table. Already dressed in my surgical gown I got up to follow her down the hall and into the surgical theatre, where the anesthesiologist was waiting for me. I laid down on the table and let him hook up the IV, the prep dose starting to seep into my veins and make me not unconscious but relaxed, too relaxed to react to anything and so be perfectly set up for the general anes-…

… wait, what was that word the doctor said? About my prep dose? Demerol…?

But I couldn't have Demerol. I was allergic to it. The medication reaction had almost killed me the first time I'd had any. It was on my chart. I'd made sure it was on my chart.

I tried to say something, to tell them they'd made a mistake, but my mouth wouldn't move…

* * * *​

My eyes snapped open. I was Taylor Hebert. I was always and only Taylor Hebert.

I had been supposed to have been a man put into the body of a dying girl in a timeline where she didn't survive, to live on with her life and her memories. Except that he'd died from a careless anesthesiologist who'd made a medication error, just as the mysterious 'ROB' behind the CYOAs had started the process. And since the ROB couldn't or wouldn't resurrect him post-death and needed at least one of us to survive to continue the scenario he'd simply tweaked things so that I didn't finish dying. Leaving me a girl who'd survived, given the memories of a dead man while his soul went on to its reward, and the powers that that man had asked for the privilege of wielding. The actual moments between John's death and my awakening in the hospital, the ones where he'd spoken to the ROB face to face, had been blurry and irrecoverable in my memories.

But ROB had still left enough there that I would know these things as a fact, if I ever developed the ability to look within and searched the right place.

My earlier speculation about ROBs and breaches of contract were, thankfully, out of place. Beings like him made a very specific point of always sticking to the contracts, even if they unilaterally wrote them and put them out like they did the CYOA docs. It was, as I'd already worked out, the only way a nigh-omnipotent being could practicably interact with mortals at all.

Much like how the Rakhasa of Roger Zelazny's "Lord of Light" novel were always entirely honest while gambling regardless of being absolutely soulless monsters otherwise and utterly beyond the power of any mortal to effectively coerce… for the simple reason that they were beyond any enforcement. At that point nobody sane would gamble with them unless they could take it entirely on faith that the rakhasa would not cheat and would pay up, and that faith would evaporate for all time at the first breach. So they kept their word, because they had to, or else they would never have anyone take them up on their offers. Even if they were absolutely untrustworthy outside that one limited activity.

I'm still not sure how 'filling out an online CYOA without actually knowing ROBs were real and paying attention' counts as contract acceptance, mind you, but John's memories of all the fiction he'd read about it apparently had that as being a traditional element of the genre.

But in this case the ROB had a problem. The CYOA as written had no proviso for if the CYOA's taker dropped dead literally in the process of finalizing the deal. It was an edge case they hadn't considered when drawing it up. And the ROB couldn't (or wouldn't, but the distinction between the two concepts was less a rule and more of a guideline at the 'omnipotent' level) resurrect him because the CYOA had already been accepted and death was a failure condition that the ROB wouldn't save you from, but likewise the ROB couldn't declare scenario failure because he hadn't been to Earth-Bet yet and he'd never had a chance to succeed. So muddling on through as he'd done was the best he could think of, leaving me where I was now.

Okay, ROB. I yelled inside my head. I know you're listening because the entire point of this thing is to give you a show to watch so of course you'd be monitoring me at all times. So what happens if I fulfill the victory condition? Do I wake up back in John's world as a man that I'm actually not?

No. You are Taylor Hebert, not John Mueller. His memories I have given to you, but his life was his own and it is now completed.

I shivered at the contact, having just confirmed that ROB actually did exist and was listening, then held on tight to my Invictus and continued.

So what, I just get nothing? As per Being Taylor Is Suffering I technically am in the Reincarnation category which means that death allows me to go home. Except I already am home. There's literally nothing in the CYOA that covers if I win!

You would destroy Zion to save your world in any event, with or without hope of reward.

In theory, you had the power to throw any of the people who took your CYOAs into any scenario and not offer them any prize beyond the powers and perks originally on offer, yet you offered additional rewards for victory anyway. This suggests that offering prizes is traditional for you and yours. Since the CYOA as written qualifies me for none of the listed prizes, I request a boon of my own choosing if I win.

What boon would you ask for?

There was a great deal of speculation back in John's world about Worm. The Entities are already too widely spread out across our multiverse, correct? To the point that even if I destroyed the Warrior, the uncounted other Entities already out there – 'if the entire multiverse was Canada and the Entities were marbles then you couldn't throw a marble anywhere without landing it within a couple dozen feet of another marble' and all that – would inevitably destroy everything anyway just a few thousand or tens of thousands of years later, well before our time? That we are all, in the entire Worm multiverse, existentially doomed without hope?.

Further Information Is Not Available Here.

Be that way, then. Here is the boon that I would ask for – that should I defeat Zion that my victory over the Warrior Entity actually be a victory over the Entities, and not merely an eyeblink of respite in cosmic terms. That not just my world but our multiverse be safe from them, permanently.

A contest of champions, then? One girl and her world vs. a lone Entity, the penalty for defeat being the doom of all those who rely on their champion?

No pressure, huh?

I find such a contest fittingly thematic. And were he cognizant enough to understand our conversation and were I willing to consult him – neither of which is true – then the Warrior would have been honored to stand as champion for his entire race. Very well then. I agree to your terms.

… thank you?

You are welcome. Farewell and good luck, Taylor Hebert. We will not communicate again.

---

Author's Note: In the middle of writing this chapter was when I finally crystallized a solution to two obstacles to my plotting. One, the exact mix of SI vs. Taylor Hebert. As I went along I realized I was more invested in and interested in exploring this Taylor's personality as informed by the memories of another man then I was in creating yet another generic SI dude like several of my previous. And so, this.

The other obstacle was, of course, my recent existential despair that put me entirely off Worm when I realized the true scope of the problem, re: "marbles in Canada" and the sheer # of entities. As I mentioned before in another discussion online, the instant that WoG came down Worm became an exercise in existential futility. "You may triumph on the fields of the Pelennor for a day, but against the Power that has now arisen there is no victory." type stuff. Kill Zion and it doesn't matter, the universe will be eaten by entities in a few millenia or tens of millenia anyway. Well before the 36 billion years it should have had, left undisturbed. And I couldn't write a fanfic idea that had any practical solution to this problem as opposed to just killing Zion, until I realized that the premise of ROBs and CYOAs was handing it to me gift-wrapped.

Always remember - when dealing with incomprehensible things from beyond the Outer Gates, mind your manners.

Oh, and since the state Brockton Bay is in is never given, merely 'somewhere north of Boston but not too far', I picked New Hampshire out of a hat and based my legal arguments on some fast googling of the New Hampshire state criminal code. So whether or not it might be canon, this is a fanfic and its true here.

 

[Trek]

I would like to think the fanfic

Click to shrink...

I think you mean thank.

 

[Kratos]

Seems interesting so far, hope you continue this into a full length story, as its very hard to find CYOA Taylor stories that actually progress far.

 

[Trek]

While it's true that it would have been a little hard I would like to reiterate that with the exception of 4 powers you can kill all entities regardless of their number with cyoa v1 powers. Mind you some powers make it easier but II can do it just as easily as say Shaper, probably easier actually. I already posted multiple ways to do this in the snippets thread so I won't repost them here but I would like to say that while the deal mc got is quite good, it by no means was absolutely necessary to pick that to destroy all the entities.

 

[Archimand]

I fucking love inspired inventor, the rest are over to quick.

 

[cliffc999]

I fucking love inspired inventor, the rest are over to quick.

Click to shrink...

"Technology Will Win The Day" needed I think maybe three weeks to ramp up far enough to blow Scion to Hell.

My Taylor as she is now could do it in two days if she were willing to sacrifice the universe Zion's main body is currently in, and the main delay on even that much would be learning and then applying enough dimensional physics to find his main body and then build a gate there. She already has a design for the weapon to do it with, the False Vacuum Collapser. And could build it right now with what's on her tabletop. The problem is in building something that can kill him without the collateral.

When doing the v1 CYOA the only way to keep things from being over too quick is to take Alexandria by itself as that's the one power that doesn't actually solve the Zion problem for you. (Shaper can just make an arbitrary amount of organic Tinkertech that just happens to do whatever you need, Psychokinesis could go all Sting on his ass and shoot him dead through his projection, Emperor of Man could just pull out the psyker powers and push him over the edge into suicide, Eidolon and Power Manipulation just make up a Zion-killing power or power combo and then drop it, and Legend can ass-pull out transdimensional planetbusting lasers.) Alexandria, OTOH, can only punch shit real good and still needs to team up with others to find a way of reaching Zion's main body to punch it. Which given the hardcoded limits on shard powers and Tinkertech re: reaching his main body is a significant chore.

Inspired Inventor is the slowest route thanks to the Tinker Cycle, yes, but even then... well, see the fic I just referenced.

So, we'll see what happens. I have several ideas for not having things be over in a flash, still deciding which one would be best.

 

[rick1497]

"Technology Will Win The Day" needed I think maybe three weeks to ramp up far enough to blow Scion to Hell.

My Taylor as she is now could do it in two days if she were willing to sacrifice the universe Zion's main body is currently in, and the main delay on even that much would be learning and then applying enough dimensional physics to find his main body and then build a gate there. She already has a design for the weapon to do it with, the False Vacuum Collapser. And could build it right now with what's on her tabletop. The problem is in building something that can kill him without the collateral.

When doing the v1 CYOA the only way to keep things from being over too quick is to take Alexandria by itself as that's the one power that doesn't actually solve the Zion problem for you. (Shaper can just make an arbitrary amount of organic Tinkertch that just happens to do whatever you need, Psychokinesis could go all Sting on his ass and shoot him dead through his projection, Emperor of Man could just pull out the psyker powers and push him over the edge into suicide, Eidolon and Power Manipulation just make up a Zion-killing power or power combo and then drop it, and Legend can ass-pull out transdimensional planetbusting lasers.) Alexandria, OTOH, can only punch shit real good and still needs to team up with others to find a way of reaching Zion's main body to punch it. Which given the hardcoded limits on shard powers and Tinkertech re: reaching his main body is a significant chore.

Inspired Inventor is the slowest route thanks to the Tinker Cycle, yes, but even then... well, see the fic I just referenced.

So, we'll see what happens. I have several ideas for not having things be over in a flash, still deciding which one would be best.

Click to shrink...

The way I see it there's no race to killing Zion. At the moment, Taylor's main deadline is killing Leviathan in a few months. Aside from that, she wants to clean up her city. A lot of smaller goals could slow her down. There are a lot of criminal parahumans in Brokton Bay, after all. Not to mention that not all of her time is going to be spent tinkering. For example, you already mentioned that her body was out of shape, so I can see her spending an hour a day exercising. Also, preparing more than the minimum amount. I don't think that she would just build an endbringer destroying weapon, she would probably also build power armor and defenses to survive a battle with an endbringer. And some tinkertech healing devices to deal with the wounded. Not to mention trying to sell her products to make the needed funds.

 

[Trek]

The way I see it there's no race to killing Zion. At the moment, Taylor's main deadline is killing Leviathan in a few months. Aside from that, she wants to clean up her city. A lot of smaller goals could slow her down. There are a lot of criminal parahumans in Brokton Bay, after all. Not to mention that not all of her time is going to be spent tinkering. For example, you already mentioned that her body was out of shape, so I can see her spending an hour a day exercising. Also, preparing more than the minimum amount. I don't think that she would just build an endbringer destroying weapon, she would probably also build power armor and defenses to survive a battle with an endbringer. And some tinkertech healing devices to deal with the wounded. Not to mention trying to sell her products to make the needed funds.

Click to shrink...

Preferably a remote piloted robot to take on the actual battles instead of her weak teenage mortal body too. It would be much better to fight the endbringers from far away, preferably from another city. Hey If dragon can do it, mc sure as hell can.

 

[sandmanwake]

I'd honestly thought about going that route anyway and letting my dad have the millions of dollars to try and restart the Dockworkers with, but he pointed out that the city would just get their money back by raising next years' property taxes on everyone

Click to shrink...

I knew the real reason from having read Worm

Click to shrink...

She knows how Worm canon went, so knows it's possible an Endbringer will hit BB soon which will send the property values way down, so why would it matter if the city raises next year's property tax? Might as well get as much as possible in settlement instead. Hell, the apocalypse is in their lifetime and having a few million dollars to work with would do more good in preparing for it than saving everyone else in property tax.

 

[cliffc999]

She knows how Worm canon went, so knows it's possible an Endbringer will hit BB soon which will send the property values way down, so why would it matter if the city raises next year's property tax?

Click to shrink...

Remember that she plans to kill that Endbringer as soon as possible, both because killing the Endbringers is on her list and because a dead Endbringer means she can basically name her own terms re: dealing with the Protectorate. (Or Cauldron).

Hell, the apocalypse is in their lifetime and having a few million dollars to work with would do more good in preparing for it than saving everyone else in property tax.

Click to shrink...

Taylor's thoughts on that topic.

There's also the simple fact that with a quarter million of starting capital and Inspired Inventor, you can potentially be richer than Tony Stark by next year. (add) Assuming fair business practices. I'd temporarily forgotten that the system is kinda stacked against rogues.

 

[Ryune]

Kindle Fire

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First off, you are a monster for owning this travesty.

On the other hand, I don't really ascribe to souls being distinct... "solid" existences. My own way of interpreting these kinds of things that is the food coloring of your soul has been dropped in their cup of soul. The question of "am I one or the other" usually either comes to "I was always as I have been" or "Both now" but that's not really an intuitive concept I find people taking up.

Prana-Bindu Disciplines

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So given the amount of mental control this implies alongside the programming and user interface charges... could Taylor basically program herself? I mean, it would be incredibly useful in instantly ingraining combat techniques, controlling microexpressions and even setting up an exercise regiment that does low level twitches of muscles to help them build up.

 

[cliffc999]

So given the amount of mental control this implies alongside the programming and user interface charges... could Taylor basically program herself? I mean, it would be incredibly useful in instantly ingraining combat techniques

Click to shrink...

Unlike many people, I interpret Inspired Inventor's "you have superhuman scientific knowledge, understanding, and skill at applying it" to already do the downloading and seamless integrating of techniques into her reflexes and muscle memory, if she puts a charge in some kind of physical skill.

Note that her 1 charge in PRT Agent Training gave her not just theoretical knowledge of but actual skill at combat comparable to a veteran PRT agent. Her only limitations on actually using that skill are the limitations of her body. She's gonna need to recover from the Locker hospitalization and then buff up a bit.

But yes, the Bene Gesserit-alike techniques she just dropped 3 charges into will definitely let her accelerate her 'getting into badass shape' program.

 

[acerak]

You know what? I like it. It's fresh, doesn't treat people like idiots, and doesn't devolve into silly bashing or tropes. Good on you, OP, and keep writing.

 

[Erddad890765]

First off, you are a monster for owning this travesty.

Click to shrink...

Kindle Fire isn't bad if you have Amazon Prime. You have access to a bunch of free fanfiction-level fiction and can download it for on-the-go reading. It's not amazing, but it's not bad. Moreover, Kindle Unlimited is where I've found the most free litrpg stories.

 

[cliffc999]

Argh.

How do you get Conceptualist's PHO interlude generator program to start out with a PM conversation where the originator is PM'ing someone else?

 

[Ryune]

Kindle Fire isn't bad if you have Amazon Prime. You have access to a bunch of free fanfiction-level fiction and can download it for on-the-go reading. It's not amazing, but it's not bad. Moreover, Kindle Unlimited is where I've found the most free litrpg stories.

Click to shrink...

Ah, my objection to it isn't because of it being an amazon product. My complaint is because it's a half assed e-reader that they didn't bother to invest in e-paper for the screen. If I wanted to read shit on a screen I'd use my phone.

 

[nobodez]

Ah, my objection to it isn't because of it being an amazon product. My complaint is because it's a half assed e-reader that they didn't bother to invest in e-paper for the screen. If I wanted to read shit on a screen I'd use my phone.

Click to shrink...

You realize you’re not the target audience, right? I mean, it’s less of an e-reader and more the cheapest “decent” tablet.

 

[verner2]

This is amazing! Wow, Taylor has the fate of the universe on her shoulders; that's not scary at all.