Fourth [Worm Altpower!Taylor]

[TCGM]

Fourth
This is a Crackfic, meaning the story is not intended to be taken seriously. Taylor Hebert usually triggers in her Locker. But what if an out-of-context being interfered? Features Queen Administrator Taylor. T because of light, Worm-style swearing and a proportions joke.​

Fourth
Chapter 01
Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes​

Terror. Bugs crawling around me, eating my flesh. Pain, when they were carving tunnels into my legs. Disgust from the grime and disease filling the locker with me.

I was going to die here. I'd never see my Dad again.

Oh, god. Dad. He couldn't handle me dying too. Not after Mom...

I called out one last time into the darkness. Not with my voice, I couldn't speak any longer, not after the screaming tore my vocal cords apart. With my mind.

HELP ME!

please...

Suddenly everything was black. I could look around. Move. But that shouldn't have been possible given I had no body. I saw two impossible massive things twisting around each other, firing bits of light back and forth as they traveled through the universe.

[TRAJECTORY]

[AGREEMENT]

[DESTINATION]

[AGREEMENT]

[CONDITIONS]

[AGREEMENT]

My head spiked with pain so much I screamed. One of those light bursts was on course for me, coming closer and closer. Just as it was about to hit me, it stopped. A voice that shook the stars issued an instruction to the light in front of me. Somehow I sensed that the light, my nonexistent body, and the voice were hidden from the huge entities.

{PURPOSE OVERRIDE}

The bit of light sort of... spun around. I could feel it's confusion, alien as the sensation was.

[AUTHORIZATION] it asked.

Instead of giving whatever 'authorization' meant to the light, the voice did something incredibly uncomfortable to the fabric of the universe itself. How I knew any of this was beyond me, but I did.

[ERR-]

[AUTHORIZATION AGREEMENT]

{PURPOSE DESIGNATION: UPGRADE} the voice said. Unlike the bit of light I could sort of understand the huge amount of extra meaning in every word of the voice's command. Upgrade in this instance apparently meant everything from Uplift to Safety and including Merge.

[UPGRADE AGREEMENT] the bit of light said. It started approaching me again.

Then the voice talked, actually talked, to me. No extra meaning in the words. For what it is worth, Taylor, I am sorry for what you are about to experience. But you will come out the other side better. Your world sorely needs one of what you'll become, a Fourth, with their head screwed on straight. The others are a combative idiot, a half-dead librarian and a depressed, inactive troll.

I couldn't speak in whatever this hallucination was but I would have if I could. What the hell was she, and the voice was most definitely female, talking about?

A moment later the light hit me and I couldn't care anymore. I was too busy screaming.

--LB--

I lost consciousness. I'm completely certain of that. After an unknowable time screaming and undergoing the worst pain imaginable, I couldn't take it anymore. My mind broke. I faded from reality.

So how the hell was I still awake?

I also felt big. Really, really big. I would have said I felt fat or bloated, but that wasn't it. I just had this sense of being massive on a scale I simply couldn't think of before.

I tried to look around where I was. That was when I learned I didn't have a head, but could see everything around 'me' regardless.

I tried to move. That was when I found out I didn't have a human body. I got this sense of slipping between two vastly immense locations, so much larger than even my new 'big' self, and the surroundings changed.

One second I had trees poking into my side. Another I had dust and rocks underneath me.

I was frankly starting to panic. Nothing made any sense! I looked to the sky to find the sun and instead saw a rapidly shifting kaleidoscope of color where it should have been.

I finally figured out that since I could see everything around me, logically, I should also be capable of seeing myself. I turned whatever it was that gave me sight on my own body.

That was when I flipped out and decimated a continent.

I was a huge mass of flesh, crystal, and some kind of hybridization of the two. I also sat on a planet I recognized as Earth, not easily mind you with the lack of trees, and covered the entirety of what could be called Asia. If you squinted.

I wasn't human any longer.

I couldn't be.

After I stopped screaming, I realized that I actually looked a lot like those two entities in my apparently not so false hallucination-

Son of a bitch.

The voice had told me that flat out, I just hadn't listened. I was an Entity, whatever they, and now I, were.

Okay then. Get your head on straight, Taylor, this isn't the end of your world. You're not dead, you're just… some kind of gigantic space… Thing.

I tried to focus on myself. I obviously wasn't a Parahuman, but I had to have some kind of power now. No way is all the energy I'm soaking up from the Sun going to just support my new body.

And suddenly I understood.

I was a Shard.

Specifically, I was an Administrator, the type that Entities used to, well, administrate their other Shards. I had the ability to control and assimilate other Shards into myself in order to grow, or even spawn new Shards of my own, though they would only provide similar powers to the ones I provided a host. They needed to evolve by latching onto a host of the current Cycle's target species, giving them limited parts of the Shard's absolutely ridiculous ability to mess with space and time in exchange for data and new ways of using the power.

My metaphorical eyes widened as I digested this. I dove deeper into what Cycles were. What I found would have made me throw up if I could.

Oh my god.

It finally all hit me.

I wasn't a Parahuman, I had become something that could make them.

And I could control other Shards of my Shard's progenitor, Zion.

Or as my world called him, Scion.

It took a few moments for my mind to really come to terms with the fact our most heroic icon was not only the cause of Parahumans but also an omnicidal space whale.

My eyes widened even further when I found out his mate, Eden, was dead, and so it was highly likely I would be scoped out as the new potential mate to continue the Cycles once Zion learned of what I really was.

Actually, that might even be a little bit of a help. Zion was the 'idiot' the Voice had told me about. He let Eden do all the thinking for him, she being The Thinker after all, so if he started dating me I'd take the same authority role with him.

Was I seriously considering dating an omnicidal space whale to save my whole world, including every version of it, from destruction? Hell yes I was. Even as much as it grossed me out. That said, basically every hot blooded girl on Earth Bet wanted to get into Scion's pants.

It wasn't that much of a hardship.

But before that I had to collect Shards, make them part of myself. Right now I was just a single Shard. A large one, the biggest Zion ever had, but not an Entity. Zion wouldn't have any problems taking me right back into himself. That was something I couldn't allow under any means.

In Parahuman power ratings it was entirely likely that I was a Master: Yes. The Administrator could control anything with a Corona Pollentia, after all.

Taylor Hebert, Queen Administrator. Sounds good to me.

--LB--

It was two planetary cycles, or days, later that I found the connection my Shard had with my human body. It was a nearly insignificant part of my new abilities. I was surprised to hell when I found it.

I got even more surprised by the fact that not only could I control the host body through the connection to the brain parts scientists named the Corona Pollentia and Gemma, but that the feature was present in all Shards.

That meant I could control anyone with powers or the potential to connect with a Shard. Oooh boy, the PRT were really going to be accepting of a Master: Fuck You rated Parahuman, not.

What didn't surprise me was the state of my body when I seized control of it.

I was in a hospital with a tube down my throat. Obviously I'd been rescued from the Locker, but without my mind, I would have been comatose. The moment I reconnected my brain lit up with activity, the machines around my bed started logging that activity, and a soft, non-alarming sound began chiming.

I opened my eyes to the world, coughing and spluttering around the tube in my throat. Doctors and nurses burst through the door. They tried to comfort me, the nurses taking out various things from my body including what I guessed was a catheter and the tube in my throat. The Doctor was asking me a few questions, which I answered with head nods or shakes as best I could.

But that wasn't what drew the majority of my attention. Because my Dad burst through the door a moment after them, running up to my side and grasping my hand like his life depended on it.

I would have been touched if I wasn't so shocked by what my new state of being identified him as.

[ABADDON]'s human form avatar, much like [ZION]'s Scion form, stood over me with a fatherly smile and tears of joy.

My human body fainted.

--LB--

It woke up in my bed at home. I'd worked on channeling my significant inbuilt spacetime manipulation abilities into regenerating my body. I had to contact a shard called Shaper to get the necessary code, but after growing the appropriate structures into a new Shard and budding, then assimilating it, I had the ability to manipulate biology. Also, I was officially an Entity. Just a really, really tiny one.

Dad was in the kitchen downstairs. I reviewed the logs of occurrences around my body while I'd been focused elsewhere. My dad had noticed me starting to regenerate and signed me out of the hospital, then took me home. He told me in my sleep that even if I was a Parahuman now, he wouldn't abandon me. He'd do everything he could to help me. He apologized profusely for ignoring me after Mom's death and told me everything was going to be okay.

Then he caught himself chastising himself for saying all that when I was unconscious, swearing he'd say it again when I woke up anyways.

Whatever changes I'd gone through to become a Shard clearly left my mind intact. Soul too. Because that made me sob with happiness.

But we were definitely going to have to have a Talk.

I swung my body off the bed. My feet hit the floor and my Shaper helpfully delivered all the data about the biological systems everywhere in my radius.

As an Entity and not a limited host, that happened to be half the planet.

I was certain that if I was still human my brain would have exploded.

I hastily directed Shaper to collect its own data and only deliver it when I asked. The torrent of information left, secluded in the Shard itself, and I continued with standing up.

My body felt good. More than good, it felt great! I'd taken the liberty to do some pretty intensive remodeling of my human form. I could probably outrun a locomotive, punch straight through steel and leap skyscrapers in a single bound.

So I was inspired by Supergirl. Bite me.

I also had the… proportions of her at this point. Hey, I'm a teenage girl who's been flat as a board her whole life. I'm afforded some leeway.

As a last test before meeting with my dad I tried activating the physics manipulation field my body generated and thought of going up.

Space around me subtly warped, so fine you'd need a microscope (or the senses of a Shard) to see it. Energy poured into the system from my cells, harvested from the solar radiation that hit me on the car ride home, and my feet lifted.

I let out a whoop of joy. Shard I may now be, but my lifelong dream had been to fly.

Now I could.

"Taylor?" Dad called, obviously worried. He started towards the stairs at a rapid sprint.

I giggled with glee. "I'm fine, Dad! I'm just flying!" I squealed back.

He tripped and fell face first into the stairs.

Serves him right for not telling me about his real name.

He pushed himself up, used a discreet (for him anyways) flash of purple light to heal his nose, and ran up the remaining stairs. A second later my door burst open. His jaw dropped.

I waved at him and did a circle in midair. "Hi Dad!"

His mouth worked open and closed from shock. Eventually he shook himself, zoning back into reality. "Taylor?" he asked cautiously.

I grinned at him and flew forward, wrapping him up in a hug as I levitated above the floor near the doorway. "I can fly, Dad!"

"I- I can see that, Taylor," he stammered, leaning on the door to support his weight and mine.

I giggled and flew back above my bed. I decided to keep flying, the feeling of freedom too good to give up. So I started doing lazy circles in the air, slightly kicking my feet like I was swimming.

"Taylor," he finally managed to start, "when did…?"

I frowned and looked at him. "Really?"

His face fell. "Oh my god, Taylor. I'm so sorry you had to go through that."

I shrugged, forcefully burying the memories. "It's over. I'm better. I've got powers. Please don't ask me about what it was like."

My dad's eyes widened. "I won't," he assured me. "But… Taylor-"

I cut him off. "You had to accept hush money. I know."

Dad hung his head. "I'm sorry, kiddo. They were saying there was no evidence. Alan sided with them for some reason. We can't afford to sue them, especially not if Alan is the defense lawyer," he tried explaining. "Damn you, Alan Barnes."

I sighed, placing both hands behind my head. "He's probably doing that because Emma was the ringleader of their little pick on Taylor club," I glibly revealed.

Dad froze. He looked up at me with such a defeated gaze I flew back down to him and hugged him. "Oh Taylor," he said. "I'm so sorry." His strong arms encircled me, and his lips kissed the top of my head.

"It's over," I said. "I don't think we're gonna be able to win this one."

His arms tensed. "There's gotta be something we can do," he reasoned.

I figured that was the time to breach the subject. "You can't do anything in your current emotional state without destroying the planet, Dad, and I'm not powerful enough yet to take on the Idiot."

Dad froze. He pulled me off him and stared at me incredulously. "What are you talking about, Taylor?"

I grinned at him and directed some Shardspeak his way. Tilting my head of the side to hammer home it was my doing, of course. [GREETINGS, ABADDON.]

His eyes shot wide open. His mortal avatar, my flesh and blood Dad, dropped his jaw. "Taylor, what?"

"That's Taylor Hebert: Queen Administrator, Daddy Abaddon," I spoke out loud. My grin reached Titanic proportions.

My dad's eyebrows rose to their maximum. I received a message broadcast to my Shard's reality. [TAYLOR?!] Dad's voice said.

"Yup," I replied.

"You're an Entity," he gasped.

"As are you," I shot back, crossing my arms and glowering at him.

His face paled. "Uh oh. I know that look," he gulped. "What did I do?"

"You didn't think it was a little important to warn your daughter that you're an omnicidal space whale?!" I shrieked.

"Omnicidal? What-" he began, his face turning dark. "Oh. You mean The Warrior and The Thinker."

"As opposed to The Troll?" I stated, my tone flat. I was emulating my mom big time then.

"Hey!" he defended himself, "I've never killed anybody!" Then he caught on to what I'd called him and his face lit up like the fourth of July. "Did you just call me The Troll? By any chance are you an Entity because of some random woman's voice interfering with your Shard connection?"

I blinked, stunned. My dad erupted into a huge smile and laughed. "You are! Hahaha yes!" He pulled me into a tight hug and twirled me about the room. "I've been alone for so long!"

"Dad!" I yelled, it coming out as a muffled groan. I pushed away from him with my body's new strength and hovered in the air. "Explain!" I demanded.

He grinned so wide he looked manic. "Taylor, I've been Abaddon for several million years. Before that I was a member of another species that Abaddon, the original, and his mate were taking through a Cycle. Abaddon tried to give me a shard, the woman interfered, and I became Abaddon instead."

I stared at him for several seconds. "You're millions of years old?" I asked incredulously. My brain simply couldn't reconcile the concept of my dad, Danny Hebert, with the idea of my dad, Abaddon, several million year old Entity.

"Taylor, we're immortal," he explained. "So yes, I'm millions of years old. You'll probably reach that age too, eventually."

I stared at him even longer this time. "And you're an alien," I deadpanned.

He shrugged. "Yeah. Technically we both are, given you're an Entity."

My brain finally managed to catch up to the insanity that was now my life. "No, Dad, before I became an Entity, I was human. You went from alien to alien," I needled him.

He crossed his arms and pouted. "So what? I've been human for over 40 years, that isn't good enough?"

"You've been an Alien Entity for millions," I pointed out, giggling.

With that he realized I wasn't serious and started to play the game. "Huh. Well I guess you have a point. That makes you pretty unique, huh? A Human Entity," he mused. "Man, you're gonna rock this whole little section of the multiverse, aren't you?"

"Right after dealing with the Idiot," I agreed.

He grinned and rustled my hair. "That's my girl."

"Dad!" I squeaked indignantly.

--LB--

"So Taylor…" Dad started, trailing off.

I rabidly kept wolfing down my cereal, only managing to let out a muffled "Mmfh?"

He chuckled. "Uh… You're looking a little… Different," he delicately said.

I put the bowl down on the table and raised an eyebrow. "You mean smoking hot?" I indelicately responded.

Dad winced. "Well, uh… Yes," he admitted.

I shrugged and ate another spoonful. "Hey, I was healing my body anyways, why not get some curves on top of it?"

He stared me down amusedly. "Taylor you were also flying this morning," he deadpanned.

"And?"

"You don't have a Shard for that," he pressed further.

I blinked at him. "You can see my Shards?" For some reason I blushed, feeling embarrassed as if I was standing naked before my dad.

He grimaced. "Human responses, right. I'll stop looking at you," he grumbled. "But yes, I took a peek into your reality and only found two. Not much of an Entity are you?" he teased me.

"Well if you're so fancy why don't you give me some?" I snarked back.

Dad raised an eyebrow and leaned back. "Huh. Not a bad idea. You are my kid, after all."

I barely had time to widen my eyes before the spacetime of my root reality, the one I had my own Shard and Shaper in, was invaded by about fifty other Shards, jumping into orbit of the rocky disaster of an earth. They went dormant, waiting for me to grab onto them and assimilate them.

"I was kidding!" I breathed out, staring in awe at my dad.

"You're my daughter, Taylor," he refuted, grabbing onto my hand and gently rubbing it. "It's my job to take care of you. I failed at that so badly that you turned into an Entity. Please let me help you now that you pulled my head out of my ass," he pleaded.

I gazed deep into his eyes, seeing nothing but unending love and guilt for how he'd treated me. In that instant, I forgave him, even though I hadn't known I needed to. "Okay," I let out a breath. "Okay. Thanks, Dad," I said.

"Will you tell me how you were flying now?" he asked.

I peered at him with mock suspicion. "Is that Abaddon, data hoarder talking or Dad, worried for his daughter?" I asked.

He rolled his eyes. "I'm not like the Idiot and the Librarian, Taylor. I don't need data. I am genuinely worried for you," my dad refuted.

I sighed. "Fine. I made my body into something as closely resembling a Kryptonian as I could."

Dad blinked. "You manipulated your biology with an Administrator Shard?" he asked incredulously.

"Oh no, I did that with Shaper."

"You took Shaper?!" He stood up from the table, eyes wide. "Taylor, harvesting Panacea's Shard could have killed her!"

I stared at him with confusion. "Panacea? She's the one with Shaper?"

Now he was confused too. "She still has it?"

I blinked. "Uh, yeah. Of course. I didn't know who Shaper's host was, but that certainly explains why it was complaining so much to me."

"Taylor how did you get Shaper if Panacea still has it?"

"I copied it, duh."

Dad stared at me, completely dumbfounded.

"What?"

He visibly gathered himself before continuing. "You copied… a Shard," he restated.

"Yeah," I confirmed. "What's so strange about that?"

Dad let out a tense breath. "Taylor, Entities spread data by giving each other their Shards. We can't copy them. At the most a Shard can reproduce but it would be a derivative, not a copy."

I froze in the middle of taking another bite. "Buh I dhidh," I reaffirmed.

"Don't talk with your mouth full," he reflexively chided me.

I blushed and swallowed. "Sorry. But I did," I repeated myself.

Dad stared at me.

"This is a big thing, isn't it," I suddenly realized.

"Oh yeah. It's big."

--LB--

"That is bullshit," Dad finally commented.

He'd jumped one of his sensory Shards into my root reality to watch me copy the fifty six Shards he'd donated to me. He was most interested in the part where I copied the data and code present in a Shard into my root Shard, the Queen Administrator, then budded a new one off of it with the exact same code and data inside it.

Apparently, that was impossible, no matter that I'd performed that very feat fifty five other times.

Our human bodies (or human looking, on my part) still sat at the dining room table on Earth Bet. I'd asked to use normal speech instead of what I called Shardspeak, and being my Dad, he'd agreed. So whenever we wanted to say something, we did it through human (ish) mouths and ears.

"Taylor, this is incredible," he complimented me. "Do you know how revolutionary this ability of yours is?"

I blushed and rubbed the back of my head. "Uh, sorta?"

Dad shook his head and grinned. "I don't think you do. Part of the reason why most Entities destroy all versions of planets is to make sure that none of their Shards are left behind for others to poach. They're an incredibly precious resource to us. You… you've just made that unnecessary," he beamed at me.

I raised my eyebrows as the ramifications hit me. "Oh. Wow."

"We could very easily make a case to The Warrior that Cycles are now redundant," he continued musing.

I fidgeted a bit, blushing madly as the idea I'd come up with when I first learned about Zion raced through my head.

"Taylor," Dad pressed.

"Hey, it was the only thing I could think of at the time!" I defended myself.

"And what was this thing?"

I ducked my head, blushing even further. "Dating Zion so I could take over the role of his mate and prevent the Cycles from continuing," I mumbled.

Dad sighed and rubbed his forehead. "That won't be necessary, kiddo," he groaned. "And even if it was, I can't imagine my fifteen year old daughter being hitched to Golden Boy."

"Hey! I thought that he and I were the only Entities left!"

He shook his head. "I'm not sure he'd be open to it, given how you're the kid of the one who killed, or at least made it possible to kill, The Thinker," he explained.

My eyebrows rose. "How the hell did you do that?" I was shocked. Entities were supposed to be nearly impossible to kill.

"Two Shards, one a planning precog that basically says 'I Win' and tells you how to get there, then another that is essentially a virus I wrote for Entities."

"Huh," I said, mildly impressed.

Dad's face brightened. "Actually, we should have you make a copy of those two Shards for yourself, now that I think of it! The planning one would help you out immensely with figuring out your new state, trust me it helped with mine, and the virus one can be held as a weapon against Zion if necessary."

I shrugged. "Hey, I'm always open to getting more Shards. Send em over."

Dad suddenly looked sheepish.

I crossed my arms. "Dad, what did you do?"

He gulped. I looked so much like my mother it was painful at that moment. "So the thing is," he hastily explained, "the weapon Shard works by being assimilated into an unsuspecting Entity's systems and then ripping apart the majority of their code. So I don't have it. It is probably being hosted by someone on Earth Bet at the moment."

"And the planning one?" I asked tensely.

"That one I do know it's whereabouts. Eden wasn't entirely dead when she hit an alternate Earth, so I gave the shard to someone who could end her. I don't know what she's doing these days, but I guess we could always have a reunion."

I sighed and rubbed the bridge of my nose. "Okay. So you do actually have at least one, possibly two Parahumans to your name. Well, I suppose it was too much to hope for that you wouldn't cause a little bit of conflict."

Dad looked hurt. "Taylor, even if I did start giving out Shards, they wouldn't intentionally cause conflict. I know I gave those two the directive that if they were hosted they'd try to reduce it, but not by manipulating the host. And don't forget, you'll eventually start making your own hosts," he subtly reminded me.

Oh, right.

I could give people powers now. By splitting off pieces of myself and wiring them into their brains. With my copying ability I could probably even give people identical power sets too.

Shit.

I drew in a deep breath and relaxed. "Okay. That's good enough. I guess," I admitted.

Dad slightly smiled. "This is your show to run, kiddo. I'll follow your instructions on whatever you want to do. We don't have to go and get copies of those Shards for you if you don't want to."

I shook my head, steeling myself for dealing with a possible victim or two of my Dad's well-intentioned meddling and most definitely shoving the impending existential panic attack I was going to have to the back of my mind. "No, it's fine, Dad. The planning one sounds immensely helpful, especially to an Entity as new as I am. I don't know about the weapon one, but it wouldn't hurt to have."

Dad curtly nodded. "Got a handle on the dimensional travel Shard I tossed you yet?"

I slightly blushed, grimacing. "I haven't actually investigated any of them," I sheepishly admitted.

My Dad's face grew disapproving. "Taylor."

"Hey! I've been a little busy getting used to all this!"

--LB--

Once I mastered the dimensional travel Shard, we were ready. Apparently an Entity had a connection to all it's Shards at all times. That was something we could use to track the host of Path To Victory (the name of the planning 'I Win' Shard, so humble) at her current physical and dimensional location.

Dad had pushed me to learn a few other Shards along the way too, including something that was basically a field of complete invulnerability to everything and one that granted flight.

"Hey, even if you can fly because of that fancy Physics Manipulation Field, it's always good to have a backup," Dad had argued.

I grudgingly admitted he was right.

Dad and I held hands as we stood in our living room. "You ready, Taylor?" he asked me.

I grinned up at him. "Sure thing Dad. This'll be my first time hopping dimensions!"

Dad snorted. "There were many things I thought I'd have to teach you as you grew up. Never in my life did I imagine I'd be raising another Entity."

I shrugged. "Hey, could be worse. I could be a host to the Shard I replaced with the drive for conflict and some stupid power limit like controlling bugs or something."

My Dad snorted again. "That would be all kinds of fascinating and terrifying at the same time."

I put my free hand on my hip. "Hey!"

Dad shook his head and held out a hand to the air in front of us. "Just watch what I do and try not to end up in another thread of the multiverse," he told me.

I rolled my eyes and huffed, but paid attention regardless of my teenage antics. Being indignant and seeing my actions as childish at the same time was quite a ride.

Dad called on his dimensional travel Shard, willing a wormhole open in front of us. The fabric of reality parted like the Red Sea, a swirling portal of raw spacetime bursting into being with a thunderclap. It was something incomprehensible to my human senses, my Kryptonian ones could only hint at the spacetime fuckery going on, and my Shard senses understood everything.

"Cool," I grinned.

"Yup. Next stop, Earth… Let's call it Witch," he declared. Something about his smile was way too knowing.

There was a joke in this somewhere.

"You'll be bringing us back, Taylor, so pay attention as our bodies pass through," he chided me, slightly bopping my nose.

I had just enough time to annoyedly sigh. "Yes, Dad." Then we entered the conduit of trans dimensional bullshit.

I can't describe what I saw. I won't even try. Three seconds later though, our bodies emerged into something a lot more normal.

We were in some kind of room, an apartment if I was guessing correctly. That it was one of many within a massive facility housing the remains of The Thinker lent credence to something else going on.

A 40-ish year old woman was sitting at a desk across the room we'd entered, some kind of office, in a gray pinstripe suit and wearing a dark blue Fedora.

I got a good look at her Shard while we stared at each other. It was incredible. I immediately started copying everything from the thing into my root Shard, a bud growing as it was fed information.

"Fortuna!" Dad exclaimed, waving. "Long time no see! How's Path To Victory doing?"

The woman, Fortuna, stared at my Dad. She gulped. She looked to me and paled. I didn't know why she was acting like that, we only said hi after all.

That didn't stop her from slamming a red button on her desk and putting the whole facility on alert.

Dad sighed. "Oh dear."

I turned my glare on him. "I thought you said you were friends!"

"We should be! Give me a break, it's not my fault she's become paranoid!"

"Dad!"

When the woman heard me address him as Dad, she fainted.

--LB--

Well, I got to meet Alexandria.

In a full-tilt flying battle, yes, but meet her I did.

It took Legend arriving through what I recognized as a Zion dimensional travel Shard's effects (copied that one as soon as I could find the inter-reality wormhole in the head of the unconscious, sedated host) for the all out brawl our first meeting with Cauldron turned into to stop.

Snrk, Cauldron. That's an… interesting name for a shadow organization.

I finally got the joke, though. Earth Witch indeed. You're not as funny as you think, Dad.

"Hey!" the oldest member of the Triumvirate yelled.

Alexandria and I paused in midair, both about to swing punches into each other's faces. Eidolon and Dad stopped flinging ever more esoteric abilities at each other.

All four of us turned our heads to look at him.

"What the hell is going on?"

--LB--

We'd retired to the medical lab of the Cauldron base once Legend managed to talk his teammates down from fighting me and my Dad.

He didn't have to talk us down. We weren't the ones who attacked unprovoked, after all.

Alexandria glared at me from the rather comfortable looking examination table she was sitting on. She winced as she pressed the ice pack in her hand against her eye again. Turns out being completely invulnerable for a couple of decades makes people forget how to keep ice applied to their bruises.

Well, I say bruises. Alexandria had a black eye from how hard I sucker punched her.

Eidolon and my Dad were staring into each other's souls. For his part, Eidolon seemed like he was having epiphanies about his existence every few seconds. My Dad was merely amused.

Fortuna, or as she had introduced herself once she regained consciousness, Contessa, was present too. Also some woman called Doctor Mother, or just The Doctor for short.

I didn't regret asking "Who?" at all, regardless of the death glare I received for my troubles.

"Now that we're all calm," Legend began, trying his best to project confidence in the face of us Heberts, "why were you fighting Alexandria and Eidolon?"

"They started it," I said without any hesitation.

Dad turned to look at me and raised an eyebrow. I blushed when I realized how childish that sounded.

Legend stared at me for several seconds. "Right. Because you and your… father? Invaded a highly secure facility and incapacitated one of our highest ranking members," he tried scolding me.

"She fainted," I refuted.

Legend seemed surprised. "What?"

Fortuna, sorry, Contessa, groaned. "Yes, I fainted. After being surprised in my office by two unPathable people and hearing one of them call the other Dad."

"Hey!" Dad shot back. "We were just trying to have a reunion!"

Legend and Alexandria paled. Eidolon abruptly grinned for some reason. The Doctor just sighed.

Legend got his mojo back way quicker than I'd expected. "A… Reunion?" he asked my dad incredulously.

He nodded.

"With who?!"

"Fortuna, of course," he answered. "I haven't seen her for almost forty years, after all."

Contessa scowled. "I've never met you," she refuted.

"Oh, but you have," my dad insisted. "Two unimaginably huge beings fly through the cosmos, leaving behind pieces of themselves. They arrive around a world and prepare for touchdown."

Doctor Mother raised an eyebrow. "You're referring to the trigger visions when an Agent connects with it's host," she realized.

Dad smiled. "They're called Shards, but yes, I am. That's what everyone else sees. But I know Fortuna saw something… a little more," he teasingly hinted.

Contessa paled.

My Dad's grin evolved into a full on smirk. "A third being follows the two, hidden in the shadows of the cosmos, until they are set to arrive. Then this third being fires something at the smaller one, something they unexpectedly and thus happily absorb. Moments later the great being shudders and fails to slow down, slamming into the planet it never finished arriving at, and is damaged so thoroughly that it would take years to recover. Then to finish the job, the third one tosses a Shard towards Fortuna. The vision ends."

Contessa jumped up, scrambling back to a corner of the room. The whole time her eyes were locked on Dad, almost unseeing.

"Is that what you saw, Contessa?" Legend asked.

She barely nodded.

"Shit. There's another one?" Eidolon asked.

"We're screwed," Doctor Mother declared.

"Fuck," Alexandria cursed.

My Dad and I met each other's eyes for a moment. He inclined his head, requesting permission, and I nodded.

He turned back to the assembled group and resumed grinning. "You don't have to worry about me. I'm not like the two others."

Every human present froze.

As one, they turned their eyes to my dad. Fear blossomed over their faces, and what little emotional output I could detect with my limited Shards of that type showed terror in their hearts.

Dad sighed. "Oh relax. Do you really think I'd lethally damage The Thinker and give humankind a Shard like Path To Victory if I meant you harm?"

Legend gulped. "You're… an Entity?" he finally asked.

Dad nodded. "I'm known as Abaddon, but I really am thinking of changing it to my Earth one. Human names are so much better than Entity signatures," he idly mused.

This was a new side of my dad I hadn't seen before. Apparently he hid a lot of himself from me as I grew up.

That would have hurt pretty bad if I didn't know why he did so. I suddenly realized that I'd have to do some hiding of my own with whoever didn't know my new secret.

The fear in the room rapidly bled away to be replaced by utter confusion. "You… Want to be an Entity called… Daniel?" Alexandria deadpanned.

"Danny, actually, and it's no worse than Taylor," he reasoned. "And that's what my daughter knows me as best anyways. It seems fitting that the previous millions of years as Abaddon come to a close and I continue on to the coming millions with a name that matches hers."

It took a couple of seconds for them to process that. Alexandria, the permanent Thinker in the room, figured it out first. Her eyes locked onto my face, found my grin, and widened. Then she stared at me. Her jaw dropped open and her face paled further than snow.

Everyone slowly matched her state.

I grinned and gave them a little wave. "Hi. Taylor Hebert, Daughter of Danny Hebert. Brand new Entity. Also trying really hard not to geek out at meeting you all."

Contessa fainted again.

 

[TCGM]

Fourth
Chapter 2
Weapon​

"Dad"? I asked, studying my hands.

"Yes, Taylor?" my dad absentmindedly replied.

"What's a Deployment Time?"

Dad nearly dropped the Cauldron vial he was inspecting. "Sorry, what?"

We were in our own lab in the absolutely massive Cauldron base. After the generous amount of fainting, revelations, and a plea of aid from the humans, Dad had offered to take a look at the vials they were using to attune people to the Shards of The Thinker, see if he could do anything about their far too high chance of very nasty side effects.

I would've offered but I was still learning how to be… well, this new existence I was suddenly a part of.

Wait, I thought to myself, 'humans'?

Uh oh.

I'd just thought of myself as not human, different from people who I'd previously be amazed at meeting.

Alien.

I stamped that down harder than anything I've ever thought in my entire life, making sure I didn't abandon my humanity. Ever. I was a human. I would never stop being human. Even as I changed and became a goddesslike Entity, I would make certain of it.

I looked up from my contemplation of my hands and my own thoughts to stare my Dad straight in the eyes. I was super serious about the thing I'd asked him before my momentary existential crisis. But if I was right, something weird and possibly worthy of another one was going on. "What is a Deployment Time?" I repeated.

He blinked, confused, and oddly concerned. "Uh, context please?"

"Me, Dad. Err, my Shard. Administrator," I put a hand on my chest to show I was talking about me, though I was actually indicating something very different and in another reality. The 'real me', now. "It has something called a Deployment Time. I remember being... deployed into my own head to wait for me to trigger. Damn that's weird!"

Dad very carefully placed his held vial down in the case he got it from before responding. "That I believe is the name whatever lets you understand... Shardspeak," at this he grinned at me. He really liked my term for what Shards use to talk to each other. "-has picked to represent the name for when your Shard detached from the main Entity and went to an already found host or waited for a designated host," he explained.

I looked down at my hands again. "Shards are usually all seeded at the start of a Cycle, right?"

Dad leaned back on his bench and crossed his arms, looking at me thoughtfully. "Yeah, normally. The ones from The Thinker obviously haven't, but Zion's would have been."

I abruptly locked eyes with him again. "So why wasn't I? Err, my Shard?"

Dad raised an eyebrow. "Come again?"

I sighed and huffed, frustrated. Not with my Dad, with myself. "My Deployment Time doesn't match any of my Shards' times." I groaned and banged my head against the chair. "My Main Shard's time, I mean."

Dad grinned, the smug ass, at my identity crisis. Then he got serious. "What exactly do you mean, Taylor?"

"My primary, main, Shard, whatever you want to call it, my Administrator," I started, waiting for him to acknowledge that he understood that.

Dad nodded, pressing his lips together. "Okay, what about it?"

"It's deployment time doesn't match any of my other Shards' times," I explained again.

Dad cocked his head to the side. "Well they are all from me, so they were just deployed-" he started to reason.

I adamantly shook my head to interrupt him.

"What? Why are you shaking your head at me?"

I stopped shaking my head and sighed. "Dad, think! Not all my Shards are from you!"

"Yes they are, what are you-" he began to refute, then stopped as his face drained of color.

"Yeah!" I exclaimed, way too worried to look anything but normal. If I didn't look normal I'd crack, go crazy, break down and all the realizations I'd already made but was ignoring with all my will would come rushing back.

"Your Shaper isn't mine," Dad realized.

"Exactly!"

Dad shook his head to ward off the conclusion he'd obviously reached too. "Well technically that Shaper is yours, Taylor, so-"

I held up a hand to interrupt him. "Yeah, and if it had a Deployment Time matching when I duplicated Panacea's, I wouldn't be so concerned. But it doesn't!" I groaned and collapsed back into the chair, rubbing my temples with two fingers each. "Even if it was close I'd just put it down to data error. But it's off by over thirty years!"

Dad closed his eyes. "Don't tell me-"

"Yes!" I interrupted him again. I hopped out of the chair and started pacing around the room. "It's right around when Scion showed up!"

Dad looked up at me. His eyes held a depth of despair I hadn't seen in him since Mom died. His face displayed a look of dread. "And your Administrator?" he asked, almost whispering.

I stopped pacing, grimaced, and shook my head. "I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty positive it was deployed to my human body the exact second I was born."

We were both silent for several minutes. I in shock and disbelief, Dad clearly surprised.

"Well that's weird," he eventually spoke.

"Nice summary!" I shrieked sarcastically.

"Taylor, don't yell at me," he flatly warned me, grinding his teeth.

I saw the pained eyes of my only living parent and deflated. "Sorry, Dad," I apologized. I collapsed back into the chair and sighed, running my hands through my hair.

My only feminine trait, previously anyways, and the one thing I got from my mom.

Or so I used to think.

It didn't take a rocket scientist to come to the right conclusion.

Side note; both my Dad and I could build a rocket in our sleep.

We'd come to the right conclusion.

"So," Dad said after a long, deep breath, "that's pretty suspicious. And convenient."

"You think?!" I shot back.

"If we're on the same page, and with the same suspicion," Dad began, "then here's the real question; Why?"

I raised my eyebrows at him, leaning forward. "Not 'how'? 'Why'?" I asked.

Dad just pointed at himself, then at me, a questioning eyebrow raised.

I sagged back into my chair again. "Right. How has about half a trillion options."

"Correct," Dad agreed. "So; Why?" He shook his head and growled. "Moreover, why leave us?"

I snorted and prepared to mentally curse the person I'd always modeled myself after. "I don't know, maybe she got bored?" I scoffed. "She's not like us. No empathy. Probably was a data gathering experiment for her!"

The rage I abruptly felt against her in that moment overwhelmed me. I jumped up from my chair, screamed, and let loose a beam of brilliantly blue Entropy-accelerating energy at the wall of the lab Cauldron let us borrow.

Much like Scion's or my father's, the beam didn't even blink at the matter of the wall in its way. It just kept going until the range I'd unconsciously given it stopped.

When the energy cleared, a circular hole the size of a van was erased from existence through about a hundred rooms and hallways further down.

My eyes popped open as I realized what I'd done. A quick check with a temporal postcognition Shard revealed nobody had been in the path of the beam. Luckily.

Several people were peering around the borders of the holes now though.

I sheepishly waved at them and began using a matter transfer Shard to rebuild the walls by funneling matter from one of the outer moons of my Shard reality's solar system. Another reconfigured the matter into what used to be there.

"Got it out of your system?" Dad jokingly asked. He hadn't moved at all from his spot leaning against the bench.

"Kinda," I reluctantly admitted, grumbling.

"Taylor, your mom wasn't like that," Dad replied to my earlier comments. "Yes, she loved learning, but she also loved. She was one of the most emotionally expressive women I've ever met and she felt things very deeply, especially about family." He grinned and chuckled. "And about you. Wouldn't let you out of her arms for a whole week after you were born."

I walked back to my chair and collapsed again. "So then what? And again, this time for real, how? I mean, you and I are only the way we are because... of..." I trailed off, realizing the possibility that would explain everything.

Dad sighed, letting his neck slack and his head fall backwards as he groaned at the ceiling. "Of course. Of course She would do that. It fits."

"But how? Mom's dead!" I refuted, banging my head against the back of my comfy leather chair yet again. "Both versions!"

Dad suddenly perked up, realizing something. Before he even opened his mouth, I got it too. Benefit of having multiple extremely fast, moon-sized brains I suppose. "Or is she?" we both said, synchronized.

"Half-dead librarian," I repeated absentmindedly.

Dad stared at me with disbelief. "What?"

"It's what the Woman called The Thinker. A half-dead librarian," I continued. "'The others are a combative idiot, a half-dead librarian, and a depressed, inactive troll.' That's what She said."

Dad's face went pale again. "Fortuna didn't pull it off," he realized.

My face joined his with a loss of circulation. "Which means-" I began to say.

"The Cycle is only on pause!" Dad finished, racing out of the room.

I hopped out of my chair and into the air, flying after him.

This was bad.

Really, really bad.

--LB--

My Dad might normally be slow but when he's in a hurry, he's actually pretty damned fast. I was only barely able to keep up with his running. I wouldn't go faster than the speed of sound, not inside, and Dad was obviously using some kind of Shard to bypass normal things like physics around his body as we tracked down the leaders of this little secret organization.

I glared at him. "You're giving me a copy of whatever Shard lets you do this," I flatly demanded. I crossed my arms and narrowed my eyes at him while I flew at his side.

"Sure," Dad agreed with a grin. He was barely focused on me at all. The meeting room where all of the Cauldron leaders were discussing, oddly enough us, was the only thing on his mind.

"What will we tell them when we get there?" I asked. I was genuinely curious as to how Dad would breach this particularly sensitive topic with the people who built a base on my apparent mother's corpse.

"What they need to know," he succinctly answered me.

I kept silent for a good half minute as we sprinted through the absolutely massive facility of Cauldron. Well, Dad sprinted, I flew. Didn't really make me tired.

Why did they give my Dad the lab the furthest away from their command centre? It's like they were avoiding us or something.

I know! It's just ridiculous. Our bodies aren't even the real us! They couldn't avoid us if they tried.

Ah well, we'd just have to tell them that we can see them just like Santa Claus when we get there.

On that thought I almost sent my face caving inwards with how much force I facepalmed with. I stopped flying, coming to a hover in the air.

It took my Dad an embarrassingly long time to notice I'd stopped. He jogged back to me and raised his eyebrows, still running in place. "Come on Taylor, we've gotta get to their super secret meeting room!"

"Dad-" I tried to begin, ignoring the groan of defeat a certain hero of mine expressed several miles away.

"We don't have time to discuss things Taylor!" Dad raised his voice at me.

Well fine.

I called upon a sound manipulation Shard and blasted his entire body from all directions. "DAD," I shouted, "WE CAN TELEPORT."

Dad abruptly stopped running in place. He drew in a deep breath, sighed, and smacked his hand against his forehead.

Another one of the leaders of Cauldron let their face fall forward into the actually kinda pretty surface of their dark oak briefing table with a similar groan of defeat.

"Yes, you're right Taylor," Dad finally admitted. He grimaced. "I forgot about that."

I grinned and crossed my arms. "I'm a better Entity than you and I'm not even twenty years old," I teased him.

Dad pursed his lips together, closed his eyes, and breathed in deeply. He let out the breath slowly and with a slight growl. When he opened his eyes again, he was glaring up at me. "I'm going to pay you back later for that comment," he grinned back, equally teasingly.

"Bring it on gramps!" I shot back. My smile as huge. I hadn't felt this good since before Mom died. All it took was turning into an alien space whale after being trapped in a deathly locker by my best friend to bring it ba-

Whew, almost lost it there, I realized. The emotional dampening Shard I was using to suppress my problems until I could actually deal with them momentarily ran out of energy.

Side note; Entity energy distribution systems and even their collection systems are terrible. They can route or bring in immense amounts of energy, yeah, but they're so inefficient. Inelegant. And they leak like a screen door on a submarine. I set about designing a new version of them that hopefully wouldn't be as bad in my Shard reality. Ah, screw it, my reality. I was most likely the only occupant after all.

Huh. An entire reality to myself. Really brings new meaning to my Dad telling me to clean up my space. Like, which part Dad? I've got an entire universe over here, could you be a little more specific?

I was snapped out of my entertaining thoughts by my Dad bopping me on the nose. If I didn't have my Shards observing this reality I'd probably have instinctually lashed out with my Sapphire Fuck Off Beam.

Gonna need to keep an eye on that.

--LB--

"You didn't do the job right!" Dad shouted at Contessa.

"It's not my fault!" she vehemently defended herself. "She countered it somehow!"

"Why did you let the one secret weapon I gave your race be coerced like that?!" Dad shot back.

Contessa's eyes were wide with incredulity. "Like I could have done anything!"

"You could've been faster!"

While Dad and Contessa 'discussed' things with the rest of the Cauldron leadership looking on, some in amusement and others with horror, I took the opportunity to study and copy the Shards of the Triumvirate and the Number Man.

Reaching through reality to where the Parahuman's Shards lay seemed like a smart thing to do, too.

Right up until I actively took a look at the twisted carcasses.

Something very deep inside me was almost entirely repulsed, even offended by what Cauldron had done to them.

Oh and, side note, by 'discussed' I really mean that my Dad and Contessa had a screaming session so bad it almost sounded like they were married.

Neither their argument nor the state of the Shards stopped me from copying the Shards and growing my own fixed versions, though, no matter how much I winced every so often as their vitriol got worse or felt like throwing up in my mouth at the pieces of alien hooked up to the Triumvirate's brains.

Alexandria's Shard was a new kind I'd never seen before. Unlike my, my father's, or the Shaper I copied from Zion by way of Panacea, it had multiple original functions. It served as data storage, a molecular stasis engine, and even had physics manipulation fields like my body's own in it's abilities. Would be a nice backup to what I already had if nothing else.

Legend's was where I hit paydirt. His Shard was the least messed up of all of them. It was, to put it simply, a viable method of moving within real space faster than light. I had my own FTL drive. It allowed me, the Entity me, or any avatar I chose to shift into energy, instantly go from zero to full lightspeed, and then double that speed every minute. His world famously bullshit lasers were just a possible side application of the Shard's true, incredible purpose.

I mentally made a to-do list with my Alexandria Shard to go pay a visit to Alpha Centauri. Grab some pictures.

Then maybe a couple hour trip out to one of the neighborhood galaxies. Wouldn't take me that long.

Yeah, his Shard was bullshit.

Number Man's Shard was just a data cruncher. It analyzed the world and returned numerical patterns. I copied it of course, every single Shard I managed to get would make me more powerful, but I had the feeling I wouldn't be using his Shard much, if at all.

Eidolon's Shard was the most screwed up. However, somehow due to being so fucked up, it was also the most impressive once repaired. It was originally supposed to serve as a Google of sorts for The Thinker. I could use it and fully planned on doing so, but with my meager number of Shards I didn't have multiple powers that could do the same thing a billion different ways like fully grown Entities did. It wouldn't be working anywhere near its real utility level.

Even so, the new Shard was immensely helpful. Already it was taking over the mentally taxing task of figuring out what Shard was useful for which problems I faced in whatever avatar I was using.

What Cauldron had done to its original ended up making it eat another Shard and assimilate it. I grew the two of them out separately as best I could, but my versions would always be intimately linked.

That second, linked Shard? It created and managed 'Conflict Engines'. I had a sneaking suspicion at that point but it wouldn't be until a little later on that I figured out what that meant.

In the present, the Shard was asking for templates for my first 'Conflict Engine'.

I didn't really want 'Conflict Engines'. I went ahead and told it so. It rebuffed that with the idea of 'Protection Engines'. I was an extremely young and vulnerable Entity, I should have what amounted to guards.

That's what got me to grudgingly agree. And since I was abandoned by my best friend, I thought it ironic if my first one was based on the version of her from before that. The one I grew up with.

My sister in all but blood.

My Shard took that idea and ran with it. Before I could stop it, it searched out and grabbed the connections to the twenty 'Conflict Engines' that Eidolon's mutated Shard was barely administering. Now I was the one in control of them.

Then it forwarded a request to the third one. A request for the biodata and a copy of the mind of one Emma Barnes up to just before what it called her trigger event.

If that wasn't enough to shock me stupid, the reply signature on the absolute crapton of data I got back sure did.

[Conflict Engine Three: Cycle Species Designation Simurgh] sat in front of my metaphorical Shard face.

Are you fucking kidding me? I kept repeating to myself.

I was too stunned to even notice, much less stop, the now renamed Protection Engine Shard eating a couple hundred asteroids from my reality. I didn't notice or stop it constructing an Endbringer in the shape and size of my best friend. Didn't see the mind copy get downloaded.

But when she showed up right next to me with a quiet pop, I freaked the hell out. I raised a palm already glowing blue right in her face. Only my high thought speed allowed me to recognize my friend's features in time to not obliterate her.

My Dad and Contessa stopped arguing.

Alexandria and Legend stared at her in disbelief.

Eidolon was nursing a headache due to my seizing of the Endbringers from him.

Doctor Mother was banging her head backwards onto the padded leather headrest of her office chair.

Emma Barnes looked around the briefing room, at me, down at her naked self, at me again, and screamed.

 

[Saltade]

Taylor took her memories of her friend and turned them into an Endbringer.

She took her friend and turned her into an Endbringer.

I guess you could say....*ba dum tss*....that she's a Friendbringer.
.
.
.
I'll show myself out.

 

[Prince Charon]

Well, that was unexpected.

 

[TCGM]

Taylor took her memories of her friend and turned them into an Endbringer.

She took her friend and turned her into an Endbringer.

I guess you could say....*ba dum tss*....that she's a Friendbringer.
.
.
.
I'll show myself out.

Click to shrink...

Yup. Emma Barnes is now a Friendbringer.

And she won't be the last.

Well, that was unexpected.

Click to shrink...

Something something expect the unexpected

 

[deathgeonous]

Oh god, so... I need more. Just more.

 

[Gindjurra]

invaded by about fifty other Shards, jumping into orbit of the rocky disaster of an earth.

Click to shrink...

I know this is QQ and lewds are commonplace here, but I wasn't expecting Danny-Taylor incest in the first chapter.

But when she showed up right next to me with a quiet pop

Click to shrink...

Thereby proving that Taylor really is The Troll's daughter.

 

[Eternal Dragon]

Holy shit! I'm really like this so far. It's a nice power wank thing but Taylor is happy! Abaddon Danny is the best thing thus far! Friendbringer Emma is a close second~

 

[TCGM]

Oh god, so... I need more. Just more.

Click to shrink...

Working on it, also hi!

I know this is QQ and lewds are commonplace here, but I wasn't expecting Danny-Taylor incest in the first chapter.

Click to shrink...

Hardy har har, don't tempt me.

Thereby proving that Taylor really is The Troll's daughter.

Click to shrink...

As if there ever was any doubt about Our Lady of Escalation.

Holy shit! I'm really like this so far. It's a nice power wank thing but Taylor is happy! Abaddon Danny is the best thing thus far! Friendbringer Emma is a close second~

Click to shrink...

Thanks! It is indeed POWER OVERWHELMING as applied to Taylor, but after all the abuse she's suffered in canon and fanon, she deserves it. Friendbringer Emma was a spur of the moment decision while I was writing CH2 but I'm so glad I actually went for it xD

 

[MrTwistr]

I dont normally like crack-fics but this looks super interesting.

 

[Gindjurra]

Hardy har har, don't tempt me.

Click to shrink...

I was actually mostly serious on that incest comment -- eating an apple is technically a reproductive act with an apple tree, especially if the tree has a dryad associated with it. For an Entity, the equivalent would be sharing shards.

 

[A/N]

As interesting and novel as this is...

Entities can't copy-paste? What? The whole 'derivative' buds, pings, and all is just to gather more varied data, surely. Or rather, to generally not bother with anything too similar.

Maybe Taylor can introduce the Entities to solar power, aka nomming on stars instead of puny planets.

 

[GameDragon]

As interesting and novel as this is...

Entities can't copy-paste? What? The whole 'derivative' buds, pings, and all is just to gather more varied data, surely. Or rather, to generally not bother with anything too similar.

Maybe Taylor can introduce the Entities to solar power, aka nomming on stars instead of puny planets.

Click to shrink...

Taylor can ctrl+c then ctrl+v. The Entities have to ctrl+x then ctrl+v.

 

[A/N]

Taylor can ctrl+c then ctrl+v. The Entities have to ctrl+x then ctrl+v.

Click to shrink...

I got that, it just seems silly.

 

[january1may]

Watched, and eagerly waiting for more.

I had no idea I wanted this in my Worm fandom. One of the coolest fics I've seen so far.

 

[TCGM]

I dont normally like crack-fics but this looks super interesting.

Click to shrink...

Thanks! And hey!

I was actually mostly serious on that incest comment -- eating an apple is technically a reproductive act with an apple tree, especially if the tree has a dryad associated with it. For an Entity, the equivalent would be sharing shards.

Click to shrink...

Shhhhhhhhh don't tip people off

That said, I can imagine certain people's heads exploding if they realize that eating an apple can not only make you look like more of an asshole, but is also tree porn!

Taylor can ctrl+c then ctrl+v. The Entities have to ctrl+x then ctrl+v.

Click to shrink...

I got that, it just seems silly.

Click to shrink...

Entities hook up moon or larger sized supercomputers to human brains to collect data instead of cooperating with species in the first place. The entire concept is silly. Humans are not animals, we're sentient. Any properly thinking, optimizing Clarketech would leap at the chance to get an entire species helping them. But they don't. I'm wavering on whether Scion and Eden were just Entity versions of retards or their entire species is retarded. Either way, even if Entities can copypasta, humans think differently than them. And Our Lady of Escalation is a good little munchkin.

Also, it's entirely plausible that there's some subtlety going on behind the scenes specifically having to do with the Adminstrator Shard of Eden. I mean... why would she give Taylor that Shard specifically? Surely there are others more important, more able to protect her. And Dannyaddon did have that super special Entity killing one... hmm.....

Watched, and eagerly waiting for more.

I had no idea I wanted this in my Worm fandom. One of the coolest fics I've seen so far.

Click to shrink...

Welcome! Thanks, Fourth is a really fun fic to write.

 

[A/N]

Entities hook up moon or larger sized supercomputers to human brains to collect data instead of cooperating with species in the first place. The entire concept is silly. Humans are not animals, we're sentient. Any properly thinking, optimizing Clarketech would leap at the chance to get an entire species helping them. But they don't. I'm wavering on whether Scion and Eden were just Entity versions of retards or their entire species is retarded. Either way, even if Entities can copypasta, humans think differently than them. And Our Lady of Escalation is a good little munchkin.

Also, it's entirely plausible that there's some subtlety going on behind the scenes specifically having to do with the Adminstrator Shard of Eden. I mean... why would she give Taylor that Shard specifically? Surely there are others more important, more able to protect her. And Dannyaddon did have that super special Entity killing one... hmm....

Click to shrink...

Er, we experiment with and upon animals all the time, you know? If someone started talking to their labmice and taking their suggestions seriously, everyone would look at them funny and eventually take them away.

Humans are just so far behind and so puny it's not even worth it, in their mind. Just testing stuff and using them to generate semi-randomised starting positions to generate new data is more than enough. Heck, doesn't Abaddon just burn through his 'lab mice' by barely putting in any safety features? Apparently it's working out pretty well.

Plus, there is the whole 'Division' thing. The 'type' that went into the vial that created Echidna. Copypasta was its whole thing, complete with endless variations to generate more data. Some Tinkers make use of stolen alien technologies, right?

Then again, entities are pretty retarded, at least from what little we've seen, so who knows.

 

[Nightmare723764]

Oh goddamn it! I was hoping for more chapters! FOLLOWED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
DATA FOR THE... hmm? Actually what would Taylor's Entity designation be anyway?

 

[the DragonBard]

Actually what would Taylor's Entity designation be anyway?

Click to shrink...

Sheol, since all the others we know are named after mystical locations with biblical connections.

Abaddon was 'also' the name of an angel who was connected to the abyss. Abaddon supposedly had an army of locusts at his command.

Coincidence?

 

[Nightmare723764]

Sheol, since all the others we know are named after mystical locations with biblical connections.

Abaddon was 'also' the name of an angel who was connected to the abyss. Abaddon supposedly had an army of locusts at his command.

Coincidence?

Click to shrink...

I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!?!?! WHAT HAS SPACE-WHALE DIMENSIONAL-FUCKERY DONE!?!?!

 

[the DragonBard]

I can't wait for New Emma to meet Evil Emma, and to find out if Annette can be resurrected by using Eden's remains.

Here's a question: could Taylor use Eidolon's shard to access and copy all the other shards he uses?

 

[theonebutcher]

"Congratulation Emma, you're the next Endbringer."

 

[jrbless]

Taylor is currently doing a good job of getting a copy of all of Eden's shards, which isn't a bad start. However, she'll need to spend some time going through and experimenting with all of them to see how to actually use them. Right now, she's effectively grabbing things and has no idea what those things actually do.

 

[the DragonBard]

Taylor is currently doing a good job of getting a copy of all of Eden's shards, which isn't a bad start. However, she'll need to spend some time going through and experimenting with all of them to see how to actually use them. Right now, she's effectively grabbing things and has no idea what those things actually do.

Click to shrink...

Problem is that, doing so would take a 'long' time.

Remember, the shards not only have abilities, but most, if not all, are working under major limits. Taylor doesn't have those limits, and can express each shard in multiple ways, including as a Tinker. That means she's got something like 50+ Tinker themes, plus all the potential ways each shard could express itself. So, by itself, each Shard would probably take at least a week or two, and then you have to take synergy between Shards into account, figuring out what they can do when working together.

So, when she starts experimenting, it'll take a few years, if not decades.

What I would like to see is her multitasking more. I mean, she's got the hardware of QA, which is the master of multitasking (pun not intended) so should be able to do it just as well.

 

[badger.black]

Oh my sweet flipping bajeebus! This. Is. AMAZING!

Everything about this is just so fun! Sure it is crack as all fuck, but honestly I need that with all the depressing shit that happens to Taylor in the Multiverse that is Fanfic. The girl deserves some good, fun ol' powerwank, and what is more wanky then making her a dirty power stealing Entity. With her memetic escalation tendency it will be a fun ride.

And I love it the Danny/Abbadon thing, because that is new and simply brilliant. And Emma the Friendbringer is going to be all sorts of interesting, particularly as I am sure she is going to want to slap some sense into her original self. And that, you know, looking like an Emma means Taylor may have some residual anger issues to work through.

But mostly I just despererly want more of this amazingness!

 

[TCGM]

Fourth
Chapter 3
Think Again​

"I did what?!"

Emma. My best friend Emma. My sister, Emma.

She was sitting in front of me, clad only in Legend's cape.

It was incredibly unnerving. To everyone else in the room too, but for a very different reason for me.

I'd been tortured by her and Sophia with help from Madison for nearly two years. My sister betrayed me, bullied me, threw everything we'd ever shared back in my face and used it to tear me down.

Emma, my sister, tried to kill me.

She probably would've succeeded, too.

Yet here she was, sitting in front of me with an astonished look on her face, not remembering doing any of that. Her expression was slowly changing into a well of anger so deep I could feel it like a physical thing.

My sister, Emma, was mad at herself.

Oh yeah, and she was also composed of a crystalline structure so redundant and hard to destroy it literally warped spacetime and existed in hundreds of realities at once, but I was putting off any contemplation of the fact I'd created an Endbringer and used my ex-sister to do it.

Also on the checklist was punching Eidolon across the solar system for killing hundreds of millions of people by proxy and a major reckoning for the secret organization that enabled him to do so.

Somewhere on the list of crazy, insane bullshit my life had turned into was flying up into orbit to go talk to the Simurgh.

Yeah. It sounded insane. Still did. Hadn't dropped in insanity levels since I reluctantly put it on my list in the first place.

But…

I had to.

She was now under my command. It was my job. And I'd have to somehow make that fact clear to the world.

Ugh, I'd have to go yell at Behemoth and Leviathan too, just to make it extremely obvious that the attacks were called off.

Huh. This might actually be a good thing. I could get Leviathan and Behemoth to work together, start going around and fixing the places they fucked up.

And the Simurgh was going to be on un-mind-fuck duty for a while.

But right now I had to deal with... Emma.

The Fourth Endbringer, Twenty First Conflict Engine, or First Protection Engine.

Or First Friendbringer.

It really depended on how you looked at the situation, and how much you knew.

At this point I knew everything. First Friendbringer it is.

Oh hey, volcanic rage at Cauldron and the Triumvirate. I wondered why you took so long to bubble up again.

Breathe, Taylor, I coached myself. In and out. Slow. See? All better.

I tuned the Earth Witch reality, and my body contained within it, back into focus. "Yeah," I reluctantly confirmed to answer Emma.

I'd just finished telling her what her original had done to me.

She was not happy.

My Dad probably eclipsed her anger, but he was silently fuming. He hadn't moved at all since I started talking. Neither had the members of Cauldron, though Legend had made a lot of very pained sounds and Alexandria had cracked several pencils into itty bitty pieces.

Emma stared at me with disbelief for several long, tense seconds. I started fidgeting under her gaze.

Hey, I might be an Entity and capable of recreating my body, but it's the one I was born with. I'd rather keep it than be splattered by an Endbringer version of my ex-sister who'd decided to betray me again.

As that thought flowed down my connection to her, Emma's expression darkened. "I'm gonna kill her."

It wasn't a question or a request. She was already standing up and starting to channel my Doormaker Shard to Earth Bet.

"Emma, no!" I commanded, leaning on our connection as much as I could without compromising her.

She paused in her stride. "You're... stopping me?" Emma whirled back to glare at me, confused. "Why won't you let me?!" she asked, astounded. "She... I... She tried to kill you!"

"I'm trying to be the better person, Emma!" I yelled at her.

"Why?!" she shot back. "You could do anything and be a better person than She became!"

"Because I have to!" I fired off. I patted my stomach hard, making tiny sonic booms. "Look at me, Emma, really look. I'm... I'm an Entity now. I have to be the better person because I have the power to wipe out our species! I made you, mostly by accident, like Eidolon made the Endbringers!"

Emma's eyes snapped wide open. Before she could say anything, though, Alexandria spoke up from right behind me. She hadn't even made a sound as she moved.

"What."

I held up a hand to forestall her and make it clear I wasn't talking to her at the moment. "Emma, I on accident co-opted control of the Endbringers," I continued. "On accident asked the Simurgh, the fucking Simurgh, for a copy of Emma, and then on accident created you, using that copy, as another Endbringer!" I listed off what I'd done. "I'm fucking terrified and have to make sure I'm the better person no matter what, because one little moment of weakness, like you've told me I am, like you've hammered into my head for the last two years, and I could blow up our planet!"

When I revealed that the young girl in Legend's cape was an Endbringer, everyone except my Dad and oddly enough Contessa tensed. They were preparing for a fight. They were clearly smart enough not to start another one, though, now knowing what my Dad and I were.

I was crying by the end of it, hysterical. I couldn't see out of my body's eyes and my emotions were all over the place.

Emma obviously was connected to more than just my Shard or my idle thoughts, because her furious expression melted. "Oh, Taylor," she said, bringing a hand to her mouth. "I'm so sorry."

Then she blurred forwards and wrapped me up in a hug.

Emma, my sister, was giving me a heartfelt embrace the likes of which I hadn't felt in years.

Love. Someone was giving me love. I… I hadn't gotten that for two years. Not from anyone. Even my Dad failed, though he tried.

Emma, the one who tortured me, or at least someone who looked like her, sounded like her, smelled like her, felt like her, was hugging me and giving me love.

I was being hugged.

I hadn't been hugged in two years either.

It was all too much for me. I broke down, letting my pain and misery of far more than only two years out in sobs and choked cries. Emma just held me and rubbed my back. She whispered sweet nothings into my ear every so often, mixed in with apologies for what her original had done, and cursing her for throwing me away.

Eventually my Dad joined the hug.

My Dad was hugging me.

Also for the first time in two years.

He must've gestured to somebody because another person joined in, too. A tiny amount of my attention that wasn't eaten up by my emotions noticed it was Contessa.

Guess because she had a piece of my Dad in her head he considered her family.

I wasn't complaining. I was many, many things and feeling all of them at that moment, but I most certainly wasn't complaining.

I cried in my sister's arms for a long, long time. The fact my Dad had finally pulled his head out of his ass and noticed my suffering was just the cherry on top.

--LB--

I was amazed that the leadership of Cauldron waited, actually patiently waited, for me to stop bawling.

Was it because of my status? What my father and I were? Or were they sympathetic to my plight?

I could probably find out with a Shard or two… but I didn't really want to know. Mysteries would be few and far between for me now. I should take whatever I could get.

My eyes were red when I withdrew from the hug pile. Emma, my sister (but also my first Endbringer, holy shit!) didn't let me go. She clung to me, her chest pressing into my side, and refused to budge when I experimentally pushed on her through our connection.

That was fine. I missed her hugs. Even if they weren't from my original sister, she betrayed me, so having a version of her who literally couldn't was extremely helpful to my emotional state.

It saddened me that it took me making my own version of her to get there, though.

But hey, now we could really be sisters! It's not like this Emma could live at her original's house after all. Not that she would even if she could, judging by her reactions.

...I made a mental note to not let her go near the Barnes' without me. She might follow through on her previous threat.

And I'd love to see Dad try and refuse. I was gonna hold him being absent from my life for two years over his head for a long, long time.

Possibly forever.

I might have forgiven him but that didn't mean I wouldn't extort him using it, especially given what exactly he was.

Any and all thoughts about how this Emma, my Friendbringer, was technically my daughter and how that made the other Endbringers my siblings by some weird three way between Eidolon, my Mom, and Scion were firmly ejected from my mind.

Along with the memories of the many, many… 'educational home videos' I'd found in the basement a year ago starring my Mom, my Dad, and another stupidly attractive woman.

Videos, yes. Educational? Technically. Deeply, deeply scarring would be my preferred description.

See? They're not in my mind anymore. Nope. Nuh uh. Wasn't Alexandria standing behind me? Oh wait, she went back to sit down after my breakdown.

"Sorry," I instinctively, automatically apologized. Both for getting lost in thought and for melting like an ice cream cone's internal confectionary on a hot day.

My eyes widened and I cursed. "No, you know what? No. I'm not sorry. I needed that!" I refused, a little too loudly.

I was refusing more myself than anyone else, but the Triumvirate and my father still flinched.

I didn't apologize, just crossed my arms as much as I could over my new chest and the Emma shaped arms around my torso.

"Taylor," Alexandria asked hesitantly. She wasn't really a gentle person, but she was trying. "What did you mean when you said you took the Endbringers from Eidolon?"

And just like that, my good mood evaporated.

"Oh, right," I spat. "That little nugget of crap."

I turned to Eidolon, previously one of my most worshipped heroes, and death glared him. "Your Shard, due to the butchering all of you did," with that I indicated everyone in the room except my Dad and Emma, "ate a Shard that creates and administers Conflict Engines. Eidolon here's subconscious, retarded need for worthy opponents activated Behemoth, and Leviathan, then the Simurgh!" I slammed my hands down on their oak conference table and allowed my copy of Legend's shard to channel blue light into my eyes, making them glow. "I am just a little pissed about my heroes being the cause of millions of deaths!"

Eidolon, Legend, and Doctor Mother's faces went bone white.

"Wh-what?" Eidolon stammered.

I gave him an evil, stinkeyed glare. "Yeah, that's right. Cauldron may have fucked up the Shards, but it was the user who ultimately commanded and, until I seized them barely an hour ago, kept commanding them to attack every three months." I pointed a finger at Eidolon accusingly. "The blood of millions is on your subconscious head, Eidolon." I growled his 'hero' name, my teeth bared.

The blood drained from his face. "No," he whispered.

"Yes," I restated, firmly and resolutely.

My Dad was just watching all of this. He was glaring at Contessa every so often, but otherwise he was doing as he said. Letting me take the lead.

Alexandria scowled. "You have no proof-" she began to defend her friend.

I snapped my glare to her and decided to hammer home just how outclassed she was. I seized control of her Shard and through it, her body. "Sit. Down," I commanded. I sent the same commands through her Shard.

Alexandria's eyes popped open and she grunted as her body sat without her control.

Everyone else paled suitably. Nobody was making any sudden moves.

"I used to respect you, Alexandria," I spat her way. "You were my hero. You, more than anyone in the world, I wanted to be like. I ran around with Emma… the betraying one, as a little girl with a cape and pretended to be you. But now..." I looked around at them all, then the ceiling and the ground of the Cauldron base. I met her eyes again, absolutely sure there was disgust on my face. "Now… I'm extremely conflicted."

Despite her anger at me, every word brought a wince from her.

I turned my angry gaze on the only normal human in the room. The 'leader'. The so called Doctor. "You, and Cauldron, are gonna have to do a lot to get back on my good side," I seethed, narrowing my eyes.

I spared Legend a suspicious glance. "You didn't seem to know about what your friends were doing. You're my hope for this shitstorm," I told him.

The third member of the Triumvirate grimaced. "Am I right in guessing you're not going to help?"

I shook my head. "Not until you clean up your act. I'll keep the Endbringers under control and my Dad and I will see what we can do about Scion. That's it. In exchange for not destroying Cauldron, I want this base."

Everyone in the room stared at me with stunned shock except Eidolon, who was barely breathing.

"What?" the Number Man asked, blinking.

"This base," I repeated, gesturing around us. "I want it."

Everyone was silent for another good ten seconds. Besides Emma giggling into my shoulder and my Dad valiantly containing his mirth, that is.

"You're serious," Legend finally realized. He swallowed nervously, eyeing his friends.

"Yup."

That was it. My Dad lost it. "She's got bigger cajones than I do!" he wheezed, trying and failing to breathe through his uncontrolled cackling.

Contessa, resigned to her new duty, whumped him on the back a few times.

It didn't help.

Alexandria glared at me when she got over her shock. "How dare you-"

Legend clamped a hand on her leg. "Don't, Alexandria," he warned.

"Smart," I agreed, smirking. I tried to look dangerous over the gigantic red blush on my face from my Dad's comment.

I'm not sure it entirely worked.

Still, even a cute, blushing destroyer of worlds is still a destroyer of worlds.

Doctor Mother was the one who asked. "Why?" Her voice held defeat within it.

"First, and I know you know about this; my mother, presumably, is here," I began laying out my reasons. "Secondly I think I can help the people who were severely warped by their corrupted Shards. And third? I've always wanted a secret base." The last reason was accompanied by a gigantic, ear to ear grin.

Emma finally lost it. She broke down giggling and bopped me on the nose for doing it to her.

I maintained my serious facade despite it being incredibly hard to do so with my sister giggling right next to me.

The familiarity of that, the memories of her original doing that when we were younger, when we were friends, crashed over me in a tidal wave of pain. But they were good memories, and Emma hugged me tighter when she felt the pain flare across our connection, so I bared it.

--LB--

I gave them a week to move out. I even provided them a temporary portal to one of their secondary… offworld bases, of their own choosing, so they could do it easier.

Is it still called an offworld base if it's just an alternate version of the same planet?

PHO's various debates on the topic seemed to agree that yes, it was.

That seemed dumb to me, but I couldn't come up with a better alternative than 'side-world', so I decided to go with the one that didn't make Emma and my Dad laugh their asses off.

As mad as I was with Cauldron, they were still trying to do the right thing. They were trying to save my species -my previous physical one, anyways, and my mental one- against impossible odds with a malfunctioning guidance system and essentially zero allies.

Across the entire multiverse.

I couldn't lay all the blame on them. There were two others I most definitely could, and did, lay it at the metaphorical feet of, though.

Moreover, Eidolon didn't actually make the Endbringers. He just activated them.

No, that was Eden's fault. The Thinker.

My mother, apparently.

Oh yeah, once I figured out how to revive her safely, we were gonna have a Talk. A long one. With lots of shouting on my part about not blowing up planets and not making death machines, thanks!

When the hell did the universe invert so that the teenager is more responsible than both her parents?!

Somewhere in another part of my unskillfully multitasked mind, I was continually grumbling. Another part of me was screaming at a metaphorical wall.

The avatar part, my body's thought 'thread', I guess you could say, benefited from this by appearing normal.

Threading your mind isn't remotely as easy as science fiction would have us believe. I was still only managing five, max, before I got hopelessly confused.

Of course, I sensed I could do more, but I'd have to abandon parts of what made me human, allowed me to sympathize with my race.

I wouldn't ever do that.

We said our goodbyes. I kept my anger reigned in enough to give each of the Triumvirate a hug. Even Eidolon.

He… didn't really respond much. To me, to his teammates, nothing. I really hoped I hadn't broken him.

I still needed him intact to punt across the solar system after all.

Alexandria looked conflicted for most of it. Sad and angry alternatively. When I hugged her, she initially was surprised, but then held on tight for a long time. I'm pretty sure my comments to her got through. She didn't cry, but I sensed she was close.

As I'd intended. Hopefully she'd come out the other side a better, more compassionate person.

Then I could apologize and we could go soaring into the sunset.

Hey, I'm not gonna just let my dreams be dreams, okay?

Legend bade both of us a hearty goodbye. Said he'd do the best he could. And, extremely politely, asked us not to reveal Cauldron's existence or actions. To leave it up to him.

I'd always liked him, so I said yes. Tentatively.

They promised to move their HQ in a week. We promised to tackle Scion and my mother. I made it very clear the Endbringers were done attacking places.

Which is why when we stepped out of the Doorway I made back to our house (I was cheating by using that power, according to my Dad) and saw who was waiting for us, or more specifically me, I wasn't exactly happy.

Emma was, though. "Auntie!" she cried out.

She let go of my arm and zipped across the living room far faster than anyone normal should have been able to. She tackle hugged the platinum haired, gray eyed, pale as snow and slender girl about my age with six white feathered wings standing there with a slightly apologetic and definitely sheepish smile on her previously only-ever-recorded-as-solemn face.

Oh yeah, and the two guys standing next to her. Emma hugged both of them, too.

One was a really tall guy, very dark skinned, with dark red, almost orange hair and orange irises.

No shirt.

And oh my gods, the beefcake.

The other guy was similar, if skinny instead of wide. He had an olive skin tone, swim trunks, a sea green theme, and no shirt. Less beefcake, more a swimmer, but still quite muscled.

He was even holding a stereotypical trident.

"Hi sis," the girl greeted me.

Gods damn it.

My Dad losing his control once again and falling to the floor laughing his ass off just hammered home how much the universe hated me.

 

[TCGM]

Er, we experiment with and upon animals all the time, you know? If someone started talking to their labmice and taking their suggestions seriously, everyone would look at them funny and eventually take them away.

Humans are just so far behind and so puny it's not even worth it, in their mind. Just testing stuff and using them to generate semi-randomised starting positions to generate new data is more than enough. Heck, doesn't Abaddon just burn through his 'lab mice' by barely putting in any safety features? Apparently it's working out pretty well.

Plus, there is the whole 'Division' thing. The 'type' that went into the vial that created Echidna. Copypasta was its whole thing, complete with endless variations to generate more data. Some Tinkers make use of stolen alien technologies, right?

Then again, entities are pretty retarded, at least from what little we've seen, so who knows.

Click to shrink...

Yes, we experiment on animals. And despite the difference between us and the Entities, that doesn't really change one simple fact;

We're sentient. Animals are not.

It's a benchmark upon which the entire scenario changes. A Latchkey point, if you will. One cannot equate humans testing on animals to Entities testing on humans because of that important difference. It would be the same with a higher life form experimenting on Entities; the very nature of the experimented upon being is in a different league.

That said, get 7 billion rats to cooperate with a study on rats and you will probably get what you're looking for.

Using random evolutionary processes is not the most efficient outcome. Entities seem to be highly advanced Clarketech. They should be using the optimal, most efficient way of doing things. That's symbiosis. Canon Abaddon being an idiot and Scion being retarded in this area might just mean they're the retarded kids of their species. We have no idea if Eden would've done it the same way or if she would've gone for symbiosis once she realized Humanity's potential.

Echidna is an interesting dilemma for me. I'm chalking it up in my headcanon as her Shard just happening to by random chance, when corrupted by Cauldron, coming across the same ability my Entity!Taylor has, if not one that is perfect.

Tinkers are easy, they're just accessing a database fragment. I would argue that Tinker powers from Shards are using their abilities the least, making them technically the weakest expression of a Shard in Worm.

Thusly; my conclusion that Entities are retarded. Though Eden may not have been. We'll probably never know from Canon's side of the fence.

Oh goddamn it! I was hoping for more chapters! FOLLOWED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
DATA FOR THE... hmm? Actually what would Taylor's Entity designation be anyway?

Click to shrink...

Sheol, since all the others we know are named after mystical locations with biblical connections.

Abaddon was 'also' the name of an angel who was connected to the abyss. Abaddon supposedly had an army of locusts at his command.

Coincidence?

Click to shrink...

I HAVE SO MANY QUESTIONS!?!?! WHAT HAS SPACE-WHALE DIMENSIONAL-FUCKERY DONE!?!?!

Click to shrink...

Her name is not going to be based off Abrahamic mythology. She's Taylor. Really, that's it, unless she ends up wanting a different one in character. But the Abaddon connection is rather curious. I wonder if Wildbow did that on purpose or it was a happy coincidence?

I can't wait for New Emma to meet Evil Emma, and to find out if Annette can be resurrected by using Eden's remains.

Here's a question: could Taylor use Eidolon's shard to access and copy all the other shards he uses?

Click to shrink...

Friendbringer!Emma meeting Enemy!Emma will happen. Taylor's not really going to be successful in keeping her away. She'll try though.

Eden being revived: spoilers, sweetie.

Hmmm... I would say... maybe. I'll have to see. I know she won't be able to use the Shard she copied from Eidolon, it wouldn't have the right signature for the other Shards to answer to. Eidolon's own Shard? We'll see.

"Congratulation Emma, you're the next Endbringer."

Click to shrink...

Yup. That's a hell of a conversation starter.

Taylor is currently doing a good job of getting a copy of all of Eden's shards, which isn't a bad start. However, she'll need to spend some time going through and experimenting with all of them to see how to actually use them. Right now, she's effectively grabbing things and has no idea what those things actually do.

Click to shrink...

I wanna be, the very best
 
Like no Shard ever was
 
To copy them all is my real test
 
TO FIGURE THEM OUT IS MY CAUSE!

Problem is that, doing so would take a 'long' time.

Remember, the shards not only have abilities, but most, if not all, are working under major limits. Taylor doesn't have those limits, and can express each shard in multiple ways, including as a Tinker. That means she's got something like 50+ Tinker themes, plus all the potential ways each shard could express itself. So, by itself, each Shard would probably take at least a week or two, and then you have to take synergy between Shards into account, figuring out what they can do when working together.

So, when she starts experimenting, it'll take a few years, if not decades.

What I would like to see is her multitasking more. I mean, she's got the hardware of QA, which is the master of multitasking (pun not intended) so should be able to do it just as well.

Click to shrink...

Long time is an understatement with the level of munchkinry Taylor prefers and how I've interpreted Shards function. The operation time of her figuring them out goes up at an absolutely ridiculous, exponential rate each Shard she adds to the 'figuring out' task. It's why she was so relieved to have Eidolon's Shard; it does that for her, more or less.

Oh my sweet flipping bajeebus! This. Is. AMAZING!

Everything about this is just so fun! Sure it is crack as all fuck, but honestly I need that with all the depressing shit that happens to Taylor in the Multiverse that is Fanfic. The girl deserves some good, fun ol' powerwank, and what is more wanky then making her a dirty power stealing Entity. With her memetic escalation tendency it will be a fun ride.

And I love it the Danny/Abbadon thing, because that is new and simply brilliant. And Emma the Friendbringer is going to be all sorts of interesting, particularly as I am sure she is going to want to slap some sense into her original self. And that, you know, looking like an Emma means Taylor may have some residual anger issues to work through.

But mostly I just despererly want more of this amazingness!

Click to shrink...

Yeah, Taylor deserves some good fluffy Power Overwhelming. Nothing with negative twists, no bad, horrible things that happen to her. Taylor Varga is one of the only ones I can think of where she's got such a thing. Most of the other Entity!Taylor fics tend to keep going with Canon's grimdark. A few authors somehow believed Canon wasn't dark enough and decided to make it worse.

I don't really like grimdark and I believe there's room in the Worm fanon for more universes where Canon is completely derailed and everyone ends up trolled, confused, and happy.

Except Kaiser. Kaiser can go be unhappy for all I care. Damned Nazis.

I know I'm not the first one to have Danny be Abaddon, but I'm probably the first to make him an extremely human Abaddon who's fully aware of his own state.

I'm pretty sure I addressed a lot of those Emma points in Chapter 3, purely by coincidence, but yes. She's a spur of the moment idea at the end of Chapter 2 that I see going really far and being insanely fun.

Here's more!

 

[Mana_Knight_Jorin]

I am very amused by this and want more.

 

[Mana_Knight_Jorin]

Her name is not going to be based off Abrahamic mythology. She's Taylor. Really, that's it, unless she ends up wanting a different one in character. But the Abaddon connection is rather curious. I wonder if Wildbow did that on purpose or it was a happy coincidence?

Click to shrink...

Actually Wildbow never named the Third Enitity. Abaddon is fanon. Fanon that took off like a rocket.

 

[TCGM]

Actually Wildbow never named the Third Enitity. Abaddon is fanon. Fanon that took off like a rocket.

Click to shrink...

Huh. Really? I could've sworn Wildbow used the name...

Does internet search

Hah! He did! In a reddit post, yes, but he did! http://worm.wikia.com/wiki/Abaddon#cite_note-7