Wait a Minute... (Guy in Worm with Trouble in Terrorist Town powers)

Phili · Sunday at 5:35 PM

Chapter 14: Earth Bet's Very First _______ ______!

January 3, 2010. Brockton Bay, Pelham House, Living Room.

Sarah stared at the dead Mr. Blobby that had just commit suicide in her living room and leaving its own dead body to fall onto a microwave, leaving the gun and half-eaten burrito to land on the carpet.

She walked upstairs, and opened Crystal's door without knocking.

"Mom! What if I had been naked?" Crystal shouted.

"It would have been nothing I hadn't seen before. Dave's here, he's in the living room. You can come down and deal with him while I make lunch in the kitchen, sound good?" Sarah asked sweetly.

"Uh, sure?" Crystal naively agreed.

"Perfect." Sarah smiled, before going back downstairs and into the kitchen, where she started to make burritos. She was inspired, okay?

"Oh, for fucks sake." Crystal said upon seeing the dead body of Mr. Blobby, microwave, strange device filled with green fluid, gun, and half-eaten burrito all on the floor of her living room.

"Language!" Her mom shouted from the kitchen.

"English!" Crystal shouted back.

"Don't steal that from your cousin Crystal! Amy doesn't get enough socialization practice as it is without you stealing one of her catchphrases! By the way, thanks for agreeing to deal with Dave. That includes cleaning up after him, just to be clear."

After Crystal had put the burrito in the trash and mixed salt into cold water and begun cleaning up the bloody carpet with the mixture, Dave respawned, then wandered into the kitchen and asked the still-cooking Sarah "Did I win at charades?" He still looked like Mr. Blobby.

She gave him a dry look. "No. I did not understand your intended message. Thus, you did not succeed at silently communicating information and therefore did not win charades."

He nodded. "Do you have any sunglasses? The lasers you're using to cook those burritos are really bright."

She pointed at the counter, "You can borrow Bella's pair until we get you your own. I'm sure she won't mind. Me, my children, and my sister are all highly resistant to being blinded by light, so any frequent guests—and my husband of course—get their own dedicated pair for when they are in the kitchen while I'm cooking. Speaking of guests, I've invited Vicky and Amy to join us. I invited my sister as well but she is busy, and her husband Mark is… busy as well." She paused before finishing her final sentence.

Dave digested that information as he put on the sunglasses, which were rather hard to get on as Mr. Blobby. Glory Girl and her sister, the new hero Panacea who had been active as a healer for a month or so were coming to have lunch. For some reason, he shivered. Then he shivered again, harder.

Sarah noticed and offered, "Do you want me to turn up the heat? I'm a little surprised your powers didn't give you temperature-resistance to go with your other abilities. You mentioned it changed your sleep-cycle, and it has certainly given you some brute powers, so a weak temperature-comfort power seems fairly on theme for such a wide-ranging power in my experience with grab-bags. Maybe you just haven't gotten it yet?"

"No, I have." Dave answered, somewhat surprised Sarah had managed to predict one of his powers, but he supposed that was a benefit of experience. "No need to turn up the heat, I do have that minor temperature-comfort thing you mentioned, it widens my comfortable temperature range by about 10 degrees Fahrenheit in both directions, just enough to increase my performance as a terrorist and not have a bomb slip out of my hands because of sweaty palms or something. I've just been shivering occasionally since I got my powers, but it seems unrelated to temperature."

"Anyways," Dave continued on ignoring Sarah's mutterings that his temperature resistance was 'weaker than expected,' "Do you know when your nieces are likely to arrive? I would like to greet them in style." He said, before transforming into Pikachu and striking a pose.

"It should be any minute now. You can wait for them in the backyard with Crystal if she seems like she's done cleaning up the blood."

"Okee dokee artichokee!" ~~Dave~~ Pikachu saluted, before scampering into the living room to see if Crystal was ready to greet her cousins.

After a little brainstorming, ~~Dave~~ Pikachu and Crystal had come up with a plan of action…

After Vicky touched down in the Pelham backyard while holding her sister in a princess carry, Crrystal proudly strode out, Pikachu on her shoulder.

Amy got down on her own from Vicky's arms while Vicky stared.

"So, you thought you could challenge me to a Pokemon battle?" Crystal asked haughtily in a deepened voice, before turning her dad's baseball hat around on her head and shouting "Fine then, let's battle! Go Pikachu!"

"Kachu!" Pikachu let out an adorable warcry as he jumped down from Crystal's shoulder and ran out to the more open part of the yard.

Vicky's eyes changed and became more competitive. "Fine, you shall face the strongest member of my team, GO PANPAN!" She shouted dramatically and pointed to the space across from Pikachu, indicating where she wanted Amy to start the battle at.

"I'm not doing this." Amy said dryly after a withering look at her sister failed. She received puppy dog eyes from Crystal, Vicky and Pikachu simultaneously. She folded instantly.

"Fine, but why am I the Pokemon?" She grudgingly agreed before walking to where Vicky had indicated.

"You were too slow sis! I called dibs on being your trainer. And everyone knows Chansey is badass anyways, I believe in you!"

Amy blushed, either at being insinuated as badass or at the thought of being trained by her sister… or at being told someone believed in her… or the humiliation of taking part in what seemed like roleplaying magical cockfighting of friendship… or the rather cold weather.

As she stood across from Pikachu, Amy still wasn't totally sure what was going to happen next, when Crystal shouted, "Go Pikachu, use Minimize, then Tackle!"

The Pikachu shrunk somehow, but its ears and tails stayed the same size and were flopping madly as it moved around. It ran surprisingly quickly, but not that quickly at Amy, before it jumped, then jumped again midair to reach her face. She reflexively grabbed it before it could headbutt her face, and she held it right in front of her face, and noticed her power didn't consider it biological, but also did at the same time.

"What are you?" She asked the tiny, shrunken Pikachu.

It wiggled its nose at her, looked deep into her eyes, then licked her nose. "Pikachu!"

Amy melted immediately. "Awww!"

Vicky pouted immensely, until Amy couldn't resist the puppy dog eyes anymore and reluctantly handed the Pikachu over for Vicky to play with.

Crystal gasped. "Oh no! Pikachu is being stolen by Team Rocket! Quick, Pikachu, use Pikapistol!"

"Pika Pika!" Pikachu brought out a Glock pistol and shot Vicky once with it.

While Vicky was surprised and her strength disabled form her forcefield being broken, Pikachu jumped down and scampered over to Crystal where Pikachu got picked up, given headpats, and placed back on her shoulder.

"Good job Pikachu! You escaped from Team Rocket all on your own!" Crystal praised.

"I told you; you can't give me headpats until I'm a Good Boy." Pikachu?? said to Crystal… in a normal man's voice?

"WHAT THE FUCK?" Vicky screamed.

Amy looked disappointed as well.

Crystal meanwhile was nonplussed, "What, did you think I found a stash of Professor Haywire's technology and opened a portal to the world of Pokemon and grabbed a Pikachu? Then taught it how to use guns?"

Vicky fake-sobbed dramatically "You gave me hope of completing my dream of becoming the very greatest Pokemon master, like no one ever was! Then you cruelly took it away. WHY CRYSTAL WHY?!" She floated over to Crystal and shook her so hard 'Pikachu' fell off.

'Pikachu' unminified himself and wandered over to Amy who was just looking tired at her sister's antics.

"So, I figured it was something like this, and she probably did too before she got caught up in the moment. Are you a Case 53 or something? If so, I'm afraid I can't help you."

"Nah, I'm good. Name's Dave, nice to meet you." The Pikachu(?) apparently named Dave said.

"I'm Amy, or Panacea, I guess. It's a new thing, I only became a cape at the end of November, so I'm still getting used to everything. I started helping out at the hospital a couple weeks ago with my healing power."

Dave returned to his original form, much to Amy's disappointment. "I'm Dave, just your friendly local terrorist!" He reached out his hand. She shook it with a slightly bemused look on her face.

"You know, your biology was… weird when you were a Pikachu, but like this it's almost normal, just with some of that same weirdness around the edges of your body instead of throughout the whole thing. It's actually quite interesting, do you mind if I examine you a little with my power at some point?"

"Oh baby, you can examine me whenever and wherever you want."

"Excuse me?" Vicky flew over from where she had been talking with Crystal. Then she looked Dave up and down.

"I refuse, you're too old for my sis. It's kinda creepy actually, since she's underage, and you're an adult."

While Crystal tried to explain to Vicky that that was just how Dave was, and he probably didn't have any flirtatious intentions, Dave gasped dramatically. "How dare you besmirch my honor? I challenge you… to a DUEL!"

"Fine, when I win, you won't flirt with Amy." Vicky agreed instantly.

"Fine, if I win, you will give me some of your used bathwater!"

"Um… what? I knew it! You are a pervert!" Vicky said with vindication, while Crystal facepalmed and Amy just looked amused.

Dave walked over to where he had started the Pokemon battle as Pikachu, while Vicky flew over to where Amy had started the 'battle'.

Dave pulled out a weird gun from his inventory. It was completely covered with nothing but weird bright purple squares checkered with pitch black squares. It looked… dumb as hell.

"This, is a Free Kill Gun, also known as a Railgun Sniper Rifle." Dave bragged. "Whoever uses it to kill someone is ethically free of guilt. In exchange, anyone else is free to kill whoever is holding it and be ethically free of blame!" Dave… explained? The gun he had pulled out.

"Now witness its power!" Dave shouted dramatically, before pressing a button on it. The gun made a high-pitched noise, that quickly got louder and higher pitched as time went on. After about five seconds, the gun exploded and Dave died instantly.

Vicky and Amy screamed.

Author's Note: At least Dave has made a good first impression this time… right? The blanks in the chapter title were Pokemon Battle by the way, I even used the correct number of underscores for each word.

SpaceWhale · Sunday at 5:57 PM

What a classic use of the Free Kill gun. if i remember correctly it was rythian who would unalive himself with the free kill gun often

Phili · Monday at 4:51 PM

Chapter 15: The Most Overpowered Burritos You've Ever Seen

January 3, 2010. Brockton Bay, Pelham House,

Amy immediately started to rush over to Dave's body before Crystal grabbed her partway there.

"Hey, hey, it's okay. One of Dave's powers is that he comes back to life after he dies, like Alabaster, but not a Nazi. It takes a while though, usually it takes exactly ten minutes unless he has a specific part of his ability toggled on. And… It looks like it's going to take ten minutes this time though, so he must have forgotten to turn that part on." Crystal comforted her cousin.

Vicky meanwhile, stopped panicking after hearing Crystal's explanations, and got figurative stars in her eyes upon hearing about a new cape power. "Really? That's so cool! So, he has a bunch of things he can toggle? Does he have a maximum number of things he can have on at once? Is there a cooldown to turning anything on or off? Are there separate cooldowns for each ability being turned on or off? Is being a Pikachu one of the toggles?" Her mouth ran a mile a minute, asking about the cool new parahuman powers, just as Crystal suspected it would.

"He actually goes into what he calls 'spectator mode' when he dies, so he can see and hear everything we are saying and doing, and he can fly around invisibly and 'no-clip' through solid things while he is dead." Crystal pre-empted her cousin before Vicky could say anything embarrassing.

While Crystal began filling in Vicky on what she knew of Dave's powers, Amy calmed down some more before slowly going over to Dave's body. She was about to reach down to examine it with her power and see if he was actually still alive when she noticed something out of the corner of her eye.

"Crystal… is that plant pot moving?" Amy asked.

"Um… so it is. Huh. I'm not sure how, but I'm pretty sure this is Dave's fault." Crystal said as the plant pot finished slowly moving over to her before nudging her leg repeatedly. The plant pot managed to look offended.

"Just ignore him. I didn't know about this particular power but I'm nearly certain this is Dave somehow making the plant pot hump my leg." Crystal said with an impressively straight face, to which Vicky burst out laughing and Amy let out a small giggle at hearing her cousin's interpretation of what was happening.

While Vicky and Crystal continued their conversation about Dave's powers, with Amy keeping an ear out because it was actually quite interesting, Amy leaned down and touched Dave's body to look at it with her power.

It was weird. It wasn't a dead organism, but it certainly wasn't an alive organism either. Her power couldn't manipulate it at all, but she could feel it was different from both his normal, living form and his Pikachu form. It was like his body changed to be entirely made up of whatever his not-biology components were that were at the edges of his body's normal form, and that made up most of his body as a Pikachu. Her power kept poking at Dave's body like it was confused, but also confused about why it was confused.

Out of curiosity she touched the plant in the pot that was still nudging her cousin affectionately(?) and examined it with her power. It was… totally normal. Then one of the fronds of the plant slowly furled around her finger, then pulled on it.

Her face went flat. Totally normal my ass. Stupid power.

A couple minutes later, Eric came outside, saw the dead body in the yard, ignored it, and said "Lunch is ready ladies. Mom made burritos. I was going to ask about the microwave in the middle of the living room floor, but I think I figured out how it got there now."

Dave conveniently respawned at that moment. "Yay, burritos!" He cheered.

As they all went inside, Vicky and Amy saw the pile of towels, some of which were slightly bloody, surrounding a microwave and a weird handheld device with a red cross symbol on the side with green liquid in it.

While Amy was just done with things and didn't bother asking about them, Vicky was more curious. "What are those? Are you guys getting a new microwave? Why is there blood on those towels?"

Crystal answered the last question. "Well, there is blood on the towels because someone decided to kill himself in the living room for some reason, and I had to clean up the blood. I don't know about the microwave or the green thing, but I assume Dave is also to blame based on the proximity to where his body was when I came downstairs."

Before Dave could explain that he had become a Doctor, Sarah called them to eat. "Come on kids, lunch is ready, we can talk about powers after we've eaten."

After everyone had eaten Sarah's homemade laser-burritos, the conversation returned to Dave's powers now that Sarah wasn't interrupting them every time they tried to bring the topic up.

"My new role today made me a Doctor! Let me know if you find my rightful screwdriver or blue box, they are my birthright as a proud inheritor of this role." Dave said, before continuing his explanation on what new things he could do.

"So, this bad boy here," Dave slapped the microwave, "is a Healing Station. You can open it up and grab a Hot Pocket or a Burrito from inside, and eating those will heal you up, or you can just press a hand on it and focus on wanting to be healed. But only one person can be healed at a time, and it has a limited amount of charge, only enough to heal about two people from the verge of death to full health, and each Hot Pocket or Burrito will also use up charge. It automatically recharges over time though, just not as fast as it uses up charge when it is healing someone, which will take about a minute to bring someone to full health if they start on the verge of death. Every time you open the door though, a new Hot Pocket and a new Burrito will appear as long as there is charge, so it does mean I just made infinite food. You guys can keep this one. You're welcome. It's not indestructible, and if it takes enough damage, it will just cease to exist, so don't shoot it too many times with a gun or smack it too many times with a crowbar."

Dave continued after seeing their gobsmacked expressions. "Meanwhile this bad boy," he picked up the Parasite Cure, "is the Parasite Cure. It's hard to deduce what it does from the name, but it actually cures parasites! Like, all of them. If I had the Parasite role unlocked, and I was infesting someone and was about to burst out of their chest like that Alien movie, using this on the person I was infesting would cure them of me. It will also work on any other parasites, including but not limited to brain worms, tape worms, ear worms, ring worms, leeches, and ticks. You just hold it and focus on curing yourself for five seconds, or you hold it and focus on the person you want to heal—while being close enough to them, like within a couple feet or so—and then whoever it is used on will be cured of any and all parasites!"

"Like this!" He said, before starting to use it on himself. "Oh yeah, and if they don't have any parasites they die when you—" he cut off as the Parasite Cure finished. He died instantly.

"Well," Sarah said, ignoring her still gobsmacked nieces. "At least now we can make sure Amy cuts down her hospital hours."

"He just died, AGAIN." Amy nearly screamed at her aunt.

"Yes, he does that." Eric said, already having the benefit of experience with Dave over his cousins.

"That… what?" Vicky was still processing.

Amy meanwhile, after calming down a little, opened the Health Station, and took out a Hot Pocket, and examined it with her power. As she had suspected, it was the same not-biology that Dave himself was made of when he was dead… or at least that his body was made of since presumably his consciousness was what counted as 'him' and that was floating around elsewhere when he was dead.

"Oh, right," Crystal gently smacked her hand with her fist, "Mom, remind me to ask him about the plant pot when he comes back, I don't think he could do that before."

After she said that, the Healing Station started slowly moving a couple of centimeters at a time towards Crystal.

"I assume this is related to what you were talking about?" Sarah asked her daughter while indicating the slowly moving healing station, while Vicky leaned in to inspect the buttons on the healing station and holding it still with her super strength.

"I think this thing has options guys. Like, I think the buttons let us choose how hot we want the burrito or hot pocket, and what ingredients we want in them." Vicky said after examining the buttons for a moment.

She messed around with the buttons, before taking out a Burrito under Sarah's bemused gaze, and took a bite from it. Amy yelped and scolded her sister before grabbing her hand, "Idiot, wait until I'm able to start examining you first. Even if Dave was right about everything, we don't know what he or his power considers 'healing', and I need a baseline of you to make sure I catch everything it does."

"Aww, I knew you would save me if anything went wrong Ames. Anyways, Aunt Sarah, these burritos are pretty good, I think you might be in danger of being replaced." Vicky joked.

"Huh," Amy said after a moment.

"Well?" Vicky asked, totally confident in her sister's ability to protect her if there were adverse effects.

"It's hard to say what it is doing about 'damage' since you aren't exactly grievously wounded, but it is improving your health a little. It's removing cholesterol buildup in your arteries from all the junk food you eat that I haven't gotten rid of recently, and it's removing the lifetime of microplastics from your body."

Vicky frowned, "If I have microplastics in my body, why haven't you gotten rid of them sis?"

"Because they are in your brain," Amy said dryly, before letting go of Vicky's hand. "That was reckless Vicky. While Dave seems like he wouldn't intentionally harm us, and obviously Aunt Sarah and our cousins are vouching for him, you shouldn't recklessly try Parahuman effects on yourself, especially while I'm not already touching you and you've just seen another example of that same Parahuman's power instantly kill someone when used on them."

Vicky gave her sister puppy dog eyes. "But… but… I trusted you would save me if anything went wrong! And these burritos are so good and I was still hungry!"

Amy caved immediately. "Fine, as long as you don't do it again," she muttered.

After it was established just how wrapped around Vicky's finger Amy was, Eric took out a Hotpocket from the Health Station and offered "Mom, Crys, you two want to split this one with me? If we split it into thirds and eat our pieces one at a time we can let Amy examine its healing effects three times while also getting rid of any of those microplastic things she mentioned. That sound good Ames?" Eric directed the last part to Amy who nodded.

"Yeah, it's better to get as many samples as possible, especially when it comes to healing, though we will also need to get a non-parahuman volunteer to try the food— and the machine itself—to make sure it isn't limited to only healing parahumans or something."

Crystal immediately sold out her friend, "Bella will do it. She already knows Dave and is familiar with his powers. She also has never had a checkup from the legendary Panacea herself," Crystal smiled at Amy, who blushed a little at being called legendary after only having her powers for a little over a month, "so I'd be happy to have the assurance that would come from her having something that can remove health problems like this. Also, she might snack on them if they are healthy enough, she doesn't have enough snack options in her apartment."

"While I can't look at the burritos and Hotpockets themselves," Amy started before grabbing Vicky's hand again, "I can see them starting to break down in Vicky's system, and if I accelerate it a little," she looked at Vicky, who quickly gave permission to go ahead, "I can see… they seem to be breaking down into a wide mix of nutrients… in fact they seem to be breaking up into exactly whatever Vicky needs most of, while none of it is breaking up into the things she already has enough of."

She paused for a moment to let the accelerated operations of Vicky's stomach finish. "Huh, the last bit of the burrito just didn't turn into any calories, but the first part of the burrito did. I'm starting to think that it may just turn into whatever combination of nutrients and calories would be healthiest for whoever is consuming it, while just dissipating into nothingness if they don't need anything at all at that moment. It doesn't look like it's related to what it does for healing though, that happened as Vicky was eating it instead of while she was digesting it."

Crystal was impressed. "Wow, that's actually a lot more impressive than I was expecting. Dad will love these, I'm gonna set two of each aside for him for when he gets back. He needs to eat a lot, so something that tastes at least alright but also has all the nutrients and calories he needs will be great. We might even end up turning these into lunch boxes or something to bring with us when we are doing patrols or training and need a lot of calories. They will also probably make staying in shape a lot easier if they won't continue adding calories to our body after we have had enough already, while also providing enough nutrients like protein that we need to build muscle." She analyzed, before doing as she said and grabbing the Hot Pocket and Burrito from the Health Station, then closing the door to it and opening it again and grabbing the new Hot Pocket and Burrito, and going to the kitchen to set them in containers for her dad.

"I'm just glad that we'll have something to help Amy. Both to lighten her load at the hospital and in case she ever gets hurt. You spend too much time at the hospital Ames, and if Dave can get enough of these, then you won't have any excuse to spend so much time there!" Vicky said before pouting at Amy.

"I spend so much time there because people need healing Vicky. With a power able to healing, it is my responsibility to heal them, and if they aren't healed, that makes it my fault if they die or are permanently injured when I could have helped them."

"Bullshit," Sarah said, despite Eric's immediate "Language!" that spoke of being on the receiving end of a scolding for swearing too many times.

"Your only moral responsibility Amy, is to enjoy your childhood while you still can. You have an amazing power and can do a lot of good, yes, but it is not your duty to fix everything wrong with everyone. You should talk to Crystal about her Philosophy classes she is taking, and look into seeing if there are any you could take at Arcadia. You should never be thinking that way Amy, it risks too many things."

"Like what?" Amy asked, having never received anything but acceptance from her adopted mother at the idea of spending all her time at the hospital.

"Well for one thing, an overinflated ego. Power over people's life and death can cause god-complexes in regular doctors, let alone one of the world's most powerful healers. It's not a major risk with you of course, but you could end up that way after a few years if the cards fell the wrong way. Burnout is a near guarantee, along with overwhelming guilt for everyone you fail to save, and there will be people you fail to save, whether because you aren't quick enough at healing them, they are too stubborn to accept help, they don't get to you quickly enough, they are too damaged for you to help by the time they get to you, or they have something wrong with their brains. That's not mentioning that there is only so much time in the day, and you can't be everywhere at once, and simple logistics means you can't help two people on opposite sides of the cities if both are near death, and trying to save both could mean failing to save either." Sarah went into lecture mode, as Amy looked slightly guilty, but also thoughtful, while Vicky was just happy that someone else was telling Amy all this and seemed to be getting it into her skull successfully.

"Then there is the risk of people becoming dependent on you. If people think they can just be treated by Panacea as long as they go to the hospital, a lot of idiots will take risks and injure themselves when they otherwise wouldn't and that will get some of them killed. Some of those idiots will just be teenagers doing stupid stunts to impress their friends because they don't know any better and their brains haven't developed the right parts to properly understand how to measure risks yet."

Vicky looked guilty now, probably because she was a risk-taking teenager. Sarah continued her lecture, having built up even more steam.

"And then there are the villains. If the villains see that injuring a hero just results in them coming back a couple days later because you healed them, they will be more likely to seriously injure a hero and risk accidentally killing them, or just escalating and killing a hero on purpose because they don't want them to be back in the field as quickly as you can get them back in. Either way, healing heroes too much and too indiscriminately can result in villains escalating and heroes dying."

Sarah still had more to say. "Then there are doctors and pharmaceutical companies. They are busy people yes, but if you somehow managed to heal everyone the doctors would become dependent on you because they are used to have you bail them out if they make mistakes, in addition to you just being able to heal people much more quickly. They also might stop ordering drugs that they need to help people if those drugs start going bad because you heal people that would otherwise need them before they actually use the drugs. Then there are insurance rates. They have to decide insurance rates and you affect those in multiple ways…" Sarah continued on, starting to make Amy dizzy from how much Sarah had to say about her hospital time.

(Big) Author's Note: Here we go, another serious-ish conversation. The Pelham house really seems to attract those doesn't it? Either way, we find out Amy has surprisingly few mental problems so far. I use the Worm Wiki Timeline page for a lot in this story, and it says that Vicky claims that Amy triggered some time in 2010, but that Amy claims she triggered in late 2009. I'm inclined to believe Amy with regards to when Amy triggered.

Anyways, that means she has only been working at the hospital for a little while, she only recently made her decision to not work on brains, and she only recently made the decision to not do anything with her power beyond healing. In other words, she isn't really burning out yet, she hasn't lost touch with reality from getting too much gratitude from people, she isn't overwhelmed by internal guilt for not saving everybody, she hasn't started smoking yet, and her power isn't furious at her for not using it for anything aside from healing. She's still a closeted lesbian that has an incest fetish and isn't aware that 'step-something' is one of the most common porn tropes of all time and has few friends in high school… and lives in Brockton Bay, so obviously she isn't exactly a picture of mental health, but it's nowhere near as bad yet as people (readers, not people on Earth Bet) normally think of her being.

It turns out, drawing the Pelhams' attention to Amy's problems before they start snowballing may be just what the doctor ordered… heh, I'm so clever… get it? Because Panacea and healing, and Dave just got the Doctor role?... Okay, I'm sorry, I'll go now.

Not really going, I've still got more to say, I'll probably put this author's note in a spoiler box actually. So, Dave had a lot of extra space in his soul because he hasn't gotten that many roles yet and only the Doctor has had shop items so far, so his power went a little ham on adding features like ingredient options for the hot pockets and burritos. (Get it, went ham on adding ingredients?... I'm sorry)

This doesn't mean he can solve world hunger. While he can generate a new source of infinite food every ten minutes, that won't actually help with world hunger that much. (I want to say Accord canonically had the goal of solving world hunger as well actually. If someone can verify that for me, that would be nice, and I'll start planning to take that into account down the road). In real life, we actually have enough food to solve world hunger, and have had enough for a while. The problem is that it is expensive to get the food to where the people that need it are, and then those people aren't necessarily able to afford it, especially after the price increases to reflect how difficult it was to transport the food there. Ultimately, in real life, the problem with world hunger is purely cost and logistics. If we had unlimited Star Trek style transporters that didn't need energy, we could solve World Hunger in however long it took to get the paper work done… and we solved poverty, because otherwise we would also need to be willing to give food to people who can't afford to pay for it, and the Star Trek thing is more likely than that happening.

On Earth Bet however, someone like Accord could –given enough time— singlehandedly make a logistics network sufficient to solve world hunger… if it weren't for the Endbringers, who would attack both the network itself and food sources like farms. Unfortunately, without at least a few years to stockpile enough Health Stations, and some method to ensure they wouldn't get destroyed by bad actors after arriving wherever they needed to go, Dave just can't make enough food to actually make a dent in world hunger.

Also, Dave remembers he can possess props while in spectator mode!

There are a couple other things that happened that are worth mentioning, like the parasite cures, but I'll leave that for you to discuss and think about as you wish.

I'm sure absolutely nothing will go wrong with using parasite cures on Earth Bet. Why would anything go wrong with using a parasite cure on Earth Bet after all?

Blitz9876 · Monday at 5:46 PM

…. Does the parasite cure work on shards since they are technically parasites? If so, does that mean he can take away powers from parahuman? XD

SpaceWhale · Monday at 6:37 PM

Dave was exactly what the doctor ordered

Megatherium · Tuesday at 12:08 AM

Blitz9876 said:
…. Does the parasite cure work on shards since they are technically parasites? If so, does that mean he can take away powers from parahuman? XD

his alien friend sorta counts as a shard right? or am i misremembering? regardless, i wanna guess nooooo but Dave's whole thing is wacky enough that i could see the gun be a temp nullifier. and if it does work, it'd be funny if he accidentally used the gun on any of the triumvirate

Phili · Tuesday at 5:44 PM

Chapter 16: Operation Protect Pan-Pan is a Go!

January 3, 2010. Brockton Bay, Pelham House, the Dining Room.

Amy was mentally spinning while Crystal and Eric looked on with sympathy at receiving one of Sarah's lectures, this one in particular, they had both received before on how doing the right thing was actually wrong under certain circumstances. Vicky just looked happy that Amy would probably be spending less time at the hospital.

"I'm back!" Dave said as he respawned from where he had died.

"Welcome back," Eric said reflexively, before doing a small double take at the exact situation, before shrugging and deciding it was the right thing to say anyways.

"So," Dave said, turning to Amy, "I hear you have a neat power."

"Yes?" Amy said suspiciously, but still off-kilter from Sarah's lecture.

"Can you do more than healing with it? Like, could you turn someone else into a Pikachu? Then make them evolve? Then turn them back into a human? Or like—" Dave got interrupted.

"Ames can only do healing I'm afraid." Vicky said in a slightly guarded tone.

"Oh, that's a shame. While it doesn't seem like it would have a ton of synergy with my powers, that would have been a pretty strong Trump rating if you could do more. It's quite good as it is of course, but I'm sure everyone here aside from myself, along with your parents and uncle would enjoy a bit of extra protection from a bonus to their Brute ratings, along with things like enhanced reflexes and stamina to make sure they can avoid injuries and stay active in fights. Maybe you could try something like blood doping them? All-natural steroids by 'healing' them to give them extra blood, and therefore oxygen as an emergency performance boost during combat? I know there are all kinds of neat superpowers in the natural animal world, I think gorillas are like four times as strong as a human the same size and stuff, so I just wanted to know if you could do things like give Crystal the superpower of that one lizard, and let her shoot blood out of her eyes." Dave went in a different direction than Vicky and Amy expected, but about where Crystal, Sarah, and Eric thought he was going. Not the exact details, but wanting Crystal to be able to shoot blood out of her eyes seemed pretty on-brand for Dave.

"Oh. Uhh, maybe I could try the oxygen thing?" Amy said, desperately looking at Vicky for help.

"We can try it later, just us two." Vicky said.

Neither one noticed Sarah and Crystal looking at them suspiciously.

"So Crystal, why did you want me to bring this?" Vicky asked, holding up a water bottle with a piece of tape on it with the words 'DO NOT DRINK'.

Crystal was ecstatic, "You actually brought it? Pay up Eric, I win!"

"No you don't, I never agreed to that sucker's bet. It was obvious that Vicky was going to do it as soon as she heard it would do something interesting with powers." Eric said.

"Hey, I'm not that predictable," Vicky pouted.

"Yes you are Vicky, we love you, but you brought your used bathwater without asking questions as soon as you heard it might do something interesting with a parahuman power," Crystal said.

Crystal quickly explained the gist of Dave's Beggar role, and that he had already 'loosened up' another role with it that would let him unlock a bunch of neat things, including things he could give others like the Healing Station, and that Crystal suspected Vicky's bathwater would be enough to fully unlock it.

"So, since an open cape's panties were enough to almost unlock the role, I was thinking, someone like you Vicky, who is a 'gamer girl', and an open cape, and objectively highly attractive, would be even more significant, and the bathwater would be 'bigger' so to speak compared to panties, and thus would probably fully unlock his role." Crystal finished her explanation.

"You gave him your panties?" Amy questioned.

"No," Crystal did not elaborate.

Amy turned to stare at Sarah who just smiled with amusement and didn't clarify.

"Well, if Aunt Sarah did it… sure!" Vicky came to a decision remarkably quickly. Nobody corrected her assumption, Sarah out of mischief and Crystal and Eric out of mortification, Amy out of ignorance, and Dave out of not wanting to accidentally prevent himself from getting a Toy.

"Dave," Sarah interrupted before any reckless decisions could be made, "Be sure you want to do this now. If it does work, then that means the protectorate won't be able to analyze your power while you are gaining a new role. If you don't care then that's fine, but if you want to know more about what happens when you gain a role, you should consider waiting until they have you hooked up to things to analyze what is happening."

Dave nodded to Sarah solemnly.

"Toy please," Dave reached out his hand. Vicky handed the cheap plastic water bottle, which she just now realized was probably a source of the microplastics Amy had mentioned, over to Dave and waited to see if anything would happen.

"So… want another superpower?" Dave turned to Amy and asked.

"What… me? I don't go into combat. And did it work?" Amy questioned confusedly.

"I am now a Traitor! And even if you don't plan to go into combat, this bad boy also helps with noncombat! It's the ultimate soda!" He said, before pulling out a purple soda bottle from his inventory, implying it did in fact work. The soda bottle had the words "PhD Flopper" written on the side in large letters.

"You just do this…" he said before chugging the entire thing and letting out a loud burp.

"And Viola! I am now immune to explosions and fall damage. Also, if I would fall a far enough distance at a fast enough speed to actually harm me, I just explode instead! So now I can jump off a building onto an Innocent Terrorist and cause an explosion big enough to kill them instantly!"

"It's voila not viola, a viola is a musical instrument like a smaller violin" Crystal said at the same time as Amy said "You can't just kill people, and what do you mean 'innocent terrorist'?"

Eric had another question. "Can you turn off the making-an-explosion part though? That seems like, if she takes it, it's just asking for her to get tossed by a villain or something and accidentally kill someone when she lands."

"Nope! Can't turn off the explosions. Well, I'll be able to eventually, maybe I can extend that to other people? Maybe make a variation? But for now, no."

"I don't think I should take it then," Amy said reluctantly, unhappy about losing out on cool powers, but not really seeing the point in powers that only protect against explosions and falling when she shouldn't be seeing combat anyways, especially if they came with the downside of risking killing other people any time she fell hard enough.

"Actually, Dave, do you know how those interact with flight?" Sarah asked with interest.

"Yes actually, that was going to be my next offer… as soon as I got enough credits to buy more anyways. If you land on the ground normally, nothing happens, if you would hurt yourself when you land, you explode, but also aren't actually hurt by either the explosion or by the fall." Dave replied.

"Hmm, I think we flyers might take you up on that then. If we actually need to cause the explosion, Crystal, Eric, Vicky and I can all disable our forcefields at our feet and increase our flight speed while going down to land harder; and if we don't want to cause the explosion, we can just land gently or keep our forcefields up, or both." Sarah said thoughtfully, before turning to Vicky.

"Vicky, it's up to you if you want to use one of these, but you and Eric will both need to do some training before you're allowed to drink one of those."

"What, why?" Eric complained.

"Because you two are the youngest aside from Amy, who was mature enough to think through what she wanted and decided to refuse a flashy new power. This won't help any of us much, but it has a lot of synergy with Mark's powers and would let him use his explosions nearer to us, even right next to us, and would increase New Wave's effectiveness as a whole. While he probably won't want one of these himself since he is already immune to his own explosions, us taking them would make him a lot more effective. If you two want to take it, you would be training with me and Mark, and my sister if she decides to take it, so we can make sure you have the maturity required to actually use it properly, and not do anything stupid like damage property and hurt people by causing an unnecessary explosion when you land for dramatic effect."

"I meant why doesn't Crystal have to do it?" Eric asked.

"Because she is a fully grown adult now, she will be training with me to get a handle on it if she decides to use it, but I trust she is mature enough to not need extra training to ensure she won't do something stupid with a flashy new power. If she wasn't going to be busy with college, I would have said she would probably be helping train you and Vicky with it."

Dave nodded sagely throughout Sarah's explanation, before turning back to Amy.

"So, I was thinking, I'll get you other stuff eventually, but right now, you are my squishiest friendo aside from Bella, who will be getting her own toys from me later. If you don't want a Flopper, I'll find other toys for you to play with. In the meantime, take these!" He pulled out a bunch of goodies for the Panpan to play with.

"And just let me know if you ever need a refill on ammo or supplies, or if you lose or break any of these, and I'll give you a new one, I have an unlimited supply!" he said as he handed her a whole bunch of family friendly fun things. While he hadn't gotten any new credits yet after he bought the flopper, he would eventually equip as much of New Wave (and Bella) as he could with fun toys.

He gave her a Pocket Sniper Rifle, a Flare Gun that worked both as a regular flare gun and a device that set anyone hit by a 'bullet' from it on fire for a set amount of time (but the 'bullet' itself didn't harm them)—though it also perfectly destroyed any bodies it was used on and left no evidence behind—, a minifier, a parasite cure, a knife ("I'll teach you how to throw it," he told her), a pistol, a double barrel shotgun, and two of each kind of grenade he had available: Smoke, Discombobulator, and Incendiary.

"There we go, now if you don't like someone you can diagnose them with a bullet to the face from mysterious causes, it was too late by the time you got to them. And if some asshole tries to kidnap you to force you to heal them like one of those stupid movie cliché things, you can 'diagnose' them with the Parasite Cure –actually take two, just in case they do have parasites—so when they suddenly die of mysterious causes, nobody can be blamed for their unexpected allergic reaction to life!" Dave suggested brightly to Amy who now had her arms full of guns and grenades and had had to set the knife, minifier, and parasite cure down on the table.

"I don't know how to use any of these things," Amy said.

"Don't worry, we can fix that with a little time and unlimited ammo! I'll make you into a wonderful terrorist before you know it."

Amy turned to Vicky, "Help."

"No-can-do sis," Vicky said, "I always wanted you to have more ways of defending yourself, this works great as far as I'm concerned."

Sarah gave her input, "We'll need to make arrangements, and actually get you trained with how and when to use firearms, but I don't see a problem with you having some of those with you when you are acting as a hero. You obviously can't bring most of those to school—" "Why not?" wondered Dave – "but when healing in the hospital or working as a hero, or just walking down the street when you might get recognized, having a concealed weapon that you only use in an emergency could be a good thing. I trust you Amy, to be mature enough to only bring a weapon out if you actually need it, and a flare gun is a good way to quickly signal you need help in an emergency if you can't call one of us quickly enough for some reason. You know what happened to my sister and I, so I actually do approve of Dave's measures in case you get kidnapped, and if you need to use his parasite cure as he suggested, well…" she chuckled darkly in anger at the though of someone kidnapping her adopted niece "sometimes things happen, and I would argue Darwinism can count as natural causes. I believe that one," she pointed at the minifier, "is the thing Dave uses to shrink, and that could be a great tool for escaping in an emergency, or just being harder to find, so I'll see if I can get the school to let you bring it with you so you can always have it on you."

Amy was wide eyed at how protective her aunt was. "That's… a lot. Are you sure? I thought the idea was to make sure nobody attacked me in the first place?"

"It is," Sarah confirmed before continuing "but while we did put measures in place, and designed your costume and filled out the paperwork to have you protected under truce, it doesn't mean much if whoever attacks you is destroyed if you are hurt or killed in the process. That's a thought," Sarah paused mid-speech, she really seemed to like her speeches, didn't she?

"If you are willing, now that you will be spending less time at the hospital," she put a lot of emphasis on that, both the part about Amy being willing and the part about spending less time at the hospital "we can see about contacting permanently injured and disabled heroes, and even rogues, across the country, or even through the Guild to get some international heroes, or maybe even further abroad, and you could heal them, and they will owe you a favor. As long as we play our cards right and make it known how many formerly disabled heroes you have helped, we can make sure your reputation expands to include 'is protected and will be avenged by hundreds, or even thousands, of heroes across the entire globe.' At the same time of course, we –or rather, you— would also be bringing disabled heroes back into the scene, and doing good from the direct manner of having healed them and indirect good from all the people they will then help."

"Of course," Sarah continued, "No amount of reputation will help with certain kinds of people, either idiots, people not in their right mind, or the utterly insane and evil like the Nine or the Teeth, so I think we should still go with Dave's idea of arming you and concealing as many weapons on you as we can after teaching you how and when to use them."

She looked at Amy affectionately, "I know you don't come over as often as you used to Amy, but we do all love you and want you protected. You don't have to carry the firearms if you really don't want to, but I suggest you do, your hero robes are highly concealing anyways, and if nobody knows, then they won't anticipate them; and they would mostly be idiot insurance in the first place. Either way, I would like to strongly advise you to at least bring the shrinking thing with you everywhere you go, and the knife and flare gun when you aren't in school." Sarah finished.

Amy was gobsmacked for some reason. Honestly, she looked like she hadn't received open affection from an adult in months and had forgotten what it felt like or something.

Author's Note: And here we go. Another serious-ish conversation at the Pelham house. I've always felt that Worm's grimderpness was built on a pile of bad decisions and idiocy yes, but also on a pile of bad lack and unfortunate timing and coincidences, along with a heaping of poor communication. Seriously, how unlikely was it that Amy never realized a step-sibling fetish was one of the most common kinks of all time (according to porn statistics at least)? Not to mention, I feel like a lot of problems in Worm are caused by the same thing that causes a good 30 or more percent of problems in all of fiction: communication, or lack thereof.

Continuing that line of thought… All it takes to start chipping away at Amy's problems is a little luck making Sarah and Crystal notice something is stressing Amy out early on, and giving her the love and affection she craves but can't get from her step-mother, while also representing two sane(-ish, they are still parahumans) adults that are smart enough to suss out Amy's 'dark secrets' and pop her self-hatred balloon before it gets too big.

Meanwhile, Dave has decided that the Panpan must be protected so she can grow into a big strong terrorist, and has decided to teach her his ways, since she is, as far as he knows, the most vulnerable person he knows, as someone that is just as defenseless as Bella, but with less common sense and a much bigger target… not that he isn't going to also equip Bella.

There are some pretty neat things in the Traitor menu, and New Wave will be getting some upgrades… but only eventually, for now, he is out of credits and doesn't have many things available in his shop.

Next time, we find out the consequences to squeezing Dave's soul full of 5 roles when it is only supposed to fit 3! It's not a terrible consequence really, just a bit of an annoyance really. After that, we go to see the Protectorate, meet some other heroes, get some power testing done, and maybe corrupt a couple of wards along the way. The next day (in-universe), Dave is going to go on his first patrol! So those of you waiting for action, you only need to wait a little bit longer, I promise.

SpaceWhale · Tuesday at 6:28 PM

i dont know why but reading the author note just made me think of Dave getting the summoner gun(think that was the one that summoned a giant bug) and him doing something random with it

Anon3900 · Tuesday at 9:46 PM

Would a Golden Gun be able to one-shot an Endbringer?

Love the story by the way. Nostalgia crack trip.

Phili · 2026-08-05T17:33:39+0100

Chapter 17: Where Dave Offers to Let Miss Militia Stroke His Dingus

January 4, 2010. Brockton Bay, Dave's Apartment.

Dave woke up feeling the consequences of his actions. He had never actually felt pain before, but now he felt sore for the first time since he woke up all those (three) days ago.

It turned out, squeezing five roles into his soul in a three-day period, when he is supposed to only get one new role per day, had consequences.

After lunch at the Pelham's house yesterday, he had returned home and, after some light prodding from DAF (also known as Daf), gone into his bed. Daf had claimed that as a result of squeezing so many roles into his soul so quickly, his soul got overfilled and stretched a little, and Dave needed to go into low-power mode for a while until Daf fixed everything. Also, his soul was 'absolutely not ready for the P-A-P,' so that has now been manually removed from his shop by Daf.

As a result of needing Daf to fix his soul for longer, Dave had been asleep since about 1:00 PM the previous day, until exactly 7:00 AM today.

Hey Dave.

So, I've fixed everything and removed from the shop that shop item you bought that you weren't supposed to have access to, so I hope you used it wisely. You'll be able to buy more of it when you have enough room though don't worry. In the meantime, I had to disable most of the interesting roles for today to make sure you didn't overfill your soul again, so you had a much smaller pool of roles you could get today. Because you were sleeping and shitposting online most of yesterday, you didn't expand your soul very much compared to the previous couple days, so you didn't have a ton of room for me to add things.

Your new role today is the Romantic! It will work just as you expect. You will have one person randomly selected, and you will know for certain that they are good. Also, you will be in a one-way soulmate relationship with them, they are your soulmate, but you are not their soulmate. They will gain no special information about you, and if they die, so do you, but if you die, nothing happens to them.

You'll know when you see them. Good luck!

"Huh, I still can't read this."

Wuh? JFjfnesekjfbesjgesiugb! YOU FUCKING CAN'T? I JUST FUCKING TROUBLESHOOTED YOUR SOUL FOR 16 HOURS STRAIGHT, THE FUCK YOU MEAN YOU CAN'T?

"Oh, my bagel's done. Yum."

January 4, 2010. Brockton Bay, Protectorate Headquarters.

The forcefield roadway was kind of neat, but even being driven over it in Sarah's car wasn't really adequate compensation for missing out on Dave's requested method of transportation.

"I'm telling you," Dave reiterated, "we totally could have done a flying totem Pole, with each person carrying another person on their shoulders. It would have been Photon Mom, Glory Girl, Shielder, Laserdream, me, then Panpan, and it would have been glorious. Vicky, you like glory, right?" Dave had decided to use Solid Snake as his Hero skin, to use when doing hero things.

"Please don't call me Photon Mom," Sarah said dryly from where she was driving.

"And call me Glory Girl while everyone is in costume, it's a bad habit to get into. It's okay to make mistakes with calling us New Wave heroes by our names, but making that mistake with anyone else will cause you problems." Vicky said with an air of wisdom. She, Amy, Dave, and Eric were in the back seats of the car New Wave used for official operations. This probably didn't really count as one, but it was borderline, and the car had enough room for everyone, so it was what they used. Sarah and Crystal were there as official New Wave liaisons, and Amy was there to help with power testing, and Eric and Vicky were there because they wanted to watch.

"Speaking from experience?" Crystal asked teasingly from the front seat.

"No, of course not, I would never make such a silly mistake!" Vicky retorted with a bit of heat.

"Uhuh," Amy said doubtfully.

"Methinks the lady doth protest too much," Eric said.

"Totem Pole, Glory Girl, yes or no?"

"Why would you be carrying my sister?" she asked suspiciously. Apparently, she still wasn't over his comment that Panacea could examine him 'anytime, anywhere baby'.

"Well, we are the only ones without Forcefields that let us imitate super strength, and unless she is way buffer than she looks under those clothes, I don't think she is going to be able to carry me… or anyone else for that matter. Besides that, she needs to be carried by someone who can help her if she or they fall, and when I double jump, I break my momentum and can thus fall from any height and land safely while carrying her, even if everyone else that can fly somehow fails to catch us." Dave replied.

"You've put a lot of thought into this I see," Sarah observed.

"Of course! I always take Totem Poling seriously!"

"Please don't call it that," Crystal requested.

"Why?" Dave asked.

"It sounds… dirty when you call it that. I'm not sure why, but it does." Eric answered for her. Apparently, he had the same thought process as Crystal, since she didn't disagree with his reasoning on why Dave shouldn't call it that.

"Hmm, are you sure you aren't just dirty minded? I knew you were a prude, but I didn't think you were so repressed as to think something as pure and innocent as Totem Poling was lewd. You've even corrupted your brother! For shame Crystal, for shame." Dave said in despair.

Vicky and Amy snickered, while Sarah gave a small smirk that is every parent's right at seeing their children harmlessly embarrassed.

While Crystal was wise to the ways of Dave, Eric was doing his best to object.

Dave answered Erics objections, "so are you saying you aren't on a fifteen-year dry spell for sex? Fifteen years is a long time, and makes it perfectly understandable to become sexually repressed after that long, but if you aren't on a dry spell of over a decade, what's your excuse for being such a pervert?"

"Yeah," Crystal piled on, doing her noble duty as an older sister, "and when are you going to introduce us to your girlfriend you've apparently been having sex with? Are you embarrassed to introduce her to us or something? Are you humiliated by the fact that we are family?" She asked with crocodile tears in her eyes.

"Crystal!" Eric shouted.

"Ah, I see, it's okay if you have a boyfriend instead Eric. You know everyone in the family is an ally, and we can send you to college in New York with Legend to protect you from the Nazis after you graduate high school." Crystal continued on.

Dave and Crystal both noticed Amy oddly perk up at that last bit for some reason though.

Ah, I see, Dave thought. Clearly, she is one of those Fujoshi things!

After they were checked in, and Sarah had made sure that Dave remembered everything regarding what he planned to tell the Protectorate, they all filed in to the Protectorate Headquarters from the parking lot.

"Welcome," Miss Militia said, giving her patented Eye Smile ™. "You said you wanted to go by 'Solid Snake,' or 'Snake' for short during the testing but hadn't decided on a final cape name, right?"

"Doki Doki." Dave said.

"What?" Miss Militia asked with confusion.

Crystal slapped a hand over Dave's mouth and ignored him as he immediately began licking her hand, like a goat that just discovered salt-covered feet.

"Sorry about him Miss Militia, he is… weird. Like, really weird. Like, really, really weird. He doesn't mean anything negative by anything he does or says, but he tends to… not give the greatest first impression, as my mom will agree—will you quit licking my hand?" Crystal took her hand away from Dave's mouth, resigned that she couldn't cover his mouth forever, and he was determined to stick his foot into his mouth as soon as she stopped covering it with her hand.

"I'm sure it'll be fine if you let him speak, though I'm not quite sure what he said earlier…" Miss Militia started, before staring.

"Milady," Dave said, tipping the cowboy hat he was suddenly wearing, before getting down on one knee.

"It's always wonderful to meet a fellow Traitor Terrorist, especially one with such a great appreciation for holding a perfectly reasonable amount of firearms inside a hammerspace to deploy at the slightest provocation," Dave began.

"Upon seeing you, it feels like there is a soul bond between us, and I have suddenly become a Romantic, and I would surely perish if you were to die. May I offer you this token of affection to keep you safe?" Dave said, holding out a bomb Defuser to her.

After Miss Militia reflexively took the bomb defuser from his hand, he pulled out his secret weapon of romanticism. "And to show my sincerity, I will allow you to pet my dingus." He said, holding out his dingus.

dingus, no capital D, was a cat that normally took up the grenade slot, and apparently counted as a rare item, but did not count as a shop item. As soon as he realized he had a dingus yesterday, Dave had bought the Pack-A-Punch item from his shop (which then broke his soul a little) and used it. The Pack-A-Punch upgraded any item it was used on, and it worked on both normal guns and grenades and potions, and on shop items, but the Pack-A-Punch cost a credit, so it was best to use it wisely. After Dave realized he couldn't buy anymore Pack-A-Punches (or P-A-Ps, or PAPs as they are also known), he used it on the best thing he could. A Packapunched dingus would gradually change color throughout every color in the rainbow. Like a normal dingus, it also meowed when pet. That was all it did, because that was all it needed to do. His only PAP for the foreseeable future was truly spent on the best possible thing.

"Meow." dingus meowed, purring. The entirety of New Wave present simultaneously facepalmed.

Miss Militia stared.

Nailed it.

Author's Note: Here we go, a nice gentle car ride across a forcefield road that seems like it should be a mario kart level, and nothing else of note happens. Oh yes, and I suppose he calls Miss Militia a fellow terrorist. I'm sure it'll be fiiiiiiine.

Oh yes, and we find out the (admittedly minor) consequence of using the Beggar role as it is intended and gaining new roles from it. It probably would have been fine a week later, but only a few days in to having his power, it meant his soul had nearly double the roles it was supposed to, so it borked things a little. It did let him get a PAP earlier than he was supposed to, which proceeded to break things more, and made him need to enter Sleep Mode so Daf could install System Updates. After this, Daf will be disabling other methods of gaining roles for a while, mainly the Drunk, which would give him a new role every three minutes he had it turned on otherwise, so now the Drunk will only be able to give Drunken powers like how the Old Man got the Combat Thinker thing. Otherwise, Dave would actually permanently die from the Drunk role unlocking everything at once if Daf didn't notice what was happening quickly enough. Good thing the Beggar role revealed that early on huh?

Dave found out who his soul mate is… but just because she is his soul mate doesn't mean he is her soul mate.

Also, we meet dingus (no capital D). Does Dave have an unlimited supply of dinguses? Yes. Is the plural of dingus dinguses or dingi? I don't know. If anyone does know, hook me up with the correct answer.

SpaceWhale · 2026-08-06T00:40:22+0100

Dave continues to make the best first impression. Truly he is a inspiration to us all

Phili · 2026-08-06T17:48:41+0100

Chapter 18: Power Testing! Finally! Wait a Minute, Didn't We Already Use That Title?

January 4, 2010. Brockton Bay, Protectorate Headquarters.

Crystal Pelham

No way, is she… blushing? Crystal stared in disbelief as Miss Militia, Crystal's first childhood female role model aside from her mom and aunts, blushed at receiving a weird rainbow cat and a bomb defuser from her new idiot friend. It was hard to see because of Miss Militia's bandana covering the lower half of her face, including most of her cheeks, but it was there.

"And you use this button to deactivate the bomb, but not move it at all. This button will bring the bomb directly to the bomb defuser after defusing it, and this one will simply erase the bomb from existence. It works through focusing on what you want to defuse, so you can't accidentally turn off a bomb you don't mean to, and it has a couple feet of range. You can also use it on a person and it will work on any and all bombs on or inside them, as long as the defuser itself is held within a couple feet of some part of their body. Unfortunately, the whole thing is one-time use and will stop existing after it's used, but I can give you another one later to practice with." Dave was explaining… or flirting? It was weird.

Miss Militia meanwhile, was saying "Oh, that would be nice, I don't have a good way of dealing with a lot of explosives at the moment, I mostly have to try and contain them with Containment Foam and evacuate the area when I encounter them. We don't really encounter them often in the bay, and I don't think there have been any capes or cape organizations that used them in a few years here, but this would have been amazing for me throughout the years… for a variety of reasons."

Miss Militia trailed off before reaching up to pet the cat Dave had called 'dingus' (no capital D, Dave insisted), that had crawled up onto her shoulders, and was audibly purring still, but seemed receptive to Dave's weird terrorism flirting.

This… had to stop.

I'm sorry Dave, my introduction that you were just weird but didn't mean any harm worked too well. I have to fix my mistakes.

"Miss Militia, you should know… he's 18." Crystal suddenly said, while Dave was about to start the process of making Miss Militia as unlikely to die as possible. After all, if she died, then Dave would die too, and unless Miss Militia was alive when he respawned, he would just immediately die again, even if he came back through the Parasite or the Phantom.

Wait a minute… he can just turn off the Romantic role. Oh. Well, she seemed happy about the bomb defuser so she can keep that, and it's not like dingus is mortal, and he can just make more dinguses as needed, even if they won't be rainbow color-shifting dinguses.

Miss Militia looked surprised and oddly disappointed. Was she that unhappy he was 18? According to his ID at least.

"Actually, it's arguable that I am 3," he said.

Miss Militia grew more confused. "You mean, like a leap birthday? Because being 18 would still make you 4 if you were only counting your 'number of birthdays' and you had been born on leap day. And you… don't exactly look 18 as it is."

"Actually, I meant 3 da—" Crystal slapped her hand over his mouth again.

"Mom, did he tell you what he decided he wanted to do about things?" Crystal asked her mom for help.

"I suppose I can help you out," Sarah, or rather, Lady Photon said, now that the free entertainment seemed to be over. She hadn't gained the information she wanted, but since her daughter asked for help, she should probably oblige her.

"Yes, he did tell me what he wanted to tell the Protectorate, which you would know if you had been paying attention. And yes, Miss Militia, he is really 18. He has a changer ability, and this particular appearance was the one he decided on for being his 'hero costume' because it looked 'the most natural for pulling out a ton of guns'. He was probably going to say that he is arguably only 3 days old due to his amnesia, which…" Lady Photon began filling in Miss Militia, and by extension the Protectorate, on Dave's amnesia.

"That's… really interesting actually." Miss Militia said with unusual eagerness, especially after hearing Crystal's theory regarding the amnesia being caused by a trigger going wrong due to research saying every Parahuman forgot things from their trigger. Miss Militia actually seemed weirdly invested in the theory, even asking Crystal if she knew of any other related information.

Crystal didn't, but promised to contact her if she found out anything more on the topic.

"Well, I'm afraid the Protectorate can't help you much in regards to your amnesia. There are programs in place to help Case 53s, but I don't believe there is anything in place for other amnesia-related cases. If Panacea couldn't find a cause for it, I don't think anyone else will be able to either. The only person I can think of that might be able to help you is Scapegoat, and he isn't Protectorate affiliated, nor does the East-North-East Protectorate have the funding to hire him willy nilly. We might be able to arrange it if you joined as a full member, but even then…" Miss Militia gave a helpless shrug. "I'm afraid I don't think we can do much to help you with memory loss." She finished.

"Um, I wasn't actually asking for help with that, I've been doing fine on my own, and New Wave have kindly been showing me the ropes. I'm mostly here for the power testing, because I don't have the means to safely test all of my current powers myself, and I don't particularly mind the Protectorate knowing what I can do. And of course, I want to make a decent impression on the Protectorate and make sure they know who I am so I don't accidentally get labeled as a villain or have someone panic when meeting me in an emergency setting or something." Dave shrugged.

"That's remarkably well-thought-out reasoning. I wish more new parahumans would come to us for testing, even if they decide not to join. I do understand that not everyone wants to join the Protectorate, one of my dear friends ended up leaving the Protectorate, and she happily operates as an effective hero still." Miss Militia seemed surprised when Dave used his basic competence skills. Maybe they were secretly intermediate competence skills? Or even… advanced competence skills?

"Would you like to register as an independent hero? Or were you planning to become a part of New Wave?" Miss Militia asked after a moment.

"We're still discussing the possibility of Dave joining us," Sarah said. "We don't want to rush him into any decisions before he is ready, and we want to give him plenty of time to think things through and decide what exactly he wants."

"I see, well, we can come back to that after the testing itself. For now, we're here." Miss Militia said as they entered a large room full of various pieces of equipment, along with a great deal of open space.

"Armsmaster will join us soon to look at your things. Lady Photon said you called them 'items,' and she described them as being 'Tinkertech-like' is that correct?" Miss Militia asked after looking at a clipboard for a moment.

"Yup, indeed it is," Dave answered.

"Well then, if you are ready, then we can start. The technicians will be guiding you through a series of tests based on the paperwork Lady Photon filled out, but let us know if there are any other tests you want to run or things you think we should know about." Miss Militia said, distractedly petting Dingus the rainbow cat.

They started with a series of simple physical tests, which Dave passed with flying colors, for a normal human. The technicians did note that his capabilities didn't quite match with what he looked like he should be able to do based on the development of various muscle groups he had, but accepted it with a shrug after being told it was a mostly aesthetic changer form.

Things got rather interesting when they were testing his jumping abilities however.

"So, your normal jump height is here, and your maximum double jump height is here. Do you think you could go any higher?" The technician (her nametag said Stacy, not that he trusted a nametag, anyone could be in disguise after all) asked after pointing at two black lines on a measuring stick.

"Yeah, I can squeeze a little more height out." Dave said, before jumping, then jumping again at the peak of his jump height using his Old Man 'Combat Thinker' skill, then… crouching? At the peak of his second jump he crouched, and his head moved a little, giving him a good extra half a foot of height. It looked incredibly odd, and didn't change his moment like a double jump, and was utterly useless for anything other than jumping the smallest bit higher, but had a massive trade-off in how awkward the movement became.

"That… what? That's the dumbest thing I've ever seen," one of the technicians said after a moment.

Dave turned to him "Are you challenging me? Because I accept!" Dave said enthusiastically, but only managed to take a single step forward before the entirety of New Wave's younger generation dogpiled him. Eric was screaming "DO NOT CHALLENGE HIM TO A STUPID CONTEST, YOU MORON!"

"I wasn't though! He challenged me!" Dave said from the bottom of the pile with an aggrieved air.

"I wasn't talking to you," Eric answered.

"So, is there anything interesting you wanted to cover with your changer power?" Miss Militia asked after Dave got bored of telling the Technicians he couldn't turn into such and such thing or this or that famous hero or villain. They did find he could choose to use his normal voice, or the 'correct' voice of whatever his skin was, though the technicians seemed doubtful of those being the correct voices instead of what he thought would be the correct voices because none of them had heard of many of the things he turned into. Dave had just thought he was really good at imitating Pikachu and Solid Snake voices until the technicians actually tested it.

"Sure!" Dave said, before turning into Shaun the Sheep from Wallace and Gromit. Then… T-Posing, which for some reason lowered his entire body through the floor without interacting with the floor itself, leaving just his little sheep head above ground, staring at Miss Militia, New Wave, and the technicians.

"I… see?" Miss Militia was confused.

"Do you actually need to do that thing with your arms?" One of the technicians asked.

"Obviously, I need to T-Pose for dominance to make the ground submit to my will. How else would I be doing this?" Dave asked.

"…"

They ended up pulling out a table for him to T-Pose on after unsuccessfully trying as many other poses as they could think of and obviously finding none of them worked to make him sink into the ground. After all, why would anything other than a T-Pose let him sink into the ground?

"And this doesn't work with any of your other forms?" Miss Militia asked.

"Nope, none that I've found anyways." Dave said, before T-Posing and sinking his body through the table. His body below his neck was visible underneath the table, while his head was above the table. "Wow, I've never been in this position and not died immediately before. Normally, people die when there is a table through their neck."

He turned to look at New Wave, without actually moving his legs or touching anything with his arms somehow, "Fear me mortals, for I am become sheep!" He said, still a small T-Posing sheep with its neck through a table and its head above the table and body below the table… without damaging the table.

Armsmaster entered shortly after that.

"My apologies," he said as he entered, "my tinkering session ran long. I understand I am here to verify and examine pieces of near-Tinkertech, that are manifested by a power without actually being built from real components?" he asked.

"Yes, we have finished up the baseline physical testing and the Mover testing, all that is left is the Blaster, Thinker and Tinker parts of the testing." Miss Militia confirmed.

"If he does not actually Tinker the things he makes himself, then it would a Shaker power not a Tinker power." Armsmaster corrected, before turning and staring at Miss Militia, who had an innocent eye-smile visible above her bandana covering her mouth.

"Please explain." Armsmaster said after no explanation seemed to be forthcoming regarding the rainbow cat on Miss Militia's shoulders.

Miss Militia gestured for Dave to come over. Crystal also came over to supervise.

"This," Dave said dramatically while pointing at the docile cat shifting through every color of the rainbow, "is my dingus. I gave it to Miss Militia as a token of affection after I realized that she was my Soul Mate, and that should she ever perish, I surely would as well. So, I gave her a Bomb Defuser and my personal dingus in order to keep her safe from the threats she may face in this dangerous, dangerous world of ours."

Armsmaster turned back to Miss Militia, "Please explain."

"So, this cat is totally immortal?" Armsmaster asked for clarification.

"Indeed, nothing can harm him, he does not regenerate because he cannot be harmed. He does not need food, water, air, air pressure, or anything else, though he appreciates pets and scritches. He can be used as a shield against bullets, but flames may go around him, though he will not catch on fire. He has no offensive capabilities beyond what a normal cat has, which is to say he can probably still kill a person if they somehow piss him off enough, which would be very shocking because he is such a good calm boy, yes he is!" Dave got distracted partway through his explanation by scratching Miss Militia's dingus under the furry chin.

"Also, most importantly, as you can see, he is fabulous," Dave finished extolling the virtues of his dingus by pointing out the gradually changing rainbow color of fur.

For some reason, Armsmaster and Miss Militia were reluctant to test the Parasite Cure on someone.

"So, you haven't tested it on anyone aside from yourself, and when you did use it on yourself, you simply died?" Armsmaster clarified after being told what it did.

"Yup!" Dave answered.

"I am afraid I cannot permit this to be tested then. It would be unethical and against regulations to test it on someone. It might be possible to draw up paperwork to test it on a volunteer who has a terminal condition that otherwise cannot be treated, but given Panacea's presence in the city," Armsmaster nodded at Amy as he mentioned her, "it is unlikely anyone will volunteer for a treatment that has never been shown to actually work and has killed everyone it has ever been tried on, even if it is only a sample size of one."

"Well," Miss Militia said, "There is that villain in Europe, I can't remember his name, who fills people with parasites that Master them, and when they inevitably die after a month or two, the victims' bodies are filled with those parasites. The authorities in areas where he is active may be interested in your Parasite Cure. The last I had heard, there has been no way to save his victims, and they had a few in custody that they were trying to treat. They may be willing to test your device on any of those victims that are nearing their death anyways, since the victims all die after a certain amount of time after being Mastered. With no hope of a better alternative, and a terminal condition that will kill them shortly anyways, there may be next of kin willing to give permission to test your Parasite Cure on one of the victims that have been captured and put in custody."

Armsmaster paused. "Yes, if you give permission, I can request Dragon reach out through the Guild to the authorities in areas that villain has been active and see if they are interested." He said after a moment.

"Sure, I've got a ton of these bad boys," Dave said agreeably.

"Please do not refer to any of your devices as 'bad boys.'" Armsmaster requested. "It may encourage people to associate your items, and possibly yourself by extension, with the Azn Bad Boys."

"Do you wish for me to contact Dragon now?" Armsmaster asked Dave. "If she is not busy with something, she may be interested in watching the results of testing your other 'items.' Her insight could be extraordinarily valuable."

"Sure, Dragons are pretty cool, and I love Canadians." Dave agreed.

After a short while, Dragon's voice came through the external speaker in Armsmaster's helmet. "Hello, Armsmaster has said you wanted to make a request through the guild and have me observe… what?" She trailed off as the camera focused on Dave.

"Greetings comrade!" Dave said, T-Posing as is the traditional greeting of his people, in his current form of a human-sized, bipedal Minecraft Ender Dragon.

"What?" Dragon repeated.

"So, this here Flare Gun, is a fantastic and versatile tool. It sets anyone hit with it on fire for a start. Only if they are hit with the projectile it fires though, for some reason it doesn't set people on fire if you hit them using the Flare Gun as a melee weapon." Dave explained.

"I assumed as much," Armsmaster said flatly.

"They stay on fire for a set amount of time, unless they go into water of course, otherwise they will stay on fire for about 20 seconds. It isn't very damaging, but it gets really hard to see while you are on fire. Also, any corpses it is used on will burn and disappear completely after burning for around 5 seconds."

"Excuse me?" Miss Militia asked.

"So, it looks like your 'magneto stick' can hold things with no space between the tip of the stick itself and the object it is carrying, and can go up to having about one meter of distance between the tip of the stick and the object it is carrying, but we can't measure it very precisely. There is significant variation in how close an object remains in relation to the stick, but you can grab an object with it from further away than the object will be carried. It also looks like you have no maximum weight it can carry—that we have been able to test for at least—but your maximum size is only about the size of a person. There seems to be a limit in terms of maximum length as well as maximum volume, and it is Manton Limited to not work on living things in the animal kingdom." The technician said.

"Actually, I'm pretty sure it would work on a person if they were limp enough, or unconscious," Dave corrected. Which resulted in one of the technicians doing their best to remain as limp as possible while Dave lifted them with the Magneto Stick, and falling when they accidentally stiffened at the sensation of floating.

Dragon made a suggestion after the third time the technician fell. "Perhaps we could test it on someone present that has a forcefield? I am curious if it works even through the forcefield, and if it doesn't the New Wave members with a forcefield can also fly and are unlikely to be hurt by falling. They may also be less likely to stiffen up because they are used to the sensation of floating."

Which resulted in the discovery that the Magneto Stick did work through the New Wave forcefields, but that Glory Girl was not good at remaining limp and kept trying to wave her arms around like she was on a roller coaster, and the discovery that Lady Photon was too dignified to go fully limp and be waved around by Dave's Magneto Stick in front of other professional heroes.

After testing how the Magneto Stick worked on people and its range and carrying capacity, as well as what counted as a 'single object' for its purposes, they moved on to testing how much force it could exert.

They found that Dave could carry an object with it, and regardless of what that object was and how heavy or large it normally was, it could be used to push people, and nothing a normal person could do could stop it.

The technician volunteer had tried planting his feet as firmly as he could on a high-friction surface, and just fell over when Dave pushed his chest with a bottle he was carrying with the magneto stick. On a normal surface, the technician was simply pushed back until he hit a wall, and was unable to struggle free after the bottle was pressed against his chest and the wall was behind him.

Upon Armsmaster's request, they found that someone with a sufficient Brute rating, or wearing armor like Armsmaster, could simply break the bottle and escape that way as the shards of glass fell to the ground. A normal human or a parahuman without a Brute rating could theoretically also escape by breaking the bottle, but would likely have bits of glass embedded in them as a result, and would likely struggle to break the bottle without sufficient leverage and not having a surface to smash the bottle against because it was floating in midair.

"You could probably use this to trap someone for containment if you had a durable enough material to use with it. It wouldn't even need to be particularly well shaped as long as it was tough enough to not break from a Brute, Striker, or Blaster trying to destroy it." Miss Militia suggested.

"Hmm… I'm afraid I don't have anything like that at the moment. Perhaps I could trade with a Tinker for something."

"I'd be happy to send you something to assist you. It's always good to see new heroes stepping up, and I'm happy to help give you more options for capturing people that are otherwise difficult to nonlethally contain." Dragon offered. "It's not my specialty, but I can come up with something rather durable. You don't need to give me anything in return, though I wouldn't say no to the opportunity to study some of your items."

They went over the Health Station, and got Panacea's report on the effectiveness of both the food and the station itself after a technician volunteered to cut himself to test the healing.

"It really was simple to use. Focusing on being healed is the best way to describe it, but it doesn't require a ton of focus, I could probably do something else at the same time for example, but I still wouldn't be able to accidentally heal myself with it." The technician described.

Glory Girl had happily described all that she had discovered regarding the various settings and ingredient options for the burritos and Hotpockets. After Laserdream's suggestion that they could be highly effective workout food, and Panacea's confirmation of their nutrient and caloric value, Armsmaster seemed even more interested in the food than the healing.

"How difficult are these for you to generate? The Protectorate would be very interested in obtaining some of these, and I suspect the PRT would be interested as well. It would accelerate a lot of the training of troops and make maintaining fitness levels much more efficient, in addition to their healing value."

"Every ten minutes, I can make either one of these or one of the Parasite Cures, although the Parasite Cures are one-time use by the way, but it seems my power considers the two things equally valuable."

"I was going to just give the Protectorate one, though I was told I should stipulate it remains within Brockton Bay, and I don't mind giving the PRT one as well, and I'm happy to send one to the Guild as well," Dave continued. "I was considering giving a few to the local hospitals, but Lady Photon counseled me against doing so without ensuring that they are protected, as otherwise they may just attract villains or gangs to attack the hospital hoping to steal them. Speaking of which, she volunteered to negotiate on my behalf for things, and also wanted to explain why using Parahuman healing for everything is bad or something, so… Go Photon Mom, I choose you!" Dave pointed at Lady Photon, who just sighed at the nickname before beginning a similar speech to what she had told Panacea the previous day.

While Armsmaster and Dragon were forced to deal with Lady Photon's speech on the ethics of Parahuman healing and negotiations for Dave's benefit that Dave was too bored to pay attention to, Dave sidled up to Miss Militia.

"Hey," he said, "Wanna play with my crowbar?" He pulled out his floppy crowbar and waggled it around. "It's floppy," he said enticingly.

"Excuse me?" Glory Girl interrupted.

"Fine, you can play with my floppy crowbar too," Dave said, before pulling out a second wiggly crowbar and handing it to her, before using the telekinetic shove function of the first one to shoo her out of the way so he could continue to wow Miss Militia with his crowbar.

…

It turned out, Miss Militia's power was able to copy Dave's crowbar, floppiness and all, and it had the same push ability that Dave's did.

"This here device, is a minifier. It minifies whoever uses it. It sometimes interacts strangely with parts of my body when I use it while in a more exotic form, usually it is either ears, nose, tail, or hair that don't shrink with the rest of me, but it isn't harmful and it doesn't affect any of my more 'normal' forms. It won't do that to anyone that isn't either a Case 53 or a changer of some sort, or someone who's form is otherwise permanently altered by their power. Even in those cases, it is only a possibility it will happen, and even if it does, it won't be harmful, just look odd. It can't be used on someone else, you do have to actually use it yourself, but that's for the best really, because it increases your speed proportionally to the amount it shrinks you, and thus makes you able to move at the same speed, or maybe even a little faster, as you would be able to at normal size. So, aside from the slight durability loss from being smaller, there are really no major tradeoffs. I'd say it makes me about 40 percent less durable compared to my normal size, but it shrinks me by a lot more than 40 percent, so it is generally worth it." Dave explained the Minifier, which Armsmaster and Dragon were paying special attention to, as the most obvious 'Tinkertech' device he had shown, and one that related directly to Armsmaster's Tinker specialty of 'Miniaturization and Efficiency' at that.

"You can have some, I've got a ton and I get more all the time, I probably already have more than I'll ever need, you can reuse them as many times as you want, and after shrinking with one you can just use it again—or a different one—to grow back to your normal size. Things like clothes do shrink with you, and I can still hit just as hard with my crowbar while I am shrunk, so I believe it doesn't decrease your strength at all while you are shrunken." Dave finished his pitch.

Wait a Minute… why am I trying to sell them my stuff? I'm supposed to be here for testing!

…

It turned out that, according to a scale, Dave (and others that used it) didn't change weight when they were minified, but in practice their 'apparent weight' shifted to whatever was in their favor, which he was assured was on-brand for Parahuman nonsense, and part of why it was generally accepted that "Powers are Bullshit." (Dave was told by a Technician that 'apparent' was a scientific term used for 'fake' things, that weren't how reality actually worked, but looked close enough that scientists just threw up their hands and gave a name because people not educated in the field didn't want to listen to how things actually worked. Apparently, centrifugal force was another 'apparent force' that didn't really exist, but Dave just tuned out after that).

When Armsmaster requested a minifier for study, Dave activated his Photon Mom powers, in the form of sending Lady Photon to negotiate on his behalf. He had discussed with her beforehand the things that he might want from the Protectorate and the PRT based on what roles and items he might get in the future, and Lady Photon was a smart enough cookie to extrapolate and expand what he wanted to negotiate with the guild. He did ask her to be nicer because they were Canadians though (or at least Dragon and Narwhal were).

After the minifier negotiations were finished, Miss Militia asked "So, did you have anything else you wanted to test while we have Armsmaster and Dragon here?"

"Yeah, I'd like to ask if you have any way to detect me after I do this." Dave said. Then shot himself in the face and died instantly.

Author's Note: Whew, my biggest chapter ever so far. It's still really small compared to a lot of other authors out there, but I'm fairly proud of it.

Sarah was letting things happen at the beginning of the chapter to see if Dave and/or Crystal had feelings for one another. She was never going to let Miss Militia stay under the impression that Dave was a similar age or older than her, but she wanted to see how Crystal responded to Dave flirting with someone else.

The cat: dingus, is an item in TTT, meaning it can't actually die, take damage, or be harmed in any way, unlike the Doggo which is an actual entity and can be killed, thus we probably won't see the Doggo for a long while, if ever, because of the risks to its health, because the Doggo automatically attacks anyone that damages the person that placed the Doggo down, and the local neo nazis aren't known for being friendly to dogs that attack them. While dingus is completely invulnerable to all damage, and totally immortal in every way, otherwise dingus is basically a normal cat… except that he comes already trained to meow on command, and his little kitty vocal cords never get tired so he can meow as many times as he wants.

I might actually be mixing up the PAPed dingus with another held cat item, but I can't remember for sure and I haven't gotten that far in my TTT rewatching yet. I had originally called dingus Oscar the Cat in this and the last chapter (because that's what I thought it was called), but then I got to the episode where dingus was introduced and figured I was mistaken. I could be totally remembering wrong, but the item I was thinking of was just like dingus, except it was a detective item and actually healed whoever was holding it, and the PAPed version got the rainbow color changing. If I am remembering correctly, we will probably see that cat later on in addition to dingus.
Update: I was thinking of a detective item that doesn't take up the grenade slot, called Maxwell, but it looks identical. It heals whoever is holding it (fairly slowly) and if it is on the ground, it heals everyone in an aura around it. I'll decide what to do with it later after Dave unlocks Detective. This is the first ever appearance of Maxwell: https://youtu.be/zehDuZ-h1m8?list=PL3XZNMGhpynP4rbJJGg3NIpZJHB5QRVC1&t=68

I may eventually need to rename dingus as Dingus for the sake of clarity, even if it would be lore inaccurate.

This and this are the two most dingus-heavy episodes of TTT I am aware of. They are also the first two ever episodes featuring dingus.

We also introduced the Parasite Cure to the Protectorate this chapter. I'm sure nobody is going to overthink why the Parasite Cure and the Health Stations are considered equal by Dave's power.

I wanted to get through all the power testing in this chapter, but there is just too much to cover. Dave will be keeping some things close to his chest for now after advice from Sarah, who is a little (understandably) paranoid after living a fairly traumatizing life. Sarah's advice was to disguise his growth rate, so he won't be showing off any traitor items or the PhD Flopper, or his Medical Doctor qualifications just yet. Next time, the Protectorate has to deal with an Operational Security nightmare, Sarah has to do her best to make sure the Protectorate doesn't realize the extent of Dave's spectator mode while also making sure Dave doesn't go looking underneath anyone's masks or seeing any other heroes on the base without a mask on. After that, we find out how much Karma Dave has accumulated, the extent of his Combat Thinker ability, and how good his Knife is.

SpaceWhale · 2026-08-06T18:55:56+0100

10/10 way to end the chapter

Blitz9876 · 2026-08-06T20:12:13+0100

Goddamnit Dave. XD

love the story so far, hope to see how dave can change the story with his.... Dave-ness. XD

Wait a Minute... (Guy in Worm with Trouble in Terrorist Town powers)

Dave's Eventual Cape Name (Vote is not binding, mostly fishing for ideas)

Sharky

Palp

Trouble

Terrorist

Town

Snake

Solid Snake

Pikachu

Something else I am putting as a comment in the thread

Not too sore, are you?

Getting sticky.

Not too sore, are you?

Not too sore, are you?

Getting sticky.

Know what you're doing yet?

Not too sore, are you?

Getting sticky.

Getting out there.

Not too sore, are you?

Getting sticky.

Not too sore, are you?

Getting sticky.

Not too sore, are you?

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