Ok people seemed to really like the last post I made summarizing an unwritten fleshed out worm fanfic I had, so here's another! This one's an altpower and wait where are you going come back its good I swear.
(tw: suicide)
Taylor triggers with Ingenue's power after an incident involving Sophia (who is removed from the wards and not a part of this fic past this), and outs Sophia as a cape since Ingenue can see powers. She's forced into the wards because she has no ability to defend herself, is immensely powerful, and people will want her dead or on their side since she can out every cape in the city. She genuinely has no practical choice besides the Wards here, so she begrudgingly joins. It's not all bad though! She actually makes friends for the first time in so long :)
Her and Missy hang out a lot, and their powers synergize super well since Taylor can make Vista frighteningly powerful. She warms up to Dennis after some patrols, she can make his power non-touch based too! Dauntless is like a mentor figure, they meet up every day so she can make his charge way more powerful, speeding up his growth by like 3 times, and he gives her lots of advice, helps her begin to come out of her shell, and is generally chill. Good times.
So y'all remember that bit about Ingenue's power causing people to go insane in the long term? What if you didn't know about that and you constantly used your power on your friends? Wouldn't that be funny?
Clockblocker is the first to snap. He's on a train when he just decides fuck it, and freezes a pencil in the air. Everyone sitting to the left of him down the length of the train gets impaled by it, just goes clean through. It's covered up as a villain attack, he's ushered off to the asylum, and the wards are just. Really messed up by it. They miss him, they miss his jokes, and they don't get why he did it.
A week passes. Taylor confides in Dauntless about how she feels like it has to be her fault, like everything is, but he reassures her. It's fine, she's done so much good, sometime's people just go bad. Genuinely just a great pep talk, she still misses Dennis but she's grateful she has the rest of her friends and Dauntless is there to cheer her up. She also mentions how it's hard to walk around the city, she keeps seeing villains and she can't do anything about it. She mentioned a few weeks ago that a bunch of them keep going into the same building, but she's helpless and just has to sit by.
That night, Dauntless levels the Medhall building. A few E88 capes were inside and they fight, and he kills them. Everyone else in the building is injured at the least, collateral damage that Dauntless would have cared about before. There's no covering that one up, he's killed dozens. When he's caught more than half the empire is dead, along with upwards of a hundred bystanders, and he's sent to the birdcage.
Taylor doesn't leave her room for a few days. Vista reassures her that it wasn't her fault.
On their next patrol, Missy begs Taylor to use her power to remove her manton limit. Taylor doesn't, but she's pretty sure she sees the pattern now. Vista's going insane. Were the other two this obvious? Should she have noticed? Would everyone be alive if she had? Would she still have friends? How can she tell anyone about this, when she'll be blamed?
She goes to Piggot, pretty much accepting that she'll get birdcaged or something. She's a horrible person, she knows that. She never gets to talk to Piggot, because all the heroes get called into the field to stop an A class threat. Vista is twisting the city around her, killing countless people. She turns bullets back, she extends a knife with her powers like Jack Slash. She's finally proving what she can do, then they'll all see, and they'll respect her and let her fight the way she wants to.
(side note, ingenue's power makes people closer to their shards in this interpretation, which also means they're flat out way more powerful even without her touch after a while)
The heroes are fighting Missy, they're losing, none of them want to hurt her. Missy see's Taylor from across the city, she's using her power to see almost everywhere at once by distorting space. Within seconds, Taylor is next to Missy. She reaches out to touch her, if she can shut down her power then it'll all be ok and Missy can get help and they'll be friends again and it wont be her fault. The space between them is a mile long and a foot thick. Missy doesn't want her help right now, she wants to prove herself to Taylor so Taylor will finally appreciate her power and they can be a team. Taylor tries to look away as Missy kills someone, space is warped so her line of sight is directly on the act. She closes her eyes, and the space between her eyelids is stretched infinitely wide. She watches, unable to stop her, as Missy keeps killing and defending and destroying. Missy begins to try to upend the sea floor, to dump the ocean onto the city. She's taken out before that can happen. How doesn't matter, what matters is Taylor couldn't stop her. The city is in shambles, its her fault, she was RIGHT THERE and she couldn't do anything, she could just watch and watch and watch.
She tells the PRT about how she thinks her power is breaking people. She's banned from touching anyone. They don't do much more, legally speaking she's safe and it wasn't her fault. The rest of the wards don't talk to her anymore. They blame her, just like she knew everyone would. It's her fault everything went to shit. She can't blame them for hating her, she hates herself too. She sneaks out to go on a walk one night, when the hateful looks and resentment get to be too much. She sees a cape. Lung.
Taylor knows her power is practically useless alone, and she walks up to Lung and insults him, provokes him, riles him up to attack her. If she dies here at least she'll be remembered for dying as a hero fighting a villain, rather than someone who corrupts everything they touch. Lung burns her, bad, all over her right side. He lifts her up by the neck and prepares another fireball. This is what she wanted, but she can't do it. She twists his power, reducing his durability and fireproof nature to zero and ramping up his firepower. Lung burns himself to a cinder in seconds, erased by his own power once the protections were gone. Taylor gets burned again in the blaze. She couldn't even commit suicide without hurting anyone else. She couldn't even die without fucking it up. She's alive. Panacea refuses to touch her to heal her, for very understandable reasons.
She goes to the asylum, despite her request for the birdcage.
Filled with guilt, afraid to touch anyone and everyone, blaming herself for everything that happened, avoiding Dennis at lunchtime while he glares at her, closing up and being silent for days on end, haunted by the people Vista forced her to watch die. Her fault, all of it.
And that's the end! Woooo! She's broken forever, no coming back from that one!
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Could you tell more about Taylor? (it sounds strange, but I'm crazy about him💀)
Taylor has really changed over the years compared to a lot of other characters, and yet I feel like I haven't ever talked in length about him personally before.
He likes to keep to himself, he's a very quiet and private guy who spends most of his time on the move, skateboarding, working out, so on and so forth. He's also been known to enjoy comics and certain movies, though not all that often.
He's got quite the stunning pair of eyes, and as such they tend to be an attractant to unwanted attention. That, and he is most expressive through his eyes. He likes the anonymity of sunglasses, and the ability they give him to observe without drawing attention to himself.
Deep conversation, close relationships, they really aren't his forte. He can talk and he can debate, but if he can help it he'd really rather not. And he tends to come across as rude and stoic when he does engage. He also has a very bitchy resting face, and whether it's forced or he was born into it, it rarely falters.
When the Fault originally took place, he was fine with learning to adapt to bracing the end of the world with someone he was acquaintances with. Close enough to not care about being around him, but it's not like he knows the guy very well. That guy being Zack of course.
Even though they're trekking this apocalypse together, you'd be surprised at how long it takes Taylor to warm up to Zack more than just an acquaintance level. He can handle getting to know one dude he's sort of stuck with, but when he's around a bunch of people, like Zack would lead him to, he really becomes a man of few words.
It's hard for anybody to learn anything about the brick wall that he is. The right types might be able to pull a little more out of him; Hannah, Tanner, really chill people who don't feel the immediate need to pry into him. But for others, one could strike the most charming first liner to a conversation and he'd more than likely pretend he didn't hear it.
Why? Aside from just not being a talker, he believes people need to earn what they get from him. Not the healthiest approach to socializing, but that's who he is. You need to earn a response from him, you need to earn his respect, his history, etc. How to go about earning any of this is something he similarly neglects to share. But I made him and so I can tell you: you need to get him excited, and know how to tell when he is.
He might seem hard to please but he carries his few interests on his sleeves. As long as you stick to what he knows when you talk to him, he can actually be somewhat pleasant to talk to. And when he's pleasant to talk to, you know you've actually got his attention and interest.
It's why Zack, such a carefree and outgoing person, still gets Taylor to stick by his side so well. Zack likes a lot of what Taylor likes, and he knows how to talk about it (Also Zack is just really charismatic and knows how to pull a chat from Taylor anyhow).
He's just a private, athletic dude who's a little bit too serious sometimes. He's strong and he's fast, and he definitely carries himself like he's in charge of his own path, but he honestly functions a little better when he's not the one deciding what to do. He wouldn't admit it, but if Zack weren't in the picture he probably would not have left hometown, and he would have no real aspiration to work towards except to survive.
Now his aspiration is to survive better than anyone else instead, as Zack drags them into increasingly more chaotic situations. He wouldn't admit this either, but Taylor also sort of likes the thrill of doing things he shouldn't, even though he was particularly law-abiding before the Fault.
Is that enough about him? I feel like I could go on, but that's essentially him at his core. Calculating and quiet, but sporty and a bit of a thrill seeker underneath.
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