Skitter

Name: Taylor Hebert Kiryu
Warden: na
Job posting: na

 

A solid example of how far good intentions can take you down the wrong road.

Again.

User Name/Nick: Hats
User DW: i_id
E-mail: [email protected]
Other Characters: -

Character Name: Taylor “Skitter” Hebert
Series: Worm, by John Wildbow McCrae
Age: 17
From When?: Monarch 16.11, Coil's Betrayal. (Published December 2012)

Inmate/Warden: Inmate – Taylor became a villain largely because she is unable to trust in any powers that be, even those that could have earned her trust. Her worldview weighs corruption and bullying as inherently more powerful and likely than good intentions or the law. She is more able to trust people with obvious malicious, self-serving, or apathetic intentions than people with apparent good will.

Arrival: Taken at the moment of death. She's blind, already had an injured arm, and has just been shot in the chest, doused in Molotov cocktails, and locked in a burning house, so the sudden arrival on the barge will be a shock. She won't have the hole in her chest or be on fire, but her costume's a wreck.

Abilities/Powers: SO MANY BUGS.

Taylor's powers came to her when she was fifteen, triggered by a bullying event that sent her to the hospital for a psych hold. In the process, she realized that her awareness was connected to any bug (insect, worm, spider, crustacean, etc, anything reasonably called a bug and larger than a mite) in her vicinity.


“I panicked, freaked out. My mind went someplace else, and it found the bugs there. Not that I knew what they were, at that point. I didn’t have a sense of proportion, and with all the info my power was giving me then, my brain didn’t know how to process it all. As far as I knew, all around me, in the walls of the school, in the corners, and crawling around the filthy interior of the locker, there were thousands of these twitchy, alien, distorted things that were each shoving every tiny detail about their bodies and their fucked up biology into my head.


I sighed, “It’s hard to explain what it’s like, having a new sense open up, but you can’t understand it all. Every sound that they heard was bounced back to me at a hundred times the volume, with the pitch and everything else all screwed up as if they wanted to make it as unpleasant and painful to listen to as possible. Even what they were seeing, it’s like having my eyes open after being in the dark for a long time, but the eyes weren’t attached to my body, and what they were seeing was like looking into a really dingy, grimy kaleidoscope. Thousands of them. And I didn’t know how to turn any of it off.

“I figured out what my power was at the hospital, while they observed me, which helped ground me, make me feel sane again. Bugs are a lot easier to wrap your head around, when you realize they’re bugs. After a week, maybe, I was able to shut some of it out.”

That connection includes using the bugs' senses (mostly touch, smell/taste, spatial orientation, and temperature sense; some hearing; sight is too fractured for more than general light and dark). She can use this to map out a space in detail by spreading bugs over surfaces, 'tagging' people with bugs to follow their movements, and arranging bugs to make signs. She can also direct bugs to breed, produce silk, eat, sting/bite, or produce waste. Bugs under her control are entirely under her control, with no ability to resist. Her bugs are not physically enhanced in any way, they're just under control. If she doesn't actively cancel a command, the bugs keep obeying it, even if she's unconscious or, presumably, dead.

Taylor has used swarms of spiders to manufacture spider-silk costumes for her team, has controlled wasps precisely enough to sting but not inject venom, has used large biting insects like locusts and carrion beetles to kill by a thousand cuts. She habitually tracks everyone in her vicinity by planting a few mosquitoes or gnats on their person. In hazardous situations, she spreads out her swarm so that anything moving anywhere in her vicinity brushes at least one bug, allowing her to keep simultaneous track of the entire field even if occupied. Enemies who have noticed this use area attacks to clear large areas long enough to move. She carries spider-silk rope at all times, from fine-as-hair to thin cables, and breeds Darwin bark-spiders and golden orb weavers for quantity and toughness of silk, respectively.

The only non-bug aspect to her powers, though she assumes it is related, is a very, very broad ability to multi-task. She can guide hundreds of individual insects through concurrent specific tasks while simultaneously issuing general commands to tens of thousands of others to work en mass. The ability to multifocus is more limited when not dealing with bugs, but she's still at an advantage over an unaltered human.

Taylor has not yet discovered a limit to how many bugs she can control at once – it exceeds multiple millions. Several parahumans around her have reached an intrinsic limit of their power (usually marked by a catastrophic headache and an inability to use powers for a while afterwards), but she never has. Not all parahumans have intrinsic limits. Her limit is range-based instead - she can operate in a sphere with a radius of approximately 500 feet. Under extreme, life-threatening stress (usually involving her feeling trapped or cornered), she's known her range to triple. Barriers do not affect this radius. I thought this would be the best place to nerf her powers, greatly reducing the physical range, how many insects she can control inside it, her ability to use her power through walls, or all three.

I suggest reducing her range to 50 feet and the number of insects she can control to under 1000 (For context, not even a significant percentage of a beehive).

From the TLV Mods:

For the most part, your restrictions on her powers sound good to us, though we do have a few further limitations we'd like to impose:

- Due to the small and contained nature of the game's setting, we'd like to set the upper limit for how many bugs she can control at 300, rather than 1000.

- If Taylor isn't commanding them directly, her bugs won't work on autopilot. This will mean that any bug that goes out of her 50-foot distance range or into a shielded area (like a warden-only area that she isn't physically in, or a cabin that she isn't on the Special Access Filter for) will immediately stop following her commands. The same goes for if she's knocked out, temporarily dead, asleep, or otherwise mentally incapacitated.

Like most power restrictions for inmates, these limitations can all be easily adjusted, or even lifted entirely, at the request of her assigned warden (temporary or permanent). That said, even if she's granted all her abilities back at full strength, shielded areas will still pose the same limitations as mentioned above.

Personality: Like everyone on Earth Bet, Taylor grew up dreaming of becoming a superhero. As a child, she idolized hero icons like Alexandria, with posters on her wall and Halloween costumes. But after her mother died and her best friend became her worst bully, her dreams were no longer aspirational. She didn't look forward to anything, merely moving forward day by day.

Then her trigger event happened. She had superpowers! But they weren't the sort she could imagine making her a beloved hero, and they were tied to the worst day of her life. All she could feel about them was how they would make her, and her dad, a target. She considered joining the local organized heroes via the traditional route, as a Ward, but was put off by the idea of being forced into so much interaction with other people her age. Her trust in oversight was already blown to bits by her school administration. So she looked for options to become a rogue hero, but her first foray into that not only introduced her to a pack of villains eager to ally with her, but soured her badly on the local organized heroes. Meeting Armsmaster, who treated her with condescension and suspicion and took credit for her actions, was possibly one of the largest forks in Taylor's path.

Taylor told herself she was joining the villains, the Undersiders, to spy on them, but knew almost from the beginning that she was just comforting herself with that lie. Her goals allied with theirs; get resources by any means necessary, form tight alliances, operate without oversight, gain increasing amounts of control over their environment, quash threats. She does not ally with villains who seeks to sow cruelty or chaos, but will turn a blind-eye if they're avoiding her and her territory, or they're a useful distraction against other interference. (She made an exception for Regent, whose body-controlling powers could be considered exceptionally cruel, because they were already allies when she found out, he used them to her benefit, and first demonstrated them on someone she particularly hated. She grappled with the moral implications of that, but did not break ties with him.) Taylor perceives authority as inherently dishonest, but feels she can trust malicious dishonesty to be predictable and useful, while well-meaning dishonesty will always move the goalposts and betray her expectations.

While before her trigger event, Taylor was self-effacing to the point of non-being, the longer she's had her powers, the more arrogant she becomes. Not in a cocky way, but in a certainty that her line of thinking is the most tactically sound. This persists even after she's had her tactics blow up badly in her face before; in her line of thinking, the fault is always external. Something she didn't know, something she wasn't told. She assumed leadership of the Undersiders not long before her death, without any sort of discussion on the matter. Grue, the group's former leader was no longer able to act in that capacity, so she just stepped forward into the role. Leadership comes naturally to her by now, following does not.

Barge Reactions: Taylor is aware of other realities. Her own universe is called Earth Bet because they're aware that it split off from Earth Aleph in roughly 1982, when the appearance of the first parahuman, Scion. Between then and her death, at least five alternate Earths have been discovered and contacted. She likely won't believe she's dead for some time – being kidnapped into pocket dimensions, forced into interior psychic realities, and trapped in holograms are all possibilities in her world. Breaches and floods, depending on how they play out, might reinforce that feeling in her, that this is all a cape manipulation. She's also used to meeting people who appear non-human and capes who display “magic.”

She's not a sit-by-and-watch person, even if she's not quite sure any of this is real. Ports will feel familiar to her – her life for years now has been all about missions, goals, and teamwork. Floods and Breaches are the kind of chaos she'll immediately start trying to strategize around.

Path to Redemption: Taylor began by wanting to be a hero. And even as a villain, one of her driving forces is protecting her people. At first, it was only her dad. Then the Undersiders, her team and friends. Then, as her presence in the city grew, she acquired territory and made the safety and comfort of its residents a priority, even those who despised her. Appealing to that aspect of her, her drive to shelter, is likely her best path to redemption.

A key crack that needs hammered on is her capacity to trust people who want to do good. As she is now, the appearance of philanthropy or benevolence inspires active distrust. Building trust between Taylor and someone who genuinely wants to do only good, whether or not they're successful in actually doing it, would be a massive force for change.


History: From story start until just before Echidna. For the purpose of this RP, Taylor dies in the aftermath of the Slaughterhouse Nine onslaught, at Coil's hands.

Sample Journal Entry: [The voice on the comm is ragged, pack-a-day ragged, and cut with occasional coughing. There's picture, kind of. It's just black, with a sense of movement against the screen.] So, if I believe I'm dead, and this is... what, space purgatory?

[A few moments of silence; verbalizing her thoughts isn't her habit, especially since the anger of her last moments has yet to ebb.]

I'm guessing there's no way back to Brockton Bay for me, right now. But is there a way for me to know if my plans got Coil? Or if my people are okay? Because if I didn't manage to stop him, it's pretty hard to see a reason to do anything. I drew his fire on my people, and I failed to be the one to stop him. Grue's out of commission, Regent will just disappear, he'll kill Tattletale if he gets the jump on her. Only Rachel's left to protect my territory, my people, and on her own? I have my doubts.

And Dad...



Sample RP:

Before the fire, Taylor had felt her range extending – it always did when she felt trapped. She'd been the eye of a storm of hundreds of thousands, millions of bugs stretching away in every direction. They hadn't saved her. And now, only the few that had survived inside her costume had come with her – four spiders and a single wasp. Nothing. She sent just one of the spiders out to be her eyes as she explored the deck of the Barge. She couldn't actually see through its eyes, there was too big a dissonance between the way the orb-weaver's vision worked and hers, but it could work like a blind-man's cane for her, moving just ahead of her feet to keep her from stumbling into anything.

She was relieved as she began to orient herself and more insects appeared in her awareness. Carpet beetles. A few flies. More spiders. A little cadre of fleas. She drew them all to her and then spread them back out so that her awareness of them made a good rendering of the space around her. Soon, it wasn't obvious at all that she was still blind, and she was able to relax a little. Just a little. She was still lost on a ship – she thought it was a ship. The deck around her, and the vibrations, reminded her of the Brockton Bay ferry, when she was little – but at least now she looked less vulnerable.

No, no thinking of Dad.

There were other people around. The cockroach she'd just taken up could taste them on the air, but none of her bugs had yet run into anyone, and she couldn't hear anybody. She found a flight of steps leading downwards and stopped, using the fleas to follow them down while the beetles kept exploring the deck. When one vanished, she flinched – it had only been a few yards away, she should have realized if anyone was that close – but no, she still heard nothing. Slowly, drawing the fleas back, she moved in that direction. She was more shocked when the beetle reappeared to her senses than she'd been by its vanishing.

A few quick forays confirmed the unpleasant news – her range was almost nothing now. She scowled, using a newly-found moth to scout the new radius. Maybe fifty feet in any direction. Taylor felt her lips draw back, and took a few deep breaths, working for calm. It was claustrophobic, only being able to sense so far, but it was a damn sight better than nothing. She wasn't trapped. Or, she was, but she wasn't trapped like that.

Fifty feet. She could live with that. Just another problem to solve. Taylor headed back to the stairs. She'd find out how much there was to this place, gather her forces, and start solving problems.


Special Notes:

Tamar Amit Joseph is my PB