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Scion.

Having finished essentially chapter one of TPF (and it really could just end on issue 16, it's kinda tied up neat, even with the foreshadowing for issue 17 and onwards) I'd like to reprise my original TPF post about a young Taylor being thrust into Superpower-dom. But lets remove her entirely from the equation.

Zion and Eden land on Earth the same way, Eden crash landing and Cauldron sparking up to run their role as per canon, and this happening right around May 20th 1982. That's when Scion is first named and when he meets Vikaire. Far along enough in the TPF timeline to have Etienne, Valentina, Heavy and Jacky Magus (original) on the world stage. Four years after the Brixton, London meeting and the formal formation of the Pyramid and Jacky's announcement to the world and the creation of the Fucking Arseholes. It is also, hilariously, a year after they put the Major in his spherical time out.

Etienne immediately picks up on Scion as an alien being the moment he tunnels through the alternate dimension earth his main body resides, but being literally too vast and maybe a little too alien, he doesn't immediately get Scion's deal. As far as the other superpowers know, this is just an alien visitor with a mysterious purpose. Same thing as Valentina, he can feel Scion's mind but cannot affect it. He can reach out to it and hear his thoughts but he's exceptionally empty, wherever the anti-Thinker shards don't just shut him out entirely.

Parahumans start popping up and I'm gonna say that Etienne can't take them out like Atomics, or at least turn them off the way he has been. Certain Parahumans like Alexandria are outright immune, anybody with anti-Thinker or power nullification work both against Parahumans and Atomics including Etienne. Zion and Eden took the Atomics into consideration when they were deploying their shards, just like the rest of humanity. Course, some Parahumans can just be remotely overloaded just like the Devil, but it draws Scion's attention the first time he does it and it's clear that if Etienne tries to snip problematic parahumans in the bud he'll be exposed for doing the same to Atomics and therefore Heavy.

Kevin Norton still happens. Etienne and Jacky let it happen while they watch on and, to their surprise, Kevin's tirade gets through to Scion, who immediately stops drifting around all hopeless and actually starts trying to be a classic superhero. Unfortunately, this is what would spark the 'incident'. Scion finishes what Valentina started by destroying literally every single nuclear warhead on the planet in under an hour with needle-like precision, leaving them useless lumps of slag and depleted uranium in their silos and warehouses. Having lost the Major the year before and their push into the middle east in the same breath, USAmerica is naturally livid and distraught at the thought of another mysterious doo-gooder angel. Valentina is flipping between a crisis of faith and a little bit of glee at Scion's golden jesus look. Etienne and Jacky are only able to get a read that all the new powers in the world cropping up after Vikare's cancer was cured all stem from him (and not much else), and because all the atomics and magic started popping up because of Valentina, she's convinced he's some kind of angel like her and has been constantly flying around trying to get through to him. She isn't doing much other than just flying side by side with him as he literally does any good deed he can do at the time, but to her it does seem like he appreciates the company.

"He's like a child in some ways. Emotions are most of what I can get from him. Bored most of the time. Engaged whenever doing something Mr Norton told him to, but still bored. Sad mostly. Some immense gulf of sadness without punctuation or nuance. Like a child, nothing but the rawest form of an emotion without the capacity or experience necessary to compartmentalize or process their feelings. Whatever happened, it's still raw. When he saw you in your full form Valentina, I got the sense of an immense, desperate hope, then crushing despair. Where he went for those three days, I haven't a clue. Jacky figures it may have been an alternate dimension or timeline we can't access, but that flies in the face of what we currently know about our universe and its position between heaven and hell. He's back to normal though. But I think you should still give him distance."

Jacky presents his working. I like how the Queen and the Major and Kid Ignition all got little graphical holograms which somehow communicate the totality of their power to Valentina but I think Scion's is like 7 feet wide and tall.

Its 1989, the Second Summer of Love that becomes the true test of Scion. I can't decide if his involvement should be early, fighting tandum with Valentina and using his Stilling to prevent the Queen from plunging the UK into hell.

Its worth noting a little something. Issue 7 is where the Queen shows up, and Valentina is the one that acts like the Superpower's first responder. She's a lot more durable than the other three that's for sure. I'm thinking she showed up to Scion the same way she shows up to the Queen, except he's calm and not putting out enough energy to give "everyone north of Northhampton cancer."

wait post canceled

Masumi is also in 1982. Etienne "talked her down" fuck fuck I need to re-write this.

Actually no. Lets keep the above and explore that then. One of Scion's first acts, instead of Kevin Norton, is to engage Deconstructia in a battle that stops her in a similar time frame, without killing Masumi? Maybe I'm being wishful but it's my post I'll be wishful. I acknowledge that an Entity cleaning house of cycle-level threats is even less likely to leave Masumi alive if Etienne would be totally fine with killing her if it meant Deconstructia could go too. We'll assume Scion doesn't do it for the same reason Etienne doesn't. His Stilling or any number of other Shards he can subtly deploy for a solution can revert Deconstructia back to Masumi, but cannot otherwise risk killing her or there will be a planet-cracking event before he can take her out.

Back on topic. Second Summer of Love draws Valentina in and plays out differently depending on if Valentina has somehow dragged Scion to Manchester to see the Queen. I think it'd be a little funny and very canon if he's late to Manchester because he was saving a cat or something and only showed up because he picked up on Europe potentially getting destroyed once Eliza sold her soul. So Eliza damned, Jacky still alive maybe, Valentina sorely beaten and Scion rescues Kevin Norton/England/Europe by Stilling the Queen before she and Eliza can start their apocalyptic beat down.

Beyond that point I'm not sure what happens. I think the biggest part of Eliza's character is that she sacrificed herself to save the world but now she cannot save herself. She was born amidst the worst Superpower incident until 1999-2000 kicks of as per current events. Europe was destroyed and Jacky dead. If she doesn't have the Queen to wield her power against, what happens? Frustrated at having sold her soul for nothing? I'm not sure what she does.

Scion for his part is just doing what he's meant to do; deal with outside context problems and float around with these humans who are as close to peers as their species is likely to get. Which is to say that they're exceptionally inferior even by Shard standards, but their power expressions are very interesting. Heavy is giving basically every gravity shard a tacit Ted-talk with his casual manipulation of the fabric of space-time. Etienne is giving all the master/thinker shards a lot of ideas. Valentina looked kind of like Eden at first, but no. She's a little annoying but at least he's not flying alone. Someone can keep up with him, even if he doesn't understand her power, and actively trying to understand her power is another thing to do, ala Wildbow's WoG on Superman + Scion AU. Eliza might get herself killed by Scion. She's supposed to rot or glitch the 'white magic' side of things that Jacky and Valentina utilize so I'm sure that's having effects on shardspace/shards/Scion himself and she's certainly a threat to the cycle. Masumi is unfortunate and I'll get into her in a bit but expect her to feel even worse for herself in 1992.

So what are Cauldron up to? Well, same as canon, except they're also trying to dodge atomics and especially Etienne. First thing to go out of the canon business model for Cauldron is any knowledge of the organization at all is completely expunged. People hear they can get powers. Get dead drops where Contessa has reasonably plotted to avoid Etienne. Clients are brought to the pocket dimension where Etienne and Heavy can't feel what's going on. Valentina can't sniff up the trail with the lines she can see with Etienne, I imagine the connection between Parahumans and their Shards are visible to her in the same way.

Interesting thought, maybe she starts intervening in people's lives before trigger events pop up? Might mean she'd have to make certain concessions to avoid being harassed by the USAmerican government, but without nukes they aren't going to be able to be as stupid as they were before.

Back on topic. So that means Alexandria, Legend, Eidolon and Hero are all on the playing field. In my opinion, and I'm welcome to other ideas, but I think that without their nukes (like Worm canon) TPF!USAmerica is quicker than Worm canon to embrace Parahuman heroes and Cauldron's exceptionally careful manipulations to get them seen as protectors of their communities. For the sake of not having to go through each and every single plot point of both TPF and Worm, lets just assume a total merger of their respective world-states.

November 13th, 1992. Hadhayosh, aka Behemoth, strikes Marun, Iran's second largest oil field. The Protectorate (the team not the org) are there under the same pretense in canon; earthquake relief and a little bit of PR from the USA since they can't threaten war in the middle east with Valentina and Scion roaming around. It's instantly on the Superpower's radar. Etienne connects Valentina and Heavy in, assume Jacky is still alive and is rebuilding the Pyramid but still doing so from the punks and anarchists of before, retaining his left-leaning rhetoric (even in the face of his self-admitted authoritarian magic cop situation) and he says he can barely offer help other than whatever Hadhayosh is, he's incredibly powerful. The Parahumans put up the same fight they did in Worm canon until the Superpowers join in. Everything shifts when Heavy tries to pick up Behemoth and throw him into the Sun. He can't. Behemoth counters with his own grip on the Earth. Main reason for this is the same as Wildbow's WoG on "Why don't they just throw Behemoth into the Sun?" being that, well, it'd just put Behemoth at the heart of a whole star to manipulate. Behemoth isn't there to do that, however, so he's not going to let them do that. Unfortunately, that means he ramps up quite a lot more than he did in Worm canon, using the full breadth of his tricks. The Parahumans and Iranian Atomics lose hard and are turned back. Just as Heavy and Etienne think Behemoth is going to come up and get them, he heads back down into the mantle.

And this is where Masumi comes in. They're calling Behemoth an "Endbringer" but not the first. He's the second Endbringer. Deconstructia becomes the first of the world killing kaiju club and this naturally leaves her in a worse state than even TPF canon. People still tiptoe around her, but there's a lot more anger directed at her. A lot more security is needed and Etienne needs to spin her plate more and with greater attention now. When Leviathan shows up in Oslo on June 9th, 1996, and sinks the whole island, it really starts seeming like the doomsday clock is ticking faster and faster. In TPF, the Superpowers don't really have much of a overarching conflict between the Second Summer of Love and 1999. There's an uneasy peace that threatens to collapse, but no real event that demands their attention or co-operation.

All of that changes with Behemoth's biannual attacks. After Iran gets hit, the next is Sao Paulo, Brazil, and then New York, USA. The former becomes a desperate battle with Valentina and Scion both working together to drive him off, but it's the attack on New York that starts to drastically shift the timeline of TPF. I'll leave the specifics of the attack on New York to others on Wormblr who have speculated as to what he could be targetting at the time. One post in particular that I can't seem to recall enough to track down suggested that he appeared underneath the rich suburbs and then pushed down into the poorest to do the majority of the fighting. A lot of fanon and fanfics suggest the island of manhatten is demolished to the point that it needs to be rebuilt.

Here, Etienne realizes he needs to move himself somewhere safe. As far as he knows, nowhere is safe if Behemoth is going to keep attacking and retreating like this. I think at this point he reveals himself to Heavy just like Valentina and asks for safe haven in Haven. Now, I think this is where my post can get interesting in the TPF fandom. Does anyone think that Lux and Heavy would be able to become roommates? In my opinion, yes. I think that seeing that the world is getting hit with this constant attacker (and when Behemoth hits Jakarta in November 1994 it becomes clear that this is a regular pattern) kinda unifies the Superpowers. Jacky (real) realizes there isn't going to be a world to save if this keeps up. Marrying tinkertech with luminous magitech is something I think the Shards would love to get involved in, though Jacky is of course less likely to trust any Tinkers completely. Valentina and Eliza are constantly hitting Behemoth with their best and it just isn't putting him down the way they need to. He's always able to scamper away back underground and Heavy can't lock in on him without ripping out a giant chunk of earth with him, and the first time Valentina tries following Behemoth down there is the last time she does it once Behemoth starts tapping into luminous energies.

To cap off this post and give it room to breathe and let people interact with it meaningfully, I want to note the last piece of the timeline I'd like to bring up. TPF kicks off in 1999, around November. Before the 12th, since that's when Tonya starts reporting to Etienne about Heavy.

As I've opinioned above, I think the Superpowers look very different in this AU. Etienne and Heavy are a single bloc. Kid Ignition is a known quantity to Heavy. Valentina and Etienne are still trying to be mostly centrists here, a balancing act. One that Etienne can actually do better with Heavy since he's got one hand on the wheel in that sense. Kid Ignition isn't an out-and-about atomic until 1999, but Etienne knows and has met him. Shutting him off now would tip his hand infront of Heavy worse than when he did the same in India with the precog. Jacky is also left leaning, but his Pyramid is a kind of counterbalance with Heavy's Family, trying to offset his more violent approach with Jacky's book-reading punks. Check page 12 of issue 5 for what I mean. On one axis Atomics and Magicians. On the third axis is Scion and his strange affiliation with the Parahumans, a large population of them now sparking up in both north and south americas in particular, but the phenomena is worldwide. The Protectorate (team) has become the Protectorate (organization) and is being more rapidly built up by the USA to increase their chances at getting an american aligned Heavy or Lux to try and scramble some small amount of power back. Scion and Valentina are openly working together and garnering a lot of popular support.

Masumi is reviled by most of the world that has been hit by Behemoth and now Leviathan, who has so far struck Oslo, Busan, Sydney and Madrid himself. It's Leviathan's strike on Busan that really startles the people of Tokyo, just because it's so close to home and they're seeing the influx of refugees and the water crisis Leviathan leaves behind.

In comes what I think would be the main event of this AU. November 2nd, 1999. Kyushu, Japan.

Leviathan shows up to sink the entire island and the fight is worse than all others before. Its Oslo but worse, as Leviathan has had to rapidly accelerate his ramping up of his capabilities just like Behemoth has.

Actually, a little thought occurred. What if, because of the Superpowers, the Endbringers have to start fighting together? Might drain Eidolon faster.

Anyway, the damage is horrible. Not just in terms of human life, but mainly the effect it has on Masumi's personal life. I don't think Isabella would leave her, but I think Isabella might get attacked or something, and that could spark a depressive cycle with Masumi.

That's even if Masumi doesn't just try to go Deconstructia to stop Leviathan. Hi Lung, didn't expect to be fighting more than one Kaiju here huh? Well, Deconstructia can certainly blast them both, though Leviathan might be counting on it and more easily evade it. I think if I were to write something like this, this is where I'd start, rather than the USA trying to assassinate Heavy, since they no longer have Jacky (fake) backing them, and their powerbase no longer has to deal with wiping out Atomics or Parahumans since they've shifted strategies to Cauldron's Cape scene plan, and therefore there's no Etienne killing the President, no paranoid Jacky identity crisis to kill Etienne over, and no loss of holy visions to trip Eliza up and over into the Abyss, and therefore nobody to inadvertently kill Isabella and send Masumi into a global spanning idiot doomspiral--

Someone just threw a rock at Isabella for fucking an Endbringer.

"We can love one another freely, without fear, hatred."

7th superpower Taylor Hebert aka Weaver. Controls all of the bug life on the planet including crabs, prawns, krill and other sea bug life. As of 1999 the most over-worked 4 year old imaginable but she loves her job. Confined to a hospital bed because her consciousness is spread across all of the bug-like creatures of the planet and her brain waves are similar to that of a coma patient (though she can still move her eyes and listen and eat and move her head). Has an entire department within the USA's Department of Agriculture and their mirror organizations in every other nation dedicated to liaising with her. Set to end world hunger by 2004 and is instrumental in the breakneck pace of helping turn the Sahara desert into a food forest.

Both parents are still alive and it's kinda uneasy how many attempts there are against them, since almost everyone knows how it goes trying to fight a superpower. Secret Service details on both of them. USA is unsure if killing her would also cause total brain death of bug life or set them back to normal. Her capacity for spying on people is a step below Lux's omnipathy. From her parents comes a leftist bent that aligns her with Heavy, but because Lux is the biggest conversationalist she has, she's more in his camp. Valentina's biggest fan. Hellbound, Magus and Masumi aren't really present in her life, but she's aware of the Pyramid and the destruction of Europe and Tokyo. Born well after the second summer of love, she's a young superpower amongst a team of very bitter rivals with long histories.

So the idea would be that she would sic several dozen bugs, some of them possibly venomous, potentially lethally venomous, on nearly every person on earth. And she would have them bite each victim multiple times, maybe dozens of times. And even if there weren't any venomous ones she could alexandria nearly everyone on the planet simultaneously.

She's weird, because unlike all the other super powers I feel like her lethality would peak somewhere around hour 2-4. Hour one, she couldn't kill a ton of people since most insect bites aren't immediately lethal. So it would mostly be limited to places closer to the equator with more dangerous species of bugs. But by hour 2, all that slow-acting venom would finally start working (and she'd be able to reach the more dangerous places) and the massive doses of poison that nearly everyone not in freezing conditions where bugs can't easily survive dies extremely quickly.

Like most of the other super powers her megadeath number would fall off pretty hard by hour 5 or so, as her bugs have travel time and limited range, and would struggle to find people out on the ocean or in the arctic.

Been thinking about all the chatter for the whole day while at work and now that I'm home (but exhausted) I think I can nail down some more thoughts here.

So a few more headcanon clarifications. She's 4 years old. Got her powers 6 months before the 1999 start date with Heavy's incursion into New York's airspace and the whole fallout there during issue 1. Her powers coincided with every single insect on the planet pausing for a solid hour before resuming normal function as she started turning them back on and going about their work. She comes to the government's attention within two weeks, is revealed and announced to the world two weeks after that in a mad scramble to basically claim a Superpower for themselves. Hotly negotiated deals with Annette and Danny. Government is desperate, her parents know it, and they work out a deal.

In the background to this is something I've been wondering about since issue 1 dropped which was "What the fuck was Heavy doing in New York in the first place? Why do the drive by?" and there's a subtle note there that he's doing it because of the president. We'll assume it's a president at odds with Heavy's political bent. It's 1999, next year is an election year, maybe this president is trying to be tough on atomics? There's also some blame from Heavy on the american people for voting the president in, so I'm assuming also that the President ran his campaign on a populist rhetoric against Atomics and likely passed some kind of legislation, emboldened by Magus and the Pyramid's support. Now with a Superpower of their own (sorta) they're able to send Taylor in as first contact against Heavy when he does his flyby. I'll circle back to this after I make my point and response.

Let's headcanon a little meeting between the six. Roughly three months before November 1999 and Heavy's flyby. Lux is meeting with all the other five Superpowers much in the same manner as they met to speak with The Major, about a very similar topic, a wholly American Superpower (at least in theory. She's only based in America, but her work is global) and what they should do about her. Specifically, if they should treat her the same way as they did with The Major.

Valentina is immediately against Lux's suggestion, even before he starts laying out the consequences or their options. She's not even remotely on board with killing a child. He asks her to calm down and that he's not suggesting that either, but he does want to lay out the possibilities, stating that the Six aren't the only ones capable or willing to kill a child to prevent them turning into the Seven.

Here are the options as Lux puts it;

One, Taylor dies and nothing happens. Insects go back to normal, the global ecosystem keeps ticking, and three months of increased agricultural co-operation between bugs and humans goes down the drain. A brief period of struggle within the nests of certain species that Taylor has started making work together, either as support for production or as an efficient food chain for the bigger insects, as they reassert battle-lines across species. A four year old dies, the Hebert family suffers an unfathomable tragedy and a hundred thousand children across the world lose their butterfly swarm avatar playmate. "Best case scenario, the world keeps ticking." He makes the mistake of saying that out-loud and it bums the whole group out and almost makes Valentina walk away. He scrambles to get to-

Two, Taylor dies and the global insect population dies with her. Lux, consults (mind reads) specialists in every field involved from economists to entomologists to agriculturalists, and confidently states that within a year at least ninety percent of humanity will have starved to death as global food production grinds to a crawl. Not a halt, but a crawl. Bird populations rely heavily on bugs to supplement their diets, even if their main food sources are fruits, fish or meat. Within two months most bird species are extinct. Birds were also pollinators and seed spreaders, so without them and bugs we're looking at even more severe knock on effects with fruiting trees. Whales and similar sea life starve without krill. Crabs, lobsters, prawns and any other kind of shellfish also cease to exist, removing a significant amount of calories from the ecosystem. Without pollinators the only kind of food that can be grown will have to be hydroponic or very specific kinds of vegetables. The third world will be hit harder than anywhere else. Without the pollination many species of plants will die off which will then also lead to soil erosion, which will cascade into a global climate crisis, mainly dust bowls and desertification. The rich farmlands of North America, Ukraine, Central and South Africa, Australia, China, Brazil all have their agricultural production slashed by numbers I'm not qualified to speculate but a scary amount, Lux assures. And a four year old will also die. It starts to become clear that Lux isn't advocating for anything. He's making the situation clear to the other five.

Three, Taylor's body dies, but her consciousness lives on in the bugs. Three A) and B) here are dependent on if she's going to lash out at humanity for her assassination or not. If her parents are dead, for example, or her death was particularly traumatic or worthy of vengeance. Suddenly, every single human being on the planet is outnumbered literally one point two billion to one. That for every pound of human there are at least three hundred pounds of insect at a conservative estimate. And that's without a vast intellect turning every thought it has to increasing production and lethality, cutting down forage time for food and simply feeding swarms of spiders, wasps and ants. And that they are no longer waging an eternal, brutal war against each-other for survival. They are now laser focused on the human race and our destruction. Taylor might not be able to fight the likes of Hellbound, Valentina or Heavy, and Magus might have to seal himself in a Pyramid for a doomed siege with dwindling supplies and initiates, and Masumi might be able to survive as her alter ego permanently, but Lux certainly can't survive in a world without humanity. His power is human centric. He'd be just like anyone else, consumed alive by the quintillion mouths of a mind he can barely speak to anymore. To top it all off? If they manage to kill her somehow without wiping out humanity doing it, they're back at square one with option two, a total ecological collapse with a global war against bugs to top it off. And she can go into hiding, burrowing deep into the earth. Imagine having to hunt down every single ant, hoping that you're burning off enough of her gestalt neurons that she suffers ego death and hasn't simply set bugs to wage war in perpetuity.

They leave the meeting with a clear decision. She's clearly their peer as a Superpower, in the sense that her death would be a horrible consequence for the rest of the world - just like a majority of their own deaths - in two out of three options, and nobody is willing to take that 33% chance, even if they've all certainly killed children before. (Although, I don't know if Lux, Valentina or Heavy has killed children. I do know that Hellbound and Magus' actions during the SSoL definitely killed children, and you could say Valentina's actions there also contributed to that, and possibly her actions in Cuba/Turkey might have had some collateral. Masumi definitely has, with Tokyo. Heavy was willing to have children killed as his peace deal, and Lux was willing to do it if Heavy traded in his own family to balance it.)

Circling back to issue 1 and Heavy's flyby, as promised. Lets say the meeting ends like that, Taylor's continued existence and the conclusions reached during the meeting also make it to the governments of the world, and they agree that the risk is too high. She's officially a Superpower like the rest of them. Taylor figures this makes her a Superhero, actually, and is the only Superpower to lean into active use of her power and the good she can do with it. She becomes a very popular figure after six months, lots of people are being urged to treat bugs well, build apiaries, pick up organic farming. Farmers save millions on insecticides. Bee allergies never have to fear again. Wasp stings, malaria mosquitos, spider bites are all a thing of the past. Tarantula pets and jumping spiders become a lot more friendly, it's like having a superhero around you at all times. The wasps even remove their own nests free of charge. Exterminators unfortunately have to shift their businesses to other pests, since you can just ask Weaver nicely to move cockroaches out of your home. No more bed bugs or lice. No more communicable diseases from insects. No more fleas, or at least, no more jumping from animals to humans. Taylor does understand she needs to keep much of the insect population functional, and she's discovering a lot of uses for the 'useless' bugs that escaped the public and academic eye. The field of Entomology is simultaneously in shambles and has never been stronger. While no modern insect behavior study can ever be trusted again, Taylor's insights have led to leaps and bounds in the field that would've taken decades, and she's got the entire field asking her questions, supplying her with answers to her own, and commenting on a dozen new species she unveils every day and globally sharing all of this information. She's even suggesting breeding hybrids, new species, guiding evolutionary processes enabling Entomologists to put a handle on a heretofore uncontrollable force of nature.

Humanity is enthused. She's saying she's running the numbers, even at her young age, and has determined she might be able to end world hunger by 2005. The american public treats her like a Superhero, and opens the way for a few other atomics to start acting the part too. It might even open up the possibility for something similar to the Protectorate or PRT to start operating. The american government asks her to intervene when Heavy swings past New York, and she does, and is able to get enough bugs together on his railing to ask him to leave because he's frightening everyone for no good reason. With her around, the government is less quick to jump towards their Numinous weapons in orbit (inverted pyramid renegades, of course), which means Heavy has no reason to push further and leaves without a confrontation, whilst still being satisfied that he's flown the colours and paraded Haven through american airspace.

Now, since the comic isn't even remotely complete, I can't exactly speculate on how this changes the future beyond Lux being able to finish his interview, get on his plane to Masumi's art gallery (Taylor is presumably there made out of a swarm clone) and micromanage things there. Magus might not get his Secretary of Magic position without a situation to exploit. The plot hasn't really moved on beyond that with issue 8, so I'm looking forward to issue 9 dropping soon this month.

Fuck this post is long enough that I'm considering making it a separate one but fuck it. My last point to cover here is that as an AU or crossover, introducing Taylor into this mess establishes a stark contrast with The Power Fantasy's canon plotline of "Superpowers must never fight eachother or we all lose" the contrast being; what if there was a Superpower who needed to use their power and the use of that power was largely beneficial. How does that skew the balancing act that Lux and Valentina are operating on. Magus is no longer the only one who becomes more powerful the more acolytes he has, in much the same way that I suspect Lux is becoming more powerful the more humans there are, Taylor would become more powerful the more bugs there are. Or at least, more impactful on society and the ecology of the planet the more bugs she has. She could also be getting smarter, that's a possibility. But back to the point. Power Fantasy is a story about the horror of conflict and the Superpower's attempts to avoid it at all costs, whilst unfortunately creating self fulfilling prophecies doing so. Taylor represents a possible next generation of Superpower. Someone to pass the torch on towards. A bit of millennial hope at the turn of the millennium. With agricultural benefits comes a shift in imports and exports, which can fundamentally shift the nature of colonialism, the third world, and global trade (especially as silk becomes as easy as cotton to harvest). The shifts can come too with the place of Atomics in modern society, from being associated with individual nuclear bombs all the way up to national arsenals, to being considered Superheroes. Plenty of room for bad heroes and good villains, sure, and contending with Supercops will also be a focus, but it will at least be a focus for the future, something that Taylor's existence is a chance at.

In Worm, Annette hung around with Lustrum for a bit, but got out before things got out of hand, so in TPF, I imagine she may well have been a lower-level member of the Pyramid out of some academic curiosity about magic, but bounced off of the cult-like structure well before the Second Summer of Love. It's a massive bullet dodged on her part, of course, and it very much informs her perspective on the Superpowers.

As a teacher, I think she'd get into the theoretical underpinnings of the grand stand-off, and so she's actually somewhat prepared (as much as any mere mortal can be prepared) for a Superpower to be close to her, and she's invested in helping shape this one right. She's the one to insist that Etienne doesn't actually get to talk to Taylor unsupervised, especially since Taylor is still so young and impressionable. Taylor tells her the moment Etienne starts talking to her again, to loop Annette into things.

Danny, however, doesn't have a head for thinking on the geopolitical level. He's a union man, he cares about the interests of the working men and women next to him, and he doesn't give a damn if their fingernails glow or not. Integrating different abilities into a union structure can be a bit of a headache, but he knows how the Powers That Be would sow division in the ranks to stop the union from ensuring people's rights, and the one time he really went off the handle was when someone within the Union tried to keep Atomics out.

He's very aware of Heavy's existence, as a result, hears his Atomic colleagues talk about him a bunch, and is aware that the fact they're letting him hear them talk openly about Heavy is kind of a big deal, but he still feels uneasy about the man, because hey, that's still a Superpower's presence hanging over things. Hard to feel wholly comfortable about that, but he does know enough Atomics after Taylor's power activates that he's able to get a good bit of support. This is a relationship that gets back to Heavy after Taylor has arrived on the scene, and it's what convinces him to try soft power rather than hard power.

So with her parents as her teachers, Taylor should be in good hands. The main problem here is that, well, she's four. I imagine she passes out in kindergarten, and her consciousness spreads through the bugs quickly but not instantaneously. There's a wave going across earth of all bugs stopping for a moment as this four year old girl deals with the fact that her new physical form now includes all of this. Her human body is now so far removed from the bulk of her existence that she struggles to control it, since the motor control for it is so vastly different from, well, most of what she is now.

And this causes some panic at first, which is decidedly unpleasant for a lot of people on the planet, but her global presence (without access to anyone's mind, and therefore language) leads to serious misunderstandings as Taylor does try to do what this four-year-old American girl thinks of as 'the right thing'.

I'm a little unsure of the Pyramid angle for Annette. It'd be easier to swing a Lustrum AU with her as an Atomic instead of a parahuman and peripherally connected with Heavy through the nuclear family, but I do like the Danny/Heavy pipeline there so Pyramid Annette is pretty cool. She can do magic tricks and that's a fun thing to think about, and what swings me towards liking it is seeing the contrast between a survivor of the event that broke Magus' whole worldview and his current politics clashing with Annette's. He very much did sell out in her eyes.

I'll save myself another fifteen paragraphs and say that in my mind, it was a birthday party, not kindergarten. Taylor is developmentally regular for a kid from birth until her 4th birthday where Taylor is chewing her cake surrounded by family and drops like a fucking rock out of nowhere. For an hour a resonating pulse encompasses the planet like psychic shockwaves as all the bug's neurons suddenly overclock and it feels like Lux is getting stabbed between the eyes, and any other atomic psychics get headaches. Taylor's human body is almost entirely lifeless. Maybe it's just the panic, but none of the adults at the party can find a pulse or heartbeat. She's as limp as a boned fish. They rush her to hospital and she snaps open her eyes just as they load her into the ambulance, with Annette in the back and Danny driving to the hospital. Taylor can move her eyes around, but nothing else. It's a tense two or three days while she communicates that she's fine and everyone becomes aware of the situation.

first of all, I'd like to make an amendment that has been bothering me for ages. on the first post I made here, I said "the comic version" of The Power Fantasy because I had assumed there was a book it was adapting and was eager to go looking for it. Jumped a bit ahead there and I'm sure nobody else noticed it or cared about it but it's been bothering me so yeah. most comics I see these days are an adaption or one of the big two doing a remake of something, or it's a light novel getting a manga adaption. just goes to show that I'm not seeing enough comics.

now that's done, lets revise a few things. I'll cut this all under the keep reading because it deals with some fresh spoilers so if anyone wants to read my analysis here, they should go read The Power Fantasy up to issue 12 to get their own fresh opinion of the big reveals.

Orym focuses in and sees the same lattice shape. The nature of the lattice field evades him, his eyes catch a glint in the middle of the red storm. He pulls Imogen over. The telescope focuses in, there is a hum in the chamber as the telescope pulls energy from the orbs.

Imogen has seen storms before. Red clouds swirling hungrily, angrily, nothing but dust and shadow. As the telescope pushes past the lattice, the storm is clearer than it’s ever been.

We finished our Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign last week, and today we just had an epilogue session where we’d figured out what everyone does after the events of the campaign and otherwise just kinda talked about things that didn’t necessarily come up during the game itself, including character backstory stuff that flew under the radar.

So with that, I figured I might share some of Corny’s university-era backstory under the cut.

ExU: A Chill Day in the Park