So, I've been reading this. Taylor's had one incident when things went well, and now she's had one incident where things didn't go well. To some extent, that makes me wonder how she's going to react to this; if she'll change her methods, become more cautious, or she'll try and rationalize it away.
To another extent, I already feel I know how everything is going to turn out. You have the NWO knock-offs (don't deny it, I saw the JB initials) talking with the PRT, ready to classify Taylor as a memetic hazard (probably with some good cause). You have Taylor, who isn't going to try and stop her hero escapism since she might slit her wrists if she had to stop. She going to slip further down the moral scale without anybody to tell her "This is wrong" and "This is a bad idea", and she's never going to trust anybody enough that she'll get somebody to call her out. She's going to keep trying at being a hero until the "Maniacs" mentioned in 3.04 show up and recruit her, because she's got no place left to go- the PRT thinks she's S9, and the criminals are too self-interested for her crusading ways. At that point, the only mysteries left is the bodycount, and when she breaks ties with Sam and her Dad- or has them broken.
One thing I wonder about is on part of the differences between this world and canon Worm. In canon Worm, parahumans were screwed up. That was part of the reason there were so many villains; you had a lot of cases like Taylor's, of people in bad situations and in bad headspaces, without anybody to pull them out. For every stable parahuman (Miss Milita, Assult, Tattletale, Grue, Vista), you had one with serious mental problems or crippling personality flaws (Early Armsmaster, Regent, Panacea Rachel, Mark Dallon). Taylor, quite frankly, falls into the latter catagory thanks to her overwhelming trust issues; she only did as well as she did by a lot of blind luck, and a near-supernatural ability to keep her cool in combat (in game terms, she's good example of Composure 5).
If, as EarthScorpion stated earlier, the Government is actively recruiting parahumans heavily and enforcing law so that the population of villains is far lower, this implies the government has a solid number of people on it's payroll that, prior to 1980, wouldn't have passed the psych evaluation.
The political and social ramifications of overlooking the malfunctions having semi-functional weirdos for the sake of stability and military force (beyond "nothing good") is beyond the scope of this post. Though it does give a reason for the NWO knock offs to exist.
The second thing I'm curious about is the military involvement with the Endbringers. Going from canon, a half-hour's warning is quite a bit more than usual, and that's with tinkertech helping. A half-hour, to my uninformed mind, is not a lot of time to make a military deployment of any force. And endbringer battles (again, going by canon) generally occur on a single day. That's relatively small window for response time. One of the reasons I accepted that Endbringer fights didn't feature military in Worm canon is the problem of response time, and the other reason was the prohibitive cost. Unless you park a tank brigade and artillery unit outside every city, getting to the battle in any timely manner is going to be near impossible. And building up enough military to keep an anti-endbringer unit outside of every major city costs a ton of money. Tanks and planes cost millions of dollars each. Tinkertech stuff probably costs more. And that's without factoring in infantry, upkeep, and replacements for endbringer fights.
That's what, a billion of dollars of military spending per city? At least? On top of increased military spending against other nations? That is an absurd amount of money. I'm guessing that not only has taken money away from other priorities in the US, but that the occupied parts of South America are currently being stripped for cash to fuel the US war machine as well. Which would make the military-industrial complex absurdly powerful as well, being flush with all that cash and having a good reason/excuse to have it.
Comparing canon Worm with Imago, it's debatable whose done a better job. In canon Worm, the government is having problems maintaining monopoly of force, at least in Brockton Bay. This problem is in part due to the absence of traditional military. This is very bad for rule of law, to say the least, and limits the ability to solve criminal problems. In Imago, the government has solved the monopoly of force problem...but has allowed power to concentrate to the point where corruption has set in, and is suffering from similar problems to canon worm due to a lack of moral and political will, rather than lack firepower.
Finally, a literary review. The vibe I'm getting from this story is that of a tragedy. We're watching Taylor's doomed attempts to be a hero fail due to her inexperience, ignorance, and trust issues/willful isolation, and her slow moral decay as she rationalizes her misdeeds. It's a damn powerful character piece.
It's also taking freaking forever.
To me, this story's conclusion feels forgone. Between the introduction of the S9 and your own cynical style as an author, I don't see any real chance that there's no way Taylor's going to redeem herself, make things better, or learn proper heroism. She wasn't a hero in canon, and you're not going to turn her into one. That's fine! If anyone can write a train-wreck of moral corruption that you can't look away from, it's EarthScorpian. But the slow pace is keeping the plot from being engaging, and the sense of a forgone conclusion takes a way the tension that would otherwise compensate for that.
To use a visual metaphor, it's like a little old lady driving down the train tracks in her car. There's the looming threat of the train coming down the tracks and smashing the old lady dead. Ideally, one of two things occur. One, the old lady doesn't know she's on the tracts, and the train arrives relatively quickly; thus, we get to watch the hideous crash in horror and fascination. The other option is to stretch things out, and make the readers hope the old lady might come to her senses before the train shows up and get off the tracks, and get tension from the uncertainty. Your story, well written as it is, is taking a less-than-ideal third option where it's very clear the old lady is never going come to her senses and get off the tracks, but the train is still taking it's sweet time in catching up to the little old lady. So instead reading with fascinated horror or gripped with tension, I'm alternating between watching the (very pretty) scenery and checking my watch, wondering why the doom train is so late.
