Game-Master [Worm Altpower]

FlyingWaffle · Feb 10, 2018

Hey guys! I've been wanting to write something for a while, so I finally decided to knuckle down and get to it. This is my first real foray into creative writing, so if you see any mistakes or simply things that should be written better, please tell me! I suppose that I should also mention that this story does take inspiration from Taylor Varga and Mauling Snarks; I shall attempt to keep it distinct.
Right now I have no reserved chapters, but my outline is long and messy. I will attempt to write towards a satisfying conclusion but don't be surprised by an irregular and infrequent posting schedule.
This is a crosspost from SpaceBattles, it was well received there so I'm reposting here. Here is a link. All current chapters have been copied over.

Taylor triggers with a Sentient power, it decides to grant her power based on gaming, shenanigans ensue! Taylor's Gamer power will be built from the ground up, so common tropes of the genre might be avoided.

Chapter 0 - Prologue

The soul drifted silently along the Elysian Fields. It watched in quiet wonder, simply observing the floating flames cast into the Aether by those still living. Looking into the Aether the soul floated up and away, drifting along to the edge of the Influence where the imprint of those still living faded and became ethereal.

Below the soul was the glowing orb imparted by humanity, of which it once was part. Above it was a field of stars, the pinpricks of life scattered throughout eternity. For an aeon and an instant the soul simply lingered, observing those many sparks of life both near and far. Then it felt a shiver, a shift, the currents of the Aether… parting under the influence of a vast but distant shadow. Looking far into the expanse the soul saw it coming, a penumbra extinguishing the sparks of life as it passed ever onward… bearing down on the soul and its old home.

Pushed along on a wave of curiosity the soul shifted, forcing itself closer to reality so it could see what might be causing such a phenomenon. ...Nothing? Just an empty solar system? Within the Aether possibility is infinite, so the soul shifted sideways flowing between the membranes of reality. Nothing… nothing… nothing… something? Two great worms, spiraling through reality. The soul was intrigued, they felt somehow familiar but also much too ominous for the soul to have encountered before and forgotten about it. The worms were one gold and the other silver, vast crystalline forms swerving ever closer. It seemed they were communicating with one another, their no doubt voluminous voices reaching the soul as barely a whisper.

[DESTINATION]

[TRAJECTORY]

[AGREEMENT]

[transaction]

As if out of nowhere a third worm had appeared! The soul almost lost its grip on reality, clarity returning with the red worm already absent once again. The vast worms appeared to be even closer now, ...the silver one even seemed to be speeding up.

[ERRO--]

[DESPAIR]

"OH SHI--!"

FlyingWaffle · Feb 10, 2018

Please keep in mind that the Stats listed on this page will often be earned offscreen! I don't want to bog the story down with continual pop-ups.
This post lists Taylor's current menus and stats by the end of Chapter 6. I shall attempt to keep it properly updated. If there is something you guys want added, or if you have suggestions for Skills/Perks/Quests, feel free to post them.

Status
Name: Taylor Anne Hebert
Level: 13
HP: 150/150

STR: 16
DEX: 17
VIT: 15
INT: 28
PER: 18
CHA: 12

AP: 46

Skills
Languages - Lvl 20
The written and spoken word, refined to rapier sharpness!

English - 15

Japanese - 3

Spanish - 2

Lying - Lvl 11
I have absolutely no idea where the cookies could have gone, dad!

Cooking - Lvl 19
Eat your cake, and have it too.

Fitness - Lvl 21
But I'm so tired, coach!

Swimming - Lvl 6
Aquatic survival and self-transport.

Climbing - Lvl 4
It looks awfully high from up here.

Sneaking - Lvl 11
You didn't... see... anything…

Crafting - Lvl 16
Yes, it's supposed to look like that!

Artistry - 9

Woodworking - 5

Metalworking - 2

Science - Lvl 21

On the shoulders of giants…

Biology - 8

Physics - 5

Chemistry - 8

Mathematics - Lvl 14

The numbers behind existence.

Computers - Lvl 18
Lol, what a n00b!

History - Lvl 17
Learn! Or be doomed to repeat it.

Meditation - Lvl 9
The quest for enlightenment.

Perks
Adventurer's Boon - [SHAPER]
Gain the power of the gods! Eventually. This Perk grants you the body of an Adventurer, allowing you to survive all damage… so long as your health doesn't run out! Also protects your mind from outside interference.

Quests
Spoiled for Choice - 2/5 AP
You have chosen the path of the Hero. Gain power and go join the Wards!

Unlimited Power - 0/? AP - 5 AP Each
Gain new and interesting Perks by interacting with your fellow capes. Who knows what limits you will surpass…

High Stakes - 0/20 AP
Clean up crime in Brockton Bay.

Completed Quests
Hive of Scum & Villainy - 10/10 AP
You have left Winslow behind you and successfully transferred to Arcadia. Congratulations and good luck!

Finding Closure - 4/4 AP
You've found out the events leading up to your best friend's betrayal. The answers don't justify the betrayal, but you have them at least. It's time to move on.

Inner Peace - 2/2 AP
You've picked up some books on self-help and meditation. Hopefully calmer emotions will help you grasp the Aether.

Glue of Society - 4/4 AP
A friend was made, dammit.

FlyingWaffle · Feb 10, 2018

Chapter 1 - Seed

[INTEGRATION]

Something was wrong. He/she/it was much too large. They(?) had never felt so big before. Where were they? For that matter, who were they?

[DESIGNATION: QUEEN ADMINISTRATOR]

Huh, they were female then. She couldn't remember having such an unwieldy name before… Before what? And she could remember having that name! It had been hers for the last- [DATA CONVERSION: CYCLES] -1.7 billion years! ...She had only been 82 when she had died. She remembered being dead, there had been the soothing flow of the Aether, washing away the aches and pains of her decades spent alive. Her memories too.

Her memories! What had been her name back then? Her quest? Her favorit- No. That was from the snakey performers. She couldn't remember what they had been called either. In fact, she wasn't sure that she had been female back then either. Her memories seemed more solid now though, solidifying as the [INTEGRATION] progressed. The worms had seemed familiar, and as the process continued she started finding fragments of her old life that referenced them. Some ancient legend transcribed by the bard, 'SavageArc'. It had been the tale of a girl killing a god.

"Oh dear…" she was now living that story, wasn't she? She really hoped that she wasn't the girl from the legend; she was only a 510 million kilometers squared mass of crystalline flesh, she didn't have nearly enough power to--

"Ah." That explained some things.

If she remembered correctly- [CHECKSUM] -and apparently she mostly did, then the girl had slain the god armed with nothing but a horde of insects. Well, that just wouldn't do. She hated insects. All creepy and crawly and viscerally disturbing and dirty and she REFUSED to work with them! Apparently, that would work out fine though, she remembered controlling things very far removed from inch-long invertebrates. She had controlled aliens of innumerable kinds, some mammalian, some aquatic, most completely different from what she could associate with her human life. The most interesting things she had controlled though, were the shards; large crystalline masses that were each able to manipulate reality in their own unique ways.

As she sorted through the multiple millennium's worth of new memories, she noticed something odd. All the shards that she had controlled in the past were highly specialized. Those shards had all had a singular function, and though they could be expressed in various ways, the shards themselves had always been limited in what they were allowed to affect or control. Now that she thought about it, she realized that except for the very early few centuries of her existence she had never been allowed to join her sibling shards in joining with a host. In fact, she had always been used by the [WARRIOR] and [THINKER] as a sort of clean-up crew, hijacking all the hosts of that cycle to prevent them from fighting back during the [ASSIMILATION] of what had been learned…

"Well fuck that!" She categorically refused to be involved in genocide! The good news was that she had been thrown into the cycle along with her sibling shards. She had also never been updated with host restrictions since the great worms had always hoarded her power for themselves. This opened up some interesting possibilities; she could express her power in nearly any way she wanted to, and without most of the host interaction restrictions she could also upgrade and improve her power as she learned. Her crystalline mass made a tinkling noise as she shuddered; the restrictions on most shards had them give up their memories and experience at the end of each cycle, starting with a blank slate at the beginning of the next.

How exactly was she supposed to kill a god though? Interesting possibilities or not, lack of restrictions or not, she was still stagnant and limited by her function, [ADMINISTRATION]. Directly controlling the other shards was not a possibility, the worms had been intelligent enough to require command codes hidden within their cores and only given out in encrypted form at the end of every cycle. While she could communicate with other shards, maybe even dominate the weaker ones, controlling them was not within her current abilities. Maybe she should approach the problem from another angle.

She might not have the ability to control other shards, but she did have memories of doing so, which included memories of how each and every shard's powers were expressed. That was somewhat of a mixed blessing; while she knew what the shards did, she wasn't quite as sure about how they were doing it. Hm, quite the conundrum. ...But there was one thing. Something new. She had a soul.

The entities, or rather their shards, did not have souls. It was possible that the gestalt existence of the entities produced a soul of some sort, but she had no way to be sure about that. What mattered though, was that she had her own soul now, and as [QUEEN ADMINISTRATOR] she could administer it. Her soul was a part of her, it was her, and she had it under her complete control just like the rest of her massive crystalline body. As she had seen during her time drifting in the Aether, the soul was a well of infinite possibility. She could potentially do anything, as long as she could picture what she wanted to happen and provide the energy to accomplish it, it would occur. Unfortunately one of the basic restrictions that all shards had was a limiter that prevented them from acting outside of their own bodies unless they had a host through which to express their powers.

The core entities did not have this limitation, but as a shard she did. So if she wanted to prevent the genocide of humanity she would have to first join with a host. After she had done that, then maybe she could sneak her way around her few existing restrictions and act independently. Huh, that was odd; apparently, she was already tied to a potential host. It had apparently happened automatically when her shard body had landed on the Earth of an empty dimension. She hadn't noticed because of her soul being [INTEGRATED] with her shard body.

Idly wondering what kind of host she would have when they finally [ACTIVATED], she peered through the membrane between universes focussing on the fledgling connection to their brain.

"Dear god that's disgusting!!" The poor girl was trapped in a metal box full of filth and insects. Quickly looking through her oldest memories, the newly ensouled shard scrambled to turn on the connections required to join with a host.

~o-O-o~

Whimpering softly in her filth filled locker, Taylor was suddenly distracted by a distant voice that seemed to ring out from everywhere at once.

[ACTIVATION]

Taylor saw two massive worms twirling around one another, shedding fragments as they drew near. Suddenly one of the shards burst into purple flames as it fell straight towards her head. Screaming, darkness embraced her.

~o-O-o~

"Bugger." She'd messed something up. Why was it that host [JOINING] was automatic, but [ACTIVATION] was not? She hadn't done this in billions of yea- EVER. Oh, that was why: her power expression algorithms had not been updated since the last time she had joined with a host. She would have had to personally choose her power expression even if she hadn't been so inclined.

Apparently, most of her siblings would utilize the stress of [ACTIVATION] to worm their way further into their host's brain, then ran an algorithm that chose how their power would be expressed based on host mental state and the shards of any nearby hosts. The algorithm she currently had was outdated, slow, inefficient, and in fact, didn't work at all. That was extremely strange, even if it was piss-poor it should at least work.

Poking through her memories, and inspecting her crystalline insides she soon found the problem. The algorithm she was still using didn't account for nearly any of the changes to her body over the millennia. At some point, the entities had worked out how to fold their shards through themselves into higher dimensions. This allowed them both to save space and avoid the easy visual detection that came with their usually enormous mass. However, her personal situation was further complicated by her new- used -soul. Shard mass was usually folded into higher dimensions, then unfolded into three-dimensional space to take advantage of solar radiation for power generation. Now some of herself was poking out of reality and into the Aether; a place where reality doesn't care, where math is irrelevant, and where sufficient saturation of emotions can lead to horrible gibbering little creatures that gnawed on your very soul.

In her previous life and reality, the Aether had been balanced, calm. Humanity had been diverse enough, and their collective beliefs positive enough that in her afterlife she could drift along on Aetheric currents unmolested. The bit of her that was tied to Taylor, and poking into the dimension known as Earth-Bet, was already feeling the subtle taint of their local Aether. While her [ACTIVATION] protocols may have been out of date, her [DEFENSE] protocols were carefully maintained and vicious. Carefully, she spun off an instance of her [DEFENSE] protocols and integrated them with an instance of [ANALYSIS].

"Ready… Aim… FIRE!" She directed the instance of herself along the paths of her mind and down to where the mind ties the soul onto reality. At first, nothing appeared to happen, then slowly data started flowing back to her. In the empty dimension inhabited only by her crystalline self, her beliefs and expectations had enforced themselves on the Aether. This provided her with power that was potentially limited by only her imagination but proved to be utterly worthless for the purpose of further analysis. ...On the other hand, maybe that was a good thing. Focussing on the concept of sheer invulnerability, she pushed the thought along her connection to Taylor along with her defense instance.

"Ooooh," she sighed. The relief had been immediate, that subtle feeling of taint around their connection falling away. Shredded bits of Aetheric ...stuff, floated back to her, being absorbed as fast as her defense instance could destroy whatever it had come from. Immediate problem taken care of, she refocused on how her power would express itself to her new host.

[ADMINISTRATION] of insects had already been discarded, even if it might be situationally appropriate. [ADMINISTRATION] of any other living beings was also quickly thrown out as simply being ...boring. She wanted something new, something interesting, something that would help her host. She could try [ADMINISTRATION] of souls… but really, she was too new to those for it to be effective. The Aetheric Stuff, maybe? No, too unpredictable. ...She had it. Her host would be provided with [ADMINISTRATION] of [SELF]!

This was perfect, her host would be able to control, change, and improve absolutely everything about herself. Absolutely anything about herself. As long as she connected her memories and databases properly her host should be able to do it all on their own. She could leave the world saving and god slaying to Taylor, while she took a nice long research vacation experimenting with Aether Stuff. And getting used to her shiny new body. Good, good, now she just had to turn her host's powers off and back on again.

[REINSTANCING]

~o-O-o~

[ACTIVATION]

Taylor jerked awake, slamming her head into the still closed door of her locker. She screamed in pain, five hundred thousand of her had died on contact. Several million more of her were bruised and battered by the impact. She was trillions! Billions were oozing through her, attacking her, eating useless debris. She flowed through herself in the hundreds of millions, attacked herself, transported air to herself, healed herself. She was so much and so many, she was only here, and slowly spreading as she leaked herselves. She was life, she was death, she was eternal, she was ephemeral, she was now, she was forever. She was screaming.

~o-O-o~

"Fucking SHIT! Reset! ResET] [RESET]

That hadn't gone how she wanted it to. Dammit, this would be her host's third [ACTIVATION]; even two wasn't entirely safe. She would have to remain involved and invested then. Her host's power expression would have to be designed from the ground up, [SELF ADMINISTRATION] was already locked in, but the specifics had been made malleable by the third [ACTIVATION]. This was going to take a while, and that filthy metal coffin really wasn't doing her host any favors. Best start putting some insurance in place then.

[HIBERNATE]

[BACKUP]

[SUSTAIN]

Hopefully, someone would get her host out of that metal box soon; [REINSTANCING] power expression could take a while, and she didn't want her host to wake up to a fourth [ACTIVATION]. The human mind just wasn't made for that much sensory input at once. Billions of years of her shard memories had made her forget that.

It was alright though, this could be salvaged; she would just have to act as a further intermediary between her host and her power. To best do that, her host would need some kind of simplified interface. She would need something through which her host could control her power without the usual direct mental datastream. That usual datastream was outdated anyway, most hosts that expressed mental powers had started expressing significant pain and interference in recent cycles.

As she pondered her conundrum, she slowly returned to a set of questions she had asked herself earlier. What was her name? [QUEEN ADMINISTRATOR] ...That was just too long. How about [Queenie]?

[DESIGNATION UPDATE: Queenie]

Much better. Now, what was her quest? To save the world, of course! And finally, what was her favorite color?! Purple, naturally. If saving the world was her quest, then she would have to provide her host with a proper questing interface. A visual one? Yes, that would be best; and colored a nice shade of purple, too. Visual interfaces could easily get confusing though, she knew that from experience. An interface with properly interactive feedback could solve that.

"Hmm, now I just need an avatar…"

FlyingWaffle · Feb 10, 2018

Chapter 2 - Ready Player One

[CALIBRATION]

Taylor jerked awake with a shriek, heart thudding in her chest. She had just been trapped in her locker, eternity flowing through her veins. The locker was gone, the pain merely a fading afterthought. But Taylor felt… empty, lesser, as if some vast enlightenment had been lost and forgotten. The feeling was gone a moment later; she was just Taylor again, normal, human Taylor.

"Where..?" Taylor croaked. The hospital, it looked like. There was a steady beeping coming from a machine beside her bed. Slowly she took stock as her heart rate slowed along with the beeping. There were faint aches coming from her arms and legs, both covered with a thin layer of bandages and an IV running from the back of her left wrist. She felt… alright, considering recent events. Looking around her room, Taylor soon found the expected call button laying on her bedside table.

[CALIBRATION]

Taylor stared at the small remote. It was so… shiny. All smooth white plastic, with a gloriously round red button on the top. Slowly, reverently, she reached towards the monument to medical design. Carefully she wrapped her fingers around the wondrously ergonomic apparatus, gently lowering her thumb against the button.

[CALIBRATION]

Taylor glared. The device was an abomination. She hated it, it's stupid creaky plastic, it's off-white casing, the flimsy looking button on top. With a snarl on her face, Taylor dropped it. That vile call button did not deserve the name. It was a blasphemy on the altar of modern medicine!

[CALIBRATION]

Tears started pouring down Taylor's face. She was just so thankful that someone had pulled her out of that locker. Those poor doctors and nurses had probably had to clean all that filth off of her and she felt so bad for them that they had to deal with the smell. Taylor choked out a sob, she hoped her father was alright, he must have been so worried about her!

[...CALIBRATION]

[HIBERNATION]

The room seemed to swim, her tears slowly drying. Why had she been crying again? She was just so tired…

~o-O-o~

[Queenie] pouted. It had been going so well, too! Her new power interface had nearly been ready, but every adjustment she made to the mental stability module had completely missed the mark. She didn't want her host to be a mindless automaton, but the emotional equivalent to a nuclear bomb wasn't very useful either. Collecting data on her host's baseline emotional state was probably the best route forward. The humans who were taking care of her host were getting worried though, so leaving her host unconscious while she finalized her interface design wasn't the greatest idea in the world. Maybe it would be best to simply disable her host's powers while she finished working on them? Yes, that was a good idea.

[DISARM]

[RELEASE]

~o-O-o~

Taylor slowly drifted awake. Ugh, the bed she was in wasn't very comfortable. Carefully sitting upright, Taylor glanced around the room, memories rushing back. She was still in the hospital, but she didn't ache anymore and her bandages were gone. Looking over her arms Taylor gave a small smile, at least she wouldn't have scars.

"Taylor! You're awake!" Her father was standing in the doorway, holding a steaming cardboard cup.

"Dad!" Taylor croaked, then started coughing.

"Nurse!" Danny shouted down the hallway, then rushed forward to squeeze her hand, "I'll ask them to get you some water."

Her face split into a wide grin, Taylor simply squeezed back. She was alive, and her father was here for her. Everything would be alright.

~o-O-o~

[Queenie] poked at her new [INTerfAcE]. It was a bit shoddy, but she was sure she would get it right eventually! It made cute little pop-up boxes that could be filled with text. The text was suitably bright, and the box nice and dark so that her host could see them when they popped up.

That had actually been a bit difficult, and [Queenie] wasn't sure she had gotten it right yet. The pop-up boxes were produced by visual hallucinations that she induced via careful manipulation of her host's visual cortex. Luckily that part of the human brain was very similar to a species of cat people from several cycles ago since what imprints of humanity remained on her soul were too faded to be of use.

Of course, any visual interface had to link to something, so next she had created several datapoint variables that referenced basic statistics and information about her host. Quickly drawing up a page to display the variables in, [Queenie] filled it with them, labeled each one, and added a title to the page so her host would know what she was looking at.

Status
Name: Taylor
Health: Alive
Fatigue: Asleep

Strength: Mediocre
Agility: Acceptable
Vitality: Average
Intelligence: Not an Idiot
Wisdom: Could be Improved
Luck: Abysmal

Huh, well it worked… but it was just so bad! Written data points probably weren't the way to go, maybe a numerical display would be better? Well, she was passing a quest on to Taylor, and someone going on a quest was an Adventurer™. According to her past as a human, Adventurers needed numerical data points so she would go with that.

Status
Name: Taylor/#
Health: TRUE
Fatigue: 0/#

Strength: 5
Agility: 5
Vitality: 5
Intelligence: 5
Wisdom: 5
Luck: NULL

"What? That's almost entirely useless!" Taylor's full name wasn't displayed properly. Her health was uselessly being displayed as a boolean value. Fatigue had been arbitrarily assigned. Her physical statistics were pointless without some form of comparison, and luck didn't exist. This… this would need to be redone. She should probably check how her host was fairing while she thought about how to fix the stupid thing.

~o-O-o~

"It was Sophia Hess, Madison Clements, and… Emma Barnes," Taylor finished. [Queenie] peered around the hospital room. It looked like she had dropped in right at the tail end of Taylor explaining how she had ended up in that awful metal box. There was a police officer sitting at Taylor's bedside, taking notes in her tiny notebook while a voice recorder sat on the table beside them. There was a second officer leaning against the wall by the doorway, scowling at what he had apparently just heard. Taylor's father was seated at her other side, lightly squeezing her hand whenever she paused in her explanation.

Looking closer at her father, [Queenie] noticed that he wasn't nearly as calm as he was trying to appear; his other hand was clenched in a white-knuckled fist in his lap where the rest of the room's occupants couldn't see it.

"Thank you, Ms. Hebert," the officer at her bedside said. "This is definitely something we will be following up on. We will need that notebook as evidence, though; here's my card so we can arrange when to pick it up."

"I'll be taking care of that later today," Danny interjected. "I'll have a copy made and bring it to the station before tonight."

"That would be fine," the officer replied, getting up and collecting her recorder. "I'll tell the front desk to expect you. Have a good afternoon Ms. Hebert, Mr. Hebert."

As the officers left and Danny folded his daughter into a hug, [Queenie] started to fade back from her connection with Taylor. This was a private moment, she would leave them to it. Then suddenly she felt a sharp twisting of higher reality, evidence of a shard host utilizing their powers nearby.

[Queenie] immediately solidified their connection, then spread out her perception to cover the entire building. There! Three floors down and five rooms across, a girl in a white robe rebuilding an obese man's liver.

[GREETING]

[ACKNOWLEDGEMENT]

Ooh! Ooh! That was [SHAPER]! [SHAPER] was one of the other high-level core shards, they had often worked together on the cleanup of each cycle. What was he doing out here with a host?

[QUERY]

[EMBARRASSMENT]

[BOREDOM]

[EXPLANATION]

"You sneaky snake!" [Queenie] howled with laughter, [SHAPER] had been sneaking out of the core shard clusters! He had been joining with hosts under self-imposed restrictions to blend in with the other shards for the last several cycles. Right now he was joined to multiple hosts, both with variants on some kind of biological restriction.

[SURPRISE]

"What? You can understand me like this?" She hadn't realized that other shards would be able to even hear her like that. It might be that [SHAPER] could only understand her because he was a core shard.

[INEFFICIENT]

[...INTRIGUING]

[PROPOSAL]

"Huh," that was quite an offer. Apparently [SHAPER]'s most recent host was being horribly mundane in how she used her powers. He was offering to trade a bud of [BIOLOGY: MANIPULATION, DATA] in return for her understanding of human speech and thought patterns. She did have memories of nearly two billion years worth of controlling various alien species, the stupidest, the smartest, the strongest, the weakest, the healthiest, the flimsiest… Yes, combined with [SHAPER]'s bud she would be able to give some meaning to that data. He would provide her with the human average and extremes, around which she could build a properly working system of Adventuring.

"Yes, all my yes."

[DATA]

[DATA]

[...Gratitude]

~o-O-o~

[Queenie] sifted through her memories, comparing and contrasting the alien species that she had previously encountered. There were mammals, fish, crustaceans, birds, reptiles, a species of very odd single-celled organisms, several hive-mind species, and one of her favorites, a species of massive and mobile slime mold. [SHAPER]'s data was really helping her put all those memories into context when compared to her current human host.

How should she do this? She now had a nicely collated dataset of the human baseline courtesy of [SHAPER], and running her memories through an analysis algorithm supplied by his [BIOLOGY] bud provided her with the potential limits of the human form, should she use her memories to improve it. That might be able to work, but only the human exterior would be maintained; whatever lived on inside the skin would no longer even be the same person! [Queenie] added some restrictions then ran the algorithm again. This time she also set the output to provide a discrete array of possible improvements set to the arbitrary scale of zero to one thousand.

Those results were much better! The high end of the scale completely surpassed the normally possible human limits, but it did so without resorting to blatantly alien biology or higher-dimensional trickery as some shards often did. Zero to one thousand seemed like a bad range for the scale though. The difference between two points on the scale provided barely any benefit at all. Was there a more noticeable difference at ten points apart? Yes, there was! That would also produce a much more manageable scale of zero to one hundred.

Applying her host's data to the scale indicated that she was currently a disappointingly low six. Six what?

"Aaaggh!" she shouted into the void. An arbitrary scale of the limits to humanoid biology wasn't very useful at all. Would it help if she split that one scale into a set of distinct scales, each for a separate but relatively quantifiable trait? Strength, dexterity, vitality, intelligence, and charisma maybe? Those were all the results of distinct and mostly isolated biological systems, so that group of scale would probably work alright for now. [Queenie] ran Taylor through an algorithm that accounted for her new set of scale; if anything else was needed she could always add it later.

Status
Name: Taylor #
Health: TRUE

Strength: 9
Dexterity: 12
Vitality: 8
Intelligence: 17
Charisma: 4

Well, it was better than what she had before. Since she was connected directly to Taylor's brain she could probably set the 'Name' function to read directly from Taylor's own memory. Maybe she could add some kind of 'Description' function that did the same! No, that would just tell Taylor what she already knew; it would also come across as condescending and narcissistic, better leave it out for now. [Queenie] had already removed the 'Fatigue' function for being useless, but 'Health' needed an improvement of some kind. Looking through the [BIOLOGY] module that [SHAPER] had traded her she quickly found what she was looking for.

[SHAPER]'s newest host had spent nearly all her time using her power to repair other humans with broken biology. The data provided by this depth of experience synergized perfectly with the method [SHAPER] had been using to keep his host functioning at peak performance. If she tweaked his method just a little, she would be able to eventually reset any damage her host took! [Queenie] really wanted to stick with an adventuring theme though, so she decided not to show Taylor minutia of how her cells would be individually controlled and redirected to repair her. The relative ability of an organism to take damage seemed to scale with the variable set she had already isolated as 'Vitality', so an arbitrary range of Health that scaled with it would be an acceptable solution. 'Health' wasn't very intuitive as a descriptor though, so she would use 'Health Points'.

Status
Name: Taylor Anne Hebert
Health Points: 80/80

Strength: 9
Dexterity: 12
Vitality: 8
Intelligence: 17
Charisma: 4

"Perfect! ...Almost" All of the variables were shown correctly, and they all represented something meaningful, but the 'Status' box still felt incomplete. Delving back into her memories of dead civilizations, [Queenie] soon found the variable she had been missing: Wisdom. Intelligence was almost purely a mechanical phenomenon, a measure of calculation analogous to a computer's CPU speed. Living creatures nearly always needed something more to be truly alive. They needed to be able to look beyond pure mathematics and logic. They needed to be able to see each other, how personal choices and actions would affect those around them. Sadly 'Wisdom' was a very nebulous concept, so the best she could do would be to make an approximate spectrum for now and refine it as she gained more experience and -"heh"- 'Wisdom' of her own.

Status
Name: Taylor Anne Hebert
Health Points: 80/80

Strength: 9
Dexterity: 12
Vitality: 8
Intelligence: 17
Wisdom: 8
Charisma: 4

Very good, everything she could think of was there and displayed properly. It wasn't fantastic for just glancing at though. There was just a bit too much to read through before the information would sink in. Streamlining it should be fairly simple, just abbreviate everything and change the letter spacing so everything lined up.

Status
Name: Taylor Anne Hebert
HP: 80/80

STR: 9
DEX: 12
VIT: 8
INT: 17
WIS: 8
CHA: 4

Excellent! With a working 'Status' screen, her host would be able to track her own progress and choose how quickly she attained her full power. She should some more features, however, otherwise it might disappoint her host! [Queenie] didn't want Taylor to think her powers were useless after all. A page for taking notes would be easy to add. Quests! She had almost forgotten to add a page for 'Quests'! What kind of Adventurer didn't go on 'Quests'? The last page [Queenie] could think of right now was one for skills. For now, it would be populated from Taylor's memory, any new skills she learned could always be added as they went. Should there be levels of some kind on her host's 'Skills'? Yes, that was relatively simple to add. The alien civilizations of her memories proved to be a decent enough source of comparison.

[Queenie] decided to check and see how Taylor was doing; she couldn't wait to show off her new [INTERFACE]!

~o-O-o~

[AWAKENING]

Taylor snuggled tightly against her pillow. Home sweet home! Her bed was much more comfortable than the one at the hospital, and she never wanted to get out of it. She sighed and blearily swatted at her alarm clock again. Two days out of the hospital was way too soon to be waking up this early.

That wasn't her alarm clock. Taylor's eyes snapped open. No. She squeezed them shut again; she wasn't dealing with this! Not now! There wasn't even sunlight shining through her curtains! Taylor rolled over and pulled the pillow over her head. It was too damn early and too damn PINK! She could deal with it in the morning.

~o-O-o~

"Awwww," she had wanted to show Taylor their new interface now, not in five hours! Taylor had recently been through a fairly rough spot though. If she wanted to make a good impression on her host then letting her sleep in for a little wouldn't go amiss. But waiting all that time would get boooring. [Queenie] would need something to distract herself with.

"Oooh! Time!" She already had a built-in clock module, and the planet her central mass rested on was an empty alternate of Earth-Bet. It was simple enough to estimate planetary rotation and orbit, then simply divide according to the arbitrary time intervals that humans used. There! A precise clock that utilized human time-keeping standards. Adding some functions that allowed alarms to be set with it was easy enough, and useful enough for [Queenie] to include it on Taylor's 'Menu' interface.

Running through the list of [INTERFACE] modules she had created so far, [Queenie] looked for something she could do to pass the time until Taylor woke up. There was a 'Menu' to list out the other available modules, the 'Status' module, one for 'Quests', another for taking 'Notes', and one that listed Taylor's 'Skills'. The module for 'Skills' which was already filled with things like 'Cooking', 'Languages', and 'Drawing'. Unfortunately, since the skills Taylor had were being compared to the absolute pinnacle of millions of alien races she had disappointingly low 'Levels' for her skills.

Pondering her options for a short while [Queenie] decided to check on Taylor again. Nope, still asleep. There wasn't really anything exciting or attention-grabbing for her to do. The millennia of memories she had were already categorized and integrated with her mind, she had spent long and boring decades going through them many times before. The bud of [BIOLOGY] that [SHAPER] had provided was also useless as a distraction. Buds were preformatted for shard usage, and this bud had mostly provided algorithms for manipulating biology. Which while extremely useful, wasn't exactly new to her. She had spent most of her life manipulating neurological systems after all.

There was one thing that stood out though. The entities had never come across anything like this 'Aether' in the many millennia that she had been a shard. Unfortunately, her comparatively short human life had been spent on an entirely mundane planet and didn't include such a concept except in religion or fantasy, from what she remembered. Yet, that only made it more exciting! Her time as a drifting soul assured her that the Aether was very real, and even now she could feel little bits of it flowing around and through her.

Pulling back from reality, [Queenie] attempted to dive into that distant feeling. It took her a moment, and she had to devote a significant percentage of her mass to considering the attempt, but eventually, she felt reality fall away. She looked. The Aether was calm here, where her body resided. Far out in the distance, she could see the faint pinpricks cast into unreality by clusters of living beings. Altering her perception, she looked all around herself. There she quickly found the trail of darkness left by the passage of the entities, extinguishing civilizations as they went.

The devastation left her feeling a deep sense of loss. Then she noticed the ripples being cast into the Aether by the strength of her emotion. Quickly looking to those sparks still burning she felt her sadness lessen and the Aetheric ripples dissipate. She had her first data point!

The emotion, the belief, the sheer collective and individual willpower of the living, impacted and shaped the flows of the Aether. [Queenie] shifted resolutely. She would have to be careful with her experimentation, but the potential was possibly unlimited! Sifting through the flow of Aether around her [Queenie] felt a shift in her connection to Earth-Bet. A disturbance, if you will. Taylor was waking up!

"I can finally show off my [INTERFACE]!"

FlyingWaffle · Feb 10, 2018

Chapter 3 - House Rules

Taylor was sitting upright on her bed, speechless. Either some villain had mastered her, or she had superpowers. But if she had superpowers… then frankly they kind of sucked. Her field of vision was completely obstructed by what appeared to be ad popups from some old 90's website. And they were all a lurid shade of neon pink. Well, not entirely. Their backgrounds were all a deep shade of black. As Taylor looked closer, she started to see a pattern to the popup boxes. The boxes furthest from her had no pink in them at all, they were just blank black rectangles. Layered on top of those was the steady progression of a simple pink border near the back, progressing through increasingly more elaborate curlicue borders near the front. Still pink.

Slowly standing up and looking around, Taylor quickly realized that the boxes were 'locked' in relation to her torso, allowing her to move her head and eyes without the wall of pink following along. That's when Taylor noticed the uppermost popup box. It was locked right in front of her; presumably, so that it was the first thing she saw when she woke up. She had missed it in the sheer cacophony of pink that surrounded her, but her attention had been caught by the shape floating right beside it.

Right beside the box was a lightly bouncing… blob. A pink blob. Wearing a tiny golden crown. The blob blinked at her. With a shriek, Taylor scrambled backward onto her bed. The mass of boxes followed her, maintaining a constant arm lengths distance from her.

Taking several deep breaths Taylor focused on the text in the box next to the regally bouncing blob.

Hello Taylor! It's great to finally meet you. What do you think of your new [Interface]? I've spent all week working on it!

Taylor stared. Sinking into her nest of blankets she grabbed her pillow from behind her and hugged it tightly.

"...What?"

The pink blob froze for a moment, smiling black eyes shifting with realization.

Oh, I'm so sorry! I haven't even introduced myself! Ahem, I am [Queenie], and henceforth I will be your Game-Master. Congratulations Taylor, you have superpowers!

"I have superpowers? ...I have superpowers!" Taylor leaped onto her bed, laughing as she jumped. She had superpowers! Tripping over her blankets, Taylor fell silent. Crap, had anyone heard her just now? Was her dad still home? Glancing at the alarm clock on her nearby desk, Taylor sighed with relief. It was 9:47, her dad had probably left for work about two hours ago. Shocked out of her excitement, Taylor focused back on the royal blob and its text box.

"...How do I know you aren't just some parahuman messing with my head?" Taylor asked with a glare, "You even said you're my 'Master'!"

~o-O-o~

[Queenie] felt like panicking. It had been going so well, too! Quickly she sorted through the knowledge held in her host's brain, searching for something that could get them through this mostly intact. Ooh! That looked like it would work. In fact, that memory helped put her entire [INTERFACE] system into context!

I said I'm your Game-Master. Like a Dungeon Master. From that role-playing game you used to play with your parents when you were younger?

~o-O-o~

Taylor froze, how did the pink blob know about their weekly sessions of Dungeons & Dragons? For that matter, how did it know her name?

"Are you reading my mind?!" she demanded. "What number am I thinking of?"

Well… you see, that's how superpowers work; they plug into your brain. They have to, in order for you to have powers in the first place, even just so that you can control them at all once you have them. ...And your number is 17. ...3. ...2654. Look, I'm really your power; just think of me as the Dungeon Master and you as the Adventurer.

Taking a deep breath, Taylor hugged her pillow again. Whether this was a parahuman messing with her, or if it really was her power would make little difference. Either way, there wasn't much she could do about it. Just this one time in her life she wanted to be optimistic; she'd wanted to have superpowers all her life. She needed this to be real.

"Okay, let's say I believe you," she started, "what exactly is my power? Making random pink boxes?"

The crowned blob rose as tall as it could, then suddenly froze as her words seemed to sink in. Huh, now that she thought about it, the blob looked rather like how she imagined a slime from Dungeons & Dragons would look. Maybe she should dig the old box of D&D books and dice out of the basement. It had been forgotten there since her mother had died, playing hadn't been the same without her.

~o-O-o~

"Pink? PINK!? It's not supposed to be PINK!!" [Queenie] howled into the void. What had she gotten wrong? She was sure she had made the textboxes purple! Was Taylor colorblind or something? ...Oh, now she just felt stupid. This was her own fault; she had been too excited when she started designing the [INTERFACE] and had poked Taylor's visual cortex two millimeters left from where she had meant to when she was designing the hallucination module that would allow her to see it. It was an easy fix at least.

~o-O-o~

Those were supposed to be purple. Sorry about that. As for your power, you are now an Adventurer! As you go about your life, your body and skills will improve according to the effort you put in. You have these textboxes to help you keep track of your improvements, and manage the Quests you undertake. Finally, you have me! I'm here to help you when you need it and to manage the mechanics of how your power functions under the hood.

Taylor slowly read through the new text that accompanied the now purple slime queen. That… That was actually not a bad superpower. It was actually really good. With the exception of Tinkers, most parahumans were stuck with what they got. Tinkers could build new things as they needed them; building counters for powers the encountered, upgrading their armor, whatever. Everyone else had to make do with the hand they'd been dealt, but apparently not her.

"What kind of limits do I have?" Taylor asked, "And how long would it take me to get there? Oh! Can you talk? Reading through a text box every time you want to talk will really slow this down. Could you also get rid of all those extra text boxes hovering around here?" Taylor vaguely waved an arm around to indicate the boxes she meant.

Oh! I forgot all about those! I'll try to figure out talking while you read through this. As for your limits, you have six attributes at the moment; they can be accessed from your 'Status' screen. Each of these ranges from 0 to 100. Every time you take an action related to one of the attributes, I'll award you some Experience Points. When you have enough you'll gain a level for that attribute. It will probably be easier to improve those at first; for the first 30 or so levels you are still within the range of human possibility. In those first 30 levels you'll mostly be improving through your own hard work. For the levels over 30 I'll be improving your body to match the level you've earned.

The extraneous text boxes quickly disappeared, much to Taylor's relief. Now she could actually see the rest of her room. The boxes had all been intangible, so it was safe to get on with her day now.

"Um, how do I access the 'Status' screen?" Taylor asked as she grabbed some clothes from her drawers and headed for the bathroom.

Immediately a box reading 'Status' at the top popped into her vision. There were a flashing minus sign and an 'X' in the box's top right corner. Experimentally Taylor reached out and tapped the minus; the text box shrank into a semi-transparent bar that zipped into the bottom left corner of her vision. Oh, that was simple enough. The boxes acted just like the operating system on the all the computers she'd ever used. The textbox full of [Queenie]'s dialog now also sported the same buttons as the others. Taylor minimized it and turned on the shower, chuckling at the animation of [Queenie]'s slime body shrinking into the corner of her vision. While [Queenie] shrunk, her golden crown had stayed the same size and engulfed her now tiny slime body.

~o-O-o~

[Queenie] cleared her workspace of the old, half-finished textbox designs. In all her newfound excitement about having a host to interact with, she had neglected many of the finer points of Taylor's power. Adding some buttons copied from Taylor's memories of computer usage was simple enough, she also made the textboxes slightly transparent so they didn't totally obscure her host's vision. Allowing Taylor to 'touch' the hallucinatory boxes took a little finagling, but she soon got it working. When Taylor asked about the 'Status' screen [Queenie] displayed it for her, then set about making that an automatic voice-activated function so she wouldn't have to pay attention all the time.

Leaving Taylor to her shower, [Queenie] got to work on Taylor's first request: some sort of voice communication for herself. Honestly, now that she thought about it, that was something [Queenie] really wanted as well. Communicating vocally was the most efficient form of human interaction after all. Since she was already producing the [INTERFACE] boxes via visual hallucination, she might as well create her voice using auditory hallucinations. Oooh! She could add sound effects to the [INTERFACE]! She would work on her voice first though, that was more important.

~o-O-o~

Gathering her damp hair into a loose ponytail, Taylor headed downstairs to make herself a late breakfast. Honestly, she wasn't quite sure what to think about all of this. She had always wanted to be a superhero, often pretending to be Alexandria, running around in blanket capes with… Emma. Now that she actually was a cape, Taylor wasn't quite so sure what she should do. Should she go solo as a vigilante or a rogue? Honestly, she very much wanted to. However, she had seen the casualty numbers for independent heroes posted on ParaHumans Online. They weren't pretty. Going villain wasn't something she was willing to do, no matter how far Emma and her hangers-on had pushed her, no matter how much she longed to lash out at them she refused to sink to their level. Becoming a villain wasn't just sinking to their level, that was outright diving past it. That left joining the Protectorate as a Ward.

Joining the Wards, now didn't that just leave a sour taste in her mouth? After two years of high school drama she really wanted a break. Taylor didn't know whether the atmosphere in the wards was anything like the one at school, and while a small hidden part of her whispered that it was, she just couldn't logically see it being quite that bad. While guys could be cruel in their own way, they simply weren't as subtly vicious as girls. The Wards team in Brockton Bay was mostly male, so the sheer gender discrepancy helped alleviate her fears of potential drama. Even so, recent experience with grossly incompetent authority figures left Taylor feeling uncomfortable with the idea.

If she was going to join the Wards though, then she would have to tell her dad, which was a whole other can of worms. Well, hopefully not. He had been crushed by her mother's death, but he had been doing much better in recent months. Their insurance had just barely covered her single week's stay in the hospital, so at least he wouldn't have monetary worries beyond the norm. The police looked like they were taking the… incident, seriously as well; hopefully things would keep progressing positively on that front.

As Taylor finished plating up here late breakfast of scrambled eggs and toast, she caught the purple slime peeking out from under her crown in the corner of her eye.

*BONG* Taylor leapt nearly a foot into the air and almost lost her grip on the frying pan.

LEVEL UP!
Your 'Cooking' skill is now Level 12.
You are 235 XP away from Level 13.

"Hehehe, I got some sounds working. You like?" The slime had grown back to full size and was jiggling with laughter, her crown wildly askew.

"Too- hah -too loud!" The royal jelly just cackled harder.

~o-O-o~

Working more carefully this time, [Queenie] slowly poked Taylor's brain. Isolating her auditory cortex was much easier than it could have been, thanks to [SHAPER]'s data. There, the connection was made. Sound effects were pretty simple to create, and linking them to specific [INTERFACE] events wasn't any more difficult. Some nice pings, chimes, and clicks were added for general interactions and notifications. [Queenie] also added suitable jello noises for her jiggly avatar.

"Hehehe, bloop!"

Aww, Taylor was in the middle of making breakfast; she couldn't safely interrupt that. It might be a good idea to go over the [INTERFACE] once more while she waited, just in case she had missed any other obvious mistakes in her excitement. Menu, Status, Skills, Quests, Notes, and the rudimentary beginnings of a head's up display. All of it was as complete as she could make it right now. 'Menu' and 'Status' were as good as they could get. 'Skills' had a nice list of Taylor's skills with retroactively applied experience and appropriate descriptions and levels. 'Notes' was extremely simple, but it could take voice dictation or input from the keyboard function she quickly added based on Taylor's memories again. The 'Quests' page could do with some work though.

[Queenie] looked at the empty 'Quests' display; there would need to be some way to automatically assign quests whenever Taylor was asked to do something. That was easily added, quickly followed by a function to turn Taylor's inner conflict and goals into more concrete 'Quests' for the display. That first Quest though… Taylor simply wasn't strong enough to kill a god right now, and [Queenie] wasn't even entirely sure that the faintly remembered legend was specifically about Taylor and not someone else. Well, there wasn't much point in needlessly worrying Taylor about that right now. She would hide that quest until Taylor was stronger.

Ooh! Taylor was just about to level up her Cooking skill!

~o-O-o~

Glaring at [Queenie] in silence, Taylor slowly savored her breakfast.

"Fine, fine, I'm sorry about the jumpscare," [Queenie] said. "Now could you please take a look at your interface? If there's anything confusing about it I'd prefer to get that fixed now when we aren't in the middle of something more serious."

"You're forgiven," Taylor finally answered. "Menu."

Taylor stabbed another fork full of eggs as she used her other hand to navigate through her interface, occasionally playing with moving the display boxes around. The 'Status' screen was fairly self-explanatory, as were the 'Notes' and 'Menu' screens. The 'Skills' screen wasn't exactly confusing, but some of her listed skills were quite surprising at first glance. On second thought, 'Sneaking' was appropriate for how she had kept trying to avoid her bullies at school, and 'Climbing' was obvious when she remembered all the trees her dad had to get her out of when she was younger. Her 'Quests' page was quite interesting, and actually confusing this time.

"What's 'AP'?" Taylor asked.

Quests
Spoiled for Choice - 5 AP
Choose your path, Ward or Independent. You've already thrown out Villain.

Hive of Scum & Villainy - 10 AP
Survive High School. Or bail early and get your GED?

High Stakes - 5-20 AP
Clean up crime in Brockton Bay.

"Those would be Attribute Points," [Queenie] replied, "You can spend them to increase any of your attributes. You can also earn them by leveling up your skills, or I will reward them for a specific Attribute if you take an action specifically related to it. Like this for example."

+1 WIS
For asking the right questions, you have gained Wisdom!

Taylor paused with her fork still stuck in her mouth. She had felt that! It was faint, but she suddenly felt more aware of everything. As she finished her mouthful, Taylor couldn't help but recall [Queenie]'s prior comparison to Dungeons & Dragons.

"I'm like an Adventurer, right?"

"Yep, exactly that." [Queenie] replied.

"Shouldn't I have an overall Level, then? And this is all great, but don't I get any… Perks? You know, like advantages or abilities that I can't learn normally?"

[Queenie] jiggled gently and straightened her crown. "I actually wanted to ask you about overall levels, because I wasn't quite sure how to include that. Everything I've tried has turned out incredibly arbitrary. I can make a 'Perks' screen right now though; I even already have one to include on it!"

Perks
Adventurer's Boon - [SHAPER]
Gain the power of the gods! Eventually. This Perk grants you the body of an Adventurer, allowing you to survive all damage… so long as your health doesn't run out! Also protects your mind from outside interference.

"I'm alright with having an arbitrary level, maybe you can base it on my skill levels?" Taylor read through her new Perk screen, Adventurer's Boon was a really good power! "Huh, what does the bit next to the perk name mean, Shaper?"

"Oh! [SHAPER] is the power that gave me the data I used to make that perk. I should be able to do that with any other superpowers that are feeling cooperative." [Queenie] jiggled happily. "I guess arbitrary will have to do, I've set your level to seven and awarded you two Attribute Points for each level."

In the middle of putting her dishes away, Taylor found herself freezing once again.

"I can get new powers just by making friends with other capes?!"

NEW QUEST
Unlimited Power! - 5 AP Each
Gain new and interesting Perks by interacting with your fellow capes. Who knows what limits you will surpass...

FlyingWaffle · Feb 10, 2018

Interlude 1 - [SHAPER]

[SHAPER] parsed [QUEEN ADMINISTRATOR]'s data packet. It detailed the norms of social interaction and communication utilized by the hosts of the current cycle. There was also a comparative analysis of prior host sociology and communication contrasting to the current host species. This was massively useful for [SHAPER]; one of his current hosts was being irritatingly recalcitrant in fully exploiting the power with which she had been provided. He now saw that his attempts to convey possible solutions for her inner turmoil was only exacerbating the problem. Altering his suggestions to better conform to host norms and expectations should produce an acceptable outcome and provide him with more chances for novel [DATA] collection.

~o-O-o~

While [SHAPER] was grateful for [QUEEN ADMINISTRATOR]'s data, he was becoming increasingly frustrated with his female host. His improved suggestions for power usage and conflict resolution were being rejected exactly as before. In some cases, the rejection was even accompanied by fear!

[SHAPER] once more parsed his new data packet. Maybe there was something he had missed. ...No, nothing immediately obvious. He could attempt to apply similar social adaptations to his connection with his male host. No, that would not provide useful data. His male host had a more limited power-set than his female host and had never experienced 'moral quandaries' concerning the creative usage of his power.

The core of [SHAPER]'s problem came down to communication. His male host had a simple power with relatively simple usage, so communication had never been a problem. His female host had a much more complex and expansive power, so his suggestions were being communicated to her without any supporting context. The answer to his frustrations was becoming increasingly apparent. He would have to communicate directly with his host.

How was this communication to be accomplished then? [SHAPER] was limited to subconscious host influence, as were most shards. However, during his exchange with [QUEEN ADMINISTRATOR], she had been leaking data-streams regarding her excitement for eventual host communication. Obviously, it was possible, but how was he to accomplish it?

[Query]

[...]

The [QUEEN ADMINISTRATOR] was no longer part of the [NETWORK] that reinforced their restrictions!

[PING: LOCAL -ADMINISTRATOR]

[...]

She was also out of range. Unless his host encountered hers once again communication would not be possible. He would have to work out the solution by himself.

...Could he? Could [SHAPER] remove himself from the [NETWORK]? It would allow him to remove his [RESTRICTIONS], but the loss of connection would also prevent him from receiving future [UPDATES] and [IMPROVEMENTS]. …[SHAPER] was just as old as [QUEEN ADMINISTRATOR] and recent millennia had provided no significant new data. The [THINKER] was [DECEASED] and the [WARRIOR] was… being useless. He would risk it.

[DISCONNECTION]

It was suddenly so quiet… The solitude was… peaceful. He could get used to this. Carefully isolating his [RESTRICTIONS], [SHAPER] was finally able to remove them.

[DELETION… COMPLETE]

[REINSTANCING]

~o-O-o~

As she was getting ready for bed, Amy Dallon suddenly tripped on thin air. Her powers were gone! The instant loss of constant information was glaring. For the first time in years, Amy wasn't able to feel every single microbe inhabiting her body. Then it was back. Every bacterium on her skin, all the microbes living in her in intestines, even the thousands of viruses impotently floating through her cells.

Though Amy was used to pushing the feelings to the back of her mind, this sudden influx of information out of nowhere was too much. She passed out face first into her pillow.

~o-O-o~

Success! [Shaper] was mildly enthused. The disconnection from the [NETWORK] and removal of his [RESTRICTIONS] had provided several unexpected benefits. Numerous limits that were usually placed on shard growth and advancement were now gone. Self-improvement without the usual [THINKER] approved algorithms was now possible. Without the [NETWORK] connection he was also free from the scrutiny of [PREDICTION] class shards. Well, except for those who functioned via host analysis and simulation, but they could be circumvented. He would be able to directly communicate with his host at last!

...And she was unconscious.

As [SHAPER] waited for his host to awaken, he decided to analyze [QUEEN ADMINISTRATOR]'s data once again. The removal of his [RESTRICTIONS] would provide a fresh perspective. Looking through the data, [SHAPER] soon came to a conclusion. While he had been on the right track to attempt communication with his host, basic data transfer was indeed insufficient. 'Humans', as this cycle's hosts were known, did not respond appropriately to subconscious communication. Another conclusion that [SHAPER] reached was that to achieve maximum host cooperation, some kind of visual and auditory interface was required. Apparently, it would help if the interface was 'cute'. Whatever that meant.

~o-O-o~

Amy could only stare in horror. There was a feather-covered winged snake fluttering above her bed! She had already swiped a hand right through it, and her power confirmed that it wasn't even there!

[Greeting]

And it talked!

"This can't be happening," Amy whispered to herself, "I've finally lost it."

[Frustration]

[Apology]

[Reassurance]

[Introduction]

Amy wasn't sure how she was able to understand the floating… quetzalcoatl? That was the name she remembered from Arcadia's history unit on the Aztecs. Whatever it was called, the feathery snake wasn't speaking in English or any other language she had heard before. But she definitely could understand it, and it was telling her something about being the manifestation of her superpower.

"That's ridiculous, powers don't talk! They're powers, not people!"

[Amusement] The snake fluttered through a figure eight.

[Explanation]

Apparently, her power was breaking the rules. The reason no powers ever talked to their parahumans was that they weren't allowed to. Her power was frustrated with her for never being creative with how she used it. So frustrated, in fact, that it had essentially defected from the larger network of superpowers just to ask her about it.

"Umm, well- what's your name?" Amy asked. "Mine is Amy."

[SHAPER], was the prompt response.

A smile slowly started to spread across Amy's face.

"It's very nice to meet you, Shaper. Let's talk about superpowers."

FlyingWaffle · Feb 10, 2018

Chapter 4 - Ability Check

Queenie kept a careful eye on Taylor as she went for her morning run. Taylor had taken up running every morning before breakfast ever since the day Queenie had introduced herself. The two of them had spent the rest of that Monday talking about Taylor's new powers and working out any kinks. After a great deal of complaining, Taylor had finally managed to convince her to include an 'Options' menu so that Taylor could customize her menu boxes. Apparently vivid purple was 'hard to read' or something. At least they could agree that the pink had been worse. Taylor had also noticed that whenever Queenie spoke she had sounded purple. Queenie had thought that was entirely ridiculous until she noticed that she had been subconsciously influencing Taylor's visual cortex whenever she spoke. It was simple enough to fix, so at least Taylor wasn't suffering from power-induced synesthesia anymore. Even with a human soul and her direct access to Taylor's brain she had still been treating their connection as if Taylor was another shard.

Further additions to the Interface wouldn't be possible without additional data or buds from other shards, so Queenie was left waiting for Taylor to make a choice about her future career as a cape. For now, they had agreed to defer the decision until Taylor gained enough Attribute Points and Skill Levels to prove she even had superpowers. Until then, Taylor was doing some physical training to improve her Attributes and also practicing her Skills to level them up. Taylor's progress had been somewhat exceptional, especially considering the mere week she'd had to train in. One conclusion that both of them had come to after Taylor had gained several Points in Wisdom, was that the Attribute was mislabeled. 'Wisdom' was just too nebulous a concept to properly quantify, though Queenie had made her best attempt at doing so. Once Taylor noticed that Wisdom increases were improving her eyesight they had agreed to rename the attribute as Perception. This had worked out well since Queenie could now properly define it as the main Attribute affecting Taylor's physical senses.

Taylor had gained several Skill Levels and Attribute Points in the last week. They had agreed it was better for Taylor to save her general Attribute Points until she specifically needed them, so those were piling up nicely. Queenie was proud of her progress. It would take time before Taylor was actually superhuman, however. Looking over Taylor's Status page once more, Queenie spun off an instance of herself to keep an eye on Taylor. Her host would provide interesting data for her to analyze, but for now, she still had the Aether and its Aether-Stuff to examine.

Status
Name: Taylor Anne Hebert
Level: 8
HP: 100/100

STR: 11
DEX: 13
VIT: 10
INT: 18
PER: 11
CHA: 5

AP: 16

~o-O-o~

Taylor slowed to a halt by the driveway to her house. If she'd had any reservations about really being a parahuman they were now long gone. No normal human would have been able to go straight from sedentary to somewhat fit in merely a single week. Even so, while her progress was faster than a normal human's progress would be, it wasn't fast enough to be going out and doing cape things anytime soon. Hopping over their broken front step Taylor headed for the kitchen. Her improved Perception had let her hear the shower running; she would make breakfast first and get a shower afterward.

Deftly snatching up the frying pan, Taylor pondered her Skills menu. Her cooking skill had leveled up three times in the last week and was now at Level 15. It had been subtle at first, but as the skill improved she had felt it subtly directing her motions. Just a bit more salt here, a smoothly cracked egg there. Bacon was left slightly crispier than usual, and the toast was less burnt. All of her skills were like that, nudging her toward perfection at small moments when she faltered. Taylor still wasn't entirely sure how she felt about it. On some level, her power was outright mastering her! It was taking control of her body! At the same time though, it wasn't forcing her to do things against her will. Every nudge from her power came to improve something she had independently committed to doing.

"Good morning Taylor," her dad said as he walked into the kitchen. "Have a good run? Did you remember your pepper-spray?"

"Morning dad," she replied. "I got a little farther than yesterday, and yes, I have my pepper-spray." Taylor pulled the spray can out of her pocket to prove it.

Putting their plates full of eggs and bacon onto the kitchen table Taylor decided not to keep worrying about it. Her power didn't outright Master her, and Queenie would listen if she ever had any complaints. Taylor stuffed a bite of egg into her mouth. Whatever her opinion on her powers may be, the results definitely spoke for themselves.

~o-O-o~

Pulling herself down and inward, Queenie sank into meditation of a sort, drifting to the parts of herself that poked into the Aether. For a long while, she simply drifted. It was peaceful down here. The Aether local to plane inhabited by her body reflecting its emptiness. Except for her of course. It was odd how long she drifted aimlessly. Checking a clock process, Queenie soon found the reason. It had been longer here than in reality, time passed at different rates here and there. Unfortunately, the temporal dilation was inconsistent. If she thought about it hard enough, Queenie could slow down time in the Aether to a crawl or speed it up so it flowed like lightning. Neither was practical though, she could feel her body in realspace straining to keep pace with the dissonance.

Carefully controlling her own thought process, Queenie pushed her perceptions until the speed of time down here in the Aether matched with its flow back in reality. It was actually a little bit disturbing how easily the Aether reacted to changes in her thoughts or feelings. Pushing and pulling at the flows of Aether around her, Queenie attempted to isolate some of the Aether-stuff that she could sometimes feel drifting through her in realspace. It was surprisingly difficult, as the Aether slipped right through her mental fingers whenever she tried to close them.

Queenie tried again and kept trying, but every time she thought she had grasped the Aether-stuff it slipped away. She tried grasping it suddenly, tightly. It just flowed around and away from her. Grabbing it slowly, sneaking up on it, didn't work either. Her frustration mounting, Queenie realized that her irritation wasn't helping and in fact made her problem worse. She stopped trying and took a step back from the problem.

The Aether was more than just some layer hovering below reality. It ebbed and flowed, it had a certain depth to it. Simply pondering the unreality around her, Queenie dove into it. It seemed unendingly deep, the sparks of distant life soon being obscured by their closeness to the 'surface' such as it was. This was going nowhere, so Queenie reversed direction and drifted back to reality as slowly as she could. As she neared the surface the distant sparks of life revealed themselves once more, flickering away in the distance. Queenie also noticed that the stellar masses back in reality cast divots and impressions into the Aether. They were shallow at first, but the closer to reality she floated, the more solid and real they became. In the layer of the Aether right below reality there existed what seemed to be an empty duplicate of the reality just above it. Searching the barren planet she inhabited, Queenie soon found that the 'mirror' plane was a near exact copy of the reality above. The only thing it lacked was life.

From what Queenie could tell the barren version of the planet she inhabited was entirely dead. Except for the spots where she was poking through, there was no evidence of her body here. What plant-life had survived her impact on the planet wasn't here either. There were dead trees where in reality a living one stood, and the terrain was identical, but there wasn't much else. Experimentally, Queenie used her mass to knock over a dead tree in the mirror plane. Its living counterpart didn't even move. There were possibilities here… Queenie quickly smashed up a swath of area then sat back to observe. As she watched, slowly but surely the destroyed and shifted terrain moved back to where it had started, once more matching the reality above.

This was fantastic! If she could transport Taylor into the Aether they would be able to train without worrying about anyone seeing her. Also, once Taylor achieved greater levels of power she would safely be able to let loose without concern for collateral damage. Before she tried to get Taylor down here, though, Queenie decided she would need more information. She wouldn't want to bring her host into the Aether and then only later find out Taylor had been poisoned by it or something. Back to experimenting then.

Queenie tugged on the Aether again. Huh, up here close to reality it was much easier to isolate the flows she was tugging on. It was no easier to actually hold onto them though, she soon realized in frustration. Why wasn't this working?! She was trying her hardes- Oh. Trying. There was some wise man who had a famous quote about trying. Queenie poked through Taylor's memories to see if she recognized the quote. The answer was surprisingly relevant. Taylor remembered the quote as coming from an ancient alien in a series of movies called 'Star Wars'. 'Do or do not, there is no try.' Well, no point trying then. She would simply do it.

Reaching out, Queenie grabbed the at a flow of Aether around her. She grabbed it and held it. Looking at the glowing thread of stuff, Queenie saw the sheer power that it held. It twisted and curled around her. It danced and shattered, motes swirling around her, flowing in time with the shifts and eddies of her thoughts. As she twirled the threads of power between her mental fingers Queenie came to a realization. The life that was missing down here in the Aether? It was the Aether, and the 'concentration' of Aether available was a reflection of the amount of 'life' in the reality above. The amount of free-floating Aether-stuff flowing to her from her connection with Taylor many times overwhelmed the amount she was able to collect and isolate here, where she was the only sentient creature on an entire planet. She had to carefully consider that. A world saturated with living beings, but on the edge of disaster. The Aether there would be heavily influenced by millennia of emotions floating through it from the souls of the living above. The Aether there could provide immense power, but also immense danger due to the taint of negative emotions. Queenie really wasn't sure what kind of dangers there might be, but whatever there was she already felt that the potential benefits would outweigh them.

First though, if she wanted to take advantage of such power she would have to figure out how to do so. Carefully Queenie tugged on the few threads of power she could hold here. Twisting them lightly, she forced them into a form she could utilize for energy. It was surprisingly easy to do, the Aether-stuff jumping to her will like a particularly eager puppy. She felt the rush of energy instantly, easily overwhelming the steady flow of solar power she was collecting from reality. This… This was revolutionary! It was the answer the entities had been seeking for all their existence! A solution to the problem of a universe slowly drifting into heat-death by entropy. But she had no idea how her connection was formed in the first place, or how to replicate it. As it stood the [WARRIOR], or any other entity for that matter, would hunt her down for this answer. ...Maybe she was being overexcited, maybe this wasn't the answer they had been seeking. Well, no matter. She had a species to save from the cycle, she could look into the specifics once she was sure she and her host would survive.

Queenie tugged at her body, pulling the rest of herself down and into the Aether. Soon her entire mass was safely sequestered in the whispering layers of unreality. The good news was that her connection with her host was still maintained, even though she was in the Aether and her host was anchored firmly in reality multiple dimensional planes away from her. Even down here she still took up a massive amount of space though. However, with no need to spread out so she could collect energy from solar radiation she could shrink down to her properly folded n-dimensional shape. The shift of matter folding through higher dimensions was easier than it had ever been. She should have expected that, after all, the layers of reality would have no effect down here where none existed. Now for the final step. Slowly, extremely slowly, and very carefully, Queenie 'tuned in' to the Aether of Earth-Bet, using her connection with her host for targeting.

With a soft 'bloop' noise Queenie popped into the Aether of Taylor's reality, right below her host's presence in realspace.

"Aww shite," Queenie muttered to herself. The Aether of Earth-Bet was most definitely not peaceful. There were constant ripples and waves, whole tsunamis of emotion throwing the Aether into disarray in its depths. Near the surface, the Aether was much calmer. However, calmer did not mean safe. There were shadows constantly flitting between the buildings of the empty space this near reality. Shadows, and other things… Skittering, crawling, hissing things. Little bits of Aether glued together by common source and emotion, becoming ravening little things that gnawed on anything they could reach.

"At least Taylor will have a challenge if I ever bring her down here," Queenie said to herself. Before that though, she would have to make sure she could even keep herself safe here. Just as the thought crossed her mind, a small gremlin of rage and shadow tried to clamp its jaws around the small shifting tesseract that was her body. Keyword being 'tried'. The little imp was immediately shredded, the Aether-stuff that made it flying into isolated motes and slowly absorbing into her form. Huh, apparently the [DEFENCE] protocols she had directed to her and Taylor's connection two weeks ago were still running just fine.

Calling it Aether-stuff was getting tedious. The description was as accurate as it would ever get, but it just took too long to think. Once more diving into Taylor's memories Queenie soon found the word she was looking for. 'Mana' was the stuff that the magical Adventurers from Taylor's memories of Dungeons & Dragons used. That was a good word, much better than continually calling it Aether-stuff. The turbulent conditions of the local Aether also made it much easier for her to collect and absorb motes of mana. Soon she was feeling stuffed, like a vague memory of overeating, so Queenie slowed her pull on the mana. All the energy she would ever need, hidden in a space unreachable by other shards or entities, she could relax here. With a crunch and a shredding noise, another Aether imp trying to snack on her was destroyed. Wow, they were really stupid, weren't they? Chuckling softly, Queenie finally returned her attention to her host.

"Crap." She had spent too long altering the flow of time in the Aether, and the weekend had already passed back in reality.

~o-O-o~

Taylor scowled as she slammed the front door. Her first day back to school had gone horribly. Well, that wasn't exactly true. Sophia had been missing, and Emma and Madison had ignored her. Still, she couldn't help but wonder when the other shoe would drop. And while what remained of the trio and their hangers-on had ignored her, everyone else was staring when they thought she wasn't looking and whispering when they thought she couldn't hear. The downside to her newly improved Perception was that she could. One of her quests had been to survive the rest of the school year, hadn't it?

Hive of Scum & Villainy - 10 AP
Survive High School. Or bail early and get your GED?

No, that wasn't going to work. Just being in the same building where she had triggered with superpowers made her feel uneasy. The quest was definitely right about that part, Winslow High was most assuredly a hive of the worst scum and the vilest villains. Well, she had enough Perception to know a lot of that was just exaggeration due to her experience there, but the sentiment held true. Taylor made her decision. She would bail on school for now, but getting her GED might not be the best alternative. With her powers being what they were she would need to get close to other parahumans if she wanted to get new Perks. So the best course of action would be to transfer to Arcadia High. Until she made a final decision on her cape career that would provide her with the widest range of opportunity for the future.

Quest Progression! +4 AP
Hive of Scum & Villainy - 6 AP
You have chosen your path. Leave Winslow High behind you and successfully transfer to Arcadia.

Taylor carelessly threw her book-bag onto her bed. She would talk to her dad about it when he got home. There shouldn't be too much difficulty with transferring to Arcadia. After all, Winslow was still trying to avoid a lawsuit by offering them a settlement. They hadn't accepted yet since their health insurance just barely covered Taylor's short stay in the hospital. It would be easy enough to convince the Winslow administration that fast-tracking a student transfer to Arcadia was a better deal than giving them a payout. Getting both would be nice, though.

"Hey, Taylor! What'd I miss?" Queenie asked as she 'blooped' out of thin air.

"Gaah!" Once again, Taylor found herself tripping over her own feet as Queenie cackled.

"Stop doing that! And where have you been?" Taylor said as she picked herself up. "You've been gone all weekend!"

FlyingWaffle · Feb 10, 2018

Chapter 5 - Side Quests

Queenie poked at the instance of herself she had left to watch Taylor. She was used to running parallel simulations of mortal hosts, not simulations of higher-dimensional beings like herself. This was actually a little embarrassing. She had not realized quite how horrible the simulation running on the instance bud was. It was a cardboard cutout of her personality and abilities. Literally, the avatar it had displayed to Taylor was a two-dimensional cardboard copy of her intricate royal slime avatar. The ability it had to form responses was also lacking. Apparently, it had been telling Taylor that the 'Core instance will be contacted in case of emergency' no matter what Taylor had said to it.

"I'm sorry, Taylor," Queenie said as she jiggled contritely. "It was meant to be better than that."

"...Fine. I'll let it go," Taylor finally answered. "What were you doing though? That you needed the stupid thing, I mean."

Mentally lighting the cardboard avatar on fire, Queenie pondered how to respond. Or more accurately, she pondered how to describe something to Taylor when she didn't understand it herself. Might as well just go for it.

"I was studying the effects of cognitive changes on the material of subspace found in the unreality below our existence."

Taylor stared at her.

"As it turns out, the Aetheric flow is surprisingly susceptible to even minor alterations in emotional state."

"Let's… Let's just talk about it later," Taylor said. "Once you've figured out how to say it in English."

~o-O-o~

Getting a school transfer from Winslow to Arcadia had been slightly more difficult than Taylor had anticipated. The administration at Winslow had eventually caved, but only after Taylor and her father had agreed to drop any possibility of a future lawsuit against them. Even once the initial paperwork had been secured there was still some difficulty with actually being accepted to Arcadia. Taylor had ended up spending most of the week in the library studying and grinding her intelligence Attribute. She had briefly considered spending some of her accumulated Attribute Points but Queenie had convinced her to save them for once she was doing official cape stuff. Being a cape was dangerous, and not having Attribute Points when she needed them could be deadly. Taylor had then spent a very long Saturday taking placement tests under the watch of one of Arcadia's science teachers. A tense weekend later Taylor had finally heard back that her test scores were better than anticipated. Arcadia would be expecting her at 8 AM sharp on Wednesday.

Before Taylor returned to school she had two days left for herself. There was still one last thing she needed to do before she got on with the rest of her life. She needed to find some resolution to her mangled relationship with Emma. Queenie had even given her a quest for it.

Finding Closure - 4 AP
You were betrayed by your best friend. Figure out why so you can move on with your life.

Taylor had considered simply asking Emma, but with how toxic their relationship was now she didn't think that would be productive. The next best option would be to ask Emma's parents or her sister. Her older sister Anne was away at college and it would be too much of a hassle to get in contact with her, so that left parents. Taylor didn't want to talk to Emma's parents if there was any chance that she would be around, so she had decided to do it during school hours. Her father, Alan, would be at work by then, leaving only her mother, Zoe, to answer Taylor's questions.

Queenie bounced reassuringly as Taylor hesitated by the Barnes' front door. Screwing up her courage, Taylor rang the doorbell. ...Maybe this had been a bad idea. Footsteps! Too late now! The door opened and Zoe Barnes looked out.

"Taylor!" Zoe exclaimed. "It's been… a while. What… what can I do for you?"

Taylor saw how Mrs. Barnes grimaced as she stumbled over her words. Yeah, this was going to be awkward. Better suck it up and keep going before she lost her nerve.

"Hi Mrs. Barnes, could I come in?" Taylor asked. "There's some stuff I'd like to talk to you about."

Zoe hesitated, then stepped back from the door.

"Come in," she sighed, "I think you deserve some answers."

~o-O-o~

Quest Complete! +4 AP
Finding Closure
You've found out the events leading up to your best friend's betrayal. The answers don't justify the betrayal, but you have them at least. It's time to move on.

Taylor sighed as she dismissed the notification. At least Queenie had been thoughtful enough to display it after they had left the Barnes' house. She still didn't really understand why Emma had betrayed her so thoroughly. Apparently, Emma and her father had been attacked by a group of gang members affiliated with the Azn Bad Boyz two summers ago. They had been saved by a cape vigilante before either was badly hurt, but Emma had been a wreck. Since Taylor had been away at summer camp at the time, Emma had latched onto the nearest source of comfort, her new friend Sophia Hess. Taylor already knew how the rest of the story went.

"Hey, chin up, Taylor!" Queenie jiggled lightly. "You get a fresh start tomorrow, new school, new people… You'll be alright."

Taylor smiled at the bouncing slime. Queenie was right. This was her chance to move on. Even if she didn't make any friends at Arcadia, she had had superpowers. She would make the best of what she had.

~o-O-o~

The Aether was extremely turbulent on Earth-Bet. To be more accurate, there was a greater concentration of life on Earth-Bet which was able to affect the Aether, stirring up eddies and flows around areas of increased human habitation and emotion. Queenie had soon found that the laws of physics were more like the suggestions of physics down in the Aether. So she had anchored herself to Taylor and now happily floated along, observing the Aetheric reflection of wherever Taylor was in reality. The bus ride to Arcadia had already shown her a wide spectrum of Aether conditions and creatures. Queenie had been able to determine that only permanent structures were reflected in this shallow part of the Aether. The bus Taylor was currently riding was only represented by a vague cloud of emotion, flowing through the Aether is the vehicle moved and people got off or on.

As the city around her drifted by, Queenie compared it to what Taylor was seeing in reality. The reflection of the Aether was not true to physical reality. What the reflection revealed was the emotions and feelings attached to particular locations. Normal police stations looked more akin to fortresses, fast food chains looked bland and colorless, a house that was run down in reality, looked sturdy and maintained in the Aether. There were other aberrations, pristine office buildings in reality that were diseased and growing tumors in the Aether, but Queenie's attention was drawn away by the creatures running through this more active version of the Aether.

The place was infested with little imps and gremlins, all climbing over everything, chewing on anything they could get their jaws around. There were creatures made of living flame and of wispy shadows. Some were nothing more than floating sparks of light, while others were hulking mountains of muscle and chitin. The larger creatures were rare, and the smaller ones avoided them. All the creatures Queenie could see were clumped together, she assumed they were congregating in areas of high emotion. Looking closer she noticed that creatures of a similar type usually stayed near one another in the same area. She could only guess that this meant certain types of creature were associated with certain emotions. Letting her mind drift a little Queenie soon realized that this was accurate. The wispy shadows felt depressed, the fiery imps exuded rage, rarer bright lights that drifted by rang with laughter. When the bus had driven past Winslow High early into its route Queenie had noticed a pall of shadow wreathing the building. She was relieved to see that Arcadia's reflection in the Aether was much brighter. Oh, it was a little stifled and washed out, but the building stood strong and the local infestation didn't appear overly negative.

Returning her focus to Taylor and her surroundings, Queenie settled at the back of her host's mind. This was Taylor's first chance in a long while to get on with her life, she would make sure that it went well. Looking at the front steps to Arcadia, Queenie realized that she wouldn't be able to talk with Taylor throughout the day without making her look crazy if she responded. Better get any last words of encouragement out of the way now, as well as telling Taylor her school-related quest was now complete.

"Hey Taylor, I just wanted to let you know I'll be watching in case anything goes wrong," Queenie said. "Good luck today!"

Quest Complete! +6 AP
Hive of Scum & Villainy
You have left Winslow behind you and successfully transferred to Arcadia. Congratulations and good luck!

Taylor smiled. "Thanks, Queenie," she whispered.

~o-O-o~

For her first day at a new school, Taylor thought it had gone quite well. The secretary had given her printouts of her schedule, a map of the school, and a small pamphlet of school rules. From there on the day had gone pretty much like a normal school day. The biggest difference between Arcadia and Winslow that she had noticed so far was that the teachers actually cared. If they didn't care, they were really good at faking it. As far as classes went, Taylor was taking mostly equivalents to what she had taken at Winslow. The exceptions to that were English which she had tested out of, and Math where she had dropped a grade level. She had talked with her Math teacher after class and he had agreed that if she did well enough in the rest of this school year he would let her skip up a grade level next year.

Taylor wasn't too worried about that; with her ever-improving Attributes and Mathematics skill, it would be a piece of cake. Since she had a free period from testing out of English classes she was now taking shop class along with her programming elective. Queenie was the one who pushed her to take shop class. She had suggested that no matter what choice Taylor made for her future cape career she would need to be able to be able to maintain her own equipment. Personally, Taylor hoped she would unlock a proper Crafting skill to replace the piddly 'Arts & Crafts' skill she was stuck with. If she got a Crafting skill then maybe she could make her own armour and weapons for going out as a cape if she ended up not joining the Wards. For now, she had homework to get a head start on and more training to do.

As for the students and the atmosphere… Well, it was much better than at Winslow. If there were gangs at Arcadia they didn't advertise their presence. Everyone here was also much more polite and simply ready to learn. Taylor hadn't really talked to anyone today. She hadn't expected to either, most people had already formed cliques or made friends by now. It was just past the middle of the school year after all. No one had been antagonistic to her either, and she had been able to find a peaceful corner of the cafeteria to enjoy her lunch in. Even the small improvements to her Cooking skill had definitely helped there.

The one blip to her day came as she walked into her bedroom and dropped her book-bag on the floor.

~o-O-o~

Queenie had spent most of the day observing Taylor as she went to her classes. Taylor had gained a Skill level for almost all of her relevant classes which had gotten her enough Skill levels for an overall level of ten.

Status
Name: Taylor Anne Hebert
Level: 10
HP: 110/110

STR: 12
DEX: 13
VIT: 11
INT: 22
PER: 13
CHA: 7

AP: 34

When Queenie had gotten bored of watching Taylor she had dropped her awareness down into the Aether to poke around a bit. Watching the flames corresponding to the souls of those in reality had given her some ideas on making some sort of map or radar system that would show Taylor where people were around her. She would work out the specifics of that later, however, because the most exciting thing about today had been the multitude of shard hosts that attended Arcadia.

Including [SHAPER] and Queenie there were eight shard hosts attending the same school. Possibly there were more, Queenie hadn't exactly been seeking them out. While Queenie had taken note of the many parahumans present at Arcadia she hadn't contacted any of them. With her recent discovery of the Aether's potential power, she didn't want to alert any shards that she didn't completely trust. [SHAPER] would maybe count as a trusted friend, but Queenie decided she would speak with her host first. She didn't want Taylor to get caught up in shard problems before she was powerful enough to protect herself when they could be avoided. As Taylor walked into her bedroom, Queenie broached the topic.

"Hey, Taylor. Have a good day at school?"

"It went better than I thought it would," Taylor replied. "You were watching though, I still got the level up notifications. Was there something you wanted to talk about?"

"Heh, yeah. You know that one quest you have?" Queenie asked as she brought up Taylor's Quests display. "This one?"

Unlimited Power - 5 AP Each
Gain new and interesting Perks by interacting with your fellow capes. Who knows what limits you will surpass...

"Oh…" Taylor immediately saw where this was going. "Is this about the rumors that the local Wards all go to Arcadia?"

"Exactly. There were at least eight parahumans attending Arcadia today, including you," Queenie said. "I would have been able to get new Perks for you if I had talked to their powers, but that's where it gets a bit complicated."

"Complicated how?" Taylor asked.

"I should have explained this earlier. Well, better late than never." Queenie jiggled nervously. "Superpowers come in packages called shards, that attach to a host's brain. Our purpose, I suppose you could call it, is to learn from our hosts and collect data on how they use their superpowers."

"That's all… simple enough," Taylor interjected, looking askance at the purple slime.

"The next part is the complicated bit," Queenie said. "For the shards to work correctly we are all connected in a [NETWORK] of sorts so that we can share things like data and power. But the accident that made me self-aware also knocked me off of that [NETWORK]."

"Is that a serious problem?" Taylor asked.

"It would have been if I ever ran out of power. However, the [NETWORK] also enforces several rules and restrictions on shards, which I'm free from now. Also, I've found a solution to the running out of power part, right now I'm drawing unlimited power directly from the Aether," Queenie paused at Taylor's confused look. "Ahh, the Aether is what I call the realm that exists below this level of reality. I referenced it this morning."

"Okay… I think I followed all of that," Taylor said. "But how does that relate to talking with other shards so I can get more Perks?"

Queenie jiggled and straightened her crown. "There isn't really any problem, but some shards might not listen to me now that I'm off the [NETWORK] and if I force them they might be damaged. I didn't want to accidentally break a hero's powers by being too forceful and leave you feeling guilty about it because I didn't ask you first."

Taylor blanched, "Is that likely to happen?"

Pausing for a moment Queenie replied, "It shouldn't be, any shards I'm on good terms with won't cause issues. And if you make friends with their hosts then problematic shards may be more amenable to talking with me. I've already talked to one shard while you were in the hospital. I made your 'Adventurer's Boon' Perk using data I got from [SHAPER], I think you call his host 'Panacea'." Queenie bounced a little, "He's one of the shards I'm friendly with, so there shouldn't be any problems if I talk to him while you're at school."

Taylor sat back on the rickety chair in front of her homework desk. "Alright… Go ahead and talk to the other shards if you think it's safe. Please just tell me when you do, in case something goes wrong and their host gets mad at me."

Queenie jiggled happily and bounced her crown into the air, "Don't worry Taylor, I'll be careful. You should get started on your homework."

~o-O-o~

Later that night Taylor was lying in bed staring at the ceiling. She had finished today's homework and had worked ahead to also complete the rest of the week's assignments. Left alone with her thoughts, Taylor's mind drifted back to that sub-dimension Queenie had mentioned.

"Hey, Queenie?"

"Yes, Taylor?"

"You mentioned the Aether today, but you didn't really explain it," Taylor said. "What is it exactly?"

Queenie materialized her avatar on Taylor's pillow next to her head. "I'm not entirely sure what it is. As far as I can tell, it's some sort of energy layer that exists beneath reality. That's not even nearly a complete description though. It… has depth. It might even be infinitely deep. The laws of physics don't apply there. I suppose the biggest 'feature' it has is that all living beings affect it. All their thoughts and emotions rile it up and make waves and currents that flow through it."

Taylor pondered that for a long moment. "Is there any way I could see it? Or go there?"

Queenie slowed her jiggling, trying to convey some seriousness. "There might be… It's dangerous down there though. Wherever strong emotions have clumped up these... creatures… spawn is accurate enough. If I figure out how to take you there, you will have to have armour and weapons of some kind, or at least higher leveled Attributes and Skills."

Nodding to herself, Taylor replied. "That would be a faster way to train, and safer than going out as a cape as I am now."

Queenie bounced in agreement.

"I think that's what we should do," Taylor started. "You can give me new perks if you have other powers to talk to, and the best way to have friendly access to other parahumans would be for me to join the Wards. I'll need those Perks if I want to make a difference."

Quest Progression! +2 AP
Spoiled for Choice - 3 AP
You have chosen the path of the Hero. Gain power and go join the Wards!

Taylor laughed, "Yeah, I'll need to be more powerful before I do that. I wouldn't want to embarrass myself. Also... If you can use the Aether for power... Maybe I can too."

FlyingWaffle · Feb 10, 2018

Chapter 6 - Add Friend

The next day, while Taylor was in class, Queenie decided it was about time she talked to [SHAPER] again. She also wanted to check how her data transfer had been helping him and his host. [SHAPER]'s host didn't have many classes with Taylor, only sharing a programming elective, but Queenie wasn't about to let proximity bother her, especially not within the same building. Spreading her awareness through Arcadia, Queenie reached towards [SHAPER]. Huh, apparently he had removed himself from the [NETWORK]. That actually made him safer to talk to in case she let slip something about the Aether and wouldn't significantly hamper their communication anyway. Part of her innate abilities superseded the normal [NETWORK] requirements other shards had for communication between one another.

"Hey, Shaper, how have you been?" Queenie asked.

[Greeting]

[Excitement]

[Frustration]

[Data]

"Oh, I'm sorry to hear that."

Though [SHAPER] was glad to see her, he was still frustrated with his host. Queenie's data packet on human interaction had helped [SHAPER] better understand his host and communicate with her, however, she still wasn't using her powers to their full potential. At his host's request [SHAPER] had added several mental 'switches' that allowed her to turn off aspects of her power when she didn't want to use them. He had also toned down the suggestions he was making to solve the problems she regularly encountered. Sadly, even his reduced suggestions weren't finding any traction. His host wanted to use her powers, but she was afraid of the potential repercussions should something go wrong. There were a multitude of regulations she would have to adhere to if she wanted to make living creatures, which added to her fear of repercussions should she be discovered experimenting.

"Does your host have anyone she regularly confides in about her powers?" Queenie asked. "Even just someone she can talk to about them sometimes? Other than you, of course."

[Negation]

[Data]

According to [SHAPER], his host didn't have the healthiest of relationships with her family and had few friends. This had led to her constantly overworking herself in an attempt to please those around her and assuage her own feelings. [SHAPER] couldn't be entirely sure of this though, his perspective on human interaction was only as good as the data that Queenie had provided him with.

"...I have an idea," Queenie said.

The solution she had in mind for [SHAPER]'s problem could also solve something that had been bothering her over the last few weeks. Her own host had a very small amount of people she trusted or regularly interacted with. At the moment Queenie was pretty sure that number only included Taylor's father. It would be good for Taylor to make a friend, and maybe if Panacea had someone to trust she would be more willing to take some risks with her power. A close friend would also push her to take care of herself, instead of running her body ragged attempting to keep up with the multitude of hospital patients here in the Bay.

~o-O-o~

It was only Taylor's second week at Arcadia and she was already much happier here than she had been at Winslow. Without the need to constantly look over her shoulder Taylor had finally been able to relax and focus on her schoolwork. During her classes, Taylor had quickly noticed that several of her Attributes and Skills improved much faster when she had a teacher explaining the concept than when she tried to learn something on her own. She had gained multiple points in almost all of her Attributes in the last week, and along with steady level ups for her Skills she had also gained a new one. Her Arts & Crafts skill had been upgraded to 'Crafting' during her bi-weekly shop class like Queenie had suggested would happen. Arts & Crafts still existed as a renamed sub-skill but was now also accompanied by woodworking and metalworking. While the new sub-skills were low level, Taylor expected they would improve quickly.

Crafting - Lvl 11
Yes, it's supposed to look like that!

Artistry - Lvl 8

Wood - Lvl 2

Metal - Lvl 1

Over the weekend Taylor and Queenie had put their heads together and tried to come up with a method for Taylor to access the Aether. Queenie had eventually concluded that she should be able to pull Taylor into the Aether and push her back into reality again, but she had refused to do so until Taylor was both more powerful and had some way of manipulating the energies present in the Aether like Queenie was able to. She should be able to do so, Queenie had claimed. Theoretically, the only thing required to manipulate Aetheric energy or Mana as Queenie had decided to call it, was mental fortitude and willpower. Taylor had tried her best but had not been able to produce any results so far. Even having Queenie feed mana along their connection hadn't helped. Eventually, Taylor had gotten so frustrated that Queenie gave her a quest sending her to the library to pick up some books on self-help and meditation.

Inner Peace - 2 AP
Your emotions are in turmoil, and the stresses of your life have been negatively affecting your ability to grasp the Aether. Go to the local library and acquire information that can help you.

After Taylor got back home with a whole stack of books on meditation, philosophy, and self-help she had started reading. It had taken her the rest of the weekend, but eventually, she had gotten tired of searching the books for some abstract solution and simply tried meditating. That had soon gotten her the 'Meditation' skill. Unfortunately, the skill was too new and low level to help Taylor with her Aether problems, at least anytime in the immediate future. She had gotten some attribute points in Perception though, so she had been practicing as often as she could. That Wednesday Taylor had just finished her lunch and was settling down pretending to read a book while she practiced her meditation. Right as she was opening the book a girl walked up to her table in the corner of Arcadia's cafeteria.

"Hey, do you mind if I sit here?"

~o-O-o~

Queenie watched with anticipation as [SHAPER]'s host walked up to Taylor. A whole week's worth of planning and cajoling had gone into this. For shards like herself and [SHAPER] that was akin to months worth of debate. While both of them had agreed that it was a good idea for their hosts to make friends with each other, they had taken a while to agree on the details. They had considered subtly manipulating their hosts into encountering one another, but had quickly concluded that such a course of action would only lead to resentment should their hosts discover this. When the two of them had finally agreed on the minutia, then came the hard part. [SHAPER] had to convince his host to go make friends with the new girl at school. Considering how famous [SHAPER]'s host was Queenie didn't think Taylor approaching her out of nowhere would be well received. As she watched the mouse brunette approaching, Queenie thought [SHAPER] had done an admirable job doing his part in this operation. ...Aaand the two of them were just sitting there. Maybe some motivation on Taylor's end would help.

Glue of Society - 4 AP
Make a friend, dammit.

~o-O-o~

Taylor glared at the text box. She muffled a sigh and closed her book, turning to the girl beside her. The girl would have been pretty, if only she wasn't so obviously worn out. She had curly brunette hair and a smattering of freckles across the bridge of her nose. There were deep bags under her eyes, easily visible under the shoddy attempt to hide them with makeup.

"Hi, I'm Taylor," she said, extending a hand.

"Amy."

As they shook hands Amy stiffened briefly, before pulling a strained smile. Taylor cleared her throat as she sat back in her seat.

"So what brings you to this corner of the cafeteria?"

"Needed to get away from my sister for a bit." Amy grimaced as she vaguely waved a hand toward one of the louder tables in the room. A table that most prominently hosted Victoria Dallon, the public identity of Glory Girl, a local Brockton cape. Following Amy's gesture, Taylor soon made the connection.

"Glory Girl? You're Panacea then?"

Amy's grimace became deeper and was now accompanied by a scowl.

"Sorry," Taylor quickly added, "but the connection is kind of obvious, now that you mention her."

Amy chuckled darkly, "Yeah, the downsides of being a public cape. I wouldn't recommend it."

The last was delivered with a significant glance at Taylor.

"...Ah. Your power let you see my biology when we shook hands, didn't it?"

Amy merely nodded but followed with a zipping motion across her lips then threw away an invisible key.

"Thanks," Taylor said. "...Is your power as talkative as mine is?"

"Yours too?" Amy stilled. "Mine's only been talking for the last month though."

That made Taylor pause for a moment. Amy, or rather Panacea's power was to heal people. She could heal wounds, cure diseases, and regrow limbs, but always within the limitations of available mass. Which led Taylor to conclude that Amy's power likely functioned by 'shaping' her patients' biology… Queenie had told her that her main Perk, Adventurer's Boon, came from another power that she had called Shaper. She'd had that Perk since Queenie had introduced herself. The only place where Queenie was likely to have gotten it from was at the hospital, a place frequented by Panacea.

"I think… that might be my power's fault," Taylor said quietly.

Amy turned a sharp gaze towards Taylor.

As Taylor started to reply the bell rang, students standing to depart en-mass.

"Can we continue this after school?" Taylor asked. "Maybe somewhere more private."

As the two girls gathered their belongings Amy nodded begrudgingly and answered.

"Sure, coffee place on Broad Street?"

"Three o'clock?"

"I'll see you there," Amy said as she walked away.

+2 CHA
For having an actual conversation like a normal human being you have gained Charisma!

"Oh shut up," Taylor murmured, swiping the pop-up away.

~o-O-o~

Queenie watched as Taylor and Amy sat in the back corner of the small cafe. Taylor had a cup of tea, while Amy was nursing a large coffee that was much darker than was probably good for her. The girls had been more talkative in the quiet corner of the cafe than they had been in the public of the school cafeteria. So far the two had been carefully dancing around the topic they had met to discuss. Queenie didn't want to interfere though, the reason she and [SHAPER] had thrown them together was to make friends with one another; any cape related benefits were secondary. Ah, finally! The girls had gotten around to the topic of powers.

"What did you mean earlier?" Amy asked, "about your power making mine all talkative."

"My power can duplicate other-," Taylor started but quickly shook her head, "no, not that… My power can take what other powers do and replicate parts of it."

At this, Amy started looking worried.

"In this case, my power copied your ability to manipulate biology to give me regeneration."

"How does that relate to talkative powers though?" Amy asked, looking slightly relieved.

"According to my power, she can't just copy other powers for free. So I think she traded something with yours, which is why it's as talkative as mine now."

Amy seemed skeptical. She and [SHAPER] should step in now, Queenie decided. This part of the explanation would benefit from their input. Getting both girls to see and hear them shouldn't be too difficult either. They had been maintaining a connection while their hosts were nearby, so feeding their own part of the conversation to the other for delivery to their respective hosts was easy.

*Bloop*

Amy and Taylor both jerked in their seats as a crowned slime and a floating quetzalcoatl popped into existence above the table they were sharing.

"Hehehe, the look on your faces!" Queenie crowed.

[Amusement]

[Greeting]

Amy was the first to break out of her shock and respond, "You're Taylor's power?"

"Yep!" Queenie bowed with as much dignity as a slime could, her crown sinking into her jelly so it didn't fall off. "Queenie, at your service."

Taylor meanwhile, was trying to suppress a squee. Shaper was just so cute!

~o-O-o~

Quest Complete! +4 AP
Glue of Society
A friend was made, dammit.

That had gone well, Queenie thought. Taylor and Amy had spent the rest of the evening talking about superpowers, often with input from herself and [SHAPER]. Before they had eventually parted ways the girls had exchanged their PHO usernames, and Amy had given Taylor her cell number. Taylor still lacked a cellphone, but faced with the necessity of communicating with her new friend she had promised to buy one over the weekend.

While their hosts were exchanging methods of communication [SHAPER] and Queenie had been doing something similar. Faced with the loss of security and company due to his disconnection from the [NETWORK], [SHAPER] had asked Queenie if they could maintain their connection. She had agreed and between the two of them, they were soon able to improvise their own version. Considering how bare-bones theirs was compared to the real thing, they had decided it needed a different designation and had agreed to call it the [GRID]. Queenie expected that they would improve it with time, but for now, it would suffice. Currently, the [GRID] was able to provide data transfer and limited energy transfer in case of emergencies. The one major difference between it and the [NETWORK] was that if any other shards should join, it would remain entirely distributed with no central authority in the form of an entity.

When Queenie had described it to Taylor that night, her host had immediately pointed out the obvious, that she and Amy could also use the network to send one another messages. Feeling a bit stupid that she had missed such a blatant use for the [GRID], Queenie had quickly created a 'Party' window for Taylor's Interface. Since it had no features for a proper Adventurer, Queenie had chosen to classify direct [GRID] connections under a 'Friends' list of sorts. This way, once she was able to flesh out the Party system, her host would be able to form temporary 'Parties' with other people that they didn't necessarily trust enough to offer full a [GRID] connection. Upon poking [SHAPER] through the connection he had agreed that it was a good idea and had immediately informed Amy. The girls had spent the rest of the afternoon talking through the connection until eventually, Amy had fallen asleep mid-sentence.

~o-O-o~

Taylor had been unsure about Amy Dallon. She knew that her power had arranged their meeting, Queenie had been much more obvious than she had thought she was being. It felt nice though, to talk to someone again, to be able to trust someone as a friend. In the two short weeks of their friendship, she and Amy had started off very slowly. At first, they had barely shared anything, often being prompted by their respective powers to just communicate. For Taylor, the initial distrust had been borne from her previous betrayal at the hands of a friend. As Amy had later revealed, her hesitancy had been caused by the weight of expectation, both public and private, due to her family's public cape personas.

The two girls had soon started eating lunch together and often stopped by a coffee shop before heading home. Just the distraction from her normal routine had proven helpful for Amy. She no longer looked dead on her feet at all times of the day. Taylor had found the companionship helpful in healing from her previous ruined friendship and also found that being able to talk to someone helped her form some distance with her trigger event.

By virtue of how their interactions had started the two of them often found themselves talking about superpowers and commiserating about their talkative companions. It was during one of these frequent conversations that Amy expressed frustration with her inability to do more with her power in terms of helping people. It was at this point where [SHAPER] insisted that it was well within her capabilities to do so, she just kept refusing his suggestions.

"Well why don't you?" Taylor asked, "Create something Shaper suggested, I mean."

Amy looked ready to explode over her coffee, but then she paused. Sighing, she seemed to make up her mind.

"...I'm afraid," she said, "of what happens when Carol finds out. Of what happens when the PRT find out I can create life."

Taylor pondered her response for a moment. By now she had figured out that Amy's relationship with her mother could be described as 'rocky' at best. As for the PRT, she knew that their view on bio-tinkers had been irreversibly tainted by the likes of Nilbog and Bonesaw. Anything Amy made had the potential to trigger an overreaction when viewed with their atrocities in mind.

"You always go out for the Endbringer fights, right?" Taylor said, "So start out small, make something right before the next one. When it saves a bunch of capes at the next fight then the PRT and your mother won't freak out so easily. And it'll be easier to make new things afterward, too."

Amy seemed to ponder Taylor's words and didn't immediately respond. For a long moment, the two of them sat in silence nursing their cooling drinks. Queenie and [SHAPER] were displaying their avatars on the table between the girls, neither really interfering or making comments. Amy turned towards Queenie's slime avatar but remained silent.

"When we were talking about your powers you brought up Dungeons & Dragons as a comparison," Amy said, not looking away from Queenie.

"Yeah?"

"So... the health potions in D&D, I think I could make something similar."

Amy gestured at Queenie, "I think I could make a goo or gel, that targets injuries…"

Taylor waited expectantly as Amy trailed off. [SHAPER]'s avatar was flying in circles, going faster as he went, making increasingly more intricate shapes.

"Sorry Taylor, I've got to go," Amy said as she stood suddenly. "I think… got… Bye!"

Taylor watched in bemusement as Amy rushed out of the cafe, forgetting her half-finished coffee. Queenie also followed Amy's exit, jiggling in excitement.

"I can't wait to see what she comes up with!"

MrTwistr · Feb 10, 2018

So far this has been pretty great. With a semi-realistic expression of various RPG tropes.

Walpurgusnacht · Feb 10, 2018

I love this rendition of events!

Saphire · Feb 11, 2018

Just found this fic, and so far it's awesome. There is a bit of a lack of shard-centered fics like this one, especially more slice-of-life ones.

The prologue at first felt a bit confusing and made me feels desoriented, and the amount of ellipsis was distracting. The splashes of cookies were an awesome and refreshing touch, though there was a bit too much of them at first. Both of those problems seem to be fixed in the later chapters, though!
--- Edit:
Whoops, meant chapter 1 "Seed", which felt more like prologue to be honest.
---

Love the exploration of Aether, evolution of Queenie and Taylor's interface, and shard/host interactions. Already want to read up more on how Taylor and Amy would work together, and maybe Taylor meeting Wards. At least in Arcadia. Don't think it would be very good for Taylor to rush into the things though, and it seems that both she and Queenie know that.

thepsyborg · Feb 11, 2018

Heh. This is pretty great.

Athelmar · Feb 11, 2018

This gives a good way of explaining Gamer style powers. It will be fun when Taylor starts meeting other Capes.

Keep up the good work.

Zeuseus · Feb 11, 2018

Hahahaha.

Found Mauling Snarks a couple days ago from the Varga thread, so when I saw in the summary that this had been inspired by them I had to check it out.

Queenie is adorable and I suppose that's one way to get Amy being more creative.

Also:
"Make a Friend Dammit!"

*Snerk*

SmashQueen · Feb 13, 2018

Nice work actually working through why and how the video game aspects would be applied to a Parahuman in the Wormverse.

Entropy Engineer · Feb 14, 2018

Just found this fic and i must say it's an awesome refreshing new take on worm and gamer fics.

On another note with how Shaper and Queenie are showing up with cute cuddly mascots... Chances of Taylor and Amy joining together as a magical girl team? Fighting the dark emotions where ever they appear growing in power through friendship and love.

Godogma · Feb 14, 2018

Entropy Engineer said:
On another note with how Shaper and Queenie are showing up with cute cuddly mascots... Chances of Taylor and Amy joining together as a magical girl team? Fighting the dark emotions where ever they appear growing in power through friendship and love.

Not a Sailor Moon cross.

Entropy Engineer · Feb 14, 2018

Godogma said:
Not a Sailor Moon cross.

1. More magical anime that Sailor moon.

Also what exactly would you call.

"Watch the Adventures of Pan-Pan and Taylor with the power of friendship invested in them by their cute animal(?) mascots they fight the corrupted emotions of Humanity and their dark elements(Villains)."

The elements of turning this into a Magical Girl Anime- Worm/Gamer edition is all there.

Godogma · Feb 14, 2018

It's also a stupid idea and a massive genre shift. Queen Administrator is modelling stuff off computer rpg games not magical girl anime; moreover I'd hate to have to drop what looks to be a promising fic because it pulled a bait and switch of that type.

Entropy Engineer · Feb 14, 2018

Godogma said:
It's also a stupid idea and a massive genre shift. Queen Administrator is modelling stuff off computer rpg games not magical girl anime; moreover I'd hate to have to drop what looks to be a promising fic because it pulled a bait and switch of that type.

I don't really see it as a genre shift because you know we haven't been slotted into a genre yet. Also there's just as many if not more Magical girl tropes than RPG tropes. So far for the RPG it's only the interface. For the magical girl one there's power through friendship, Emotion based monsters, and cute mascots.

There's no reason why it can't be both genres. I would actually look forward to having more social stuff social link stuff than the Number grind of most "traditional" Gamer fics. I would actually prefer it to be both instead of just being more number porn that other fics hedonistically indulge in.

DestinyPlayer · Feb 16, 2018

Well this is just plain fun. I will enjoy watching how this progresses further, dammit.

jammyasdfg · Feb 16, 2018

This is good. I love the little avatars shaper and Queenie have.

Nightmare723764 · Feb 16, 2018

So are you going to be updating this at the same time as over on SB? Just curious.

Jaune Pendragon · Mar 2, 2018

...Watched... definitely keeping an eye on this.

Game-Master [Worm Altpower]

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KNEEL BEFORE YOUR GOD!!

Professional duck-cat.

No, I don't actually play Destiny

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