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System Administrator (Worm) (AltPower!Taylor)

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TW33K said:
Of all of Wildbow's shitty retcon's Canary's is probably the least offensive.

We see several powers in canon increase in potency during high stress situations. So her power managing to apply her master effect by just shouting when confronted by her abusive ex who has somehow gotten past her security seems pretty reasonable. She had to be extremely stressed and her power could have picked up on that.


While it's a stretch it's not a large one.
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Unfortunately that's not what the retcon is about. This wasn't a case of extreme emotions empowering an ability, this was her power activating without her prompt or knowledge. Basically just leaking out without being noticed. Which is why I call it power incontinence. If such a phenomenon was known to people, then parahumans would be much, much more careful because you could never know when it happens to you.

Paige never mentions any security and since she was just starting to play at larger venues and didn't even have a contract with a label yet, she might not have had a full crew around her. Or maybe she's an unreliable narrator since she's telling this story to Bakuda after being threatened, while waking up from sedatives on her way to the Birdcage.
 
Awesome story! :) Love Taylor's on the side hero work, and with such a great start! Hope Armsmaster has fun hunting down all those moles, and I really enjoyed how excited he got to teach something sciency to someone (I'm betting that's part of the reason he wants her to pretend to be a tinker, so he can teacher her moar!!!).
 
TemporaryMeasure said:
Bingo! I was wondering how long it would take. Taylor is neither a trained lawyer nor investigator, and is not doing the best possible job of interpreting the evidence.

That said, it is pretty clear from the way Canary's story goes that she definitely wasn't mastering her ex. Her power only applies itself through song. Either:
  1. He was mastered when he tried to make it through security, in which case he'd fail
  2. He wasn't mastered when he tried to go through security, but was afterwards, in which case he'd have to have heard her singing, in which case she'd have to have been singing, which I find unlikely and which in this story she definitely wasn't (which is maybe an AU but it is small and it is my story, so nyehh)
  3. He wasn't mastered but chose, for whatever reason including being his particular brand of crazy and stupid, to pretend to be
  4. He wasn't mastered but knew she could master people, and therefore thought he was mastered and had to do it
  5. He was mastered but wasn't??? IE, he got the master effect applied in the audience, and then got past the guards because it for some reason wasn't working then, but then it started again when face to face with Canary (See Wildbow's slipshod retcon)
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Or he was mastered, but not by her, And as such, he is a false flag attack vector. Hmmm, I seem to recall that We know a character with that MO.
Not saying it is mind, just allowing the possibility
 
Riverking said:
I feel like you are both underestimating what it takes to cut your penis off. Being a psychopath does not mean you are a robot who is able to cut organs off of your body on a whim. You would need to have something much more seriously wrong with you for that.

I just can't picture this man hearing someone say "go fuck yourself" and immediately deciding "I know! I'll cut off my penis and then no one will look into it at all, not even someone with super powers who would want a favour out of a high level master." It's the worst plan I've ever heard.
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you'd be surprised. recently in the UK there was a woman who repeatedly hit herself in the face with a hammer so much that her face was half destroyed, and then she went to the hospital and media claiming to have been brutalized and raped by the infamous rape gangs.

rape gangs, which I might add, were a real thing and had genuine victims resulting from that. She was of course very mentally ill and craved attention, but it did damage some of the actual victims' creditability as the men in the rape gangs were able to cry out that this whole thing was just racism.

www.bbc.com

Eleanor Williams: Accused 'hit herself with hammer and lied about rape'

Eleanor Williams is accused of falsely claiming she was raped and trafficked by multiple men.
www.bbc.com
 
Fenixlord said:
Аlexandria have husband?!
How? When? For what? Body in stop-time (no affection, no erection, no need eat, no need sleep) only breath-limited.
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I know right? I have, never, ever, heard of the idea of Alexandria being married!
Having a deniable boyfriend as Chief Director? Sure, might have heard of that one, maybe once, from a one-shot.
Having a fling with another Couldronite? A couple more times in my memory, but only one of them wasn't smut.
This breaking new ground! After five years of canon ending!
 
Menthewarp said:
I know right? I have, never, ever, heard of the idea of Alexandria being married!
Having a deniable boyfriend as Chief Director? Sure, might have heard of that one, maybe once, from a one-shot.
Having a fling with another Couldronite? A couple more times in my memory, but only one of them wasn't smut.
This breaking new ground! After five years of canon ending!
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The closest I've ever seen is Taylor Costa-Brown, where a young Taylor wonders why she hasn't married Hero's civilian identity yet. She also questions why she never married Danny after the one night stand that resulted in her birth.
 
HoodsGate said:
This is unambiguously my favorite quotable from any fic I've read since at least 2020. Bravo!
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It's definitely a good one. But my favorite line from this fic so far is describing the Bad Canary court case as "the kangarooiest of courts".
TheAkashicTraveller said:
If he and the guards were under the affect they would have just let him in when he asked.
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I would be very surprised if they heard anything at all of her concert while standing around outside her dressing room.
 
Ok, people need to remember this is an AU. It doesn't have to match up with Canon. Maybe Lexi has more time on her hands OR her marrying this guy is a path of Contessa's; it's not like she would be above marrying for political reasons. Also, in this universe, Paige's ability works like the author says.

HoodsGate said:
This is unambiguously my favorite quotable from any fic I've read since at least 2020. Bravo!
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Well, it sure as heck is a better quote than the Simurgh thinking the following: "Conflict Drone Twelve, Leviathan, was an asshole."

Man, I miss Addy.
 
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Tisaku said:
-Two hours really isn't much time for a newspaper to research, write, proof, typeset, print and distribute a story. Lots of work involved in dead tree stories.-
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Yep! But Taylor doesn't know that. I think it's a reasonable guess that she's going to be getting some annoyed requests for more time pretty soon. Also, keep in mind this is the 21st century, and Sudo is a denizen of the internet. She's more concerned about online publication than the print version. People who take print rather than online won't see it on PHO first; the purpose of the delay is to give the online publications and news channels the chance to break the story before it goes out on PHO.

That said, no way no how is 2 hours at all reasonable, and she'll get an inboxfull soon.

(Also, fixed capitalization. Thanks!)
 
Daemion said:
Unfortunately that's not what the retcon is about. This wasn't a case of extreme emotions empowering an ability, this was her power activating without her prompt or knowledge. Basically just leaking out without being noticed. Which is why I call it power incontinence. If such a phenomenon was known to people, then parahumans would be much, much more careful because you could never know when it happens to you.

Paige never mentions any security and since she was just starting to play at larger venues and didn't even have a contract with a label yet, she might not have had a full crew around her. Or maybe she's an unreliable narrator since she's telling this story to Bakuda after being threatened, while waking up from sedatives on her way to the Birdcage.
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Is she actually aware of when the master part of her power activates in general? I thought that was just always on when she sang and she didn't control it and might not be able to tell when it is or isn't on.
 
Ferrite said:
In canon, it isn't so much singing as her voice and the emotion behind it(the emotion part is REALLY important). When he busted into her room, she was still high off of the performance; then you add in the anger and she becomes a LOT more persuasive.

This isn't Canon so please don't let that impact your story.
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I also like the head canon that when she told him to go fuck himself he deliberately chose the worst interpretation of that phrase
 
zeromass said:
I also like the head canon that when she told him to go fuck himself he deliberately chose the worst interpretation of that phrase
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yeah. I mean, when I think of people literally fucking themselves I think of things like dildos or even those weird fanfics where clones have sex with each other. Dude could've gone looking for another parahuman out there who could fillfull that request, ie blasto, and asked for a clone of himself so that he could fuck himself. or just less complicated, make a mold of his penis and turn the resulting product into his dildo.

so many ways to interpret it. heh.

edit: she also didn't give him a time limit to do it now that I think of it, so it wasn't as if he had to do it right away, right?
 
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zeromass said:
I also like the head canon that when she told him to go fuck himself he deliberately chose the worst interpretation of that phrase
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That's basically the argument Quinn Calle uses in one fic where him and Carol are hired on as Canary's lawyers. That the whole thing was a set up to get Canary into the birdcage because there were so many other ways he could have fulfilled the "go fuck yourself" 'command' that wouldn't require self-mutilation.
 
The one thing I find weird in this chapter (working under the assumption that Costa is Becky husband) is that she put her last name LAST. Most often in a hyphenated name due to marriage, you put the new surname last, which would make her Rebecca Brown-Costa.

And as for a psychopath/sociopath, it's quite likely he'd do the mutilation, knowing that he could probably make a claim for nearly 100 percent of her fortune once she was Birdcaged. And with Cauldron and company setting up the laws such that parahumans pretty much have to work for the PRT or be villains (with rogues being outliers that are lucrative for the PRT in some way or another), you know the law would be set up to influence the Dred Scott-ness of the entire parahuman situation.
 
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WillRobinson said:
The conflict drive isn't literally mind control, it's mostly on the power-side of things, like giving the parahuman more power under certain conditions. I literally just gave you two examples of this in Lung and Taylor. Just because this doesn't fit your fanon idea of what a conflict drive should be doesn't mean it's nonsense.

Canary is a special case in that she's a Cauldron cape, so instead of having rewards and punishments tailored to the host she has a chance of getting residual programming from previous cycles, and that she tries not to use her power. If Triumph sat around without using his power (or used it to play baseball as he intended) maybe he would have found himself blasting someone during an argument too, but not many capes do that.

Hell, there was even a moment in canon where Taylor finds out that her power was acting on its own to mask a camera's view of her movements and make her look scary.



Broadly I agree that it makes sense for things like this to go on behind the scenes, and it fits the timeline. But you're misremembering canon again, the PRT weren't ever going after Paige. It was the state of Massachusetts, which is why Dragon sent letters to the judge, DA, and governor that had it out for her. She was initially picked up by police, we only see the PRT involved in her transport to the birdcage.

Edit: One inconsequential inconsistency in the chapter, the judge in canon was named Peter Regan, not Brawen.
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Thank you for telling me about these differences from canon! Gonna be honest, I forgot that it was the state of MA, not the PRT, and I also had no idea that the judge's name is specified. I'll fix the name, and we can consider the MA vs PRT issue a minor AU. The PRT is definitely going to be getting involved, after all – no way do the regular MA police have the facilities and expertise needed to handle parahuman prisoners. Thanks for canonchecking me!

PossiblyEnos said:
Most often, not always.
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Also, if he was Steven Brown, none of y'all would have noticed. :)
 
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0xFFF1 said:
Might be approximately the same logic as to why astronauts need to have families. Keeps them psychologically grounded. Having someone to return to is motivation to not go insane. Mental instability could ruin the mission, after all. Either that or people in power need families so that they can be taken hostage if you go mad with power. Gives you a good reason not to go mad with power. Unless you're a sociopath and just need the family as window dressing. Then all bets are off.
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Its a PR thing. People will feel inclined to "trust" someone who lead a stable upstanding family. Leftover from last century norm where a individual truly become member of productive society by having proper job, owns house (or land) and happily married. In case of women, that be good "proper" wife, have child(s) or properly raising one into proper adults. Each country differ slightly but usually marriage and stable family signified a good mannered and upstanding individual.
 
Sleepless1990 said:
Its a PR thing. People will feel inclined to "trust" someone who lead a stable upstanding family. Leftover from last century norm where a individual truly become member of productive society by having proper job, owns house (or land) and happily married. In case of women, that be good "proper" wife, have child(s) or properly raising one into proper adults. Each country differ slightly but usually marriage and stable family signified a good mannered and upstanding individual.
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Man, it's like y'all refuse to view Rebecca Costa-Brown as a person beyond her goals as part of Cauldron. Perhaps, even though she's a member of a secret organization and illegally running a gov't organization, she can still feel love? And yeah, with her power, sex is probably pretty impossible. But honestly, not all of a relationship is sex. Maybe it is something more sinister, but can we all just allow for the possibility that Alexandria might have feelings and an actual home life? Just sayin'.
 
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