Vespa

"There are limits to everything. Sooner or later, you go past those limits… shit's gonna get real. Might be they need a reminder of that before it goes that far."
*starts humming "Solidarity Forever"*
"Yes, my other daughter, who is far crazier than this one," he snorted, shaking his head, then putting his arm over her shoulders for a moment. "This one is calm and responsible. As I keep telling myself. Possibly erroneously."
You know, that'd make for an interesting fic. Taylor having a twin sister who's just like her, just one's decided to play villain while the other goes hero...
 
okay, though if she has a hornet in her hair or bee in her bonnet I'd expect that to have been spotted on the x-ray as an anomaly if nothing else.
You forget her ability to absorb and extract her hornets at will. As long as they're touching her.

And I'm pretty sure what's going on with not being able to turn the others into perfect copies of herself. She is still human, so there can probably only be one human at a time. Which she could test by taking on a driver form and having one of her other selves try to become human.
 
okay, though if she has a hornet in her hair or bee in her bonnet I'd expect that to have been spotted on the x-ray as an anomaly if nothing else.
What x-ray? 9/11 didn't happen on Earth-bet; Behemoth did. No one's checking people with X-ray machines to see if they're concealed-carrying an endbringer. Similarly with international travel so curtailed and the Middle East too busy dealing with internal problems, airport security ought to be even more relaxed, especially for an internal flight.
 
"Forty minutes to get to South Station. We'll take a cab, I don't feel like walking that far this early in the morning."
...How do you take a train to Boston and end up needing to take a cab instead of a subway to get to South Station? If the train doesn't go to South Station directly (the endpoint of half the train lines coming into Boston), then it goes to North Station (endpoint of the other half), and checking the history, there's been a one-transfer subway connection between them since around 1916.
 
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Everything proof. I don't think an airplane falling apart midflight would inconvenience her. Danny on the other hand... yeah, let's hope Contessa doesn't get any bright ideas. Or Simurgh.
Both Contessa and The Simurgh try to rube-goldberg something to sabotage the flight, only their efforts interfere with each other and wind up inadvertently exposing a third unrelated terrorist plot in the process which leads to the authorities taking down the entire terrorist network.
Meanwhile Danny and Taylor are completely oblivious to all this happening in the background.
 
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Damnit Pi, why do you make these interactions between Taylor and QA feel like an old lesbian (T) talking an experimental college girl (QA) into doing things she isn't quite comfortable with… I swear I'm gonna have to hit the naughty side of AO3 after I finish this post…
 
Damnit Pi, why do you make these interactions between Taylor and QA feel like an old lesbian (T) talking an experimental college girl (QA) into doing things she isn't quite comfortable with… I swear I'm gonna have to hit the naughty side of AO3 after I finish this post…

...It's a gift?

🤷‍♂️

...How do you take a train to Boston and end up needing to take a cab instead of a subway to get to South Station? If the train doesn't go to South Station directly (the endpoint of half the train lines coming into Boston), then it goes to North Station (endpoint of the other half), and checking the history, there's been a one-transfer subway connection between them since around 1916.

Big fight with the Teeth wrecked that line four years ago and local politics have been stalled on digging a new tunnel ever since :) Danny is aware of this and planned around it, being a practical sort of guy.
 
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You know, that'd make for an interesting fic. Taylor having a twin sister who's just like her, just one's decided to play villain while the other goes hero...
And periodically switch places to keep from getting too bored. If they do it right, nobody would notice.


I'm hoping none of the corporate types are up for removing the union guys before they ever make it to the conference.

There's a good chance Taylor would detect an explosive device, and hopefully be able to deal with it, but wouldn't do much for the poor corpo's that set it up. She'd dig up more than enough dirt on them in SoCal, she could bury them five times over with it. That is assuming they live long enough for it to be used... Union people, especially dockworkers, don't take kindly to that type of attack, at all.
 
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That's true of the law enforcement thing for a PI license too, in fact. It used to be that you had to have been a cop or something of that nature, but they loosened up the regulations about a decade ago and all you need now is to prove that you worked in an investigative field for a minimum of a year. Oddly enough, I was able to figure out how to spin what Calvert had me doing to meet the requirements."

Investigator for PRT Consultant. Lol.

Wonder if the Wards are investigative enough that Vista could get one too?
 
The single limitation she'd so far hit with her multiple bodies trick was that for some reason she couldn't seem to produce several copies of her completely human-appearing form.
That's actually surprising, considering that she's got the whole 'global library' thing up and running. Though I suppose it still is locked down to a subset of life that doesn't include humans. For now.

Though maybe she can cheat a bit, unmerge something and let it take a little Human with it.

... god fracking damn it, now I'm imagining her popping off extremities and them sprouting legs and shit like she's the bloody Thing.
 
Is this better or worse than 'Needs more cowbell'? (SNL)

I'm... speculating, if the plane did crash, could everyone, including Danny and Taylor, be carried to safety by a sudden swarm of giant flying insects? Who then amazingly fly-off/disappear?
(Taylor gathering back all she released might take a while, and the tiny bugs on the plane would need thought...)

BTW, I'm glad Taylor has hands and voice properly managed for all her driders. Human face/skin/hair - likely surprisingly tricky. But, latex skin, silk(y) hair, big issue is expressiveness and things like micro-expressions? Dunno if minute changes from blood flow is noticed on an unconscious level...

Faking the smell of humans, for those with good noses, may be tricky...
 
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Deciding that having so many of her around right now wasn't required, she changed most of them back into the base form each had started as, Jumpy, Impy, a drillipede, and a so-far unnamed but unnaturally large black widow taking the place of the hybrids, while the super-hornets shrank back into Vespa I and II.
Did Taylor just decide she was surplus to requirements and downsize herself?

I thought she was a Union Girl!
 
At this rate Taylor's going to become that one two-parter who is every insect on Earth after dying in the Locker. But slower. And not a distributed intelligence comprised (initially) of all the bugs.
Also wooo LA meets Vespa time
 
And, she'd reasoned once she'd thought of it, if that was the case, then the logical conclusion from that was that her library of creatures should be available to all of the level twos at the same time. Because they were all connected to each other, and her, via whatever method the power used.
Yikes. Between that and her setting up relays in other cities she's got a good start on that ficlet where she took over the insect population across multiple Earths. And near equally unkillable, not that anyone's probably going to even try for a while.

...Wait, what happened to Hess in this one?

Anyway, I have a feeling the Shards are going to have trouble inciting finding conflict soon...
It wasn't the same. Something was missing, something she couldn't quite describe even to herself yet.

Not enough eldritch, possibly, she thought with an inner grin.
I am still waiting for this to be literally correct.

She can feel free to add some, though. A bit of Eldritch is good for you.
 
Aisha is going to be the black best friend??? (Or course, Brian might want to be around, to keep an eye on her... He does (allegedly) have his own job...)
Why would Aisha be the best friend? Afik, Lisa barely even knows Aisha at this point. Besides, Brian already pretty much qualifies, and better fits the comparison.
 
And periodically switch places to keep from getting too bored. If they do it right, nobody would notice.

Except, of course, her parents. In a story like that, I somehow see her mother as still alive. Perhaps paraplegic after the accident, rather than killed, and ... damnit, I'm already working on one story I'm posting, and the other one I started is a lot of chapters in ... I don't need a third or fourth Worm story living in my head!

As for the relationship with QA, I don't know if anyone else has said it this way, but I don't think that Taylor has QA as her power; it's more that QA has TAYLOR as ITS power ...
 
...Wait, what happened to Hess in this one?
Sophia is cooling her heels in a cell, courtesy of the PRT/Protectorate after having done the monumentally stupid thing that was physically and verbally assaulting Taylor, and Lucy at a fast food joint, and getting her stuffing knocked out of her by Taylor and Lucy double teaming her.
With all of that getting caught on camera, because, you know, mobile telephones.
 
"We have added your biological distinctiveness to our collective and made it our own,"
...and now Bet has a limited (for now?) version of the Borg, if on a biological bent.
At least Taylor is benevolent.
You know, that'd make for an interesting fic. Taylor having a twin sister who's just like her, just one's decided to play villain while the other goes hero...
And periodically switch places to keep from getting too bored. If they do it right, nobody would notice.
Just imagining this is great!
As long as they're touching her.
Not anymore.
...Wait, what happened to Hess in this one?
She's currently in the PRT's custody after her phenomenally stupid actions in attacking Taylor and Lucy in a crowed restaurant (and being completely owned). I think that Piggot is waiting on more evidence to make sure that those above her cannot just wave away her actions because she's 'potentially useful'.
As for the relationship with QA, I don't know if anyone else has said it this way, but I don't think that Taylor has QA as her power; it's more that QA has TAYLOR as ITS power ...
Somewhat similar to Agent Gimme.
 
So, while it would probably be a very funny joke to have her dad come down to breakfast one morning and find two of her sitting at the table, she could live without that. She'd probably crack it sooner or later but it wasn't a high priority. One human-appearing version of her and multiple hybrid variants was still really cool and very useful. And the main utility of the trick was being able to use a global library rather than multiple local versions, after all. That part expanded her options massively in one step.

This Taylor is inspired by Varga shenanigans as well, she just has to work out the right way to do it

Until then, she'll continue with her own flavor of shenanigans as she spreads her influence across the country... though, probably not to much of her flyover travel since that'd be a bit harder

I wonder if the decreasing crime figures will start to pop up in Boston and New York and if Armsy's stat tracker will catch on to that?
 
Sophia is cooling her heels in a cell, courtesy of the PRT/Protectorate after having done the monumentally stupid thing that was physically and verbally assaulting Taylor, and Lucy at a fast food joint, and getting her stuffing knocked out of her by Taylor and Lucy double teaming her.
With all of that getting caught on camera, because, you know, mobile telephones.

Don't forget pulling a knife that previously belonged to a gang member, and doing all of this in front of Amy, Vicky and Missy, who all promptly went to speak to Piggot about the matter.
 
"And if we do need to step in, do it discreetly. But at the same time, make it impressive. In a discreet manner, of course. Because Presentation is key, so I'm informed, and that guy seemed to know his stuff."

Taylor, that's for super villains.

Everywhere needed a little eldritch. It added character.

No! Stop! Eldritch is NOT needed everywhere, or anywhere for that matter!

Also, why do I suspect there will be an attempted hijacking of this particular plane?
 
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