Taylor Hebert

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<tabber> |-|Worm=

{{#if:Tattletale to TaylorSpeck 30.1|

“	I mean, you ask when you approach other groups, and it’s like you’re holding a gun to their heads as you ask, or you ask at a time when it’s hard for them to say no, because all hell’s about to break loose. [...] Let’s just say you make a decision by yourself, and then you use others to get help carrying it out. That’s not really you asking for help, is it?	”
{{#if:Tattletale to Taylor| —Tattletale to Taylor{{#if:Speck 30.1|, Speck 30.1}} }} }}

|-|Ward=

{{#if:VictoriaBeacon 8.11|

“	A nameless cape. Taylor Hebert. Skitter. A bug controller from my hometown. We were too spooked at the idea that we might draw her attention and start that whole engine back into motion to mention her by name. Best to leave it alone.	”
{{#if:Victoria| —Victoria{{#if:Beacon 8.11|, Beacon 8.11}} }} }}

</tabber> <infobox> <title source="name"><default>Taylor Hebert</default></title>

<image source="Image"></image> <image source="image"></image> <group><header>Basic Information</header> <label>Civilian Name</label> <label>Aliases</label> <label>Gender</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Death</label> <label>Age</label><default>Unknown</default> <label>Post-timeskip</label> <label>Ward start</label> <label>Relations</label> <label>Family</label></group> <group><header>Professional Status</header> <label>Occupation</label> <label>Classification</label> <label>Unique Features</label> <label>Alignment</label>

<label>Status</label><format>

Alive?

</format>

<label>Location</label> <label>Teams</label> <label>Previous Team(s)</label> <label>Base of Operations</label></group> <group><header>First Appearance</header> <label>Worm Debut</label> <label>Ward Debut</label></group> </infobox>

Taylor Anne Hebert<ref name="14.8 eName">My name is Skitter, I thought, Taylor Anne Hebert. Sixteen. Born in Brockton Bay. Student at Winslow High. Ex-student. Member of the Undersiders. - Prey 14.8</ref> (pronounced "Hee-bert"; IPA:/ˈhiː.bɝt/<ref name="SB532">How tall exactly is Taylor? in comparison to the Wards ENE?

I think I mention it in the story, but you wouldn't be too wrong if you said she's 5'7" or 5'8" (corrected from 5'6") at the story's outset, taller than Battery, who's maybe 5'3" or 5'4". The only one who'd be taller than her would be Browbeat (using his power) or Aegis (who's a tallish male about to turn 18).

Taylor's last name is pronounced 'A bear' right? I ask this because I recall Victor calling Skitter 'heb' and she having a panic attack because she thought he knew her last name. Did I miss something?

Hee-bert. A-bear would be the French pronunciation, but her family uses the American pronunciation. The slur is 'heeb', short for Hebrew. - Comment by Wildbow on Spacebattles</ref>), known in her primary cape identity as Skitter, is the main protagonist of Worm.<ref name="Cast1">Skitter – The protagonist. A bug controller, she wears a black spidersilk costume with gray-black speckled armor panels. If you’ve forgotten who she is, you have a problem. - Cast (spoiler free)</ref>

Personality

Background

Taylor is initially a shy and awkward teenage girl with an interest in capes. She read cape magazines for a few years,<ref>Brian nodded, a small smile playing on his lips, “Nope. Now, how on the ball are you, as far as knowing what we’re up against?”

I blinked a few times, then hedged, “For other local capes? I’ve done research online, read the cape magazines religiously for a few years, more since getting my powers… but I dunno. If the past twenty four hours have taught me anything, it’s that there’s a lot I don’t know, and will only find out the hard way.”

Brian smiled. I mean, really smiled. It made me think of a boy rather than a nearly-grown man. He replied, “Most don’t get that, you know? I’ll try to share what I know, so you aren’t caught off guard, but don’t be afraid to ask if there’s anything you’re not sure about, alright?” - Excerpt from Insinuation 2.7</ref> though this only taught her basic facts about local heroes.<ref>His trademark and weapon was his Halberd, which was basically a spear with an axe head on the end, souped up with gadgets and the kind of technology you generally only saw in science fiction. He was the kind of guy who appeared on magazine covers and did interviews on TV, so you could find almost anything about Armsmaster through various media, short of his secret identity. I knew his weapon could cut through steel as though it was butter, that it had plasma injectors for stuff that the blade alone couldn’t cut and that he could fire off directed electromagnetic pulses to shut down forcefields and mechanical devices. - Gestation 1.6</ref><ref>Battery and Velocity were both speedsters of a sort, giving them the ability to move at a ridiculous pace. They were very different kinds of speedster, though. As I interpreted it, from all the stuff I’d read online and in the magazines and interviews, Battery could charge up and move at enhanced speeds for very short periods of time, sort of like how Bitch’s power pumped up her dogs, but concentrated into a few brief moments. It was a physiological change, altering her biology and then altering it back before it became too much on her body. The actual act of moving at the speeds these guys could manage was an incredible strain on the body. There were only one or two parahumans on the planet who could manage that kind of movement without any workarounds or limitations, and Battery and Velocity weren’t among them.

Velocity, in contrast to Battery, was more like Shadow Stalker. He changed states, and while I had no idea what this meant exactly, whether it was him shifting partially into another dimension or altering the way time or physics worked in relation to himself, I did know that it made him able to move very fast, without needing to rest like Battery did. Fast enough that my wasps couldn’t really land on him, and those that did were dispatched before they could start stinging. - Tangle 6.6</ref><ref>When I looked at our remaining escape route, Dauntless was at the other end of the alley. Brockton Bay’s rising star. It would have been easy to peg him as a tinker, but he apparently wasn’t. His power let him, according to details he’d leaked when he’d appeared on TV and in magazines, imbue his gear with a little bit of power every day. Thing was, every bit of power he parceled out had permanent effects. Every day, he was just a little bit stronger than he’d been the day before. A little bit more versatile. It was expected that he would eventually surpass even the likes of Alexandria, Legend and Eidolon, the ‘triumvirate’ of the Protectorate, the top dogs. That kind of made him a big deal in Brockton Bay, a hometown hero.

I didn’t follow that stuff, didn’t buy into the hero worship. I’d always found the capes interesting, I’d followed the non-gossipy news about them, but with the exception of a phase around the time I was nine where I’d had an Alexandria t-shirt and had my mom help me find pictures of her online, I had never really got giddy over any particular hero. - Tangle 6.7</ref><ref>A scattered few independent heroes and villains were around as well. Few I could name. I saw a girl dressed up like an old fashioned doll. Parian. She was local, and she wasn’t hero or villain. A rogue, who only used her powers for business or entertainment. She could sometimes be seen doing some promotion for a store downtown, giving life to some massive stuffed animal or a store mascot. She’d done an interview in a magazine I’d read back before I had powers, and I knew she was a fashion student, though she wasn’t revealing just who she was until after she was more established. - Extermination 8.1</ref><ref>Worse, if by some small miracle two capes managed to find comfort and support in each other, there was no guarantee that those other two points that Sundancer had raised wouldn’t ruin things. The intensity of our lifestyle and the sheer violence. Lady Photon had lost her husband in the Leviathan fight. Glory Girl had, if the magazines and papers were any indication, maintained an on-and-off relationship with Gallant. He’d died too.

So this? Lying here beside Brian? It was sort of bittersweet, with maybe a 60-40 split on the sweet vs. the bitter. - Colony 15.4</ref> She looked forward to the part of her World Issues class where they discussed capes "since the start of the semester".<ref name="1.1"/> She had seemingly never heard of Trigger Events, but this may have been a mistake by the author.<ref>Being completely honest, even as the author, I'm a little surprised Taylor didn't know or even voice that she'd come across the idea while on ParahumansOnline. I thought I remembered the dialogue going more like, "Do you know what trigger events are?" "I've heard of them, but..."

I suspect I may tweak it just a bit when I return to the chapter while doing the edits for the polished final version. - Comment by Wildbow, archived on Sufficient Velocity</ref>

She was "'surviving', for lack of a better word," from the point her mother died, and then surviving from the point she started getting bullied -- she just wanted to get by. She responded to stress with silence and withdrawal.<ref name="IRC eEarlyTaylor">Wildbow: Early Taylor responds to stress with silence and withdrawal.
[...]
logiccosmic: Anything else you remember from the shit show?
Mishie: back
Wildbow: The big issue is it doesn't feel like Taylor.
Wildbow: When writing a character, you gotta start from the motivations. Taylor, starting out, just wants to get by.
(logiccosmic scribbles furiously)
Wildbow: She was 'surviving', for lack of a better word, from the point her mom died, and then surviving from the point she started getting bullied.
Wildbow: She compartmentalizes things, but she's very prone to having her perspective skew like crazy.
Wildbow: (I really want to emphasize this more in the rewrite, for the initial arcs) - Wildbow on IRC, archived on SpaceBattles</ref> She was starved for touch.<ref> Lisa, though, put one of her arms around my shoulders and gave me a one-armed squeeze of a hug. She was a little older than I was, so she was just tall enough to be at the perfect height to do it. What caught me off guard was how nice the gesture felt. Like I had been needing a hug from someone who wasn’t my dad for a long time. - Excerpt from Insinuation 2.7</ref> She suspected that she would hurt herself before she hurt the Trio.<ref name="1.2"/> However, Wildbow has stated that if she hadn't triggered, Taylor would likely have simply stopped going to school rather than harming herself.<ref>People keep saying suicide, but that isn't quite it.
Taylor likely would have stopped going to school. She was already on that road. - Reddit - "What would've happened to Taylor if she'd never triggered?"</ref>

She was afraid of illegal drugs, saying she "had this sense" that they were like "an unstoppable black hole". Just the idea of being around someone that was high made her mildly anxious.<ref name="5.8">Hive 5.8</ref> She disliked taking painkiller pills because they never seemed to make a difference.<ref>Brian insisted I take two Tylenol, though the pain was still limited to a mild ache in my arm. I grudgingly obliged. I’d never liked taking pills, and never felt they made a real difference. - Excerpt from Insinuation 2.9</ref>

She was familiar with navigating computers from a young age thanks to her mother.<ref>I knew my way around computers, my mom had made sure I had one since before I could read and write, but I would be lying if I said I could tell if I was being hacked or do anything about it. - Excerpt from Insinuation 2.5</ref>

She was a "nonbeliever", as opposed to an 'atheist', when it comes to religion, as the subject was not something she put a great deal of thought into and certainly not to the point where she'd label herself an 'atheist'. Due to her habit of blaming the people in charge when things started becoming bleak and messed up, it would be a stretch for her to be faithful in a world with poor conditions like Worm.<ref>Comment by Wildbow on RPG.net</ref>

Disliked the idea of having her bodily autonomy taken away even before she triggered.<ref name=":2">That was disturbing.  I didn’t have a better way of putting it.  I’d almost been paralyzed by Leviathan in the Endbringer attack, but even before that, the idea of being left conscious but unable to move of my own volition had always spooked me.

I’d never had a relative in the hospital suffering from anything like that, and I couldn’t remember seeing any movies or shows on television that might have put the idea in my head at an impressionable age.  Still, it was one of the first places my mind went when I thought about worst case scenarios and horrific fates.  It had been in my thoughts more over the past two or three years, and the idea had been showcased in more than one nightmare over the past two weeks.

Maybe it was more general than that.  Not a fear of paralysis, specifically, but of helplessness.- Excerpt from Parasite 10.3</ref><ref>“You… voluntarily gave him control over you?” I asked.

“Little while back,” Imp said.  “I wanted to see what it was like.  Could come in handy.  Did come in handy.”

It’s Regent, I thought.  I’d fought beside him in life and death scenarios and I would never have allowed him to take control of me.  Couldn’t fathom it.

Was there a way I could diplomatically say as much?

None I could think of, right this minute.

“I can’t imagine submitting myself to that,” I said. - Excerpt from Imago 21.3</ref>

Taylor was canonically heterosexual.<ref>Wildbow on Spacebattles.</ref>

Story Start

She has shown some insecurity in her femininity, describing her long, dark curly hair as her "only feminine feature".<ref name="1.1"/> Used to regularly spent time in front of a mirror, fixating on the flaws and things she didn't like about herself to the point where she would see a stranger in her reflection.<ref>To say I barely recognized myself was.. how could I put it?  It was true, but I could also remember myself months ago, when I’d look at my reflection and I would be so focused on the flaws and the things I didn’t like about myself that I never felt familiar with the person I was seeing in the mirror.  It was as though it was always a stranger I was looking at, and I would be left vaguely surprised at the combination of features across from me. - Excerpt from Infestation 11.1</ref> She would always stress over choosing her clothes.<ref name="6.2">“Don’t you?”  She asked.  She turned her attention to my selection of clothes piled on the bed.  “You’re paying a lot of attention to what you’re going to be wearing.”

“I always do, even when I’m just going to be hanging out with you and Bitch.  I second guess and stress over the clothes I’m wearing if I’m walking to the corner store by my house to buy milk and bread.” - Excerpt from Tangle 6.2</ref>

She had a tendency to throw herself into danger without considering the consequences to herself, that could easily have resulted in her death had it persisted.<ref name="R S">Taylor isn't suicidal but would have dropped out of school.
Depends on your definition of suicidal. I've fairly sure I've dropped WoG (That's noted in the archives) that states Taylor would not live in a lot of AUs because she was liable to tailspin into self destruction (the thought 'I want to die' not crossing her mind even as she put herself into dangerous situations) in a lot of scenarios where she didn't have the same outside influence. - Partial comment by Wildbow on Reddit</ref>

Taylor considered joining the Wards, but felt that "the notion of escaping the stresses of high school by flinging myself into a mess of teenage drama, adult oversight and schedules seemed self-defeating".<ref name="1.6">Gestation 1.6</ref> She had no trust in organized institutions, and felt happier having some independence and control.<ref name="1.6c1">As Taylor states, “I had considered applying to join, but the notion of escaping the stresses of high school by flinging myself into a mess of teenage drama, adult oversight and schedules seemed self-defeating.”

In brief: The Wards could easily be everything she’s trying to get away from.

Beyond that, she has no trust in organized institutions (school has failed her badly – see the next chapter for more on the subject), and she’s happier having some independence and control (personal power, freedom, escapism) in circumstances where she otherwise has none, than she would be as another rank and file member of the Wards. Or, perhaps to phrase it better, she’s more afraid of being unhappy in the Wards than she is of being unhappy on her own.

So why not just fly solo for a while, right? - Comment by Wildbow on Gestation 1.6</ref>

She had increasing difficulty attending school.<ref>Kicking myself even as I did it, I turned away and walked back down the hall towards the front doors of the school. I knew it would be that much harder to go back tomorrow. For one and three-quarter school years, I had been putting up with this shit. I'd been going against the current for a long time, and even though I was aware of the consequences I'd face if I kept missing school like this, it was so much easier to stop pushing so hard against the current and just step in the other direction. - Agitation 3.1</ref> Sometimes she would make deals with herself to attend for part of the day, then convince herself to attend for more.<ref>I stared out the window of the bus, watching the people and the cars. On days like this, after being publicly humiliated, getting myself to the point where I was willing to walk through the door was about making deals with myself and trying to look past the school day. I told myself that I would go to Mrs. Knott's computer class. None of the Trio would be there, it was usually pretty easygoing, and I could take the time to browse the web. From there, it was just a matter of convincing myself to walk down the hall to Mr. Gladly's class.

If I just made myself do that, I promised myself, I would give myself a treat. - Agitation 3.1</ref>

Taylor became very self-conscious when she was physically close to people, worrying if they could smell bad breath or body odor to the point of stopping to breath just in case she had bad breath.<ref>“Relax.  You’re allowed to breathe.”

I laughed lightly at the realization I was holding my breath, which resulted in a nervous, chuckling exhalation that only added to the awkwardness I was feeling.

He was smiling, “You okay?”

What was I supposed to say?  Admit I didn’t know how to deal with being around a good looking guy?

I stared down at the ground, at the table leg I was holding.  “I get nervous when I’m close to people.  I think, you know, maybe I have bad breath, or maybe I have B.O., and I wouldn’t be able to tell, because it’s mine, so I hold my breath like that to be safe.  I dunno.” - Excerpt from Tangle 6.3</ref>

Tattletale mentioned that Taylor was "observant, detail oriented and focused", and that she watches, observes and then acts with careful, surgical precision.<ref>“You and Brian are similar, but I wouldn’t say he’s cautious.  He’s… pragmatic.  You both are.  The difference between you two is that he’s been doing what he does for three years, now.  Two years of experience, before he joined the group.  So a lot of what he does is automatic.  He doesn’t give a second thought to the little things he’s done dozens of times already.  He takes a lot for granted.”

“And I don’t?”

“You’re observant, detail oriented and focused.  More than any of the others.  You watch, you interpret, and then you act with this careful, surgical precision. That’s a strength and a flaw.” - Excerpt from Shell 4.2</ref> Brian describes her as "analytical", going through points step-by-step like checking things off a list.<ref>He didn’t speak, giving me a chance to continue, “I think you’re good looking, I like you as a person.  I respect you, more than any of the others, because you’re smart about what you do, career-wise.  You know.  And because you’re so comfortable in your own skin, so confident.  I admire that.”

“You sound so analytical,” Brian offered me a slight smile, but he looked a little pained, “Going through the points, step by step, like you’re checking things off a list.”

“That’s not- I’m not trying to.”

“I’m not criticizing you.  I’m saying it seems very you.” - Excerpt from Buzz 7.6</ref> Taylor doubts these observations.<ref>“It makes the most sense.  You have the best grip on who’s in play and how to use our abilities.  You think tactically,” she murmured.

[...]

“Just because we’re putting you in charge doesn’t mean I can’t still handle that stuff.  If you want to delegate to me at any point, that’s fine.  It’s just a question of who we turn to when we need a spur of the moment decision.”

“I’m not good at those.  I’m only good when I can plan, consider everything that’s at play.”

“I don’t think you give yourself credit.  I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again, you’re good at improvising.”- Excerpt from Colony 15.5</ref><ref>"Come on, you know me pretty well.  All the others describe me as careful and cautious, though I’m not entirely sure why.  Do you really think I’d pick something as important as a dog, a new addition to my family, without researching, first?” - Excerpt from Buzz 7.3</ref>

Tattletale also noted, later on, that she seemed to "gravitate toward solitude", and that she seemed oblivious to people staring at her as Skitter, perhaps because she had spent so long assuming everyone was staring at her as a result of her poor self-confidence. Tattletale believed that Taylor would be better at using Tattletale's power than she was.<ref name="I8">Interlude 8.y</ref>

Post-Leviathan

She suffered from nightmares.<ref name="11.1c1">I know the dream sequence is sort of a tired bit, but it struck me that I’ve mentioned a few times that Taylor has nightmares, earlier in the story, and there’s the stress over Dinah, her dad and Sophia, and I wanted to sort of touch on that without getting into pure exposition. Showing rather than telling. So I went with the dream.

All in all? I’m ok with how that part turned out, personally. Though I welcome any complaints/criticisms/praise to let me know if I hit the mark & should leave that option open for another story/book in another year. - Comment by Wildbow on Infestation 11.1</ref> Shocked by the city's devastation, Skitter focused on establishing her new territory and finding a way to retain "employees", despite other demands on her time such as negotiating with Coil over future plans.

Post Slaughterhouse Nine

She was known for reviewing previous fights to see how she could have done things differently or if some new trick she learned could have taken care of the situation.<ref>Colony 15.2</ref>

Taylor started to take the lead more in engagements the Undersiders participated in. Eventually taking over as the leader of the Undersiders when dealing with Dragon.

Was described by Director Piggot and, to a certain extent, the PRT as "reckless, shortsighted, capricious, violent, even vicious… but not stupid."<ref>“I said it earlier, I think, but you’re not a stupid girl, Skitter.  Reckless, shortsighted, capricious, violent, even vicious… but not stupid.  I’m hoping you have the sense to realize how dangerous your current position is.  There will be more mechanical suits coming.  There will be heroes coming to Brockton Bay to assist us.  You can’t afford to hold this city, and we can’t afford to let you.  Not in the grand scheme of things.” - Excerpt from Monarch 16.3</ref>

Post-Echidna

Taylor had time to reconnect with her dad, but still had some guilt about the distance in their relationship. She met Emma at school and was surprised to see how her view of her tormentor had changed because of recent events.

After Dragon's return visit, while angry she tried to find a way to compromise after the event by turning herself in. It didn't go well. But eventually her faith in the system was restored somewhat.

As the negotiations turned into extortion and interrogation, a crisis started to form. However it was defused and in its wake, Taylor had achieved what she felt was necessary: a stronger front against the Endbringers and End of the World scenario. She stated “This is what I want to do, above all else," and would commit to joining the effort under the new name of Weaver.<ref name="22.6">Excerpt from Cell 22.6</ref>

Post-Timeskip

She is noted to be cold, distant, exceptionally driven, and even ruthless by many characters.<ref>Cell 22.2</ref>

She became concerned that her passenger was influencing her behaviour.<ref name="27.3e1"/><ref name="26.2 e2"/><ref name="24.4e1">Had I? Not wholly consciously. I'd set up the string, but how much of that was intentional? Was it habit, now, to have a measure on hand when dealing with any weapon?

I focused on the swarm, focused on the cords and threads that traced the room. One in the doorway, one at each of Phir Sē's feet, just waiting for me to finish the deal and bind him. Others extended between us, spiders poised to cut the threads or tie them, as the situation demanded.

The passenger, or was it me, being wary?

"I guess I did," I said. I made the spiders cut the threads between us.

[...]

My heart was still pounding, my mouth dry, and it wasn't just the Phir Sē thing, or the teleporter. The passenger. - Crushed 24.4</ref> She even blamed ordinary emotions on her passenger.<ref name="27.3e2">"It's been a bad day, in case you haven't noticed. You're allowed to feel bad. It's kind of normal."

Normal.

I'd been thinking of my feelings as being off-kilter, out of control, unreasonable and irrational.

Were they just regular feelings? Emotions that weren't being reined in by my discipline and bottling everything up, by distraction and disconnection?

Somewhere along the line, I'd stopped thinking about my feelings as being mixed up or fucked up and stopped concerning myself with them altogether. On a level, I'd blamed my passenger.

But I wasn't sure I could justify that with what I was experiencing now. Why would the passenger take away, gain ground in subsuming my identity and then give it back, all like this?

Was it just me? - Excerpt from Extinction 27.3</ref> She tried hypnosis and bartering with it to control it, to no avail. Eventually she made a kind of peace with it.<ref name="26.4">Sting 26.4</ref>

Gold Morning

Taylor's sanity begins to rapidly fracture after her Corona pollentia was 'de-regulated' by Panacea. Panacea's alterations reduce the range but dramatically increase the power of Taylor's control, at the cost of the 'limiter' on Queen Administrator that prevents Taylor's powers from harming her. The consequences of the loss of the 'limiter' are fundamental. She immediately loses the ability to speak, read, or write and continues to degrade over the course of Gold Morning, eventually losing the ability to understand spoken dialogue.<ref>Speck 30.7</ref>

Shards have a pre-programmed drive to cause conflict. The loss of the limiters on Taylor's Queen Administrator shard cause this quality of her power to excessively bleed into her personality. She loses the ability to understand basic human emotional cues and bodily language, ultimately interpreting nearly any and all forms of human interaction as fighting or conflict. Driven into near-total insanity by her powers, she resolves to take over the disparate Earths in order to finally have peace, but is convinced to peacefully retreat into a self-imposed exile by several heroes, including Narwhal, Rachel, Imp, Tattletale, and Glastig Ulaine.<ref>Speck 30.7</ref>

By the end of Gold Morning, the boundaries between Taylor and the Queen Administrator shard have worn thin. Queen Administrator is able to speak and communicate through Taylor, using Taylor's own voice. <ref>“I don’t-” I started. What had I been saying?

Not me. The passenger. I had to relax. Allow myself to speak. - Excerpt from Speck 30.7</ref> Contessa compares her to other parahumans who have lost control of themselves due to the personality bleed-over from an unleashed shard, such as Echidna, Glaistig Uaine, and the Ash Beast as examples of parahumans that Taylor now resembles. Taylor has by this point become so degraded that she mainly communicates through the assistance of powers, and needs to exert effort in order to be able to communicate as herself instead of allowing her shard to speak for her.<ref name="30.7"/>

Taylor ultimately expresses regret for the long chain of decisions she's made, starting from her first meeting with Armsmaster, and culminating in Scion's defeat. At a certain point the losses of friends and the moral compromises became too much, though not even she knows when or where the balance was tipped. Taylor says, in the end, that if she had a way to do it all over again, she would find a way to be a hero differently, a way to do it all better and not pay the prices she was forced to pay.<ref name="30.7">Speck 30.7</ref>

Post-Gold Morning

After being seemingly exiled by Contessa to Earth Aleph (which is isolated from the multiverse) alongside her father, an unpowered Taylor aims to pursue a normal life, but struggles to find peace now that she has it after all the decisions she's made and how nothing she'll ever do will ever come close in importance to what she did before. Taylor also questions why Contessa spared her when she asked for death, forcing her to come to terms with her regrets and causing her to doubt things could be going well for her and her dad. After the talk, she decides that, although that she has a lot of stuff bothering her, she's dealt with worse and could maybe deal with it and learn to be okay.<ref name=":1">Excerpt from Interlude: End</ref>

Relationships

Civilians

Taylor had a strained relationship with the students of Winslow High. Because she was bullied extensively by "other girls and a small handful of boys" with the "trio" - Madison Clements, Sophia Hess, and Emma Barnes<ref name="1.1"/> acting as the ringleaders, she was reluctant to make friends and believed that boys didn't like her.<ref name="1.1"/> She speculates that the few boys that bullied her sought approval from three of the prettier and more popular girls.<ref name="1.1"/>

As Skitter, Taylor had developed a fearsome reputation as a powerful cape and supervillain due to her exploits against the ABB, Empire 88, Coil's criminal empire, the Slaughterhouse Nine, the PRT, and the Protectorate, whilst assimilating much of the territories and assets of the three former groups into her own criminal organization. Effectively becoming a warlord that ruled Brockton Bay. When Dragon publicly outed Taylor under Director Tagg's orders, Taylor used her exploits to urge 100 of her classmates to help her escape from Arcadia and flee from the heroes. Within the relative confines of her own territories, she was able to walk in public with impunity prior to her conditional surrender to the PRT and Protectorate. With her resources, Taylor funded multiple projects to rebuild the city after Leviathan's attack, though much of this goodwill was overshadowed due to her reputation.

As Weaver, Taylor's chafes under the directives she's mandated to follow as a probationary Ward, limited to the use of non-venomous bugs. She visits Ms. Yamada for therapy. Due to her killing Alexandria, Taylor's been looked upon distrustfully. The public start to see Weaver as a hero following the New Delhi battle.^{[citation needed]}

Teachers

Taylor disliked Mr. Gladly viewing him as one of the ‘popular kids' who had become a teacher.<ref name="1.1"/>

Mrs. Knott, who taught Computer sciences, was Taylor's favourite teacher.<ref>Computer class was one of the few parts of the school day I didn't usually dread. For one thing, it was the one class in which I was doing well.

[...]

Mrs. Knott was an alright teacher, if not the most hands on; she was usually content to give us advanced students an in-class assignment and then focus on the more rambunctious majority for the rest of the class. - Insinuation 2.2</ref><ref>I looked at my teachers. At Mrs. Knott, who I'd even say was my favorite teacher, "Don't you see how fucked up this is? He's blackmailing us right in front of you, and you can't understand that this manipulation has been going on from the beginning?"

Mrs. Knott frowned, "I don't like the sound of it, but we can only comment and act on what happens in school." - Hive 5.4</ref>

Taylor's Bullies

Madison Clements, Sophia Hess, and Emma Barnes - The Trio of students responsible for bullying Taylor. Emma was Taylor's best friend from first grade to middle school, the two girls stayed at each other's houses every weekend.<ref name="1.2"/> Upon entering high school, Emma suddenly abandoned her for Sophia and Madison. The three then tormented her - Sophia physically, Madison superficially and Emma emotionally. Because Emma was once her best friend, she was the only one of the three that could truly harm Taylor, using information that Taylor once confided to her to psychologically harm her, such as the death of Mrs. Hebert. Taylor resisted attacking the trio with her powers, no matter how much she wanted to.<ref name="1.1"/> She considered the thought of her father's disappointment on seeing that she had attacked the Trio "daunting" but less than her anger and frustration with them.

After facing the likes of Coil and the Slaughterhouse 9 Taylor was able to overcome Emma's emotional attacks; following Taylor's public outing as Skitter Emma broke down. Emma Barnes' parents and sister blame Taylor for their daughter's eventual death.

Madison would ultimately come to regret her actions after learning that Taylor had become Skitter, feeling somewhat responsible for the path of violence that Taylor had taken. She would ultimately reach out to various heroes hoping to gain more information but was rebuffed. Eventually Victoria gave her some answers, saying that she would never know whether her actions had ultimately saved the world or not.

Danny Hebert

They develop a somewhat strained relationship after she becomes Skitter, but repair it over the time she acted as Weaver. She always saw his teachings as a source of strength.

Territory employees

After saving Charlotte from the Merchants, she loyally looks after Skitter's base and reports daily to her. While Skitter is thankful for her help and loyalty, but isn't sure how to show her appreciation to her.

Parahumans

Before becoming a cape, Taylor was, in her younger days, a big fan of Alexandria and Armsmaster. As a member of the Undersiders she becomes close friends with Tattletale, Grue, and Rachel (Hellhound/Bitch). She has a somewhat more distant relationship with Regent, due to being somewhat unsettled by him.

Taylor and Grue become romantically involved after the events of the Slaughterhouse Nine arc, but the relationship is short-lived and fizzles due to dramatically different levels of potential investment in the relationship, as well as the prevalent, tumultuous circumstances looming over both their civilian and cape lives . Where Grue was unwilling to make it a 'serious' relationship, Taylor very much was. Nonetheless the two remained on positive terms.

Taylor and Clockblocker share a vaguely respectful mutual relationship despite being enemies, a connection forged by fighting with or against one another several times. This connection becomes obvious to the point that civilian rumors begin to circulate of a romantic relationship between the two. Taylor is also close to Golem, serving as something of a mentor figure. She also spends a large amount of her time with Chicago wards but is considered not to be as close with them as she is with the Undersiders. As Weaver, Taylor visits Ms. Yamada for therapy. The civilian public begins to see Weaver as a hero following the Behemoth battle and Glenn Chamber's unauthorized release of her POV video of the battle.

After the time-skip, she is close to Golem, serving as something of a mentor figure. She also spends a large amount of her time with Chicago wards but is considered not to be as close with them as she is with the Undersiders. After recovering from her injuries during the oil-rig battle, Taylor collects a team of parahumans with a semi-rotating membership from capes she had known in the past. This group includes Lung, Tattletale, Shadow Stalker, Cuff, Tecton, and Canary at different points.

Armsmaster

He was the first real Cape that Taylor worked with and admired him when she was younger. After Armsmaster's actions during the battle with Leviathan, which also culminated in him revealing her status as a mole to the Undersiders, she loses her respect for him, and they later become bitter enemies. After gaining perspective, Armsmaster, later rebranded as Defiant, apologizes to her (which catches her off guard.) Afterwards they're able to have a civil (if not friendly) relationship.

Alexandria

Alexandria was Taylor's favourite heroine when she was a kid.<ref>Without taking the box, I tilted my head to get a better look at the front, "Alexandria. She was my favorite member of the Protectorate when I was a kid. Is the lunchbox collectable?" - Excerpt from Insinuation 2.6</ref> When she was nine, she went through a phase where she wore an Alexandria t-shirt and had her mom help her look up pictures of Alexandria online; the only time she had ever been a fan of a particular hero.<ref>I didn't follow that stuff, didn't buy into the hero worship. I'd always found the capes interesting, I'd followed the non-gossipy news about them, but with the exception of a phase around the time I was nine where I'd had an Alexandria t-shirt and had my mom help me find pictures of her online, I had never really got giddy over any particular hero. - Tangle 6.7</ref>

She developed a fractious relationship with the hero which turned dangerous a bit before Taylor began her career as Weaver.

Lisa "Tattletale" Wilbourn

Lisa is one of the first to trust Taylor from their first meeting and eventually becomes her closest friend. Despite some a few later misgivings over Tattletale's morals, especially when she suddenly unveils her more audacious plans, Taylor generally accepts her reasons and trusts her to do the right thing. In turn Lisa is somewhat protective of her because of two reasons: her past, and her involvement in recruiting Skitter.

Brian "Grue" Laborn

Taylor develops a crush on him and the two date for awhile. After the timeskip, though they have long since separated, she is still surprised to see that he had moved on with someone else.

Rachel "Bitch" Lindt

The two initially have a rocky relationship, but by the end of Worm, Taylor is one of the few Rachel could call a friend.

Taylor eventually came to think of Rachel by her name instead of her cape appellation.<ref>Queen 18.5</ref>

Alec "Regent" Vasil

Taylor is wary of Regent's ways. She knows that he's sociopathic and considers his membership on the Undersiders a necessary evil.^{[citation needed]} She acknowledges his power is useful, but doesn't fully accept its moral implications.

Aisha "Imp" Laborn

Taylor thinks she's annoying, but tolerates her out of respect for her brother. They develop a close personal relationship later on.^{[citation needed]}

Aiden Tate

Taylor was only around Aiden for a short while,<ref name="II10.z eImpact">But this was the kind of thing they needed. Alliances, solidifying ties. When people were hurt, they needed to be taken care of. He’d learned that sort of thing from Charlotte and Forrest, from Sierra, and from people who had passed more quickly through his life. Taylor had only been around for a short while, but she had made an impact too. - Interlude 10.z II</ref> not long after his parents died.<ref name="II16.7 eAidenMemory">“I think about her once in a while. Skitter, I mean. Weaver. Taylor. I go a month without thinking about her at all and then I’ll get really curious because-”
[...]
“-she was there not long after my parents died. But I think about her less and less. You can only ask the same questions so many times, you know?” - From Within 16.7</ref> As a warlord, she paid Charlotte to look after him and the other orphans;<ref>“This is what she was doing, all that time? Taking care of these children?”

“That was only a small part of it. She mostly paid me to look after them and make sure people got the food they needed. She looked after everyone. When they were all in the worst situations they’d ever faced, struggling for food, worrying every hour if they would be attacked or preyed on, she stepped up.”

“You’re trying to defend her. To justify what she did.”

“Only a little.” - Interlude 22.x</ref> Aiden spent more time around other Undersiders like Grue than he spent around Taylor.<ref>“Tattletale says some stuff, but she’s biased. I barely remember her. I spent more time around Grue than I spent around Skitter, and-” - Interlude 10.z II</ref> However, she did make enough of an impact on him,<ref name="II10.z eImpact"/> such as possibly giving him a mug of hot chocolate,<ref>As Chicken Little approached it, I could see the scene unfold.

Chicken Little, much smaller and younger, sitting in a tiny kitchen in a narrow house.

And with him was a girl with a tumble of black hair, wearing a tank top and pyjama bottoms. Round spectacles.
[...]
Little Aiden sat on a stool, and Taylor Hebert, Skitter, Khepri, gave him a mug of what might have been hot chocolate, before sitting beside him, rubbing his back. - Infrared 19.8</ref> for her shard to bud onto him.<ref>Aidan sat off on his own, a pigeon sitting on his knee. He opened and closed his hands, and the bird hopped from the one knee to the other, then back again. Something had happened there, but it wasn’t a focus. Not right now. - Extinction 27.1</ref>

Coil

Taylor is extremely distrustful of Coil because he involved the Undersiders in a kidnapping (albeit indirectly), but depends on his funding and supplies. As his plan to dominate the city comes to fruition, their conflict puts her increasingly on edge.

Skitter works to save Dinah Alcott. While unfortunately she works for the PRT, she harbors no regrets or ill will towards the thinker.

Travelers

Skitter comes to know and talk with all of the Travelers, who cautiously respect her. She first meets Sundancer while fighting at the ABB warehouse, but unnerved her by disfiguring Lung. Likewise, she doesn't seem to get along too well with Trickster nor Ballistic, who don't trust her motives and are suspicious of her. Genesis is more neutral but later sensing Skitter's agitation with Coil, becomes guarded.

Panacea

Complicated. While she disliked the Undersiders due to the bank argument, she would later come around. Because of the Nine, she gifted Skitter with Atlas and Relay bugs to cover her weaknesses. Though these were meant to be temporary they helped her escape the firebombs.

Miss Militia

They would cooperate to some extent, Miss Militia's attitude as leader of the local heroes more amenable than that of her colleagues. During the Echidna fight Skitter often informed her of urgent developments and did get understanding if not acceptance from the pragmatic hero. Like Defiant, she was sympathetic to the worst of Skitter's treatment as a cape, including the PRT order to unmask her. Thus she would be somewhat involved in Skitter's Surrender, although Skitter begrudged her decision to avoid influencing the ongoing negotiations.

Defiant

Despite his earlier betrayal, Defiant becomes something of a friend to Taylor, or at least a respected colleague. He and Dragon work to create her equipment and ferry her from place to place, at least partly as an apology. Their relationship is purely business.

Appearance

Civilian Identity

Taylor was a tall,<ref> Broomstick arms and legs, gawky, with a wide, guileless smile, her eyes just a fraction larger behind the glasses she wore, a little too old fashioned. Her long dark curls were tied into a loose set of twin braids, one bearing a series of colorful ‘friendship braclet' style ties at the end. Only her height gave her age away. - Excerpt from Interlude 19.z</ref> stick-thin,<ref name="I10.5e1"/><ref>A girl, skinny, but not in the attractive way you saw in magazines. Spindly. - Excerpt from Sentinel 9.6</ref> young woman with long, curly black hair<ref name="19.ze1"/><ref name="I10.5e1">A girl with curly black hair and glasses, stick thin, hugging a red-haired girl. The body type was a match.

[...]

The goal was always the same: to look for the girl with the slight build, curly black hair and glasses. Taylor Hebert. - Excerpt from Interlude 10.5</ref><ref>Skinny teenage girl with black curly hair entering and leaving the same building that the skinny teenage villain with black curly hair was operating out of? - Excerpt from Infestation 11.1</ref><ref>Her expression was masked behind a shifting mass of bugs that moved in and out of her hairline. Sierra couldn’t even tell where the bugs ended and the scalp began, as the small black bodies crawled into and onto the black curls. - Excerpt from Interlude 14.x</ref> and glasses. She had a thin-lipped, wide, expressive mouth she inherited from her mother, and her large eyes and gawky figure made her look a lot like her father.<ref name="1.1">Gestation 1.1</ref><ref name="I22">Interlude 22.x</ref> According to Wildbow's Patreon art, she has brown eyes.<ref>Close-up of Taylor pic.</ref> She was approximately 5'8 at the story's outset,<ref name="SB532"/> but grew to 5'9 at the time of her Wards physical,<ref name="25.1 e2"/> and then later 5'10.<ref name="26.2"/>

Taylor didn't wear clothes that showed skin, or bright colors. Emma presumed this was an unconscious effort to blend in or hide.<ref name="19.ze1">Taylor kneeled in the middle of a massive puddle of juices and sodas, some of it still fizzing around her. She was drenched, head to toe, trickles still running off of the lengths of her hair. Her style of dress had changed over the past little while, in ways Taylor probably wasn’t fully aware of. She wore darker clothes now, cloaked herself in sweatshirts and loose fitting jeans. Her long hair was a shield, a barrier around her face. All measures to hide, signals and gestures of defeat.

More than that, she’d changed in behavior, had stopped fighting back. She’d stopped reacting, for the most part. Her expression was impassive. It took some of the fun out of it. It was almost disappointing. - Excerpt from Interlude 19.z</ref> Lisa Wilbourn came to a similar conclusion.<ref>Your personality is reflected in your fashion choices. Muted colors. Brown, gray, black, white. If you are wearing something with color to it, you’re wearing it under a sweatshirt, sweater or jacket. Never anything that would stand out. Never showing much skin. While most people our age are picking clothes with the intention of defining an identity for themselves, fitting into a clique, you’re focused on staying out of sight and not attracting attention. You’re being too cautious, overthinking things you don’t need to, always making the call to play it safe. - Excerpt from Shell 4.2</ref> At various times, she wore a brown hooded sweatshirt over a green t-shirt.<ref name="1.1"/>

As time went on and under the influence of Lisa Wilbourn, she began to vary her wardrobe more. Learning to vary her appearance to blend into situations. She also grew taller and gained some muscle from her training regime and activities as a parahuman.<ref name="19.ze2">The casual display of emotion was startling. It was equally startling when, in the moment Emma’s dad slowed the car down, Taylor’s head turned, her eyes falling on them, her head and upper body turning to follow them as they passed.

She didn’t even resemble the person Emma had known way back then, not the girl who’d approached her house after coming back from camp, and not the girl who’d been drenched in juice. The lines of her cheekbones and chin were more defined, her skin baked to a light tan by the sun, her long black curls grown a touch wild by long exposure to wind. Light muscles stood out on her arms as she held a box, her dad standing back to direct.

Even her clothes. She wasn’t hiding under a hood and long sleeves. A trace of her stomach was exposed between the bottom of her yellow tank top and the top of her jeans. The frayed cuffs were rolled up at the bottom, around new running shoes, and neither Taylor nor her dad seemed to be paying any attention to the knife that was sheathed at her back. - Excerpt from Interlude 19.z</ref> The fact that she didn't need to turn her head to look at things gave her a false appearance of extreme confidence.<ref>She wasn’t in costume. It was odd, seeing her approach from a distance, observing her uninterrupted over a longer span of time. She conveyed an eerie kind of confidence that he knew she didn’t have at her core. Some of that was how she unflinchingly looked forward. She didn’t react as the wind blew her hair across her face, didn’t turn to look around the street as she crossed an intersection.

He might have to say something about that. If that was her using her power to assess her surroundings and keep an eye out for trouble, she should avoid doing it when she was in civilian wear.

She stopped a short distance away, holding grocery bags in one hand and tucking her hair back into place with the other. She wore a black tank top, jeans and rubber boots, with a sweatshirt tied around her waist. That last article of clothing would be to conceal weapons, he guessed. Her glasses caught the light from the sun to the west, turning almost opaque in the glare as she looked his way. - Excerpt from Interlude 15.y</ref>

Parahuman Identity

<tabber>As Skitter=

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Image by Ariirf

As Skitter, Taylor wore various costumes made of spider silk.

Initially, she wears a black-and-grey spider silk bodysuit with armor panels made out of insect shells and exoskeletons augmented with more spider silk. <ref name="1.2"/> She dyes it black with grey paneling before she goes out.<ref name="1.3"/>

The yellow lenses of her mask are durable, high-end swim goggles tinted to help filter out bright lights, with lenses from an old pair of her glasses sealed inside with silicon.<ref name="8.5">Extermination 8.5</ref> Her mask leaves the back of her head uncovered and her hair free to fly behind her.<ref name="5.10">Hive 5.10</ref>

The costume lacks the full extent of the armor paneling she planned, including protection for the back of her head, but the armor covers her face, chest, spine, stomach and major joints (including wrists, shoulders, elbows and knees).<ref name="1.3"/> Each had "layers" resembling a pillbug.<ref>Alas, I’m not a talented artist, or I’d be able to sketch out the armor in proper. I’ve got two pieces of work that I’ve yet to sit down and finish; one being a sketch of her armor, as she might have drawn it in her notebook (see arc 1, chapter 2) and the other being a drawing of Taylor herself, which stalled because I can’t draw hair in a way that satisfies me. I may get it done if I find a good reference image that I can build off of, as well as the mood to draw at a time to actually do said drawing.

But yeah. Keep in mind that her armor features that spade shaped compartment over her back – sort of like a beetle shell, about the size of a small backpack. There’s also shoulderpads, elbow pads, wristguards, chestguard, kneepads, etc. Each having layers in the style of insect chitin (pillbug, etc), that adds to the bulk (and internal capacity, as it happens), without making it too ‘loose’.

As I think on it, though, it is a rather high number. If I recall, it was a placeholder I put in there while I didn’t have access to the web or a library for research, and I never thought to change it while doing sweeps of edits & whatnot to the subsequent drafts. I’ll change that. - Comment by Wildbow on Tangle 6.6</ref> The mask design features dull yellow lenses and sections of armor designed to imitate a bug’s mandibles.<ref name="1.4"/><ref name="Cast2">Taylor Hebert, Skitter– A 16 year old native of Brockton Bay, Taylor gained the power to control arthropods and other simple lifeforms, sensing what they sense to varying degrees. With a wide range (spanning nine to fifteen hundred feet around her) and the power to individually control each insect, she relies on versatility and strategic thinking to seize the advantage in battle.Her powers manifested in January 2011, triggered by a bullying campaign by her former best friend and two other girls. She found a measure of escape with her dream of becoming a superhero, but things didn’t quite work out that way. She’s now one of the controlling powers in Brockton Bay, a villain warlord in charge of the Boardwalk, with a small contingent of followers working under her, and leader of the Undersiders.
.
In civilian guise, she’s skinny to the point of being scrawny, with glasses and long curly hair she maintains as a desperate grasp at a single feminine feature. Her gawky or nerdy appearance is marked by a wide mouth and large eyes.
.
As Skitter, she wears a costume of black spider silk and gray armor panels, a yellow-lensed mask that features a mandible-esque design around her jaw. Her hair blows free. Depending on the situation and the state of her costume, she occasionally wears a skirt or shawl of black spider silk with ragged or torn edges, for protection, concealment, and to offer more surface area for her bugs to crawl on. When battle ready, bugs crawl over every surface of her costume, including her hair and mask. The carapace-like panel of armor at her back serves as a utility compartment, holding her weapons and various items. - Cast (in depth)</ref>

She kept her costume clean by having bugs eat and clean any waste and wiping it down with a cloth.<ref name="6.6c1">Easy peasy. There’s bugs that eat and clean the waste of other bugs (pillbugs, for example) and she can suppress or time their need to create the waste in the first place (at least for the, say, pillbugs, who would therefore not be making mess as they clean it up).

As the armor’s mostly waterproof (see chapter where she mentions trying to give Newter first aid, for this), all she’d need is a wipe-down with a wet cloth and some pillbug attention. - Comment by Wildbow on Tangle 6.6</ref>

The spider-silk fabric is too tough to cut with an x-acto knife, although it can be slowly cut through using wire cutters.<ref name="1.2"/> It was mostly waterproof.<ref name="6.6c1"/> Prior to dying, the costume's prototype had fabric that was a dirty yellow-gray color, and the armor was naturally a dark mottled brown-gray.<ref name="1.2"/>

Taylor has a detachable<ref>I reached over my shoulder, slowly, and unbuckled my utility compartment. Tattletale grabbed it for me as it came free, and the straps fed out through the rings beneath the shoulder panels. She handed it to me, and I drove away the bugs I’d gathered inside. When they were gone, I sent away the bugs that were nestled in the midst of my hair, beneath each of my other armor panels and the ‘skirt’ of my armor, where it covered the scorched leggings of my costume. - Excerpt from Queen 18.3</ref> utility compartment for storing necessary items, weapons, and insects in the shape of a spade-shaped armor panel that covers her back.<ref name="1.4">Gestation 1.4</ref> Taylor's backpack contains "a set of EpiPens, a pen and notepad, a tube of pepper spray meant to hang off a key chain and a zippered pouch of chalk dust."<ref name="1.4"/> In Queen 18.3, Miss Militia takes a look at the contents and sees: A handgun (Trickster's spare), a length of spider silk fashioned into a long cord, pepper spray, a change purse, containing cotton swabs (to muffle the noise), needles, smelling salts, and change, a collapsible baton, and a combat knife (sturdy enough to be used as a crowbar if needed).

When her costume was damaged fighting the Nine, she added a makeshift silk skirt<ref>My bugs had finished connecting the tattered pieces of fabric. It wasn't pretty, but a few tugs to test it showed it was as sturdy as anything I'd made. I draped it over my lap. Until my legs healed, I'd be wearing my new costume for my upper body, with the tattered cloth as a skirt to protect my burned legs. - Snare 13.6</ref><ref>I was wearing only my old costume and the built-in makeshift skirt to cover me where the fire had eaten away at the leggings. - Monarch 16.13 </ref> and a cape/shawl.<ref>I was put in mind of the moment I donned my costume, of being Skitter the Warlord, with her half-cape, half-shawl. There had been a kind of power to the gesture, to draping myself in the cloth and assuming the title and the role. - Speck 30.3</ref><ref>She wasn't in costume, but her glower was intense enough that she might as well have been in her full garb as Skitter, complete with shawl, skirt and the carpet of insects crawling on her. - Interlude 24.y</ref><ref>Skitter sat at the end, backed by her forces, looking over the room. Bugs swarmed her from the shoulders down, but Accord could note a shawl and hints of protective armor. - Interlude 20.y</ref><ref>I draped the shawl-cape over my armored shoulders, and then covered it in bugs. - Chrysalis 20.1</ref>

After the events of Echidna she partially redesigned her armor, replacing worn parts and changing its aesthetic to have the armor panels be more convex, and generally sharper defined.<ref>Some of my mask, the back compartment of my armor and my gloves were more streamlined. Or less streamlined, depending on how one looked at it. Sharper lines, convex armor panels that flared out more, gloves with more edges for delivering damage if I had to get in a hand to hand fight.

I’d only done some of the armor, pieces of my costume that were already battered and worn. My gloves, my mask and the back compartment of my armor tended to take the most abuse. I’d update the rest later. - Imago 21.1</ref> Among the changes are the addition of clawed fingertips.<ref>The core costume was the same, but the details, the features… clawed fingertips of Skitter or the extra armor of Weaver’s, with a spare coil of silk hidden beneath an armor panel at the back of the hand? - Extinction 27.4</ref> |-|As Weaver=

She first wears a generic version of her costume created by Dragon, which lacks the armor of her earlier costume simply being a light grey bodysuit with cleaner, slim dark grey armor panels. The mantle around her shoulders and the cloth hanging from her belt are marked in electric blue with her personal gang emblem (a beetle facing downwards) in miniature at each corner, flipped upside down so that it faces upward.<ref name="22.6"/>

When she deployed against Behemoth in New Delhi, she temporarily re-used her old Skitter costume so she would have proper protection.<ref name="23.5">Drone 23.5</ref> as she hadn't had the time to make a new costume yet.<ref>“You’re wearing your old costume,” Grue said, finally.

“Haven’t had a chance to make a new one,” I said. - Excerpt from Drone 23.5</ref> Defiant also equipped her with a flight pack which she would use for the rest of her career, replacing her utility compartment. The flight pack has antigravity wings resembling dragonfly wings which fold at the joints, antigravity panels on the bottom and sides, and mechanical arms. There are controls hidden in her gloves, as well as redundant control systems inside operated by bugs.<ref name="23.5">Drone 23.5</ref>

After The Timeskip Weaver was properly outfitted with a heroically themed costume. It had more armor in comparison to her Skitter costume, with a coil of silk hidden beneath an armor panel at the back of the hand.<ref name="27.4">Excerpt from Extinction 27.4</ref> Wildbow had her down in his notes as 5’8″ (175 cm), 125 lbs (56 kg) during her stay in prison.<ref>In my notes, I had her down at 5’8″ (178 cm), 125 lbs (56 kg). Pretty close! - Comment by Wildbow on Drone 23.1</ref> According to her Wards physical, she was five feet and nine inches tall.<ref name="25.1 e2">Scarab 25.1</ref> She later described herself as a hundred and thirty pounds and 5'10".<ref name="26.2">Sting 26.2</ref>

After the start of Gold Morning, she began wearing a black bodysuit again, with white armor panels and lenses. She carried mostly symbolic weapons - a handgun, taser, and pepper spray - and kept her flight pack.<ref name="27.4"/>

Later, she was given a nano-thorn knife by Defiant, which she carried in a knife holster.<ref>The knife won’t degrade too much in the next day,” Dragon said. “And we have spares, thanks to Masamune.”

“You didn’t make this much of a fuss with my flight pack,” I said.

“I included documentation,” Defiant said.

“Thank you,” I said. I found the holster for my old knife, then put it through the belt at my back, holstering the new knife. - Excerpt from Venom 29.3</ref>

|-|As Khepri =

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Khepri by Superwhity

Recovering from the Oil-rig battle Taylor wears a black bodysuit with white armor panels and lenses.<ref name="27.4"/> As Khepri she is missing her right arm, and appears to not be able to control her body very well. Throughout the fight with Scion, she usually had Doormaker and Clairvoyant attached to her, though when Doormaker ran out of energy for his power, she left him behind.

The name of Khepri was first seen when Contessa refers to Taylor as such, after the fight with Scion has concluded. <ref name="30.7">Speck 30.7</ref> </tabber>

Abilities and Powers

Taylor possesses a form of telepathy that transmits and receives information via yet-unknown channels<ref name="8.4c1">In truth, when they’re quoting the scientists as saying “There’s no telepathy, it's impossible.” they’re quoting something where the scientists theorized that thought-transference wouldn’t work. Which is similar but different.

Yes, Taylor is telepathic – she transmits information via. yet-unknown channels to her bugs, who respond, and through these same channels, she gets very frequent (to the point that it feels real-time) updates on her bugs’ positions, biology/status, etc. in what’s sort of a very rapid, hyper-detailed echolocation.

Meanwhile, thought-transference is more the ‘put thoughts in other people’s heads, or take thoughts out of other’s heads and understand them.’ - Comment by Wildbow on Extermination 8.4</ref> that grants her total control over most arthropods.<ref name="12.1c1">Ah, but the control & organization of the bugs she controls don’t necessarily matter. She maintains absolute control anyways. The only convenience would be, say, that they could cooperate in her absence. (As opposed to black widows which have to be isolated from each other as they’re territorial enough to kill one another). - Comment by Wildbow on Plague 12.1</ref> So although she usually controls a variety of insects, she can also control a number of sea creatures such as crabs, lobsters, and krill,<ref name="Control"/> some Mollusca like slugs and snails,<ref name="Infest-11.7"/> and can even control certain in-body parasites such as heartworms.<ref> Buzz 7.2</ref>

Double Trigger

According to Number Man, Taylor has had a Double Trigger, where a person triggers twice back-to-back; the sheer trauma of her first trigger causing a second one. As such, she is unable to have a Second Trigger to become more powerful, since she already had one.<ref>"But I'm afraid that power you're digging for is out of your reach, Weaver."

I looked at him.

"Or it's already in your reach. You can't have a second trigger because you already had one," he said.

I blinked.

"Given the signature, it's very possible you had two trigger events in quick succession. Not uncommon. The horror of manifesting your power, it prompted another trigger."

"No," I said. "There's got to be something."

"If there is, a second trigger event isn't it," the Number Man said. - Excerpt from Venom 29.7</ref>

Had she not undergone this double trigger, her bug control would have been much cruder and less skilled, being like how Chicken Little controls birds but with insects instead.<ref>/u/Edello: [SPOILERS FOR WORM] What if Taylor...
...hadn’t double-triggered?

/u/Wildbow: She'd be Aiden, but with bugs. - Comment by Wildbow on Reddit.</ref>

Based off what has been shown of Aiden's control, this could likely mean that she'd be unable to precisely operate and her insects, instead controlling them more like a 'wave' that she 'pushes' and 'pulls' using a sort of invisible 'rally points' with the capacity to give additional orders like to attack on the way while the bugs are being drawn to the point, and likely could not control them and co-opt their senses at the same time. Additionally, any fine and precise control of insects she does have would most likely be limited to either a single bug or at least a much smaller number than her full swarm, at the cost of becoming unable to have any control whatsoever of all the other insects in range, instead of being able to micromanage and skillfully direct all the insects in her range like in the story proper.

Control

She can make her minions do things that they would not normally do, and push them to the limit where they end up harming themselves with how much effort they put in.<ref>Comment by Wildbow on Sufficent Velocity</ref>She can make them destroy themselves to accomplish tasks,<ref>I sent the roaches after him, the PRT uniform. They landed on him, individually squeezed into the pouches on his belt and bandoleer.

Found the keys on his belt.

Getting the keys out of the pouch was harder. I had to be smooth, and the keychain was heavy enough that the roaches couldn’t pick it up with their mouths. Instead, I tried lifting it up with the middle of a roach’s body, supported by the rest. No luck, it slipped free off of the convex exterior of the cockroach’s shell.

I turned it upside down, instead, used the more textured underside to catch the loop of metal. The rest of the roaches latched on, hauled the roach up and out of the pouch, squeezed it through the flap-covered opening, breaking it nearly in two against the metal of the ring as they drove it through the too-narrow gap. One roach dead, but the keys were falling free of the pouch. - Excerpt from Extermination 8.6</ref> produce so much web silk that they physically couldn't produce any more<ref name="14.4c1">Comment by Wildbow on Prey 14.4</ref> or stinging while injecting little<ref name="15.9">Colony 15.9</ref> to no venom.<ref name="6.7">Tangle 6.7</ref> She doesn't require "organized" insects. Once they leave her range and she stops controlling them, her bugs revert to their normal behavior patterns.<ref name="12.1c1"/> However, if she has given a command to them while still in her range, she must intentionally dismiss the instruction she gave them or give them a new one, or else they will continue to fulfil their last command. This resulted in the accidental murder of Director Tagg when she was knocked unconscious, as her last order to 'sting him' was not interrupted by her, so her insects stung him to death without her able to stop them.<ref> - Excerpt from Cell 22.5</ref>

Her power designates what classifies as a "bug", and thus what she can control, during her Trigger Event based upon her understanding of the term and the human knowledge of parahuman hosts within Shard Network. As such, Taylor's notion of a 'bug' is nebulous and sometimes inaccurate.<ref name="discordBreed"/> Her power doesn't work on creatures below a certain size, such as skin mites<ref name="15.1c1">It’s been stated in the comments, but Taylor’s power doesn’t let her control bugs below a certain size. It’s why she can’t sense skin mites. - Comment by Wildbow on Colony 15.1</ref> or nematodes, which prevents her from sensing people through the microsophic insects on or inside the human body, nor could her power affect squid.<ref name="Infest-11.7">Comment reply by Wildbow, archived on Spacebattles - Questions: A) Has she used her ability on snails or slugs? Probably not due to their lack of combat utility, but it would interesting as whilst still ganglionic, Mollusca nervous systems are a whole leap ahead of arthropods and annelids.

B) Trying to use her power on squid would be even more interesting as they have actual complex brains in addition to a ganglionic nervous system. If she can bypass their brains it would imply all sorts of things of what she could do to higher animals. What is the sinoatrial node of the vertebrate heart if it isn’t a very stupid ganglionic subbrain?
[...]
D) At the other end of the scale, can she pick up the signals of nematodes? They are more closely related to insects than insects are to worms, and they do have discrete nervous systems. If yes then she effectively has a ‘life radar’ as every single vertebrate has millions of the things in their gut all the time. Ditto every patch of soil and plant. Not useful offensively but would still be pretty amazing to have. Same question obviously with Rotifers, which certainly have as much brain as tapeworms and are near as ubiquitous as nematodes.
Wildbow : A) Yes. She can control them.

B) Squids are out of bounds.

D) Not stated outright in the story, but her inability to sense people suggests that she can’t sense/control nematodes (or dust/skin mites for that matter). Not saying it’s definitely for sure, but a probable reason would be due to size constraints. A minimum size.Not stated outright in the story, but her inability to sense people suggests that she can’t sense/control nematodes (or dust/skin mites for that matter). Not saying it’s definitely for sure, but a probable reason would be due to size constraints. A minimum size.</ref> At different times, she speculated that she could control anything with an exoskeleton or shell -- which wouldn't explain how she could control earthworms -- and that it was the subject having a non-complex nervous system.<ref name="3.1">“I used to think I could control anything with an exoskeleton or shell. But I can control earthworms too, among other things, and they don’t have shells. I think all it takes is that they have to have very simple brains.” - Excerpt from Agitation 3.1</ref> It's possible that she could control bugmen, depending on their brain makeup and chemistry.<ref name="I5c1">Um the Muse: Hmm, I wonder if Skitter could affect the various bugmen? I know that she said that it had to do with the size of the brain involved, but how certain is that?

wildbow: Probably would depend on their brain makeup & chemistry.

But I think the real concern wouldn’t be so much ‘Is it possible’ as the ethics involved. - Comment by Wildbow on Interlude 5</ref> However, she could not control bug-like Case 53s,<ref>thetntm: I don’t know if it was a word of god or a head cannon or something, but I remember reading that because Taylor’s power went off of her mental image of “creepy crawlers” when determining what counted as a “bug,” she could have controlled a sufficiently bug-like case 53.

My question is, could Aiden do the same, but with birds?

Wildbow: Bonesaw talks a bit in Worm 11.h about how the shard reaches out and uses hosts & hosts' connections to other hosts & the hub to suss out definitions and categories.

Aiden's (and the collective unconscious's) perceptions wouldn't include a part-bird, part-human because they wouldn't be familiar with such and it wouldn't be regularly in that initial, "Think about a bird!" instant connection.

For taylor, pulling more from the rest-of-the-world perceptions, crabs sorta kinda fall in that bucket, atlas falls in that bucket, while we aren't aware enough of skin mites or Hercules the beetle C-53 to really grok it. - Wildbow on Reddit, archived on Spacebattles</ref><ref name="discordBreed"/> Breed's creatures,<ref>“Breed’s creatures. Can you control them?” this from Revel, taking advantage of the stunned silence.

I glanced up at the body the things had invaded. I tailored my response so both Revel and the Undersiders could make sense of it. “I can’t control those things, and I can’t sense them either.” - Sting 26.1</ref><ref name="discordBreed">Chiro: I was wondering as of late, why Taylor can't control Breed's parasites? Is it because they as lifeforms don't fall into the portfolio of creatures Taylor controls, or because Breed controls them already?

Kyakan: might be as simple as them not being around when Taylor's power was defining what counted as "bug"

Wildbow: Kyak has it right. Bonesaw talks about how shards conceptualize their idea of what X is when the trigger happens.
It's why Taylor's notion of what a 'bug' is remains pretty nebulous, including some things (crabs, earthworms, arachnids, insects) and bypassing others (skin mites, bug case 53s).
And it's not just Taylor- it pulls from the shard network of wider human knowledge across hosts. - Conversation with Wildbow on Discord, archived on Spacebattles</ref> or any insects cloned by Echidna.<ref>I might have missed it if I hadn’t had the bugs pressed together to contain the rats. I had missed it already, countless times. Wasps, hornets and cockroaches were crawling free of the slurry of flesh that Noelle had vomited into the building’s lobby. They were attacking my bugs and any people they found.

I couldn’t sense them, and I couldn’t control them. - Queen 18.7</ref><ref name="18.8 e1">“She’s been absorbing my bugs. She’s spitting out some, and I can’t control them. They’re methodically destroying my swarm, and they’re hunting down people and attacking them.”

“She probably absorbed some before she even ran into us,” Tattletale said. “And she just needs one of a given type to make copies. I wouldn’t blame yourself.”

“Did she absorb hornets, black widows, brown recluses?”

“Maybe not,” Tattletale admitted.

“Okay,” I said. “Because there’s homicidal hornets and spiders out there now. Because of my fuck-up.” - Queen 18.8</ref> At one point, Taylor attempted to distract a foe underwater by forming simulated bodies out of sea creatures.<ref name="Control">Simple lifeforms. If there were none above the water’s surface, I’d use the ones below. A glance above me showed one of the flying heroes above the water’s surface, watching. Good. We’d be able to coordinate an attack.

We were too far from the ocean floor for me to find crabs or lobsters, but there were others.

Krill. Two inches in length, at best. But they were alive, and I could move them. I could use them. Another swarm decoy, another combination attack. - Excerpt from Extinction 27.5</ref>

She was able to control Atlas, a horse-sized beetle, and have her range extended with relay bugs by roughly three hundred feet around each relay.<ref>Prey 14.3</ref> Both of these were courtesy of Panacea. Like all of her other bugs she saw them as tools, though Atlas did have some sentimental value.

Multitasking

Taylor has an almost limitless ability to focus on multiple insects at once, or to focus on other things while also using her insects.<ref name="15.9">Colony 15.9</ref><ref name="11.2c1">Re: Skitter’s power, she’s yet to demonstrate the inability to control some bugs because she was focusing on others or focusing on something else. Well, there was the bank robbery, but that was Panacea’s interference at work. It’s unstated, but multitasking abilities come part and parcel with her power, as far as her facility with her power is concerned. - Comment by Wildbow on Infestation 11.2</ref> She can give general instructions, in which case she is only vaguely aware of their movements, or guide individual insects through complex tasks, in which case she is more precisely aware of their movements and environment.<ref name="4.3c1">Taylor’s power is fairly nuanced, and I guess I haven’t really elaborated enough on that aspect of things. I tweaked the sweaty crotches part of the chapter just a tiny bit, and will strive to explain a little better in a later chapter. Long story short, Taylor’s sensory input from the bugs is vastly different depending on whether she’s giving them a general ‘find your way to me’ impulse or whether she’s focused enough on them individually to have them navigating their way into somebody’s underpants. In the former case, she’s drawn her bugs in while really stressed (such as when Bitch attacked her) without really noticing she was doing it. Things are that thin, that easy to block out.

You said “not at all recognizable from the ‘human’ perspective except by a good deal of piecing together of clues.” – Except she’s got a helluvalot of clues. Even fuzzy, blurry clues add up to a pretty strong mental picture when you’ve got enough of them. When there’s also context, with Taylor knowing in advance what her bugs are doing, there’s going to be (even if Taylor doesn’t really want to) a framing of those clues in a particular way. - Comment by Wildbow on Shell 4.3</ref> However, she could be distracted by the difficulty of focusing on her insects' senses,<ref name="14.4c2">Comment by Wildbow on Prey 14.4</ref> and by Panacea's modified insects providing contradictory signals.<ref name="11.2c1"/><ref name="3.12">Agitation 3.12</ref>

Behind the scenes, Taylor's shard handles this multitasking so that she can independently control those in her swarm. Outside of this ability, Taylor's power does not give her augmented multitasking: despite controlling multiple swarm-clones with her power, she was only capable of holding one conversation at a time.<ref>I focused on my swarm-clones, staying totally still while he worked on removing the metal end of the dart. They were largely composed of flying bugs, but I was bulking each of the forms out as more bugs arrived, giving them a more solid mass. I used my free hand to pop my ear-buds in.
[...]
Sierra had been coordinating everyone, trying to put people with experience in charge of people who were lacking it. It was interesting, trying to hold multiple conversations at once with the various project leaders. Difficult, too. For one thing, my speech with my swarms was somewhat lacking, missing consonants, but I could still make myself more or less understood. For another, my ears could only process one thing at a time. I managed by talking with one or more swarm-clone while listening with one at a time. After too many misfires and moments of confusion, I scaled down my efforts to a single conversation at once, simply standing silently by with my other selves.

I made a mental note to try to practice with that. Exercising the range of my power hadn’t done anything for me, and there didn’t seem to be any upper limits to how many bugs I could control at once, but there had to be other ways I could train my abilities. Multitasking was one I hadn’t tried yet. Trying to interpret the senses of my bugs was another, though I feared it would take a more concerted effort to effect any sort of change. - Excerpt from Colony 15.7</ref> Her power can also perform actions automatically that Taylor did not intend to do. For example, Taylor was so focused on listening to a conversation that her bugs reacted to her irritation and revealed that she was eavesdropping.<ref>“Guys!” Miss Militia stood from her chair, the feet screeching against the ground. She raised her voice another notch. “Look.”

She pointed at the window.

I moved my bugs to check for whatever it was she was pointing at, then stopped.

She was pointing at the bugs. They’d reacted to my irritation, and were swirling just beyond the window of the conference room, clustering on the glass surface.

“Is she making a move?” Tagg asked.

“No. They’re… just there. Reacting,” Miss Militia said. “To this. Here.”

“She’s watching,” Tagg said.

“Watching what? There’s nothing to look at,” Miss Militia said. “Think about it. What this is to her.”

“She hears,” Mrs. Yamada finished the thought.

I shut my eyes, swore under my breath. I’d let my guard down. I’d been too focused on what was going on inside the building, letting bugs cluster on the outside, that I’d given my reactions away. So much for gathering intel. - Excerpt from Cell 22.1</ref> Her power would sometimes perform actions by habit,<ref name="24.4e1"/> when she was incapacitated,<ref>Hey, passenger, I thought. Do me a favor. If I get taken out of action and you step up to fight, work on taking out Jack, alright? - Sting 26.4</ref> or when she was in an altered mental state,<ref name="26.2 e2">Passenger, I thought. Been a while, trying to figure out how to make peace with the fact that you're there, that you're affecting me somehow, taking control whenever I'm not in my own mind. I think we've made strides. I've sort of accepted that you're going to do what you're going to do, whether that helps me or hurts me. - Excerpt from Sting 26.2</ref> without her conscious instruction.

Emotions

Taylor would sometimes use her bugs to "channel" her emotions and body language, lending her an "aura of indomitable calm".<ref name="27.3e1">I was using my bugs to channel my feelings, even with my concerns about my passenger and how it might be merging with me. I was wearing that aura of indomitable calm, even though I wasn't sure I liked the Taylor of this past year and a half, who had been doing just that as a matter of both habit and necessity. - Excerpt from Extinction 27.3</ref> This ability gives her a partial Anti-Thinker resistance, even against powerful Thinkers like Alexandria, Tattletale and Jack Slash, or Emotion-readers like Cherish. This can be seen with Alexandria's interrogation, when Taylor was able to attack Alexandria off-guard as the latter was not prepared because Taylor had offloaded all of her emotional and social cues into her bugs and thus appeared calmer than she truly was.<ref>Wildbow - Had Taylor broken, raged out, in the sense of chapter one, they would have had a scapegoat for everything that happened in Brockton Bay. She could have tapped Cauldron resources and been on the alert. But Taylor offloaded all cues to her shard. She appeared far calmer and more subdued than she was, Alexandria calibrated her approach with this in mind, and things tilted off differently.
Wildbow - Taylor was absolutely not a killer at that stage, unless she had a reasonable target, and Alexandria presented herself as that target. Alexandria looked at Taylor, talked to her, and saw someone different. All of the profiling and information worked -against- her.- WoG from Spacebattles</ref> Armsmaster's lie-detector and Cherish's power also had partially bad reads on her emotions, even Jack Slash can get incorrect reads on her. Even those close to her have trouble understanding her at times, even a powerful Thinker like Tattletale.<ref>Armsmaster's lie detector.
Cherish gets a partial read on Skitter, but extrapolates wrong. Jack remarks on this on two occasions, especially how (he feels) if the read had been correct, he could have convinced Taylor to kill Battery.
Powers set aside, she expresses frustration at people misreading her motivations, especially at the meeting with Accord/Valefor/the Teeth. Virtually everyone around her has trouble grasping what she's doing and why: her dad, Emma (most recent encounter), D&D, Grue, even Tattletale at times. - Partial comment by Wildbow on Reddit</ref>

Senses

The sensory input from her bugs is "fuzzy" and difficult for humans to interpret.<ref name="4.3c1"/><ref name="6.1c1">Well, she can’t quite hear through her bugs. As she says in 2.6, noises break down to weird and irritating pitches that she can’t quite make out.

The one real exception to this occurs at the conclusion of the ‘Shell’ arc, where she was overhearing music through a moth. But that’s an exception, not the rule. - Comment by Wildbow on Tangle 6.1</ref> She can sporadically hear and see clearly, but the "signal quality" is unreliable.<ref name="6.1c1"/>

Practicing doesn't seem to produce results.<ref name="14.4c2"/> However, over time, Taylor does learn to more reliably hear through her bugs.<ref name="6.1c1"/> In her last day as Skitter she was unable to understand a phone message heard with her bugs, but was able to identify it was a recording. She was only able to discern tone of voice at "rare moments".<ref name="22.4">Cell 22.4</ref> Her ability to interpret sensory data from her insects seems to increase during periods of stress that match the emotions of her Trigger Event: in one such instance, she was able to clearly see and hear everyone in a room and beyond in detail with just a single butterfly, identifying both her dad, the PRT officers, details of their appearance, what room in the house they were in, and what exactly they were saying.<ref name="20.5"/>

Based on the combined sensory input of large numbers of insects, Taylor can gain a very clear mental picture of whatever they're interacting with.<ref name="4.3c1"/> She can also sense the biology and location<ref name="8.4c1"/> of every bug she can control.<ref name="9.1 c1">He doesn’t have a conventional brain, but his system isn’t so simple that Taylor can take it over. If she could have, her power would have detected & sensed him the way it usually does bugs. - Comment by Wildbow on Sentinel 9.1</ref> This gives her enhanced aim<ref name="26.6">Sting 26.6</ref> and the ability to dodge attacks with supernatural reaction times.<ref>I didn’t hear the rest. Behind my back, Assault moved to kick one of the desks. It went flying into the air in the same instant I threw myself to the ground. I could feel the rush of wind as it passed over me, hurtling into a cubicle. I scrambled for cover.

“Prescience. Interesting,” the Director called out, as I ducked low and used the cubicles to hide. “We assigned you a thinker-one classification, but perhaps we fell short.” - Excerpt from Monarch 16.2</ref> However, in environments where bugs are scarce, or when dealing with materials that they don't interact with well, her image of the area can become less reliable.^{[citation needed]}

Taylor also receives some knowledge of her bugs' biology from her power,<ref name="14.6">Prey 14.6</ref> giving her an understanding of their limits, capabilities and the effects of adaptions such as any venom they have.<ref name="2.6">“Yeah,” Lisa raised an eyebrow, “You do know which bugs you had biting him, right? Black Widow, Brown Recluse, Browntail Moth, Mildei, Fire Ants-”

“Yeah,” I cut her off, “I don’t know the official names, but I know exactly what bit him, what stung him and what the venoms do.” - Excerpt from Insinuation 2.6</ref>

Range

Taylor has a limited range around, above and below her, of about a tenth of a mile,<ref>I was steamed and I could hardly focus on the lecture, as my power crackled and tugged at my attention from the periphery of my consciousness, making me acutely aware of every bug within a tenth of a mile. I could tune it out, but the extra concentration that took, coupled with the anger I felt towards Madison and Mr. Gladly, was distracting enough that I couldn’t focus on the lecture. - Excerpt from Insinuation 2.3</ref> and later about 3-4 city blocks with a block being 300 feet.<ref>Wildbow: She’s described her range as 3-4 city blocks. A city block is about 300 feet long.</ref> During periods of stress that are close to the feelings of frustation and hopelessness she felt during her Trigger Event, it would increase, once reaching over six and a half blocks,<ref name="20.5">It wasn’t long before I was close enough.  My range was longer, now.  Odd.  It was supposed to get longer when I felt more trapped, but ‘trapped’ wasn’t the word I would have chosen.

My bugs rose at my command, tracing over the area. It wasn’t so unusual, that there were flies, bumblebees and ants about: the heat of summer, the humidity, the imbalanced ecosystem… Nobody paid them any heed.

A small butterfly found its way into the house. It traced over the glossy smooth armor and helmets of PRT officers, touched the badge on the chest of a police officer.

It touched my dad’s shoulder, moved down his bare arm to his hand. He was sitting at the kitchen table, his head in his hands.
[...]
“Taylor,” he said.

Six and a half city blocks away, I replied, “I’m sorry.”

The butterfly and I took off at the same time. - Excerpt from Chrysalis 20.5</ref> which also came with her bugs responding faster to her commands<ref>Infestation 11.4</ref> and getting better at interpreting their senses, such as when she could clearly see and hear everyone in a room and beyond in detail with just a single butterfly.<ref name="20.5"/> However, these power boosts are not permanent and will fade as her feelings return to normal, and with it her Range.<ref>Wildbow: The range increases aren’t permanent. - Comment by Wildbow on Infestation 11.3</ref> Nevertheless, her base range did slowly increase over time as she won more conflicts;<ref>Much like Taylor's achievements went hand in hand with a growth in her capability and flexibility with her power (on a blunt level like the waxing & waning max range, in terms of being able to see/speak with them, and on an abstract level, like how the shard is helping more in the background or when she's unconscious), - Comment by Wildbow on Armsmaster's growth.</ref> starting at two blocks radius early on,<ref name="1.2e1">I wasn’t just grabbing every creepy crawly in a two block radius, though. I was being selective, and I was gathering quite a few.

It would take time for all of them to arrive. Bugs could move faster than you thought when they moved with purpose in a straight line, but even so, two blocks was a lot of ground for something so small to cover. - Excerpt from Gestation 1.2</ref><ref name="5.5e1">I generally measured things in city blocks – I’ve never been good at eyeballing distance – and I would say my range usually sat at around two blocks. - Excerpt from Hive 5.5</ref> up to three blocks radius when she began to claim territory,<ref name="11.2e1">Generally speaking, there were two routes I tended to go. The first put me in one spot, drawing my bugs from the area. A three block radius made for a good number of bugs.
[...]
Today wasn’t one of the days my power was working double time, with double the range. I’d wanted to make sure to reach as many as I could, so I’d started drawing the arrows and words with the bugs early. - Excerpt from Infestation 11.2</ref> and up to a base range of five blocks by the time she surrendered to the PRT, a fact supported by her in-depth Cast profile describing her range as being nine to fifteen hundred feet around her around her time as a warlord,<ref name="Cast2"/>which would extend if she felt 'trapped'.<ref>My power's range was about five blocks. It should have been larger, going by the running theory that feeling ‘trapped' extended my reach, but I was in here by my own device. I couldn't necessarily force it. - Excerpt from Cell 22.1</ref> However, sometimes she would get increases in stressful situations even though she didn't feel 'trapped';<ref name="20.5"/> she later states that her power gets stronger when she feels either 'trapped', 'despair', or 'betrayed'.<ref>“Yeah,” I said.  “I triggered while I was in a locker.  I’ve been thinking, I get just a little stronger when I feel trapped, or when I despair, or when I feel betrayed.  My range extends.” - Drone 23.1</ref> By the time she fights Behemoth as part of the Chicago Wards in India, she mentions that her range is now a radius of one thousand, eight hundred feet,<ref>Crushed 24.1</ref> which is roughly six blocks and makes her full range at the time to be double that at a three thousand, six hundred feet diameter.

She had a temporary range boost while in the area-of-effect of The Yàngbǎn's power-magnifying field, increasing her range by several blocks and growing, which she used to contact Phir Sē in his basement. The exact extent of her range increase under the field is not mentioned.<ref>Crushed 24.4</ref>

Skills

Taylor has come up with a multitude of creative uses of her power. For example, she can produce and manipulate large quantities of spider silk, coat her insects in petroleum jelly and capsaicin to use them like pepper spray, deploy groups of bugs to create humanoid figures,<ref>I took a page out of Grue’s playbook and gathered a group of bugs together into a densely packed, vaguely humanoid shape. - Excerpt from Hive 5.6</ref><ref name="11.3">Infestation 11.3</ref> mask her movements, and clear out rat infestations. She was able to catch containment foam on glass carried by her bugs and stick it to her attackers.<ref name="10.5">Parasite 10.5</ref> She can disguise or project her voice by having her insects buzz and chirp together.<ref name="9.6c1">Pinkhair:
I figured that Taylor did the voice trick to disguise herself, now that she knows that Sophia might possibly recognize her by voice.

Wildbow:
We have a winner. - Comment by Wildbow on Sentinel 9.6</ref> Over a two year period she learned how to read braille so that she could read with her bugs.<ref name="26.2 e1">The moment the wind died down, I bid the bugs to shift position, carrying the pages to me, sorting them into the appropriate order.

I bent down and began collecting the pieces of paper. I could feel the raised bumps on the pages as I brushed them free of specks of dirt and leaves. Each set of bumps corresponded with a letter or punctuation mark, which had been printed over the dots in thick, bold, letters.

I gathered the pages into file folders, then clipped them shut, stacking them on the patio chair. I made my way to the patio table, bending down to collect the pages as they made their way to me. The writing on these was different; the letters were drawn in thick, bold strokes, fat, almost as if I’d drawn them in marker. My notes: thoughts, things that needed clarification, ideas. - Excerpt from Sting 26.2</ref><ref name="30.2">When the bullying had started, books had been an escape. I’d be exhausted at the end of the day, feeling a low that counterbalanced the higher adrenaline and stress of the time spent in school. Curling up with something to read had been a refuge.

Maybe that had lapsed when I’d become a cape. The costumed stuff had become an escape of sorts. But I’d gotten back into it in prison, and on some of the stakeouts. I’d taught myself braille, so I could read with my bugs, and take in more. - Excerpt from Speck 30.2</ref>

She even had some tricks she wasn't consciously aware of learning. For example, she would occasionally use her bugs to cover her while she moved without noticing, making her difficult to track.<ref>All around me, PRT employees were howling in pain, their cries silenced by the lack of an audio feed. Either the camera hadn’t picked it up, or Glenn had muted it. They thrashed. One reached for me, for the me on the screen, and I could see how I moved out of the way without even glancing at him. The swarm concealed me at the same time, briefly obscuring the Skitter in the video from both the man on the ground and the security camera. When it parted, she had shifted two or three feet to the left. A simple step to one side in the half-second she couldn’t be seen, but it misled the eyes.

And I couldn’t remember doing it. I’d never consciously added the trick to my repertoire. - Excerpt from Drone 23.3</ref>

Taylor had an unusually high pain tolerance, which she blamed on her exposure to a pain-bomb of Bakuda's.<ref name="29.9 e1">“Whatever,” Panacea said. “Works for me, actually.”

Then she touched me, and the pain went away. I relaxed so suddenly I felt like I’d suddenly become part liquid. I’d been so tense my head wasn’t even touching the countertop, my legs and shoulders tense.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thanks.”

“You have a high pain tolerance,” she said.

“One of Bakuda’s bombs, way back when,” I said. “I think it messed with my head, as far as my perception of pain. I found out what it’s really like to feel pain, real ten-out-of-ten pain. A part of me knew it was too much to be true, and other stuff’s affected me more because I knew it was tied with something real. Case in point, a burn is still a motherfucker.”

“Well, we’ll fix it,” she said. - Excerpt from Venom 29.9</ref>

Post-Timeskip, she is an exceptionally accomplished martial artist; her bug-swarm-enhanced senses enable her to react to events faster than a normal human should be able to. She can easily defeat even other experienced parahumans in hand-to-hand combat. The boost to her senses and coordination due to her swarm also allows her exceptional accuracy with firearms. Personality-wise, she is noted to be cold, distant, exceptionally driven, and even ruthless by many characters.<ref>Cell 22.2</ref>

Classification

Taylor was rated by PRT analysts as a Master 5,<ref name="8.5 eClassification">“She’s a villain,” the PRT uniform cut me off, touching his way through some blackberry device with his free hand. “Designation Master-5, specifically arthropodovoyance, arthropodokinesis. No super strength.” - Extermination 8.5</ref> which was later upgraded to an 8. A rating of Thinker 1 was officially added when Emily Piggot deduced she could see through her bugs in a limited fashion.<ref>Excerpt from Cell 22.1</ref><ref name="18.3">Queen 18.3</ref> Piggot suggested that this should be upgraded when Taylor admitted she came up with the plan to raid the PRT to stop Dragon and demonstrated the ability to anticipate incoming attacks through her bugs,<ref name="16.2">Monarch 16.2</ref> but she was still classified as a thinker-one after Piggot had left office.<ref name=":0">"Arthropodokinesis, arthropodovoyance," the Deputy Director said. "She's on record as a master eight, thinker one. The thinker classification is key here: ex-Director Piggot noted Skitter can see through her bugs' eyes."
[...]
Director Tagg nodded slowly, then rubbed his chin again. The movement of his wrist against his armrest nearly killed the bug I had in between his dress shirt and jacket. "Agreed. I already informed each of my officers to treat her as though she had a two point classification in every category, or two points higher in cases where she's already received scores. Brute two, mover two… all the way down the list. It won't do to underestimate her." - Excerpt from Cell 22.1 </ref>

Later Director Tagg ordered for her to be treated as a Master 10, Thinker 3 with an additional rating of 2 in every other category; in order to make sure his soldiers didn't underestimate her<ref name=":0"/> and to authorize additional means of containing her.<ref name="SB56">Tagg slaps a '2 of everything' on Taylor because it gives full authorization for all special measures, and it's a constant reminder to his people that she's a threat in every department... Comment by Wildbow on spacebattles</ref>

Taylor's trigger event, which involved both an environmental stressor and a thinker stressor, led her primarily Master power to have Thinker and Shaker overtones.<ref name="IRC eElements">TFS Is the fact that Taylor was trapped a reason why her Master powers act the same way as Shaker powers do?
soulpelt| do tell
Wildbow Yeah, there's overlap.
[...]
soulpelt| Taylor is needing help from being trapped in a sucky environment.
Wildbow Environmental stressor, thinker stressor, more thinkery shakery master power. - Conversation with Wildbow on IRC, archived on SpaceBattles</ref>

Khepri

In order to combat the end of the world during the Gold Morning, Taylor gave Panacea instruction and permission to remove the safety restrictions and regulations on her power through the Corona Pollentia and Gemma. The result of this was later known as "Khepri". Taylor's range became significantly reduced to a radius of three hundred feet,<ref>I felt the range of my power halve, as though a guillotine blade had dropped down, cutting it off.

My control began to slip.  It wasn’t so severe as the effect on my range, but I could feel it degrading.  I was aware of my bugs in a general sense, and they were moving in reaction to my subconscious thoughts, but the end result wasn’t precise.  I moved them, but getting them to stop had a fraction of a second’s delay.
[...]
My range was dwindling with every passing second, and so was my control.
[...]
I could feel Panacea working to give me that control, changing what she was focusing on.  I felt the swarm moving more in sync with what I was thinking and wanting.  But this… I could sense what was happening, feel my range plummeting yet again, the guillotine coming down.  My range had been cut down further.
[...]
Stop, Panacea, I thought.  Stop, stop, stop, stop…

My swarm attacked her, and it wasn’t because of any conscious command on my part.  The attack was crude, more the swarming behavior of wasps drunk on attack pheromones than the calculated attack I was used to employing.
[...]
I looked at Amy, realizing the bugs were still approaching her.  I pulled the swarm away, and I felt how hard it was to move them.

I was left with the ruins of my power.  My range was maybe a third of what it might otherwise be, the control rough-edged at best.  There were bugs in my swarm that I couldn’t control, too small. - Excerpt from Speck 30.1</ref> making her diameter double that at six hundred, which she could extend through the use of her relay bugs.<ref name="30.3"/> While her control over insects was still present, and she could still sense their presence and have them react to her subconscious thoughts, this control was reduced in precision to an unknown extent, her bugs using more swarm tactics than her usual calculating attacks, nor could she communicate through her bugs. Furthermore, her size limit has increased, as she comments on there were bugs in her former swarm that are now too small for her to control.<ref name="30.1-1"/>

To contrast this, Taylor gained a crude control of nearly every sapient and sentient creature that enters within nearly sixteen feet (fifteen point nine-eight feet to be precise)<ref name="30.1-1"/> making her full range a diameter of nearly thirty-two feet. This most notably includes parahumans and, subsequently, humans,<ref name="30.1-2">It belatedly clicked.  Sixteen feet was the distance they needed to keep from me. - Excerpt from Speck 30.1</ref> as well as a focused sense and awareness of their bodies. This range cannot be increased through periods of stress mirroring her original trigger event, as her Corona no longer connects to the parts of her brain related to emotions or similar concepts. She also slowly began to lose control and awareness of her own body, unable to communicate directly, move as fast or as well as she used to, only able to focus and perform one bodily function like breathing at a time, and losing touch with reality. Her Shard was able to to obtain some control over her body, emotions and thoughts, and would perform actions without her conscious or reflective command in an effort to help her, trying to learn how the two can work together. All of which grew worse as time went on and the barrier between Taylor and her Shard became thinner and blurred, losing understanding of what people were saying and interpreting all actions as conflict to fight.<ref name="30.1-1">Speck 30.1</ref>

This control is not automatic, and Taylor, in brief periods of lucidity, can choose not to control someone in her range. People who are in her control are capable of feeling emotion, perform steady breathing, feeling tense and perform slight, subconscious usage of their powers like Lung; all of which Taylor is capable of sensing, along with sensing other inner workings like their well-being, where a person was sore, how fit they were, and most importantly how their parahuman powers works. Taylor can also co-opt their senses like she did with her bugs, allowing her, for example, to see and hear through multiple people. However, the people are completely unable to move despite their feelings and attempts as they are, in Taylor's words, "Waiting for instructions". Any control that Taylor does exert on them is crude, but a bit more fluid than her control over her own body at that point, allowing Taylor to give them somewhat more precise commands. This ability also causes Taylor and those she controls to suffer shared experiences; feelings felt by one bringing up different memories from each person that are associated with those emotions, and those memories being exchanged between them and Taylor, as those she controls become an extension of herself. Control and senses over their parahuman powers is more precise and efficient, though Taylor remarks in the case of Bitch that controlling her would not give her any special knowledge of Bitch's whistles or commands, or her instinctive understanding of the dogs.<ref name="30.1-1"/>

Taking command of Doormaker and Clairvoyant, Taylor was able to round up and control roughly five thousand two hundred Parahumans and over ten quadrillion insects from dozens of different Earths to combat Zion, using the latter to find parahumans and insects, and to keep track of the battle across alternative Earths, and the former to open portals within her range to other parahumans so that she can control them. Taylor comments that, had she the time, she could control over ten quintillion bugs; the total number of insects on the entirety of Earth.<ref name="30.3">Speck 30.3</ref> With these she coordinated the fight with Zion while launching a number of psychological attacks against him, taunting Zion with his dead partner, and sequestering a vast number of Tinkers away to construct a form of tinkertech interdimensional battering ram to kill The Warrior's main body when his avatar was destroyed and a portal was opened to it.

Though a full list of creatures Taylor can now control is unknown, there are a number of beings she cannot that is known. She could not control Zion or the Endbringers, nor the Three Blasphemies. She seemed to be unable to control Dragon for unstated reasons. She is unable to control Imp and in fact the latter is able to get closer enough to talk to her through power keeping her hidden,<ref>I heard a voice, female, kind words, spoken haltingly, out of place in the midst of this. I had trouble placing the memory.

[...]

Again, the voice interrupted. Patient, almost like I was overhearing something being said. It made for a kind of… what was the word? A conflict between two ideas. Dis- Dissonance.

[...]

I was preparing to go down with the clairvoyant, making sure we wouldn’t break contact even if we had a hard landing, when I heard that voice again, small and afraid.

I couldn’t place the recollection.

[...]

Again, that soft voice I couldn’t place, something to help me keep moving onward, a human sound when abstracts were becoming all too real.

[...]

I could hear the voice again.

Another person appeared twenty or so feet to my left, startling me. My bugs moved, creating a barrier.

No. She was a familiar face, so to speak. A gray mask, horned, with mischievous eyes, a mouth hidden by a scarf or cowl she’d piled around her shoulders. She was the source of the voice. She’d been with me, keeping me company.

Tears came unbidden to my eyes. - Excerpt from Speck 30.6</ref> though she was able to take control of Imp once she turned her power off and revealed herself fully.<ref>I sensed my bugs moving, shifting position without even moving a limb or wing. Before I even grasped what was happening, I was moving. I cut out with my knife, feeling like I was swinging madly into open air.

A girl materialized, shouting or saying something. She’d appeared just a little in front of me, her back initially to me as I continued cutting, the actions jerky and stiff, uncoordinated and continuing long past the moment there was any point. I could feel her body appear in my mind’s eye, and I asserted control over her. - Speck 30.7</ref> She was temporarily able to control Glaistig Uaine, but she was able to escape Taylor's control by swapping the control on her over to one of her ghost projections. Finally, she did not control the Sleeper, though this was not due to an inability to control him but rather because she determined doing so would be more troublesome than it was worth.

Had Jack Slash been active at the time, his secondary power would be better at sabotaging her compared with the typical parahuman.<ref>Depression-the-Game: Alright so, Jack Slash doesn't lose against parahumans. What about shard controlled Parahumans? Like Ash Beast or Khepri.

Wildbow:For an analogy, think of boomers trying to use an app a bizarre sci-fi megacorp designed to kill an executive officer of that megacorp's company. And that megacorp is monitoring them and they control their internet, the data they see, and you're tracking them. The boomer, for whatever reason, can't ditch their phone (In setting, it's stuck to their brain).

Because they're boomers they don't really understand the tech and a lot of it is screened off from them, right?

Boomer has an app that mail orders feral bears? "I guess we have to deliver, but let's just order some really shitty bears and have the driver honk his horn to alert the CEO, and if our boomer makes any mistakes in the ordering and isn't focused then we'll just empty the truckload of bears right in front of him."

App to get someone killed? They hook it up to your boomer's pacemaker and reserve the ability to stop his heart when his lifespan (going by compiled insurance data from up to 150 providers) is halfway up, in exchange for giving him data to call in accurate hits. He just made that install and your tracking indicates he's intending to call a hit in on your CEO? Use just the two providers that give the shortest lifespan, cut that in half, (he should be in 4 minutes, according to sketchy companies A and B? hit that button to stop our boomer's pacemaker!) Or lean on your megacorp's subsidiary companies and track what he's doing on the internet to slow him down. Mess with his head.

Utilizing a shard-controlled parahuman is getting deeper into the megacorp's control.

The way it works is that you want to rely on someone who isn't using the megacorp's tech or who isn't tracked and monitored by the megacorp. Anything else is going to see the executive officer getting a courtesy phone call and your tech guys are going to do everything they can to mess with your potential threat.

Anything else is liable to be a "Gee, why can't I use my app from megacorp to destroy a megacorp executive officer?" - Conversation with Wildbow on Reddit, archived on Spacebattles</ref>

Shard

Taylor's powers are the result of receiving a crippled Administrator shard from Scion. In its non-crippled form, Scion uses the Administrator to coordinate and control his shards such as deciding their configurations before handing them out.<ref name="26.x eScionCripple">When it knows the configuration is absolutely decided, it reaches for the last fragment it will cast off. This one, too, it cripples, even largely destroys, so as to limit the host from using it in the same fashion.
[...]
It could see the connection to the female’s shard, the activity as it broadcast signals, reaching out to contact lifeforms throughout the area, coordinating them.
[...]
The entity recognized her shard. The last one that had split off before the entity took on this form.

Queen. - Excerpt from Interlude 26</ref> Unlike Eidolon's shard (i.e., Eden's counterpart shard to the Administrator) which can administrate shards,<ref name="reddAdmin">HighSlayerRalton: Taylor is Eidolon's 'reflection'. Or rather, the Queen Administrator is the High Priest's reflection.

Taylor gets to administrate bugs, because Scion damaged and limited his Queen Administrator shard before distributing it.

Eidolon gets to administrate the pool of shards Eden was reorganising when she crashed (including the power-drawing ability), because Eden was still using her Queen Administrator counterpart to do that at the time.

The kid who controls bugs and the world's most powerful superhero are two sides of the same coin.

Wildbow: Yeah, pretty sure I already confirmed this elsewhere, but this is a great summary of it. - Conversation with Wildbow on Reddit</ref> Scion intentionally cripples Taylor's shard before handing it out and even largely destroys it to completely prevent its host from using it in this fashion during the Cycle.<ref name="26.x eScionCripple"/>

After being limited, the Administrator shard explicitly specializes in coordinating control over large numbers of smaller lifeforms.<ref>In devising the actual trigger, we actually figure this out in a way like we would a Cauldron vial. We know what the shard does, and the key thing to figure out is how that shard expresses its power and how it manifests.

The QA shard specializes in coordinating control over large numbers of smaller lifeforms. We see it in Skitter (bugs), we see it in Aiden (birds) and we see it in Chitter (rats). - Comment by Wildbow on Reddit, archived on Spacebattles</ref> Thus, the powers that it hands out will generally have some Master element of controlling many minions.<ref>Dwood: Wildbow: can the QA shard add brute flavors to its triggers?

Wildbow:Generally QA is going to operate around the fulcrum point of being a 'controls many minions' master trigger and is going to seek out hosts that hit that note. In the most forced context, you'd probably get a 'mass/tower of rats' brute body. - Conversation with Wildbow on Discord, archived on Spacebattles</ref>

Like Taylor, the Administrator shard has a drive for control:<ref>I watched that crowd with one eye.

Some of them would kill me the second they thought they could get away with it. Others would be scheming. I had power, they wanted that power for themselves. They’d take it like my portal man was taken from me. They’d take all of it.

My hand was clenched so hard I thought something might break. - Excerpt from Speck 30.7</ref><ref name="30.7 eBargain"/> it desires to dominate all Earths and control everyone completely,<ref>A doorway opened beside her. She floated away a touch, as if inviting me through.

I hesitated, at first, because of suspicion. I had worlds filled with enemies, worlds I needed to bring under my thumb if I was going to be able to relax for even a moment.

I forced the worries aside.

I felt another stab of that not-fear sensation. That balking on the part of my passenger.
[...]
I stared at the portal. A point of no return. I could pass through, and I’d be able to take steps to get control, to carry out my plan.

-Again, that dissonance.

It was uncomfortable, distracting. I wanted to be able to pursue my goals unmolested. - Excerpt from Speck 30.7</ref> including Taylor.<ref name="30.7 eClaimTaylor">“Because I think you have a chance to come back from this. Not much of a chance. Part of that rides on me. I could help you, or I could stop you from troubling anyone ever again. Part of that? It’s up to you to win the fight, to take control and keep the administrator from claiming everything you have, leaving you a shell.”

I felt a chill. Was part of it my passenger? Both of us? - Excerpt from Speck 30.7</ref> Similar to the typical shard,<ref>“It isn’t human, and it never was,” she went on. “Don’t expect it to have human rationales. Do expect it to have a program it follows, a set goal that may or may not be one hundred percent clear. It’s going to be somewhat predictable, but powerful enough that the predictability isn’t reassuring or an easy answer.” - From Within 16.8</ref> the Administrator shard follows a set goal<ref name="30.7 eControlMission">I needed to escape, I needed time and resources to analyze what I was up against, frame it all. I’d stabilized, I’d stopped degrading, now I could start building- rebuilding my knowledge base. Put everything into a context that I could grasp, with my mind working in a different way, with different priorities.

Then I could take control. Then I could eliminate the problematic elements.

Then everything would be peaceful.

A mission. I functioned best with a mission. My thoughts and actions had always processed best when I had a mission, a task. - Excerpt from Speck 30.7</ref> and is intrinsically conflict-oriented:<ref>Con- conflict. I could function so long as there was conflict, so long as I was creating it or resolving it. Given the choice between paralysis and conflict, I wondered if anyone would really choose the former, committing to it over time.

Paralysis was a scary thing. There were a lot of forms of it, and they ranked up there as far as fates worse than death.

Conflict was better. Familiar. - Excerpt from Speck 30.7</ref> it typically frames situations in context of violence.<ref>It had started.

The outcry was picked up by others. People grabbed one another, arms were thrown around necks, fingers dug into costumes and skin. They whimpered, screamed, shouted. I could see tears in eyes, faces contorted in emotion. Groups turned inward, focusing on one another, loners backed away, positioning themselves where they had space to maneuver. Madness, hysterical, chaotic. Grown adult and child alike, costumed and uncostumed, individuals dressed in white or in bright colors, individuals in black, they were part of the riot.

They held nothing back, emotionally. I saw fireballs explode in midair. People streaked into the sky, lightshows following after them.

But the yelling, the echoes of that first cry, they were what shook me, what shook everything. The only thing around us to block the sounds were people, and those people were making more sound. Thousands echoing of that one cry.

None of this surprised me, that they’d turn on each other the moment the real threat was gone. It was the way our species operated. A reality that had been writ over and over again in my experiences. I couldn’t remember the specific cases, but the lessons remained with me. - Excerpt from Speck 30.7</ref><ref>I heard the voice in my ear. It was trying to sound soothing, gentle, but it was failing. I heard the fear in it. That fear was reassuring in its own way. It told me I was right. That the world did revolve around fear and violence. That I was doing the right thing, standing guard, being ready for a fight at any moment.

The madness around me continued unabated, the shouting fading, then starting anew, picked up by others, different factions, fresh sets of lungs.

I wasn’t going to listen to the voice. Not with all of the powers arrayed against me. it would be idiotic and foolish if I did listen, whether I understood or not.

The others, they were arguing amongst themselves, barking out insults, yelling, pointing at me. I’d taken control of them, and that was a fresh wound. - Excerpt from Speck 30.7</ref> As a result, Taylor losing herself à la Khepri and giving the Administrator more control over her actions is not a good thing.<ref name="reddit eEgoDeath">Many breakers can go permanent breaker. Shadow Stalker, for example, doesn't have any strict forces in play that forces her to conserve the breaker state or balance her living & breaker state.

But it's still bad times for those who go that route, because they're forced to or because they prefer life in the breaker state to their ordinary life. Breakers have a closer connection to their passenger than any cape, and in the course of diving deeper into their breaker state and not, for lack of a better phrasing, surfacing for air, they begin to lose themselves and the shard gets more of a say. This is, very obviously, not a good thing. We see this sort of mentality in Khepri, and we can assume something like it in Night Hag.
[...]
The breaker document includes some examples (the Atropos breaker, the consequences for death breakers in general) of ways the passenger might seep in or that life might suddenly get harder, when one lapses fully into a breaker state.

So just wanted to point out that this is a thing that happens - and ego death often goes hand in hand with it. By the flip side of that same coin, to finally get around to answering your question - ego death, momentary, partial, or permanent, would destroy the Self and insert more Breakerness into the void that's left behind.

Most of the time they rampage - Ash Beast and Night Hag and the like. But if the shard isn't equipped to take advantage of the opportunity (Cauldron shards, Eden shards in general), maybe the self comes back and you get a Grumman. - Wildbow on Reddit, archived on Spacebattles</ref> After Scion's death, Taylor's shard agrees to release its remaining thralls because it realizes that acquiescing here would give it more control over Taylor and grind away at Taylor's sense of self.<ref name="30.7 eBargain">I reasserted control.

Again, I tried to let my passenger take control, to set things on autopilot.

Again, the others began to descend. This time, the forcefield woman remained where she was.
[...]
I’d have a harder time taking control of things in the long term, but I was okay with survival.
[...]
Others were placed indiscriminately in the crowd below me. My swarm, returned to the place they came from.

I turned to go, and there was far less resistance.
[...]
Before it could go any further, I wrested control for myself. Easier. It was like it was weaker with every set of actions.
[...]
It kept wanting sacrifices in the short term. Responding to its desires had left me feeling more secure, made the ensuing resistance weaker. The implicit promise was that acquiescing would be rewarded with a surer footing. Footing that I could use. There were doors open to every world. If I could take time to heal, to build my strength. Eating well, resting… I could move on, carry out my plan.

The question was whether the cost was too high.

It was a gamble. I was risking myself, setting myself back. People would come after me.

But it meant more control, and it all came down to control in the end. - Excerpt from Speck 30.7</ref> Indeed, had Contessa done nothing to Khepri or someone else (e.g., Defiant) had the final conversation with Khepri and then that individual failed to, as an example, kill/place Taylor in a coma, Taylor would have fully lost control: the Administrator would completely subsume Taylor's mind and then resume its plan to put everyone under its thrall.<ref>Wildbow: What's the context of the Colin talk though?
[...]
Or subject, or how do you lead from that to an ending? Do you have him shoot her two times to be sure she's dead?
Or dead/in a coma?

Kaisheng21: i guess
well in the hypothetical where i were writing worm, which is just mad to think about
i'd have taylor just sorta fade out from accumulating brain damage
and colin's there holding her hand

Wildbow: It's not really brain damage though. And he'd need an inspector-gadget style robo-arm to hold her hand because her revised QA power is still active at that point.
[...]
She doesn't fade out so much as she goes full Khepri again.
[...]
Or rather, Taylor does fade out, but simultaneously, QA fades in. - Conversation with Wildbow on Discord, archived on Spacebattles</ref>

Scion refers to Taylor's shard as Queen<ref name="26.x eScionCripple"/> or the administrator shard.<ref name="I26e1">The female with the administrator shard had long since fled, covering the retreat with her small army of lesser lifeforms, more traps snapping into place in her wake. - Excerpt from Interlude 26</ref> Contessa similarly calls this shard the administrator.<ref name="30.7 eClaimTaylor"/> Glaistig Uaine refers to Taylor's shard as queen administrator.<ref name="25.5 eQueen"/> She also claims that this shard was on par with her shard as a noble along with other shards such as those possessed by Amy and Eidolon.<ref name="27.4 eOtherNobles">“You view us both as queens, Faerie Queen?”

“I do. But let us drop the titles when we talk.”

“Okay… Glaistig Uaine. Anyone else?”

“There are others who stand shoulder to shoulder with us, but queen is the wrong word, Administrator. The champion, the high priest, the observer, the shaper, the demesnes-keeper. Why do you ask?” - Excerpt from Extinction 27.4</ref><ref name="Ciara">“The high priest,” Glaistig Uaine admonished me. “You and I may be doing without the titles, but we mustn’t offend the others.”

“Right,” I said.

“As for his role, well, you should know.”

“I should know?”

“Yes.”

I could only think of one powerful individual who was on a par with the others she’d named. Contessa and Glaistig Uaine were easily twelves or higher on the power-ratings scale, and I could look to others with powers in that neighborhood to figure out who she was referring to. Panacea, Labyrinth…

Which raised two questions.

Why the hell was I on that list, for one thing?

And was Eidolon the high priest? He was the only one I could think of to fit the role. - Excerpt from Extinction 27.4</ref>

Chevalier sees Taylor's power as a bright glowing membrane or network of cells surrounding her person, with an uncountable number of tendrils extending out. These tendrils were only made distinct by highlights rushing down them as she gave conscious direction to her bugs.<ref>His eyes settled on Weaver, surrounded by the nimbus of her power, which glowed with an intensity that surpassed any and all of her teammates.  When she stepped forward, it was like she was pushing against a curtain, only it was a membrane, a network of individual cells, each with tendrils extending out, so thin he couldn’t make them out, except by the highlights that seemed to rush down them as she gave conscious direction to her bugs. - Excerpt from Interlude 24.x</ref>

History

Background

Taylor Anne Hebert was born in June 1995, arguably on the 12th<ref>“It’s the nineteenth,” he said. “Your birthday was a week ago.” - Excerpt from Monarch 16.7</ref> (i.e., a week before the 19th<ref name="25.1 e1">“Will you state your name for the record?”

“Taylor Hebert.”

“Your date of birth?”

“June nineteenth, 1995.” - Excerpt from Scarab 25.1 (this was later redacted by WoG)</ref>) or the 11th (i.e., about a week before the 19th and the date Worm began).<ref>Assembler: In Monarch 16.9, Danny said that Taylor's birthday was a week before June 19th. However, in Scarab 25.1, Taylor said in court that her birthday was the 19th.

Maroon Sweater: I like it being the 12th because i like the beat where she blanked out on turning 16

Assembler: I find it interesting that about a week before the 19th is June 11th, and June 11th, 2011 is the day you posted Worm's first chapter.

Wildbow: @ Asse - I do believe that was the rationale for it being her birthday. But yeah, it's not the 19th. - Conversation with Wildbow on Discord, archived on Spacebattles</ref>

Growing up, Taylor's parents showed concern for her safety. They warned her to stay on the Boardwalk and avoided the bad part of town, a command she scrupulously obeyed.<ref name="1.3"/>

When she was around five or six, she saw a meth addict freak out on the bus, making enough of a ruckus that the driver had to stop and force him off. This fright permanently affected her.<ref name="5.8"/>

Her mother, Annette Rose Hebert, died in a car crash later attributed to texting while driving. As a result of the incident, Taylor becomes closed off and rigid. Her previously strong friendship with Emma Barnes became strained due to this change, but it still served as an emotional pillar.

A year and a half before the story begins, just before they enter high school,<ref name="1.1">Gestation 1.1</ref> Emma unexpectedly abandoned Taylor to befriend Sophia Hess and later Madison Clements. The Trio then began aggressively bullying Taylor, including one event in early January<ref name="I3c">Comment by Wildbow on Interlude 3</ref> that causes Taylor to trigger. They send her vicious e-mails, upend trash over her desk, and steal her mother's flute from her locker.<ref name="1.1"/> Others join in, ‘accidentally’ skipping her when passing out assignments and adding their own voices to the taunts and emails.Taylor begins lying low in the bathrooms during lunch and comes to view it as "refuge ... a place I could retreat to, a place where I was off their radar".<ref name="1.1"/>

In January 2011, she arrived back at school to find her locker had been filled with used pads and tampons, and then someone shoved her inside. She triggered after enough time had passed to realise no one who'd seen what happened was trying to help,<ref>Shell 4.3</ref> and was freed from the locker by or before the end of first period.<ref name="period">Taylor's classes are an hour and a half long, or an hour and fifteen minutes long, IIRC, with a bit of extra time for homeroom announcements and whatnot. She arrives at the start of the day and goes to her locker, she gets shoved into her locker and she has time to get a glimpse of people looking - and enough time passes that she realizes that those same people who saw didn't take any action on her behalf. She's not really in a position to bang, facing in, too cramped to turn around.

Not so much time passes that the next class starts - or it's as the class opens that people realize what happened and that's when she's let out. - Comment by Wildbow on Reddit</ref> While she recovered in hospital she was visited by the PRT in case she had triggered. She was overwhelmed by the sensory input of her power and didn't notice.<ref name="TT">Wildbow: Generally the PRT will pay visits to likely triggerees - special cases, victims of extraordinary violence or disaster, etc. They paid a visit to Taylor in her hospital room, for example, though nothing came of that.

[Edit with afterthought: Crisis points, ftr]
[...]
Discreet: If she did get visited by a hero, I'd find it odd that she'd never mention it, especially when at one point or another she's fighting them later in the story or stuffing centipedes in their mouth

Wildbow: Taylor was near catatonic when she got a visit. - Conversation with Wildbow on Discord, archived on Spacebattles.</ref> Her near catatonic state kept them from drawing any conclusions.

Three months before the story begins -- once Taylor recovered from her trigger event -- she started to prepare herself to become a hero.<ref name="1.2">Excerpt from Gestation 1.2</ref> She exercised, honed her abilities, doing research and preparing her costume. Her training schedule consisted of running every morning and every other afternoon.<ref name="1.3">Excerpt from Gestation 1.3</ref> She resisted using her power in school for three months, restricting it to a faint buzzing sound at the edge of her consciousness.<ref name="1.1"/> She conducted practice sessions, "far from prying eyes", to determine the extent of her power.<ref name="1.1"/>

At some point, her backpack was stolen from her locker by the Trio and stuffed in a trash can. She bought a new one for twelve bucks. This incident alerted her to the risk of someone reading her notes, and she rewrote them in code. Around the same time, she began hiding equipment for her superheroics in a boarded-up coal chute in her basement.<ref name="1.2"/>

Story Start

On April 8th, 2011,<ref name="I3c"/> Taylor was discovered in the School bathroom, ruining her hiding place. The Trio drenches her clothes and bag in juice. She then throws her bag against the wall in anger, her midterm project -- due that day -- is destroyed. She finally lets her defenses drop and is automatically swarmed with bugs responding to her emotional distress, but she resists killing the trio.<ref name="1.1"/>

At home, Taylor discovers the juice also ruined many of the contents of her bag, including notes on her eventual superhero career. This event pushes Taylor to stop putting off the start of said career.<ref name="1.2"/> That weekend Taylor completes her costume and on Sunday night goes out in costume for the first time, crossing into the "bad part of town" just after midnight.<ref name="1.3"/>

On that first night out, Taylor notices a group of ABB members, including Lung (who she recognizes immediately from the news and online). She hears them discussing killing "children".<ref name="1.3"/> She fights Lung alongside the Undersiders.

Having been seemingly mistaken for a villain, Taylor joined the Undersiders, intending to gather information as a mole. She helped them rob a bank and attack a fundraiser, embarrassing the heroes.

She was concussed when the ABB ambushed them. Bakuda launched a wave of bombing against the city to free Lung, forcing the other villains to unite against her. Skitter personally defeated Lung after he defeated Kaiser, Fenja, Menja, Bitch and Sundancer.

She fought the Endbringer Leviathan when he attacked Brockton Bay, helping to track his location and rescue wounded until her communicator was fried. She was nearby when Armsmaster duelled the monster and picked up his Halberd when he fell, using it to wound the monster and help other heroes clear rubble.

Post-Leviathan

Taylor discovered that the hero Shadow Stalker was in fact Sophia Hess, one of the girls who had tormented her. In the ensuing conversation, Armsmaster was revealed by Tattletale to have fried her armband in order to prevent her giving away the beast's location to other heroes, which would have prevented him duelling it one-on-one. In revenge, he revealed Taylor's status as a mole to the Undersiders.<ref name="8.7">Extermination 8.7</ref>

Nevertheless, she rejoined the Undersiders, disillusioned with the heroes. She agreed to Coil's plan to take over the city, claiming a territory. There she fought the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Post-Slaughterhouse Nine

Spearheaded winning strategies against Dragon's suits.

On June 19th, Coil completed his takeover of the city by faking his death and discrediting Emily Piggot. He claimed he was going to release Dinah Alcott, as agreed, but instead attacked Skitter. After the Undersiders defeated Coil, Taylor killed him.<ref>Monarch 16.13</ref>

Post-Echidna

Taylor felt increasing pressure from the authorities, who revealed her secret identity to the public during a confrontation at Arcadia, in which Dragon publicly outed her in a cafeteria with hundreds of her classmates and some faculty present. Though she revealed no secrets, she managed to sow distrust in the Protectorate by indicating her knowledge. Taylor's already-shaky confidence took a blow when Dragon revealed that Dinah Alcott had helped the PRT by determining that the odds of them capturing Taylor was 96.8 percent, high enough for the PRT and Protectorate to willfully violate the Unwritten Rules. Though hurt by this, Taylor didn't waver, and managed to leverage the heroic actions she had done to convince over a hundred students to help her successfully escape the Protectorate. Within the safety of her own territories, Taylor continued to operate in Brockton Bay alongside the Undersiders.

After learning that Dinah predicted the world's survivability was dependent on Skitter surrendering to the Protectorate, Taylor attempts to manage a conditional surrender to the PRT in the hopes of bringing about reforms that'll better their odds. This initially fails, but after she eliminates the PRT's local and national leadership by killing Tagg and Alexandria, with the details of their demises subsequently fabricated, she was proclaimed a hero, and is rebranded as "Weaver".<ref>Cell</ref>

Taylor is then charged as an adult due to the amount and severity of her crimes. PRT requests for leniency during the trial result in her being sentenced to probationary membership in the Chicago Wards, along with imprisonment in a medium security facility when off-duty. When introduced to the Wards, Taylor begins to chafe under the restrictions imposed on her, being limited to PR campaigns and a limited range of non-venomous insects when engaging in any serious operations, in addition to the wariness and mistrust in her by her teammates.

Took part in the battle against Behemoth in New Delhi.

The Timeskip

Taylor spends the timeskip as a member of the Chicago Wards, participating in many Endbringer fights. She helped her team expand their operations into neighboring cities.

Together with Golem, they studied and trained relentlessly in preparation for the end of the world and Jack Slash's challenge.

She participated in the fight against the Slaughterhouse 9000.

Gold Morning

Taylor was mortally wounded during the Oil-rig battle and, after being healed by Panacea, spent two to three days unconscious.<ref>Two days, at least, I’d been out, probably three, if I judged by the state of my hair.  Rachel rubbing my head hadn’t helped. - Excerpt from Cockroaches 28.1</ref> Was present for the interrogation of Saint shortly after waking up. Going off of what Dinah told Taylor about what she saw in her vision of the end of the world, she and the Undersiders collected company and went to convince the Endbringers to help humanity in the fight against Scion.

Attended the cape meeting in the ruins of Agnes Court's settlement.

Got irrationally annoyed when the Simurgh, who was following the Undersiders, was tethered to Tattletale instead of herself.<ref>But a small part of me had hoped that the Simurgh had picked me to follow.  That same part of me had almost believed it, taken it for granted.  It was horrible and scary and almost wrong, having an Endbringer at one’s beck and call, but I’d been prepared to shoulder the burden.  I wanted to handle it, so people I cared about wouldn’t have to.

Another part of me?  Maybe it had wanted her to be stuck to me, just to have one more tether keeping me connected, at a point where I felt like I wasn’t very connected at all.

And perhaps I wanted it to have the power so close to hand, so I could be relevant. - Excerpt from Cockroaches 28.6</ref>

Spent an hour saying last goodbyes to Charlotte, Forrest, Glenn Chambers and Quinn Calle.

Was reminded of Dinah's second message by the Simurgh when she visited Tattletale.

When Doormaker was incapacitated she led a strike team to investigate the Cauldron Compound, and to find a viable weapon or a solution against Scion. She and her strike team killed a significant amount if not most of the Irregulars's leadership, including Mantellum.<ref>One pass.  A lazy swoop with the swarm, the knife suspended by threads.

I couldn’t see, even with the camera, but I was aware of Mantellum stopping in his tracks.  The boundaries of the circle stopped drifting in the general direction of the stairwell.

I waited, willed the lights to flicker.  Time passed.

People were reacting, outside the circle.  How much damage had I done?

The lights went out.

Another pass.

Mantellum’s effect dissipated.  The blind spot filled in, a crowd, capes, blood spraying.  My bugs could sense them all. - Excerpt from Venom 29.5</ref><ref>Floret shrugged.  “We could handle a computer, a lock, even a vault, no sweat.  But not this.  The plan was to wait for the group on the other side of the facility to forge their way through the steel, or around the steel, but someone gave the Custodian a tinker-made super death knife, and well…”

“That was me,” I said.  “Nothing to do with the Custodian.”

“Ah, well,” Satyr said.  “Good and bad to any situation.  We’ll be able to assert control over that group more easily, with their leadership dead.  And there won’t be as great a chance that they take the good Doctor out before we can get a word in… but progress will be slower, and we don’t have much time to spare." - Excerpt from Venom 29.6</ref> She made her team taunt Scion with his partner's corpse before dropping the entire Cauldron compound on his head.

After having successfully exfiltrated what remained of the Cauldron compound together with her team and the surviving Cauldron personnel, and with no clear-cut solution in sight, she asked Panacea to modify her Corona Pollentia as a move of desperation. The expression of her power changed drastically, gaining the ability to control nearly any living being in a short radius around her, at the cost of most of her control over her body, written text, speech, and a stark reduction in the range and precision of the control of her bugs.

An attempt was made to seal Khepri in a cave far away from the fighting, but was met with failure as she figured out her newfound powers. After her escape, she started experimenting, trying to figure out the powers of the people she could control. She talked with Glaistig Uaine, who pressed her on the importance of Anchors: People and places that she would need to remember lest she risked irrevocably losing herself to her power.

After connecting herself to the Clairvoyant and Doormaker, she breached the world the C.U.I was hiding in with the aid of Teacher's tinkertech to control the Yangban. With her mental state deteriorating, she fought Dragon over the remaining Birdcage prisoners, and again after she faked her death. She momentarily lost control over her army when Dragon deployed a drone that scrambled Doormaker's portals.

Free of hazards and enemies that could stop her, she finished building her army, pulling capes from all around the world and even different ones with her to fight Scion. She had long since stopped being able to comprehend languages, and she started forgetting the identities and faces of the people she knew, losing her anchors one-by-one.

She tried one strategy after the other on Scion, temporarily trapping him in a world using one of Teacher's devices. She used the bought time to re-organize her army, to hit him with a constant variety of different powers to deny him adapting to any one of them.

Thanks to her omniscience and support from dozens of Thinkers in her thrall, she could react to Scion's attack near instantaneously. As a result, casualties were relatively light. She had to switch gears and use Canary's power to induce calmness into her army after Moord Nag got a stroke. Her control didn't extend to the mind, and everyone started to succumb to the stress.

Meanwhile a massive tinker project, a collaborative effort of hundreds of tinkers whose powers had been distributed among themselves by Null, was built and finished by Khepri's subconscious. It was meant to break through the dimensional barrier hiding Scion's true body. It didn't succeed.

Scion, using his own path-to-victory power, started going after her specifically. Despite linking up every precog with Null's power, partially circumventing his precog immunity, Khepri didn't succeed in throwing him off her tail. In a last ditch effort, she had Foil and Ballistic use their powers on a rock, and observed how Scion broke off his pursuit to dodge the projectile. She theorized that Scion had fail safes and contingency measures in place that would override his existing path should he be placed in a situation where he could be threatened.

Keeping him busy with capes tough enough to withstand him, she organized the Tinkers to rebuild their dimensional breach device into a weapon.

After observing an artificial construct resembling Scion's partner and his emotional reaction to it, Khepri figured out Scion's weak point. With an actual plan in hand, she started sending every cape under her control to New York. Unfortunately, she had used Doormaker's shard to such extent it had run out of power, closing every portal she had created. She lost control of most of her army beyond her personal range.

Khepri's mental state deteriorated rapidly from this point onward, but retained enough awareness to notice her brain swelling and changing.<ref>Except thinking was harder still.  I was a husk, and things were rotting from the inside out.  I’d hoped I’d recuperate some when I had less people in my control, but it didn’t seem like it worked out that way.  Damage done was damage done.  One section of my brain was swelling or creeping out to take over other sections, like it had overwritten dog-girl’s social perceptions. - Excerpt from Speck 30.6</ref> Regardless, after instilling confidence into the battlefield with Canary, relayed through every available phone, she started building up an army consisting of Changers and Shakers with the help of Labyrinth's and Scrub's powers. She recreated parts of the partner's body and their face, which Scion would prioritize destroying before fighting.

After repeated taunting by both Khepri and others who had started copying what she was doing, Scion released an indiscriminate destructive blast. She offered her friends, whom she could barely name at this point, a way out which they declined. Glaistig Uiane, with Doormaker's shade, opened up portals to evacuate everyone but Khepri, leaving her alone. Khepri survived by making her own portals with Labyrinth and Scrub, using Narwhal's forcefields to propel them out of range.

In the immediate aftermath, Khepri created a portal right next to Glaistig Uiane, taking temporary control over her and Doormaker's shade. She delivered the killing blow to Scion by opening a portal between him and Oliver, whose power made him resemble his dead partner, making him feel a brief moment of hope before it faded away. He didn't resist Foil's arrows tearing into him and, in perfect synchronization, the tinkertech interdimensional gun that destroyed his true body.

Almost immediately after, Khepri's mental degradation was complete. She couldn't remember her own name or past, and she mistook the people cheering for Scion's defeat as them fighting amongst each other. Conflict followed, where Khepri tried and failed to flee with as many people as possible with the intention to re-assert control over the world when she recovered. Her friends tried to talk her down, using the pepper spray can she had used earlier to prove her identity.<ref>“I’m not getting enough details here to paint a picture.  I trust the hell out of you, but I’m not sure this is you, Taylor.”

I pocketed my phone, then reached into my belt.  I hesitated for an instant, then pressed my hand to my chest for long seconds.  I knew I didn’t have time to spare, but…  no.  I didn’t have time to spare.

I opened a portal twenty feet above Tattletale, then opened my hand. The little tube of pepper spray dropped through the portal.  Tattletale caught it. - Excerpt from Speck 30.2</ref> It failed, she could neither recognize the can or her friends.

Chased by a small army of flyers, Khepri was herded towards Glaistig Uaine, who offered her a portal to an empty world to escape to. Her passenger managed to convince Khepri to let go of all the capes under her control before entering the portal and letting go of the Clairvoyant on the other side, going unconscious for days as a side-effect of using the Clairvoyant's power.

When she roused, she came face-to-face with Contessa, who tracked her down to the world she was in. They had a meaningful conversation, aided by Contessa's power, about past events, legacies and regrets. Contessa gave her the choice of two options, and, as a result of the unexpressed self-depreciation for herself, Taylor chose death.<ref>“A choice?”

“Life and death.  Or so I thought.  I chose death, and she gave me life, and I’m still trying to reconcile why.” - Excerpt from Interlude: End</ref> Contessa then shoots two bullets into the back of Taylor's head.<ref name="30.7"/>

Post-Gold Morning

Against Taylor's wishes, Contessa appears to have spared her: the two bullets seemingly disabled Taylor so that Contessa could arrange a power removal.<ref>Her hand touched her forehead, and she felt a pair of soft spots, each barely wider across than a dime. She ran her hand over her short hair. She didn’t know how it had happened, but she could guess. Bullets to disable her, surgery to seal her power away.

Cauldron, apparently, did have a means of locking powers away. Or maybe it was Contessa, doing the work, or perhaps she’d simply been kept alive, carted to Panacea or Bonesaw, who could fix things up.

But dwelling on those things wasn’t healthy, and it was pointless in the end. She’d likely never get a serious answer. She only had the two dimples or holes in her skull, the sole apparent casualty of some kind of brain surgery. - Excerpt from Interlude: End</ref> Contessa then appears to have exiled the unpowered Taylor with her dad to a world sealed from the multiverse. Taylor now possesses an artificial right arm she is learning to get used to, and her long hair is cropped short. She also has two dime-sized dimple scars on her forehead (and presumably the back of her head as well) from the gunshots. She meets an alternate version of her mother there who is still alive, had married someone other than Danny and had two young sons. Taylor aims to pursue a normal life, but struggles to find peace now that she has it after all the decisions she's made and how nothing she'll ever do will ever come close in importance to what she did before. Taylor also questions why Contessa spared her when she asked for death, forcing her to come to terms with her regrets and causing her to doubt things could be going well for her and her dad. Taylor expressed the difficulty she was having in reconciling the past, and the doubts she was having for both the present and the future.<ref name=":1"/>

Confiding in her mother about her identity and her troubles, they agree to meet again for more casual conversation. As Taylor leaves with her thoughts more clarified from her talk, she spots a boy that reminds her of Alec, but dismisses the similarities as minor if entirely absent. Meeting up with her dad, who has a new chance to be a parent to her in aiding her recovery in their new life, Taylor states that, although she has a lot of stuff bothering her, she's dealt with worse and could maybe deal with it and learn to be okay.<ref name=":1"/>

After Gold Morning, speaking of or mentioning Taylor by any of her names was considered taboo by most parahumans. Her survival or demise was unknown to wider society: Taylor is gone.<ref>Point_Me_@_The_Sky: Now she’s gone and you’re still here.

FlippinMad: Gone?
FlippinMad: she retired? Or she’s dead? Gone gone?

Point_Me_@_The_Sky: She is *gone*. - Glow-worm P.9</ref><ref>ViVaVl29: Dropped ward a couple months ago. Just want to know do we ever definitively find out Taylor’s situation?

Wildbow: In Glow-Worm, it's stated outright that she's gone. - Conversation with by Wildbow on Reddit</ref>

Chapter Appearances

Ward Chapter Appearances

{{#if:Daybreak|{{#if:Daybreak|Daybreak|Daybreak}}|Daybreak}} 1. Daybreak 1.1 {{#switch: debut=Debut yes=Appears pov=Point of View flash=Flashback f=Fantasy c=Clone s=Spirit m=Mentioned sc=Screen d=Death co=Corpse sh=Shadow Absent}} 2. Daybreak 1.2 {{#switch: debut=Debut yes=Appears pov=Point of View flash=Flashback f=Fantasy c=Clone s=Spirit m=Mentioned sc=Screen d=Death co=Corpse sh=Shadow Absent}} 3. Daybreak 1.3 {{#switch: debut=Debut yes=Appears pov=Point of View flash=Flashback f=Fantasy c=Clone s=Spirit m=Mentioned sc=Screen d=Death co=Corpse sh=Shadow Absent}} 4. Daybreak 1.4 {{#switch: debut=Debut yes=Appears pov=Point of View flash=Flashback f=Fantasy c=Clone s=Spirit m=Mentioned sc=Screen d=Death co=Corpse sh=Shadow Absent}} 5. Daybreak 1.5 {{#switch: debut=Debut yes=Appears pov=Point of View flash=Flashback f=Fantasy c=Clone s=Spirit m=Mentioned sc=Screen d=Death co=Corpse sh=Shadow Absent}} 6. Daybreak 1.6 {{#switch: debut=Debut yes=Appears pov=Point of View flash=Flashback f=Fantasy c=Clone s=Spirit m=Mentioned sc=Screen d=Death co=Corpse sh=Shadow Absent}} 7. Daybreak 1.7 {{#switch: debut=Debut yes=Appears pov=Point of View flash=Flashback f=Fantasy c=Clone s=Spirit m=Mentioned sc=Screen d=Death co=Corpse sh=Shadow Absent}} 8. Daybreak 1.8 {{#switch:m debut=Debut yes=Appears pov=Point of View flash=Flashback f=Fantasy c=Clone s=Spirit m=Mentioned sc=Screen d=Death co=Corpse sh=Shadow Absent}} x. Interlude 1 II {{#switch: debut=Debut yes=Appears pov=Point of View flash=Flashback f=Fantasy c=Clone s=Spirit m=Mentioned sc=Screen d=Death co=Corpse sh=Shadow Absent}}

Trivia

• Wildbow's favourite line in Worm is "This was it. Finally, everyone was working together.", mentioned by Taylor in Speck 30.4, and which Wildbow considers the summation of her.<ref>Wildbow: This is probably my favorite line as the author, but for different reasons. It's the summation of Taylor.
  
  Her frustrations from start to finish, the distorted narrative, the personal struggles and the struggles she sees elsewhere, and her view that it's because people aren't on the same page. She straddles the line between good guy and bad and vainly tries and fails to bridge it, like someone standing on a bridge, holding ropes attached to anchors on either side, striving to tie the two ropes into a knot. It's reflected in the coordination of the bugs and her inability to properly coordinate everything else. She views her successes as successes only if they help bridge the gap and coordinate people, she doesn't see genuine victories as victories unless they hit that mark.
  
  That final moment, where she's torn down friends because they were in her way, and she's finally gotten everyone on the same page, just so happens to be when she reaches her crescendo, ceases being Taylor and starts becoming the shard. - Comment on Reddit</ref>
• An underappreciated part of Worm is that, given its first-person perspective, the viewpoint character can shape readers' perceptions. As a character, Taylor lacks self-awareness and is not infallible to emotional biases, trying to fool herself, or more importantly, compartmentalizing. TV Tropes calls this an Unreliable Narrator.<ref>I've written more than one series with an unreliable narrator. One had a protagonist who lied to herself and self-justified well enough the audience got caught up in it. Some didn't quite 'get it' and took her at face value even as she did some reprehensible things, well past the series ending, or only 'got it' on a reread of the work. - Wildbow on Reddit</ref><ref>Taylor, as a character, is painfully lacking in self awareness, and tends to compartmentalize and optimize. Throughout the story, as things are tense, she finds herself faced with situation after situation that sees her pursue her immediate needs and handling the immediate crises. - Wildbow on Reddit</ref><ref name="IRC eEarlyTaylor"/>
• Taylor's bullying experiences can invoke near-universal life experiences; thus, many readers could read into the text elements in a way Wildbow did not intend.<ref>

  6. Taylor is a minority victim

I believe I said she would be at risk of becoming or being read as a minority victim, not that she was already one. My apologies if I was unclear.

7. Her sexuality is central to her character and would be on prominent display at school.

Not necessarily.

At school, she's being targeted and victimized. She's already hiding a great deal of herself already (masking herself with certain clothing choices, eating in the bathroom stall), retreating from the world. Failing to mention that she's hiding her sexuality (which she would be, given Emma or Sophia would target or use against her) would seem like an odd choice, making it read more like the sexuality was tacked on & that I had no interest in the deeper ramifications of a GBLT character, beyond the 'lesbians are story bonus points' mentality. Reviews then call out the story on this. Readers take it as a cue and then take that cue to a conclusion.

Mentioning it, conversely, would push things towards 'Worm is a story that starts with anti-gay bullying' in the public eye. I know you really want things to just be taken in stride, for it to be a non-factor, but that's not how it goes. - Wildbow on Spacebattles</ref> For example, the author wrote Taylor as a cisgender heterosexual; however, many readers read Taylor as being some presentation of LGBTQA+.<ref>Sexual preferences - Taylor is not a lesbian. Or bi. I would have made more of it if she were, because that sort of thing is an automatic bump in readers, but it's too easy and too cheap. - Answering Questions? (Wildbow, spacebattles.com, 2014-01-14)</ref>

• Taylor likely triggered Monday the third of January 2011 as it was described as the first day of school in the new year.
• Clones of Taylor made by Echidna are called variously Chitter or Scurry, both words can relate to rats just like skitter, her villain name, can relate to insects. Scurry being the movement of rats while chitter is more of a vocalization, and not solely related to rats.
• "Khepri" is a god in ancient Egyptian religion connected with the scarab beetle, because the scarab rolls balls of dung across the ground, an act that the Egyptians saw as a symbol of the forces that move the sun across the sky.
• Taylor's surname, "Hebert," would most likely be pronounced "Ai-bear," as it is a French name. H is rarely pronounced in French, especially at the beginning of a word, and a final consonant is also rarely pronounced without a final "e" after it. However her surname is canonically stated to be pronounced "Hee-bert".<ref name="SB532"/>
• Taylor is fond of sweet and savory food, prefers tea over coffee and doesn't like anything spicy or sour.<ref>“It’s fine.  I’m not offended, I am a villain.  But I’m also a person under this mask.  Someone who prefers tea to coffee, who enjoys reading, who…”  I floundered.  “…likes sweet and savory foods but dislikes anything spicy or sour.  Point being, I’m someone who wants to make sure you get taken care of.  Especially if you’re among the people I’m protecting in the territory I’m claiming.  Go.  Find a bed.” - Excerpt from Infestation 11.3</ref> She likes her tea black<ref>“Details about you, your tastes and priorities.  Maybe I’ll have tea ready the next time we meet.  Black, green, herbal?”
  
  “Black.” - Excerpt from Drone 23.4</ref><ref name=":3">“Green?” he asked me.  “The others drink green.”
  
  “Black.  With milk.” - Excerpt from Venom 29.9</ref> with sweeteners,<ref>“I’m okay,” Skitter said, without looking up.  She removed her hands from her face and leaned back.  There was no sign of tears – her eyes were dry.  Just tired.  “Could I bother you to make me a cup of tea?  Milk, drop of honey.”
  
  Sierra nodded, “I remember.” - Excerpt from Interlude 14.x</ref><ref name=":3" /> and particularly honey over sugar.<ref>I sipped on the tea.  My dad had made it with sugar, not honey. - Excerpt from Colony 15.10</ref>
• Taylor's blood type is AB.<ref>“Blood type?”
  
  “AB.” - Excerpt from Colony 15.7</ref>

Quotes

• (To Lung): "Don't underestimate me."
• (To Triumph): "Sorry. I didn't want this to go this far."
• (To Doctor Mother): "I know what that's like, I've walked down that road. Maybe not so ugly a road, but I've gone that route. All the way along, I told myself it sucked, but I wouldn't do it differently. I did everything I did for a reason. Except now, having reached the point I was working towards, I finally do regret it all. The last two years, the way I treated my teammates, leaving the Undersiders... I'd change it all in a heartbeat."<ref>https://parahumans.wordpress.com/2013/08/17/extinction-27-2/</ref>
• (To Tecton): “Being good or bad was never a thing for me. Not really. It was all about the actions I was taking and why."
• I didn’t follow that stuff, didn’t buy into the hero worship. I’d always found the capes interesting, I’d followed the non-gossipy news about them, but with the exception of a phase around the time I was nine where I’d had an Alexandria t-shirt and had my mom help me find pictures of her online, I had never really got giddy over any particular hero. - Tangle 6.7

Fanart Gallery

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  Skitter, as seen in her first costume.
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|- |-|Weaver=

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|- |-|Khepri=

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  Illustration by rgoh101 on Reddit

</tabber>

References

<references/>

Site Navigation

Winslow High
Teachers	Mr. Gladly {{#switch: unknown	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Mrs. Knott {{#switch: unknown	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Mr. Quinlan {{#switch: unknown	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}
Students	Taylor Hebert {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Greg Veder {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Sophia Hess {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Emma Barnes {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Madison Clements {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Charlotte {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}

The Undersiders
Leader	Grue {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Skitter {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Tattletale
Members	Bitch • Foil • Imp • Parian • Regent {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Chicken Little
Subordinates	Atlas {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Barker • Biter • Cassie • Charlotte • Forrest • Bryce Kiley • Sierra Kiley • Chicken Large • Snuff
Associates	Accord's Ambassadors • Bitch's Dogs • Coil's Organization • The Heartbroken • The Needlepoints • Sons of Bitch • The Chicken Tenders

The Wards
Anchorage	Auroch • Feint • Roulette • Vellum
Austin	Hoyden
Baltimore	Houndstooth • Avenguard • Avian • Stungun • Keychain • Blush • 10-59 • Pigeonhole • Optics {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}
Boston	Hunch • Reynard • Roulette {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Weld {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}
Brockton Bay	Aegis {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Battery • Browbeat {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Chariot • Clockblocker {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Crucible • Flechette {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Gallant {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Glory Girl {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Kid Win {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Shadow Stalker {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Toggle • Triumph • Vista • Weld
Chicago	Annex • Bearach • Cuff • Garnett • Golem • Grace • Raymancer {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Romp • Tecton • Wanton • Weaver {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}
Houston	Gentle Giant {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Chronicler • Young Buck
Los Angeles	Arbiter • Auroch • Flambé • Leister • Vantage
New York	Flechette {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Jouster • Shelter
Raleigh	Cask {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}
San Diego	Gully {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Scapegoat
San Francisco	Trapper {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}
Texas	Chronicler • Intrepid • Strapping Lad • Young Buck
Unknown Location	Eviction • Fisherboy • Greenhorn • Hype • Sunflower
Inaugural Wards Team	Chevalier {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Miss Militia {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Mouse Protector {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Reed {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}

S-Class Threats
Endbringers	Behemoth {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Leviathan {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • The Simurgh • Khonsu {{#switch: unknown	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Tohu {{#switch: unknown	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Bohu {{#switch: unknown	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}
Titans	The Kronos Titan {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Titan Eve {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Titan Fortuna {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • The Nemean Titan {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Titan Arachne {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Titan Oberon {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • The Ashen Titan {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Titan Skadi {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • The Ophion Titan {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • The Strange Titan {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Auger {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Titaness Amenonuhoko {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • The Flowing Titan {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Drillbit {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • The Liminal Titan {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Pouffe {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Valkyrie {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Morgana {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Yakshini {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Ashoka {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Ghast {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}
Groups	The Slaughterhouse Nine {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Three Blasphemies • The Machine Army
Parahumans	Ash Beast {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Echidna {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Khepri {{#switch: former	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Nilbog • Pastor {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Scion {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }} • Sleeper • The Tower {{#switch: deceased	deceased=†	noncanon=≠	former=‡	unknown=*	#DEFAULT= }}