Crawler

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<infobox> <title source="name"><default>Crawler</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>

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<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> Ned, known publicly as Crawler, was a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine.<ref name="Cast1">Crawler – Member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, Crawler is a monstrous figure who heals with incredible speed and adapts natural defenses or augmentations in response to any healing. - Cast (spoiler free)</ref>

Personality

Nothing pleases Ned more than being given a chance to get hurt, to the point that he secretly wishes that Siberian would try to seriously hurt him.

He has masochistic tendencies always throwing himself into new challenges.

Appearance

Originally Ned was a feeble narrow shouldered man, only five and a half feet tall.<ref name="i25">Interlude 25</ref>

By the time of the Slaughterhouse 9 visit to Brockton Bay Crawler resembles a black six legged dinosaur-like beast the size of a van, bursting with raw strength while also mobile enough the tear into prey, His entire body is covered in scales, spines and bristling hair where thick armor plating doesn't protect vital areas. His mouth is a huge thing, wide like a fishes and crammed in with mis-sorted fangs, it drips acid. Eyes and eye spots dot the entire length of his body. From the knees of his foremost pair of legs, of 3 pairs of limbs he has, smaller limbs resembling human arms emerge.<ref name="I12 e1">Crawler, the most monstrous member of the group, loomed over the rest. His chest was ten feet deep from front to back, his head the size of a small car. He combined the most effective features of a bear and a panther. Sinuous, flexible, bristling with quiet menace, but also brawny with muscle. He had armor plates covering him, with scales where armor wouldn’t allow him optimum flexibility, and spines and coarse hair where the scales wouldn’t do. Head to toe, he had the coloring of an oil slick, black by default, but scintillating with rainbow hues in just the right light. A hundred black orbs studded the length of his body, set into the plates of armor. Caustic venom virtually poured from a mouth that bristled with mismatched fangs, spattering precipitously close to Cherish and eating at the concrete rooftop. Perhaps most unnerving of all were his six legs, each forking at the knee or elbow joint, with one larger limb ending in scimitar-like claws and a smaller set of limbs for each; tentacles for the rear four legs and a long fingered human’s hands for the forelimbs. - Excerpt from Interlude 12</ref>

Abilities and Powers

Crawler's power was adaptive regeneration. Any injury he suffered would heal in a way that made the healed area resistant or immune to the source of the injury. This adaptive regeneration had turned his body into a monstrous form and was powerful enough to develop an immunity to Armsmaster's nano-thorn.<ref name="26.x e1">He was struck by the Azazel that still approached, caught by a long tail and flung down at the ground. He rolled, and in doing so, he rolled into the same nano-thorn rails that had taken down his brother. Half of his body was disintegrated in an instant.

It regenerated swiftly as he scrambled away on his three remaining limbs. This time, as the flesh swelled out and took form, there was a blur around his right arm, red, more at his shoulder, along his leg.

The Azazel struck out with a tail, and he blocked the blow with the newly grown arm. The tail sheared off as it made contact with his newly grown defenses. The chunk of metal rolled into one of the cars further down the road. Still, Crawler stumbled from the force of the attack. To avoid being disintegrated, he drew his freshly altered arm back towards the barrier behind him. Where his blur met the blur that extended from the rail, the two nano-growths merely pressed against one another, almost springy, neither severing the other.

He reached back with his unaffected arms and intentionally disintegrated them. They regrew, with alterations matching the ones he’d grown on the other side of the body. Better equipped, he stalked towards the Azazel that had laid down the rails, his back to the one that had struck him from the roof of the bus. - Excerpt from Sting 26.x (Donation Interlude; Saint)</ref> The regeneration also let him develop countermeasures, such as his signature acid attack that converted dissolved flesh into more acid and the aforementioned nano-thorns, where body parts that were disintegrated by the nano-thorns turned into organic nano-thorns themselves.<ref>Organic nanotech is also a part of what lets geckos crawl on walls. - Comment by Wildbow on Sting 26.x (Donation Interlude; Saint)</ref>

He had a "core",<ref name="r1">Brutes (esp. regenerators) and changers often relocate their cores/coronas to the hardest to access part of their body, or adapt to do without. Crawler's wasn't in his brain, for example. - Reddit comment by Wildbow</ref> whose destruction is the only way to ensure his death,<ref name="SB1">Crawler = Contessa can avoid harm/evade full grown Crawler until she gets her hands on a weapon/individual that can hurt him, target his core. Not-fully grown Crawler you can best by controlling the damage & resulting evolution to force him into an immobile shape. Bury him in concrete/sand/whatever. - Comment by Wildbow on Spacebattles</ref> that was not located at his brain but rather closer to his center, as such destroying his brain could slow him down, but it would not kill him.<ref name="I12 e3">Crawler was one of the two group members who had yet to rejoin the group. He was engaged with a young man with a glow that suffused his hair and emanated from his eyes and mouth. White flashes appeared with little accuracy and devastating effect, carving spherical chunks out of the brute. This only encouraged the monster, and Crawler eagerly paced closer, his wounds closing together with a startling rapidity. So few things could hurt Crawler these days that Jack rarely got to see the regeneration in full effect. Crawler’s healing powers appeared to play out in fast-forward when compared to even the regenerators who could heal wounds in seconds. Hundreds of pounds of flesh were replaced in one or two heartbeats.

One eruption of light hit Crawler in the dead center of his chest. It made him pause, no doubt removing one of his hearts and some of his spinal cord. The boy with the glowing hair pushed his power into overdrive, calling forth a series of flashes that exploded in close succession. One caught Crawler in the face, revealing only a cross-section of his head, complete with a bisected brain, a skull six inches thick and the interior of Crawler’s mouth. Crawler collapsed.

[...]

Crawler’s brain grew back to its full beach-ball size in one or two seconds, followed closely after by the healing of the skull, the reappearance of his facial muscles, then his skin, hair, spines, scale and armor plating, roughly in that order. He shook his head like a dog with water in its ears and looked around, searching for his quarry. - Excerpt from Interlude 12</ref>

He never had the same powers for long given his constant adaption. However his power could potentially have forced him into an immobile shape, allowing him to be buried.<ref name="SB1"/> this was do to his adaptions covering multiple vectors, not just offensive but also defensive mobility related and enhanced senses.<ref>greatwyrmgold:

Crawler–How does his regeneration “work” if, say, he is cut in half? Which half regenerates? Does he have a “core” like Echidna’s, or does one of his organs function as such? If so, what happens when his Core/brain/heart/spleen is cut in half or destroyed?

Wildbow:

Crawler – Q1A1.
His form is monstrous because the adaptations aren’t purely defensive. His power provides the ability to defend himself better. Multiple legs to give him more stability so he can’t be knocked over, etc. - Comment by Wildbow on Extinction 27.4</ref><ref name="RPG1">Question by braincraft: What classification is used for enhanced or expanded senses? There are a lot of characters in Worm that have something along those lines, and outside of Worm there's stuff like Superman's telescopic vision, x-ray vision, and enhanced hearing, or Wolverine's ability to track by scent.

Answer by Wildbow: Thinker. In some rare cases they'd fall under a Brute classification. - RPG.net comment by Wildbow.</ref>

History

Background

From the way he acted, Bonesaw presumed that he did not have a happy home life before triggering.<ref name="i25" />

Likely fought an Endbringer before.<ref>Who says Crawler hasn’t duked it out with one of the Endbringers? - Comment by Wildbow on Snare 13.10</ref>

Post-Leviathan

Crawler came to Brockton Bay with the rest of the Slaughterhouse Nine. His choice was the buried girl as Cherish had termed her. He was unable to attack her and eventually left her and her hosts people be.

Later participated in the massacre of the Merchants, where he met Scrub.<ref name="I12 e2">Crawler threw himself into the point where the crowd was thickest. Bodies flew as he moved on his two rearmost legs and swept the other four claws and two tentacles through the ranks of the Merchants. When everyone within his broad reach was dead or suffocating from the paralytic venom, he turned toward the wrecked aircraft and began advancing with a more measured pace. Each of the hundred eyes along the length of his body blinked to clear away the blood and dust that had spattered him in his all-too-brief spree.Jack watched as someone drew a gun and pointed it at Crawler, then reconsidered. - Excerpt from Interlude 12</ref>

He was finally killed by one of Bakuda's bombs, which turned his entire body into silicon, during a bombing run ordered by Director Piggot. Mannequin was also killed in the same attack.

Post-Timeskip

Ten clones of Crawler were among the ranks of The Slaughterhouse Nine-Thousand: nine perfect duplicates and one hybrid with Breed.

Fanart Gallery

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  Image by Abyranss on Reddit
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  Image by DerTodesbote on DeviantArt.

References

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