Taylor Hebert
Female. Civilian name Taylor Hebert.Member of The Undersiders. Master 5, specifically arthropodovoyance and arthropodokinesis.
The Main Character of Worm.
A 10th grade student at Winslow High, Taylor is a bullied teen and aspiring superhero. Her powers manifested in January 2011, giving her the ability to psychically command invertebrates: insects, arachnids, worms, crustaceans and the like. Though her original plan was to become a hero, a case of mistaken allegiance led to the villainous group known as the Undersiders inviting her to join. Knowing the local heroes were struggling to get details on this particular group, she accepted the offer with the plan to serve as a double agent.
Costume
The idea for the costume come to Taylor watching a Discovey Channel programm about an anti-bear suit made of synthetic spider silk. With her powers she can use the real stuff.
The best spider for the job would be the Darwin's bark spider(Caerostris darwini) whose dragline silks is the toughest biological material ever studied, over ten times tougher than a similarly-sized piece of Kevlar. The average toughness of the fibres is 350 MJ/m3, and some are up to 520 MJ/m3, making the silk twice as tough as any other spider silk known. Unfortunately they are only found in Madagascar.
The best choise betwen the North-american spiders was the Black Widow.They weren’t typically found in the northeastern states, where it was generally too cold, but the Brockton Bay area was warmer than the rest of the region.This characteristic that made it a tourist destination and a hotspot for capes also made it a place where black widow spiders could live, if not thrive. The tensile strength of the black widow silk is comparable to that of steel wire of the same thickness. However, as the density of steel is about six times that of silk,this silk is correspondingly stronger than steel wire of the same weight.