Taylor Hebert

Skitter {{#if: File: Skitter_worm_fanart_by_drunkfu-d4yobln.jpg|
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Name	Taylor Hebert {{#if: Aliases|
Aliases	Skitter <br\>Weaver<br\>Khepri {{#if: Age|
Age	15, now 16 {{#if: Gender|
Gender	female {{#if: Alignment|
Alignment	Villain <br\>Hero {{#if: Classification|
Classification	Master 8 (arthropodovoyance, arthropodokinesis, arthropodoaudience) <br\>Thinker 2 (Superhuman awareness through arthropods) <br\>Effective rating of 2 or higher by the PRT in all other classifications. {{#if: Location|
Location	Brockton Bay, USA {{#if: Team|
Team	The Undersiders<br\> Coil's Organization<br\> Chicago Wards {{#if: Status|
Status	Alive {{#if: Relations|
Relations	Danny Hebert (father) <br\> Annette Rose Hebert (mother, deceased) {{#if: |
Too many parameters		}}	}}	}}	}}	}}	}}	}}	}}	}}	}}

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Sketch of Skitter in civilian guise. Fanart.

The Main Character of Worm.

History

A 10th grade student at Winslow High, Taylor was 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, but became a geniune member after enjoying the company of the Undersiders and realizing the self-proclaimed heroes were often just as morally ambiguous as the villains. This defection led to the downfall of the now disgraced superhero known as Armsmaster.

Taylor took control of a portion of Brockton Bay after the Undersiders were recruited by supervillain Coil, hiring a team of workers and ensuring the welfare of those living within her territory. She disagreed morally with Coil's kidnap and drugging of a child with precognition abilities, leading to Coil ordering her assassination, though it is implied he had always intended to betray the Undersiders. The assassination attempt failed and she executed Coil in return, with Tattletale taking over his organization.

Following the Slaughterhouse Nine's visit, Taylor replaced a mentally unstable Grue as the leader of the Undersiders. After the deaths of Alexandria and Director Tagg, she defects to the PRT with the new codename Weaver. When Scion turns on humanity, she abandons her hero persona in favour of Skitter, working with the Undersiders and various other groups to organise the resistance. Realizing her power is insufficient, she has Panacea perform a risky operation to remove the limits on her ability. This allows her to control any being (Scion and Endbringers excluded), but reduces her range and causes slow physical and mental deterioration. By the time of her victory over Scion, Taylor is severely paranoid, and her mental abilities have degraded to the point she is no longer capable of recognizing her friends, understanding language, controlling her movements or thinking about situations except in terms of combat (implied to be a secondary power of hers). Recognizing the danger she poses, the Contessa leads her to a deserted beach and shoots her. It is implied Taylor was killed, but an epilogue reveals she was stunned, and later returned to her father with her power disabled.

Trigger Event

Taylor's trigger event is closely related with her experience as a victim of bullying.

The bullying began in the summer/fall of 2009. It was conducted mostly by three girls: Sophia Hess, Emma Barnes and Madison Clements (sometimes other schoolmates participate aswell). Each of the three had a separate approach, but all tried to outdo each other in how creative or mean they could get.

After a year and a half, around November 2010, the pranks, the taunts, the hate mails, etc, got tamer and eventually stopped. It seemed like the bullies had become bored. A girl that had previously taunted Taylor befriended her. For most of November and the two weeks of classes before Christmas break she was able to relax.

When Taylor came back from the winter break the other shoe dropped. When she opened her locker it was full of used pads and tampons that have been left there to rot since before the school closed for Christmas. Taylor began to throw up and before she could recover someone (probably Sophia Hess) grabbed her by the hair and trapped her inside the locker.

None of the students that had seen the incident went to look for a janitor or a teacher to help her. Taylor began to panic. Her mind went someplace else, and it found the bugs there. Her brain don't know how to process it, all around her, in the walls of the school, in the corners, and crawling around the filthy interior of the locker. There were thousands of twitchy, alien, distorted things, each shoving every tiny detail about their bodies and their fucked up biology into her head. She didn’t know how to turn any of it off.

When someone finally let her out, she came out biting, kicking and screaming incoherently. She spent the next week in the hospital, where she figured out what her power was and how to shut some of it out. Taylor's Dad was compensated by the school. Enough to pay the bills for the hospital stay and a little extra. The bullies got away with it because no witnesses were willing to talk and the lawyer said it wasn’t going to be successful without hard evidence to identify those responsible.

Costume

The idea for the costume came to Taylor while she was watching a Discovery Channel program about an anti-bear suit made of synthetic spider silk. With her powers she can work with the real stuff, bypassing many of the inherent issues of managing the spiders and creating the fabric.

Taylor notes the best spider for the job would be the Darwin's bark spider (Caerostris darwini) with a dragline silk that is among the toughest biological materials around, 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 the spiders are only found in Madagascar, and the spiders would likely have difficulty surviving in Brockton Bay.

She settled on using the Black Widow spider, instead. Though these spiders aren't typically found in the northeast of America, where it is generally too cold, the Brockton Bay area tends to be warm, with mild winters, thanks to the surrounding geography. This same characteristic, which 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 stronger than steel wire of the same weight. Further, the elasticity of the material makes it less prone to wear and tear.

Taylor's costume combines the fabric, which is made of dragline silk, with panels of armor strategically positioned over her vital areas. The armor is made of insect shells (chitin) reinforced with dragline silk. The costume covers her entire body except her scalp, leaving her hair free. The armor includes a compartment at her back, spade shaped and hanging loose so it can cover her spine. She keeps equipment, tools and supplies in this space. The only part of her costume she did not design herself are the yellow lenses/goggles, which are goggles for underwater spelunkers, scuff resistant and tinted to reduce glare. She has dyed the fabric of her costume black, and painted the armor dark gray, to better blend in with her swarm.

Trivia

• Started running in the morning in February, about a month after her trigger event. Continued doing so until being imprisoned. (Drone 23.4)
• Made about fifteen to twenty million dollars over her career as Skitter. (Drone 23.4)
• Likely triggered Monday the third of January as it was described as the first day of school in the new year.