I sat in the cafe and tried to remember how I got here. There was some kind of fog in my head. It had been January, I'd been watching Psycho-Pass, before that I had played Alpha Centauri as the Morganites on cheat mode, and...

I could remember my whole life, but there was this gap of "green" before I arrived on the street. It was freezing in Brockton Bay, and so far I had to act like I actually was in Brockton Bay. In the past hour I had thought over every variation of the simulation hypothesis and dreaming and being a coma patient, and come to the conclusion that I had to act as if this was actually happening until given better information.

Odds I see my parents again? I asked Dinah's powers. The answer came up blank, unknowable for this power, or maybe there was just no chance it would happen. I switched Dinah's set for Uber's to avoid the thinker headache of accidental power overuse.

I needed a computer at the very least. Various ideas bounced around my head in no particular order. Emailing Alexandria's civilian ID, emailing Dragon, walking into Protectorate HQ and asking for help and advice, finding Tattletale or Faultline. But why bow before your inferiors? I smiled softly and left the the $100 dollars on the table as a tip.

Taylor Hebert was at the heart of this world, this place. Skitter, Weaver, Taylor, Khepri. I had to get to her first. If there was anyone, anything else penetrating this world as a crossover then Taylor would be at the center of their activities. Ordinarily, the question of how I would find her would be interesting, but I merely looked around and chose a path. I had taken a power that ensured I would have insane luck. I accelerated my motion using my "mover" power and was jogging at a super-sonic speed down the street. The strange "green" feeling washed over me again, the distance I could feel but not ignore, and my mind felt the jog down the street as a frantic motion like a bullet at the same time it felt the jog. A few minutes later I found myself looking at a lonely girl in a bathroom squeezing juice out of her hair.

"Hello Taylor." I said quietly. She started, whirled around and looked at me, her body hunched in fear.

"Who are you?" She demanded.

"Call me..." I considered for a moment. "Wyld, I guess." I laughed. "I guess that's my cape name."

"You're a cape," Taylor said.

"I think so." I nodded and turned my hand into a sword blade. "You are too, Taylor."

"How do you know my name?" She asked. I appraised the pathetic looking girl. She reminded me of a drowned hamster.

"It's complicated. It'll be easier if we just agree it's a thinker power and leave it at that, okay? You have something I want." She started.

"What do you mean?" She had bugs outside the bathroom, I realized. Not that it could help.

"You are a very useful cape, to be honest. Probably oversold, but still. I have a particularly good set of powers, and you would be useful to me." I smiled at her. "You see, I can copy powers and you have control over creatures with simple nervous systems as well as functionally unlimited multitasking. I think you would make an excellent security system and, well, you'd do maintenance. I think we'd work well together." I shrugged.

"What the hell?" Taylor asked. I sighed, swapped in Heartbreaker, and was briefly stunned. Heartbreaker was a better cape than I'd expected. Cherish was her father, trading range for duration. Heartbreaker understood her past emotions, a long pit depression and anger trailed back.

"Want." I touched her. "Take." I hit her with a blast of supreme infatuation. "Have." I patted her head.

"You're..." She shuddered.

"I can copy powers. One of the powers I can copy is Heartbreaker. The fact is, you can know exactly what Heartbreaker does, and still love and serve him faithfully. This power is, for obvious reasons, highly appealing to me. I can only copy two power sets at once, and not all power sets. This makes slavery a very useful tool for me."

"What the..." Taylor looked at me, her face a picture of confusion and anger, her mind showed much more promising emotions.

"Right now you're a suicidal nutcase, and your future is not much better. So I am taking you as my first sex slave." I noticed I was hard. "You have absolutely no choice about this, actually. If you manage to successfully resist I will find more effective forms of control. I have powers such as complete control over biology and Teacher's brainwashing abilities. Unless we end up dealing directly with the Simurgh or Contessa I do not expect to be thwarted on the issue."

I was surprised how quickly the bug swarm hit me. One second I was looking at Taylor, the next bugs had enveloped me from behind. My brute power protected me from the more generic assaults. The rush into my mouth and nose was easy enough to beat. I began to create oxygenated blood directly as I sealed up every orifice. I was briefly blind and almost deaf, but a moment later my force field snapped out. Bastion. Clear, powerful force fields that let sound through. It was me, Taylor, and a fairly small batch of bugs. I briefly exploded, a wave of tentacles snapping at everything that moved. When I was done Taylor was stung and bleeding and almost all the bugs were dead. Taylor had a very determined look in her eyes. I flicked to Panacea's power and knocked her out quickly and painlessly. The bugs kept swarming against my shield, directed by the Queen Administrator's orders. I switched to Bonesaw's powers and felt a rush of ideas. I opened my mouth and unleashed a stream of poison that wiped out the bugs in a manner of seconds. Bonesaw and my internal biological control were exactly as frightening a combination as I had hoped. Bastion was dropped, giving me room for Panacea's power set to keep Taylor alive and stable despite the blast of poison.

Huh. I'd unleashed a blast of poison in the middle of a school. This could be a problem. I flipped from Bonesaw to Accord and felt a plan materialize. Vista and Accord let me play with the air and pressure density. According to my intellect the poison I had used could be neutralized easily, not like it had been that strong. Okay...

That crisis averted. I sighed. I had not expected the highlight of my day to be "did not accidentally murder a high school."

Huh. I looked down at Taylor. Abducting what was arguably a child to become my sex slave and soldier was also an unexpected event, and seemed rather atypical of me. It struck me suddenly that there was a very good chance I was acting irrationally.

Huh. I looked at my situation from Accord's enhanced perspective. I was "in Worm." In Worm, people with powers have an impulse towards conflict. Generally, the higher the power the stronger the impulse. It stood to reason that I was probably not in my right mind. The problem being of course that I was in the Worm setting, and as such there was a very tiny pool of people who could plausibly help me.

I swapped out powers. Labyrinth and Scrub. The two of them worked together easily to make portals. A few flashes of light, and I had a portal open, and I moved it to a world without humans, if I was reading Labyrinth's reality warping thinker power right. I stepped through, made another one on that end to Earth Bet, stepped back, and turned the one starting in Earth Bet to a new probably uninhabited world. I stepped into the world I had opened and moved the portal there to a separate uninhabited world. Following me should be difficult, though Cauldron was impossible to guard against.

I looked out at the trees and hills of the world I had found for myself. I looked down at Taylor Hebert, a girl who deserved so much better than this.

Possessiveness. Conquest. I had gone for maybe the most valuable thing in the world and taken it for my own. Maybe that was my derangement? Or was I twisted enough that the second I got real power I started doing unbelievably evil shit?

Agnes Court was not Cauldron, it seemed. Not as versatile as I hoped, either. Neither was Ziggurat, the earth-mover of the CUI, though T?ng LМng T? was quite powerful, though slow, practically Skitter like in complexity. Agnes Court, extensive library of effects, but nothing "alive" as an end result.

Tecton the architecture tinker-thinker a lot stronger than I'd expected, more versatile, and had let me plan very quickly and easily. I had a walled city. Agnes Court seeds for walls taller than skyscrapers. Outside of that I'd dug a moat I expected rainwater to fill with T?ng LМng T?'s power.

I had Nilbog and Panacea powers active as I waited for Taylor to wake up naturally, and I tried for some introspection. With Nilbog I had manpower, and with Panacea I could get around his weaknesses. Nilbog was crazy, lonely, evil, and miserable. Address the direct problems of his tiny kingdom and he would surely find new ones, so my slice of being a bit stronger was unlikely to make me happy if I went the Nilbog route. Heartbreaker didn't exactly sound happy either, according to the perspectives of his kids. If I was a parahuman, than I would need conflict in my life to be happy or else I'd get as depressed as Amelia or Sabah.

There were very few happy people in Worm.

I watched Taylor wake up. Her eyes fluttered open and she glared at me with a deep venom.

"No one at school got hurt," I told her. "I left Brockton Bay a gift, I guess. I opened a portal into an empty universe. Your city's economy is probably going to grow."

"What?" She stared at me.

"I guess, um, maybe that's a wedding present?" I mumbled. She continued her glare.

"You think we're married?" She asked with venom.

"I know I'm crazy, Taylor. The best case scenario is that I am an over-excited crazy fucker, but I rather suspect that I am being driven mad by an evil space bug. So yeah, I think the best way to look at this is a shotgun marriage that neither of us will be particularly happy about. Does that sound worse than being a crazy fucker's sex slave?"

"What is wrong with you?" Taylor asked. I considered the question.

"People have asked that before all of this. I've always been a weird kid, then a weird man. I like to think I've typically been nice and moody before this, and to be fair most of my really psychotic writings were when I was suffering from a form of depression that had yet to be medicated." I laughed. "I don't think I'm likely to turn you into furniture. I hope that's not where this is going."

"Are you going to bring me back home?" Taylor asked. I closed my eyes and thought hard about it.

"If you really want that, I can try to bring you back home. I make no promises, because my past behavior is no indicator of future behavior because space bug. But I think I can do that if it matters to you. I can't promise I won't go back and track you down, of course. I don't know if my condition is going to worsen or get better or if this is a psychotic break due to meeting someone who from my perspective has been a fictional character I have known about for years."

"Of course I want to go home!" Taylor shouted. "Please, please bring me back home!"

"Fuck." I sighed.

* * *

"Let's try this again." I looked at what was definitely the outside of the Undersider lair. I had last dropped Taylor off at PRT HQ. According to a brief use of Dinah's power, I was absolutely going to take her back, which frightened me.

Panacea and Sophia were my waifus, but to be honest I'd rambled them into deep OOC territory and in canon they were both kind of cunts. Admittedly, that was a lot of why they appealed to me, but that did not make for good relationship choices. I sighed, closed my eyes, and activated Shadow Stalker's power, letting me glide through the door as if nothing was there. The whole world darkened and cooled and it was pretty awesome. I returned to "normal" and shouted.

"Sarah, Lisa, whoever you are, I'm here to free you from Coil!"

"Fuck, fuck, fuck!" Lisa grunted. Her powers were disabled and Cherish had heightened her drives pretty well. I wouldn't call this precisely legally consensual, but it was a bit better than crazy bathroom abduction.

Outside of my Agnes Court created building, the Undersiders lurked. I wasn't really sure if they counted as abducted. A brief explanation of my powers and a spoilery elevator speech on their future had gotten them to come along, but not too happily. I really did not trust any of them with information about the future and the freedom to go about their business as petty criminals. Now they were mine.

I felt Tattletale climax, though I was too inexperienced to have noticed without Cherish's helpful power. I pulled out and smiled.

"Thanks," Lisa said breathlessly.

"Um, you're welcome?" I looked down at my penis. Having complete control over your biology had made the idea of climaxing kind of weird. I just made my penis flaccid and wrapped myself in "clothing" that was part of my body. "I'd offer you a towel but I haven't figured out a way of making one that isn't pretty creepy." Lisa waved it away.

"It's fine, 'Wyld.' She laughed. "This is going to be fun." I briefly wondered if having a crazy lady with a superiority complex and an evil space bug in her brain as my voice of reason would turn out to be a mistake. "Now that we're done with that, tell me about this thing where we save the world."

High Times With Daddy Blasto

(Автор: The Shadowmind)

Worm SI story

* * *

The first thing I woke up was the fact I was in a glass metal tube filled with clear liquid in a overgrown brick lab. The fluid filled my lungs as I panicked.

A thin looking man in a lab-coat was the only other person I could see in the plant filled building. He had tanned skin, and looked in his mid twenties with a somewhat Hispanic in appearance.

He started to record down notes. "Brain activity shouldn't be occurring at this stage. Emergent behavior in project Brigid due to unknown reason."

I could feel a spiderweb of lights coming from his head. Beautiful glimmers of color that I wanted to touch, for no sane reason.

The tube lifted up, as the man caught me as I fell. Wet white hair covered my face as I toppled forward into his arms. The wonderful smell drifted from his body. "My sweet Brigid, my little goddess," said the man as he held me in his arms.

"Who are you?" I managed to croak out. My voice sounded young and sweet.

"How are you able to talk yet. Something about the powers of the parahumans used in your creation? Maybe it was Teacher's DNA. Inversion of his power?"