A Darker Path / Tropes G To O

Tropes A to F | Tropes G to O | Tropes P to Z

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G-H

• Game-Breaker: Invoked; the Path to Ending shard was intentionally designed to disrupt the other Entities' experiment. All the constraints that the shards normally use to impose a degree of "game balance", so as to improve the amount of conflict and data, are ignored, letting Atropos trounce everyone she faces. She has no Weaksauce Weakness, no Kryptonite Factor, by design; she's not there to play, or even to fight, but rather to kill what needs killing. Parahuman activity settles down a lot in Brockton Bay as a result, with villains either dying, getting caught, or leaving town — just like she told them to do.
• Game of Chicken: Taylor kills the police's suspicions of her involvement in Sophia's death with a single conversation, but there's still a risk of someone in the PRT making the connection to the fact that Sophia bullied Taylor for a year. That is, there was a risk, until Atropos publicly claims the kill after murdering her way through the city's worst gangs. Faced with the possibility of outing Atropos and drawing her ire, for the sake of a troublesome Ward who could have landed them all in hot water, the PRT blinks first, officially doubling down on an alternative theory about Sophia's death and unofficially acknowledging that they don't want to know.
• Gaslighting: Taylor's revenge on Principal Blackwell for her uncaring and unhelpful attitude is to forge a conversation trail of emails regarding Cherie's enrollment, which have apparently been read and replied to by Blackwell, then confront her about why she hasn't made the arrangements, causing her to panic about her own mental health and sanity.
  Taylor: She's going to spend the next month combing through her email inbox and her spam inbox, looking to see if there's anything else she's missed.
• Genre Blind: When Bianca "Goddess" learns about the Rules for Fighting Atropos, she only reads a couple of lines before ignoring it entirely, thinking it doesn't matter since her power will be enough to control Atropos, not fight her — ignoring every other instance of Atropos just killing anyone who thought they could stop her.
• Get It Over With: When Atropos turns up in his home, Theo Anders assumes she's there to finish the job after killing his father, but can't muster the energy to fight or run.
  There was no real point in begging for his life, and he didn't care anyway.^note Atropos actually has no hostile intentions and considers it more evidence of how much his father messed him up.
• The Glomp: Riley (the former Bonesaw) gives Atropos one in thanks for getting Panacea to bring her back from within her villainous persona.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Dragon would really rather go through proper legal channels to rescue Paige Mcabee from her sham trial and railroading into the Birdcage. But when all her other avenues fail and it's clear that the system is determined to make an example of Paige, Dragon is willing to make a deal with Atropos and bring under-the-table threats to bear.
  • Riley doesn't like her memories of being Bonesaw, and hates to dip into them. They're faded, too, due to Panacea's efforts. But they aren't gone, and they include a wealth of experience in dealing with larger opponents, from deliberately vomiting as a distraction, to groin strikes, to incapacitating someone through impromptu surgery.
    She just had to hope that there was a way back for her after all this was over and done.
• Gone Horribly Right: A downplayed example when Taylor's class is invited to discuss situations where the status quo between heroes and villains was disrupted, one side killing or driving the other out — and none of them are willing to talk about Atropos as an example. She was hoping to hear people's opinions, but it turns out that she's just too scary, and since many of the students suspect who she is, they're not touching the subject with a ten-foot pole. Danny and Cherie have a laugh about it afterward.
  Taylor: Meanwhile, all I wanted was some feedback. Would that have been so difficult?
  Danny: I think they call that 'suffering from success', hon. Congratulations. You're officially too scary for your own good.
• Good Feels Good:
  • To her own surprise, Cherish finds she enjoys using her powers to help people once the various rehab clinics open in Brockton Bay for drug addicts.
  • Damsel of Distress might not want to be a hero, but she still finds herself enjoying it when a minibus of workers cheer for her after she saves a man's life.
• Good Is Not Nice: Atropos can be nice, she can relax and have fun with friends, but she can also stab a roomful of people and not lose any sleep. She's working to improve the city, which Director Piggot would approve of, except that she's brutally (and ironically) murdering anyone in the way. The innocent are left in peace, the guilty in pieces.
• Gotta Kill Them All: When Taylor first asked her power for a Path to end the threat and legacy of Heartbreaker, it blithely offered ways to kill all his children, until she steered it more toward gathering information on her options.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Atropos takes out a mook threatening Aisha, by throwing someone else at him — through a third story window, resulting in broken bones for both of them. But the guy she threw was a drug dealer, so she doesn't care.
• Groin Attack:
  • Just before she kills Kaiser, Atropos throws a paperweight at Crusader. His ghosts are quite reluctant to engage her after that.
  • A mugger briefly makes the mistake of trying to grab Taylor when she's out following a Path, and gets a demonstration of the fact that she can consciously choose to execute a potentially lethal attack with less force so it's just crippling.
    I chose not to kill him, but unfortunately for him, you have to kick someone very hard indeed in the testicles before it's life-threatening.
  • She also makes An Offer You Can't Refuse to Heartbreaker by threatening to castrate him with her shears, via another orifice. When he submits, she settles for just hitting him with her knee.
• Half the Man He Used to Be: The explosion that kills Fog turns everything above his waist into pink mist.
• Happiness in Slavery: Cherie Vasil is willing to trade pretty much anything for protection. She's obligated to help Atropos and will be killed if she steps out of line, and she's been sufficiently terrified by Atropos to know that the threat is 100% genuine and inescapable — and she couldn't be happier, because she's now under the wing of the deadliest cape around. She would have gladly sold her body to Atropos if it were necessary or helpful. It certainly helps that Taylor and Danny are perfectly amicable people and Atropos never demands more than "use your powers on these people when I say so".
• Hassle-Free Hotwire:
  • After her trip to an electronics shop, Taylor uses two of her purchases to start a nearby motorcycle "almost as fast as I could've done it with the key."
  • Typically subverted; when borrowing a car, Taylor notes that her power is totally capable of guiding her to hotwire it, but it's simpler and safer to just lead her to vehicles with spare keys left inside.
• Heart Is an Awesome Power:
  • Taylor is thoroughly underwhelmed when she sees Emma and Madison and her power helpfully informs her that they are focused specifically on her. She's a lot more impressed when she realises that that Spider-Sense has no range limit, works even with people she's never heard of if they intend to harm her or her loved ones or disrupt her life, and gives her detailed information about what they intend, enabling her to immediately start a Path to end their interference.
    Mentally, I apologised to my power for the previous sarcasm; it seemed that aspect could be useful after all.
  • Queen Administrator doesn't think that the ability to look in on any aspect of a group activity and nudge events toward success, turning bad luck into good luck or adding and reducing the impact of events, has applications in combat. But a four-on-one assault is a group activity, and the exact weak points of all your opponents are aspects of that activity, and a punch is an action with a chance of hitting and force that can be increased or reduced. Danny quickly wipes the floor with the four goons sent to bully him into paying inflated prices for the goods and services the union needs. He knows who has a bad knee, he can ensure that his blows land and his opponents' don't, or don't make any impact when they do — and he doesn't even have to reveal that it's a parahuman power, since he beat them up in an apparently mundane manner.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • With Shadow Stalker removed as a threat and the Undersiders scattered, when Brian/Grue gets caught by the PRT, they're able to flip him. He rebrands as "Tenebrae" and joins the Wards, in exchange for a light sentence and assistance in getting custody of his little sister.
  • Atropos gathers a team from multiple PRT branches to turn Damsel of Distress from a villain to a (very edgy) rogue. Once Damsel's powers are fixed, she talks herself into accepting a job with the Betterment Committee, telling herself it's good preparation for her future villain career, but quickly becoming attached to comfortable living conditions, good pay, and the genuine respect of her coworkers.
  • Faultline shuts up shop and flees Brockton Bay once it's clear that Atropos is serious business, but later gets Atropos' permission to come back and go legit.
• Here We Go Again!: Atropos was managing to slowly get Emma to stop considering her some kind of deity. Then Goddess kidnaps Emma and Atropos saves her in the nick of time, which causes Emma to go back even harder into worship, much to Taylor's chagrin.
• Heroic BSoD: Bagrat (The Guy in the Know) suffers one of these after attending the murder scenes of first Lung and then Skidmark. He ends his post with these two lines:
  As for me, I think I need therapy. There is no way in hell I'm ever going to be able to unsee that.
  If anyone wants me, I'll be in the shower, huddled in a fetal position.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Eidolon wants to be the greatest hero in the world, which has resulted in the Endbringers appearing for him to fight. Atropos exploits this desire by presenting him with the opportunity to remove the Endbringers, not by exercising his powers, but by relinquishing them. He struggles with it, but ultimately accepts the deal, putting the survival and well-being of all their potential victims ahead of his own power.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Amy buys a pet bearded dragon to hide the mushroom baby she's created.
• Hoist With His Own Petard:
  • Shatterbird, whose power is to control glass with her voice, dies choking on a piece of glass, from her own broken mask, no less.
  • Jack Slash sends out Crawler and Hatchet Face to investigate Atropos' activities — but Hatchet Face's nullification power is one of the few ways to overcome Crawler's Healing Factor and take him down permanently.
  • When Atropos kills Bastard Son's power, this has the effect that his previously fanatical followers are now able to think clearly, and are not happy that he just ordered them to effectively commit suicide by attacking her. He is last seen fleeing from them.
• Hollywood Acid: Fluoroantimonic acid is actually perfectly real, but its effects are so horrifying that Director Piggot describes it as, "a type of acid I still have trouble believing wasn't created by some demented Tinker." The fumes alone are massively toxic and corrosive hydrogen fluoride, while the direct effects elicit screaming even from Lung. After being forewarned and insisting that he wouldn't scream.
  Gaseous hydrofluoric acid, as my power gleefully informed me, possesses no friends whatsoever.
• Hollywood Hacking: Atropos appears, from everyone else's perspective, to have mythical computer skills. In fact, she doesn't understand what she's doing; she just starts running a Path like "destroy all chance of this being traced" or "end the barriers to my access" and types whatever her power says to type. As a result, she can breeze through passwords and security holes, write complex code in a single pass without testing it, and otherwise put even Hollywood's efforts to shame. But she doesn't actually know much about computers.
  I zoned out, allowing my power to type in the security code; my eyebrows rose when it turned out to be an eight-digit PIN.
• Hope Spot: Coil's power means that Atropos' terrifying assault on his base was All Just a Dream; upon dying, he wakes up in his other timeline, breathing hard. To find Atropos sitting next to his bed, repeating the same Pre-Mortem One-Liner she used in the other timeline.
• Horrifying the Horror:
  • Except the Butcher, everyone in the Teeth thinks the deaths of Lung and Skidmark were seriously gruesome.
  • After bringing the Simurgh down, Atropos aims her shotgun at Leviathan and warns that either he fucks off or he's next. Leviathan chooses to fuck off.
• Humiliation Conga:
  • As agreed with Mouse Protector, Atropos destroys Ravager's credibility. She intercepts Ravager attempting to rob a shop, takes her shotgun, scares off her goons, drives her frothing mad by repeatedly misnaming her, trips her all over the place with marbles, sticks googly eyes over her real ones, glues a giant toy pacifier into her mouth and gives her a fake clown nose, throws ravioli all over her, writes RAVIOLI across her jacket as her new name, breaks her down to the point where she just starts doing as she's told rather than keep resisting — and gets a shopkeeper to film the entire thing, which she then posts online.
    Mouse Protector: You did all this to her … just to mess with her credibility?
    Atropos: That's what I said I'd do, right? You didn't want her dead. She might want to be dead right now, but that's totally not my problem.
  • Atropos pulls one of these in reverse when she is attacked by the junior villain team of Bambina, Starlet and August Prince. She dances between their attacks, then gets a selfie with each one before removing their powers and subduing them in no uncertain terms.
    Atropos: See, this is the problem with kid supervillains. Nobody wants to fight them, because if you win you've beaten up on a kid, and if you lose, you just lost to a kid. They get overconfident.
    Bambina: Shut up!
    Atropos: You want to know why I haven't given you any warnings yet? Because you're no threat. I'm not going to kill you. I'm not even going to hurt you.
    Bambina: Shut up and lose already!
    Atropos: (Takes August Prince's mace and knocks Bambina out of the air with it.) Well, much, anyway.
• Hurricane of Puns: Atropos lets one loose when she describes how she slaughtered the Slaughterhouse Nine; they had to "lie down", "pop off", "spill their guts", etc. It was a killer party!
• Hypocrite: Saint persuades Mags that Atropos should be killed, because she's a multiple murderer — even though all Atropos' targets were multiple murderers. Apparently, if Atropos puts an end to a serial killer, it's bad, but if Saint puts an end to a serial killer, it's good. Of course, the real reason is that Atropos is using the same exploits on Dragon that the Dragonslayers are, and Saint just can't let that go.
• Hypocritical Humor:
  • After Atropos arranges for Damsel of Distress to get their power fixed along with a job offer at Brockton Bay, Contessa complains about the regulations Atropos ignored. Legend points out immediately that she never pays attention to regulations.
  • When Piggot meets the New York Wards, Scribe (formerly the Empire 88 cape Rune) maliciously brings up Piggot's Embarrassing Nickname, only to complain when Piggot mentions Rune's own epithet.
    Piggot: Also, you know what they say about glass houses and stones ... Sabrina.

I

• I Am the Noun: The Path to Ending shard is underwhelmed by Nicholas' fear attack.
  Path to Ending: You think to inflict fear on me? I am fear. I am Death. I am Ending.
• I Call It "Vera":
  • Taylor considers naming her shears "Reason". Because convincing people often requires her to make people see Reason.
  • She later tells PHO that she went to greet Damsel of Distress "along with my good friend, Mr Pump Action Shotgun." Said friend later has a "conversation" with Spree, of the Teeth. His preferred topic, apparently, is that Kneecaps Are A Privilege.
  • She also names several of her weapons just to make some punny names:
    • She promises to kill the Endbringers "with the power of friendship." She picks up a second shotgun from Ravioli and engraves "The Power of Friendship" on the side, even using a Panacea product to make the name glow red after she fires it.
    • The Machine Army will be ended "with panache and style". Panache is a computer virus to put a kill-switch in the machines, Style is a micro-organism that Panacea makes for her to help destroy the hold-outs.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Atropos doesn't show any particular enjoyment of killing for its own sake, but she makes no apology for kills she considers necessary, and is upbeat about the positive effect she's having on the city by removing very dangerous people from it. Danny Hebert has a chat with some friends after a day at work, where there are different opinions on whether Atropos' spree is justified, but overall, a strong argument is made that even if it's not precisely "good", it's needed.
  Danny: Not necessarily the right thing, but… sometimes, all you've got are bad options. And if I'm being brutally honest, I'm not sure anything less would actually work for this city, right now. <Beat> Don't quote me on that.
• I Need A Drink:
  • After reporting what happened to Lung, Bagrat signs off of PHO because, "I have a date with several stiff drinks."
  • Partway through listening to Amy unloading on her about liking Parian and having had a crush on Vicky for years, Carol opens up the champagne that Atropos recently brought over and pours herself a glass.
• I Warned You:
  • Atropos specifically explains on PHO that the four gang bosses are going to die if they don't give themselves up or leave town. They choose to not leave town or give themselves up. They die.
  • She also has words for Jack Slash.
    Atropos: What are you doing in my city? I believe I already put the word out that I was going to kill you. Just how stupid are you, anyway?
  • After Atropos pulls a bag over Night's head, she vents a little before killing her.
    Atropos: Sucks, doesn't it? Can't see your opponent. About to die. But I warned you.
  • Bianca the self styled "Goddess" tries to argue that she wasn't given any warnings. Atropos sets her straight.
    Atropos: I asked you how you thought you were going to survive this. I told you that you'd regret it. I even explained that I'd bring you down the same way I did with Bastard Son. I gave you every warning possible.
• If I Wanted You Dead...:
  • After Taylor partially paralyses Madison's diaphragm with a nerve strike, she calmly eats her lunch and explains the situation while Madison fights for breath. Once finished eating, and she's sure Madison has got the message, she reverses the effect and walks away.
    Taylor: You'll live. I didn't hit you hard enough to paralyse your diaphragm all the way, just partially. Though I could have, if I really wanted to. You could be sitting there, suffocating in front of everyone, with nobody the wiser. I could finish this meal, get up and walk out, and you'd die in the middle of a crowded room.
  • Dragon's musings about Atropos hacking her code are overshadowed by the recognition that she could have just destroyed Dragon. The ability to patch against Ascalon implies the ability to have inflicted it, instead.
    She could have killed me, but she didn't. In fact, she chose to save my life. And if she was telling the truth about the code-string she also patched me against, I can take the fight to the Dragonslayers for the first time.
    Who even does that for someone who's trying to capture them?
  • Uber and Leet initially panic when they find out that Atropos wants to talk to them, but they try to reassure themselves that if she wanted them dead, that's not the approach she would use; they'd just get a warning to leave, and then die if they disobeyed it.
    Leet: Whatever she wants, I don't think it's to kill us. I hope.
  • When Atropos destroys Ravager's credibility, she makes it clear that Ravager is only alive because Mouse Protector wanted it that way.
  • Atropos ambushes March and beats her up, but assures her that she's not going to die. If that were in the plan, she'd already be dead.
    "... probably in a highly ironic and somewhat hilarious fashion."
    • She further underscores the point by stabbing March in the throat and chest, but stopping an inch short of lethal injury. (It's actually a Cruel Mercy in a sense, because "catch, hurt, and release" is exactly the twisted game that March was planning to play with Flechette.)
  • When she is attacked by Bambina, Starlet and August Prince, she doesn't even bother to give them warnings.
    Atropos: Because you're no threat. I'm not going to kill you. I'm not even going to hurt you. (smacks Bambina with a thrown mace) Well, much, anyway.
• I Have Your Wife: Bastard Son is wise enough to recognize that Atropos is extremely dangerous in a straight fight, but he thinks he can get leverage by threatening or kidnapping people she cares about. What he doesn't realize is that her power gives her awareness of anyone with intent to harm her, and harming people she loves counts as harm to her. And that's on top of him directly intending to bring back her head. Basically, his plans are as visible to her as a neon sign.
  • Goddess thinks kidnapping Aisha (actually Riley) and Emma (with Theo as a bonus) will be enough to make Atropos do her bidding if her powers don't work on her. Spoiler alert: it isn't.
• I Know You Know I Know: When Piggot meets with Badaboom and asks about her debut as a cape, the latter requests not being forced to answer, but both of them know that the other knows that the official story of how she was recruited is inaccurate.
• I'll Kill You!:
  • When Atropos confronts Damsel of Distress at the bus station, she tells Edict and Licit that if there's a repeat incident, Damsel will just die.
  • After blowing up a smuggler boat, Atropos calls one of the heads of Gesellschaft on Fog's phone and delivers a very thorough threat in German.
    This is Atropos. You've probably heard my name before. Night and Fog are dead, as are the entire crew of the boat that was transporting your poison to Brockton Bay. Now, listen very carefully. If you send one more cape, transport one more ounce of illegal drugs, or smuggle one more bullet into my city, I will kill you in your sleep. You have been warned.
  • Atropos gives the villains of Gary, Indiana and Gallup, New Mexico free passage from their respective quarantine sites... so long as they go straight.
    Atropos: You may choose to leave, but if you deliberately commit even one felony from this moment on, I will know about it, I will know who you are, and I will murder you in a gruesome yet ironically amusing fashion.
• I'll Pretend I Didn't Hear That: After Atropos fulfills her promise to end Ravager's credibility, Legend remarks that he's supposed to arrest her, but he'll be busy with detaining Ravager for the next five minutes. Then he'll be forced to notice her presence.
• Immediate Self-Contradiction: Saint tries to claim he won't be recognized despite his light up facial tattoo then seconds later insists that said tattoo lets everyone who sees him know he's Saint.
• Impaled Palm:
  • If you pull a gun after Atropos specifically warns you not to, then having your hand nailed to the table with her shears is getting off lightly. Which doesn't stop Troy from screaming. He does calm down slightly once he's able to stop jostling the wound, but he screams again when she yanks the shears out.
  • While fighting Night, Atropos spikes her hand to the cabin wall beside them, also with the shears, so that Atropos can always see her.
• Implied Death Threat:
  • After triggering, Taylor asks Madison to pass on a message to Emma and Sophia, then tells her a story about a farmer with a stubborn mule. When the mule stops suddenly, the farmer strikes the mule and says "That's one." When the mule stops again, the farmer strikes it with the butt of his shotgun and says, "That's two." When the mule stops a third time, the farmer declares, "That's three," and shoots it in the head.
    Madison: What... what's the message?
    Taylor: The message is... that's two.
  • When she visits Uber and Leet, Atropos warns them that if they ever have another episode where anyone gets seriously hurt, she'll be by to have another chat. An extremely brief one.
  • When she calls Mayor Christner to request him to create a committee that will take charge of implementing Accord's city-wide detox and rejuvenation plan, she states that, if anyone in the committee has the bright idea of trying to skim, she will know — and their colleagues will be dissuaded from attempting the same thing. It actually turns out to be nonfatal. When two people try, Atropos blinds them and cuts off their right hands.
  • After Atropos meddles with one of her paths, Contessa creates a portal to the back of Atropos' head and aims a pistol at it, intending to convey the message that Atropos will die if she meddles with her paths again. She promptly finds Atropos aiming her own pistol at her, making it clear that Contessa will be the one to die if she tries to pull a stunt like that again.
  • Taylor "coincidentally" comes across a bullying scene at school and very casually describes bullying as a "bad habit", then reminds everyone that Sophia Hess was a bully and she got killed.
• Impossibly Mundane Explanation:
  • While investigating Sophia Hess's murder, Battery puts forth the idea she was killed by someone she was bullying, having found considerable evidence on Sophia's phone she was bullying someone. Specifically, Battery figures that Sophia was planning on beating her victim, only to get beaten in turn and died because they happened to kick her in the chest at just the right time to stop her heart. Alternately, that her victim hired someone to kill Sophia. Instead, she and Armsmaster come up with a complicated scenario where Othala can grant Changer or Stranger powers but never revealed it, and gave them to Cricket who came to Winslow, transformed into Sophia and killed her, then left and the Empire 88 simply never claimed credit. In reality, Taylor did it using her Thinker powers, and the identical clothing Armsmaster noticed was because Taylor stole Sophia's spare sneakers and jeans since her own clothing had been ruined by the locker incident.
  • In a (canonized) Omake, Alexandria wonders how Atropos snuck into Wilkins' office, and comes to the conclusion that Atropos can steal the powers of those capes she kills. In reality, Atropos just hacked the security and then snuck into the office right behind the Director, always staying out of sight.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Path to Ending grants Atropos the ability to know when and how to shoot with maximum accuracy without bothering with aiming.
  • Atropos kills one of Bonesaw's spider-robots by throwing her shears through its brain-case, from thirty feet away, at the exact moment it scuttles into view. She scores a direct hit and kills it instantly, before it has time to register her presence, which would have impressed even her if she didn't already know what her power is like.
    It wasn't like the shears were balanced for throwing, after all.
  • When faced with a speeding car on the highway, Atropos fires four shots from a regular 9mm pistol. The first three kill the three men in the car, and the fourth blows out one of the front tires, causing the car to crash. From five hundred feet away.
  • When assaulting the drug warehouse at the Docks, she kills one of the snipers covering the place, takes his rifle and proceeds to snipe the other three snipers and the other six goons in the outside without pausing to aim.
    It had a very nice night-vision scope, but I didn't bother with that.
    • She kills the last one with a pistol shot. Still without aiming.
  • She perfectly throws multiple grenades out of a pickup truck's windows so they will fall into piles of drugs with the perfect timing to cause a dust explosion just as she escapes — all while driving with her knees.
  • She can also use a shotgun to get in a running fight with two eighteen wheelers and win.
  • Mama Mathers and Valefor are tossed off a three storey roof, and land head first on the corners of a concrete planter box that she wrote their names on beforehand, with arrows aimed at their impact points.
• Improbable Weapon User:
  • Thanks to her power, Taylor can easily do this whenever she fights.
    • She fights Sophia with a pocket calculator up her sleeve, then throws it to disrupt Sophia's shadow state.
    • She brings down Glory Girl by throwing a quarter so she'll choke on it.
    • She knocks out Bonesaw with a medical probe.
    • She kills Heartbreaker with a large candy heart.
    • Ravager slips on Atropos' scattered marbles, multiple times, and is blinded and silenced by having items attached to her face with quick-setting Krazy Glue.
  • Part of Bastard Son's power is to give people the ability to become this (and Mastering them into following his orders). During the fight with Atropos, the people he's using are wielding a pool cue, a golf club, a broom, a straight-razor, a folding chair, a pair of bowling pins, a pair of shears, and a book. Atropos not only manages to take apart several of the weapons, she also ends up wielding them much better than them.
    It looked like volume E of the Encyclopedia Americana, but I could've been wrong.
• Inner City School: When Winslow is the scene of the Fallen being thrown head-first off a three-story roof, Armsmaster wonders at first if any of the students will need therapy due to witnessing the scene. Then he remembers what institution he's dealing with, and figures they probably need therapy just for attending the school.
• In Spite of a Nail: Taylor still ends up recruiting Charlotte as a minion. Rather than saving her from the Merchants, Atropos finds Charlotte imitating her to pull a Scare 'Em Straight on a thief who hit a shop owned by a friend of her father. Atropos lets her off with a warning in exchange for substituting for her as a body double at an undisclosed future point in time. Taylor later has her at one of the Quarantine Zones so that the pair of them are giving the exact same speech hundreds of miles apart at the same time, offering those within a chance to surrender.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: After Taylor announces Kaiser's death, an unnamed member of the Empire 88 insists she's lying and that "The E88 will outlast everyone" in Brockton Bay. Minutes later, Victor posts that Kaiser is most definitely dead and the entire leadership of the E88 is getting out of Brockton Bay and that all other villains should do the same. Except Lung; Victor's certain he can take Atropos.
• Insult to Rocks: Atropos compares Bastard Son to "what you'd get if Teacher and Jack Slash had a kid and kicked it out of the house because they were sick of its attitude."
• Internal Reveal: Taylor carefully lays the groundwork and plans the timing for when her dad will "catch" her coming home in costume and realise that she's Atropos, without freaking him out.
  Path to End the need to lie to dad about this: complete.
• Invisibility: Skidmark and Squealer plan to avoid Atropos by driving around in an invisible and soundless vehicle until after midnight. However, Path to Ending is essentially omniscient and doesn't care in the slightest about whether its host can physically see or hear the target. Plus, she sabotaged the truck so the stealth systems would break down just in time for the show.
• Ironic Echo: Just as she prepares to point a gun at the back of Atropos' head, Contessa thinks of her message: "If you try that sort of shit with me again, you will die." Then the portal opens, and Contessa has a pistol aimed at her face before she can react, and the pistol withdraws before the portal closes. Which allows Contessa to understand the message: "If I try that sort of shit with her again, I will die."
• I Shall Taunt You: Atropos plays the Imperial March for 30 seconds on a horn looted from one of Nilbog's creations, as his other monsters rush toward her, before stepping out, for maximum dramatic impact and frustration.
• It's Not You, It's Me: Inverted by Atropos when she's explaining why she's choosing not to work directly for the PRT, citing how they'd probably try to order her not to kill people.
  Atropos: I'd say it's not you, it's me ... but it's totally you.
• It's Personal: Atropos knew that Director Piggot would show up in person to the end of Nilbog.
  Atropos: I know you, and this is personal. There's no way you could stay away.
• It Works Better with Bullets: Coil gets killed by Atropos in one timeline, and the shock wakes him up in his other timeline — to see her standing over his bed. He promptly yanks the pistol out from under his pillow and shoots her repeatedly, only to have her open her hand and reveal the pile of cartridges that she took from the gun before he woke up.
  There was one dry click, followed by a lot of useless trigger pulls.

J-L

• Jack the Ripoff: Atropos does not take kindly to copycat killers diluting her brand and tarnishing her image — which is to say, she immediately tracks down the fools who tried it and brutally kills them all, then posts a public warning to anyone who might have a similar idea.
  Atropos: Just ask the three ... well, two ... okay, one ABB guy whose idiot buddies were gonna kill some girls to cover their tracks.
• Kangaroo Court: Dragon reaches out to Atropos for help in bringing about justice for Paige Mcabee, who had been set up to be railroaded into the Birdcage, and she gets permission to use Atropos' name to threaten the judge. Faced with drawing Atropos' ire, he winds back some of the more grossly unfair measures, such as preventing Paige from testifying in her own defence or using her own funds to hire a decent lawyer, then recuses himself from the case.
• Kansas City Shuffle: Part of how Atropos ultimately kills Kaiser. She poisons a bottle of alcohol and sets all the clocks at Medhall HQ to 15 minutes later, so that when they find it after "midnight" and think that was her attack, they are completely distracted and not keeping an eye on Kaiser.
• Kick the Dog: Janice Templeton, one of the members of the committee meant to help rebuild Brockton Bay, erases several people from the list of those meant to receive stimulus cards just because they have foreign names - all so she can take their cards for herself. She promptly gets a close encounter with Atropos' shears.
• Kids Driving Cars: Since it's going to be a very late night, Taylor does most of the driving back from New York, running a Path to Ending This Journey Safely at Home. Danny has seen too much of her capabilities at that point to doubt her.
• Kill It with Fire: Atropos uses this rather liberally when getting rid of drug stashes, even triggering a mushroom cloud in two separate instances when aerosolised drugs and cash blow up.
• Killed to Uphold the Masquerade: Director Wilkins realises that it should be possible to identify Atropos by examining Winslow school records related to Shadow Stalker — and gets Atropos' shears at her eye, warning her that if she continues that search, she dies.
• Klatchian Coffee: When she's buttering up her dad for a conversation about her work as Atropos, Taylor makes him a coffee that's rather more intense than usual.
  Danny made a non-committal grunt before taking a sip from the mug. His eyes opened wide as the extra-strength caffeine bulldozed through his taste-buds before opening a direct line to his hindbrain and announcing that all hands were needed on deck right now. Even as he sat bolt upright, he detected a faint hint of salt in there, which just sealed the deal.
  "Taylor," he enquired just a little plaintively, "when did you learn to make Navy coffee?"
  She shrugged slightly, and he thought he caught the hint of a mischievous grin. "I figured you'd want something a little stronger than usual after last night."
  He looked at the cup warily, then took another sip. It was still as powerful as ever, and he could feel his groggy neurons waking up and sparking to life. "I'm worried that it might dissolve the mug."
• Knee-capping:
  • A senior Gesellschaft representative survives Atropos' attack on his warehouse, but she shoots him in the knee before leaving so he won't be able to escape the authorities.
  • Atropos has been asked not to kill Ravager, and so she won't, but she has other ways to send a message.
    If you're harboring secret plans to go back to that shop, or attack that shop assistant, for some kind of revenge... don't. I'll know, and I'll be waiting with my good friend Mr Pump Action Shotgun to have a conversation with you about how Kneecaps Are A Privilege.
  • Atropos later has a conversation with March on that subject when March attempted to ambush Flechette so she couldn't attend a charity fundraiser in Brockton Bay.
  • Barrow, the leader of Lost Garden, becomes the first person to learn that, indeed, Kneecaps Are A Privilege.
  • Bianca aka "Goddess", ruler of Earth Shin, becomes a Visual Pun, with Atropos stating that she started the day with three shins and will go all the way to zero if she doesn't cooperate. (She ends up with one.)
• Know When to Fold 'Em:
  • After Sophia's death, a thoroughly shaken Emma and Madison agree that they need to stop everything that would hurt Taylor and never go near her again.
    Madison: We're alive, right? That's because we didn't go with Sophia. Because we didn't go after Taylor again. She told me that's two, right? If we step over the line one more time, we're dead. All we have to do is never step over the line.
  • After watching Atropos completely No-Sell Nicholas' power and brutally kill him, as well as finding out how she destroyed the Nine, Guillaume is left with the options of returning to Heartbreaker without Cherie and Nicholas (which would certainly go badly), surrendering, or dying on the spot — but he's more level-headed than Nicholas.
    Slowly, he put his hands up. "I'd like to surrender now, please."
  • Damsel of Distress decides to take Atropos' offer to leave Brockton Bay, since she has realized that Atropos will kill her at the first sign of a twitchy finger.
  • Three groups of men paid to cause trouble at the newly opened rehab clinics all have realizations described as "I'm not being paid enough for this shit" when Cherish uses her powers to remind them that Atropos would disapprove of what they're about to do.
  • When the three minions Ravager brought along to rob a jewelry shop realize they are face to face with Atropos, they look at each other and immediately skedaddle.
  • As Dragon puts it, when Judge Regan heard that Atropos was paying attention to the Canary trial and wanted it to be fair, "he basically tossed all the paperwork in the air and walked away from it."
  • When Atropos issues an ultimatum to the quarantine zones, Pastor surrenders outright, after much soul-searching, and the majority of capes from Gary and Gallup turn themselves in, while the remaining few leave. Only the last zone, Flint, chooses to fight.
    Dust Devil: We surrender, we're doing hard time, no two ways about it. But would we rather go down fighting, or just walk out and let them slap the cuffs on?
    As he scanned the crowd, not even he knew which way the vote would go.
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • When a pair of ABB gangers decide to murder the prostitutes they're guarding and pin it on Atropos, she promptly shows up and cuts their throats. Their comrade, who objected to doing so, is left with a stark warning to improve himself lest Atropos return for him.
  • When Atropos pulls Teacher out of the Birdcage for a plan, the villain just can't help but to attempt to use his power on Atropos. Because of that (and the thousands of people he ruined in the process), Atropos arranges it so when Teacher powers up Damsel of Distress and Scopegoat, the latter passes all the mental issues he and Damsel suffer into Teacher, whom Atropos tricks into running through a portal that takes him back to the Birdcage.
• Last Chance to Quit: Atropos insists on offering Nilbog the chance to surrender to the PRT within 24 hours, as she did for the gang bosses. Not that she thinks he's likely to accept, but he is sapient and capable of reasoning, even if "The reality he's living in only touches on ours here and there," so it's a matter of principle.
• Laugh Themselves Sick:
  • When Taylor describes how she's hacked Blackwell's email account to drive her crazy over Cherie being transferred to Winslow, Danny has to stop his car because he's laughing so hard he can barely hold onto the driving wheel.
  • The jewelry shop worker filming Ravager's Humiliation Conga breaks down laughing non-stop mid-fight, and has to concentrate to achieve the feat of filming the entire thing.
  • By the end of the advance screening of the Ravioli takedown, Aisha and Riley have collapsed helplessly on the couch and Riley is struggling to breathe as she laughs herself to tears.
  • Legend is left wheezing and short of breath after Atropos reveals how she hired Accord to craft a plan for Brockton Bay, and paid Accord with his own money.
  • When Atropos throws down the gauntlet to all the remaining quarantine zones at once, Aisha and Riley have to take turns talking about it, between collapsing in fits of cackling.
    She joined in with Aisha's mirth then, holding her sides because it hurt to laugh so hard.
  • Newter is flopping on the ground and unable to speak for quite some time after realising that Mel had a drunken one-night stand with Anne Barnes and Crystal Pelham. Labyrinth doesn't get why it's so funny.
    Newter: HAAAAAhaahaAAAhahAHhAAhAhAAAAhahaHAHhaahAhAHAhahaHAha--!
• Leave Him to Me!: The Rogues' Guild tries to step up and help Atropos face Bastard Son, but she doesn't need it and doesn't want them in danger.
  Atropos: No. This isn't about you three anymore. Thanks for the offer, but I got this.
• Leeroy Jenkins:
  • Glory Girl is very prone to charging without thinking, trusting that her power will protect her and let her overwhelm her target.
    "Vicky, wait a minute. Let's just take a—" But Vicky was gone, rocketing across the park, bag of oats dropped and spilling on the ground.
  • Ravager attempts this approach while fighting Atropos. It... doesn't go well.
• Legendary Impostor: Chariot is interrupted during a burglary by a figure in a dark coat and morph mask, panicking him into running away, promising to turn himself in and go legit. Once he's gone, Charlotte, one of Taylor's classmates who has a fairly similar build to her, breathes a sigh of relief, telling herself she can't believe that worked. Atropos, who turns out to be standing right behind her, agrees that it was impressive.
• Lesser of Two Evils:
  • Atropos is able to nudge Brian toward accepting her as the lesser evil, by having him work with her, on the premise that if he uses his darkness to blind her targets, she'll subdue them alive, but if she has to work alone, she'll kill them. Recognizing that she's willing and able to exercise that restraint goes a long way toward reinforcing the PRT's hands-off attitude to her.
    It was very much a gauntlet being thrown down. He could save the lives of every person in there, if he was willing to use his power to help me get what I wanted.
  • Atropos' confrontation with Bastard Son brings all of Director Piggot's concerns about her to the fore. Deliberately standing back and doing nothing to interfere with impending murder really grates on the director's principles, but she still knows she can't really do anything to stop Atropos — and she still hates Bastard Son more. So she's able to square inaction with her conscience, while hating it.
    Atropos was an unapologetic murderer, with a death toll that was now into the dozens, not even counting the unpowered mooks she'd executed along the way, but she was still preferable to Bastard Son.
  • Director Piggot has another chance to exercise her least-bad-choice muscles when she works out the true background of Badaboom's situation, but decides not to take action.
    Piggot: I'd rather a Ward or hero who started out with sketchy motives but who's trying to make something of herself, as opposed to a villain on the run.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: Atropos somehow manages this even though she's already very dangerous when, in the aftermath of clearing out Eagleton and Ending the Machine Army, the PRT's Chief Director asks her how quickly she can clear out the remaining Quarantine Zones. She promptly issues a warning to the villains in said zones that they can surrender or die. Most choose to surrender.
• Let's You and Him Fight:
  • When the Empire 88 capes give up and leave the city to avoid being killed by Atropos, they recommend that her other targets do the same.
    Victor: Except Lung. You can take her. I have faith in you.
  • When the Dragonslayers come to town gunning for her, Atropos sabotages their suit programming to make them target Lung instead. And you've got one guess at the title of that chapter.
  • The PRT initially tries to intercept Atropos and rescue her targets, but after a string of futile attempts, and after reassurance that she isn't going to target them if they don't attack her, they settle for keeping the Wards out of her way and giving her an open invitation to cooperate with them as she goes through villains like a combine harvester through a wheat field.
  • Uber is initially unimpressed with Leet building a personal teleporter that will help Atropos be even more terrifying — until Leet points out that she'll only terrify everyone else.
    Leet: You and me, we're out of here. Remember?
    Uber: Good point. Very good point.
• Lie Detector: Armsmaster arranges for Brian's interview to be examined by both his own voice analysis software and Gallant's ability to see emotions, to ensure Brian's sincerity.
• Lights Off, Somebody Dies: Atropos isn't trying to confuse who's responsible, but when she's going after Max Anders/Kaiser, surrounded by bodyguards, remotely disabling the lights both makes it easier to reach him, and gives her a chance to pose dramatically with a Finger Gun when the lights come back for just a second.
  Atropos: Bang.
• Literalist Snarking: Atropos can out-snark even Amy.
  Amy: You can't just kill her!
  Atropos: I think you'll find I can. It's very much what I do. Ask the rest of the Nine. Oh, wait. You can't.
• Logical Weakness:
  • Shatterbird needs to sing in order to be able to control glass. Atropos takes advantage of this (in a very ironic way) by force-feeding her a piece of glass, preventing her from singing at all.
  • Similarly, Heartbreaker needs to talk to someone and be heard once he's forced feelings of love and devotion on them in order to get them to do what he wants. Atropos has Cherie wear earplugs so she can't hear the orders he's giving, then breaks his jaw so he can't give any anyway.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Subverted. Path to Ending doesn't work for things like "End my lack of money"; the path must end something.
    • Her power will, sometimes, arrange a Path that gets her things as collateral. Her Path to Ending Oni Lee leads to her getting her costume, and robbing Kaiser's house got her the bodice shears that become her weapon, as well as the sword she would later kill him with.
    • Also, while she intends to get money by killing the Slaughterhouse Nine and getting the reward for that, it's going to go straight back into fixing Brockton Bay, as per the plan she just commissioned off Accord.
  • A group of drug traders attempt this by setting up shop right outside Brockton Bay's city limits. Atropos doesn't care much for the details, though; that still affects the Bay, therefore it draws her attention.
    Atropos: I paid them a visit, explained that why yes, I *can* actually travel outside the city, then torched their stash. And their car. And their shoes (I made them take the shoes off first, because I'm nice like that).
  • Danny's version of Queen Administrator gives him the power to affect probabilities when he's involved in a group effort. This works even when the group effort consists of attacking him.
  • Badaboom (the New York cape that would have been Bakuda in canon) avoids being sent to prison because the event of her debut was when Fenja and Menja attacked Cornell and she became an Accidental Hero.
  • Valefor is understandably careless in the wording of his orders when Eligos is bleeding out in front of him. He only instructs Atropos to drop her guns and knives, which she does, and she then proceeds to blind him with a goblin claw.
• Ludicrous Gibs:
  • Crawler can't be conventionally killed, so Atropos has to thoroughly blow him up.
    When I poked my head up, my first impression was that there had been a whole lot of Crawler, and now he was everywhere.
  • Fog is turned into a pink mist by the multi-grenade explosion in the ship he's in.
• Lured into a Trap:
  • Atropos persuades Lung to step into her trap by specifically telling him it's an ambush for him. He's too proud and arrogant to do anything other than charge in.
  • Taylor specifically tells Emma that she'll be on the roof, knowing that Emma won't be able to resist passing it on. Which means the Fallen walk right into her setup and are thrown off the roof. Emma is initially upset with herself for revealing it, but once she learns about Valefor's power and realises it was all planned, she's quite sanguine about being Atropos' pawn.
• Lying by Omission: Taylor tells Alan Barnes that if he wants to know details about the clearing of the Boat Graveyard, he'll have to ask her dad, since "I don't work for the committee." In point of fact, she supervised it more closely than her father did, and made all the arrangements, but it's literally true that if he wants more details, he'll have to ask her father, since she's not telling. And it's also true that she's not an employee of the Betterment Committee — although she practically owns it.

M-O

• Make an Example of Them:
  • As Atropos explains to Jack Slash, her killing of Oni Lee was a warning to everyone in Brockton Bay, and the deaths of the Nine are to be her warning to everyone outside of it. That warning boils down to: If I say that I'll kill you, then I can and will.
  • The way that she serially escalates the drama and gore of each gang leader's death also sends a clear message to take her very seriously. (The bystanders get it loud and clear, although most of her targets have to learn the hard way.)
    I knew where I could've gotten a rifle with armour-piercing rounds, to blind-snipe him through the window, but I'd chosen instead to go with the most horrifyingly spectacular kill I could manage under the time constraints.
  • She doesn't actually say what will happen to anyone who tries skimming off some of the money earmarked for revitalising Brockton Bay, except that their colleagues will be dissuaded from attempting the same thing. The two people that try it end up losing a hand and their eyesight.
  • To reinforce the message for Gesellschaft, Taylor kills Night and Fog, blows up the ship taking them and their smuggled cargo of drugs and weapons towards Brockton to kingdom come, and then calls Fog's contact in Gesellschaft to let him know about it, and that he'll be next if they try again. When they do try again, she not only makes good on the threat, she kills another Gesellschaft guy who tried to attack her as she delivered her second warning to them.
  • Atropos knows about Bastard Son's plans as soon as he first forms the intent to harm her. But she doesn't act immediately, because she would rather wait to act more visibly.
    If I stepped into Bastard Son's presence and put a bullet in the back of his head while he was plotting in his hideout, nobody would notice. It would be a waste of a perfectly good cautionary tale.
• Malicious Misnaming: Atropos does this with Ravager (now Ravioli) as part of her plan to destroy her credibility. It works like a charm.
• The Masquerade Will Kill Your Dating Life: In a sidestory, Taylor realizes that, due to the fact that pretty much everyone at Winslow knows she's Atropos, there's a likely chance people will either be too scared to date her or just want to claim they had sex with Atropos. Granted, with her power she can shoot down the latter, but it does nothing to get her a decent date...
• Mass "Oh, Crap!":
  • When some thugs are hired to mess with the newly opened rehab clinics, Cherie gives them a slight nudge to remind them that Atropos has a vested interest in said clinics. Their blossoming terror is described as "Like an ink bomb dropped into a pail of milk."
  • After Atropos kills the Simurgh, the US House of Representatives tries to screw with the promised bounty, to which Rebecca Costa-Brown delivers a simple message from Atropos, which causes "four hundred thirty-five people to suddenly reconsider their priorities."
  Atropos' message: Don't make me come over there.
  • Atropos later issues a 24-hour notice to four quarantine zones at once, all of whom are full of people who have heard about her exploits. They don't all accept, but they are all very aware of what's coming for them. Hardened criminals panic and give up hope of beating her.
• Memetic Mutation: In-Universe, Atropos' Shout-Out to The Lord of the Rings triggers more references from PHO writers.
  Atropos: You guys are total nerds, and I love it.
• Metaphorically True: When Atropos says she's killed Bonesaw, she means it. It's just she's "killed" her by having Amy erase or blunt Riley's memories of being Bonesaw and then changing her features so no one recognizes who she is in reality.
• Morton's Fork: What Bastard Son thinks he's doing to beat Atropos - he sends his minions to kidnap people and take them in cars carrying drugs and tricked out to explode in several different ways. If Atropos doesn't stop them, he gets drugs into the city, but if she does the car will explode, killing everyone on board. Atropos deactivates most of the explosives, saves everyone, and then tricks Bastard Son into thinking she's dead.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • Sophia ignores Taylor's Implied Death Threat and decides to "show her her place". Taylor quickly proves both willing and able to follow through, using Combat Clairvoyance to brutally kill Sophia without taking even slight damage in return.
  • A mugger once tries to grab Taylor. Taylor dissuades him quite strenuously.
  • Stanley and his small gang decide to mug a group of young women, thinking them to be defenseless. As he learns too late, all but one of the girls are capes, and the thugs go down like a house of cards. Bonus points because even after one of the girls levitates six feet off the ground and announces that she's Laserdream, Stanley still thinks his boys have the upper hand.
• Mundane Luxury: For Damsel of Distress aka Ashley Stillons, a small apartment with working utilities and a hot meal is far more than she's had in years. Actually getting those causes her to start crying Tears of Joy, not that she'd admit it.
  And it had a TV.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Taylor can use her power to instantly fall asleep; she just chooses to end her wakefulness and lets her shard pilot her body into following the Path.
    • She can also use it to put a set of billiard balls in place for a game without using a triangle - by hitting three of the balls with a cue in quick succession.
  • Salvage (Trainwreck in canon) alters his Powered Armor body to work as a forklift. He even goes through the proper safety training and gets a forklift ticket.
    Salvage: Also, I'll be adding flashers and a beeper for backing up.
  • The Travelers are hired by the Brockton Bay Betterment Committee to work alongside unpowered labourers, with the intention that their powers will fill in for specialised machinery, and be paid at the same rates as the operators of said machinery. Even more esoteric powers like Cody's time-rewinding are simply treated (and paid) as special safety precautions.
  • Damsel of Distress similarly ends up working for the Committee as a demolitions expert. Her first day on the job starts with saving a man trapped under a collapsed building.
  • Damsel of Distress is completely immune to her own disintegration power, so in a pinch, she can use it to clean her hair without needing shampoo (and she has been in a pinch, many times). She still appreciates actual hair cleaning products when she can get them, though.
• Mythology Gag: In spite of Taylor being even more terrifying here, there's still people that think they can take her.
• Named by the Adaptation: Captain Lassiter Reeves of the PRT, aka PHO member Reave, starts off as just a nagging comment each time Atropos posts a status update, but eventually develops into something of a contact point for her with the PRT and starts appearing in person.
• Narrative Profanity Filter:
  • In-Universe, Atropos makes a Funniest Home Videos version of her Ravioli takedown, with the expletives replaced by other sound effects.
  • As the team approaches Damsel of Distress' residence, there's an explosion from inside, followed by "a tirade of profanity that would've made even a hardened Dockworker raise an eyebrow in appreciation."
  • Atropos is dealing with a bunch of speedsters, who all have accelerated metabolisms.
    I heard them coming, got into the right position, and fired my pistol at the correct instant. It took out the left leg of the first guy coming down the stairs as he blurred into sight, and he tumbled. His buddies didn't have time to adjust to the brand-new obstacle, and they all went down in a welter of limbs and high-frequency cursing that would've had the local bat population blushing.
• Nerves of Steel: Deconstructed when Vista summons Atropos to deal with her parents. She doesn't even flinch with a literal knife to her throat, informing Atropos she fought Hookwolf once. Atropos points out that a lack of fear isn't necessarily a good thing.
• Never Bring a Gun to a Knife Fight: Riley sees that her captor carries a gun and a knife, and immediately recognises that the gun would be useless to her, since she's small and untrained, while the knife, on the other hand, gives her all sorts of options. A few minutes later, the guard is undergoing involuntary surgery.
• Never Bring a Knife to a Gun Fight: Even if Atropos were unarmed, it would still be futile and foolish for a drug dealer to pull a knife on her when he's been busted. But as it happens, she never goes unarmed.
  Atropos: My good friend Mr Pump Action Shotgun then had a brief conversation with him about how Kneecaps Are A Privilege. He might walk again someday. I hear they're making great strides with artificial knees. (Pun totally intended).
• Never Live It Down: When Tattletale, Regent and Bitch troll Brian by making it look like all the Undersiders were in a polyamorous relationship, Brian sends Tattletale a PM sarcastically thanking her for making up something no one will ever let him forget.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: When Glory Girl crashes the get-together in the park, she accidentally demolishes the picnic table they'd been sitting at.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Emma getting Blackwell to clean up the mess from the trio's "prank" on Taylor and fix their lockers means that no one in a position of power can actually link Taylor to Sophia's death (at least, not before she sets up her position as The Dreaded).
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown:
  • Rachel's dogs savaging Hookwolf goes on for long enough — ripping, tearing, hurting, even dismembering, but never finishing the job — that Regent gets bored with watching it, and suggests a Mercy Kill just so they can move on.
  • Ravager gets one of these from Atropos, though it's mostly emotional damage.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Atropos doesn't mess around with 'maybe I should let them live' nor does she care about giving someone a fair fight. By her own words, she doesn't "fight" enemies; she just kills them.
• No One Could Survive That!: Bastard Son actually watches his explosives count down, via video camera, right up to the point where the image turns to static, then congratulates himself on killing Atropos. She teleported out at the last moment, letting him believe she's dead so his guard is down.
• No-Sell:
  • Path to Ending lets Taylor/Atropos do this to anything that impedes her goals. Such as being banned in PHO.
    ►BigRedSharpie (Moderator)
    Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:
    Okay, I'm done. This has gone on long enough. Thread is locked. Atropos, you just bought yourself a ticket to Ban-town.
    Maybe next time don't be so Edgy McEdgelord, hmm?
    ►Atropos (Original Poster) (Banned) (You Wish) (UnVerified Cape) (Can Actually Kill Anything) (Yes, Really) (Watch Me)
    Replied On Jan 3rd 2011:
    Meh, Ban-town was boring. I'm back.
  • Since the Path to Ending shard isn't intended to cooperate with other shards, it also lets Taylor ignore powers that would either affect her power, such as Hatchet Face's nullification aura, or those that work through her shard to get to her, such as Jack Slash's ability to detect and manipulate other capes.
    When he (Hatchet Face) got too close, I could feel his nullification power trying to overcome mine, clawing at my capabilities in an attempt to strip them away from me. Because he's a cheaty cheating cheater.
    I could also feel my power doing the equivalent of giving his power the finger.
  • This also goes for emotion-manipulation powers. As Cherie and Nicholas Vasil learn (too late for the latter), her power can override whatever effect their powers have on her body if necessary.
  • Path to Ending can also allow her to ignore the Butcher's pain-inducing blast and Animos' power-nullifying scream.
  • When she kills Butcher and the Butcher personalities end up in her head, Path to Ending takes offense. There's a lot of screaming, followed by silence.
    Atropos: Let's just say ... my power doesn't play well with others.
• Noble Demon: Atropos is nothing if not fair when it comes to her victims, generally warning them in advance that she's coming after them and offering them a way to avoid her wrath. She even warns Kayden of Kaiser's death and what it means before she can be arrested, only takes the minimum actions necessary to convince Glory Girl to stand down when attacked, and she'll do her very best to save any innocent that might get involved. That said, when she decides somebody dies, they die—quickly, brutally, dramatically, and efficiently.
• Noiseless Walker: Atropos manages to walk up behind Uber unnoticed, even though she's wearing knee-high hard-soled boots.
• Noodle Implements: Path to Ending sometimes tells Taylor to get things that make little sense initially, such as a blank key or a quarter, but they always come in handy.
  (And yes, I was impressed that my power could freestyle a working key in thirty seconds with an angle grinder.)
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Having previously been the lowest priority villains in Brockton Bay (and some of the only ones not on Atropos' list at all), Leet and Uber suddenly find themselves as the villains in the city after the rest are killed, arrested, or simply flee the city entirely.
• Not Enough to Bury: After Atropos kills him, Skidmark has to be cleaned up with a squeegee and a bucket due to being left smeared across 200-ish meters of asphalt.
  Atropos: Careful of that contact high, guys.
• Not Hyperbole: If Atropos is to be believed, Accord plans his bathroom breaks down to the second. Brian initially thinks she's screwing with him, only to realize she's dead serious.
• "Not So Different" Remark: Jack Slash tries to tell Atropos that she's a monster, just like him, and so they should work together. She dismisses it, insisting that she's a very different monster.
  Jack: Monsters are still monsters, no matter how they pretty themselves up. You're just playing the nice guy for the peanut gallery. One day, you'll realise that they only like you for what they can get from you. You should start taking your due now, rather than waiting until it's almost too late.
  Atropos: Oh, I'm definitely a monster. I'm someone who commits atrocities and breaks the social contract on the regular. That's me all over. But what you don't get is the difference between you and me. See, I'm reliable. I announce what I'm going to do, and I do it. I warn people if they're a problem for me, and I let them live if they change their ways. You kill people for fun, at random, for no good reason except that you want to see their blood run down your blade.
• Not What It Looks Like: Paul King tries to argue that the roomful of injured people around him is "not what it seems". Atropos just rolls her eyes, since she knows perfectly well what really happened: they were goons he'd hired to disrupt her plans, and she has just finished beating them up — and he's next.
• Nothing Personal: Atropos makes it clear that if the world's various S-class threats stay away from her city, then she has no vendetta against them. Then she's offered her standard rate, 10% of the containment budget, to clear out the remaining PRT quarantine zones.
  Atropos: Well, *now* we're talking.​
  * cracks knuckles*
  * pops neck*
  * sharpens shears*
  * racks the slide on my good friend Mr Pump Action Shotgun*
  Ahem.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse:
  • Atropos gives the four major gang leaders three options — leave Brockton Bay, surrender to the PRT, or die (which also counts as I'll Kill You!).
    So, the leaders of those gangs I just named: Kaiser, Lung, Coil, Skidmark. You have twenty-four hours to either a) leave town for good or b) surrender to the PRT. In twenty-four hours from midnight tonight, if you haven't all done this, I'm going to kill one of you that hasn't. Just one.
    Then I'll start the clock again.
  • Subverted for Panacea, who sneers at Atropos drawing a pistol, until she realises that Atropos isn't going to kill her if she refuses to wipe Bonesaw's personality out of Riley. Atropos will instead kill Riley.
    Atropos: If you don't think it's worth your time to eradicate Bonesaw, then I'll do it my way. One shot, problem done.
  • Danny is a bit perturbed about Taylor coercing the Administrator shard, to make it give him decent powers without any trickery.
    Taylor: Barely had to do anything. We just had to explain the facts of life, that's all.
    Danny: She said it threatened her with physical violence.
    Taylor: The facts of life being that if she didn't play ball, there would be physical violence.
• Oh, Crap!: The usual reaction to Atropos' shenanigans.
  • Hookwolf initially questions whether Kaiser's home invader was actually Atropos, until he learns the significance of what was taken and recognises that yes, it was definitely her, and she has inexplicable knowledge and skills.
  • Coil suffers this at least twice before Atropos kills him, once when she effortlessly enters the access code to his sanctum, which only he was supposed to know, and again when that timeline collapses and she's right next to his bed in the other timeline (which results in Bring My Brown Pants).
  • Tattletale when she realizes that Atropos has served all of Coil's files to the PRT on a silver platter, including the ones on the Undersiders.
  • Krieg when he realizes Atropos tampered with the clocks at Kaiser's office so they would be fifteen minutes ahead of time — allowing her to take advantage of the Empire capes lowering their guard to kill Kaiser.
  • Victor sees flickering lights, hears shouting, and races back into the room, to see Kaiser with a sword through his eye.
  • The Dragonslayers suffer a very brief one when they realize that the Atropos they were attacking was actually Lung.
  • Uber bursts into panicked profanity, interrupting L33t's game and dragging him to the computer to read PHO, when he sees that Atropos has called out the two of them and wants to have a chat.
  • Atropos captures a photo of the exact moment when a charging Glory Girl realised that Atropos had already dodged and she was about to crash into a picnic table. Aisha loves it.
  • Troy the drug dealer immediately recognises Atropos when she yanks him into a room and tells him that they need to have a chat. He can't immediately recall her name, but he knows her reputation and is thoroughly freaked out.
  • Epic-level one when Hatchet Face and Crawler realize they're about to be on ground zero for a missile explosion — just when the former has nullified the latter's Healing Factor. Dragon manages to take a photo of the perfect moment and plans to frame it.
  • Director Piggot looks at Dragon's footage and realises that Atropos is confronting the Slaughterhouse Nine in Brockton Bay, whereupon she starts swearing.
  • The Siberian catches a thrown grenade pin and works out what it means just in time for her eyes to widen, but not soon enough to actually save William Manton from the explosion.
  • Jack Slash when he realizes that Atropos is most definitely trumping his "intuition" (his secondary power that lets him instinctively read other capes' intentions and nudge them into self-defeating choices). And more when he tries to set up an ambush to kill Atropos — only to find a tad too late that she was waiting for him already.
  • Costa-Brown, Piggot, and Armstrong when they look into Wilkins' window in their conference call and see Atropos walking up right behind Wilkins.
  • After seeing Atropos casually No-Sell Nicholas' power then kill him with hardly any effort, Guillaume is quite eager to surrender out of fear at what she might do to him.
  • Hemorrhagia and Animos when the Butcher learns about Atropos, as they had been keeping silent about the latter's actions.
  • Damsel of Distress when she notices the shotgun barrel right behind her head.
  • The Teeth when they're driving down the highway and see Atropos aiming an AT-4 rocket launcher at the van they're in.
  • Heartbreaker when someone taps him in the shoulder a second before he gets his jaw shattered by Atropos.
  • The men waiting on the dock to receive the drug and weapon shipment from Gesellschaft have a moment of this when Atropos literally teleports into their presence with pistol already levelled. A moment later, the menace level is doubled down on when the boat explodes behind her.
  • Ravager's three henchmen have this reaction when coming face to face with Atropos.
  • Bastard Son when Atropos shows up alive and well and when Atropos informs him she just killed his powers - right as the people he had Mastered recover from their fight with Atropos, ready to pummel Bastard Son. Atropos describes the look on his face as "one of the perks of this business."
  • One unrelated to Atropos occurs when Danny realizes four men are walking into a building that's about to collapse. He drives like a professional street racer in order to get there in time to save the one who's trapped.
• Once Done, Never Forgotten: Brian complains to Lisa that he'll never live down her making half the city think he was dating all the Undersiders at once.
  Brian: Aisha only stops laughing about it to make bad jokes.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
  • Watchdog's Thinkers are notorious for giving cryptic answers, so everyone gets concerned when their analysis of Atropos is fairly straightforward.
    Piggot: Two of their capes reported 'Vantablack' and 'infinity squared' as indicators for the danger level of directly engaging her, while a third one went into fetal position, mumbling about eyes in the darkness. That precog has now taken to wearing a tinfoil hat and refuses to even acknowledge the fact that Atropos exists.
  • Animos lampshades the fact that, for once, he's going to be the voice of reason in trying to convince the Butcher not to poke Atropos.
  • When Krouse (Trickster of the Travelers) comes up with a plan to heal Noelle that is actually good, the others are totally weirded out by their so-called leader's burst of actual competence. In fact, they're all behaving more or less oddly — and then they learn that the Simurgh has just been killed, and all the effects of her Scream have been undone, making them realise that they had still been more affected than they knew.
• Open Secret: About half of Winslow High's students know that Taylor is Atropos, but they also know that attempting to reveal this will only result in trouble (for them), so she's left alone.
• Original Position Fallacy: When one of Earth Shin's inhabitants claims they should treat capes the same way they treated normal people during Goddess' tyranny, Atropos points out that anyone could become a Parahuman, and if that happened to them, would they just submit to the same rules they so vociferously supported in the past, or would they fight back against what they now see as injustice?

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"Hi, guys. The name's Atropos, and I'm here to collect on your generous offer. TVTropes thanks you for your donations."