An Essence of Silver and Steel
is a Worm crossover with the Nasuverse.
At the moment of transformation, when the connection was to be established and a young girl's life forever changed, the Red Shadow intervened, and the Administration shard became its tool on the path to human salvation. With the power of every hero ever immortalized in myth and legend, what can that girl do but be a hero herself? -A not-quite-crossover with FSN/Prisma Illya-
Also found on Sufficient Velocity and Archive of Our Own. As of March 6, 2021, this story is a Completed Fic.
This fic provides examples of:
- Absence of Evidence:
- A detective investigating the Locker finds it extremely odd that absolutely no-one is saying that they saw or heard anything, especially given what the average teenage rumor mill is like. Even factoring in stuff like gang tension doesn't make things make sense.
- Parahuman fights are rarely, if ever, silent, so no-one hearing the fight that killed Shadow Stalker is noticeable.
- Taylor realizes that the gargoyle attacking her is a projection because it has no blood, apparently feels no pain, and shows no concern about losing a hand, despite showing no signs of regeneration like Lung.
- Ain't No Rule: Taylor gets around Tagg keeping her from continuing to train others by doing it when not on duty.
- All There in the Manual: The author has published chapters on Sufficient Velocity detailing things like the heroes and Noble Phantasms Taylor can access, among other things.
- Ambiguous Situation: In-Universe, Taylor's uncertain on how much of the powers, etc, of her heroes remembered pasts come from their actual lives and how much from their myths. It's also unknown how much of her abilities are a classic case of parahumans' abilities being weirdly esoteric and how much of it is her literally tapping into actual magic.
- Alternate Self: Khepri is one of Taylor's heroes.
- In the illusion Apocrypha makes and traps Bonesaw in, one of the things that appears is the canon post-Worm version of Riley.
- Amazonian Beauty: It's mentioned that Taylor's getting some abs from her training.
- An Arm and a Leg:
- Lung is de-limbed by Taylor unleashing Siegfried's Noble Phantasm on him when he can't dodge and uses his limbs to shield himself.
- Vista's arm is blown off by a bullet meant for Taylor when she's confronting her.
- Lisa loses an arm in the Leviathan fight.
- Arbitrary Skepticism: Lampshaded one or twice about the idea of magic being real. This is part of why Taylor was initially less than eager to really use the potential of her Casters, especially with Myrddin claiming to be a wizard and being mocked for it. The PRT is only really humoring it because of how physics-breaking her healing of Vista was.
- Armor-Piercing Question: In the illusion of her greatest regret that she's trapped Bonesaw in, Apocrypha asks Bonesaw how much of her is Riley and how much is her passenger, which she can't answer.
- Asleep for Days: In the aftermath of Echidna, Taylor is rendered this, only waking up about a week afterward, and since she was on her own, magically-enhanced bed, she was resting for the equivalent of roughly eighteen days. And this after Panacea barely managed to revive her from cardiac arrest.
- Asshole Victim: When she learns Shadow Stalker was actually Sophia Hess, Taylor immediately loses all of her guilt about her demise.
- Barrier Warrior: Taylor has an ability that creates a defensive barrier around herself, which is basically a weaker imperfect copy of Avalon.
- Berserk Button: Medea really hates being called a "witch".
- Taylor loses it when she thinks Leviathan killed Lisa.
- Brought Down to Normal: Using the Cup of Communion in the presence of Cauldron, Taylor is able to bring them all, including herself if she hadn't used other items to counter its effects, to the strength of the weakest among them. That is to say, Doctor Mother, the only non-parahuman member.
- Captain Obvious: Lung and his dragon traits as he grows, which Taylor finds a bit on-the-nose when she learns of it.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Apocrypha vs. the surviving remnants of Empire Eighty-Eight in Interlude 10.b. The only one not beaten effortlessly into the ground is Krieg, who shows enough smarts to surrender without a fight.
- Death by Adaptation: Shadow Stalker managed to survive all of the events of Worm in canon, with her ultimate fate in Ward being intentionally left up in the air. In An Essence of Silver and Steel, she dies fairly early on in the story when she gets bisected by the Dragon's Teeth sentries Taylor put in front of her home to keep her and her father safe from hostile intruders.
- Death Seeker: One of the Amy clones created by Noelle/Echidna — the Fingerpainter, who is the embodiment of Amy's self-doubt and loathing — asks Taylor to Mercy Kill her.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Taylor kills Leviathan with Excalibur.
- Dies Differently in Adaptation:
- In canon Worm, Max Anders/Kaiser is killed by Leviathan during his attack on Brockton Bay. In An Essence of Silver and Steel, Kaiser is Killed Offscreen by one of Bakuda's bombs.
- Simiarly, in canon, Coil is killed by Taylor through a "simple" Boom, Headshot!. In An Essence of Silver and Steel, Lisa violently shoots Coil in the chest multiple times before finally executing him with a headshot.
- Another character who dies differently than they did in canon Worm is Leviathan. In Worm, Leviathan is killed by Scion during Gold Morning. In An Essence of Silver and Steel, Leviathan is killed by virtually all of the capes of Brockton Bay working together with Apocrypha so she can obliterate the Endbringer with her Excalibur spell.
- Disneyfication: Lampshaded by Taylor about the happy endings of some heroes, which didn't happen in the original myths, as well as pointing out that some heroes seemed to be in a new relationship every story, among other things.
- Do Not Adjust Your Set: As revenge for Taylor killing Leviathan, a group of The Fallen appear on TV and decapitate an innocent woman, then threaten to kill more unless Taylor surrenders herself.
- Forbidden Chekhov's Gun: Subverted. The author was setting Gilgamesh up as this note , but Taylor wound up instead using Khepri instead to finish Scion off.
- Future Me Scares Me: Khepri terrifies Taylor so much that it takes the threat of Amy and Lisa being killed by Eidolon while still in Echidna to get her to use her.
- Godzilla Threshold: There is a heroine that Taylor knows of that could help with the Echnida situation, but she had promised herself not to use her under any circumstances. She is forced to do so anyway when Alexandria and Eidolon give up on extracting Amy and Lisa and try to take Echidna out completely. Considering that the Heroic Spirit is Khepri, it's hard to blame her.
- Green-Eyed Monster: After her interview, it's implied that Eidolon is jealous of Taylor.
- Half the Man He Used to Be: Shadow Stalker's final fate, brought about by a Dragon Tooth Warrior.
- Alexandria, sort of, during the final battle – Scion takes great, gaping scoops out of her body mass, before ultimately crushing her disembodied head between his hands to finally kill her.
- Heel Realization: Rune apparently had one when she saw Taylor/Apocrypha use Excalibur against Leviathan. Unfortunately, she went entirely the wrong way and started going on a murder spree, and her Second Trigger couldn't have helped.
- Heroic RRoD: Taylor's use of her powers is not unlimited. If she uses too much energy in hero form, she can be hit with exhaustion when releasing the hero. Though she gets better about this over time, she's not entirely sure if she's whether she's getting better at handling the energy, or if there's some kind of upper limit that's growing over time. The Echidna fight ends with her falling unconscious as a result of this.
- It also severely strains her to do what she calls "hotswapping", switching heroes without letting go between Installs. The first time she tried it, she was sick for a week, and actually had to miss three days of school, with Danny assuming she had the flu. Doing this multiple times in a row likely contributed to her passing out after the Echidna fight due to cardiac arrest, taking the equivalent of eighteen days to recover even on her magically-enhanced bed.
- Immune to Bullets: Taylor makes Mystic Codes in the forms of necklaces that provide this effect on their wearers. There's one particular moment where Lisa is ambushed by Coil's assassins, and after being knocked down by one of the snipers, Lisa picks up what looks like to her a flattened silver dollar... and then has an Oh, Crap! reaction upon figuring out that she's holding a bullet flattened by impacting her Mystic Code.
- Immune to Fate: Coil's timeline simulation power is disrupted by Taylor. Whenever she gets involved, things deviate from what actually happens when the timeline choice is made, like the timeline Regent being dead when the real Regent is still alive after the Lung encounter, apparently because it can't properly model her. Even Dinah can't get clear answers regarding her, at least a couple of times she's gotten answers that aren't even numbers.
- Inspector Javert: Vista. She's horrified by the death of Shadow Stalker, and hearing a conversation between Apocrypha and Armsmaster leaves her convinced the PRT has decided to ignore Sophia's death to get Apocrypha on their side, not knowing the actual reasons behind the killing. She then plans an operation to capture Taylor with the Wards and Glory Girl, though Clockblocker contacts Piggot and sabotages it from the start. The operation goes worse yet when a sniper attempts to kill Taylor, getting Vista caught in the crossfire. Though Taylor heals Vista, the latter gets thrown into M/S containment as soon as she returns to the PRT.
- Ultimately averted, when Taylor and Vista have a heart to heart in Chapter 7.1.
- Karmic Death:
- After Taylor talks back to her, Sophia heads to her house to cut her hair off in her sleep (at best). When she crosses the Bounded Field and realizes that Taylor is a parahuman, she plans to kill her and Danny, only to get bisected by one of the Dragon's Teeth Taylor had as the second defense stage.
- Lisa has often made mention of Coil metaphorically holding a gun to her head to keep her in line as basically his glorified slave. As soon as she gets the upper hand over him, Coil gets shot almost a dozen different times by Lisa.
- Killed Off for Real:
- Sophia after she triggers the defenses Taylor put on her house when she tries to attack her.
- Bakuda's bombing spree hits the Medhall building when Max Anders/Kaiser was last seen inside, and Lisa (as well as the author) later confirms that he's dead.
- Coil, thanks to Lisa.
- Leviathan, thanks to Excalibur.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: Krieg, after witnessing Apocrypha wipe the floor with the rest of the E88 survivors, including among others, Cricket, Crusader, Stormtiger, and Hookwolf. He even lampshades this as he surrenders.
- Logical Weakness: Since Lung becomes more and more dragon-like as he ramps up, Taylor realizes that an anti-dragon hero like Siegfried is the perfect counter when he ramps up far enough.
- Make It Look Like an Accident: After realizing that Taylor has become a parahuman, Sophia plans to kill her and Danny and make it out to be a case of her running into a dangerous Master and being forced to use lethal bolts in self-defense.
- The Mind Is a Plaything of the Body: The personalities of Taylor's Heroic Spirits can bleed over a bit, sometimes even when she's not actively tapping into them, like when Medea fed her some words to verbally slam Sophia and her cronies. This is part of why Hundred-Faced Hassan is Taylor's main Assassin when she needs stealth: she looked for the Assassin with the "weakest ego". In a flashback, when she first tried Installing Gilgamesh, his ego was so strong that she immediately aborted the attempt. This is also part of why she was so terrified of Khepri: she was afraid that since the effect is stronger with heroes that she sympathized with/had a connection to, Khepri, being her Alternate Self, would affect her even more, to the point that she would essentially become her. She's not even sure how much of her friendship with Amy and Lisa is the result of Khepri's experience.
- Mundane Utility: Taylor enhanced her bed so that three hours of rest on it is equivalent to a full night's rest.
- Mythology Gag: A bug powers gag shows up once or twice.
- In a deliberate parallel to the end of canon, Contessa is two-shotted by Apocrypha in a bid to remove her powers, with her final fate being left unsaid.
- Not Quite Dead: The armbands report Lisa as dead during the Leviathan fight, but she is later revealed to be very much alive, just seriously injured.
- Offscreen Moment of Awesome: After the scene in the middle of Riley's mind is finished, it is revealed that Taylor also managed to subdue Burnscar, and outright wiped out the rest of the Slaughterhouse 9.
- Painful Transformation: "Hotswapping", switching from one Install to another without letting go of the first in-between, is highly painful to Taylor, in addition to the damage it causes to her physical body.
- Paranoia Fuel: In-Universe, Hassan of the Hundred Personas makes the PRT realize that Taylor can pull out heroes that have been forgotten over time that they would have no information on, since all they have on him is the name of his sect. Not to mention that they have no idea how far her time range is regarding usable heroes, in either direction.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: When Dennis makes a "Death by Snu-Snu" joke, Taylor has no idea what he is talking about.
- Poor Communication Kills: Vista, due to not asking for more information, gets an entirely wrong idea of the bullying Taylor suffered at the hands of Shadow Stalker, so she thinks the latter got killed for a fairly petty reason. Clockblocker averts this when talking to Piggot about Vista's plan.
- Self-Duplication: Hassan of the Hundred Personas, of course.
- Semantic Superpower: Taylor's Mystic Code amulets can protect from anything "fired", save for splash damage effects, from bullets to lasers.
- Shout-Out: One Mystic Code crafted by Taylor is a pair of glasses enchanted so people don't make the connection between her and Apocrypha while she's wearing them. Their name? Kent Glasses.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Eidolon was saved from his canon fate, and managed to survive all the way to the end of the battle against Scion.
- Superpower Lottery: Taylor gets the power to Install and Include pretty much the entire Throne of Heroes, allowing her to access the powers of all those heroes and villains. Even when being humble, Taylor has to admit that her power is Triumvirate tier, and that's not even including things like using Aife's Noble Phantasm to learn martial arts that boost her to the point that Glory Girl can't land a hit on her, or creating Mystic Codes that continue to work even after she lets go of the Caster.
- Thou Shalt Not Kill: Taylor takes this to a frankly stupid extreme, that she would not even kill Coil preferring instead to put a geas on him. Tattletale even tells her that Coil is petty enough to break the geas, just to get back at her. It's heavily implied that someone in her repertoire has basically scared her into this. Later confirmed to have been her alternate self, Khepri.
- What the Hell, Hero?: Piggot is not happy with Director Costa-Brown's decision to stress-test Apocrypha, claiming it will only make the girl paranoid and mistrustful.
