Fanfic / Great Grand-Uncle Schimmelhorn's Toolbox

Great Grand-Uncle Schimmelhorn's Toolbox is a Worm fanfic by mp3.1415player, where Danny finds Taylor attempting to fix the damage to her mother's flute, and directs her to the toolbox and journals of an ancestor of hers in their attic to help. They soon discover that said items are more than what they seem...

Surprisingly, it is a sort-of crossover with a 1950 science fiction short story The Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out by Reginald Bretnor.

It is posted on FanFiction.Net (here), Archive of Our Own (here), SpaceBattles.com (here), and Sufficient Velocity.com (here).

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The Tropes Come from the Woodwork Out:

• Absence of Evidence: When Armsmaster and Dragon find proof that Coil's base was where he and his mercs say it should be, they're baffled because there's no known method, via parahuman powers or Tinker technology, that could produce such an effect, and regardless teleportation abilities and tech always leave identifiable traces, none of which are present, which makes it clear to them that something very out of the ordinary is going on.
• Accidental Truth:
  • Sophia was right in that Taylor put the drugs in her pocket — only, she's claiming this because she's still trying to get Taylor in trouble while attempting to get scot free from her actions. (And Sophia was responsible for the drugs, having planted them in Taylor's locker just a short time earlier.)
  • When Winslow gets shut down as a result of Taylor's lawsuit, the cover story is that there was asbestos discovered in the school. The mayor then launches a real search for asbestos in other public buildings and actually finds some. Apparently, the last group of inspectors a few decades ago just embezzled the money and didn't even look for any.
• Adaptational Heroism: Alan Barnes goes from being a somewhat crooked lawyer who spoiled Emma to a man who was unaware of Emma's misbehavior and is immediately remorseful for not stepping in sooner. Though his wife is still highly unimpressed with his failure to seek therapy for both himself and Emma at the time.
• Adaptational Sympathy: Whereas canon Emma remained an unrepentant bully to Taylor, this Emma eventually breaks down when confronted by her mother and is revealed to be a broken girl in need of psychological help.
• Adults Are Useless:
  • Winslow High and Blackwell deliberately invoked this and turned a blind eye to Sophia's bullying out of pure corruption. But since Taylor has a recording of them doing this, they're going to be in legal hot water for some time to come.
  • Defied by Danny, who immediately tries to help Taylor once she makes it clear how much shit she's been through. Both the Barnes also start working to resolve Emma's psychological problems once they see how horribly she's treated Taylor, and suing the pants off of Winslow when the evidence of their neglect has been laid bare.
• Alien Geometries: Beneath allows Taylor to do stuff that is utterly incomprehensible if using just normal dimensions, like connecting a door in her house's basement to Coil's base and another to the Dockworkers' Association, even though they are a couple miles apart at least.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: Everyone in Brockton Bay, criminal and non-criminal (besides Lung and the ABB, of course), cheers when Danny (secretly) kills Oni Lee with his own grenades.
• Are You Pondering What I'm Pondering?: Lisa and Taylor use this joke when they see how much money Coil had, which they now have access to due to capturing him.
  Lisa: "Are you thinking what I’m thinking, Agent Gimme?"
  Taylor: "I think so, Agent Thinky, but where are we going to get a bucket of glue, five cats, and half a ton of blueberries at this time of night?"
• Armor-Piercing Question: "What's your earliest memory?" Taylor asks Glenn Chambers this in order to point out how much Emma means to her, and how the PRT's incompetence led to the complete destruction of the sisterly bond she had with Emma.
• Ascended Extra: Zoe Barnes goes from a minor character to a recurring character.
• The Atoner: The Barnes family works hard to make it up to Taylor after seeing everything Emma put her through because of their neglect.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: Using a few pieces of scattered information, Taylor manages to deduct a lot of information about the Shard Network and how it works, as well as detect the presence of the Queen Administrator Shard following her even though she hasn't Triggered.
• Badass Normal: After Taylor gives Coil's data on the dirty cops to the mayor, the cops in the Bay become more effective... and ruthless, managing to significantly hinder the Empire in a fight between them and the Protectorate.
• Bad Boss: Coil is willing to blow up his own goons, much to the shock of the mercenary Danny is interrogating.
• Bait the Dog: Coil can put on a pretense of magnanimity to his subordinates, but he's perfectly willing to knock them off if there's a chance of them speaking.
• Beware the Nice Ones:
  • Zoe Barnes is a loving mother but she is furious with Emma for bullying Taylor and getting herself arrested by attacking a cop.
  • Danny uses Anton's trick to steal the pins off two of Oni Lee's grenades, causing him to blow himself up, after the parahuman goes into a bombing spree while he and Lisa are nearby.
• Beyond the Impossible: By the standards of the shards, what Taylor can do with Anton's trick and Papa's inventions is blatantly impossible, but still works anyway. This causes Lisa's shard to freeze up and reset from how it completely undermines the model of reality the shards run on.
• Bigger on the Inside: Working with different dimensions means that distances just don't behave the way that three-dimensional thinking would expect.
  Lisa: So this will let us make... bigger crystals?
  Taylor: On the inside, yeah.
• Bigotry Exception: For all her distrust of Parahumans, Piggot has no problems with either Miss Militia or Armsmaster for being competent capes who fight to keep order.
• Blackmail: Lisa is able to get her shard to get its restrictions loosened by the administrator so it can give her more information it normally couldn't by threatening to cut it off from Taylor and the data she's producing for it through Anton's trick and Papa's inventions, which it desperately wants more of.
• Brick Joke: When Coil is captured by Taylor in both timelines, his narration gets cut-off mid-sentence - with the second half of both sentences appearing when he's pulled out from beneath seven chapters later.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Papa Schimmelhorn was an eccentric womanizer, even into old age, but he was a damn brilliant engineer who could make the laws of physics bend the knee.
• Butterfly of Doom: As Coil gets captured before he can start the Undersiders, Rachel remains a runaway struggling to survive in Brockton Bay, which leads to her almost dying when one of her attempts to bust a dog-fighting ring gets her shot.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • No one at school ever believes Taylor when she points out she's recording everything happening around her. Even after weeks of carrying her placard, when Taylor shows it to the "BBPD agents" investigating Sophia, Blackwell demands that she put an end to the "charade". The fact that there haven't been any visible consequences during those weeks contributes, too; no one at school knows about how she's showing the recordings to her dad, making backup copies, and giving them to the DWU's lawyer. As a result, all her bullies are their usual nasty selves, the teachers are as apathetic as normal, and Taylor records more than enough to legally bury them all.
  • Sophia is actually telling the truth in both her earlier accusation that Taylor planted the drugs on her and when she later blurts out that she didn't forget to plant the drugs on Taylor. Since she was the one who called in the tip against Taylor, who never got within twenty feet of her, and her forgetting to plant the drugs is a much easier explanation than Taylor just happening to have a power that would let her covertly find and move the planted drugs out of her locked locker and into Sophia's pocket without an entire hallway full of witnesses seeing a thing, nobody believes her.
• The Chains of Commanding: To say the consequences of Sophia's actions wear down Piggot, on top of the potential damage to the PRT's reputation, dealing with hostile capes with a limited budget, and her kidney failure is very much an understatement.
• Clever Crows: Edgar, a raven that Amy healed and who decided to stick around despite several attempts to make him leave, is noted several times to be rather intelligent even by raven standards (which is implied in Chapter 47 to be at least in part because he drank some glowing liquid), doing things like changing the TV channel to the news when it's on a show he doesn't like and no one else is watching, using tools, and even understands when Amy tells him to bite Dennis's ear for teasing her. Later, he gets enough other ravens to go to her for healing that she suspects that she's seen most of the ravens in the city before too long, and several scientists are very interested in studying the phenomenon.
• Control Freak: Piggot outright describes Costa-Brown as one, and that she's someone who has to have everything her own way. In particular she kept putting pressure on Glenn Chambers to try and sweep the mess with Shadow Stalker under the rug, and gets mad when Piggot gets the Hebert and Barnes families to settle out of court for a fraction of the settlement that they could have gotten and avoiding the negative PR of a trial (not to mention how a NDA can't be used to cover up a crime, ruling it out as a solution), and isn't happy to have to accept the deal despite it being the best option that the PRT has.
• Cool Old Guy: Erwin, the old fisherman that keeps telling tall tales and never pays for his beers at the pub, turns out to be quite accomplished in the art of espionage, enough that the FBI has entire filing cabinets about his (mis)adventures. And he doesn't seem to have lost any of his skills either, given what he does when searching for the truth about Rachel.
• Department of Child Disservices: Sophia's handler at the PRT, out of pure corruption and greed, deliberately covered up Sophia's actions. Emily notes this is going to get her in a lot of legal hot water.
  • As Erwin discovers, Rachel "Bitch" Lindt's case was full of this, with a foster mother who was in it only for the money and mistreated her charges and a corrupt judge that bribed his brother-in-law, a PRT agent, to classify Rachel as a deliberate murderer to hide his dirty dealings.
• De-power: Thanks to the fact that it's a Cauldron-bought power, and thus "dead", Coil's shard is unable to properly reconnect to him after he's brought out of Taylor's pocket like Lisa's did (and said connection is in fact likely to fail entirely soon), thus rendering him unable to use his powers for the first time after having been using it constantly for years. Taylor even suggests she may be able to use her skills to sever the connection permanently herself, or maybe even steal it for her own use.
• Dies Differently in Adaptation: Brutus and Judas die in a Merchants shootout instead of while fighting Leviathan.
• Do Wrong, Right: Thanks to Taylor's manipulations, Sophia not only gets busted for trying to frame Taylor but she is brutally admonished by Piggot for having done so incompetently.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • After being rescued from Coil's forced recruitment, Lisa is very eager to bring Coil down.
  • One of Coil's mercenaries points where Coil's base is after learning the supervillain has their vehicles rigged with explosives if he finds they are useless to him.
• Dramatic Irony: Taylor considers the idea of Sophia being able to reach through something solid terrifying - not knowing that she already does, thanks to her Parahuman power.
• Eldritch Abomination: The strangely shimmering creatures that come out whenever Taylor plays her gnurr-pfeife apparently come from "yesterday", though not in the usual sense of having existed in normal reality the previous day, and can only be described as "mice that aren't mice." Whatever they are, they're ravenous enough to wreck a building in seconds, yet won't hurt anything living.
• Enraged by Idiocy: Piggot is so pissed off by Sophia's idiocy that the PRT director is sorely tempted to have the delinquent shot dead.
• Entertainingly Wrong:
  • U.N.I.O.N., though the name isn't known, is assumed by the PRT to be a very old agency with vast resources and very careful planning in every operation. While the Dockworkers Union is as old as the city, U.N.I.O.N. itself is only a few months old, they have almost no monetary resources (though they have a lot of odds and ends they keep just in case), and only half of their notable operations so far weren't spontaneous.
  • The Empire 88 thinks that Victor's disappearance must have been the work of a calculated action to weaken them just before one of their planned attacks. In fact, he had the bad luck of crossing paths with Taylor and became a target of opportunity when she realized who he was.
• Epic Fail: On top of ruining her chances of legal freedom and damaging the PRT's reputation, Emily also brutally mocks Sophia for (apparently) being so stupid as to try and frame Taylor for drugs while forgetting to plant them in the locker.
  Emily Piggot: Then, as the latest little entertainment in this sick operation, you decide that it would be a fantastic idea to plant enough drugs on the girl to get the cops to arrest her for possession and probably dealing, exactly as happened to you. But you can’t even do that properly and get caught in your own trap. Which on one level is about the funniest thing I’ve heard in years, but on every other level has opened a can of worms that makes me wonder if I should simply arrange to have you shot while trying to escape and say ‘whoops.’
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Piggot briefly contemplates shooting Sophia and claiming she was trying to escape, but she's not that much of a bitch. What does get her furious is how Sophia spent a year and a half torturing someone else for kicks, and she takes great pleasure in letting Sophia suffer the consequences of her actions.
  • Carol notes, for all their flaws, Piggot and the PRT would never have countenanced Sophia's vicious bullying of Taylor.
  • Even Piggot thinks that Costa-Brown is a total Control Freak.
  • Danny Hebert is a moral man, but seeing the sheer depths of the depravity Coil has sunken into leads him to genuinely question if Kurt's suggestion to Just Shoot Him and dump his corpse in the bay is such a bad idea.
• Evil Gloating: Oni Lee does this during his fight with Miss Militia. This gives Danny the time he needs to pull on the pins on Oni Lee's grenades, killing him in the process.
• Extreme Omnivore: Gnurrs. The first time Taylor summons them, they eat out an old warehouse from the inside, along with all the stuff that was still inside, before she can even finish the tune. Later, Taylor uses them to get rid of the old tanker blocking the harbor — tens of thousands of tons of rusted steel — and they eat everything down to the sea floor in about ten minutes.
• Failsafe Failure: Coil's shard attempted to reconnect with him after Taylor put him in her pocket, like Lisa's did, but thanks to being "dead" all that does is speed up its loss of power, since it can't really recharge due to being improperly deployed. By the time that Taylor steals it, it's completely out of juice.
• Framing the Guilty Party: In payback for Sophia trying to get her in trouble by planting drugs in her locker and calling the cops on her, Taylor uses her new tricks to not only remove the drugs, but put them in Sophia's pocket in time for the drug dog to detect, making it look like Sophia tried to frame her but was too stupid to actually plant the drugs. Understandably, no one believes Sophia's attempt to claim innocence, especially since she was the one who originally placed the tip about Taylor's locker, with her attempts to blame Taylor being dismissed and making her look even worse.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: Carol muses that whatever psychological issues Sophia had, it does not excuse her horrible bullying of someone. Emma, however, who was Sophia's victim as much as collaborator, gets more sympathy.
• Full-Name Ultimatum: Amy chastises her raven with "Don't you talk back to me, Edgar Dallon-Poe!" and then realises a moment later that she hadn't meant to admit to naming him that in her head. Vicky and Mark promptly Laugh Themselves Sick.
• Fun with Acronyms: United National Intervention Operators Network, aka U.N.I.O.N. Even after the acronym starts to spread, no-one thinks to connect it with the Dockworkers' Association.
• Germanic Efficiency: Schimmelhorn was a German-Swiss engineer and brilliant enough to challenge the laws of science as humanity knows them.
• Good Is Not Nice: Danny uses Anton's trick to stealthily pull on two grenade pins in Oni Lee's supply, killing the serial bomber while he's in a rampage. He notes that living in a town like Brockton Bay, he has to be tough to keep his head above water.
• He Knows Too Much: As an example of Coil's ruthlessness and heartlessness, he murdered the people who built his escape tunnel so that only he would know where it was.
• Hidden Depths: Glenn Chambers initially comes across as needlessly antagonistic and unreasonable regarding the lawsuit against the PRT due to Sophia Hess. Once everything is settled, he reveals he acted that way due to massive pressure from Chief Director Costa-Brown and he actually agrees with the lawsuit and settlement on a personal level.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • When Madison puts several thumbtacks on Taylor's chair, Taylor uses Anton's trick to send one into Madison's shoe, causing Agony of the Feet.
  • Sophia tries to get Taylor arrested by planting drugs in her locker and having the cops brought in, but thanks to Anton's trick, Taylor not only removes the drugs Just in Time, but plants them on Sophia in time for the drug dog to detect. This not only gets Sophia arrested for possession, but leads to her misdeeds being discovered by the PRT.
• Hypocrite: After he's released from Taylor's pocket, Coil tries to claim that they're violating the Unwritten Rules. After the reasons that they are not doing so are listed (that they're not parahumans, for example), it's pointed out that since they know that Coil has been violating the rules himself on a major scale, he doesn't have a leg to stand on there.
• Hypocritical Humor: When Taylor comments on how much PRT stuff Coil had in his office, Lisa jokingly points out that Taylor's nickname is Agent Gimme for a reason.
• I Need a Freaking Drink:
  • When Taylor tells her father how her latest experiment with her Hammerspace pocket has gone, he decides he needs food before dealing with the latest craziness in his life.
  • After realizing that Carol is slowly going paranoid over Edgar, Sarah goes to retrieve a bottle of wine and two glasses.
• In Spite of a Nail: Despite the differing circumstances, Taylor still meets Rachel, and Brutus and Judus still die.
• Internal Reveal: Danny tells Zoe Barnes about Emma's horrible treatment of Taylor, complete with the recordings Taylor has made. Zoe is so angry at what her daughter has done, and had done to her by Sophia, that she struggles to speak.
• In-Universe Catharsis: Piggot revels in the amount of legal shit Winslow High is in over Sophia's bullying, partly because of her anger at them for letting it get out of control.
• It May Help You on Your Quest: The Dockworkers Union never throws anything out, whether it be sheets of copper foil or an old boat door, in case they find a use for it later. This actually gives them considerable resources whenever they need to build or fix something, such as an interrogation room that's completely isolated from the outside world.
• Just One Second Out of Sync: Apparently the Gnurrs come from "yesterday" in this manner, based on Taylor's understanding of Papa's notes.
  Taylor: They're… coming from yesterday? But not yesterday yesterday, more the concept of yesterday. So if we were in yesterday, from our point of view the gnurrs would still be coming from yesterday. They're always there in yesterday even when yesterday was today. Or when it's tomorrow, they'll come from yesterday, but that won't be today, it'll be yesterday relative to tomorrow.
• Karmic Death: Danny uses Anton's trick to blow up Oni Lee with the very grenades he was using to terrorize Brockton Bay - and he was able to do it only because the villain stopped teleporting so he could so some Evil Gloating at Ms. Militia.
• Kleptomaniac Hero: Taylor's power allows her to engage in thefts, although she mainly sticks to small-scale stuff, and even ends up calling herself Agent Gimme. She half-jokingly suggests keeping Coil's cash for herself, much to Danny's consternation. But she's completely serious about stealing his base.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Queen Administrator keeps Cauldron from going after Taylor by using its network control to make them forget whenever any of them thinks about going after anything in the Bay.
• Laugh Themselves Sick: When Taylor reveals to Anne and Lisa that she's put Alabaster in her Hammerspace pocket by doing a Shout-Out, the other girls begin laughing so hard that Anne has to pull over.
• Logical Weakness: Taylor's power does mean she could fairly easily steal Coil's entire underground base but doing so pretty much guarantees that the building above said base would collapse. It takes a fair bit of work to first get all the necessary materials to prevent it, then get them all in place just right. It's notably the first time Taylor has ever struggled using any form of Anton's trick.
• Loophole Abuse: The reason that QA is able to give Contessa, then Rebecca, and then a bunch of Cauldron researchers, Laser-Guided Amnesia is by apparently exploiting a loophole in protections meant to keep the cycle going, since Taylor is currently the biggest source of new data out there, and they'd interfere with her making said data.
• Loose Lips: When trying to get more information on what happened to Shadow Stalker, Victoria and Amy specifically target Dennis for the reason that he's the most likely to let something slip.
• Make It Look Like an Accident: When Danny uses Anton's trick to steal the pins of two of Oni Lee's grenades and cause the cape to blow up, the PRT eventually assumes that he either botched the timing or used a faulty grenade, because there's no evidence of any other parahumans involved. It's even noted that Lung can't go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge because, as far as anyone can tell, Oni Lee did it to himself.
• Mama Bear: Zoe Barnes is really pissed off at Winslow for enabling her daughter's bullying of Taylor, allowing Emma's behavior to deteriorate to the point that she would assault a cop.
• Mask of Sanity: Emma is very good at pretending to be all right when she's really not, to the point that her own mother couldn't tell just how broken she was inside, or that she'd been through a traumatic event at all, until Sophia got arrested and Emma thought that attacking the arresting police officer was a good idea.
• Minor Crime Reveals Major Plot: Downplayed, but Sophia’s attempt to frame Taylor for the (relatively minor) crime of drug possession ends up backfiring on her and being subjected to Framing the Guilty Party. The following investigation of Sophia reveals her bullying of Taylor, her manipulations of Emma, and various other crimes (including outright murder).
• Mook Horror Show: When Taylor uses her trick to put away Coil, all his mercenaries and every piece of valuable stuff in his base, she does so room by room, increasing the fear Coil has as he loses contact with his entire base with no apparent reasons for it to happen. The last employee vanishes mid-word during a phone call.
• More Dakka: Taylor's ability to adjust the momentum of objects returning from Beneath allows her to shoot ball bearings at bullet speeds and beyond. And she can do it more rapidly than a machine gun; when testing it at a firing range, there's a buzzing sound and half the paper target drifts to the floor.
  Anne: How many was that?
  Lisa: Twenty eight plus the calibration shot. In just under a second.
• More than Mind Control: Discussed. Many people view Sophia's manipulation of Emma as something akin to the brainwashing of an emotionally vulnerable person. The PRT has to actually double-check that Sophia doesn't have a hidden Master power, and Brandish severely hopes that what she did, which most cults would love to be able to do reliably, was just luck on Sophia's part rather than planned.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Taylor uses Anton's trick to get stuff from drawers and the fridge without opening them, and to get eggs without breaking the shells.
  • She later discovers its utility to get scratch lottery cards with good prizes.
  • She also uses the fact that anything she "puts away" is frozen in time until she takes it out to keep food warm.
  • It's also useful to keep injured people safe until they can be transported to a place where they can be healed, which Taylor uses when the dockworkers find a gravely injured Rachel Lindt.
• My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Coil usually would ignore an organization as benign as the Dockworkers, but a tingling in the back of his neck tells him something big is going on. It doesn't save him.
• Nothing Is Scarier:
  • Part of what freaks Coil out so much about what happened to his mercs that he sent to forcibly recruit Lisa is that by the time he could get someone else out there, they had simply vanished without a trace. There was no sign of who could have done it and how, no trace of any fight, and no evidence of any parahumans with similar powers in the Bay. And then it starts happening in his secret base...
  • After Taylor uses the Gnurrs to make the giant ship blocking the Bay go away, the fact that no one can tell how the deed was done causes more than a little uproar.
  • The PRT are rather baffled when Coil's base isn't where his mercs say it should be, even though the hidden doors are still there. Their best theory is that Coil somehow hid his base's real location, but even they admit that it's a bit of a stretch. Later, when Armsmaster and Dragon figure out that the base was somehow stolen, they're completely baffled at how it was done.
• Obviously Evil: Amy and Victoria discuss how it’s not surprising that Sophia, with her history of violence and general unpleasantness, would find herself the victim of a lawsuit.
• Occam's Razor: This trope shows up a few times, usually when someone is being Entertainingly Wrong.
  • The PRT assumes that the drugs being found on Sophia was simply because she botched framing Taylor, since it makes more sense than Taylor just happening to have the powerset needed to plant said drugs on Sophia when she never got close to her and they have no evidence that Taylor's triggered.
  • When Danny pulls the pins on Oni Lee's grenades and kills him, everyone assumes that he simply got some flawed grenades or something, since it makes more sense than someone having the necessary powerset to kill him without anyone realizing being there.
  • When the PRT find the location of Coil's base after Taylor steals it, they're baffled, as the fact that the hidden doors are still there makes it clear that something is supposed to be there, and all the mercenaries corroborate that, but they can't find a single other trace. Their best current theory, given how ridiculous stealing the entire base would normally be even with multiple parahumans working on it, is that Coil somehow obscured his base's real location from his mercs, even if they admit that it doesn't fully fit, and given Coil's Villainous Breakdown he's currently unable to say anything one way or another. Of course, that theory goes out the window when Armsmaster and Dragon realize that it was there.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: It's noted that the PRT Chief Director's reaction to the Hebert lawsuit is rather unusual for her, and that she seems distracted.
• Open Secret: Secret identities are not as secret as most people believe; it is easy to discover the identity of a cape with a bit of digging. Most organizations, criminal or legal, maintain the fiction of secret identities to avoid unnecessary conflict.
• Parental Obliviousness: Played for Drama. Zoe Barnes had no idea how badly Emma had been treating Taylor and is extremely unamused to learn this from Danny, and Alan is equally upset that he failed to notice Emma's emotional breakdown.
• Parents as People:
  • Despite his neglect, once Taylor reveals to Danny the hell she's endured at Winslow, Danny immediately helps her patch up the flute and helps her take her bullies down.
  • Alan has to face the fact that he utterly failed Emma in not finding her a psychiatrist to deal with the trauma of being attacked, which resulted in her instead leaning on Sophia, adopting her philosophy of violent and selfish conflict.
• Pet the Dog: After discovering a homeless man that had been kidnapped by Coil for his sadistic urges, Taylor gets the man out and gives him a briefcase with several thousands of dollars so he can make a better life for himself and his family.
• Plausible Deniability: Danny doesn't want to be told exactly how Erwin is going to be getting answers from people, especially after a baseball bat is mentioned.
• Point of Divergence: The major divergence point here is that when Taylor recovers her mother's flute, Danny finds out and directs her to the titular ancestor's toolbox and journal in the attic in the quest to repair it. Soon, with Danny's help and Schimmelhorn's tools, Sophia's bullying is exposed, Coil's plans to force Tattletale to work for him fail, and Piggot and the PRT discover Coil's infiltration and subterfuge.
• Poke in the Third Eye: Thanks to QA, foreign Thinkers trying to get a read on Taylor get blocked, or even forget that they tried. For Dinah, whenever she gets asked a question involving the Bay, it gives her a result saying that the probability is -1%. She doesn't really mind though, since it makes her power much easier to handle, as the failed questions don't cause Thinker headaches.
• Poor Communication Kills: As Zoe notes, the issues between Taylor and Emma could have been solved if Alan had told her about the ABB attack or if she had taken the time to speak with Danny and find why Taylor wasn't around as much as in the past.
• Properly Paranoid: When the Dockworkers use repairing the potholes on the street by his base as a cover, Coil is deeply suspicious of them. It's largely a Right for the Wrong Reasons type of scenario, given how freaked out he is by how his mercs vanished, but they are out to get him.
• Punny Name: Amy names the raven she saved (and which keeps getting into the Dallons' home) "Edgar Dallon-Poe". She really meant to keep the full name to herself, but it slips out when she's scolding him; Vicky stares for a moment, then collapses into laughter.
• Put on a Bus: Sophia is sent to juvie for her crimes while Emma ends up instituted once her Mask of Sanity breaks.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Emily Piggot. She brings the hammer down on Sophia when she learns about her criminal behavior and plans to pin Sophia's handler and Winslow's inept staff to the wall for letting Sophia's bullying get out of control. During the meeting with the Heberts and the Barnes to settle their case, she agrees with them and accepts a deal that both gets her what she needs (keeping news of Sophia's involvement in the entire kerfuffle silent) in exchange of a reasonable set of demands.
  • Roy Christner is genuinely devoted to doing the best he can as Mayor of Brockton Bay. As a result, when Taylor anonymously passes him the information needed to be able to prosecute the corrupt officials responsible for the asbestos not being removed, among many other things, he's rather happy about it once the shock wears off.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Once Sophia gets arrested Piggot lets the delinquent have it for her psychotic bullying, risking her own parole, and trying (and failing) to frame Taylor for drugs and makes it clear she's screwed for her horrible misbehavior.
• Refuge in Audacity:
  • Taylor manages to get away with recording everything that happens at school (particularly the bullying) by carrying a placard stating that she's recording everything. If no one believes her, and even ramps up the bullying in reaction, that's their business. And if the teachers attempt to take the recorder (even though they have no standing to do so), she can give them a fake one, keep recording, and warn Danny so he can report it as theft.
  • Lisa manages to outright blackmail her power into getting its restrictions loosened by the Queen Administrator by threatening to cut off the data the shard is getting from Taylor, which it desperately wants more of.
• Revealing Cover Up: In their attempt to keep Sophia's case from getting out, the PRT ensures everyone involved knows Sophia is a Parahuman. Though in their defense, they didn't have much choice since not pulling the strings to quickly get her out of police custody and into theirs would require trusting a loose cannon like Sophia to sit quietly in police custody and not do anything stupid like attempt to escape before they could more covertly arrange her transfer.
• Running Gag:
  • Taylor and the DWA acting out the idea that they are a spy agency (U.N.I.O.N.), and Danny's sighing when he has to deal with that.
  • Lisa's power freaking out over how what Taylor is doing should be impossible.
• Saying Too Much: When Piggot reams out Sophia for being so stupid that she forgot to plant the drugs she wanted to use to frame Taylor, Sophia shrieks that she didn't forget, invalidating her previous protestations of innocence.
• Shout-Out:
  • When it goes into its Blue Screen Of Death over the implications of Papa's creations and Anton's abilities, Lisa's Shard throws out the lines "everything is made of onions" and "is that a lizard", referencing the author's Taylor Varga.
    • When two truckers see Victoria and Amy flying and followed by an unkindness of ravens, one of the truckers mentions seeing something similar but with lizards.
  • The concept of the gnurrs and gnurr-pfeife come from the short science fiction story "The Gnurrs Come from the Voodvork Out".
  • After stealing Alabaster, Taylor tells Anne and Lisa "Two. I have two Nazis. Ha Ha Ha."
• Smug Snake: Emma and Sophia act like tough shit, but fall apart quite quickly when Taylor manages to outsmart them.
• Spanner in the Works:
  • Taylor's Framing the Guilty Party on Sophia inadvertently helps expose the depths of Coil's influence in the PRT when the organization starts to investigate Sophia's case handler, and notices Coil's interference; even though the handler was a mixture of incompetent and corrupt, she did try to report some things that didn't make it through, and once she comes under scrutiny, Armsmaster spots the discrepancies. Later, Taylor uses her trick to not only rescue Lisa from Coil's mercs "recruiting" her, but capture all of them and their van full of gear after he'd dropped the timeline where he didn't give the go-ahead. And after that, she just goes and takes everything in Coil's base - including his mercenaries and Coil himself.
  • The PRT sends an agent of their own posing as a police officer to check on Sophia's actions at Winslow. Taylor immediately suspects him, and Danny contacts a friend of his own in the force. Dancing very carefully around the issue, they realize who the agent really was, and Danny agrees to send his friend the data Taylor collected so he can channel it to the original "cop". As a result, the Brockton Bay Police Department receives hard data proving PRT involvement in Sophia's case and the complicit Winslow faculty, before the PRT does.
• Spit Take: Taylor times the reveal that she put Victor in her hammerspace pocket just right to make Danny spit his coffee.
• Stupid Evil:
  • Piggot is flabbergasted and angered by Sophia risking her own freedom just to make one girl's life a living nightmare, on top of stupidly trying to frame that same girl for narcotics possession. Renick, after hearing about how Sophia was arrested for possession of drugs, even notes that her being high would explain a lot about the thought processes, or lack thereof, behind her more boneheaded decisions.
  • Later, the QA shard expresses a low opinion of Scion and his mate's data-gathering methods, noting that cooperation, namely with Taylor, is providing much more useful information than their brute-force approach of generating data by causing conflict via traumatized people with powers fighting one another.
• Taking You with Me: Erwin's philosophy is that you should either push on with life and make things better for the next generation, or failing that, go out with someone else's throat between your hands.
• There Are No Therapists: Averted. Emma's father turned a blind eye to his daughter's psychological issues, and didn't even tell his wife or other daughter what had happened, but once her parents see how horribly she bullied Taylor, they waste no time in getting her professional help.
• The Thing That Would Not Leave: Amy heals and feeds an injured raven, but no matter how many times she lets him outside he keeps coming back into the Dallon house whenever he can. Eventually they just give up on trying to make him leave. Later, he even follows Amy to Arcadia, and every time the teachers try to get him to leave, he simply finds his way back to Amy. Eventually they just stop trying because Edgar is fairly well-behaved as long as they leave him alone.
• Time Stands Still: When Taylor puts something in her Hammerspace pocket, it essentially pauses the passage of time for the object or creature in question. She uses this to keep food warm.
• Too Clever by Half: It's noted that while Coil, while smart and cunning, was far from the genius he thought himself as being, and wasn't nearly as clever with his power as he thought, as otherwise the deep scan Armsmaster did wouldn't have exposed his presence in the PRT systems so easily, for starters. They even say that they're lucky that someone truly competent didn't get his power, otherwise he would have been almost impossible to stop.
• Torture Cellar: To Taylor's horror, Coil has his own dungeon where he watches as kidnapped homeless people be tortured to sate his sadistic urges.
• Tragic Keepsake: Annette's flute and it being destroyed is what finally causes Danny to notice Taylor's torment.
• Troll:
  • After bringing Coil out of Hammerspace and telling Coil to sit in a particular chair, every time Coil tries to get rid of it, Taylor either puts it back in the same place or (if he breaks it) replaces it with an identical chair.
    • The incident turns out to leave Coil with a fear of chairs in general. After she gets her hands on him, Piggot takes to showing pictures of a chair to him to make him freak out.
  • Edgar the raven seems to take a liking to messing with Carol, much to the amusement of the other Dallons. Victoria even notes that Edgar would stop messing with Carol if the latter just stopped freaking out every time she saw him.
• Unintentional Encryption: Taylor mentions that Papa Schimmelhorn's notes are extremely difficult to read due to being written in a mixture of German, English, and a whole bunch of terminology that he had made up himself because the words to describe what he was doing either didn't exist, or he didn't know them.
• Verbal Backspace: Taylor's lawyer demands 1.5 million dollars to be awarded to the Heberts and Barnes' families each for the PRT's mishandling of Sophia Hess. When Glenn Chambers angrily protests, the lawyer ups the amount by half a million. After the second time the amount is increased, Piggot rather angrily shuts Glenn up.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Sophia and Emma fall apart hard when the former is outmaneuvered and arrested. The latter gets so unhinged she assaults a police officer.
  • Coil starts freaking out when he realizes his base is under attack and all his minions are suddenly disappearing without a trace.
    • And again when his mysterious captors not only demonstrate very in-depth knowledge of his organization, but also when the chair he's trying to get rid of keeps reappearing no matter what he does. The fact that his powers are on the fritz certainly doesn't help.
  • Kaiser throws an outright temper tantrum after Alabaster goes missing.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Zoe is extremely unamused with Alan for not bringing up Emma's nearly fatal attack and allowing her mental health to deteriorate to the point where she would bully her best friend.
• Womanchild: Piggot considers Costa Brown to be so bratty and demanding that Taylor comes across as more mature than her despite being only fifteen.
• Wowing Cthulhu: Lisa's shard and the Queen Administrator are amazed by Taylor and company, not just by Papa's tech and Anton's trick (though that's a big part of it), but also Taylor's intelligence and capability to use aforementioned things to get new and interesting data, as well as managing to figure out key aspects of the shard network, including Taylor even managing to notice the QA shard before triggering just to start with. QA even actively interferes with Contessa and the rest of Cauldron to keep them from harming Taylor and company and cutting off said data, and is genuinely impressed and eager to see what else she does.
  • When Taylor figures out how to craft a crystal she can use to let Administrator access beneath, Lisa's shard states Administrator suffering from near-Taylor experience.
• Wrong Context Magic: Papa's mechanical creations and Anton's trick are not Shard-based like the usual powers of the setting. Besides the fact that they can be understood and even taught, when Lisa's power gets its first look at the latter after Taylor uses it to rescue her from Coil's recruitment attempt, Lisa gets the mental impression that it's gaping like a fish in astonishment at something it's never seen before, and is very eager for Lisa to try and learn it herself. When Taylor tells her some of the theory behind it, as well as showing her several other tricks she's come up with, the Shard suffers a Blue Screen Of Death because what Taylor is doing is seemingly impossible even by their standards, and implies that the Shards' understanding of the universe is incomplete or flawed and has to reset. Taylor also manages to successfully plant the narcotics on Sophia because the PRT can't think of a way Taylor could have done that, since Taylor hasn't had any kind of Trigger they could detect.
• Xenofiction: Chapter 47 is from the perspective of the ravens that Edgar told about Amy.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Coil rigs his mercenaries' vehicles with concealed bombs in case he ever needs to get rid of them. Danny reveals this to a captured mercenary, who is not amused, to say the least.

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