Fanfic / Hive Daughter

Hive Daughter is a Worm/Warhammer 40,000 crossover fanfic by PlateGlassArmour.

For a moment, Taylor Hebert connected to a vast alien entity. In most universes, she gets the power to control insects, in some, she gets a slightly different power. In this universe, in some cosmic case of wrong telephone number, Taylor connected to the wrong vast alien entity. In this universe, for a few seconds, Taylor Hebert connected to the Tyranid Hive Mind.

Can be found on FanFiction.Net (here), SpaceBattles.com (here), and Sufficient Velocity.com (here).

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Tropes:

• Affably Evil: Accord is polite and helpful when helping Taylor make plans to promote order, even when those plans could include a carefully orchestrated Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• All for Nothing: Cauldron's schemes in general completely fail.
  • Kidnap one of Hive's Runners to examine and hope to duplicate its anti-Thinker ability? The Runner escapes and lets Taylor know who stole it.
  • Send Hive to the Birdcage for learning about the previous scheme? She's a Hive Mind so, once she gets over her initial breakdown, the whole affair is just a minor inconvenience.
  • Decades of plotting to one day kill Scion? Hive does it by connecting Scion with the Tyranid Hive Mind.
• Almighty Idiot: The Tyranid Hive Mind. When Taylor makes accidental contact a second time, both minds instinctively scan each other. Taylor's fails almost immediately due to the sheer number of entities connected, but the Tyranid Mind copies her mental structures associated with creativity. After some recovery time, Taylor realizes the Tyranids' Mind is unspeakably vast and clever, but lacks the spark of imagination. It's implied absorbing those bits will begin changing the Tyranids, since the Hive Mind now has an identity beyond a simple awareness of itself.
• An Arm and a Leg: Scramjet cut off his own arm in order to be free of the explosive wristband once he ran out of time to escape the Simurgh. He later builds himself a prosthetic.
• Armor-Piercing Question: When the rest of Cauldron is getting worried about how Hive's actions in Canberra, despite promoting stability in the city, are weakening their ability to predict what's happening there, Legend asks if they need to be the only ones to save people.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Eidolon always wanted a great final battle against a Worthy Opponent. His ultimate fate is to be stranded on an alternate Earth with only the rest of Cauldron and stuck fighting Endbringers.
• Berserk Button:
  • After her traumatic experiences at Ellisburg, Director Piggot is not happy to hear that the new cape may be a bio-Tinker, immediately ordering Armsmaster to bring her in alive or dead as his top priority.
  • Even though Assault has never even met Hive, his own history makes him absolutely furious about sending her to the Birdcage via Kangaroo Court, and only his wife Battery is able to stop him from going on the warpath with physical violence instead of words.
    It wasn't hard to see that this issue would speak to him directly, and tread on his hot buttons something fierce.
• Big Eater: Taylor's bio-modifications are typically Cast from Calories, so she eats quite a lot to fuel them. Fortunately, her creations can typically consume just about anything with calories in it, but she sticks to human-compatible foods for her own body.
  I started making myself some oatmeal as well, only five packs today, I'd eat a big lunch.
• Bio-Armor: Taylor's costume is a type of chitin tough enough to "shrug off bullets, electricity, and some lasers." It also augments her strength, has a full-strength stealth package, and can move around independently at her direction.
• Bio Manipulation: Taylor has boosted her own body, making it stronger, tougher, able to eat anything, breathe anywhere (or even operate without oxygen briefly), and never sleep.
• Blind Obedience: Averted. Once Legend is shown how he's been deceived by the other members of the Triumvirate, he states he won't martyr himself for their mistakes.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Being new to this "personal identity" thing, the Hive Mind is genuinely curious about how Taylor's mind works, but genuinely doesn't have any idea of how to treat her. When she retreats from Scion to the Warhammer reality, the Mind receives her, and basically disassembles her mind to better protect her, labeling everything and noting how it fit together.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Taylor's tinker tech inventions that she gives others are all simple, but solve significant problems.
    • Her first creation is a machine that creates net guns, which fire nets that even Lung has trouble breaking out of, giving police officers an extra non-lethal option and a way to actually have a chance against villainous capes.
    • Her next creation is improved armor for PRT troopers. They're so strong that one trooper who was nearly killed by Hookwolf notes he'd have been unscathed if he had that armor at the time.
    • Next, Taylor creates a machine that creates bottles of "healing spray". The spray acts as a coagulant, disinfectant, painkiller, and anti-inflammatory. According to Panacea and one hospital's head nurse, a spray that can near instantly stabilize someone enough to be transported (or simply buy time for more intensive treatment) is a godsend that will save countless lives.
  • Ad Lib gives his bodyguard, Smash and Grab, a length of string holding numerous playing cards with holes punched in them. As Smash and Grab's power lets him teleport to any non-living object he's broken (at the cost of vanishing it once he does so), it gives him a lightweight and easy to use method to create tokens he can teleport to.
    • For a time, Myriad uses Smash and Grab's teleportation to help ferry supplies from place to place in Canberra. While the man knows he's a glorified courier, he gets supplies to where they need to go faster than anyone else can.
• Brought Down to Normal: As Hive's anti-Thinker influence spreads, at least some Thinkers find themselves unable to use their powers at all. Numbers Man had to teach himself math after decades of relying solely on his power.
• Chameleon Camouflage: Real chameleons only wish they had camouflage like Taylor's runners. It adds a bit to the growth time but she considers the results well worth it.
  Almost instant response time, perfect color fidelity, and I'm positive it covered a far greater spectrum than humans could even see in. It even had some funky refractive properties so that different viewing angles on a single patch of skin would have different color responses.
• Cool, but Inefficient: Taylor and her creations are capable of operating without oxygen, but it's far less efficient and the couple times Taylor is forced to, she can barely think because of how much energy everything requires. She lampshades that there's a good reason that anaerobic operation isn't a feasible alternative to aerobic.
• Could Say It, But...: Implied. When Armsmaster presents Hive with the explosive charges she's being forced to put in all her creations, he explicitly tells her that they're shaped charges so if she doesn't put them in just right, they might not be effective. It's left ambiguous if that's just his No Social Skills or if he's trying to give a hint to a Tinker he respects on how to bypass the security measures placed on her.
• Crazy-Prepared: Accord, per canon. The part that most irritates him about Hive's unlawful imprisonment is their sheer disregard for the chaos the PRT's actions unleashed, even within their own organization. He also leaps at the chance to draft a plan to bring some peace to the Birdcage.
• Deadly Dodging: Lung's swing misses Taylor and hits the wall of her cell, exposing them both to vacuum. She can survive without air for a while, though it's unpleasant and burns calories. He can't.
• Defeating the Undefeatable: The world is stunned when Hive's creatures hit Leviathan's core with a warp lance and he falls down dead.
• Determinator:
  • Taylor's creatures don't know the meaning of giving up. Her kidnapped runner gets dropped into the Indian Ocean from a mile up. It uses its capture nets as a parachute to survive the landing (though damaged), holds a lungful of air for buoyancy, lives off water for days until its carapace has healed, reconfigures its body for faster swimming, swims toward the Brockton Bay beacon for two weeks, turns around when the closer Canberra beacon comes online, then runs all the way across Australia. All to follow Taylor's instructions to return to her, and also to report on what happened to it.
  • Scion, obsessed with finding something that will convince others of his race to expend the necessary resources to restore its partner, finds the errors generated by the Shadow in the Warp.
• Does This Remind You of Anything?: Amy's aka Panacea's reaction to touching Taylor or any of her creations is treated similarly to both caffeine and hallucinogenics. Besides causing her to just stare off at nothing for several minutes if allowed a prolonged touch, a quick touch tends to immediately focus Amy, something Taylor does when Amy is distracted or half-asleep.
• Establishing Character Moment: Alexandria's first scenes are kidnapping one of Taylor's runners, trying to kill it when she decides it's more trouble than it's worth, and using the "missing" runner to preemptively set Taylor up to be sent to the Birdcage because she's inconvenient.
• Exact Words:
  • Getting Tinker tech approved for usage by law enforcement requires a ranking law enforcement officer signing off on it and an expert in the relevant field declaring it safe for use. While it's intended to mean only the PRT and Protectorate can use Tinker tech, Taylor gives some to the local police department since they also count and the "relevant field" is non-lethal weaponry, which the police have plenty of.
  • When explaining she can create anything organic if provided biomass, Taylor has to explain to Lustrum that she doesn't need to use food and that biological waste works just fine.
• Extreme Omnivore: Besides her spawning pools and "machines" being able to consume almost anything (though energy rich materials are better), Taylor idly notes that she could probably digest the chair she's sitting on in her school cafeteria. She typically instructs her creations to feed on things that won't be missed, like garbage and compost.
• Fantastic Racism: It's noted that some powersets, like bio-Tinkers, are discriminated against even by heroes, with Piggot's attitude towards Taylor changing drastically after she found out that the latter was a Bio-Tinker and not a Case 53. She goes from reprimanding the police department over using a Fantastic Slur ("monster cape") to immediately demanding that "Hive" either be forced into the Protectorate or killed.
• Feels No Pain: While performing surgery on a conscious runner, Taylor notes that pain is optional for any of her bodies.
• For Want Of A Nail: The Travelers never left Boston, since Coil, who they intended to sign up with, had already left Brockton after a horrible experience with Hive. This irritated Accord, who contacted Hive to deal with Noelle.
• The Gloves Come Off: Taylor figures she has nothing to lose after her human body is sent to the Birdcage, so she starts openly using biotinkering to help in Canberra, producing medical sprays and food and communications.
• Godzilla Threshold: When Scion finally catches wind of the effects of the Shadow in the Warp, he begins pursuing its origin to the Birdcage, and tries to catch Taylor. Having no options, she uses her limited time to travel to the Warhammer 40K reality and beg for the help of the full might of the Hive Mind, even though the only brief contact they had before ended up leaving her nearly braindead.
• Have You Told Anyone Else?: Chief Director Costa-Brown insists that to ensure security, Hive's evidence against Alexandria and Eidolon needs to be handed over in person, in a week's time, without letting anyone else know.
• Healing Factor: Taylor's altered biology barely bleeds, can knit itself back together very quickly, and her biological manipulation means that she can rapidly repair or even regrow anything damaged. She gets a plastic ruler phased into her chest by Shadow Stalker, and simply pulls it out with a sucking sound, essentially unaffected.
• Here We Go Again!: Cauldron, minus Legend, is left stranded on an uninhabited Earth after Scion is killed. After a few weeks of Eidolon angsting over never getting a final battle against a Worthy Opponent, new Endbringers start attacking Cauldron.
• Heroic BSoD: After learning that Taylor could make creatures the size of an office building (but isn't because she doesn't want to scare the PRT), Danny stares blankly into space for several minutes.
• Hive Mind: As befitting the Tyranids, Taylor exists as one mind in all of her engineered bodies.
  Being one mind in two brains was not what I was expecting; there was no stretching or reaching myself to try to do both at once, there was simply that much more of me.
• Hive Queen: Taylor for her new Tyranid Hive. She basically is the Hive Mind, and if her body were destroyed while in range of the rest of it, she could recreate her body with no memory loss. In a few timelines where he tried to assassinate her, Coil keeps ending up with her creatures going after him even when he succeeds in taking her out because her mind is still intact.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: Before she every considers approaching the PRT, Taylor decides to hide some of her capabilities. This saves her when she's thrown in the Birdcage; she still has parts of herself on the outside that the PRT doesn't know about.
  When I actually joined, the Protectorate would want to know exactly where I had been making my creatures, so I would need to show them a base; I wanted to make sure it wasn't my only base.
• I'm a Humanitarian: Taylor finds it distasteful to feed human corpses into her creatures, but it's the logical approach in Canberra, where they're a disease risk if they stay, and the energy-rich biomass will help her build up quickly.
• Immune to Bullets: Taylor's main body can shrug off small-arms fire. In her suit, she can mostly ignore sniper rifles and grenades. The planters she spreads under the bay, covered in water and silt and stone, would survive a decently sized nuclear strike.
• Innate Night Vision: It's trivial for Taylor to give her main body improved low light vision, able to see at night as if it were midday.
• Invisibility: Most to Taylor's creatures have access to this, including her Power Armor. Though after a certain size, it becomes impossible for her to install it as the energy required would literally cook an organic brain.
• Kangaroo Court: The sham "trial" used to sentence Taylor to the Birdcage is openly referred to as such by Armsmaster, who notes that not only was the defendant never even informed of the charges, but that the prosecution used supposition and outright falsified information as evidence.
• Knight Templar: Cauldron discusses destroying all of Canberra and killing everyone in it, simply because they can no longer Path it, ignoring that the city wasn't part of their Path to begin with once Simurgh attacked it. Though they try to justify that it might interfere with stopping Scion, their true motivation is being Control Freaks who are upset that something is outside their control.
• Laser-Guided Karma: After spending years manipulating Earth Bet for their own ends, heedless of the lives lost, Cauldron is left stranded on an uninhabited Earth with zero resources. Then the Endbringers start showing up.
• Let No Crisis Go to Waste: Taylor, as Myriad, gets her spawning pools in Canberra started up by using the corpses of every dead person she can find, as not only is the biomass high in energy for her creations, but it also reduces the risk of disease from having thousands of rotting corpses lying around. She also realizes it's the perfect location to create another relay in case her one in Brockton Bay is ever destroyed, as Simurgh Containment Zones aren't monitored.
• Let's You and Him Fight: When Scion very nearly catches her, Taylor desperately flees to the Warhammer 40,000 universe and into the protection of the Tyranid Hive Mind. When Scion pops in a while later, he's in the sights of the Hive Mind's unfathomably vast psychic power, and is quickly lobotomised.
• Lightning Bruiser: Taylor's chosen creature to fight an Endbringer is a Titan the size of an office building, with correspondingly large swords on each limb, yet capable of keeping up with Leviathan moving at a hundred miles an hour.
• Logical Weakness: Ad Lib's power tells him which argument he thinks of is most likely to sway someone. However, it doesn't provide the argument; he has to think up the words himself and he won't know if his argument will work, just that it's the most likely to work amongst the options he came up with.
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Taylor to get past the restrictions on Bio-Tinkers. Anything a Tinker creates has to be approved by the Protectorate beforehand except things they create before joining, so she seeks to give herself a decent set of creations beforehand, so she'll be effective immediately, rather than jumping through hoops to make anything at all.
  • Done by both parties when Dragon is forced to send Taylor to the Birdcage; she deliberately keeps herself as ignorant as possible so that she isn't forced into action.
    • Dragon preemptively tells Taylor to not hand over her files or even acknowledge their existence in any way. If she does, Dragon will forced to follow her orders and hand them over to Rebecca Costa-Brown. But if Dragon "just happens to find them" in her ship afterwards, she can pretend she doesn't know for a fact they're Taylor's, and do whatever she wants with them.
    • Taylor asks what'd happen if she happened to be outside the Birdcage when her sentence is overturned and she hasn't been found to have broken out, to which Dragon admits that if that somehow happened, Taylor will have broken no laws.
• Major Injury Underreaction: The very first scene of the story is Taylor noting that Lung just tore off her arm, and how inconvenient that is. She then needs a moment to realize she's treating a missing limb as "inconvenient."
• Might as Well Not Be in Prison at All: Taylor's main body being imprisoned in the Birdcage has exactly zero effect (beyond leading to Lung's death), since a piece of her is still outside and she manages to establish a connection with the rest of her network very soon.
• Mighty Glacier: Newton's power makes him stronger and tougher the slower he moves. If he's motionless, he can tank hits from Alexandria, but punching a wall would just injure his hand.
• Mistaken Identity: Scion, when traveling to the Warhammer reality, mistakes the Hive Mind for another of its species and tries to start dialogue — only to be rebuked with a colossal blast of psychic power.
• Moral Myopia: Simurgh victims who form mobs and start beating people to death will usually say that they suspect their targets of being Simurgh bombs. Justified since they're by definition not thinking straight due to the Scream.
• Mugging the Monster: A Merchant with a knife is so completely outclassed by Taylor's runner that she mostly ignores him in favour of pondering what direction she'll upgrade it next. While the mugger throws out frantic threats, she's tossing up between infrasonic mapping vs containment tools like glue and nets. Eventually she gets tired of him ranting and drags him into an alley by his ankle, then lets him run away screaming.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Taylor modifies one of her creatures with the only purpose of having an all time connection with the internet.
  • Much of Accord's plan for Canberra revolves around utilizing the various surviving capes and their powers to rebuild society.
    • Smash and Grab and Highline use their powers to deliver supplies around the city. The latter is also perfect for erecting windmills and water towers^note Her power lets her launch objects towards a given destination and with a given parabolic curve, and negates all momentum just before impact.
    • Sinker is used to create complex but single piece parts by melting the necessary materials into a mold. Even materials that can't normally be melted, like wood.
    • Scramjet is a tinker who specializes in air power and designs several windmills to supply power to the city.
    • Newton raises the first couple of windmills by slowly "climbing" a horizontal ladder while tethered to the top of the windmill.
    • "Myriad" (aka Hive) uses her multitude of bodies to quickly communicate information all around the city and coordinate people's efforts.
  • After resigning from the Wards, Kid Win opens up an electronics and small engine repair shop, utilizing the fact that his Tinker specialty (modularity) means he can easily tell what part is broken and swap it out for a working one.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
  • Alexandria is interested in Taylor's creatures and arranges for a demonstration she's putting on for Piggot to go awry so she can abduct one. After the Triumvirate witnesses its effectiveness even when it's cut off from Taylor's Hive Mind, they drop it from high above into the Indian Ocean, assuming it will die from the fall or drowning and that will be that. Had Taylor not specifically tailored the Tyranid not to self-replicate, the ecological damage would have been catastrophic. To make it worse, she manages to recover the damaged creature and now she has hard evidence of the involvement of Alexandria, Eidolon and Contessa.
  • Their sending her to the Birdcage to try and deal with her not only causes a public backlash against the PRT when news of Hive and Canary being sent to the prison on flimsy grounds comes out, along with the public support Hive had built up (with even a lot of Brockton's PRT troopers feeling outraged at what happened) and the charges that were installed in her creatures being revealed when one of her flying creatures falls with a hole in its face in traffic, but her Hive Mind nature means that even though she's cut off from her Birdcaged original body, she's still active.
  • Not only is the discrimination against Taylor/Hive for being a bio-Tinker and her being Birdcaged without a legal trial being lampshaded as something that's going to keep independent heroes and rogues from being able to trust the PRT, and will likely be used by villains as propaganda against them, but Armsmaster, Ms. Militia, Battery, Assault, Velocity, Gallant, Vista, Clockblocker, Kid Win, Browbeat, Aegis, and the entire Philadelphia Wards team all either retired, took a leave of absence, outright quit, or, in the case of some of the Bay Wards, were pulled by their parents.
  • It also results in a minuscule turnout at the next Endbringer battle as none of the independents, rogues, or villains trust the PRT to honor the Endbringer Truce if they're willing to Birdcage one of their own who hadn't broken any laws.
• Nightmare Fetishist: Downplayed. Panacea is absolutely fascinated by Hive's physiology, getting completely lost in examining it to the point others have to bring her back to the present.
• No One Could Survive That!: Alexandria disposes of a captured runner by opening a Door to a point one mile above the Indian Ocean and letting it escape through that.
  Alexandria: If it doesn't die of a terminal velocity impact with the water, it will drown.
• No-Sell: After considering her options for responding to the Trio stealing her lunch and then returning it drenched in hot sauce, Taylor decides to just eat it anyway, in front of them, with her enhanced biology allowing her to completely ignore the spice and loudly proclaim her enjoyment of it.
  If only they knew I could digest the seat I'm sitting on these days.
• The Nose Knows: Taylor's sense of smell is enhanced far enough for her to notice that Sophia has been in the PRT building recently, though at the time she doesn't realize the significance...
• Obfuscating Insanity: After interacting with her in the Birdcage, Taylor comes to believe that Glastig Uaine is less crazy than most people think she is, and likes to play it up.
• Oh, Crap!: Several times.
  • Alexandria freezes when, in her identity as Chief Costa-Brown she receives a message from Hive saying she can directly prove her involvement in the kidnapping of her runner.
  • Taylor, when she realizes Dragon's plane isn't going to take her to see the Director - it's going to dump her in the Birdcage. And again when her spaceship makes accidental contact with the actual Tyranid Hive Mind.
  • Teacher seizes up when first he gets exposed at the cell block leaders' summit and summarily executed by Glastig Uaine.
  • Alexandria, when it turns out all of Cauldron' actions were ultimately worthless after Hive successfully kills Scion.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Legend is famously kind and even-tempered. Alexandria knows that he's properly furious when he swears at her during a Cauldron meeting.
• "Open!" Says Me: Taylor opens the locked back entrance to a Merchant lair by simply punching it, breaking off the deadbolt.
• Pet the Dog: Taylor approaches Accord with a plan to help Canberra after earning a favor by killing Noelle. Accord insists on doing it for no charge and even offers to help for other plans to promote order.
• Plausible Deniability:
  • When Taylor is ordered to install a Self-Destruct Mechanism in all of her creations in case one escapes, she's not happy about it, knowing that her creations have instincts that should mean they're not truly dangerous, but she isn't going to outright defy the order. However, Armsmaster is sympathetic, and makes sure to carefully instruct her about how the explosives have to be installed with the arrow facing the correct way if they're going to work. And then he leaves it to her to perform the installation.
  • Taylor isn't sure whether or not Deputy Director Renick figured out that 'independent, non PRT associated, subject matter expert consultation for Tinker tech' means she's visiting Newter to try recreating his hallucinogens, but if Renick did guess then he's apparently decided not to officially know.
• Police Are Useless: Taylor works to avert this by using her Tyranid abilities to create weaponry for Brockton Bay's police to use against criminal capes
• Powers as Programs:
  • Making contact with the Tyranid Hive Mind damaged the templates Taylor originally triggered with. Still, Panacea prefers it that way — instead of working off premade templates, Taylor can now innovate, merely drawing inspiration from the original Tyranids.
  • After studying the Simurgh's scream, Taylor develops a modified variant, a psychic blast, that is far less subtle but much more targeted and with more immediate effects.
• Psychic Static:
  • Apparently the Shadow In The Warp affects some Thinkers. Coil is driven to a near Villainous Breakdown just by being in the same room as Taylor during her interview, even pulling a gun on her in one timeline, and even Contessa has trouble using a Path around her creatures, to the point that even one separated from the hive mind is invisible to her power. The Simurgh's Scream doesn't work on the creation that Taylor sends to fight it, and the Endbringer is unable to perceive it until it attacks her. Accord is immune because his power works by allowing him to plan better based on the information he has, not by gathering info for him.
  • It's also very hard to seize control of any part of Taylor or her creations. When Noelle tries to duplicate one of her assault creatures, the result is a pure Tyranid. While Taylor manages to force a connection with the creature and subsume it into her control, she knows that if she lets control slip before she can fix it, it's going to cause a bloodbath, so the Tyranid allows itself to be destroyed. The organic console she creates at the Birdcage is Mastered by Teacher, though the control isn't absolute, allowing her to see what Teacher is trying to do and subverting his attempts at escape.
• Quantity vs. Quality: Taylor quickly determines that the templates given to her by the Hive Mind have cut corners in pursuit of ridiculous growth speed. She slows things down a bit to add more useful features, like camouflage of which "actual chameleons would be jealous"; it doesn't matter to her if a creature takes days to mature instead of hours.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Taylor is doing her best to defy this, starting by making biological net launchers for the Brockton Bay Police.
• The Scapegoat: Alexandria makes Piggot into one for Taylor being unlawfully sent to the Birdcage.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • In protest to Hive being jailed in the Birdcage unfairly and illegally, Armsmaster, Ms. Militia, Battery, Assault,and Velocity all either retire, take a leave of absence or outright quit, and that's only in the Protectorate in the Bay; Gallant, Vista, Clockblocker, Kid Win, Browbeat and Aegis all either did the same or were pulled by their parents, the entirety of the Philadelphia Wards quit in protest, and Chevalier notes that half of the Chicago team wants to join them.
    • Apparently the PRT's head of public relations publicly left, along with most of his team, as a result of what happened to Taylor as well.
  • Cauldron, minus Numbers Man and Legend, abandon Earth Bet rather than actually pay for their crimes. Given that they end up stuck with The Endbringers, they'll wish they'd have stayed.
• Skewed Priorities: Legend notes that his fellow Triumvirate members care more about control than actually helping people, to the extent that they consider destroying Canberra, which is doing far better than any other Simurgh Containment Zone, simply because it's beyond their control.
• Spanner in the Works: Myriad, one of Taylor's creations, completely ruins Simurgh's plans for Canberra. First, she destroys the Simurgh's device, then after Simurgh retreats, she spends months helping rebuild the city. More importantly, her Psychic Static nullifies Simurgh's effects over time, especially as Myriad's bodies start numbering in the thousands.
• The Stoic: Taylor is a downplayed example. She shows emotion, but only to the extent she chooses to, after which it all just seemingly disappears. After her father comments on it, Taylor explains that as a Hive Mind, everyone is basically only interacting with her left hand. No matter what happens to her, it's not that big of a deal.
  • Not So Stoic: That said, Taylor passes out crying after learning she's being sent to the Birdcage.
• Super-Toughness:
  • Taylor is extremely resilient thanks to her upgrades. In one timeline Coil shot her in her exposed face and it only really mildly annoyed her.
  • When planning her expansion into the bay, Taylor doesn't bother making any adjustments for the salt water, because "my creatures would be just fine operating out of a sea of acid."
• Sure, Let's Go with That: Marquis assumes that Taylor used her internet tap to learn about Amy's current activities. Taylor lets him think so rather than revealing her distributed mind.
• Taking You with Me: Armsmaster suspects that he's been targeted since Director Piggot is going down anyway; she's lashing out at others, and his explosives were used to kill Hive's creatures.
• Tempting Fate: While developing the trauma spray, Taylor thinks to herself that it'd make for great insurance against being sent to prison because "it'd be a particularly stupid bureaucrat who tried to birdcage someone who created such a thing". Piggot, with Alexandria's help, does indeed get Taylor sent to the Birdcage. On the other hand, Taylor is right that the backlash is considerable.
• These Look Like Jobs for the Superman: Quite a few in Canberra.
• Too Dumb to Live: Despite Taylor's warnings, Lung attacks her after she's sent to the Birdcage, penetrating the outer walls and causing him to die of suffocation, especially since he tries to use his fire even as the air rushes out of the room.
• Too Much Information: Asking about Officer Johnson's job was just supposed to be small talk. Taylor didn't expect to hear about Hookwolf stabbing him in the kidney and how he's off patrols until he no longer has blood in his urine.
• Transhumanism: Taylor, with Panacea's input, has worked out a way to convert humans into Tyranids. She hasn't used it yet, though.
• Villains Out Shopping: Once they get access to the internet, the inmates at the Birdcage largely use their allotted hours to look up family members, check sports scores, and other mundane activities. Once the public learns that their online activity is so ordinary, there's considerable push-back against trying to sever the internet connection (not that anyone can).
• Wham Line:
  Dragon: I'm sorry Taylor, we're not going to Washington. You're being sent to the Birdcage.
• Worthy Opponent: When Taylor is sent to the Birdcage, the Fairy Queen greets her personally, referring to her as an equal and calling her the "Hollow Queen" due to her anti-Thinker effect.

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