Fanfic / It Gets Worse

Looking at it in a certain way, it could all be explained away logically. As Dad had once told me, dice have no memory. It was perfectly possible for a series of one-in-a-million chances to happen, one after the other, to the same person, for the same end. But plausible? Not so much.

It Gets Worse is a Worm alternate universe fanfic by ack1308 (also known for Security! (Worm), Hope Comes to Brockton Bay, Wyvern and Another Way).

By the name of the fanfic, one would assume that it is a story of how life really gets worse for Worm protagonist Taylor Hebert. It is not that kind of story. In fact, besides the locker incident, she's been lucky lately, as her tormentors' attempts to harass her have either ended in failure, or worse, backfiring on them. It is then discovered that she triggered with a luck-based power, which seems to be acting on its own, ensuring that Taylor will have a happy life by manipulating events into her favor. So while Taylor's life had gotten better, things do get worse... for those who deliberately go against her.

The story can also be read here on SpaceBattles.com, here on Sufficient Velocity.com, and here on FanFiction.Net.

It is complete as of October 14, 2018.

---

This work contains examples of:

A-D

• Accidental Truth:
  • Sophia, of all people, manages this while attempting to slander Taylor to Director Piggot after she's concussed. One of the Non Sequiturs that she drops is, in fact, the origin of powers in the Worm 'verse, babbling about a space whale being in her head. Piggot understandably ignores it, given that Sophia is concussed and babbling at that point.
  • When Jack Slash wonders why Crawler, Hatchet Face, Mannequin and the Siberian haven't returned yet from Brockton Bay, he comes up with an hypothetical situation for how they could have been defeated — not knowing that it is exactly what happened. Sure enough, when L33t and Uber show up (after taking the Siberian out with their Ghostbusters trap) when he has kidnapped Taylor, Jack becomes dumbfounded.
  • Legend notices that the Endbringers altered their behaviour for the better on the same day that Eidolon got his new girlfriend and wonders if there's a connection, but decides to dismiss it as silly.
• Aerosol Flamethrower: In hindsight, it wasn't a good idea to start getting Burnscar motivated and flaming at the same time that Crawler was due for his concrete-induced epic flatulence.
  And then there was fire. All the fire in the world.
• All Is Well That Ends Well: Taylor ends up in potentially lethal danger on multiple occasions, only for her power to step in and take down the threat in a humorous manner before she can actually get injured.
• Anachronic Order: The story's narrative often goes back in time to explain a series of innocuous events at some point in the past that Taylor's power nudged into place back then, in order to set in motion something that would help Taylor in the story's present.
• Animal Companion: After the Chicken Festival, Taylor finds herself the owner of a cute baby chick, which she names Chick Norris. When it grows up, it's named Chook Norris.
• Animal Motif: For Taylor and her power, it's butterflies. The PRT decide to give her that as a cape name, and after she escapes Jack Slash holding her hostage by means of a Piano Dropping on him, she gives a bow to the crowd and the butterflies that started it all fly down and land on her.
• Anvilicious: Coil gets one hammered into him In-Universe, delivered with actual anvils, that leads to him turning himself in. What do eight anvils landing all around him in a circle close enough to kill (and actually do kill if he tries dodging with his power), followed by a ninth that points towards the PRT building, say? "You can't run or hide. I will get you, any time, any place. Your life is mine now, so you'd better do what I want, or you'll never see it coming."
• Anvil on Head: A near-miss example: through a series of convoluted events, nine anvils fall out of a building and land perfectly around a wandering Coil (and played lethally straight if he tries save-dodging with his power), delivering a literally Anvilicious message to him that scares him into turning himself in.
• An Arm and a Leg:
  • When Burnscar gets thrown off the overpass by the explosion of Crawler's fart, she manages to get a hold of the railing at the last second, only to lose it from Hatchet Face's flying axe shearing her arm off.
  • New York cop Jamie Nightingale lost her left leg to an attack from Garotte (her partner also lost his right arm, but couldn't be rescued in time) five years prior to the events of the story. Panacea eventually fixes it, using a leg of ham that had been delivered to her apartment by mistake.
• Armor-Piercing Question: Jamie Nightingale, an ex-rookie cop who lost a leg in a supervillain accident, asks Eidolon why the supposed superheroes haven't solved problems besides the ones caused by supervillains? He finds himself speechless when he can't name five problems not involving supervillains he has used his powers to solve.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Über and L33t's testing of L33t's new Portal Gun exposes Scion's body via Flechette, kills him via a String Theory superweapon, and dumps the Number Man on top of Contessa.
• Atomic F-Bomb:
  • String Theory's F-Driver yells out an extremely loud "FUCK YOU!" when shot at its highest power setting.
  • Scion's last word, right as the convoluted plan involving String Theory, Flechette and L33t obliterates him.
• Attack Backfire: Oh so much. Taylor's power will take notice of any threat to her well-being or her interests, and it will preempt you. If you just wanted to embarrass or scare her, you probably won't die, you'll just trip over and drop your water balloons on yourself, or get pooped on by a bird, or have a rogue frisbee splatter your ice-cream cone all over your face. If you're more serious about it, you might find yourself falling in road tar and having feathers blown all over you, or breaking bones. If you intend to kill her, then watch out for falling pianos, lightning strikes, and suddenly helpful Endbringers. The PRT refuses to even give her a threat rating, because viewing her as a threat is too dangerous.
• Bond One-Liner: Hookwolf sneers at Taylor's warnings that he's making a mistake, and asks her, "So what are you gonna do about it?" Then a tremendous chunk of blue ice comes in through the roof and carries himself and Kaiser through the floor into the basement.
  Taylor: Something like that, maybe?
• Born Lucky: This is basically Taylor's power ("Triggered Lucky" would be more accurate), to the point nothing can bring harm to her (and, by extension, her loved ones) anymore, and woe to anyone who tries. The story ends with Lisa inviting her and Brian to a concert given by a freshly exonerated Canary, with front row tickets that "basically fell into [her] lap".
• Bring My Brown Pants: After being perfectly encircled by falling anvils, Coil finds himself in need of a new pair of trousers. Piggot takes great glee in pointing that out afterwards.
• Broke the Rating Scale:
  • Assault already has a threat rating lined up for Taylor/Butterfly's power: Shaker: Nope. Piggot actually agrees with this, since power ratings are based on threat levels, and trying to categorize her would involve thinking about her in a threatening manner... and no one wants to do that.
  • A String Theory Wave-Motion Gun called the F-Driver has a final power setting called "FUCK YOU."
  • L33t invents a "weird-shit-o-meter" (or luck detector) that can detect the effects of Taylor's power. It starts at "Odd" and ends in "Just Nope".
• Chekhov's Gun: Pretty much everything from chapter 1 onward becomes important later.
• Clark Kenting: Unintended, but Victoria is unrecognizable by the public after having her hair cut short, which proves fortunate when she and Amy end up in the same place as Jack Slash and Bonesaw.
• Cluster F-Bomb: The police are able to free Sophia from the duct tape, but she loses hair and skin, and is very vocally displeased.
  Officer: Now that you've gotten that out of your system, miss, would you like to tell us how this happened?
• Coincidental Broadcast:
  • The moment Coil gives himself up, a nearby TV showing Get Smart says: "Good thinking, 99!"
  • While driving around Brockton, Jack turns on the radio. Flipping across stations, he receives the following message in snippets: "Welcome..." "...to Brockton Bay..." "...Jack Slash, of the Slaughterhouse Nine..." "...you're gonna..." "...die here!" He tries to ask if anyone else heard that, only to turn back and hear the rest: "—don't say you weren't warned. Next on our list of 'Most Despised Men in America', we have—"
• Coincidental Dodge: Taylor notices her shoe is untied and bends over right as Cricket throws a knife at her. A bus then hits Cricket before she can make another attempt.
• Comically Invincible Hero: With Taylor's "Karma Administrator" power practically a Story-Breaker Power from how unassailable it is, pretty much all of the story's humor is to watch someone directly or indirectly wish harm against Taylor, watch the Disaster Dominoes get set up ages in advance, and laugh as they fall one by one on the unsuspecting schmuck, no matter their power or influence.
• Contrived Coincidence: Taylor's power loves setting these up. When Director Piggot discusses her abortive conversation with Shadow Stalker, she and Deputy Director Renick agree that individually, each event has a plausible explanation — pens run out of ink, emails interrupt, visitors pop in — but taken together, it's clear that something odd is happening.
• Cosmic Plaything: Marcus 'the Russian' Kellerman, who has a spate of unnaturally good luck happen to him, uses it to take out the Merchants, and then when he tries to remove Taylor as "the luckiest person in Brockton Bay", her power chooses then to decide it's done with him.
  • Uber and L33t as well, as their luck guns overload and fry when they meet Taylor, which Lisa recognizes as her power having chosen them to help taking down the Nine and deciding they've played their part (and even then, it leaves L33t with enough residual luck to build the portal guns that help taking out Scion).
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: When Eidolon goes to Accord to ask him to come up with a plan to solve world hunger, Accord points out that he'd come up with one six years ago, and only went into villainy because he couldn't get anyone to read it and needed crime to acquire the resources to attempt implementing it on his own. ^note All of which is canon. He then hands Eidolon a revised version of the plan, which he had updated that morning.
• Cover-Blowing Superpower: Sophia could have escaped from the duct tape ball using her powers, but that would have meant outing herself to the four boys with her. Still, she's at the point of just doing it and swearing them to secrecy — until a dozen more people show up, meaning that if she goes ahead, she's outed to everyone. She chooses to stay put and wait for rescue, even when someone steals her phone and gives her a parting slap on the backside.
• Crazy Homeless People: The depowered Dr. William Manton is reduced to aimlessly wandering and babbling about how he can't find his wife and daughter after the Siberian is caught in Uber and L33t's Ghostbusters-style energy trap. Danny calls the cops on him.
• Curse Cut Short: Jack Slash is halfway through an expletive when he's killed by a falling piano.
• Death from Above: Several times over the course of the story, Taylor's powers result in something falling from above.
  • A mass of blue ice breaks off from a passenger flight over Brockton Bay, crashing through a Empire 88 hideout and flattening Kaiser and Hookwolf.
  • When Coil tries to leave town to avoid Taylor's wrath, he nearly ends up the victim of falling anvils from an art gallery. He realizes that Taylor's power wants him alive so he can ensure Taylor's happiness.
  • Jack Slash ends up crushed by a piano, courtesy of the same art gallery.
  • Prior to that, Shatterbird gets struck by lightning after being shot by L33t's bad luck gun.
  • Animos of the Teeth is flattened by a manhole cover, sent flying into the air by Leviathan emerging from the sewers to send the Butcher flying.
• Defecting for Love: Non-villain example - Amy decides to leave New Wave and join the New York Wards after falling in love with Flechette.
• Didn't Think This Through: Victoria, before you decide to cut your hair off after getting an impromptu paint bath, you should make sure your sister is willing to grow it back.
  • For that matter, perhaps you should have checked what was in that dumpster before tossing it into the air to show off...
• Disaster Dominoes: Taylor's power has set a lot of these up, where random unlucky events cumulate in the elimination of a threat to Taylor's well-being. There's a reason why Taylor's PRT-assigned cape name is Butterfly.
  • While Taylor is showering at school, Sophia tries to steal her clothes. But Taylor had dropped a bar of soap, and Sophia slips on it, landing on Taylor's shoes and bruising her ribs. Later that day, the soap remnant on Sophia's shoes causes her to slip on a wet floor, knocking the Trio over and dousing them in all six of the water balloons they were going to throw at Taylor.
  • A random storm in Miami leads to the virtual downfall of the entire E88.^note The storm caused a refrigeration unit that had in-flight meals to turn off for a few hours. These meals were then served in a Miami-to-Portland flight, whose passengers suffered from food poisoning, requiring them to go to the bathroom. This filled the toilet tanks, and some turbulences caused a hairline fracture in the tanks to become big enough to drip its contents. The plane was forced to rise in order to avoid the storm and blue ice started to form, an unusually large one that started causing control problems in flight that led to the plane lowering its height, which melted the blue ice just enough to make it fall off the plane - right on top of the storage building where the Empire is holding Taylor hostage in an attempt to blackmail Danny into letting them continue their smuggling operations (as Danny had noticed something amiss and suspended their inside man earlier that day).
    • When this storm travels northward, it also participates to the undoing of Coil, Lung and the Slaughterhouse Nine.^note A blocked storm drain (by the collapse of the aforementioned storage building) leads to Coil's base being flooded in one timeline and exposed in another, while a leak in the drainpipes of the PRT building makes a waterlogged ceiling tile fall on top of him and break his collarbone (see Laser-Guided Karma), and a short circuit in a nail factory causes a batch of defective nails to be produced, which are then used to assemble a table that would carry several anvils (more on that below); the rain also causes the sinkhole in which Lung falls, as well as the reduced visibility which forces Burnscar and Shatterbird to rely on the faulty GPS of their stolen motor-home for directions, and damages a culvert on the highway near Brockton Bay, which gets closed for repairs, isolating the rest area where the Nine had stopped. Incidentally, because Faultline has to send the rest of her crew out while electricians come in the Palanquin Nightclub to fix a short circuit, Labyrinth is at the right time and place to recognize Burnscar, unconscious and minus an arm, lying in a garbage truck and rescue her.
    • It also makes Eidolon attend a school play in New York^note After the governor of Florida gets injured in an accident caused by a malfunctioning traffic light and poor visibility, both due to the storm, the opening ceremony Eidolon initially intended to attend to fulfil his quota of public appearances gets postponed, forcing him to change his plans. The play itself was put together at the last minute after a collapsing auditorium ceiling destroyed the props and sets for the planned presentation and a leaky roof ruined the script and stage directions. where he has a chance meeting with someone that gives him a new outlook in life, thus putting an end to the threat posed by the Endbringers.
  • A single sneeze passing around to a cold leads to Coil being scared into turning himself in.^note The sneeze caused a woman to catch a cold, which she passed to her husband, the owner of an art gallery. Because of his cold and being forced to stay at home, the man saw a Western that inspired him to create an exposition about the normal life in the Old West. The factory hired to build the furniture suffered an incident that weakened several nails (mentioned above), which were used to build a table where nine antique anvils were to be placed. The worker driving the forklift placing the anvils in place got shocked when a butterfly (more on that below) flew in front of him and he flinched, hitting the table in such a way that the nails broke and the table's legs became dismantled, sliding all the anvils through the upper story window just as Coil is passing under it.
  • A random gust of wind and a street sinking lead to Oni Lee's death, Lung's capture, the collapse of the ABB and the Undersiders changing sides.^note The gust of wind moved a newspaper in such a way that gave the leader of a poultry concern the idea of hosting a festival to promote egg consumption, for which the group hired to provide the ballons ended up using hydrogen due to not having enough helium. The street sinking (near where the festival is going to take place) due to the storm led to road repair crews to work there. When the festival is taking place, the Undersiders are running away from Lung (having just tried to rob one of his casinos), and Coil (who is now trying to devote himself to Taylor's happiness) directs Tattletale to go to the Festival, which Taylor is attending. Tattletale accidentally drops her phone when the dog she's riding jostles up in a jump, and Lung slips on the phone, falling into a tar truck from the road repairs, and when he keeps pursuing them (getting tarred and feathered in do so) he ends up getting entangled in the balloons. Oni Lee shoots the balloons point blank to free Lung, but one of them is full of hydrogen, causing an explosion that kills Oni Lee and sends Lung flying into the sinkhole being filled with cement, trapping him when the cement dries due to his heat, while the Undersiders become friends with Taylor and, thanks to her convincing Piggot to give them a chance, they become heroes.
  • A random cat in the wrong place at the wrong time leads to the Merchants being taken out by raw bad luck.^note The cat causes an undercover cop to accidentally get made by a suspect he's trying to arrest. The suspect runs and suffers an accident that completely ruins any use he has for the police (which also allows them to work on Taylor's case without distractions). The Merchants go after the suspect's partner, only for him to have a stroke of good luck that makes him think he's supernaturally lucky, so he goes after the Merchants' capes and kills them thanks to a stray bullet.
  • Some butterflies setting up in a random piano, a used car dealership picking up a vehicle with a malfunctioning onboard GPS (both of these taking place nowhere near Brockton Bay) and Rachel Lindt accidentally slipping in the shower leads to the demise of Jack Slash.^note The used car's dodgy GPS leads the Slaughterhouse Nine straight to Brockton Bay, which Jack had expressly wanted to avoid (his secondary power kicking in and trying to warn him to stay away). After a number of catastrophes kill/incapacitate everyone but Jack and Bonesaw, he decides to go into the city to find out what could have happened. Meanwhile, Bitch slipping in the shower sprains her ankle, and Grue takes one of her dogs for a walk, but the dog gets stuck behind a dumpster. Glory Girl passes by and shows off to Grue, getting showered with paint that had been thrown there (the dumpster belongs to a hardware store). She cuts her hair too short after getting rid of the paint, but Panacea refuses to restore it to teach her a lesson about taking Amy for granted, so she has to accept a change in hairstyle that makes her unrecognizable to the people. Glory Girl and Panacea, by coincidence, become patrons to the same restaurant Jack and Bonesaw are in, and Amy recognizes them: with the aid of her sister, she separates them, evacuates the restaurant and incapacitates Bonesaw. Taylor is using the restaurant's bathroom, and Jack takes her hostage. At the same time, at the gallery, another piece of the exposition, several antique pianos, are being put in place, but one of them had several butterflies setting up within (one of them being the one that caused the anvil incident) and when they all come out the startled workers again, accidentally dropping the piano out of the window - which lands on top of Jack Slash.
  • L33t building a portal gun (with a dodgy 'safety catch'), Flechette getting target practice, the Dragonslayers investigating String Theory's old lab and The Simurgh laughing leads to Scion's death^note An unintended side effect of Taylor's luck, which himself and Uber had been tracking down and collecting (and had in turn lead to them killing Shatterbird via karma-guided lightning bolt), gives L33t the one-off chance to duplicate something without it blowing up in his face, so he makes Portal Guns for himself and Uber. The safety catches are a feature he didn't even acknowledge until Uber pointed them out, and even then he's just assuming that's what they're for; testing out proves inconclusive. Meanwhile Flechette and The Wards are doing some target practice (after a previous quite spectacular failure necessitated some remedial training) and the Dragonslayers are investigating one of String Theory's old labs, and messing around with one of her big experimental guns causes it to charge up and ultimately fire at full power. Conveniently timed and placed portals cause Flechette's thrown weapon to hit Scion in the back, disrupting his form and opening up the pocket dimension where he keeps the rest of his body, which String Theory's cannon promptly fires into before he can rebuild himself, and lasers most of his major shards to pieces. The Simurgh laughing distracted Scion enough to create the opening to let it happen in the first place..
• Distracted by the Sexy: Taylor is delayed in answering Brian's questions about her power, because she's paying more attention to how his biceps barely fit into his sleeves. Alec later mocks her for it, and promptly gets his ice-cream splattered over his own face by a Frisbee.
  Did you set this up for me, power? If so, nice.
• Do Not Go Gentle: Paul, aka Alabaster, when realizing he's facing members of the Slaughterhouse 9, decides to go out fighting them while giving Rune a chance to escape.
• Don't Make Me Destroy You: Both Danny and Taylor warn Kaiser that he should let her go and walk away.
  "You don't want to do this," I stated, a little more boldly than I felt. "This is a really bad idea. Trust me on this."
• Dope Slap: Alec still finds himself on the receiving end of several of those, some courtesy of Taylor's power through random events, like a stray frisbee covering him in ice cream.
• Dramatic Thunder: After being affected by pure good luck, whenever L33t makes a dramatic statement thunder rolls out. Even with clear skies.^note That last one was actually caused by Alexandria breaking the sound barrier on her way to investigate some unusual activity from the Simurgh.
• The Dreaded: Taylor's power makes her someone to be feared. After seeing what happens to the first victims of Taylor's power, Director Piggot calls her scarier than Nilbog, and outright tells everyone not to do anything that could be considered a threat to her.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: The Fallen, Heartbreaker and Ash Beast are all victims of the Endbringers turning over a new leaf.
• Dumbass Has a Point: One of Eidolon's early sounding boards for solving the world's problems is...Mouse Protector.
• Dwindling Party:
  • The Slaughterhouse 9 lose their members one by one, without any other knowing they've been taken out.
    • Shatterbird is sent to scout the city, only to be struck by Uber and Leet's bad luck guns, followed by a bolt of lightning.
    • Burnscar is blasted into a garbage truck after igniting Crawler's flatulence, and then later recovered by Faultline's crew.
    • Crawler, Hatchet Face, Mannequin, and the Siberian are then sent in, only to encounter Purity's group of remaining Empire 88 members. Alabaster manages to injure Hatchet Face before dying. Crusader kills Mannequin by chance; he's more concerned about The Siberian, but takes out Mannequin as a target of opportunity after Purity disarms him and his ghosts can bypass his armour. Rune uses a chair to carry Hatchet Face and dump him onto Crawler, allowing Purity to kill both of them. As for the Siberian, Uber and Leet show up with a device based on the ghost trap from Ghostbusters, which actually works and ensnares the projection.
    • Finally, Jack Slash and Bonesaw then decide to explore Brockton Bay themselves, stopping by a restaurant. When that restaurant becomes patronized by Amy and Victoria, and later Taylor, things go downhill for those two.
  • The Teeth also count, after they make the moronic decision to target Taylor despite knowing about her powers. Animos and the Butcher are the only ones to even make it to Taylor, and they don't last long either. The Butcher is infuriated to discover that Taylor has no idea what they went through; her power absolutely went to town on them without her knowing a thing.
    "Don't tell me you don't know!" Her voice was savage. "I started out with my whole team, plus fifty followers. Everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. Flat tyres, wheels falling off, flash floods, crashed cars, exploding engines, stupid fights, people accidentally shooting each other, people deliberately shooting each other, bees in the cars, venomous snakes in the cars, an African honey badger in one car, the PRT, the Protectorate and the *** cops. Vex and Spree got as far as the edge of town, then got dumped in the *** Florida Everglades by some kind of blue-rimmed portal! Vex got eaten by an alligator, and Spree was kidnapped by the Fallen!

E-L

• Eating the Eye Candy: Taylor takes a moment to answer Brian's question about why the Undersiders are suddenly her friends, because she's distracted by his biceps barely fitting under his sleeves.
  Did you set this up for me, power? Because if so, nice.
• Epic Fail: How many of Taylor's lucky power retaliations play out.
  • Abound for Sophia, Emma and Madison's bullying attempts. Water balloons? They drop them on themselves. Pouring stuff on Taylor while she's in the toilet? The toilets they're standing on drop out from under them, leaving them stuck in very unfortunate positions. Tie her up with duct tape? One trip, and they're tying themselves up instead.
  • "Russian Roulette" when confronting Taylor. Her luck powers, up till then giving him a big windfall, choose then to abandon him, leaving his gun falling apart in his hand and him being terrified by Taylor's new pet chick.
  • All Saint is trying to do is turn a dial on a String Theory superweapon off. Why the hell does he keep accidentally turning it higher?!
  • Elsewhere, Victoria tries to show off for a hot guy (who turns out to be Grue) by tossing a dumpster into the air and catching it. The (paint shop) dumpster then proceeds to give her a very colorful bath.
  • Legend is baffled when all of the New York Wards manage to miss during target practice, even Flechette whose Improbable Aiming Skills fail her when her hair gets blown in her face at exactly the wrong moment - even though they were in an indoor facility with no wind to speak of. This leads to another session that ends up killing Scion with none of them the wiser.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The Merchants tried to recruit Uber and Leet for an attack on the Dockworkers. The duo didn't agree with that, and instead, the Merchants became the first unknowing targets of the bad luck gun.
• Everything Makes a Mushroom:
  • The explosion caused by setting Crawler's Farts on Fire produces a small mushroom cloud, as Uber and L33t can attest on their footage of the event.
  • The Truth in Television nature of this trope is mentioned as Dragon and Alexandria investigate a sizeable (although non-nuclear) explosion that wiped off the map the Ghost Town housing String Theory's old base (and, unbeknownst of them, the visiting Dragonslayers who caused it) shortly after Scion vanished.
• Evil Gloating: Taylor taunts Kaiser when he has her tied up.
  Taylor: You're the villain, I'm the hostage, you've got me in your secret lair. Why not indulge in a little gloating? Reveal your master plan to me. Come on, you know you want to.
• Exact Words:
  • A PRT medic announces to Director Piggot that Sophia is awake after Aegis collides with her, slamming her hard into the wall. When Piggot tries to interrogate Sophia about what she was trying to tell her, the response is noncoherent. The medic then points out he said Sophia was awake, he didn't say she was lucid.
  • When Director Piggot attempts to make an offer for Taylor to join the Wards, as she is a parahuman with a very useful power, a fly flies right into her throat. Therefore, the director tells Taylor that she is categorically not asking Taylor to join the Wards, playing it safe due to the nature of said powers.
• Expecting Someone Taller: Taylor says that to Jack Slash when he introduces himself after taking her hostage. Bear in mind that in canon Jack is about 6' 6''.
• Face Palm: Armsmaster's gauntlet meets his visor when Taylor announces that the Undersiders are with her now and she doesn't want him to arrest them.
• Failed a Spot Check: Thanks to Victoria's impromptu new hairstyle and Amy's natural wallflower personality, Jack Slash and Bonesaw don't notice that two public independent heroes just walked into the same diner as them.
• Flipping the Bird: The Simurgh does this to Scion right before a Contrived Coincidence involving Flechette, a L33t portal gun, the Dragonslayers and a String Theory Wave-Motion Gun vaporises him. For extra humor, Scion doesn't know what the gesture means and investigates to determine whether or not it's an attack.
• Forced to Watch: Kaiser leaves a phone call running so that Danny can listen to Hookwolf making Taylor scream. So Taylor is able to let Danny know she's okay after a ton of blue ice comes through the ceiling and takes both Kaiser and Hookwolf out.
  Kaiser: Now, Mr Hebert, listen very closely. This is what happens when men like you overreach themselves.
• Foreshadowing: When Uber asks L33t what he plans to do with all the luck he's getting from Taylor, he jokingly asks if he plans to make something that won't blow in his face. He does. Twice. The first thing helps capture the Siberian, the second thing helps to kill Scion.
• From Bad to Worse: Eidolon thinks this when he is trying to stop Ash Beast from wiping out some new super-crops, Behemoth shows up. Only to his surprise, instead of wreaking havoc, Behemoth destroys Ash Beast, waves goodbye and leaves.
• Gasshole: Whatever abomination Crawler has for a digestive system doesn't react well to concrete, and it gives him gas when he eats it. Which, as Burnscar unfortunately finds out, is very explosive.
• Gone Horribly Right: Uber successfully persuades L33t that it's not feasible to claim Shatterbird's bounty unless they can kill off all of the Slaughterhouse Nine, then realizes that L33t is already suited up and didn't actually want to win that argument.
• Good Is Not Nice: While Taylor's power is humorous, efficient, and devoted to her happiness, if things escalate enough, it is not nice. Just ask Cricket getting hit by a bus at full speed or Stormtiger falling into a pit of hot tar. Nor is it above drawing in Innocent Bystanders as part of its Disaster Dominoes, such as giving innocent airline passengers acute gastric distress, giving a poor art gallery owner a cold and having several of his exhibits fall out the window, or dropping a random truck driver into a rogue sinkhole.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Once the freshly flipped Coil orders them to befriend Taylor and her power ends up saving them from Lung (and puts them under her protection), the Undersiders are all too happy to give up their criminal activities (especially after Taylor leverages her influence with the PRT to make the problems that led them to crime in the first place go away).
  • After most the Empire 88 capes get arrested, Purity convinces Crusader and Rune that their safest option is to go straight. Only Alabaster aggressively refuses to give up on the Empire's cause and has to be taken down by the others as a result.
  • Once Eidolon shifts his focus from seeking worthy opponents to seeking worthy projects and solving worthy problems, the Endbringers stop attacking cities and instead focus on helping him complete said projects.
• His Name Is...: Played for Laughs, as Sophia attempts to slander Taylor to Director Piggot, but is constantly interrupted. When she is able to speak without interruption, it was only after Aegis accidently crashes into the office and gives her a concussion, so Sophia can only speak in Non Sequiturs. The whole string of bad luck however does clue Piggot in that something funny is happening. As for Sophia, she gives up on the idea and attempts to take out Taylor personally, the key word being "attempt".
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Many times.
  • Be it pencil shavings, water balloons, pudding or duct tape, Emma, Sophia and Madison all find their bullying implements turning on them instead.
  • To test her power, Piggot orders one of her men to dump a bucket of water on Taylor. The soldier trips on his own feet and dumps the water on Piggot, while the bucket falls on his head after a Face Plant.
  • Oni Lee shoots a festival balloon at point blank range to free Lung. But the balloon turns out to have been filled with hydrogen instead of helium, and he's blown to smithereens.
• Humiliation Conga: If Taylor's powers don't leave whoever threatened her dead, it'll have them defeated in a humiliating manner. An early episode that really clues her in to the fact it's more than coincidence is when Sophia and four track guys chase her with a roll of duct tape, trip into each other, somehow wrap themselves up in the tape, Sophia gets gagged with it, a crowd gathers with cameras and mockery about getting a room, someone steals Sophia's phone, and one of the boys, when asked later why he didn't cut them free, turns out not to have been poking Sophia with a pocketknife after all. Taylor can barely speak for laughing.
• Innocuously Important Episode:
  • Danny leaving work earlier to be with Taylor leads to a paperwork backlog that he later has to work on, allowing him to find that one of his men is stealing things from shipping manifests. Turns out, the man works for Empire 88, which leads Kaiser to attempt to kidnap Taylor - only for her power to kick in and destroy half of Empire 88 with a ton of blue ice.
  • Some of the setup of the Slaughterhouse 9's defeat involved two things that, at first glance, weren't related to on-going events.
    • First, Bitch slips in the shower and sprains her ankle, so Grue offers to take one of her dogs out for a walk, only for the dog to get stuck behind a dumpster. Victoria Dallon decides to help Grue, showing off in an attempt to flirt with him, only to get paint from the dumpster all over herself. As part of the attempt to get rid of it, Victoria cuts her hair too short and Amy is unwilling to fully restore it, so now she is unrecognizable by the public. Following a trip to the salon, Victoria takes Amy to the same restaurant that is unknowingly hosting Jack Slash and Bonesaw, and as no one recognizes the former the latter do not get a warning - but Amy does realize who they are, so she quietly gives Jack Slash a horrible case of food poisoning to get him out of the way, and then incapacitates Bonesaw, telling Victoria to evacuate the restaurant, thus denying Jack any hostages - except for Taylor, who had just entered the restaurant to use the bathroom.
    • Second, a cop trainee whose career ended due to being crippled by a cape ends up encountering Eidolon. The ex-cop criticizes him for really being more of a soldier than a hero and being focused just on problems that involves other capes and/or powers. This (and an encounter with Mouse Protector) later leads to Eidolon looking for Panacea for her assistance in a project with Accord, but he finds her just when she is having difficulty subduing Bonesaw, which he quickly rectifies.
  • And that's not even counting the Anvilicious incident with Coil (which was why Taylor was even in the area at the time); the Pioneer Days exhibition by the Forsberg gallery (which is where the anvils and the piano that falls on Jack Slash came from in the first place); the Chicken Festival (which is how Taylor met the Undersiders in the first place)...
• I Shall Taunt You: Lisa accompanies Taylor at Winslow's cafeteria (with Alec and Brian tagging along) for the express purpose of doing this to Emma when she tries to resume her bully routine, by rubbing in her face first the pictures of her humiliating bathroom moment, then the video of Taylor taking down Jack Slash, adding that the bounty means Taylor and her father are now significantly richer than hers, which means Alan won't be able to bury the case Taylor made against her, not helped by the fact that she just violated the restraining order put on her during the investigation. Enraged by that and Brian weighing in, which causes Madison to abandon her, Emma attempts to throw a bowl of dessert at Taylor, only for it to land on her face, courtesy of Alec using his power to interfere.
• If I Wanted You Dead...: When Director Piggot starts to suspect cape involvement in Shadow Stalker's abortive attempt to talk to her, she can tell that someone is hostile to Shadow Stalker, but doesn't actually want her dead.
  Piggot: Two feet either way and Aegis would have put her through a wall brace. Broken back, fractured skull, at the very least. She could be dead right now. But she's only in the hospital.
• Joke and Receive: When casting about for something really unlikely, Jack Slash comes up with L33t building something that could stop the Siberian, dressing up like a Ghostbuster, and teaming up with Empire 88 to use it. This is exactly what happened.
• Just in Time: Whenever it seems like Taylor is going to be victimized, something happens to prevent said victimization at the last second. For example, the Empire 88 are permitted to capture Taylor, make their ransom demands, refuse attempts to negotiate, and have a blade at her throat when her power drops a literal ton of blue ice on them.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: After the failed kidnapping, Taylor advises Lee Adamson to leave town, since her power is unhappy with him. After what he's just seen, he responds that he's leaving the state.
• Laser-Guided Karma: This is basically the premise of the whole fic, but in some cases it's particularly ridiculous.
  • Coil wants to test Taylor's reach, so he hires a thug to injure her father. The thug decides to ambush Danny and break his collarbone. While attempting to do so in the middle of a rainstorm, the thug is struck by lightning and breaks his collarbone. Moreover, Coil has a ceiling tile full of water land on him, where it breaks his collarbone and shorts out his computer, giving him an electrical shock. And, for extra Karma, the computer in his underground base glitches and connects to the PRT base, allowing them to extract all the information contained within and completely screwing up with his plans.
  • Notably, while Taylor's power is willing to engage in some minor collateral damage such as giving innocent plane passengers minor food poisoning to set up a falling chunk of blue ice at a crucial moment, it takes the degree of malice into account when dealing out Laser-Guided Karma rather than engage in Disproportionate Retribution. For example, while the trio of bullies get injured and severely humiliated when they try to target Taylor, Piggot only gets doused with her own bucket full of cold water when she tried to arrange the same for Taylor as a test of her powers since there was no ill intent behind it (while the soldier actually throwing the water gets the bucket on his head), and the only people who end up dead are the ones who intend to kill Taylor.
  • The Empire's fate demonstrates just how carefully Taylor's power deals out proportionate consequences. Kaiser organised it, and Hookwolf was about to injure Taylor as a lesson to her father; both of them are directly hit by the ton of falling blue ice. Stormtiger, Fenja, and Menja were merely standing by, so they're just thrown out of windows and restrained for the PRT to arrest them. Cricket was also thrown clear, but then tries to kill Taylor with a throwing knife, so she gets hit by a bus and thrown into another bus, breaking most of her bones and leaving her unconscious.
• Last Chance to Quit: Taylor specifically warns Kaiser and Hookwolf that injuring her while her father listens is a mistake, after Danny already told them that they could let her go and walk away and everyone could just forget about it.
  Taylor: You don't want to do this. This is a really bad idea. Trust me on this.
• Laugh Themselves Sick:
  • Taylor ends up in this state twice after two consecutive attempts to bully her by the Terrible Trio end up backfiring on them. When she leaves the bathroom where they attempted to pour juice and soda on her, she's stumbling and weeping and wishing she could hang around longer to watch, and although she's happy to tell people about it afterward, she has to gasp the words out between her fits of laughter. At the time, she can't even tell the passersby what's going on, because she's laughing too hard to form words; she can only point back into the bathroom.
    I would have given my soul to own a camera, right at that moment.
  • Taylor tries to keep the giggles down when she sees Sophia and four boys accidentally getting Bound and Gagged in a big ball of duct tape and unhappy teenager, but only manages a sentence or two before "I was laughing so hard that my face turned red and my stomach hurt."
  • The Wards enter a fit of hysterics when they see the photographed aftermath of Taylor's dealings with the Empire: the Fenja/Menja twins stuck headfirst in manholes, Kaiser and Hookwolf flattened by blue ice, etc. Triumph is concerned about the level of violence that occurred, and tries to get Vista to back him up on that, but she can't, because she's collapsed near-speechless on the floor in a foetal position, giggling.
    As Triumph moved toward her, she gasped out, "Head … first … down … manhole …" then went back to giggling.
  • Lisa falls off the couch as Grue is relating what happened with Glory Girl and the dumpster. Taylor later hears the story and has to sit down, weak-kneed, gasping, and with tears streaming down her face.
  • Uber and L33t have to sit down on the sidewalk after viewing photos of Sophia, Emma and Madison after their mishaps. They do it again when they realize they have footage of Crawler's fiery gassy moment.
  • Assault bursts into giggles when he sees Taylor politely not allowing Armsmaster to arrest the Undersiders — and then Armsmaster is about to turn back and argue, and immediately slips over on cooking oil, and Assault loses it, having to lean against a food stand because he's shaking with laughter so hard.
  • The Simurgh does this as the Disaster Dominoes leading to Scion's demise are set in motion.
  • Taylor and the Undersiders completely lose it after they are confronted by the Teeth, only to be rescued by Leviathan and the Simurgh.
• Laxative Prank: Not a prank, but Amy taints Jack Slash's soup order with an engineered dose of E. coli, guaranteed to make him need to use the toilet and getting him out of the way just long enough for Amy to bushwhack Bonesaw.
• Lifesaving Misfortune: A few times.
  • The janitor spilling coffee on himself made sure he was passing by in time to free Taylor from the locker.
  • A major case falling through for the police allowed them to put all their focus on Taylor and the bullying, making sure things wouldn't fall through the cracks.
  • Victoria needing a haircut thanks to an impromptu paint bath meant that she and Amy were in just the right place to help with the defeat of Jack Slash and Bonesaw. Said haircut also keeps the public recognizing them, otherwise Jack and Bonesaw would have inflicted casualties had they known two heroes were in the same restaurant as them.
• Lighter and Softer: Very much in comparison to canon Worm, due to the very comedic takedowns of most of the Capes that get in Taylor's way.
• Lightning Can Do Anything: Taylor's power uses lightning strikes to reprogram Coil's computer to email the PRT all his evil plans, then activate his base self-destruct (on a much shorter timespan than he programmed in) and play a mocking message.
• Literal Metaphor: Kaiser and Hookwolf getting crushed by a ton of blue ice when they try to kidnap Taylor to put pressure on her dad. In other words (as pointed out by Clockblocker and a random PHO user), they got shat on from a great height.
• Love at First Punch: When Jamie Nightingale first met David/Eidolon, the first thing she did was call him out on all the human problems he could solve, but doesn't because he wanted to focus on parahuman problems. After he gets his head on straight, he goes back to thank her for being his inspiration, and they end up falling in love.

M-Z

• Made of Explodium: Due to a mishandling of the Chicken Festival, there isn't enough helium to fill all the balloons. The employee responsible instead fills one with hydrogen. It wouldn't have been an issue had Oni Lee not shot the balloon.
• The Matchmaker: Taylor's power goes out of its way to get Eidolon and Panacea girlfriends. It also shows it has its own plans for her when Glory Girl gets interrupted in her second attempt to ask Brian out by a bird defecating on her shoulder.
• Million to One Chance: Many people comment about the events set up by Taylor's power coming in this flavor.
• Mugging the Monster:
  • Russian Roulette hears about a supposedly lucky cape, and sets out to pit his own luck against hers and take her down. He has no idea that his lucky streak is actually just Taylor's power setting him up. Needless to say, when he tries to shoot her, his luck runs out.
  • Emma stomps up to try to belittle Taylor and hurt her feelings — only to be intercepted by Tattletale, who not only makes a specialty of that sort of emotional warfare, but also has a power that makes her superhumanly good at it. And has the rest of the Undersiders standing right behind her, such as Brian, over six feet tall and with muscles on his muscles.
    Lisa: Oh, you don't want to see pictures of yourself? Huh. I thought there was no such thing as bad publicity, even for a model. I thought maybe you could sell toilets with this one.
• Negated Moment of Awesome: Villainous example with Butcher's "fight" against Taylor. Picture this: she is face to face with Taylor Hebert, the luckiest girl in Brockton Bay. She's fought her way across America to get to this point. On the way, she's lost fifty followers and all but one teammate to innumerable dangers (including one that got eaten by an alligator in Florida shortly after entering Brockton Bay). She's delivered her Pre-Asskicking One-Liner. Her teammate has depowered the 'lucky girl'. Her minigun is spinning up, preparing to unleash a hail of leaden death. And then she gets launched skyward on a manhole cover propelled by a Leviathan-generated water jet, and finally she is scooped up by the Simurgh, never to be seen again.
• Nerves of Steel:
  • Director Piggot has a peaceful and cordial discussion with the Heberts about Taylor's powerful, capricious, luck-based power and how to move forward from there. When they leave, she finally allows herself to relax, admitting to herself that this is one of the few times she's actually been scared out of her mind.
  • When Amy realizes that Jack Slash and Bonesaw were in the same restaurant as her and Victoria, she calmly plans a way to get out of the situation, considering the many ways things could go wrong. That isn't to say she didn't worry about Victoria accidently putting everyone in danger.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: After the majority of the E88 leadership is arrested, Purity wants to go hero, but there is a dilemma of what to do with Alabaster: drop him off to the PRT, or force him to leave town? Not liking the idea of betrayal, Rune tries to help Alabaster escape, but they are then beset by the Slaughterhouse 9. Alabaster ends up dying by Hatchet Face, neatly ending the dilemma.
• Non-Action Protagonist: Taylor doesn't have any weapons, training, Super-Strength, or any other direct combat power. What she does have is extreme luck; her power constantly, and without her conscious direction, shifts probabilities in her favour, setting up chains of Disaster Dominoes and Humiliation Congas for her enemies and deliverance for her friends. Taylor herself is basically a passenger, strolling through life and seeing the world rearranging itself around her.
• Obliviously Superpowered: Even when Taylor approaches Director Piggot to report the extreme coincidences that are happening around her, she still isn't sure it's actually her own power; she wonders if she might have a "guardian angel" of some sort. Director Piggot examines the events and concludes that it fits better with merely having a power beyond her conscious control. Taylor can't tell, in any case, even as the Humiliation Congas pile up on her enemies.
• On Second Thought: Director Piggot says this a lot as Taylor's power tells her it will be far better to change her decision.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Piggot starts to talk about the new parahuman in Brockton Bay, everybody is unconcerned. When she states she is scarier than Nilbog, everybody pays attention.
• Out-Gambitted: When the highest echelons of Cauldron ponder whether they should recruit Butterfly, Contessa refuses. When asked why, since her own power should help convince Taylor, Contessa replies she's already tried to model a recruitment speech, only to find out every Path ended with her receiving a Pie in the Face. Eventually, she realized this meant Taylor's power had already trumped the Path to Victory, making it useless against her.
• Pass the Popcorn:
  • Assault asks to be assigned to follow Taylor around with a video camera. He also requests an advance on his pay to buy a lot of popcorn.
  • A non-canon omake has the Simurgh descending on a small town in Kansas, stripping it of all its metal and electronics and stealing several thousand acres of corn, then returning to orbit and building a tremendous solar-powered microwave, all to watch Taylor's antics.
    She would have to remember butter next time.
• Pervert Revenge Mode: Upon learning that the pocketknife she felt in the pocket of the boy behind her...wasn't a pocketknife, Sophia has to be tased to get her off him. Director Piggot later confronts her about how she broke his nose, fractured his cheekbone, and kicked him in the testicles.
• Pie in the Face: Contessa runs a Path to find out who is behind Butterfly's power, and has to abruptly terminate the Path when she's about to be hit in the face with a banana cream pie.
  Contessa: I can't work around her, because her power's already worked around me!
• Pinball Projectile: Russian Roulette routinely demonstrates his luck by emptying one chamber of a pistol, spinning it, and then firing it at himself, always getting the empty barrel. When he shows Skidmark and Squealer, who have recently been hit with Leet's bad luck gun, the preliminary shot ricochets off a girder, goes through Skidmark's head, and cripples Squealer's tank with her inside (including filling the cabin with noxious smoke).
• Powers Do the Fighting: Taylor has no conscious control over her luck manipulation power; all she ever does in a fight is watch interestedly as her foes are taken out by sheer random chance, and hope that the outcome doesn't involve too much collateral damage.
• Power Incontinence: Taylor cannot control her probability manipulation, which has a singular, unfailing focus in keeping her safe and happy. However, even if the outcome is never in doubt, it's not above leading her into some potentially harmful situations, like giving her the need to use the toilet with the perfect timing for her to become the sole hostage of Jack Slash.
• The Pratfall: When the two toilet seats that Emma and Madison are standing on give way, both go down hard. Emma lands upside down, stuck between the cistern and the divider, with one arm pinned and the other having no leverage. On the other side, Madison lands butt-first in the toilet bowl itself, covered in the chocolate pudding she had planned to pour all over Taylor.
  Her knees were quite literally up around her ears. And as petite as she was, she looked wedged.
• Precision F-Strike: It has been many years since James Aramis has used profane language, but upon watching all his anvils fall through the window of his gallery, he breaks the Stunned Silence with a single four-letter word.
• Properly Paranoid: Once Piggot figures out Taylor's power, she takes it very seriously, to the point that, when she's interrupted in the middle of inviting her to join the Wards by a bug flying in her mouth, she hastily retracts the offer and pointedly endeavors to never let the PRT get on her bad side.
• Psycho Party Member: Alabaster turns into this during Purity's meeting with the remnants of the Empire 88, when he insults the rest of them as traitors and cowards for giving up on their captured comrades (even though they lack the manpower needed to break them out of PRT custody and rebuild the gang) and has to be taken down, at which point he switches to death threats, forcing the others to discuss options on how to deal with him.
• Raging Stiffie: Sophia conscripts some jocks to tie Taylor up with duct tape, but they end up tripping and tying themselves to Sophia instead. When they are finally released, Sophia asks one poor sap why he didn't cut them free with the pocket knife she felt digging into her, only to be told that... it wasn't a pocket knife. Her reaction is, bluntly put, unpleasant.
• Reassigned to Antarctica: After Detective Calhoun's attempt to capture an important witness falls apart, he's assigned to look into a case involving a locker at Winslow High School, which is both minor for someone of his talents, and also a terrible environment.
  Calhoun: Is this a punishment detail, sir?
  Reynolds: Would I do a thing like that?
• Rescue Sex: Variant example: Jamie Nightingale asks David to stay the night after he (accidentally) arranges for Panacea to regrow her leg.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Chick Norris, the baby chick Taylor adopts from the Chicken Festival. So cute that even Bitch smiles while holding it.
• Rube Goldberg Hates Your Guts: Taylor's power loves to set up events even before someone outright is a threat to Taylor. For example, before Kaiser ordered Taylor kidnapped in order to blackmail her father, a warehouse fridge that stored in-flight meals for a Florida to New England flight broke down. The slightly spoiled food was served to the flight's passengers, leading to heavy usage of the plane's bathrooms. That led to the formation of a large blue ice mass on the bottom of the plane's fuselage due to a hairline crack in the waste tanks becoming bigger. By the time the plane was over Brockton Bay, the mass of blue ice was over one ton in size, and the weather in the area was warm enough to break the ice free, sending it falling and crashing on top of Kaiser and Hookwolf, while sparing a kidnapped Taylor (and freeing her by dropping a knife on the ropes holding her tight and giving her Kaiser's undamaged phone). The only real weakness to this power is that it can't alter events that happened before her Trigger to set up a Rube Goldberg chain, but given that it only needed two weeks lead time to break every major gang in Brockton Bay, take down the Dragonslayers and the Slaughterhouse 9, neutralize the Endbringers and kill Scion, that isn't much of a weakness, and it gets less restrictive every day.
• Scare 'Em Straight: Coil is terrified into surrendering himself into PRT custody after Butterfly's power delivers a literally Anvilicious message.
• Screw the Money, I Have Rules!: Try to bribe Danny Hebert, and he'll rightly show you the door. The Empire 88's attempts to buy him off investigating merely confirm to him that he's stumbled onto something worth stopping. (And then they make the mistake of escalating by kidnapping Taylor — but he already knows about her power, and trusts it to keep her safer than he could. Taylor has his back, too, encouraging him not to give in.)
  There was a freedom, he found, in being able to deny another person something they wanted from you, something that you did not want to give. Could he do with ten thousand dollars? Of course he could. But could he accept the inevitable strings that would slowly, inexorably, invisibly enmesh him into tighter and tighter coils if he allowed this first bribe to go through?
  The answer, of course, was 'no'.
• The Scrooge: Paul Garibaldi reached his position as the owner of Garibaldi's Bakery "by never letting go of a dollar that he didn't have to." This extends to keeping a van whose tyres and brakes and engine don't work properly, without even maintaining it, and employing his cousin Francis only as a driver instead of a partner, while docking Francis' pay for any late delivery. Francis keeps to the backstreets for his deliveries because he knows that any police officer would declare the van unroadworthy if they saw it.
• Shout-Out:
  • Besides L33t's inventions paying homage to Ghostbusters and Portal (going so far, for the former, as tuning the humming of their power packs to the theme song), when he and Uber meet Taylor and recognize her as "the lucky girl", they prostrate themselves before her, chanting "We're not worthy!"
  • The police captain running the Frederickson sting is called Reynolds. He refers to his people as his 'crew', and asks himself, 'why can't things go smooth?'.
• Shower of Angst: Contessa has her Freak Out there after realizing Taylor's Shard has killed Scion and that Cauldron is next if they dare looking at her funny.
• Slippery Skid:
  • During a chicken festival, a stall owner ends up spilling a barrel of cooking oil, and the Undersiders and their giant dogs step right into it.
  • Later, Armsmaster takes a very embarrassing spill too, just as he considers arresting the Undersiders in opposition to Taylor's feelings on the matter.
• Sneeze of Doom: Sort of; when Saint first tries to turn a dial on a found String Theory super weapon off, he sneezes and turns it from "Low" to "Medium". That isn't the "doom" part; the fact that he keeps trying to turn it off and only succeeds in turning it higher is.
• Stating the Simple Solution: As part of Accord's end-world-hunger plan, Blasto tries to create a plant that can grow anywhere while requiring not too many nutrients and ensuring it cannot compete with already extant food sources, but he's hitting an obstacle with trying to make it so it can grow in cold and hot climates. Panacea suggests creating different plants that can grow in different climates.
• Story-Breaker Power: Taylor's luck power. It is so damned powerful that it can outthink Coil and Contessa, and that's without her even knowing about them.
• Stronger with Age: Every day that passes gives Taylor's power more random events to work with.
• Stunned Silence: Coil when his attempt to prevent his base from self-destructing not only does not work, but the system mocks him (something he's quite sure he didn't program) before making the self-destruction sequence a lot shorter.
• Tampering with Food and Drink:
  • Part of Kaiser's takedown involved causing a plane load of airline food to spoil sufficiently to give all the passengers the runs.
  • Amy has Victoria distract the waiter carrying Jack Slash's order so she can add highly modified E. coli to his soup, sending him running to the bathroom within seconds.
• Tarred And Feathered: This happens to Lung he chases after the Undersiders. The tar? Lung fell into a tar truck out for road repairs. The feathers? The chase ended at a chicken-themed festival. For good measure, he's then buried up to the neck in concrete.
• Tempting Fate: After his mishandling of the F-Driver causes it to harmlessly discharge into a portal, Saint allows himself to breathe as the gun powers down and only has time to say "Well, that wasn't so ba-" before it powers back up as a final "fuck you" (accompanied by a literal pre-recorded one) from String Theory.
• This Is Gonna Suck: This is how Crusader reacts to Uber and Leet joining the fight against the Siberian.
  • It did, but not the way he thought.
• Throw the Dog a Bone: For some of the folks caught up as pawns of Taylor's powers, they do end up better off.
  • Purity, Rune, and Crusader will get a chance to become legitimate heroes and get a part of the bounty on the Slaughterhouse 9.
  • Uber and L33t get the bounty for Shatterbird and the Siberian and L33t uses the last of the luck energy to build self-repairing, self-recharging portal guns that Taylor's power sometimes uses for its own ends.
  • Panacea and Eidolon get their issues resolved and end up with significant others.
  • The Undersiders get to go straight and hang out with Taylor. This is occasionally very entertaining.
  • Once the Simurgh and the other Endbringers start doing good deeds due to Eidolon getting a new outlook, the case against Canary falls apart; though she has to pay damages, she is eventually able to perform again.
    • The victims of Heartbreaker are freed from his influence by the Simurgh and proceed to kill him. Ziz also does Dragon a solid by paying a visit to the base of the late Dragonslayers in Toronto.
  • After getting almost blown up by Crawler's exploding flatulence, Burnscar ends up getting retrieved by Faultline's Crew, who include her Only Friend from the asylum and are thus possibly the only group in the setting who are willing to take her in, keep her safe and hidden, and make an attempt to unfuck her mind rather than killing her or turning her in for the bounty.
  • Even the bystanders often get some kind of a payoff, such as the successful chicken festival revitalising a poultry business, or the gallery owner getting a new spark in his marriage.
• Toilet Humor: A few of Taylor's targeted events involve toilets - most prominently the mass of blue ice (frozen leaked waste from airplane toilets) that dropped onto Kaiser's head with surgical precision.
  • The Trio's attempt to ambush Taylor in the bathroom notably results in Madison being stuck butt first in a toilet bowl.
  • A bad interaction between Burnscar's power and Crawler passing gas at the same time ends up with Jack having his facial hair burnt off and Burnscar missing.
  • After getting food poisoning from Panacea, Jack has to make a very unpleasant trip to the bathroom.
  • Glory Girl ends up victim of a Bird-Poop Gag when she tries to make a move on Brian.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Saint, when two instances of bad luck have you turning the dial on a Tinkertech super weapon up instead of down, maybe you should let one of your colleagues handle it instead of letting your pride get the better of you?
  • When the Teeth get wind of Taylor's luck powers annihilating the Slaughterhouse 9, they decide to actively target her. None of them live to regret it.
• Troubled Fetal Position: Contessa, the boogeyman of Cauldron, ends up Cry Laughing in her shower (directed by her power, no less!) after she realises how powerful Butterfly's power actually is - powerful enough to kill Scion and make the Simurgh laugh.
• Trumplica: Frederickson is a failed con artist who makes his living by supplying the Merchants with the ingredients for their drugs. He is grossly overweight, wears a terrible fake tan, and has a ridiculous combover hairstyle. During a failed police sting, he receives a massive electrical shock, leaving him unable to do much more than parrot out-of-context quotes of Trump catchphrases.
• Umpteenth Customer: Taylor wins the store copy of an upcoming video game when she happens to be the millionth customer to walk inside, which she gives to Alec as thanks for making Emma hit herself in the face with a bowl of pudding.
• Underestimating Badassery: More than one character underestimates just how powerful Taylor's luck powers are, even when they know that she has them. Coil makes a single attempt to figure out just how far they extend, and quickly discovers that the answer is "much further than he was ready for," when his threat against her father results in her power disabling the goon he sent, disabling him, handing over his base to the PRT, and threatening him into devoting the rest of his life to Taylor's happiness.
• Unluckily Lucky: Taylor's powers don't prevent her from walking into danger, but they will make sure she walks out completely unscathed and, in cases, laughing.
• Villainous Valor: Alabaster may be an unapologetic racist and card-carrying member of the Empire 88, but when faced with the likes of Hatchet Face of the Slaughterhouse Nine, his thoughts go to the fellowship he is loyal to and the comrades he refuses to abandon, which is why he chooses to make like Butch and Sundance and go out in a blaze of glory.
• Wave-Motion Gun: The Dragonslayers track down an old Tinker lab that contains the F-Driver, one of String Theory's old devices. It proves instrumental in killing Scion.
• What Does This Button Do?: After getting the F-Driver's switch stuck on "FUCK YOU", Saint hopes that pressing the red button next to it will unlock it, over Mags telling him Don't Touch It, You Idiot! Guess who was right?
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: The main focus of Taylor's power, with a ridiculous focus on Laser-Guided Karma at anyone who tries to harm her. The only issue is that she has no conscious control over it.
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?: Russian Roulette has a marked fear of chickens. When his attempt to attack Taylor utterly fails, Chick Norris walks to him and renders him almost catatonic with fear.
• Wrong Bathroom Incident: Uber isn't comfortable with entering a girl's bathroom in search of luck energy. L33t is unimpressed since they've already broken into the school in the middle of the night, and the chance of a girl being there is basically zero.
  L33t: You want I should protect you from the cooties?
• You Can't Fight Fate: Jack's power gives him a strong urge to avoid Brockton at all costs. Unfortunately, due to the Slaughterhouse Nine stealing a van with a faulty GPS, that's exactly where he ends up and where he meets his fate.
• You Do Not Want To Know: Director Piggot has to investigate how Taylor's power managed to drop a literal ton of blue ice on half the Empire 88 capes, but she isn't sure she actually wants to know the gory details.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: Crusader's reaction when L33t's Ghostbuster energy trap captures the Siberian.

---

"Stay out of her way. Don't do anything that might upset her. If you ever do encounter her, be very, very polite."