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Fanfic / Living The Dream

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Taylor Herbert’s had a rough life. Living on her own, she spends nearly all her time tinkering with bizarre and unorthodox gadgets, which have a tendency to explode or malfunction in bizarre ways. Then one of said gadgets ends up creating a strange floating star. Things only start getting stranger from there.

Living the Dream is a crossover fic bewteen Worm and Kirby by stabbyGamer on Spacebattles.

Work can be found here.


Living the Dream contains examples of

  • Adaptational Heroism: Thanks to Taylor getting her away from Coil’s territory, Tattletale never joins the Undersiders and now goes by the name Sherlock, though she’s still involved in some criminal enterprises.
  • Adaptational Superpower Change: Taylor triggers two years earlier than in canon and is a Tinker who specializes in a form of energy called aether.
  • Badass Boast: Taylor gives an impressive one early in the story:
    Taylor: (to her star) …There are monsters out there, you know? The Blasphemies. The Slaughterhouse Nine. Nilbog. People with powers that actively use them to make other peoples' lives worse. Walking nightmares. And that's just in countries like ours, where things are mostly the same as they were before powers. The Yangban runs most of Asia with an iron fist. Africa is a bloody wasteland. Germany is fighting a guerilla war against Gesellschaft, they're the E88's parent organization so I might as well just call them what they are - they're Nazis. The population of the Birdcage, who knows where that is. And... the Endbringers. I want to end them. All of them. This world is harsh enough already. But I'm not strong enough yet. So... we work our way up. Yeah, both of us. I know the Bay. Born and raised. So... we keep building. Keep fighting. We take it all back from the monsters, one step at a time. The people they've hurt. The places they've destroyed. The dreams they've crushed. We'll build it all back up, bigger and better than before!
  • Batter Up!: Taylor wields a bat with her META armor.
  • Cloudcuckoolander's Minder: Reflex becomes Taylor’s when he moves into her lab.
  • Ditzy Genius: Living alone, Taylor has picked up some bizarre habits and has no one to reign in her tinker impulses, at first, but she is still a tinker and a highly competent one.
  • Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Thanks to Taylor’s Dark and Troubled Past she tends to react negatively to what she views as Condescending Compassion and has aggressively turned down recruitment pitches from the PRT.
  • Entertainingly Wrong: Several of the guesses that the PRT makes concerning Taylor come off as this.
  • Fight Magnet: While all parahumans are this to some extent, Taylor can’t seem to ever leave her lab without running into trouble at some point.
  • Killer Rabbit: Taylor’s star may be goofy looking, but it can easily move at supersonic speeds, is incredibly durable, and can create massive explosions of energy. And when it transforms into the Star Allies Sparkler it actually puts up a decent fight against Simurgh. She still counts this even more when she transforms into Stella Nova. While she is just a small pixie like creature, she is stronger than she looks and according to a brief POV from her she’s still in the process of regaining her power.
  • Mass Super-Empowering Event: Whatever happened during the last part of the fight with Simurgh created an energy wave that gave roughly half the animal population on earth superpowers.
  • Minor Living Alone: After her father's death, Taylor became a Ward of the State, and lives on her own at her old house on a government stipend. It's implied she was meant to go live with the Barnes, but after Emma turned on her she'd rather tear her own heart than under the same roof as her friend-turned-bully.
  • Noodle Incident: Two of Taylor’s earlier experiments apparently failed in bizarre ways, with one creating an explosion of cotton candy and the other causing it to rain tiny energy stars for two hours. She also apparently sleep tinkered at some point, with the end result creating a huge oil stain.
  • Poor Communication Kills: The main reason Taylor has yet to join any major superhero team and spends most of the story as a lone wolf is that most of the other heroes she meets bungle their first impressions by accidentally hitting her Berserk Button or in some instances mistaking her for a villain and attacking her.
  • Powered Armor: Taylor creates a set of this she calls META. No guesses as what it's inspired by.
  • Super Power Lottery: Downplayed. Taylor's speciality as a Tinker is centered around a versatile substance called aether. Aether defies many of the laws of physics and Taylor theorizes it is what superpowers run on.
  • Uplifted Animal: Implied with Reflex’s cat Mr. Fluffles as he seems much smarter than a regular cat.
  • Villainous Breakdown: Coil is implied to have undergone one. In the aftermath of Simurgh’s attack he keeps sending out mercenaries armed with tinkertech weapons to attack random targets for no apparent reason aside from causing chaos.
  • Wrestler in All of Us: Taylor in her META armor manages to suplex Hookwolf into the ground. Simurgh apparently pulls some impressive wrestling moves on several of the capes during her attack on Brockton.
  • You Killed My Father: One of the reasons why Taylor hates the Protectorate is that, when her father was killed (one of Shadow Stalker's bolts ricocheted on Kaiser's armor and hit Danny) they only forced Stalker in the Wards and buried the entire mess, not even bothering to do any justice.

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