LORD DOOM WOULD LIKE TO POINT OUT HIS NAME IS SPELLED WITH ALL CAPS.
Lord Doom is a Worm fanfiction posted on SpaceBattles.com, here
, and completed in March 2020.
Even though the bullying didn't escalate to the locker incident, Taylor Hebert still triggered with powers. Instead of controlling bugs, she's a Tinker who can make tiny drones. Lots of tiny drones. But before she can make enough to be a serious hero, she'll need some starting capital, and that's much easier to do as a villain...
LORD DOOM IS BEYOND THESE TROPES:
- Adaptational Superpower Change: Taylor stays a Master here, but instead of controlling arthropods, insects, arachnids, and crustaceans, her power is instead "limited" to drones that she creates.
- Becoming the Mask: Lord Doom was supposed to be a temporary identity to quickly steal enough funds to get Taylor started, but she finds that the Large Ham personality is too much fun to drop it entirely, and continues to make use of his persona when she has dirtier jobs to do. She also notices that her thinking has been influenced in the long term by acting that way.The theatricality, the bravado, the utter disregard for the thoughts of others, Lord Doom was all that and more. From the start he had been a mask Taylor could put on that would let her confront the world. He was a way for Taylor to escape, to be someone else for a little while, a person that had none of her problems or issues.
But wear any mask for long enough and your face underneath changes to match it. - Betrayal Insurance: Taylor is quite concerned about what Tattletale may have been able to figure out about her, but consoles herself that "if Tattletale's power was good enough to know Taylor was Myriad then her power was also good enough to know Taylor had very high resolution images of her masked face from a dozen different angles."
- Blatant Lies: Tattletale claims that she knows Lord Doom is interested in teaming up due to lack of resources because she can read minds. For the record, Lord Doom is a cluster of microdrones inside of a cloak, so Taylor immediately knows that Tattletale is lying, and fires back with "LORD DOOM FINDS IT UNLIKELY YOU ARE READING LORD DOOM'S MIND. BUT YES."
- Bring It: After forcing his way into a dogfighting ring, Lord Doom gestures to Hookwolf and invites him to "COME AT ME." He proceeds to ride Hookwolf like a bronco, humiliating him and making him completely miss the fact that the Undersiders are looting everything not nailed down.
- Cape Swish: Taylor's heroic persona has a cape held by drones, "to make sure it always flapped in exactly the right, heroic, way."
- Cassandra Bystander: Taylor reveals that she is Lord Doom to Shadow Stalker, knowing that no one else will listen.Taylor: FEEL FREE TO TELL THEM ABOUT THIS, NO ONE WILL EVER BELIEVE YOU.
- Death by Adaptation: Lung managed to survive the events of both Worm and Ward in canon. Here, he is killed by being transmuted into a glass statue by Bakuda.
- Dies Differently in Adaptation: Hookwolf is killed by Foil in Worm, but here is killed by Taylor as Myriad via a Zerg Rush of taser drones.
- Faking the Dead: Taylor arranges for one of the Lord Doom instances to be caught in a Bakuda time dilation grenade, and self-destructs all the others at the same instant, giving heroes and villains alike the impression that Lord Doom is gone for good. After all, Myriad is well established at that point, and she has punished the Empire for attacking her civilian identity, so it's time for Lord Doom to retire. Unless she really needs him back.
- False Flag Operation: In Taylor's heroic debut as "Myriad", her first public action is to chase Lord Doom away.
- The Gloves Come Off: Taylor doesn't like using bombs salvaged from Bakuda, not least because Bakuda might be pleased to hear about the results. But in response to the Empire attacking her out of costume, she's going all-out.
- Large Ham: Taylor initially chose to ham up Lord Doom's persona so that the PRT wouldn't come after him too hard. When that doesn't work out, she still keeps it up because it's funny.LORD DOOM: WHO DARES DISTURB LORD DOOM?
Clockblocker: Seriously? Lord Doom? With the glowing red eyes too. - Laughing Mad: Bakuda is "cackling madly without a shred of humor" during the video she posts of killing Lung, for an entire minute. The Wards mostly don't bother watching it, but Clockblocker has seen it all and found it disturbing.
- Light/Darkness Juxtaposition: Since Lord Doom is just a black cloak with glowing red eyes, Myriad has white armour with green highlights, for maximum contrast.
- Look Behind You: Lord Doom suggests that Armsmaster look behind him, not because he actually needs Armsmaster distracted, but just for the entertainment value of seeing Armsmaster's reaction to a second instance of Lord Doom stealing his motorcycle and escaping with a bag of loot.Lord Doom: SWEET RIDE.
- Lured into a Trap: When war breaks out between the Empire 88 and the ABB, the Empire steadily pushes the ABB back, until suddenly the ABB ambushes them with an assortment of Bakuda's exotic bombs, slaughtering many of the Empire capes and forcing a retreat.
- Narrative Profanity Filter:
- When Lord Doom steals Armsmaster's tinkertech motorcycle, promptly crashes it, and then flies away into the sky while laughing, "Armsmaster said some things that were probably not PR approved." Unfortunately for Armsmaster, he was caught on camera and becomes a PHO meme.
- When all the gangs are invited to Somer's Rock to discuss the ongoing gang war, "For the record, we did invite the ABB. Bakuda told us no, but in less polite terms."
- No-Sell: Since Lord Doom is just a bunch of tiny drones hiding under a cloak, "he" can flat out ignore all sorts of attacks. For example, bullets will usually miss the drones, or will only take out one or two of the swarm, not enough to matter. Clockblocker's time-freezing only freezes the cloak, much to the PRT's bafflement."YOU FOOLS. LORD DOOM IS BEYOND TIME."
- Pooled Funds: Taylor doesn't have a good way to launder most of the Empire 88's money, but she still plans to steal it, and make a big pile for her drones to fly in and out of when she's bored.
- Self-Destruct Mechanism: Taylor routinely triggers the self destruct on any instances of Lord Doom that are captured or otherwise outlive their usefulness, incinerating everything. It prevents anyone from discovering her drones, and contributes to Lord Doom's mystique of apparent invulnerability, since he keeps coming back regardless.
- The Stinger: Coil manages to kidnap Dinah and plots how to use her to finally defeat Lord Doom... not knowing that Lord Doom is about to capture him in both timelines.
- Swiss-Army Superpower: Taylor's drones can carry all sorts of payloads. Lasers, tasers, armour, force fields, lifting, glowing, cameras, plus the factory drones that take raw materials and assemble more drones. Each one is individually weak and single-purpose, but in large numbers they're very powerful; Myriad is considered to be an "Alexandria package", essentially a Flying Brick with enhanced senses, due to the swarms of drones that protect her, carry her, and do her bidding. She can even make cruise missiles.There was surprisingly little difference between a drone and a missile; her power seemed to have zero issues with expendable use-once drones controlled from miles away.
- Tactical Withdrawal: After Lord Doom is blasted into the ground by hundreds of lasers, he flees and his voice is heard from a distance, "LORD DOOM CHOOSES TO MAKE A STRATEGIC WITHDRAWAL." (However, it's actually a setup; the lasers came from Taylor's heroic persona, Myriad.)
- These Hands Have Killed: Just before she passes out from a bullet wound, Taylor orders her drones to disable her attacker. Unfortunately, although the drones do understand the concept of stopping when the threat is gone, they interpret even twitching as a sign that the target is still active. Everyone agrees it was self defence, but she's still upset with herself.She had killed Hookwolf and every time she thought back or even looked at her taser drones, she felt her breath getting short and her vision narrow again.
- Third-Person Person: LORD DOOM ALWAYS REFERS TO HIMSELF BY NAME, NEVER AS "I". After all, how else would everyone know who he is?
- Totem Pole Trench: Lord Doom starts out as just half a dozen drones and a cloak, becoming more sophisticated as Taylor builds up her swarm. It's actually the source of most of "his" apparent powers; everyone (except Tattletale) thinks he has an invisible intangible Breaker state that can defeat Clockblocker's touch-based freezingnote and registers as non-living to Vista's spatial power.
- Zerg Rush: Taylor's power doesn't do large powerful drones; she's tried, it just doesn't work. Instead, it works with small drones in large numbers. For example, a laser drone is only powerful enough to blind a human. But when there are hundreds of them, that's a different story. Forty taser drones together are able to kill Hookwolf, blasting him en masse and repeatedly until he stops moving and then a few more times for good measure.
LORD DOOM IS MERCIFUL. IF YOU LEAVE THIS PAGE NOW, NO HARM WILL COME TO YOU.
