Mutant Deviations
is a Worm fanfic by Slider214 or alternatively TemporalKnight. It takes the consequences of Taylor's tendency to shunt emotions into her swarms, the way those imprints affect the Queen Administrator shard, the consequences of Glory Girl punching first and asking questions later at the exact worst time, and then running with the Butterfly Effect of this like there's no tomorrow.
Taylor, as she is wont to, plans on ways to protect herself from becoming a target for all the factions in Brockton Bay, while doing her best to be a hero. Especially after her initial foray of thwarting a bank robbery involving the Undersiders quickly becomes a near debacle. Afterwards, thanks to some advice from Amy Dallon, she comes up with a plan to start a team. The planned founding members being: Queen (Taylor herself) and Hive (her supposed Case 53 enforcer - which is actually her controlled swarm in part).
Things quickly go wrong when Glory Girl sees the tail end of a conversation between Queen and Tattletale (both having very good reasons to want Coil out of the picture in this setting). Glory decides to beat the bad guy up nearly accidentally killing Taylor in the process. The consequences of Taylor diving deeper than ever in an attempt to not die, Amy reaching her Breaking Point healing people very injured from Vicky's enthusiasm, and humanity becoming infectious for the Queen Administrator shard start having some long term deviations from then on.
Can also be found on Archive of Our Own, FanFiction, and Sufficient Velocity.
It is now complete, and with a sequel that's a Mass Effect crossover called "Mass Deviations".
This fanfic contains examples of the following:
- Adaptation Name Change: Amy after leaving New Wave after Vicky nearly kills Taylor goes from Panacea to Darwin via rebranding. Several others include Rune becoming Artillery and Tattletale becoming Insight. Averted with Vista and Clockblocker as both were stated to be careful with their contracts and were able to keep control of their names no matter which team they're a part of. However, most recently, it's been played with concerning Burnscar. She's technically being renamed, however she's actually just going by her original name in-universe now. Just nobody really remembers that one anymore because of her more famous actions.
- Adaptive Ability: Part of what makes fighting Monarch so tricky. While it itself doesn't have one once it is exposed to a parahuman ability it can reproduce specialised offspring to counter specific powers and tactics. For example Fireproof bugs to deal with Lung's pyrokinesis and exploding bugs with superacid in their stomachs to deal with his Healing Factor.
- Amazon Brigade: The Outcasts start out as an all-girl team. Even picking up Clockblocker as The One Guy does nothing to hinder the in-universe memes about Taylor being Lustrum's successor or jokes about her having a harem.
- Ambiguously Human: Definitely Taylor post Shadow Stalker fight, where she to all intents and purposes fell to her death. QA wasn't willing to let it end there and with some help from the network was able to put her mind back together near enough to what it was. Taylor is quite open and okay with the fact, and thinks that the same is becoming true of others in The Outcasts.
- A Mother to Her Men: Taylor is fiercely protective of her team and anyone else she considers "her people".
- An Arm and a Leg: Amy loses a leg in the Leviathan fight.
- And Then John Was a Zombie: Taylor and Queen Administrator have the potential to be a nascent Entity. Contessa's plan is to guide them into it, and it occurs at the end of the Desecration arc.
- And Then What?: One character asking this drives a major plot point. Contessa used her power to simulate what would happen should Cauldron actually succeed in killing Scion. The surviving shards would be without guidance or purpose and launch into a Succession Crisis to be the new Entity / network hub, with one of the worst candidates being Path to Victory itself. Contessa's plot is to set up Taylor and QA as a successor who would understand and care about humanity.
- Antagonistic Offspring: Taylor and Danny Hebert. Or rather Queen and Coil.
- Anticlimax Boss : Khonsu. Clonedolon summons it during the Echidna battle to try and get the other Endbringers to stop fighting each other. It appears for less than a minute before Insight and Flechette blast it to Kingdom Come.
- The Siberian too. With 2 people (Flechette and Insight again) who can bypass her invulnerability, she's dealt with fairly easily.
- Armor-Piercing Attack: Flechette and The Siberian, as in canon. Insight gets this power too after she 2nd Triggers.
- Badass Boast: Amy to the newly arrived Flechette, "Welcome to Brockton Bay, where the monsters come to hunt, and then we hunt them."
- Badass Normal: Madison Clements, the only non-Parahuman in the outcasts, who shoots Jack Slash to death. No longer the case as she does eventually get powers around the time of the Echidna fight.
- Battle Harem: Commonly believed to be the status of the Outcasts to Taylor/Queen in the pages of both PHO in-universe and in a meta sense on spacebattles.
- Break Them by Talking: Taylor uses Gallant's power to bombard Scion with basically the sum total of humanity's emotion and show it there's more to existence than The Purpose to get it to finally stand down.
- Brick Joke / Chekhov's Skill: Hive is mildly impressed with Madison's reflexes and aim when they first meet. She's the one who blows away Jack Slash.
- Bug War: narrowly averted thanks to Taylor's intervention.
- But Now I Must Go: Scion departs Earth to deal with the rest of the Entities; by conversion or annihilation.
- Chronic Hero Syndrome: Taylor goes out of her way to help anyone who needs it or asks for it. Even with Burnscar, a member of the Slaughterhouse Nine, her thought process is merely to acknowledge that she'll be putting another target on her back, but refusing to help is never considered an option.
- Clueless Chick-Magnet: Taylor is honestly perplexed as to how she keeps picking up girls and adding them to her team, and doesn't realize several of them are interested in her until she is told outright.
- "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot: One of Amy's experimental butterflies escapes. Taylor sees this and Amy waves it off as nothing to worry about. This butterfly eventually becomes Monarch and nearly wrecks the city. Taylor gives Amy both barrels for not telling her at the time, when they could have nipped it in the bud.
- Death by Adaptation: Fenja, Menja, Purity, Newter, and Gregor the Snail are killed in the attack on Leviathan.
- Deal with the Devil: The Slaughterhouse Nine breaks Shadow Stalker out of prison and recruits her in exchange for granting personal revenge on Taylor.
- Discard and Draw: Lisa Second-Triggers with a cross of Miss Militia's weapon-spawning power and Lung's scale-to-threat power.
- Eaten Alive: Taylor's horde goes all the way on Shadow Stalker and costs Jack Slash his right arm and half his face.
- Enemy Civil War: Endbringer Civil War. Clonedolon summons all 3 Endbringers to the Echidna fight. QA attempts to override the network, which leads to the 3 getting into a disagreement about how to proceed, which quickly turns violent.
- Enemy Mine:
- Endbringer fights, naturally- Leviathan's attack on Brockton sees Bakuda help Kaiser and Hookwolf slow down Leviathan.
- Taylor, the PRT, Empire 88, the ABB, Coil, and Cauldron against Monarch.
- Sophia Hess is so obsessed with revenge on Taylor for getting thrown in jail that she joins the Slaughterhouse Nine, which gets a retroactive Kill Order on her after her death (though that is just for the purposes of giving her a bounty that Queen can collect).
- Everyone against the Slaughterhouse Nine-
- Jack Slash and Cherish are tag-teamed by Watchtower and Monarch. Cherish is splatted off screen while Jack gets a bullet based Death of a Thousand Cuts.
- Mannequin is killed by Glory Girl/Sanctuary via Trans sonic Human Cannonball.
- Bonesaw is killed by Darwin's bugs
- Shatterbird is killed by Artillery squishing her with a slab of concrete.
- Crawler is killed by Lung breathing fire down his gob in classic Godzilla fashion.
- The Nine's new recruit, Shadow Stalker, is killed by Queen's swarm eating her alive after throwing themselves off of Wilmslow's roof.
- Burnscar defects to the Outcasts
- The Siberian scarpers after the swarm finds and nearly eats Manton. She gets hers later from a combination of Flechette's power opening up the Stinger (Manton's) Shard's pocket dimension, Queen determine where it is, then Insight's 2nd Trigger powers giving her the means to blow it to Kingdom Come.
- Flat "What": After Taylor hijacks control of The Endbringers by subjugating High Priest, she tries to make them less terrifying. That apparently involves Ziz choosing their wardrobe. This is Cassie's response.
- For Want Of A Nail: Two very specific instances of this provide the main deviations from Worm...
- 1: the identity of who becomes Coil... Danny Hebert instead of Thomas Calvert.
- 2: When Coil gets his powers tested by Cauldron it is in a Precog battle... with Contessa. After the testing is over Coil asks his opponent one thing do you think about the consequences of your plans. She tells him no, since if the plan works, why bother. Well as seen in He Who Fights Monsters the consequences of one particular plan should really be looked at.
- Gone Horribly Right: Amy tried to create bugs to go after Empire 88 members. if not for Queen Mastering Monarch, it would have resulted in humanity losing a Bug War. Leviathan would have been a casualty. And due to Eidolon's carelessness, they crack Interdimensional Travel and can access all Earth's and Cauldron's Pocket Dimension.
- Heel Realization: Played for Laughs after Taylor watches "Simmy" and Mimi (formerly Burnscar) high fiving.Taylor (in narration): How had this become my life? Was it too late to go back to living in fear of being inducted into my father's criminal empire in a misguided effort to fix the Bay? Wait... had I somehow become the misguided, scary, criminal empire that was trying to fix the Bay?
- He Who Fights Monsters: Played With and Played Straight at the same time. Contessa in looking at the consequences of Cauldron's plans to kill Zion/Scion after a conversation with Coil is horrified by the degrees of magnitude the situation on Earth Bet goes downhill after Golden Morning would take place canonically. Probably directly referencing the Titans in Ward, Contessa begins to make a few small changes to her plans in order to try and ensure that something will be in place to prevent the disaster that a post GM Earth Bet would endure Entityless. Mainly making Queen Administrator into a fledgling Entity in her own right and making Taylor her equivalent of Zion via mental mapping and connections via emotion shunting and deep dives through her insect control. Ironically enough finding out about the entity creation part of Contessa's attempted backtrack from the
Moral Event Horizon convinces Alexandria that Cauldron's Path To Victory has done just the opposite. - Hikikomori: Madison starts the fic as one. She gets better when she finds out Taylor is alive.
- Hive Mind: Darwin creates one controlled by a Hive Queen called Monarch.
- Hive Queen: the basis of Taylor's cape name. Monarch, a giant butterfly, also counts before getting Mastered by Taylor.
- Killed Offscreen: Amy is too busy trying (and ultimately succeeding) to restore Mouse Protector from Murder Rat that she doesn't even acknowledge Bonesaw's demise as Monarch's bugs rip her apart. Cherish is killed offscreen by Monarch and Madison while chasing after Jack.
- Living Emotional Crutch: Taylor is Madison's. The rest of the Harem has noticed Madison's mental state. In the aftermath of the Shadow Stalker fight, and the belief that Taylor fell to her death, Maddie sneaks behind the school and tries to slit her own wrists. This also causes Lisa's Second Trigger, so the same is probably true of her too.
- Mission Control: Watchtower (Madison Clements) is this to the Outcasts. She's their computer whizz and through their family connections is one of the ways of procuring whatever the gang needs without arousing suspicion.
- Mundane Utility: Canary's Compelling Voice can help with pain relief, up to and including Thinker Headaches.
- Mythology Gag: Possibly also Shown Their Work, Lisa's Second Trigger ability is one of the powers she would have got in the event of a hypothetical Broken Trigger and going Titan during the finale of Ward.
- Never Gets Drunk: Taylor by the Damages arc is a type 3.
- Nothing Is the Same Anymore: The Leviathan fight and Queen's revelations rocks Cauldron to its core. Alexandria now knows that Eidolon is responsible for The Endbringers, has to be talked out of killing him on the spot, and realising that all her sacrifices have been for nothing declares Screw This, I'm Outta Here Eidolon suffers a Heroic BSoD because he doesn't know how to make them stop. Legend finds out the hard way about the character of the people he's worked with for years. Even Contessa, Miss I Did What I Had to Do, is ashamed of herself.
- Now or Never Kiss: Lisa kisses Taylor before the battle with Leviathan. They start dating afterwards
- Oh, Crap!: Monarch, a giant butterfly controlling a Hive Mind of mutant bugs, causes this in Empire 88, Taylor, Rune, Dinah, even Contessa...
- Only Sane Man: Kevin Lemark, Coil's right hand man. He has to remind his boss about pretty much everything that doesn't directly pertain to his plans like a living Personal Organiser, including details of his personal life like Taylor's Birthday, and is probably the only one who calls him out of his more irrational moments, can talk back to him and get away with it.
- Rage Breaking Point: Jack Slash after Queen Administrator basically permabans Broadcast from networking with Shards, and he notices that his secondary Thinker ability has stopped working. To be fair it was a RBP for QA too, being thoroughly fed up with Broadcast's shit.
- Revenge Before Reason: Allying with the Slaughterhouse Nine for revenge on Taylor does nothing to help Shadow Stalker, and only gets her a posthumous retroactive Kill Order so that a bounty can be assigned. Queen gets the credit.
- Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The Siberian flees Brockton Bay after the only other surviving Slaughterhouse Nine member, Burnscar, defects to the Outcasts.
- Shout-Out: The Author includes a Fanfic Rec with each chapter.
- Sweet Tooth: Not surprisingly, being an insect, Monarch has one. Threatening to revoke her candy privileges is a pretty reliable way of keeping her in line. It a regular source of humour.
- There Are No Therapists: Averted; Jessica Yamada has Taylor as a patient for a short time. After she has a My God, What Have I Done? moment in an Endbringer Shelter during the Leviathan fight and consequently triggers, Super Therapy is basically Emma Barnes' power in a nutshell, which she inadvertently uses on Taylor (due to having only just got them and thus having no control, especially when she's stressed) to start down the long road to patching things up between them. She takes the Cape Name Heartsight.
- Took a Level in Badass: Madison. She goes from a depressed web-browsing shut-in who spends all her time in her bedroom to hunting down and killing Jack Slash in a protracted execution.
- Unwanted Harem: Taylor, though she part won't admit it and part can't see it, has amassed her own little lesbian harem. Lisa is first lady, Madison's feelings have been lit up in neon for a while, and Cassie eventually admits to having a crush. Possibly Flechette too. Hell, even frickin' Emma. The only question mark over Amy is whether she chooses Taylor or Vicky, since she has finally had a (100% consensual, albeit Truth Or Dare prompted) kiss with the latter.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: One of Amy's butterflies escapes. That butterfly becomes Monarch.
- You Don't Look Like You: Canary after Amy gives her a makeover to disguise herself after she gets sprung from prison. Those in the know can see some resemblance but anyone else would be none the wiser.
