Fanfic / Paradoxical

Paradoxical is a Worm/Destiny crossover fanfic by ensou. It can be found on AO3, Fanfiction.net, and Sufficient Velocity.

Wherever she ends up, Taylor Hebert always seems to throw a wrench in things. Why would being resurrected and wielding the Light be any different?

Or: In which Taylor ends up becoming the Queen's left hand and the Vanguard has no idea how to handle it.

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This fanfic contains the following tropes:

• Achievements in Ignorance: Kali wonders how much of Taylor's seemingly unique abilities with the Light are the result of her working at finding everything it can do and how much is because she was simply never told that it couldn't be done due to lack of other Guardians during her training.
• Action Bomb: Taylor's fireflies. Being infused with Solar, they can swarm and latch on to their targets, and then promptly explode.
• All the Other Reindeer: Due to being the only human to live among the Awoken in the Reef, much less the only human member of the Queen's Guard, Taylor was treated with hostility and even assassination attempts. She receives this treatment, but she otherwise is seen with respect by the present day.
• Armor-Piercing Question: "When is a Guardian not a Guardian?" is a question posed by Mara Sov to her brother Uldren when the latter asks her why she let Taylor join her Guard. It's meant to be a riddle and an answer to his question. It takes him almost three years to find the answer: Mara allowed Taylor to join because while she was a Guardian, she has had zero interaction with the Last City, other Guardians, or the Speaker, meaning she's essentially a blank slate, much like how the Risen were before the Iron Lords and the Speaker came into power.
• Analogy Backfire: Taylor tries to explain how the shard connection works to Kali using an analogy with a cable box, forgetting for a moment that Kali's never heard of them.
• Animal Motifs: Fireflies for Taylor/Weaver. What seems to be her most powerful attack ability involves creating fireflies out of Solar Light and siccing them onto her enemies, where they promptly explode.
• Blessed with Suck: Upon arriving on Earth, Taylor reconnects with the Queen Administrator, and in the process, regains not only her memories of her old life, but also her powers. Unfortunately, she has zero control over who is affected by her powers. The only ones that aren't affected are the Guardians and Mara Sov. She relies on a Power Limiter in the form of a helmet, and later on a Techeun implant, to better control her powers.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Taylor's Ghost, Kali, is all black metal and sharp edges, but still good.
• Energy Bow: One of Taylor's tricks is to channel her Light directly through her bow in any element.
• The Extremist Was Right: The Darkness really wants the Traveler to see what Taylor and the Queen Administrator has become, since he considers them proof that he was right about the final pattern and how the universes, full of complexity and "unfavourable rules" due to the Traveler's intervention, was still able to produce a being like Taylor and the Queen Administrator that can hold domain over all. The Darkness want to see the Traveler so that he can "laugh and laugh and laugh".
• Fantastic Racism: Taylor's early tenure in the Reef under Mara Sov led to her being discriminated against by the other Reefborn Awoken, with one side story featuring an Awoken slave trader about to be executed claiming Taylor will "never be one of us". In Prince, Uldren initially holds contempt for Taylor since she's a Guardian and is confused why Mara would allow her to join her Guard until Mara gives him a riddle.
• Identity Amnesia: Prior to her meeting with Zachary and subsequent arrival on Earth, Taylor had no memories of her past. She regains her memories when they approach Earth, which causes the Queen Administrator to reconnect with her.
• Insistent Terminology: Taylor does not refer to herself as a Guardian, but as a "Risen", which was the original name Guardians went by when they first started cropping up.
• Multi-Melee Master: Taylor is highly skilled with several different weapons.
• Ontological Mystery: Somehow Taylor ended up on Mars in the Destiny world in-between Worm and Destiny.
• Person of Mass Destruction: Taylor, with effort, can generate enough Solar fire to destroy an entire city block.
• Power Limiter: Taylor designs one to contain her power after reconnecting with the Queen Administrator. She initially required a helmet to contain it, but later gained a better one in the form of a Techeun augmentation.
• Psychic Block Defense: While she can feel the influence of Taylor's powers, Mara is otherwise unaffected.
• The Red Mage: Taylor seems to be a mix between a Hunter and a Warlock, moving like the former and using abilities like the latter.
• Spikes of Villainy: Kali, though not a villain, is rather spiky. At one point another character wonders how Taylor can hug her without impaling herself.
• Token Heroic Orc: Taylor is this to the entirety of the Reef, being the only human (much less a Guardian) among their number.
• Villain Respect: In TAKE|CONQUER|REIGN, the Darkness sings praises about the Queen Administrator, and Taylor by extension; he believes that Taylor will be the QA's final host, and will go from parasitism to finding her "[self]" in symbiosis, and thus considers them two sides of the same being called "the Queen". He considers them to be the final pattern, the final shape, and proof that he was right.
  • He is implied to not like the Entities, though, calling them "[those that consume indiscriminately]" and thinks them to be too inflexible to the point of blind religious fanaticism in following the rules of the universe. He thinks differently of the Queen Administrator because, due to her connection with Taylor, she now is made aware of acausal and paracausal things of the universe, things that defy causality and logic, and thus is more flexible in not-accepting universal laws at face-value or not being "too literal" with them and the paracausal and acausal. He also brings up how the power to Take is so similar to the QA's ability to control the wills of others, and, with the QA now being made aware of to Take, he considers the two to be made for one another. After noting that the Queen wields two knives, one shaped like [collected knowledge and experience] and the other like [domination], the Darkness tells her to "Conquer and subsume all within your domain" and "retake your rightful throne", suggesting that he wants the Queen to become the Taken Queen.
    The Darkness to Oryx: The world is not built on the laws they love. Not on friendship, but on mutual interest. Not on peace, but on victory by any means.
  • The knife part is especially important for two reason:
    • 1. Instead of one knife, there are two, unlike every conversation between the Darkness and the Taken where he mentions only one knife(with the exception of the Vex Taken, where he mentions the changing blade of of the acausal environment).
    • 2. He doesn't say that "There is a knife for you" and to take it up. He mentions the Queen already has the knives.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: Mentally lampshaded by Kali after finding non-aggressive Fallen, and wondering if she had started doing this to them.

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