Art by Metaphorical Gravepine.
Skitterdoc 2077 is a crossover fanfic between Worm and Cyberpunk 2077, written on Fanfiction
, SpaceBattles and Sufficient Velocity by SpiraSpira.
As Taylor is stuck in her locker and about to trigger, she gets mysteriously swapped with her alternate counterpart residing in Night City. Lacking the means to return, she decides to do the best of her circumstances.
Skitterdoc 2077 contains the following tropes:
- Adaptational Superpower Change: Here, Bonesaw and Skitter have swapped powersets, leading Riley to become a famous Ward named Ladybug while both Taylors are medical Tinkers.
- Back-Alley Doctor: Taylor tries to refrain, as she's concerned it would prevent her from becoming a legitimate doctor later, but is willing to help out friends and is often assumed to be one.
- Benevolent Boss: Taylor, as Hasumi, is exceptionally kind to her employees, by cyberpunk standards.
- Combat Medic: An absolute must for anyone working in Trauma Team. This includes Taylor.
- Conditioned to Accept Horror: In the first days of her swap, Taylor is flummoxed by the sheer ultraviolence in Night City's streets and how casual the citizens are about it. Even after growing somewhat desensitized, she's initally uneasy about killing and maiming.
- Corporate Samurai: Night City Danny Hebert was one, specifically a Major with Militech.
- Cover-Blowing Superpower: Taylor is very anxious about someone realizing her surgical prowess isn't exactly mundane even with all the cybernetics she received and discovering she didn't originate in the Night City universe.
- Crapsack Only by Comparison:
- What Brockton-Taylor thinks of Night City — sure, it's a Wretched Hive but there's no Endbringers slowly destroying human civilization one city at a time!
- In turn, this is what Night City-Taylor thinks of Brockton Bay and Earth Bet in general — sure, the Endbringers may destroy a city every decade or so, but daily life is a lot safer and the standard of living is higher than in Night City. And the fact that she considers Brockton Bay to be safer says a lot about Night City.
- Culture Clash:
- The story mainly focuses on Taylor's early New Tens sensiblities causing her a great deal of struggle in the Cyberpunk universe. Initially at least.
- More low-key, living in Japantown means Taylor has to familiarize herself with Japanese Politeness and obsession with face.
- Dead Person Impersonation: Due to certain events, Taylor is forced to leave Night City for a brief time and assume a new identity, with Wakako giving her the identity of "Hasumi Sakura". Taylor not only slips into the role easily but even goes the extra mile of making sure the impersonation is perfect by taking up some of Dr. Sakura's old hobbies, which include continuing Hasumi's isekai web novel series.
- Death by Adaptation: Sophia Hess is Killed Offscreen by Night City!Taylor sometime after she and her Earth Bet counterpart swapped places.
- Embarrassing Nickname:
- After joining Trauma Team, Taylor is nicknamed "Heartbreaker" by her teammates for performing a cardiac bypass on one of them. She's mortified because it's the alias of a notorious Canadian villain on Earth Bet.
- Quinn comments on Night City Taylor picking "Maeve" as her cape alias as it's another for the Faerie Queen.
- For Want Of A Nail: As Riley triggered with the Queen Administrator shard, she immediately murdered Jack Slash by swarming him with wasps after triggering, then joined the Protectorate as a Ward named Ladybug.
- Future Food Is Artificial: Taylor's familiarity with animal produced meat has marked her as having a far richer and more priviliged childhood than she's had.
- Going Native: After several months in Night City, Taylor muses she's far happier there than she was in Brockton Bay and it doesn't take her long to adopt Night City attitudes.
- Grass is Greener: Both Taylors find their new world an improvement over their old.
- Grey-and-Gray Morality: Very much so. The government is hopelessly corrupted, gangs are semi-legal, and the main heroine really enjoys playing with brains a wee bit too much.
- Hero of Another Story:
- Riley kills Jack Slash, becoming a beloved Ward named Ladybug and an icon for Earth Bet afterwards.
- Night City Taylor setting herself as a Rogue Tinker focused on medicine, becoming friends with Othala and joining Cauldron.
- Heroic Neutral: Both Taylors are willing to close their eyes on a patient's criminal past or to engage in crime themselves as long as it allows them to cure illnesses and improve life quality.
- Hooker with a Heart of Gold: The dolls working at Clouds are quite friendly with Taylor (platonically).
- Immortality Seeker: Siuainne Astor-Armstrong really wants to live forever or long enough for the difference to be negligible. Taylor also is interested in longevity treatments, mostly to improve them and distribute the final product to mankind as a whole.
- Inherent in the System: A lot of the problems in Cyberpunk are not just because people are assholes, it's because the system will screw over people who aren't assholes.
- Lie Detector: Siuainne Astor-Armstrong will know if someone is saying the truth around her. When the target is physically removed from her presence, her power doesn't work as well.
- Me's a Crowd: Taylor creates a gestalt mind for herself — she currently has three identities, Taylor Hebert, Sakura Hasumi, and Hana Rahim.
- Mistaken for Spies: Taylor has been misidentified as a British Spy on a number of occasions.
- Mutual Envy: As noted under Crapsack Only by Comparison, both Taylors think the other Taylor's homeworld is better than their own.
- Narnia Time: For three years in Night City, barely six months have happened on Earth Bet.
- Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters: The Tyger Claws gang maintains a semi-legal facade in Night City, very polite to Taylor, and quite invested in protecting their dependents. Though it is noted that all bets are off if there aren't any higher ranking members around to enforce things, or if they feel harming you is more profitable.
- Off the Rails: Suffice to say, Taylor's actions render the events leading to Edgerunners totally and utterly impossible. Not only is she friends with Kiwi, who is not only a hardcore asskicking Netrunner the likes of which her canon self could only dream of, but she prevents Lucy's friends from dying during their ill-fated escape from Arasaka by incapacitating a guard. That's to say nothing of her friendship and relationship with the Martinez family.
- Outside-Context Problem: Night City Taylor bluntly calls herself such for Earth Bet, as she's not a native of either there or Earth Aleph and was born in the future to top it off.
- Platonic Co-Parenting: After having to flee Night City for Los Angeles, Taylor finds herself helping her friend Gloria to raise Gloria's young son David.
- Pop-Cultural Osmosis Failure: Several characters complain about Taylor's outdated slang and references, or are completely baffled because they don't know what she's talking about.
- Properly Paranoid:
- A fifteen year old Taylor who has been bullied to an inch of her life immediately assumes everyone living in Night City is waiting for an opportunity to backstab her. It actually helps her to survive and adapt to her new surroundings very quickly.
- Night City Danny left detailed instructions for Taylor in case he died, which correctly predicted that Militech would screw her out of the settlement package she should have been entitled to, and takes advantage of the corpos greed and competativeness to help her get the best deal she can. He also hid a cache of pillaged implants, cybernetics, weapons, and various other things for her, and made sure that the message informing her of it would only arrive a month or so after he died, to ensure that Militech wouldn't find out.
- Racial Transformation: As she's fleeing for Los Angeles, Taylor has to temporarily discard her identity and rewrite her genome to turn into Sakura Hasumi, a Japanese citizen.
- Read the Fine Print: An important skill Taylor learns about when dealing with corporations, to the point that hiring a lawfirm to go over the contract for settlement package Militech offered her ends up paying for itself several times over when they help close some loopholes. This is after she had to settle for a lesser settlement package than what Night City Danny technically qualified for, as Militech had decided the operation he died in was a "police action", and as such didn't qualify for full benefits.
- Really Royalty Reveal: (Night City) Taylor is, through her mother, descended from one of the richest and most powerful families in the world. This isn't as helpful as it sounds.
- Spider-Sense: Deconstructed. Jack Slash's ability to tell when someone with a power was about to attack him was quite powerful, but there's only so much it could do when the person in question just Triggered with bug-controlling powers while he was busy torturing their parents and the attack in question was several thousand wasps becoming laser focused on killing him.
- Super Doc: Taylor is probably the world's best doctor, skilled in all types of medicine, from surgery to genetics to psychology, which can be a problem when her background includes no medical training.
- Teen Genius: Taylor graduated from medical school — one of the hardest study fields — with almost perfect marks? Definitely qualifies, from an outside perspective.
- Transferable Memory: Both Taylors get some of the other's memories in the swap.
- Trapped in Another World: Both Taylors are stuck after the swap and have no idea of how to go back to their former dimension. Brockton Taylor actually admits it's a lot like an Isekai story.
- What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?: The trend for most of the Astor bloodline. Taylor's aunt is able to know how many hairs someone has on their body, and Taylor outright gapes at the sheer uselessness of it.
- "World's Best" Character: Both Taylors consider themselves as "the world's best surgeon", and odds are for them to be entirely in the right.
