Somebody in Rain’s cluster will die, and the remaining ones will get a boost in power.
As we have seen through Rain’s Interludes, the unknown fifth member of the cluster (who is probably dead) seems to be granting a random member of the group a ‘boost’ on certain days. Currently, Rain’s powers are pretty weak.As a way of making Rain stronger at certain points in the story, other members of his cluster will die and he (and the other survivors) will gradually grow more powerful.
- Confirmed: Rain kills Snag, and he gets most of Snag's tokens, with Cradle getting the other one, though Love Lost gets nothing.
- It happens again when Cradle tries to drain the cluster's powers for himself. Once Love Lost realizes that Cradle has been manipulating her with personality bleed, she gives Rain all of her tokens. Rain's Blaster, Mover, and Tinker powers wind up at the lowest they've ever been, but his emotional Shaker aura gets such a massive powerup he's able to basically Master dozens of people at once while simultaneously cranking up the emotional pressure one Cradle to the point it can break through his sociopathy and drive him mad with guilt and shame.
Tattletale and Victoria will team up.
This one is pretty obvious. As of right now in the story (end of Arc 5), the Undersiders and Team Therapy aren’t exactly on opposing sides of the current conflict. But at some point, Victoria will be forced to work with the Undersiders, and she’ll hopefully come to see Tattletale’s side in what happened between her and Amy.- Confirmed: they wind up doing so when March starts trying to hunt down the Undersiders to get at Flechette. Later circumstances conspire to force the Undersiders and Breakthrough to work together often enough they've been called the BreakSiders.
Chicken Little will get a massive upgrade.
We'll all be reminded that birds are actually a subclade of dinosaurs, when Tattletale finds a universe in which a particular extinction event didn't occur...- Confirmed: Tattletale gifts him a Haast's Eagle, a huge bird of prey that is extinct in our reality, but not in one of the many realities that Tattletale has access to...
Rain's Cluster could be the next Goddess.
Goddess has been shown to have multiple incredibly powerful abilities, described as "a set of powers that would each be world-class on their own" (Pitch 6.8), and similarities are drawn between her cluster and Rain's, after she robbed them of their power. What if, in following with the first WMG on this page, Rain (or the surviving member of his cluster) ends up on a similar power level? And, furthermore, what would happen if Goddess recognized this?- Semi-confirmed: Cradle enlists the help of March and several other capes to try to pull this off, trying to capture his clustermates and drain their blood to confuse their shards and transfer their powers to him at full strength. He winds up being foiled (no pun intended) by the combined efforts of Breakthrough, the Undersiders, the Heartbroken, and several other hero teams.
Victoria's plan for defeating The Simurgh and Titan Fortuna by genociding all capes, or talking them into a suicide pact, using a cape-targeting virus
will fail massively, and the story will end much more optimistically with the heroes figuring out a third option.This is more a thematic Doylist argument than an in-universe Watsonian one. If a major theme of Worm is "the effects trauma has on people," then a central theme of Ward is "how people cope with and recover from trauma." Every member of Breakthrough is recovering from a terrible trauma and though it's difficult and not without setbacks, they are largely succeeding. A solution to the Titan and Simurgh crisis that basically involves murdering all capes, or getting them to agree to kill themselves seems thematically inconsistent with the rest of the novel, basically sending the message that "there is no permanent recovery from trauma, so you might as well die." Wildbow's protagonists give heavily of themselves in their endgames, but their endings are usually bittersweet, not downright depressing. So they'll figure something out at the last minute, and in keeping with the theme, the protagonists will be changed by their experiences, perhaps drastically, but not destroyed by them. Sleeper is the same type of being as Scion.
Given how apparently easily he disposes of (an admittedly already weakened) Simurgh suggesting a power level greater than hers, how much of The Dreaded he is, how nobody really knows anything about him sans him taking over an entire alternate earth, and how You Cannot Grasp the True Form of the storm he generated, and we know the Entities are an Eldritch Abomination race. Khepri decided he wasn't worth recruiting (possibly because he could gave slipped the leash with ease if he wanted to), and Scion was seen at least attempting a facsimile of human existence before he went postal, which Sleeper's book reading could be seen as his equivalent. Victoria's dad is Uncle Neil
Her powers are much more similar to the Pelham side of the family than the Dallons and it's a known fact that Carol cheated with Neil around the time Vikki was conceived. Also it would help explain Mark's myriad family problems come Ward; the events of Worm notwithstanding, he strongly suspects if not outright knows by now that Vikki is not his daughter. The Sleeper has Eden's equivalent to Stillness
Because Eden was more of Strategist, her anti-power Shard did not just cancel out powers and wavelengths of whatever was thrown at her but actually put them into a dormant state. As a result, the Sleeper could put just about any Shard and host around him to sleep, even a weakened Endbringer. However, the Shard itself tends to sleep unless its host is threatened or there is a great amount of awake powers and/or lifeforms in range. If Khepri had tried to take over the Sleeper, it would have shut down her Shard and render her vulnerable to Scion.