History Literature / Worm

''[[http://parahumans.wordpress.com Worm]]'' by John [=McCrae=], a.k.a. Creator/{{Wildbow}}, is a WebSerialNovel centered around Taylor Hebert, a teenager with a superpower enabling her to control bugs. It is the first novel in the Literature/{{Parahumans}} series.

''[[http://parahumans.wordpress.com Worm]]'' by John [=McCrae=], a.k.a. Creator/{{Wildbow}}, is a WebSerialNovel centered around Taylor Hebert, a teenager with a superpower enabling her to control bugs.

* CosmicHorrorReveal: It is revealed late into the story that the thing giving all of the superheroes and supervillains in the setting their powers is [[spoiler: an EldritchAbomination, part of a whole species of them that ranges throughout the universe giving sapient species some of their own powers to get ideas for what they are capable of before killing everyone on the planet]], and the identity of this being is [[spoiler: Scion, the enigmatic golden man who was seen as the world's greatest hope.]]

* EnigmaticInstitute: Cauldron is an institution with access to a secret formula to give people superpowers, which they sell for exorbitant prices to people regardless of whether they want to use it for good or evil, justifying this by saying having even villains with powers is necessary for when they all team up against the Endbringers' attempts to slowly destroy humanity. They stay secret, with their headquarters unknown and in an alternate dimension that one of their capes is capable of providing access to. It later turns out they are also [[spoiler: experimenting on people they kidnap from alternate universes with new versions of the formula which often horribly mess with their bodies, and are planning this all out to mitigate the effect of Scion's upcoming rampage.]]

* BigBad: [[spoiler:Scion, the world's first superhero, is truthfully an EldritchAbomination that introduced superpowers to the world as part of its species' life cycle, making him indirectly responsible for every conflict in the story as the parahuman powers drive their users to conflict that the Entities can learn from. While the Entities' life cycles usually end in the destruction of all life on the planets they inhabit, as well as every alternate version in the multiverse, the death of Scion's partner leaves him unable to finish the cycle and seriously unstable, with a chance meeting with the villain Jack Slash convincing him to speed up his omnicidal timetable. All of Cauldron's atrocities stem from their efforts to stop Scion when he inevitably goes rogue.]]

* BigBad: Several exist in Brockton Bay. Lung, Kaiser, and Coil are the resident big bads at the beginning of the story. [[spoiler:Skitter later turns into one.]]

* ShipperOnDeck: Imp discusses all the possible girls Taylor could end up with, ''including herself'', with some squicky details thrown in for good measure. Then again she might just have wanted to mess with [[spoiler:Canary]] after she failed to realize ''why'' [[spoiler:Parian and Foil]] wanted to [[IsThatWhatTheyreCallingItNow go someplace]] alone.[[note]]This happens ''after'' [[spoiler:Canary]] did time in the [[DoesNotLikeMen militant lesbian terrorist]] section of the prison[[/note]]

** Amy violates her rule of not using her power on people's brains, at first due to being forced by Bonesaw, and later [[spoiler: using it on Glory Girl.]]

* BladeBrake: To avoid being sucked into Bakuda's [[UnrealisticBlackHole black hole explosion,]] she stabs the extremely high quality combat knife she was given into the side of a derelict shipping container.

* MysteriousEmployer: The Undersiders are employed by a mysterious person who orders them to do various dramatic crimes. Taylor tries to stay with them as a spy long enough to find out who it is and report back to the heroes. [[spoiler: It turns out to be Coil.]]

* RecursiveReality: [[spoilers: The reason precogs interfere with one another is that the powers are biological supercomputers building simulated models of anticipated events, so if additional precogs become relevant to the prediction, ''their'' models will also need to be simulated.]]

* ScryVsScry: Precognitives (and certain classes of Thinker) can interfere with the abilities of other precogs. Including the ''Simurgh''. It eventually can be reasoned that this is due to [[spoiler: RecursiveReality]]. While powers that muck with time do exist, precogs function by [[spoiler: constructing simulations of potential futures. If another precog is a relevant factor, ''their'' model would have to be modeled, setting up a recursive loop that the power has to simplify or ignore.]]

* ScryVsScry: Precognitives (and certain classes of Thinker) can interfere with the abilities of other precogs. Including the ''Simurgh''.

* BigDamnVillains:
** Arguably, the uber-trope of the entire story. The Endbringer attacks are always opposed by heroes and villains working together, with the villains often accomplishing more than the heroes. [[spoiler:Lung, a particularly nasty villain, is the only parahuman shown to have fought and driven off an Endbringer single-handed, although his victory didn't happen in time to prevent it from being the single most destructive attack by that Endbringer ever, sinking the entire island of Kyushu and killing almost ten million people.]] Other threats like Bakuda's reign of terror and the Slaughterhouse Nine are stopped by the Undersiders and other villains at least as often as by the Protectorate and Wards, and [[spoiler:Cauldron's experiments on non-consenting human subjects and sale of powers to ''anyone'' who can pay their rates, no matter how immoral their intentions]] are all done for the purpose of saving the world when [[spoiler:Scion inevitably turn against humanity.]]

''Worm'' takes place in an alternate universe known as "Earth Bet". The history of Earth Bet very closely resembles that of our own Earth, but things rather drastically changed when a naked man with golden skin, going by the name "Scion", was suddenly found hovering in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean in 1982. Following Scion's appearance, a fraction of the human population found themselves suddenly gaining superpowers, usually a result of being faced with an extraordinary traumatic and stressful event in their lives; these incidents became known as "trigger events" and the superpowered people that resulted from them became formally known as "parahumans", informally as "capes". In the beginning, the sudden influx of these parahumans gave birth to the brief era that became known as the "Golden Age of Heroism", as many of them started using their powers in name of public good and helping people. But in the late 1980s and early 1990s, this Golden Age gradually faded out, as a growing number of the parahumans instead started using their powers to commit crimes, something which presented an increasingly serious challenge to the parahumans who stayed on the path of heroism. In addition, the growth of the superpowered criminal element and the brutality of their crimes, resulted in widespread concern and discontent amongst the regular human population, resulting in several of the world's governments founding agencies to counter parahuman criminals.

* AbortedArc: Leviathan's arrival and the AnyoneCanDie dice rolls to decide the survivors end up rendering the build-up to [[spoiler: Kaiser as the next big local villain once the Endbringer threat is over]] completely moot.

* CerebusRetcon: Uber and Leet are initially presented as comic relief due to their AwesomeButImpractical CripplingOverSpecialization, with Uber's power to automatically master any one skill while he focuses on it undermined by his natural incompetence with anything that skill doesn't cover, and Leet being able to build any device he sets his mind to but the results blowing up in his face if it's too similar to something he's done before. It's later retconned that [[spoiler: this isn't a limitation of Leet's power. His shard thinks he's not being violent and innovative enough, so it is subtly mind-controlling him into introducing these backfires in an attempt to either push him to behave more to its liking or to kill him and move on to a more suitable host, which it [[KilledOffScreen eventually succeeds in doing]]]].

** [[spoiler: InvokedTrope by the shards, which moderate the strength of the powers they grant their hosts to foster innovative conflict. Cauldron capes don't have such limits built in, which is why the likes of Contessa, the Triumvirate, the Travelers, and Case 53s make up the bulk of the setting's most powerful capes.]]

** In the interludes for Dinah and Coil, [[spoiler: she sees the numbers change when he splits universes, putting the alternative outside of her view and allowing him to ask how the numbers change depending on the actions he intends to take in the universe he's in.]] Later on, she is able to incorporate his power into her predictions just fine. This is because the author later solidified how [[spoiler: alternate universes work, and his power was in contradiction of that.]] The {{Retcon}} of his power into a [[spoiler: Thinker power that's only creating simulations he ''thinks'' are real]] and the general principle that's later established of [[spoiler: Thinker powers often interfering with one another]] help smooth over the change, but that contradiction remains.
** In their first encounter, Tattletale claims Armsmaster's Tinker knack for miniaturizing technology only works in his immediate vicinity (one of the examples of MagicPoweredPseudoscience), and is clearly implied to be on the mark. Later, after other justifications for Tinkers not sharing their toys are established (see ReedRichardsIsUseless below), he is able to gift a small number of items with no issues about distance from him and no comment from him or [[spoiler: Weaver]] about any such limit or lack thereof.

* CreativeSterility: [[spoiler: Not only did Scion become a hero just because it was suggested to him and he didn't have a better idea of what to do with himself, the Entities' plan as a whole is based on this. They possess god-like power and are biological supercomputers capable of modeling the events of entire planets decades in advance, but they foster these planet-wide conflicts because they believe that violence breeds innovation and that outsourcing to a host planet provides a better chance of finding a way to beat entropy than what they could come up with on their own.]]

*** Legend is quite like Apollo from ComicBook/TheAuthority. A fast flyer with laser beams, is gay and HappilyMarried, and later adopts a child. [[spoiler: They are also the respective TokenGoodTeammate of their teams.]]

* MagicFromTechnology: [[spoiler: Superpowers turn out to be alien biotechnology that the titular worms reverse engineered and expanded from the technology and innate abilities of the many alien species they used as guineae pigs over the eons.]]
* MagicPoweredPseudoscience: How Tinker-tech works, [[spoiler: as presented initially. Their gadgets only work because the shard responsible for it is active and connected, exerting its influence.]] As a result, tinkers have to spend a lot of time maintaining their equipment if they want it to work and are basically incapable of explaining how it actually works, with only Dragon seeming to be able to create things that other people can actually maintain and use. Arguably subverted in some minor ContinuityDrift; Tinker powers are revealed to be [[spoiler: technological knowledge gleaned from alien civilizations and bestowed on the host in isolation, so the technology isn't directly fueled by the shard, but the shard doesn't share knowledge of how to make it durable and explainable to non-{{Sufficiently Advanced Alien}}s.]]

* NewPowersAsThePlotDemands: If a cape goes through a ''second'' intensely traumatic event, they can potentially trigger a second time, altering their powers in a way that typically makes them stronger. This happens because [[spoiler: the shard reconsiders the boundaries it set to make the granted power competitively balanced and less likely to harm the wielder, so it "recalibrates"]]:
** We witness [[spoiler: Grue]]'s power go from [[spoiler: dampening other powers to a degree that's negligible for almost all of them]] to [[spoiler: dampening them much more heavily while allowing him to copy them]], with the downside that it [[spoiler: spreads more slowly, especially vertically]]. This is the only time in the story that a second trigger event saves the day, and the emotional toll is given heavy emphasis.

** It turns out [[spoiler: Taylor]] got this ''immediately'', as the [[spoiler: confusion and sensory overload from her bugs immediately overwhelmed her, so her shard gave her an amplified ability to multitask and strategize to better accommodate the input.]]

* NoConservationOfEnergy: At first it seems to be played straight: superpowers do not follow the laws of physics. Later, as more about the powers is learned, it turns out conservation of energy is being obeyed: [[spoiler: each superpower ("shard") has a finite amount of energy in it, and if it runs dry its associated powers will cease working. That well of energy is enormous, such that most superpowers will conceivably keep working for thousands of years, but it is still finite. Furthermore, many of the shards that appear to "produce" new matter are in fact drawing raw material from parallel timelines rather than generating it out of their energy.]]

* SexyDimorphism: Of the [[spoiler: original]] Endbringers, the two male ones Behemoth and Leviathan look like very inhuman monsters, while the female Simurgh looks humanlike. Given that they are shown to not be like normal biological lifeforms, Wildbow has said that the gender is arbitrarily applied to them, and [[spoiler: they might fall into this trope due to their design taking into account Eidolon's knowledge of mythology, religion, and typical monster design tropes.]]

* TheWorfEffect: Among the many capes killed by Leviathan is [[spoiler: Aegis, whom specifically had survivability as his most prominent power.]]
* WillfullyWeak: [[spoiler:The Endbringers haven't been putting any serious effort into trying to destroy mankind. If they did, the world would've already ended. Rather, it may be that they've been trying to give Eidolon a challenge.]]
** [[spoiler: Shards deliberately limit the scope of the powers they bestow to avoid burning through their collective's energy reserves too quickly and to minimize the chance of the host hurting themselves with the power. Second trigger events convince the shard to reconsider where it has drawn those boundaries, and are usually more powerful as a result. Similarly, shards nudge their hosts away from BoringButPractical strategies out of a belief that risky individual conflict is the best way to gather the data they need, even if the boring approach would be the more powerful one.]]

*** '''[[GadgeteerGenius Tinker]]''' - Capes capable of highly specialized technological/biological creations years ahead of their time: from building [[EnergyWeapon laser beams]] or a HoverBoard, to growing MixAndMatchCritters. They're separated into two types, with specialty tinkers having a specific type of thing they build, while method tinkers are unique in how they tinker. Wide-scope method tinkers theoretically can create anything but with a catch such as Leet's inability to create the same thing perfectly twice, while narrow-scopes like Armsaster are more limited but can create extra effects with what they do have.

* WithGreatPowerComesGreatInsanity: Labyrinth, of Faultline's crew. She has a shaker rating of ''[[UpToEleven 12]]'', but her reality-altering powers come with the side-effect of [[spoiler:her mind constantly wandering around various parallel dimensions]], effectively giving her autism.

** Another recurring meme: the worst possible way to [[TemptingFate tempt fate]] InUniverse is saying "meh, I could take her" when confronted with Taylor. No matter how overpowered you are it's a guaranteed [[CurbStompBattle curb stomp]]. And then a BigBad -- [[spoiler:[[KnifeNut Jack Slash]]]] -- says "Eh, I can take you" to her face.