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Camera Shy (Worm)

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Camera Shy (Worm) (Fanfic)

Camera Shy is a Worm alt-power fic by TheGreatGimmick.

Taylor would never have imagined that going blind would have improved her life so dramatically, yet so it happened to be. Not only is picking on a blind girl too petty even for the Trio, not only has having to learn to care for a blind daughter helped her dad fight through the worst of his depression at losing his wife, but she even got superpowers out of the whole ordeal!

Not the most impressive powers, granted, but powers none the less.


Camera Shy contains the following tropes:

  • Accidental Nightmare Fuel: In-Universe. Taylor frequently acts absolutely terrifying by complete accident. It actually works in her favor, since her powers get stronger the more she frightens the people around her.
  • Adaptive Ability: Challenger grows a little more resistant to any negative effect or danger she's exposed to. For example, the more reckless she drives, the better a driver she becomes. If she's repeatedly burned, she'll grow heat resistant. She's a perfect counter to Krieg as she'll grow too fast for his kinetic manipulation field to be able to stop her.
  • Boring, but Practical: Handyman's actual powers are far less generally impressive than the Tinker powers he allegedly has, but almost as useful. Being able to see the future up to a few hours in one eye, the past up to a few years in another eye, and generate enough electricity to spot weld and form special batteries allows him to create tools needed for a job before the job even starts. While Handyman doesn't particularly appreciate it, his postcognition power is considered absurdly powerful by those who know how to utilize it properly. It's enough to allow Coil to easily foil Tattletale's plans and accelerate his own plans by several months.
  • Buffy Speak: Having little socialization with people her age occasionally makes Taylor fumble her words, such as saying she doesn't want to "be all sparky" when questioning whether Handyman's gear would shock her.
  • Canon Character All Along:
    • One of Taylor's cluster-mates, Handyman, turns out to be one of Taylor's classmates, Sparky.
    • Incog, an invisible murderous vigilante, is actually Sophia Hess/Shadow Stalker when amped up by Emma's powers.
  • Chronic Self-Deprecation: Taylor, as in canon. Even while she's consistently taking down entire buildings full of gangsters, by herself, with only one functional arm, it takes Nikkommo telling her flat-out for her to realise how strong her powerset really is.
  • Combo Platter Powers: As a grab-bag cape, Taylor has several apparently unrelated minor powers. In her case, these powers actually fit together pretty well into a cohesive whole.
    • Her first ability allows her to see through the eyes of any sapient being who has any part of her in their field of vision. This power blocks her from using her own eyes, and if nobody is currently looking at her she is blind. She can process numerous separate perspectives on herself without issue.
    • Her second power allows her to cause momentary disruptions in electronic systems: Lights flicker, cameras momentarily go to static, etc. If she really pushes this power, she can blow out light bulbs, but that's the strongest effect she can to generate if it's not being empowered by her fourth power. Using this ability rapidly tires her.
    • Her primary power allows her to enter a kind of time-frozen "ghost realm" as long as she is not being directly visually observed by any sapient being, bringing anything she is wearing or carrying with her. Note that while she cannot enter the ghost realm if observed, she can "prime" herself to enter that state, such that she will then go ghost if unobserved for even a microsecond. Taylor's other two powers do not function in this state.
      • Within this realm, Taylor is intangible, able to move freely in any direction at about the equivalent of a brisk jog and phase through solid objects. She cannot reenter the normal world in any location which is being directly observed by a sapient being, though she can move through such locations freely.
      • When Taylor phases through objects, they appear to "smear" along the direction of her movement as if someone had smudged a painting. When she re-enters the normal world, anything smeared will be pushed along the direction of the smear. This force is not usually strong enough to move heavy or anchored objects, but can send light objects flying.
      • Taylor can see through her own eyes when in the ghost world. Anything not directly observed by a sapient or camera being appears to be perfectly evenly lit, regardless of real-world lighting conditions. Any area which is directly observed appears as absolute blackness when in this state; Taylor cannot see through the darkness projected by a sapient being, but can see in a short radius around herself inside blackness projected by a camera.
      • Remaining in the ghost world rapidly causes Taylor to feel fatigued, becoming exhausted after only a few minutes. However, this exhaustion is not felt in the real world, and remaining in the real world allows her to recover at roughly a ten-to-one ratio (for every ten seconds in the ghost world, she needs one in the real world to recover).
    • Finally, her fourth power makes her other powers proportionally stronger depending on how afraid the people around her are. Taylor eventually figures out that this fourth power also makes everything she does automatically "scarier". For example, when Taylor opens a door normally it will creak, but while she's being affected by a power-nullifier it will open without a sound.
    • Each of Taylor's cluster-mates also have related "grab-bag" powers.
  • Creepy Good: Taylor's power set and costume come off as unsettling — read "pants-wettingly terrifying unknowingly and by accident" — to most, but she tries her hardest to be a hero. The rules of her ghost state teleportation mean that she can disappear any time you're not looking at her, then appear when you open a door, or pop up behind you to tap you on the shoulder and vanish before you can turn around... Doctor Pearson watches just a video of Taylor's activities, and ends up wearing her lunch, hitting her head, getting chills up her spine, and then shrieking when someone knocks on her door in the real world.
    • This gets even worse when Taylor figures out that the strength of her powers is affected by how scared those around her are, and starts deliberately trying to inspire terror to boost her abilities.
  • Cursed with Awesome: Taylor has mixed feelings about her powers, but she's actually quite pleased with the results of going blind. It has done wonders for her relationship with her dad, who now has a problem he can focus on and help with, and the school has been forced to take steps to help her out, including assigning her a full time assistant who proceeds to catch and shut down most of the bullying.
    I never would have thought that nearly all of my problems could have been solved by suddenly going blind, but here we are.
  • Didn't Think This Through:
    • Taylor initially doesn't tie back her hair while in costume, merely covering it with her hoods, because it's the one part of her she likes. It's not until her hair gets loose and prevents her from using her "ghost realm" powers (due to Stormtiger being able to see a part of her body) that she realizes the flaw with this idea.
    • Taylor decides to appear non-threateningly to Miss Militia on her first night out. Since Taylor doesn't want to be mistaken for sneaking up on her by appearing behind her, Taylor decides to come out of her Ghost World less than two feet away from Miss Militia, in the split second where Miss Militia's sight is obscured as she's lowering her scope, directly in front of her. From Miss Militia's perspective, an unknown (and rather spooky) cape just teleported right in front of her without saying a word or signaling their intentions, resulting in her letting out a string of Kurdish curses and shooting Taylor with eight con-foam grenades.
    • After injuring her shoulder, Taylor keeps going out every night as a cape, only to realize how much harder everything is with only one usable arm.
    • Taylor has a habit of replacing her older equipment with newer gadgets whenever she gets the chance. It takes Nikkomono pointing it out for her to realize the old stuff didn't become obsolete just because she got something more high tech, citing that trapping Night in a net while fighting her would have helped Taylor greatly if she hadn't ditched said nets after getting tinker-tech gadgets.
  • Dirty Coward: One of Sparky's defining character traits. He was standing right next to Taylor when she triggered, and didn't step into help her because he was too afraid of being expelled for having drugs on school grounds, despite fully recognizing that she was drowning in two inches of mud and porta-potty fluid. Instead, he dithers on the sidelines while Taylor is literally drowning, lamenting about how unfair it is that he's being pressured into making a choice, until he eventually Triggers.
  • Exact Words: Sofia claims that she isn't the murderous vigilante known as 'Incog', despite them both using a crossbow, because their powersets are different and Sofia hasn't had a second Trigger Event. She hasn't had a second Trigger, but she is getting juiced by Emma Barnes' Trump power, modifying her powers to the point of being unidentifiable.
  • Foil:
    • Handyman and Tattletale. Handyman downplays his powers and shows little appreciation for them while Tattletale is extremely proud of her Thinker power and pretends it's even more powerful than it actually is. While Handyman is content to be a follower, even to a Complete Monster, so long as he can coast through life, Tattletale hates being beholden to others, especially someone like Coil. Finally, while Tattletale triggered over her regret for not speaking up and potentially preventing her brother's suicide, Handyman triggered over potentially having to make a choice that would save a life but might get him in trouble.
    • Sowilo and Taylor. Their main similarities are that both Used to Be a Sweet Kid and triggered due to Emma and Sophia. However, Taylor became a Shrinking Violet while Sowilo became a neo-nazi. Taylor triggered because a "prank" was going to get her killed whereas Sowilo triggered due to a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown brought about by her own racism. Taylor's powers make her Weak, but Skilled, with forced clever usage of her costume and gadgets, due to how they synergize. Sowilo defeated Armsmaster on her debut but is notably Unskilled, but Strong. The Emotion Eater aspects of their power are also stark contrasts. Taylor grows stronger when she causes fear in others with her powers automatically making her actions scarier, while Sowilo gains strength from The Power of Hate even when she's not the cause. Even the Kiss/Kill dynamic acts as a foil with the hateful and heterosexual Sowilo having romantic feelings for Taylor, while Taylor has an Irrational Hatred for Sowilo.
  • Foreshadowing: Multiple hints regarding Taylor's clustermates come up throughout the story.
    • Handyman reacts far more strongly to Taylor saying the word "Sparky" than he does anything else, due to her accidentally name-dropping his public nickname from Winslow; he's also aware of her civilian identity, so he thinks that she's discovered his identity and is subtly threatening him over it.
    • Alan Barnes sold off basically everything he owned and liquidated all his savings for an unknown purpose: buying Emma a Cauldron vial. Alan catches remarks about becoming withdrawn and disheveled, while Taylor notices that Emma's backed off and become quieter.
  • Good Is Not Soft: Taylor tries to be a good guy... but has no problem causing serious bodily harm to Nazis and other villains, and once she realizes her powers get stronger the greater the number of people who fear her and the deeper fear they feel she leans into scaring the hell out of bad guys and playfully scaring civilians before patrolling, in order to prepare for possible cape fights.
  • Handicapped Badass: The extrasensory powers that come with Taylor's blindness have severe limitations and restrictions, not to mention being practically unusable in her civilian identity, forcing Taylor to get creative in fights and rely on external tools and gadgets to work effectively as a cape.
  • How Do I Shot Web?: Unlike the rest of her powers, Taylor initially has no idea that her fourth power (which passively makes everything she does "scarier" and strengthens her other powers depending on how much she scares people) even exists, much less how it functions. This is because one of her cluster-mates got their power via Cauldron vial, which don't bestow an intuitive understanding of their powers like natural triggers do.
  • Irrational Hatred: The Kiss/Kill dynamic impressed on Taylor and the rest of the Winslow Cluster gives Taylor this for Sowilo. Inverted for Sowilo, to whom the Kiss/Kill dynamic inflicts the opposite towards Taylor, and Downplayed between Taylor and Handyman, who just get a low-level, mutual disdain for each other.
  • Jerkass Has a Point: Exorcist is a Heteronormative Crusader who's blatantly trying to take down Taylor just for a PR boost, but Taylor struggles to refute his arguments against her persona when he brings up past cases where similar heroes who tried to be terror heroes accidentally inspired horrible crimes, such as two mentally ill teenage girls who burned down four buildings with seven casualties because they were inspired by a flame controlling hero named Wickermannote . He also points out that Taylor has no actual plans beyond "fight crime".
  • Laziness Callout: Handyman received multiple in his personal life from his father, himself, and finally from Tattletale.
    • His father gives him a Hard Truth Aesop about how he has to either work hard now or work harder for less later, regardless of what he wants to do in life, and that his habit of seeking instant gratification is only making things worse for him.
    • At the end of his temporary job working for the same machine shop as his fathernote , Handyman realizes he wasted his eight weeks there and had several opportunities to learn valuable skills that would have secured him a career later in life. Instead, he just did his hours, refused to do any extra work, blew off the workmen who tried to mentor him, and fantasized about getting back to playing in his Garage Band.
    • Finally, Tattletale calls him out for having the ideal powers to plan ahead and learn from his past mistakes but instead only living in the moment and being perfectly happy as a tool for Coil's ambitions, citing he's incapable of actually accomplishing anything on his own.
  • Loophole Abuse: While Taylor's power in some sense counts clothing as part of her for purposes of determining whether she's observed, as long as no part of her actual body is visible she can still go into the ghost realm and leave the clothing (which is technically what's being observed) behind. She takes advantage of this by putting together a costume which is effectively several full-body cloaks layered over each other, allowing her to repeatedly escape by sacrificing the outermost layer of her costume. She can even enter her ghost state and leave a layer behind, fly around for reconnaissance or telekinetically "smearing" objects, then return to her clothing before exiting ghost state, as if she never went anywhere.
  • O.C. Stand-in: One of Taylor's clustermates turns out to be one of her classmates, Sparky, who appeared in one chapter in canon.
  • Offscreen Teleportation: Though the actual mechanics are a lot more complicated (as seen above), this is functionally what Taylor's power works out to. As soon as she's not observed, she can stop time and fly at high speed for up to several minutes to another unobserved location.
  • Oh, Crap!:
    • When facing Stormtiger, Taylor tries to teleport away, only to remember she never tucked away her hair after it got loose, meaning she's being observed and can't use that power.
    • During a massive attack by the Empire, Taylor panics when she sees something moving inside her ghost realm, something that should be impossible. It turns out, Night's monstrous body doesn't move per se. It simply manifests close to the nearest target, even in frozen time.
  • Orifice Evacuation: Taylor accidentally performs an example of this when she lets her ghost world session run out while inside Krieg. Challenger, a hero who sees Glimpse come out of Krieg's mouth, calls it the most terrifying experience of her entire life, and that's including participating in a fight against Leviathan.
  • Point of Divergence: The entire story was ultimately kicked off by one change to canon: After the pre-canon incident where Emma and Alan Barnes were menaced by a gaggle of ABB gangbangers, Alan liquidated all of his assets and took out several loans, bankrupting the family in the process, to buy Emma a Cauldron vial.
  • Politically Incorrect Hero: The items Exorcist empowers block out anything he classifies as an "adverse mental effect". This includes debilitating fear, many mental disorders, and all mind-affecting powers, but it also includes things like homosexual feelings, transgender identification, and neurodivergence.
  • Power Of Hate:
    • One of Sowilo's subpowers is that her powers get stronger when people near her feel hate, anger, disgust, and loathing. This is rather important when she's fallen in with the Empire.
    • Emma's main power is to absorb negativity from someone then use it to empower them.
  • Power Nullifier: Handyman's fourth power, which he wasn't even aware he had due to one of his clustermates receiving their power via Cauldron vial, makes parahuman powers less effective against him the more emotional he becomes.
  • Power Stereotype Flip: Handyman's powers are heavily focused on planning ahead and introspection. Sparky prefers to live in the moment and regularly wastes opportunities given to him in exchange for instant gratification and/or only putting in the bare minimum work. To twist the knife, he does occasionally have moments of clarity where he recognizes opportunities to improve or fix his mistakes, but only after it's too late for him to act on them.
  • Pragmatic Hero: Nikommo's personal philosophy, which she tries to pass on to Taylor, is essentially pragmatic heroism. She believes that it's OK to break some laws in the service of doing good, and indeed feels that the advantage of being an independent hero is that while she has less support and resources than the Protectorate, Wards, or corporate teams, there's also many fewer rules and regulations to get in the way of doing the right thing, when it needs to be done.
  • Pronoun of the Dreaded: One of the names that Taylor picks up on PHO is HER or SHE.
  • Prophet Eyes: Taylor's power makes her blind in the real world, as a side effect of letting her see through the eyes of others. It also gave her surprisingly pretty cosmetic cataracts.
  • Psychic Static: An unintentional example. Handyman sees the future with one eye and the past with the other. Passively, it amounts to three seconds in each direction, but the difference gives Taylor headaches whenever she sees through his eyes.
  • Right for the Wrong Reasons: Sowilo tries to get her hands on one of Exorcist's cross pendants, which in addition to protecting against mind-affecting powers also suppress things like homosexual attraction and transgender identification, to get rid of her unwanted feelings towards Taylor. He tells Sowilo (while trying to get her to submit to PRT custody) that those feelings are coming from her power and are accordingly unnatural and will never fade on their own. Neither almost certainly do not know that those feelings are genuinely unnatural, imposed by her Shard as part of the Kiss/Kill dynamic.
  • Shout-Out: When Nikommo gets caught breaking into a date rapist's house in Focus 3.14:
    Homeowner: Who are you, and how did you get in here?!?
    Nikommo: I'm a Tinker... and I'm a Tinker.
  • Synchronization: The fic posits that the Kiss-Kill dynamic shared among cluster-mates directly reflects how each parahuman's Shards feel about each other.
  • Taught by Experience: After her first outing gets her significantly injured due to her hair coming loosenote , Taylor makes a point to tie back her hair whenever she goes out in costume.
  • Terror Hero: After the livestream of Taylor's fight against Uber and Leet is uploaded to the internet, the similarities between her abilities and mannerisms and those of various horror-movie antagonistsnote  combined with her rather unorthodox choice of weaponrynote  quickly lead to her being declared a literal ghost who is addressed as "SHE" or "HER". Taylor is not happy when she finds out, but eventually comes to accept it and continues playing the part. Becomes justified when she finds out that her powers get stronger when her enemies are more afraid of her.
  • Took a Level in Kindness: Sophia is still gruff, but isn't nearly as abrasive or aggressive as in canon, something many attribute to her getting counseling. Subverted: It's later revealed that Sofia is acting nicer because Emma Barnes is regularly using her Emotion Eater power to outright remove Sophia's perpetual anger. And Sophia gets very angry and defensive when Emma expresses concerns about Sophia being addicted to it, to the point of beginning to threaten Emma when she tries to wean Sophia off of the power. Not to mention the fact that she's also the murderous vigilante known as Incog.
  • Unwanted Assistance: As mentioned above, Taylor's blindness is actually an artifact of her power to see through the eyes of others. This becomes a potential issue when a doctor offers to bring in Panacea to heal her eyes: If Panacea touches Taylor, she'll know there's nothing wrong with her eyes, potentially unmasking Taylor as a cape.
  • Used to Be a Sweet Kid: Sowilo fell down the Nazi pipeline because a random recommended video in her Youtube feed brought her to more and more extreme racist propaganda (plus falling in with Empire sympathizers at Winslow) and she ignores all of her disquiet about she is hearing, until she went from a quiet kid focused on journalism to escape her rough home life to becoming a genuine believer of Nazi rhetoric who gives Empire kids a platform to spread their views through the Winslow school paper. She defaults to joining up with the Empire after she panics over "killing" Sophia Hess, a.k.a. Shadow Stalker, in what she calls self defense. While explaining herself to Mr. Fischer, Sowilo conveniently glosses over her racist bigotry that prompted Sophia to begin giving her a beatdown instead of just breaking her camera and leaving.
  • Wham Episode: Collage 4.1, which reveals not only the exact circumstances around the fic's Point of Divergence from canon, but also the identity of Taylor's fourth cluster-mate: Emma Barnes.
  • What Were You Thinking?: Lianne, as the only responsible adult Taylor knows who knows her secret identity, calls Taylor out for thinking that infiltrating the Undersiders (as she did in Canon Worm) is a good idea, particularly considering that Tattletale flat out told Taylor that her power is a superpowered Sherlock Scan, implying that she already knows about Taylor's plan and is manipulating her into joining. Taylor eventually admits that she Didn't Think This Through, and agrees not to go through with it, but stops short of realizing the reason she is so easy to manipulate—her desperate loneliness.

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