Fanfic / A Champion in Earth-Bet

A Champion in Earth-Bet is an in-progress Worm quest written by sun tzu.^note Updated November 2023. Its POV protagonist is the Avatar, a visitor from The Avatar's World (a Mutants & Masterminds-style original superhero setting), The Leader of the top-tier Global Champions Super Team... and, incidentally, the god of Heroism. The story follows the events that happen when an exceptionally powerful and idealistic character gets thus sent to a Crapsack World like Earth-Bet.

A side-story, titled The Brave Little Spider, displays the events of the story from Taylor's perspective.

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A Champion in Earth-Bet provides examples of:

A-D

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Both defied and played straight. The Avatar knows several A.I.s from his own world, both heroic and villainous. And Dragon is of course one of the mightiest heroes of Earth-Bet. The Endbringers, semi-biological AI to the point of thinking of themselves as being named Terror Drone Number, are working to complete their programming to cause terror and conflict. They know perfectly well that the reason for their programming (the Entities' reproduction cycle) is no longer possible, but they're doing it anyway.
• Adaptational Wimp: This fic's version of the Fallen, which is taken from Worm, but not Ward. Instead of a powerful organization with the insidious Mama Mathers at the head, they are just Endbringer cultists with a grudge against the Avatar for killing two of their gods, which Jack Slash uses as a distraction against the Protectorate during his attack.
• All According to Plan: The Guild is confronting the villain Skylance, protector and overseer of the Kyushu refugee camps, who is graciously agreeing to surrender peacefully into their custody to avoid needless casualties in her camp (and incidentally, make her into an ultranationalist martyr for her supporters). Then a battalion of vans and villains arrive led by another ultranationalist villain Fuji-Sama, who first calls out Skylance for her apparent cowardly surrender and then encourages her to join forces with him to fight off the Guild. The Avatar's thoughts?
  So far so good. This was your Plan A. Plan B was messier.
• All There in the Manual: Some characters' backstories and power details, parahuman organizations and other bits of information haven't made their way into the actual story, but are instead sprinkled throughout the thread. The author has created a repository for all his notes thus far.
• All Your Powers Combined: Surdoué of the Guild has a mental version of this. He essentially has the intellectual strengths, skills, and knowledge of everyone in his range, as long as they remain there. Does not apply to actual superpowers.
• A Nazi by Any Other Name: Gesellschaft and its child organization Empire 88, as in Worm canon, are this sort of far-right organization, but as part of this Quest's Worldbuilding, also mentioned are many of Gesellschaft's fellow white supremacist organizations around the world, such as the Front Pour la Patrie in France, Camelot in Britain, Asgard in the Scandinavian countries, and the Slavic Union in post-USSR Russia. As the Avatar espouses global cooperation and collaboration to protect Earth-Bet, he and the Guild soon start to set their sights on dismantling these organizations.
• And Then What?: What ultimately tips Taylor over to quitting Coil's employ.
  Avatar: Well, if I may suggest, start by taking some perspective. Let's suppose you decide to let things be as they are, in order to stay with the Undersiders. What will happen afterwards? Will that be the last moral compromise you need to make?
  Skitter: ...It'll never end. Our patron… he's a monster. A real monster. He'll keep breaking every rule to get ahead. There will be more atrocities. Whatever I do about the Undersiders, he needs to go down.
• And There Was Much Rejoicing: There is widespread partying at the announcement of the death of Jack Slash and the Siberian, accompanying the total defeat of the Slaughterhouse Nine.
• Anti-Climax: Jack Slash's demise is given just as much ceremony in the narrative as he deserves; stranded on another world and stripped of anything that could let him escape or even hurt the Avatar, the Avatar barely gives his last diatribe any thought as he probes his mind for any final contingencies and then atomizes him into dust.
• Apocalypse Wow: Courtesy of a tinkertech antimatter weapon, the Avatar's fight with the Simurgh starts with an explosion that causes the (parallel, uninhabited) Earth below them to lose its spherical shape, unleashing a firestorm that advances across its entire surface. The fight ends with an explosion that vaporizes the planet, and melts the side of the Moon facing it from hundreds of thousands of miles away.
• Artificial Human: Throne, the parahuman king of Uzbekistan, was grown in a vat by a bio-tinker, and then given a Cauldron vial. He was meant to be a weapon against the Endbringers, but quickly turned against his creators and set himself up as a dictator.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Jack Slash has gotten away from many scraps by using his silver tongue to deliver Breaking Speeches and Armor Piercing Questions, assisted by his power's intel. Right as the Avatar (who Jack can't read at all) has cut off his escape, Jack tries to do the same to him, but the Avatar distracts him by saying, "What if I told you,", and then uses that moment to telekinetically strip him of all his final tricks, without ever finishing his sentence.
• Batman Gambit:
  • When Fuji-Sama was informed of the Guild's attempt to arrest Skylance, he immediately crashed the party to usurp her position as champion of the far-right. Feeding him the information about the event was all part of the Guild's plan to halt Skylance's Failure Gambit to be taken in peacefully and paint herself as a martyr.
  • As Mexico is about to become part of the Protectorate, the cartel cape Lord Cognito stages a robbery on a police armory. This goads his main rival, Deadmask, to one-up him by staging a bigger assault on a military armory with more casualties, which immediately makes Deadmask and his cartel the top priority of the new Mexico City Protectorate while leaving Cognito aside for the moment.
• Brutal Honesty: Director Piggot isn't happy with the Avatar when he calls the PRT press-ganging the minor villain Unexpected into the Wards "extorting" him, especially since his unwilling actions with the Slaughterhouse Nine give them cause to play hardball. The Avatar responds that it would be extortion on someone who deserves better, and he didn't want to manipulate him. The Avatar is inspiring enough that Unexpected takes the deal anyway, for the right reasons.
• Big First Choice: The first chapter of the quest had the readers choose which of the 10 Global Champions would be the one Madman sends to Earth-Bet, and where exactly in the timeline they'd be sent to. They chose the Avatar, and put him in right as Leviathan started attacking Brockton Bay.
• Blessed with Suck: Princess, a new Houston-based Cauldron cape hero and Alexandria package, exudes a pheromone (or something similar) that elicits adoration or obedience to her, which she can't turn off and finds deeply embarrassing. Luckily, her long time friend and fellow Cauldron Cape Ultimata can create pills that grant temporary immunity to this effect.
• Breaking Speech: In trying to gain Tattletale's help for the Guild, the Avatar exposes a few uncomfortable truths about her motivations to help Taylor; in that while she genuinely is Taylor's friend and brought her into the Undersiders to save her life, she also manipulated her into becoming a villain rather than a hero, something that was one of her core tenets from the get-go, and doing so nearly broke her.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: Israeli villain En Kamoni. He's possibly the most powerful cape in Israel and has a long storied criminal career. But because he scrupulously avoids permanent injury or death, and because of his tendency to take out the major criminals worse than himself, he is more valuable to the country free than in prison.
  • Coil tries to convince the Avatar of this rather than be arrested and Birdcaged. But, while he could be enormously useful, what he asks is too much for the Avatar's morals.
• Captain Patriotic: There was actually a Captain Argentina who did some good work in the country before the Parahumans cartels forced him underground. The new Guildswoman Centro asks for the Avatar's help in getting in contact with him, and they enlist his assistance in retaking Belo Horizonte.
• Captain Superhero: As in canon mostly averted; the readers (who make The Avatar's decisions) think a) it's cliché, and b) it doesn't fit the setting. Polish cape Captain Hydro is an aversion, albeit a reluctant one; she was a full time firefighter before she Triggered and was given the honorary rank of Captain post Trigger, though she is pretty embarrassed by it and feels she hasn't earned it. 'Doctor' and 'Professor' get similar treatment.
• The Cavalry: The Slaughterhouse Nine's attack on Brockton Bay is punctuated by a huge army of Nilbog monsters coming out of the ocean. Partway through the Protectorate and Guild's defense, heroes from other countries come into assist, including Ice Queen and Goldorak from the European Brigade and Singularidade from the recently-supported Brazil.
• Chekhov's Gunman:
  • Tsunami is a Japanese hydrokinetic villain that Triggered in the wake of the Sundering of Kyushu, who made a very public Heel–Face Turn to the Brockton Bay Protectorate after the Avatar killed Leviathan, declaring I Owe You My Life. The Avatar later enlists her help, along with other Japanese parahuman expats, in the operation to take out Skylance, the villain that is keeping the Kyushu refugee camps under her thumb.
  • Uber joins the Undersiders to find out what happened to Leet. Later we find out: the Simurgh kidnapped him and used him as a living Tinkertech blueprint repository to create super weapons to use against the Avatar.
• Child Soldiers: Comes up as a sticking point in one of the Avatar's tasks. The Youth Guard approaches him about the situation in Jacksonville, Florida, where the villain-hero ratio is almost 4-to-1, and dire circumstances are forcing the Wards to be deployed increasingly frequently and into more dangerous situations. There are a lot of back and forth negotiations about the Wards getting the help and space they need.
• City of Adventure: Zigzagged for Brockton Bay. While most of the focus of Worm was centered around the city (at least in the early part), the Avatar has been more focused on the worldwide situation. Even Taylor doesn't stay in the city, as after she joins the Wards, she gets transferred to Boston so she doesn't have conflicting loyalties about fighting the Undersiders. On the other hand, it being the spot where both Leviathan and the Simurgh met their ends has made it an incredibly symbolic location, which is also why the Slaughterhouse Nine paid it a visit.
• Cloak and Dagger: It's been noted that unlike a lot of Earth-Bet, Argentina's parahuman environment filled with cartels, spies and soldiers on the take involves a lot more stealth and subterfuge than active heroism, as the Intrepid Reporter and newly-minted Guildswoman Centro knows all too well.
  • Also a major part of Indian cape culture, where the dynamics have settled into two factions that stay out of each other's business for both heroes and villains. On the one hand you have public, dynamic capes (Garama) and on the other you have the Cloak and Dagger espionage game (Thanda). The current threat in the Thanda cape scene is Asura, a villain who uses nanomachines to both grant superpowers and enslave minds. Readers have acknowledged her as a major looming threat, but the Avatar and his allies are currently stretched far too thin to address her.
• Compelling Voice: How Kamikoe's power works, and how she forcibly converts people to her Cult. She can tell people short single sentences that they will always believe, for the rest of their lives, no matter what. She can even tell people they're dead and they spend the rest of their life believing it, though they may simply break down from the inability to reconcile the "truth" with the facts they see.
• Conflicting Loyalties: Taylor goes through a lot of this in the beginning of the story, trying to decide whether to stay with the Undersiders, even though they have no compunction in working for Coil despite the atrocities he did to Dinah Alcott, or betray the only friends she ever knew to do the right thing. Luckily the Avatar helps her work through them, and when the topic of her joining the Wards comes up, he advocates that she be relocated to another city as a way to help avoid these issues.
• Corrupt Church, Cult & Religion of Evil: There are plenty of capes (not surprisingly usually Masters) in charge of all three of these on Earth Bet, from the canon example of the Fallen (US), to Kamikoe (Osaka, Japan), the Purifier (Afghanistan) & Hamashiakh (Israel).
• Crazy Enough to Work: Use of these tactics is the only way the Avatar can outmaneuver the Simurgh.
• Crazy-Prepared:
  • The Simurgh, full stop. She created a plan to kill the Avatar revolving around Tinkertech superweapons and transporting him to an uninhabited dimension where he could be permanently killed. According to her infallible precognition there was literally no chance for him to survive. He did. The battlefield was prepped with backup plans anyway, including further weapons from Antimatter Conversion Beams and Mass Accelerators to Grey Goo. He won. And even though the Avatar should have been inescapably dead or stranded in another dimension, she still arranged for Jack Slash to gain the powers of Butcher and Coil as a final time bomb aimed at him.
  • Madame Lustucru made a lot of preparations to cause as much damage to her territory as possible if her territory was stormed (poison and explosive mines across the area, hidden capes, objects falling from the sky, child hostages, child hostages falling from the sky...).
• Crippling Overspecialization: Downplayed for Ultimata, whose Tinker speciality is specific-purpose devices. She can build generic or multipurpose Tinkertech that is only a bit better than mundane tech, but she truly shines when building devices to do one thing really well (e.g. build a gun to specifically take out Lung when he's going all out).
• Cry into Chest: Upon hearing about the moral dilemmas that Taylor has been wading through and really not coping with, the Avatar asks to meet her in person, then surprises her with a fatherly hug. Taylor freezes up, wondering how to respond, for several seconds, then just breaks down sobbing.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • When the Avatar intervenes in a battle between New Wave and the Merchants, with Protectorate reinforcements inbound, the battle was only ever going to end one way.
  • Even with a cape roster edging into the hundreds, the Omega Cartel doesn't stand a chance against a Protectorate assault force that includes both the Avatar and Eidolon.
  • While the lead-up and chase was the tricky part, Jack Slash's final one-on-one with the Avatar is practically an afterthought, and is treated as such in the narrative. None of his or the Butcher's powers can stop or even hurt the Avatar as he scans Jack's mind for any tricks or info, nor save him from being vaporized.
• Dead Man's Switch: Subverted for Harvest, who has a Tinkertech switch that threatens to incinerate all her algae farms, only to be told that those farms are the reason she's being offered a community service deal instead of being sent to the Birdcage; destroying them would be sabotaging herself as much as anyone else. She surrenders shortly afterward.
• Death by Adaptation: Coil gets killed by Jack Slash after becoming the Butcher, which not only means that he died before he did in canon, but that Jack is now the Butcher.
• Death from Above: By way of Suspiciously Specific Denial, Word of God is that this is how Coil killed Butcher XIV.
  "I intend to neither confirm nor deny, but... A construction site, a crane, and a bunch of very heavy steel beams may have been involved."
• Death Is Not Permanent: As long as there is one sentient being alive with a spark of heroism in their heart, the Avatar cannot be permanently killed; he'll be Back from the Dead in a while. This includes nonhumans, such as Dragon, and even any villain capable of redemption. It requires for the "one being alive with a spark of heroism" to be within range, though, which is why the Simurgh starts her fight with the Avatar by moving them both to an uninhabited dimension.
• Deconstruction: The Avatar deconstructs the relationship between Lisa and Taylor in early Worm. While Tattletale might have helped provide a support structure for a nearly-suicidal girl with no friends, and may have saved Taylor from herself, Taylor wanted to be a hero first and foremost (and indeed, wanted to be one for years). Tearing down that dream did great damage to her psyche, and while Tattletale might deny it, her motives for helping Taylor were not entirely altruistic. The two of them still consider each other friends, but the way it was in canon was not a healthy relationship.
• Defeating the Undefeatable: What does the Avatar do on his first day in Earth-Bet? Kill Leviathan.
  • And then goes two for two with the Simurgh.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • Sure, Coil, tell the Avatar how your power works and that you're holding an entire timeline hostage! It's not like he has a way to make you drop your timeline bargaining chip! Oh wait...
  • The Simurgh finds her perfect pre- and post-cognitive senses stymied every time the Avatar's fate control shifts the odds around.
  • As the Avatar notes, Bonesaw's spiderjacks allow her to access her victims' nervous systems, senses and muscles, but not their thoughts. As such, when the Avatar telepathically reads her victims' minds for intelligence, the Nine have no idea that anything happened.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Leviathan never considered that by punching a Nigh-Invulnerable target deep into the ocean floor, the pit he digs with all the punching would leave him no way to dodge the retaliation attack coming right for him.
  • The Avatar calls Trickster out on his obvious plan to trick him into coming into contact with Echidna, which would make evil clones of him. The Avatar points out that this "Genius Plan" would mean that there are now evil clones of a person capable of killing an Endbringer flying around, an idea that horrifies the other Travelers.
  • When the Avatar used a magnetic pulse to destroy all the nanomachines the Simurgh sent at him, he forgot about the ferrous asteroid fragments she threw at him first and effectively fires thousands of railgun shots at himself. In general he doesn't see anything about the Simurgh coming, especially since the fight opens with a dirty Scry and Die trick that teleports him into another dimension full of superweapons.
• Dirty Business: Wing Warrior doesn't like betraying the Guild's trust and secretly replicating Tattletale's power in his Tinkertech in a backroom deal with Prochnost, but he's willing to do so if that's what it takes to get the tools to keep the world safe.
• Dirty Cop: A subversion. During an operation in Mexico to eliminate the Omega Cartel, the Avatar and his cosmic senses notices the second-in-command Del Duque taking something from a third-party cape named Singul in exchange for letting him go free. The Avatar decides to ask Del Duque in private what that was about, and Del Duque clarifies that Singul is a Venturous Smuggler with moral standards, who frequently herds refugees in the right direction towards caring authorities and who Del Duque judges as worth more as a part-time informant.
• Do Not Go Gentle:
  • With the E88 leaving Brockton Bay in droves, Hookwolf would rather go down fighting, even against someone like the Avatar, than give up peacefully. The Avatar declines to give him a dignity he doesn't deserve, allowing instead Miss Militia to do the honors while he keeps everyone else safe. A Nazi being triple-tapped by a middle eastern woman with a bazooka becomes an instant meme, especially after the satire shows already portrayed him as a childish Small Name, Big Ego.
  • Madame Lustucru does a lot of inhumane things For the Evulz, and if she goes down she's going to do as much damage as she can in the process.
  • Similarly, with how the Guild has been hounding him and his band, cutting off their escapes and denying them resources, Jack Slash figures that the Nine's next attack would be their last, so he wants to make their finale as big and bloody as possible.
• Dramatic Irony: In one of his discussions, the Avatar is somewhat relieved that parahumans, like his own world's mutants, are safer than unpowered law enforcement, since it's not possible for those who seek power for malevolent ends to actively turn themselves into parahumans. Keep in mind that he doesn't know about Cauldron.
• Dressing as the Enemy: How the Avatar and the Guild take care of the territory of the Nigerian villain Blood Count - the Avatar flies in, shapeshifted to look like Blood Count, and with the help of the Stranger Ninja Roja, lures all of the villains in his territory into one location for the Guild to ambush all of them at once.

E-L

• Establishing Character Moment: In the middle of a Global Champion meeting where the members are all discussing important events and updates, Madman pops in and says he's just here for the coffee.
• Everyone Has Standards: The Madman may do a lot of dangerous things for the laughs, but even he puts his foot down when the Simurgh plans to make an alternate Earth her one-on-one battleground with the Avatar, heedless of the 7 billion inhabitants (as he views the countless casualties as needlessly grimdark). He instead moves the battlefield to an Earth where an ecosystem never evolved.
• Experienced Protagonist: With experience in superheroing stretching back to the 1920s, leadership of the Global Champions, and his dealings with the likes of Garzor, Nollius and Professor Cryo in his own world, to say nothing of his credentials as a god, the Avatar has a lot of experience under his belt by the time he is placed from Earth-Gimel into Earth-Bet.
  • As the Number Man observes, the Avatar's idealism is in no way wide-eyed, as his distribution of the Slaughterhouse Nine's bounty money is not only to victims, but also to the Guild's war chest and to civil rights groups around the world, to advocate for free press, democracy and social equality and against police brutality and persecution. In other words, his support is calculated to help groups that can bring about the most change and to push back against those that want to keep the unequal status quo - as if he knows full well about the darkness of the world and how hard the fight is to keep it at bay.
• The Exile: With his power of supersonic flight, and sub-powers of inter-planar and inter-dimensional travel, the Avatar has done this a few times.
  • He left Wyld Hunter on the moon, knowing his area of influence would keep him alive.
  • Ash Beast, Skylance and Fuji-Sama are all shunted to another Earth where they can't harm anyone. The former willingly goes and the Avatar regularly checks up on him, the latter two's stay is just temporary until their trials.
• Expy:
  • There is a member of the New York Protectorate named the Silver Crusader, who had dealt with a villain group called the Fear Syndicate and their leader Titan.
  • Storm Rider and Throne, two parahuman warlords and members of Lord Cognito's coalition, are reminiscent of Iskander and Gilgamesh respectively.
  • The Ice Queen, an Italian cape who is an extraordinary cryokinetic and lives alone in an ice castle in the mountains, is very reminiscent of Elsa.
  • The Avatar himself is one of a sincere Scion, being one of his world's first superheroes who appeared out of thin air, has no civilian identity, and does literally nothing but be heroic. The only major difference (and, admittedly, it's a big one) is his origin. This causes some confusion on all sides.
  • There are at least three female Tinkers with plant specialities mentioned in this fic (Cosecha from Argentina, Harvest from Lagos, Nigeria, and an unnamed one in Warsaw, Poland), with the latter two being villains. The author has admitted some influence from Poison Ivy.
• Explaining Your Powers to the Enemy: Played with. Rhetor has a conversation with a minion explaining in detail how his powers work and how he used them to trick and manipulate a Tinker into working with literal Nazis while coming across as extremely reasonable - at worst a Well-Intentioned Extremist. The reader is left with the impression of a Pragmatic Villain simply using Nazi ideology as a means to gain money and power. And then we find out in his inner monologue that he is exactly as racist as he openly portrays himself. His minion, though, isn't an ideological Nazi but is vulnerable to manipulation by making her think she's part of the select inner circle of those smart enough to see through the facade.
• False Flag Operation:
  • The Polish cape Napoleon's Establishing Character Moment is, in a face-off against some villains, to give an order to one of the enemy capes to distract them all for a crucial moment.
  • Before the Guild operation to take back Belo Horizonte from the Brazilian cartels, the Avatar shape shifts into a female cape with electrical powers to take out one of the stronger capes of one of the cartels, to entice the other cartels to go after their weakened adversary and keep them preoccupied while not suspecting the Guild.
• Fantastic Recruitment Drive: Two so far after the Avatar decided to join the Guild and go international - one where the Guild looked for international heroes to join it alongside the Avatar, and another where the Avatar scouted potential European heroes to revitalize the European Brigade.
• Fighting a Shadow: The Avatar uses an "Earth-Gimel" classic against part of the Slaughterhouse Nine's forces - send in a holographic illusion to draw enemy fire and attention while he flies outside and shoots down the important targets.
• Fighting from the Inside: The remnant of Coil's mind, who had become part of the Butcher collective that then passed to Jack Slash, tells the mind-reading Avatar all of Jack's plans in the hopes of a permanent Mercy Kill.
• From Bad to Worse: The Slaughterhouse Nine going on the attack in Brockton Bay is bad enough, the idea that one of them had inherited the Butcher's mantle is worse, but then the Avatar discovers that some of their murder-beasts are Nilbog's creations.
• The Fundamentalist: The Purifier is essentially a Taliban with the parahuman equivalent of a Death Note. Good thing it's vision-based.
• Gambit Pileup: This is the case when the Guild go to oust the Japanese warlord Skylance and take her into custody. Skylance's initial plan was to selflessly surrender herself to the Guild, turn herself into a martyr and encourage her supporters to campaign for her release. The arrival of her rival Fuji-Sama, though, forced her to stand and fight lest he denounce her as a coward and usurp her position as leader of the Japanese ultra-right movement. The Guild, however, were the ones who directed the two villains' attention at each other in the first place, putting their plans in conflict with each other and allowing the Guild to capture both of them, cripple their political agendas, and push for international cooperation instead.
• Gargle Blaster: An omake introduces Mimic to goblin homebrew, which starts out with several types of 200-proof alcohol — some of them poisonous to humans — adds a cocktail of actual poisons like alkaloids, and spices things up with potassium nitrate^note Which can be used in smoke bombs and pyrotechnics. The blood is probably the safest ingredient, which makes sense since it's literally designed to double as a weapon.
  This wasn't a drink. This was bathtub grade napalm, mixed with a smoke bomb and precursors for nerve gas.
• Glass Cannon: A Nigerian villain cape named Deathblow is pretty much this, as he can can release destructive force with a touch that grows increasingly stronger the longer he goes without using it, but is a completely ordinary human otherwise. It takes 10 minutes for the attack to be as strong as a regular punch and an hour for it to be able to blow down walls, and after not using it for several months, there were rumors he could take out the Avatar. However, when Deathblow's opportunity came, he had a Sudden Principled Stand instead.
• Healing Magic Is the Hardest: Though the Avatar's cosmic manipulation can do a lot, healing (or reversing entropy) is one of the more energy-taxing things it can do. Even in his own world, reversing entropy is one of the rarer powers in that Fantasy Kitchen Sink.
• Heel–Face Door-Slam: Defied. Taylor turning to heroism after her stint with the Undersiders faces some challenges and hostility due to her past actions, but the Avatar's support helps her get through them... for now, at least.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door:
  • The Polish villain Niszczyciel has had a very tumultuous journey, going from human thief, to hero, then to A-lister villain after the Simurgh broke his hand, and finally, after Leviathan's death to European Brigade hero.
  • The Indonesian parahuman Blink was once a member of the national hero group Red White, but turned to villainy under the Skull King when the stress got too much. Like Niszczyciel, he turned himself in after Leviathan's death.
• Heel–Face Turn: Several villains across the world do this following Leviathan's death... including Skitter.
• "Hell, Yes!" Moment: Legend feels hope for the first time in an Endbringer fight when the Avatar appears, and his first cosmic blast slams Leviathan to the ground and cuts the inhuman monster to the bone.
• Helping Would Be Killstealing: This is a factor of the Avatar not actively assisting in some Guild operations, such as the raid on the Indonesian Lords of Flesh. After all, he does plan to return to Earth-Gimel eventually, and wants to make sure Earth-Bet and all its Super Teams are as well-equipped and well-formed as possible and able to operate on their own before he leaves.
• He's Back!: It's not outright stated, but it's mentioned that Tattletale's insight for Cauldron has helped Eidolon figure out how to recharge his own powers, allowing him to regain some of his old potential.
• Hoist by His Own Petard:
  • In a brutal moment of bad luck, the Simurgh ends up shooting herself with her own Anti Matter Tinker cannon. Which is all the opening the Avatar needs.
  • In Spy Games, the Avatar manages to use Jack Slash's theorized power of getting Gut Feelings of what other parahumans are doing and thinking against him to rescue a kidnapped Tattletale. By telepathically telling the Travelers (who are also hostages) that he has a list of possible locations that Tattletale gave him (which she never did) and is planning a rescue op, he spoofs Jack Slash (whose power now thinks the Travelers know where the Avatar will raid) into moving Tattletale to a location the Guild has already raided and thus wouldn't be checked again... right where the Avatar is observing.
• Hope Bringer: The Avatar and his speeches do this very well. It's the subject of his very first public address in Earth-Bet.
• Hope Spot:
  • An inverted example. Taylor is despaired when her armband reports that the Avatar was killed by Leviathan... but that's only because his Dragon armband was destroyed by the full might of Leviathan's power. A moment later, the Avatar gets his Heroic Second Wind, blasts the Endbringer clear out of the ocean, and then obliterates his core with his full cosmic might.
  • The Kolwezi warlord Madame Lustucru actually Invoked one to spread more despair amongst her subjects and show how much of a bastard Hope Crusher she is. A cadre of parahumans staged a rebellion and actually managed to oust Lustucru, only for her and her allies to later walk right into the victory party and reveal that the rebel leaders were working for her the whole time.
• Humans Are Special: The Avatar states this outright while he's reeling at the news that three out of four parahumans turn to villainy.
  "Humans, simply put, are better than that. You've observed them for enough millennia to know."
• Humiliation Conga: Empire 88 in general, and Hookwolf in specific, are put through this deliberately when the Avatar begins his campaign to denazify Brockton Bay. Part of destroying any such group is killing their mystique. As they face one defeat after another parodies of them become memes, particularly Hookwolf being dragged away by sensibly terrified Nazis while screaming 'Lemme at 'em!' And then, to rub salt in the wound, Hookwolf tries to die a glorious martyr fighting the Avatar himself. The Avatar refuses, and Miss Militia triple taps him with a bazooka.A badass middle eastern woman killing a Nazi supervillain on live tv sets off another round of memes.
• I Am Not Left-Handed:
  • At one point during Leviathan's attack on Brockton Bay, he tries to drown the Avatar under countless tons of water, not knowing the Avatar does not need to breathe. However, the Avatar pretends to drown in order to keep Leviathan's attention on him while he telepathically coordinates with the other heroes, and once they're in position, commences his counterattack.
  • While dealing with Wyld Hunter, the Avatar sends out a blast that the Reality Warper tanks easily, and commences with the boasting and the counterattack. However, that was just a finger-poke to gauge Wyld Hunter's mettle, and the next blast sends him through a tree.
• Ideal Hero: The Avatar, by his very nature as the god of heroism, pretty much has to be this.
  • Tattletale is able to get relatively close to the Avatar's origin because of this, picking out that he was created rather than was born - he's too perfect at the job, and doesn't truly relate to others except through heroism.
• I Know You Know I Know: The Avatar's thoughts go through a lot of this during his battle with the Simurgh. Especially after he reads her mind.
• Inelegant Blubbering:
  • Taylor breaks down in tears when the Avatar gives her a hug after hearing all the turmoil she'd been going through, from her joining the Undersiders to finding out about Coil's plans for Dinah.
  • Brian Clay, a news anchor, tears up on live TV when the news comes in that the Avatar has slain the Simurgh.
  • Naguib Salmawy a.k.a. Ash Beast, sobs once the Avatar makes contact with him, as it's the first piece of human contact he's had in years.
• In Spite of a Nail: The UK still decided to leave the EU. In 2002.
  • After the Simurgh had ravaged most of mainland Europe already (which depleted the EU's resources trying to fix), she hit London. The neo-Fascist Lord Walston, after Parliament and Queen Elizabeth II were killed, had earned fame in the immediate aftermath organizing the evacuation and setting up an emergency government under King Charles III as acting Prime Minister; he was already infamous for stamping out the IRA. When the UN elected to put London under Simurgh quarantine protocols (which the UK's delegate didn't veto and was subsequently assassinated by nationalists). Britain saw it as a betrayal after they had footed most of the bill for fixing Europe (nevermind that Europe didn't have any money to give in return after Lausanne and the collapse of the banking system) so left out of spite.
    • For added Irony, the chapter that revealed all this was released on the day of the Brexit referendum, June 23rd 2016.
  • Likewise Scotland tried for independence in '07.
• Instant Expert: The specific power of the Mexican cartel leader Lord Cognito; any information source he touches, from books to electronic devices, he can instantly read and understand.
• Ironic Echo: "You needed worthy opponents." Said here by Madman to The Simurgh after he interferes with her plans to get rid of The Avatar.
• Know When to Fold Them: Credit to Coil where it's due, as soon as he learned that the Avatar was on his case for kidnapping Dinah, he immediately let her go and put her at a hospital to recover. Of course, he immediately switched to negotiating with the Avatar to stay out of his business in exchange for his help.
• Launcher Move: A large part of the battle against Leviathan is for the heroes to keep him airborne and from reaching the water by any means necessary, while the Avatar's cosmic firepower blasts him apart.
• Lesser of Two Evils: This is often the case where less reviled parahuman warlords garner support by opposing more openly villainous warlords.
  • In Brazil, many cities often beg to be put under the protection of villains, just so they have some defense against the marauding Wyld Hunter and his murderous hunts.
  • The Triple Alliance, three allied Congo warlords, claimed to be the lesser evil against the more sadistic and vicious Madame Lustucru, but kept her in power because she was a useful boogeyman against potential rebels. Likewise, many of Madame Lustucru's own supporters joined her just to get away from the Triple Alliance.
  • Black Sun and Phosphor are both brutal dictators, but since they're actually trying to keep Vietnam functional enough to rule it, the Avatar is willing to focus on brokering peace between them rather than opposing them, and save the Guild's time for much worse threats.
• Logical Weakness:
  • Both the Purifier and Heartbreaker need to see to use their parahuman powers. As such, both of them are neutralized by means of a flash-bang and an eyeless helmet.
  • Blood Count's array of Combo Platter Powers is wide, varied, and makes him nigh-unstoppable, but none of them include mental protection. One concentrated Psi Blast, and he's stunned long enough to be subdued.

M-P

• Magic A Is Magic A:
  • The Avatar has made a clear distinction between planes and dimensions, and what can cross one can't necessarily cross the other (such as the Simurgh's Tinker remote that allow her to control her Tinker devices across dimensions, but not planes). In particular, the Avatar has discovered that the source of parahuman powers are inter-planar in nature, and can allocate his secondary power pool to blocking that inter-planar movement and thus nullifying powers.
    • However, further investigation has him realize that some of Earth-Bet's alternate dimensions are stacked together like planes, so he can use his inter-planar transportation to cross between those alternate dimensions. This confuses and unnerves him, since it is entirely unlike his home dimension. It's likely due to the Entities' and Shards influence.
  • Powers from the Avatar's universe work (and are acquired) differently from those of Parahuman abilities, ranging the Fantasy Kitchen Sink from Mutants to actual magic. It's why he initially shows such shock at the prevalence of child heroes and villains as well as precognitive powers - such things are very rare in his world, but are fairly common on Bet.
• Making a Splash: Aside from Leviathan, three parahuman hydrokinetics have shown up in the story: Tsunami, an ex-villain and Kyushu survivor who joins the Brockton Bay Protectorate, Captain Hydro, a Polish cape and new member of the Guild, and Madame Lustucru, a Congo warlord that can bypass the Manton limit. Thanks to Leviathan, and to a lesser extent Madame Lustucru, this power actually has a fairly unpleasant reputation.
• Manipulative Bastard: Many of the more terrifying Master and Thinker abilities revolve around this, and can be worse than outright mind control. Examples include Rhetor, the leader of Gesellschaft, whose Thinker power tells him exactly what arguments will convince a person without the need for guesswork. Or the Israeli cult leader Hamashiakh, whose Master power inhibits people's emotional response to things they disagree with and ability to come up with counterarguments. Worse, it can actually be broadcasted through technology.
  • Specifically noted as one of the Avatar's few weaknesses despite his Super-Senses and infallible Psychic Block Defense; with the right mundane arguments, he can be fooled, manipulated, or tricked as much as the next person. Note however that as the Anthropomorphic Personification of heroism itself, it is axiomatically impossible to make him unheroic. Word of God is that even if someone used the Path to Victory power to manipulate him into agreeing with racist ideology and the inferiority of minorities - a project that would take a decade of effort or more by an entire organization like Cauldron - he would still fight Nazis on grounds that this means they need more help and protection. And, unlike a human, his ego doesn't get in the way of his changing his mind when he realizes he was wrong.
  • Skylance also qualifies, on an entirely mundane front, given that she fed the Kyushu refugees a false story about how the rest of the world had abandoned them to keep them endeared to her, when in reality she was the one keeping the world out of the camps.
• Mercy Kill:
  • The Avatar would prefer to capture villains alive. But those for whom nothing can be done, like people hollowed out and replaced with a Master power, he can kill without angst. Though of course he will check as thoroughly as possible first.
  • Coil's voice among the Butcher chorus offers up everything he knows in exchange for true death.
• Military Superhero:
  • A couple of them, Multi-hit (India) and Sunblade (Japan), come up during the Guild's international recruitment drive.
  • The Avatar's teammate back home, the Super-Soldier Bleu-Blanc-Rouge (France), also counts.
• Mission Control: Many Guild operations now utilize plenty of Thinker support to direct forces to the right places and keep track of enemy movements, from official Guild members like Centro, to auxiliaries and third-party contacts like Tattletale and Forecast, to local forces like the Nigerian Spark Brain.
• Mission Control Is Off Its Meds:
  • The PRT's comm system is hijacked to decoy the Brockton Bay Protectorate away to allow Coil and Echidna to escape PRT custody. All part of a Simurgh plot. Luckily, the Avatar, with his own communication powers, doesn't need to go through the comm system to coordinate.
  • Heroic example - when dealing with the Four Ghosts of Santiago, the Guild's first order of business is to neutralize their surveillance expert Mil Ojos and hijack her comms to misdirect the rest of her team.
• The Mole: The Toybox associate Prochnost, who assists the Guild with his robustness Tinker specialization, is a mole for the Queen of Black and White.
• Multinational Team: There had been a tragic dearth of these in Earth-Bet (most likely due to the Simurgh), but the Avatar and his support of international assistance is seeking to change that.
  • The Guild was already this, with members from Korea, France, Argentina and the Congo, and the addition of the Avatar encourages them to go for more recruiting, adding heroes from Poland, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Japan and the Ivory Coast. Later operations in Cuba, Nigeria and Brazil also add more heroes to their ranks in thanks.
  • The European Brigade was an inter-European parahuman peacekeeping force proposal that was rendered stillborn by the Simurgh, but the Avatar slaying her gets the idea on more stable footing.
  • On the villainous side, the Mexican Lord Cognito has a Villain Team-Up with Russian, Burmese, Iraqi, Ivory Coast and Uzbekistan warlords.
• Must Make Amends: After the Avatar slew Leviathan and spoke to the world about heroism and hope, a lot of villains worldwide, from Tsunami in Brockton Bay, to Niszczyciel in Poland, to Blink in Indonesia, turned themselves in to custody, if not pulled outright Heel Face Turns.
• My Country, Right or Wrong: Given the Crapsack World of Earth-Bet, it's no surprise that a lot of governments and the people and capes in charge of them have adopted this ultranationalist mindset due to the rise of parahumans, from the Yangban, to Lord Walston of Britain's King's Men, to Fuji-Sama and the Yamato Party of Japan.
• Neglected Sidequest Consequence: Implied; as the Avatar and the Guild maintain focus on their Stern Chase of the Slaughterhouse Nine, they constantly keep them on the run and deny them resources and recruiting opportunities. Some scenes devoted to the chase mention parahumans that were rescued from the Nine's mercies (such as a power effect storer and a dungeon-creator), with the implication that if the Guild had eased up on the pressure, those parahumans and their powers would have shown up in the Nine's final confrontation as their unwilling minions.
• New Skill as Reward: A variation involving parahumans and resources. After the Avatar joins the Guild and they begin taking out the worst of the worst global threats, they slowly gain political capital and favours owed to them by the countries they assist. After operations in Cuba and Japan, they end up recruiting some high-tier capes from those countries.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: The Avatar says as much to Jack Slash during their confrontation. Jack Slash's plan for the Slaughterhouse Nine's grand finale involved gaining the Butcher's powers, recruiting Nilbog and getting him out of Ellisburg, and co-opting the Fallen, meaning that the Guild, Protectorate and their allies now have the opportunity to wipe them all out in one day. Moreover, since it involved the assistance of heroic capes from around the world, it also furthers the Avatar's agenda for international cooperation. As such, the Avatar appreciates the legacy Jack is going to leave behind, making Jack... upset.
  Avatar: This day is going to play as big a role in restoring hope and goodwill among people as the death of either Endbringer; if your impact until today has been a carnival of death and misery, then today effectively wipes your ledger clean.
• "No. Just… No" Reaction: After the Avatar successfully kills the Simurgh, he asks Alexandria if she wants the corpse thrown in with Leviathan's for study. Alexandria responds with this trope and outright asks him to obliterate the thing as thoroughly as he can. Both for symbolism and because it's the frelling Simurgh.
• Not So Invincible After All: Examples both heroic and villainous. On the heroic side, the Avatar has personally defeated the Simurgh and Leviathan and led the international team that took down (among others) Slaughterhouse 9, Nilbog, and Madame Lustucru. On the heroic side, though, both Endbringer fights brought the Avatar very close to death. Particularly the Simurgh, where permanent death was on the table and a hairs breadth away.
• Not His Sled: Word of God is that a major character's dark twist from Worm is not true in this setting. Eidolon has nothing to do with the Endbringers, they're malfunctioning all on their own. Instead his power is strengthened by large concentrations of capes - like you find at Endbringer fights.
• No One Could Survive That!: One could infer the Simurgh thinking this, on account of when she appeared in Brockton Bay, her first move was to send the Avatar to another dimension where he was instantly hammered with a barrage of Tinkertech superweapons that all but ended his life. However, her predictions never accounted the Avatar altering the odds to barely survive by the skin of his teeth, forcing her to travel back to that dimension to finish the job personally.
• No-Sell:
  • Madman is perfectly aware of how cape powers work and countering them. When he visits Tattletale, her power keeps telling her that he, a twentysomething-looking white guy, is the Prince of Nigeria, who's come to sell her 100% effective penis-enhancing pills, and that it's a bargain she can't let pass.
  • The Avatar has no human bodily functions and is Immune to Mind Control, so any parahuman power targeting those specific functions against him (like Heartbreaker's powers) are useless.
  • Celo, an Argentinan Guild member, has this as her main power; she has complete immunity to all parahuman power effects as well as being a mid-range Flying Brick.
  • Benefit of being the Butcher? The powers of every Cape that the Butcher has ever been. Downside to being the Butcher? Near-instant madness as the voices of every person who was the Butcher starts screaming at you. Jack, thanks to Bonesaw's brain mods, shrugs it off by barely being able to hear it.
  • Invoked in the Polish villain Niszczyciel's backstory. He at first tried to be a hero with his disintegration forcefield that made him quasi-indestructible, but after he broke his arm trying to punch the Simurgh, he completely lost his faith and turned to villainy, until the Avatar's defeat of Leviathan and the Simurgh caused him to turn himself in and join the European Brigade. Then, he later discovers that his disintegration field actually does work on Endbringer flesh, and Dragon posits that the Simurgh had actually used her telekinesis to break his arm and simulate invulnerability, not only to deliberately break his spirit, but because she knew he could hurt her.
• The Notable Numeral: Just like the Triumvirate, there are other countries with ace superhero teams based on numbers.
  • France's Irreductibles have Les Quatres As (The Four Aces), whose effectiveness is attributed to their ally Professeur Plus, a Tinker who specializes in power-complementing equipment.
  • Kenya has the Pentagon, five capes with amazing power synergy, who are a major reason why the country is relatively more stable compared to its neighbors.
• Not-So-Harmless Villain: En Kamoni in Israel, whose name in Hebrew means "I am the best/ain't no one like me". Despite his powers of training himself to superhuman levels, he mostly indulges in harmless, hammy "villainous" activities, from bombastically robbing banks while causing no fatalities or permanent injuries, to showing off on the beach in full costume, flexing his muscles and hitting on girls. Then he goes and utterly humiliates Hamashiakh (translates to "the Messiah"), who almost Mastered the entire country into a theocracy, completely No Selling his Master power and leaving him for authorities, and everyone is left wondering how powerful/serious he really is.
• Not Me This Time: Readers all thought it was Cauldron who abducted Coil after he escaped from prison. It was actually The Simurgh.
• Off with His Head!: Armsmaster and his halberd do this to Valefor during the Slaughterhouse Nine's grand finale in Brockton Bay.
• O.C. Stand-in: This fic's version of the bit cape Chubster is quite different from canon. In canon, he was a jovial Protectorate member with Super-Toughness and immovability powers, who died during Leviathan's attack on Brockton Bay. Here, he's an ex-independent hero and loner, current Guild member and Flying Brick that can hit proportional to his mass (hence his weight gain), with political views that tend towards anarchism.
• Offscreen Moment of Awesome: After the Avatar neutralizes Coil, Echidna comes barreling in. The next scene is him telling Director Piggot how he handled both threats.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • The Simurgh has a brief Eye Take when she realizes that a twist of fate has caused her own Tinker super-weapon's targeting systems to mistake her for the Avatar.
  • Poseedor of the Four Ghosts of Santiago has this reaction when he finds the Avatar knocking on his doorstep.
  • Fuji-Sama has this reaction when the Avatar tells him he's not going to be put into an ordinary jail he could easily break out of, but instead an alternate Earth where he can't hurt anyone until his trial.
  • Shape-Stealer has his grin wiped from his face when he realises that he is not in a mundane prison he can escape from, nor the Birdcage full of parahumans that he can kill and gain their powers, but in a Lockbox suspended in orbit around the earth.
  • This is Shatterbird's reaction when she sees several nearly-dead Bonesaw victims teleported in, along with the Guildswoman Voodoo. A super-sped second later, the victims are all intact and Shatterbird's body is a wreck.
• One-Steve Limit: A few aversions:
  • There are two characters named Titan, both of whom don't appear in the story: the Avatar's Sizeshifting comrade from Earth-Gimel and fellow Global Champion, and a villainous cybernetic Tinker that was taken down by the Protectorate and the Silver Crusader.
  • When hearing about a Nigerian warlord named "The General", the Indonesian Guild hero Iron Snake thinks back to a villain in his home country with the same moniker. And his reaction to another General in Vietnam is "...Seriously?"
• Outside-Context Problem:
  • The Avatar is a big one for most of Earth-Bet, with powers that rival any cape but not being a parahuman himself.
  • On the flip side, the Avatar is a little puzzled about Tinkers and precogs - the former because the whole idea of blueprints appearing in one's head from nowhere is frankly bizarre, and the latter because he's encountered precious few of them throughout his whole decades-long hero career.
  • The Avatar points out that this is one of the problems with Earth-Bet, as while in his world, there have been superpowers for a long time (mutants have been around since the dawn of the twentieth century, and magical powers go back much further), Bet's history with powered individuals only goes back about thirty years, and are exacerbated by the nature of said powers. While his world was, for a lack of better term, eased into the concept (with examples of such individuals going back centuries or even thousands of years), Bet was suddenly and violently thrown into a world they had no knowledge or experience with.
• Overnight Conquest: For a city the size of Lagos, Nigeria, ousting and arresting its seven largest villain warlords would be a long, painful endeavor lasting ages, but the Avatar, along with the Guild, the Kenyan Pentagon and lots of backup, manages to do so in a couple of days.
• The Paragon: The Avatar, as the Ideal Hero, is obviously one, and he makes a big deal about inspiring others to do good and to encourage Earth-Bet to develop their own super teams to protect society after he departs. One whole interlude chapter, Paragon Planning, is a discussion with multiple heroes around the world about the need for paragon heroes in society, and how they will encourage virtue in Earth-Bet long after the Avatar leaves.
• Power Misidentification: Since Leviathan can only sense his surroundings through water molecules, the Avatar going intangible to pursue him effectively renders him invisible to Leviathan. With that in mind, once the Avatar gets in range, he dephases, aims, and then blasts Leviathan with firepower instead of aiming first, so that Leviathan would mistakenly think that the Avatar can just teleport to his location, thus tricking him into staying and fighting rather than waste energy on a fruitless escape.
• Power Nullifier: Through his cosmic Super-Senses, the Avatar knows that parahuman powers are inter-planar in nature. By putting up a planar barrier, he can temporarily halt power effects, like Gray Boy loops.
• Pragmatic Hero: The Avatar can heal people, but it exhausts him more than his other powers. He could heal a few people an hour, but it's a better use of his powers to patrol for villains and combat threats in other ways. The exceptions he makes are spending six hours a day breaking Grey Boy's time loops and healing Echidna.
• Pride: What drives the alliance between Lord Cognito and his co-conspirators.
  Bariq: All well and good, but pride is competitive. Proud people, generally, hate other proud people. How will we keep from killing each other?
  Lord Cognito: It is precisely our pride that will maintain our alliance. Once we have given our words and committed to a course of action… why, it then becomes beneath us to stray from that path. Of course, basic politeness and common courtesy will no doubt help too.
• Prisoner Exchange: Inversion, an Extradition Exchange. The rival Vietnamese warlords Black Sun and Phosphor are allied with people that the other wants handed over for punishment (a gang allied with Black Sun that had committed war crimes in Phosphor's territory, and a banker allied with Phosphor who is connected to the warlord that attacked Black Sun's hometown). As part of their truce negotiations, both agree to extradite their "allies" to each other, but to alleviate the loss of face this betrayal causes on both sides, the Avatar offers to patrol both warlords' areas, as well as assist them in other endeavors.
• Punch! Punch! Punch! Uh Oh...: When the Avatar calls out the Jacksonville villain Flash, the speedster (who gets faster the stronger his opponent is) runs in and starts whaling on the Avatar with metal bats and hammer and chisels in a blistering Speed Blitz. All he gets for his trouble are sore hands and almost piercing his target's skin before the Avatar cancels out his powers.

R-T

• Railroading: Invoked as part of the narrative: at the end of the chapter Avatar World Tour, instead of delivering the quest's usual choices for the readers to decide the Avatar's next course of action, the narrative presents a series of preselected actions that the Avatar takes, which references the Simurgh's manipulations to get him in just the right place for her to abduct him.
• "Reason You Suck" Speech: The Avatar gives a mild and constructive one to Dauntless, regarding why Armsmaster dislikes him so much. Avatar posits that Dauntless' lack of work ethic is a main sticking point. Dauntless counters that everyone is a slacker compared to Armsmaster. Both Sides Have a Point but The Avatar's main argument is that if Dauntless is going to be a Superhero it should be something he chooses rather than allowing it to be something he is simply resigned to.
• Reconcile the Bitter Foes: The Vietnamese warlords Black Sun and Phosphor came to a truce shortly after the Avatar's arrival, but after talks started to deteriorate, the Avatar himself decided to mediate things personally.
• Recruiting the Criminal:
  • Niszczyciel, a Polish parahuman with a Touch of Death forcefield, is one of the ex-villains who wants to make amends following Leviathan's death, doing so by joining the European Brigade.
  • The Avatar has requested Tattletale's expertise and Thinker support on several Guild operations.
  • After their arrests, the Nigerian warlords Harvest and the Doctor are put to work in civilian capacities by the Guild and governments as their Tinker-engineered crops and healing powers respectively are too vital to Nigeria's future.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: Played straight with Tinkertech, which can't be reproduced. To help combat this, the Avatar produces tons of carbosteel and omni-metal (supertough Fantasy Metals from his world) for the scientists to reverse engineer.
• Resigned in Disgrace: The Politically Incorrect Hero Bastion had his career saved from an anti-hispanic racism scandal by his prominent part in the fight against Leviathan, but after he is caught making the same sort of remarks again, during the time when Mexico is becoming part of the Protectorate, things get too hot for his career to be saved. The Avatar talks him into resigning without a fuss in order to preserve the Protectorate's mission statement, and even gives him an opportunity to regain his hero cred by potentially going undercover in the far-right villain organization the Freedom Congress.
• Save the Villain: The Avatar may not have a strict Thou Shalt Not Kill code against villains, but he does do his level best to preserve his foes' life if at all possible. Just as examples during the Slaughterhouse Nine's attack, he preserved the lives of Murder Rat, Pagoda, Unexpected, Burnscar and Bonesaw, even when it would've been plenty easier to remove them with lethal force.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • The Empire 88 decide to leave Brockton Bay en masse after the balance of power in the city swings firmly towards the Protectorate, and after an operation that cuts their illegal operations and supply lines out from under them.
  • Midway through the Guild's battle with Skylance's forces, the warlord uses one of her portals to evacuate the battle after she gets injured. Luckily, one of the Guildsmen has the powers needed to track her down.
  • During the Guild's Lagos operation to clear out their warlords, one of them, the Doctor, decides to skip town to Port Harcourt. It doesn't help him.
• Scry vs. Scry: With Thinker and precognitive support on both sides, the Guild's operation to clear out Lagos's villain population is just as much tactical chess as it is urban combat.
• Shadow Archetype: The author has stated that he's taken cues from canon Skitter and the Undersiders when Worldbuilding some of Earth-Bet's supervillains from other countries.
  • The Undersiders' description of a villain team who never sought to become the city's conquerors, but ended being the last ones standing after the authorities tried to intervene is taken and applied to the Four Ghosts of Santiago, four parahumans with great synergy who ended up taking over one of Cuba's cities even after the big dogs of the country were sent. The difference, of course, is that all the Ghosts are unrepentant Card Carrying Villains, with Poseedor in particular taking enjoyment in doing whatever he likes while being functionally immortal.
  • Skitter's image as a Villain with Good Publicity who visibly helped out after an attack from Leviathan and garnered a lot of goodwill from the populace, even while deliberately hampering relief efforts from the authorities to keep control of her territory (at Coil's behest) is applied to the Japanese warlord Skylance, who controls the refugee camps after Leviathan's Sundering of Kyushu and established herself as their sole protector, while intercepting legal relief and distributing it to earn her the credit. The difference is that Skylance is a self-serving demagogue who espouses this propaganda purely for the power and parahumans the refugee camps can provide her.
  • In an All There in the Manual example, a near-Skitter Expy of a teenage cape who genuinely wanted to do good, but a number of bad choices, committing crimes to save the city, defending criminals because she felt loyal to them, escalating against the government and a severe distrust of authority and Control Freak-level paranoia led to her becoming a conqueror, is established in Multiplicité, a Self-Duplication quasi-immortal parahuman who ended up conquering the entirety of Madagascar, slowly drove the country into the ground, and then dropped it into a power-vacuum anarchy when she and all her bodies were Compelling Voiced into suicide.
• Shout-Out:
  • Some of the OC capes mentioned in the story notes used to Worldbuild this fic have power sets that reference common Fandom Specific Plots in Worm:
    • Summoning powerful characters as minions e.g. Projection Quest: Summoner, head of the Protectorate Seattle branch and the highest-ranking Cauldron cape in the Protectorate below the Triumvirate. She has a growing charge that she can spend to create projections with a large variety of shapes, abilities and powers, from dragons to avenging angels. The more charge she accumulates, the more powerful projections she can create, but any projection that is destroyed is lost and must be re-created with more charge.
    • Peggy Sue fics e.g. Security: Naya Mauka, an Indian Thanda cape that Triggered in 1994 with a full lifetime of memories had he not Triggered. His foreknowledge saved many lives and kept Indian heroes on top of many disasters, but due to his shard's blindspots of Endbringers and Scion, he couldn't predict the attacks or loss of life, and Leviathan's first unpredicted attack eventually made him commit suicide in 1996.
    • The Gamer/RPG Mechanics 'Verse fic e.g. Co-op Mode: En Kamoni, seemingly harmless villain and arguably strongest cape in Israel. His power is the capability to train everything about himself - strength, speed, agility and even physical and mental skill - to superhuman levels without ever hitting limits or diminishing returns, and also a complete immunity to Master effects.
  • A French independent Tinker specializing in Humongous Mecha has modeled his appearance on an old Japanese anime, and has named himself Goldorak. It's part of why he's independent; there's no way he could get away with this if he was government-sponsored.
  • The Japanese hero Wing Warrior takes some inspiration from the anime Wing-Man.
  • "Familiar Farces" is a TV series using latex puppets of celebrities to deliver news on a comical tone - a blatant reference to ''Les Guignols de l'info", a French political parody.
  • The Choker is a Nigerian A-list villain that uses his nitrogen-focused aerokinesis to mass-suffocate his victims. Given his name, his appearance of a facially-scarred suited man in a smiling gas mask, his psychotic, sadistic personality and his proclivity to play "games", he has some clear inspiration in The Joker.
  • One of the team leaders in the Chicago Protectorate is a cape named Sunset, who has been linked on PHO to the disappeared supervillain Shimmerstar.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: The Avatar does this to quite a few villains, such as Coil and Kaiser.
• Shut Up, Kirk!:
  • Hookwolf gives this to the Avatar, choosing to go down swinging instead of surrendering with dignity.
  • During the confrontation with Skylance, as soon as the Avatar starts speaking to the crowd, Skylance immediately opens fire on him since she knows how charismatic he is and the last thing she wants is to give him an avenue for a speech.
  • The warlord Madame Lustucru, when told to stop being puerile and surrender peacefully by the Avatar, replies with "Then let me be puerile!"
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: This gets played with. The setting of the story is pretty far on the cynical side of the spectrum, but it gets greatly impacted by the Avatar, who hails from much closer to the idealistic end. If you want to get technical, the Avatar is literally the Idealistic end of the spectrum, seeing as how he's the god and Anthropomorphic Personification of heroism as a concept.
• Spanner in the Works: The Avatar's arrival was completely unpredicted by any precog or clairvoyant on Earth-Bet, derailing a number of plans including those of the Simurgh's.
• Spared by the Adaptation: The only cape casualty of Leviathan's attack is a cape named Multishot. Every other canon casualty, including Bastion, Dauntless, Gallant, Aegis and Kaiser, isn't.
• Speeches and Monologues: The Avatar gives a lot of these over the story, from the rousing to the hopeful, and he's a master at delivering them.
• Stern Chase: A case where the good guys are the chasers - ever since the Guild received their membership boost, the Avatar has advocated constant support on hunting down the Slaughterhouse Nine, drawing in Thinkers from other countries to assist. Already they have prevented them from gaining resources or "recruiting" other capes, and they are slowly running out of places to hide. Then again, you know the phrase about cornered rats...
• Stop Worshipping Me: The Avatar says as much to an evangelist preaching him as the return of God, saying that he wishes to be emulated, not worshipped. While the evangelist is right in that he is an actual god (or at least the Avatar of one), the Avatar has dismantled a few cults to him in his time, so talking the evangelist down isn't a problem.
• Story-Breaker Power: Downplayed; from the Avatar's perspective, Super-Speed is one of these as a potent, fairly ubiquitous, force-multiplying power. He gets the shudders when he hears how fast Leviathan is in addition to his hydrokinesis, commonly uses mental and physical super speed on himself to outmanoeuvre his opponents, and frequently uses speedsters like the new Guildsmen Iron Snake and Multi-Hit and the Kenyan Pentagon's Kinesis in his vanguard strike teams. Back in Earth-Gimel, he holds up the Global Champions' Tracer Pulse and Global Might's Blitzkrieg as potent combatants due to their combination of super speed and firepower (in fact, Tracer Pulse's recruitment into the Champions was due to the sheer usefulness of his speed).
  • To a lesser level, Teleportation is also one of these force-multiplying utility powers. The Guild makes frequent use of Strider's services, they frequently target enemy teleporters in operations against gangs and villain organizations, and the Slaughterhouse Nine becomes a lot harder to pin down once they get Unexpected into their ranks.
• Sweet and Sour Grapes: From the perspective of the President of Brazil, her request for the Avatar to telepathically confirm the loyalty of three people she wants to put in positions of power to stabilize Belo Horizonte is this. The Avatar refuses her request since it would be unethical to read their minds without permission and they would be seen as less credible if they refused to allow it, but then he goes off and asks each of them in private if they would allow their mind to be read, and tells the President that all three are trustworthy.
• Sudden Principled Stand:
  • Present in the backstory of the Indian Garama cape Multi-Hit, where he Triggered after refusing military orders that were borderline illegal and unethical.
  • One cape enforcer named Deathblow that the Avatar encounters during the Lagos operation refuses to attack him, as he thinks that attacking the man that killed Leviathan and the Simurgh and ousted Madame Lustucru is just plain not right.
• Swiss-Army Superpower: The Avatar's cosmic energy manipulation is essentially this, since it can become almost any superpower that he wants. However, it takes time to change powers, and there's only so much cosmic energy to go around at any one time.
• Tailor-Made Prison: After gaining more Tinker support, the Guild starts developing Lockboxes as alternative prisons for parahuman criminals with troublesome powers but do not warrant the Birdcage. They are placed in various inescapable locations such as in orbit or buried beneath the earth, with only a few parahumans able to place them and transfer prisoners into them.
• Talking Is a Free Action: The Avatar subverts this on a couple of occasions.
  • While trying to talk Hookwolf down from his Last Stand, he also sends telepathic commands to the surrounding civilians and incoming Protectorate capes, getting the former to take cover and informing the latter of his plan. As such, when Hookwolf says "Shut Up, Kirk!", Miss Militia is ready.
  • The Avatar had no belief that he could talk the psychotic Madame Lustucru into surrendering, but the time he did spend talking was time that he could clear the air of the room of children she was trying to fill with propane gas.
• Talking the Monster to Death: When the Avatar encounters the Travelers, he manages to convince them to turn themselves in without fighting him, by promising them that he'll be fair in exchange for their backstory, and telling them that they have no fear of being pawns in the Simurgh's plan since his unpredicted arrival has effectively derailed it.
• Talk to the Fist:
  • After the villains Skylance and Fuji-Sama spend some time trying to wrest the narrative of their conflict with the Guild to their control, the Avatar pipes up, which causes Skylance, a Manipulative Bitch who knows full-well of his charisma and cannot afford a moment of him speaking, to immediately open hostilities and blast him.
  • The Japanese hero Wing Warrior does this to Fuji-Sama, before the villain can spin the rhetoric to his favor yet again. That said, the Avatar has to nullify Fuji-Sama's Brute powers first before Wing Warrior knocks some of his teeth out.
  • As he is confronted, the Nigerian villain called the Choker is about to propose playing a game, but the Avatar just blasts him before he gets any further.
• Team Spirit: Cooperation, especially of the international sort, is something the Avatar is trying to establish all across Earth-Bet. Early on, he explains to Armsmaster why he tries to set up teams and encourage other heroes - despite the Avatar not needing sleep at all, even if he had a full week every day he'd never get done everything that needs getting done. Having more people in the fight helps.
  • After a cape battle which took out all the Merchants, Shadow Stalker called out the Avatar for following Armsmaster's orders during the battle instead of finishing everything himself, saying that because Avatar is stronger, he doesn't have to heed Armsmaster's will. The Avatar calmly rebuts her argument by saying that strength comes in many forms, including the abilities to form good plans and ally with good people.
  • The Guild went on an international recruiting drive to bolster their roster and become more of an international peacekeeping force.
  • The Avatar advocated for reviving the stillborn European Brigade international organization, something that had been proposed before but never really got off the ground. This already has seen a few benefits:
    • A Tinker specializing in Humongous Mecha but had transportation logistical issues gets proposed assistance from a Tinker specializing in pocket dimensions.
    • A Tinker capable of improving the robustness of Tinkertech has assisted a force-field-based Tinker in Kenya, freeing her up to assist in other projects.
  • The Pentagon are Kenya's five best capes with significant power synergy with each other, and the reason the country is an island of relative stability on the African continent.
  • On the villainous side, the Four Ghosts of Santiago, the Triple Alliance of the Congo and even Cognito's coalition are all proof that teaming up has its benefits.
  • On a personal basis, the parahuman Johnny Kong has a Thinker power that revolves around teamwork synergy.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Wyld Hunter, a Brazilian Reality Warping villain, has this to say after he successfully tanks less than 0.1% of the Avatar's power.
    Wyld Hunter: You should've picked an opponent in your league. (Delivers a Bolt of Divine Retribution)
    (The Avatar No Sells the bolt, and blasts Wyld Hunter through a tree)
  • Representative Dunst of Iowa, one of the more hardline right-wingers in Congress, thinks that as long as the Avatar and the Guild keep supporting "third-world hellholes" instead of American interests, he can keep riling up support in his constituents that keep seeing someone that isn't them get the Avatar's help. Then he gets the news that the Avatar and Guild's latest triumph is over the Slaughterhouse Nine, in Brockton Bay.
• There Are No Therapists: Subverted once Taylor joins the Boston Wards and is made to attend therapy sessions with Doctor Yamada.
• This Is Something He's Got to Do Himself:
  • Present in spirit when Hookwolf, watching the Empire leave Brockton Bay, chooses to go down swinging against the Avatar. The Avatar, however, views his own presence as superfluous and lets the local Protectorate have the honors of getting closure while he keeps the bystanders safe, resulting in Miss Militia triple-tapping him with a bazooka.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • The Guild themselves, while hardly ineffectual before, gets a major power bump after they go on a worldwide recruiting drive and induct the Avatar and several other international heroes into their ranks. After several successful operations around the world, one of the members, Laser Fist, finds herself almost thinking of an operation to clear out one of Kenya's most persistent and ruthless parahuman gangs as "pest control". Narwhal reminds her that their new luck won't last forever.
  • Similarly, the European Brigade, intended to be an international task force to handle parahuman threats throughout Europe, was effectively a joke due to the Simurgh, with its member countries only contributing a few token heroes each. Once the Avatar killed the Simurgh and brought new life to the project, more A-lister capes were added to the Brigade's ranks, including Ice Queen, Goldorak and Niszczyciel, incredibly boosting their effectiveness.
• Trans Tribulations: The minor villain Unexpected ran away from home after he was outed as trans, and he triggered with Teleportation powers to escape from his family. He still faces this prejudice after being rescued from involuntary service with the Slaughterhouse Nine and the Avatar supporting him, such as from a reporter who still refers to him with female pronouns.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: One of the key differences in powers between the Avatar's world and Bet is that Parahumans acquire their abilities through this trope exclusively. In the Avatar's world, there's multiple sources, but the most common is the Puberty Superpower method.

U-Z

• Übermensch: The Argonauts of Boston are a villain group founded on this ideal; founder Jason was set on living his life in the manner of the Classical Heroes, i.e. how he saw fit and not let modern morality stand in the way of do so. This naturally attracted many villains and at least one disgruntled hero to his banner.
• Unblockable Attack: The Avatar's solution to taking out the A-lister Nigerian villain Blood Count. Having drained enough people to build up his Combo Platter Powers and boasting defenses from a Danger Sense, Healing Factor and force fields to liquid transformation, teleportation and Super-Speed, there seems to be no good way for the Avatar to land a telling blow... until the Avatar uses a cosmic blast as a feint to distract Blood Count, and then floors him with a psychic assault that no amount of physical defense can save him from.
• Unfortunate Names:
  • There is a Vietnamese warlord named Phosphor, as in white phosphorus. Word of God mentions that he has some degree of self-loathing.
  • The Guild discusses the appropriateness when they hear of a Polish Thinker named Napoleon, considering the country's polarized opinion over his historical namesake.
• Ungrateful Bastard: What does the villain and ex-Slaughterhouse Nine member Shape-Stealer do when the Avatar frees him from a Grey Boy loop? Try and blast him with a fireball. Not that it works.
• Unwitting Pawn:
  • The Japanese A-lister villain Fuji-Sama was used as such by the Guild to take out their main target, the Villain with Good Publicity Skylance. By clandestinely feeding him information and getting him to crash their confrontation, they put his and Skylance's ultranationalist agendas in conflict with each other and kept her from spinning the narrative in her favor.
  • Wing Warrior may think he's in a backroom deal with Prochnost and the PRT to secretly copy useful parahuman powers into modules for them, but he's actually making them for Cauldron and the Queen of Black and White instead.
• Vampiric Draining: The essence of Blood Count, an A-Class villain in Lagos, Nigeria. He slowly kills people around him by exhaustion, effectively draining their Life Energy, and the more he does so, the more Combo Platter Powers he develops, from Super-Speed to liquid shapeshifting to disintegration touch. He's said to be in Eidolon's class if he drains enough people, and Endbringers aside he's the first cape to at least keep pace with the Avatar in a one-on-one fight.
• Vertical Kidnapping: The Avatar has done this a couple of times to subdue particularly troublesome villains, by (telekinetically) grabbing them and flying them a good distance into the air. Interestingly, all of them had Area of Effect powers (the Cuban Horror was a Supernatural Fear Inducer, the Mexican Reina De La Niebla produced Mind Controlling mist, and the Indonesian Skull King could stop all biological functions in his area of influence, and choose which people remained dead when they exited it).
• Victor Gains Loser's Powers: Two occurrences in this quest:
  • Throne, Artificial Human and parahuman king of Uzbekistan, can summon and banish swords that store and replicate the powers of parahumans they kill.
  • Shape-Stealer, ex-Slaughterhouse Nine member, is a Shapeshifter who takes the forms of people he kills, as well as a copy of their powers if they have any.
• Villain Ball: Coil holds this big-time when he tells the Avatar how his power works in order to play up his usefulness to the greater good, and says that if the Avatar doesn't accept his deal to stay out of his business, he'll drop the current timeline for one where he'd already killed a lot of people. He never expected the Avatar to have a way to make him drop the wrong timeline.
• Villain Team-Up:
  • A Multinational Team example. After the Avatar returns from killing the Simurgh, six parahuman warlords: Lord Cognito from Mexico, Swarm from the Ivory Coast, Storm Rider from Myanmar, Bariq from Iraq, Koroleva from Russia, and Throne from Uzbekistan, form a coalition dedicated to bringing him down.
  • Jack Slash's plan for the Slaughterhouse Nine's big finale involved him gaining assistance from the Teeth (by means of him becoming the Butcher), Nilbog and the Fallen.
• Villain with Good Publicity:
  • In Japan, the warlord Skylance holds control of the refugee camps that resulted from Kyushu's sundering, protecting them from outside interference, bringing them supplies, and telling them that the outside world and the government has abandoned them and the only one that can save them is each other. In reality, she's the one who's been intercepting the aid packages and redistributing them to the refugees, endearing herself to them and giving her power and control over them, as well as preventing any workers from actually entering the camps and disrupting her doctrine. This is a key factor in the Guild's operation against her, as they do not want to give her any avenue to make herself a martyr.
  • Gesellschaft, as well as its many child organizations around the world, also have a lot of support from the populace. Though the Avatar is seeking to change this.
• Weak, but Skilled: Eidolon isn't weak by usual standards, but he becomes much more effective (eg sweeping the team mock battles) when the Avatar persuades him to try reaching less for direct firepower, and more for Thinker powers, like hearing all sounds within a radius of miles, or knowing what will happen to himself within the next six minutes.
• Wham Episode:
  • The chapter Avatar World Tour concludes with the Avatar returning to Brockton Bay after clearing four global A-Class threats (Moord Nag, the Purifier, Wyld Hunter and Heartbreaker), only for the Simurgh to appear and abduct him.
  • Perspectives: Earth-Bet shows that not only has the Butcher's powers passed to Coil and then to Jack Slash, Behemoth is charging up for his next battle along with two new Endbringers and plans to open the fight by detonating Yellowstone Supervolcano.
• What If?: Some are provided in a series of author-written Omakes:
  • Alternate Paths provides scenes of what could happen if any of the other Global Champions were chosen to be inserted into Earth-Bet instead of the Avatar.
    • Titan appears in the middle of Taylor's first fight with Lung and literally stomps the dragon-man flat.
    • Bleu-Blanc-Rouge carves up the entirety of the E88 single-handedly and leaves Kaiser begging for mercy. You can tell he really hates Nazis.
    • Mr. Tomorrow tears through the Slaughterhouse Nine with his monomolecular claws.
    • Tracer Pulse easily out-speeds Leviathan.
    • Causality clears out Ellisburg by shunting Nilbog's armies to another dimension, starving him of biomass.
    • Techno-Paladin clotheslines the Simurgh, already geared up to counter her every advantage.
    • Mimic clears through the Birdcage with the intent of releasing seven innocent inmates, and challenges Glaistig Uaine to a duel for her help against the Endbringers.
    • Phantom undermines the Yangban of its press-ganged parahuman labor, while hinting that he's also keeping an eye on the PRT.
    • Thermakron blasts away Behemoth's flesh through extreme thermic shock.
  • Darker Paths display what could happen if any of Earth-Gimel's major Big Bads were the ones inserted instead. To say any of them makes things all the worse for Earth Bet is a massive understatement:
    • Doctor Combat begins selling his augmentation formula to disgruntled humans en masse.
    • Shadow prepares to annihilate around 95% of all parahumans and sell Shadow-controlled weapons to the remaining governments.
    • Lord Garzor keeps firing his ship's weapons to erase small towns off the map until humanity gives him a method of returning to his home dimension. A method they do not, in fact, possess. He knows they probably don't actually have it, he's just not taking any chances and doesn't care at all about human life.
    • Global Might goes on a killing spree against the members of the Protectorate and the Triumvirate.
    • Uberwyrm pounds Moord Nag's shadow into pieces and forces her to become his lieutenant, with the implication she's but one of many.
    • Lord Powermonger seizes control of the Endbringers and prepares to kill all life on Earth.
    • Nollius convinces Bonesaw to prepare a series of plagues to kill all mutants in Earth Gimmel, letting her create art in his dungeons as payment.
    • Professor Cryo captures the Birdcage, frames the Undersiders for killing Dragon, and escapes unsuspected, intending to use the para/metahumans of both Earths as Outside Context Problems for each other.
    • Astor takes the time to torture Legend - along with thousands of others simultaneously using divine multitasking - and remakes the Simurgh with boundless love and compassion for humanity while increasing its compulsion to drive them to terror and despair.
    • Eternatus uses Save Scumming to send data to its past self with information on how to cripple Scion, vaporizes Earth, and reprograms all shards to obey it.
    • Lung desperately fights against a single Berserker unit, and it takes everything he's got to destroy it. Then the skies grow dark...
    • Checkmate joins Skitter's fight against Lung.
• What Would X Do?:
  • The Avatar has just engaged in battle with the Simurgh, and she's outthinking him at every turn. Realizing what he's doing isn't working, the Avatar thinks about what his genius allies in the Global Champions would do, and the combination of Tracer Pulse's deduction, Causality's analysis, Techno-Paladin's logic, and Bleu-Blanc-Rouge's tactics help him come up with a successful plan.
  • When trying to work out a way to get around Blood Count's combo platter of defensive powers, the Avatar thinks back to some of his fellow Global Champions and their fights for inspiration.
• Winds of Destiny, Change!: As part of his divine purview, the Avatar has the power to alter fate itself to cause one-in-a-million events to happen, and unlike everything else he does, its usage cannot be predicted by precognitives and can trick even the Simurgh. However, it is extremely energy-intensive.
• Worldbuilding: One of this quest's main strengths. With the Avatar's heroics going international, this quest takes a look at how the rest of Earth-Bet fared from the advent of parahumans, from the villains all over the world and the heroes that try to stop them. Especially when the Guild goes on an international recruiting drive.
• Wretched Hive: In the age of parahumans and Endbringers, quite a few cities and even countries have almost been completely taken over by villains and criminal organizations. Santiago, Cuba was taken over by the Four Ghosts, many cities in Nigeria are almost entirely the lands of villain warlords and Kolwezi in the Congo is the domain of the sadistic Madame Lustucru, while the Ivory Coast was taken over by the villain Swarm and Brasilia, Brazil is the only place in the country that is not cartel-controlled. The Avatar, upon joining the Guild, has put clearing some of these cities out higher on his agenda.
• Wrong Context Magic: The rules of how powers work are very different between those of Earth-Bet (Worm) and Earth-Gimel ("The Avatar's World"). Mutants/Metahumans in the Avatar's world, for example, don't get their full strength until they hit adulthood, and on average tend to be much stronger than those found among Parahumans (and that's not getting into supertech or magic). On the flipside, Parahumans get their full power as soon as they Trigger, the power variety is much greater than those of most Metahumans, even young people can get powers, and abilities can include precogs, which is practically unheard of in the Metahuman population.
• Xanatos Gambit: The Simurgh set up a few more of her domino time bombs to drive the world into more chaos in the event that she loses the one-on-one with the Avatar. Fortunately the Avatar not only won, he read her mind in the process, enabling him to defuse said time bombs.
• You Are Better Than You Think You Are: The Avatar thinks very highly of Taylor, and doesn't miss an opportunity to let her know it.
  • It also extends to her father as well, and he doesn't let him forget it either.
    Your daughter is a good person. She did not get it from a bad father.
  • He also says a similar line to Tattletale, claiming that despite her manipulating Taylor into becoming her friend and abandoning her heroic dreams for her own ends, she truly cares for Taylor as her friend and is a lot more altruistic than she gives herself credit for.
• You Are Number 6: In their interludes, the Endbringers refer to themselves as "Terror Drones", each with a number. Behemoth is Terror Drone Two, the Simurgh calls herself Terror Drone Seven, Leviathan was Terror Drone Thirteen, and Behemoth's interlude also mentions Terror Drones Five and Sixteen.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Quoted directly by Myrddin when he stops Madame Lustucru's last trick: a kinetic projectile falling from the sky.

---

Tropes in The Avatar's World

• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Averted; in the Avatar's experience, A.I.s generally do what they're made to do, with further character growth as per anyone with free will. Assonance and Alliteration were built to be Madman's rhyming henchmen, and that's what they do, and Thermakron was seemingly built with heroic impulses and is a member of the Global Champions. The closest straight example is Overseer, who was built by the KGB to conduct national surveillance, and now surveils a new totalitarian regime inside the Cryosphere.
• All There in the Manual: Aside from an introductory first chapter, a few Omakes and the Avatar's inner monologue, very few details of Earth-Gimel make it into the fic proper. The majority of information is located throughout the story thread and from this incomplete wiki.
• Always Need What You Gave Up: Adeltom gave up the vast majority of his divine powers when he crippled himself from a god banished to Limbo to a cosmically-powered Avatar able to bypass the banishment and still become the world's greatest hero. Then 20 or so years later, at the end of World War II, the banishment was removed, allowing magic, and later the gods, to return to the world, with the crippled Adeltom unable to support his fellow good gods against the evil gods.
• Amnesiac Hero: Phantom, Thermakron and Mimic of the Global Champions have very little knowledge of their origins. The former only approached Earth out of curiosity and has no knowledge beyond appearing in space, and the latter cannot remember anything before waking up in Nollius's dungeons in Avalon.
• Been There, Shaped History: In Earth-Gimel, the Avatar has been around since the 1920s, and he's participated in a lot of events since then, including taking out the Ku Klux Klan. In Earth-Bet, the neo-Nazi Kaiser is flabbergasted when the Avatar tells him he's heard the same insulting rhetoric from Hitler himself, and he wasn't impressed then either.
  • In Earth-Gimel, he gave Martin Luther King Jr. a protective amulet that kept him from being assassinated. This means that in Earth Gimmel he remained an active and controversial political figure despised by the right, rather than a lionized (and sanitized) martyr and national hero.
  • Also, while he was still a god, he created a demigoddess that became the Lady of the Lake in Arthurian Legend and gifted Excalibur to Arthur.
• Benevolent Conspiracy: The Arcane Alliance, a secret coalition founded by the Avatar to find a way to stop/slow down the return of the gods to Earth after the unbanishment of magic, since his transformation from Adeltom to the Avatar vastly (and to his knowledge irreversibly) crippled his power, and he would thus be unable to maintain the Balance of Power between the good and evil gods. The reason for secrecy is that all it would take is a few idiots working to summon them to bring the gods back that much faster, so the less people that know, the better.
• Brought Down to Badass: Banished to Limbo along with the other gods many centuries ago, yet able to witness the first mutants being persecuted by humanity, Adeltom, the god of Heroism, could not stand by any longer. So, he restricted himself to a physical avatar that was able to bypass the banishment spell, but only had a crippled fraction of his full divine power. That fraction of divine power was still more than enough for him to enact great change as the Avatar, Earth-Gimel's first and greatest superhero.
• Bullying a Dragon: When Golden Dawn managed to perfect a Power Parasite magic ritual, they decided to test it out by targeting Global Might. It didn't go well for them. At all.
• City of Adventure: Megalopolis, a city built largely of omni-metal by the MegaCorp Omnicorp, that boasts one of the highest metahuman-to-human population ratio on Earth.
• Corporate-Sponsored Superhero: The Omni-Force, the world's largest Super Team, is sponsored by the MegaCorp Omnicorp. Though they've been accused of being a giant PR stunt, they've garnered a lot of good will.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Illustrated in Earth-Gimel's historical version of Arthurian Legend. King Arthur had just gotten through telling Mordred about his plan to replace Camelot's succession of royal bloodline with a democratic process in which the people and lords can vote on their new king and reject him if unfit. Unfortunately, Mordred, who had been told from childhood that the King was his father and that Camelot was his by birthright, and had worked tirelessly to gain Arthur's favor till then, saw this as a colossal snub that ultimately kicked off his Face–Heel Turn. For his part, Arthur already knew that Mordred was his bastard son and didn't care about that fact, seeing him as a knight as worthy as any other and perfectly capable of being chosen as the next king if he garnered the people's support. Mordred, however, didn't think of it that way.
• Depopulation Bomb: The Necrosphere, a planet-wide Doomsday Device created by Shadow for the purpose of killing off metahumans.
• Deus Exit Machina:
  • The Avatar would have been an outright game changer for the Allies in World War II, so Hitler hired an alien mercenary named Tagton to dispose of him. Tagton successfully trapped the Avatar in the sun to burn as fast as he could regenerate, keeping him out of commission for the majority of the war; the Avatar only managed to escape in time for D-Day.
  • One event in the campaign has the Global Champions out in space to stop the alien death god Nihil, leaving it up to the quest's protagonists to handle the current threats on Earth.
• Diabolical Mastermind: Professor Cryo, the Conqueror of Cold, one of Earth-Gimel's greatest villain masterminds. He is named for his signature thermodynamic field that can sap nearly any person or being of their energy the moment they enter it.
• Didn't See That Coming: When the Avatar crippled his power from a full divine god to a Physical God avatar in order to escape the banishment from Limbo and assist humanity's growth personally, he never thought that during World War II, the Nazis would somehow find a way to undo the banishment. Which means that sometime in the future, the other gods will return from Limbo with their full divine might, with Adeltom, stuck in his crippled Avatar state, unable to maintain the Balance of Power. It's why he formed the Arcane Alliance in the first place.
• Enigmatic Empowering Entity: The Living Nebula, a space-faring entity that seeks to empower humanity to save them from the Berserkers, a pursuing Horde of Alien Locusts. It does so by secretly editing the DNA of humans all over the world, creating the first mutants in the 1920s.
• Evil Doppelgänger: Techno-Powermonger, a Mirror Universe counterpart of Techno-Paladin, who had his hero career cut short and was inducted into Shadow.
• Expy: Oh, plenty.
  • The Avatar, as the world's greatest superhero and inspirational figure, takes some cues from Superman.
  • Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, as a Captain Geographic Super-Soldier wielding a weapon made of Fantasy Metals, is essentially a French Captain America.
  • Mr. Tomorrow, as a Mutant with a Healing Factor and hand claws, is a more politically-minded Wolverine.
  • Madman, as the resident Great Gazoo, fills a niche similar to Mr. Mxyzptlk.
  • Professor Cryo and Nollius take some cues from Professor Coldheart and No-Heart respectively, though vastly more villainous.
• Fantasy Metals:
  • Omni-metal was reverse-engineered by Omnicorp from the wreckage of an alien invader's spaceship and is nearly indestructible. It is used both in military and civilian construction (Megalopolis is almost entirely made out of alloys of it), and Bleu-Blanc-Rouge wields a Monomolecular Blade made out of omni-metal.
  • Venture Industries developed carbosteel, which is just as durable as omni-metal yet lighter than plastic (though prohibitively difficult and expensive to produce), and is used extensively in the aerospace industry and even in the construction of the Tower of Babel Space Elevator.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: You've got gods, Mutants, aliens, super-tech, dragons, magic, etc, etc.
• God of Evil: The pantheon of gods includes Astor, God of Hatred, Kotos, God of Madness, and Paronak, God of Fear, counterparts to the gods of Love, Civilization, and the God of Heroism, Adeltom.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Berserkers, a space exploration probe mutated into a Grey Goo Horde of Alien Locusts, capable of devouring galaxies at a time (gods and all). The thing that Garzor, Upstart and the Living Nebula have all fled to Earth to desperately try and escape from.
• Hero Killer:
  • Angelbane of Global Might's raison d'être, created by Nollius for one purpose - to kill superheroes. It's practically a neurotic obsession with her.
  • The Man of Might, who single-handedly turned Jerusalem into a crater and halved Earth-Gimel's hero population. Even the Avatar fell to his power. Indeed, the mass reduction of heroes is what kicks off the main campaign storyline of The Avatar's World.
• Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: Inverted; with the Avatar doing his super heroics before World War 2, when the nukes landed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, one critic compared their power to the Avatar's, but with none of the compassion or morality.
• Legion of Doom: Global Might, the villainous counterpart to the Global Champions. Comprised of:
  • Mordor, common thug turned Super Strong syndicate-made supervillain.
  • Angelbane, Nollius's tailor-made psychic Hero Killer.
  • Reaper, Badass Normal scythe-wielding Serial Killer.
  • Jack of All Trades, speed-learning combat master.
  • Blitzkrieg, gun-wielding super-fast ex-Waffen SS Super-Soldier.
  • White Witch, Lady of Black Magic.
  • Upstart, alien demigod with Avatar-lite powers.
  • Valerius, vampiric mastermind.
  • Gatemaster, technological Teleportation expert.
  • Toxin, Walking Wasteland with a Touch of Death.
• Lowered Recruiting Standards: Thermakron was inducted into the Global Champions a few years after his debut, for the simple reason that the Man of Might attack decimated the hero population and their ranks and that they need all the heroes they can get.
  • Tracer Pulse was inducted into the Global Champions for has vast Speedster and Blaster powers, as well as his genius detective skills. This was not uncontroversial - the Avatar actually voted against his induction, because Tracer is too much of an antihero. Though the opening narration has him grudgingly admit that, yes, all the Champions are heroic and incorruptible. Even Tracer Pulse.
• MegaCorp:
  • Omnicorp. It has its own City of Adventure (Megalopolis), its own developed super-metal (omni-metal) and its own Corporate Sponsored Super Team (Omni-Force), with over a hundred members.
  • Venture Industries. It too has its own City of Adventure IN SPACE (Venture City, connected to Venture Island by the Tower of Babel), its own developed super-material (carbosteel), and its own super-genius Dr. Dexter Darien, with research into dimensional travel.
• Multinational Team: The Global Champions boast members from all over the world, with representatives from France, India, Morocco, the United States and Japan.
• Nebulous Evil Organization:
  • Shadow, an organization created during the Cold War to try and gain control over metahumans.
  • The mysterious Checkerboard and its leader Checkmate Warren, who delights in playing heroes and villains against each other.
• Ominous Floating Castle: Avalon is this after is re-emerged from Limbo. With Nollius as its leader, it currently floats over the Atlantic ocean, blockaded by an international warship fleet on the lookout for any sign that he might be implementing one of his schemes.
• Our Dragons Are Different: Uberwyrm, the last dragon. Last because he killed all the others to consume their power.
• Outlaw Town: What used to be the city of Pittsburgh is now the Cryosphere, a domain taken fully over by Professor Cryo and a haven for supervillainy. The heroes of Earth-Gimel have tried several times to reconquer it to no avail.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Avatar mentions that Tagton, an alien mercenary that Hitler hired to get rid of him, was an example of this trope at the time, since he was the first alien to actually reach the Earth and the first defeat he actually suffered.
• The Paragon: King Arthur was one of these in Earth-Gimel's history. In a discussion about paragons in superhero society, the Avatar thinks back to his life and how one of his demigoddesses granted him Excalibur, and how he founded Camelot, united the tribes of his land, and inspired knights around to follow him and grant the land 20 years of peace and prosperity.
• Putting on the Reich: Blitzkrieg is a German Super-Soldier, speedster and actual member of the Waffen SS. After the war and as the years went on, he became a deadly mercenary and member of Global Might, though he's since become bored of the Nazi ideology and only displays their symbols out of nostalgia.
• Pyrrhic Victory: The Man of Might's attack on Jerusalem was an Endbringer attack in all but name; even with the Man defeated, the cost was an entire devastated city, countless casualties, and the global hero population cut in half. Even the Avatar was a casualty, despite it not sticking.
• Really 700 Years Old: As a god, the Avatar's been around since as long as there have been humans, but he only became a hero in the 1920s.
• Rule of Symbolism: There was a reason that the Man of Might chose Jerusalem as the city to destroy - as the master plan of the demon Asmodeus channeling the power of hell, he knows the value of destroying a religiously important city to crush humanity's spirit.
• Sealed Good in a Can: King Arthur counts as one, as although he is sleeping in Avalon waiting to be awoken, in the interim, the Evil Sorceror Nollius took over Avalon, turned into a flying city-continent over the Atlantic, and laid so many curses over Arthur's mausoleum that he wouldn't last minutes if he awoke.
• Secret Identity: Most democratic nations require metahuman heroes to register, but they can ask that their identity be kept hidden. About half take it, and those that don't remain relatively safe for the same reason that regular cops don't have secret identities - if anything happened to them, the other heroes would fall on their attackers like a legion.
• Spanner in the Works: Asmodeus's plan to ritually channel the plane of Hell into himself, summon himself into Earth as the Man of Might, and wreak havoc on humanity, was stopped by Madman shooting him with a ray from space that scrambled his powers (and asked Venture Industries to take the credit), allowing the heroes to defeat him.
• Super Team: The Global Champions, Earth-Gimel's greatest hero team, who have saved the world many times over from a multitude of threats. Each one is noble, competent and a force to be reckoned with in a fight, which is why Madman decided to send one of them to Earth-Bet to fix things up. Its latest membership includes:
  • The Avatar, the founder, The Leader, and the world's greatest superhero.
  • Titan, Size Shifting heavy hitter with a Heroic Lineage.
  • Bleu-Blanc-Rouge, sword-wielding Super-Soldier and master tactician.
  • Mister Tomorrow, Close-Range Combatant and Mutant advocate.
  • Tracer Pulse, energy-slinging speedster and Hardboiled Detective.
  • Causality, physicist turned sorceress.
  • Techno-Paladin, "the smartest guy in superheroics".
  • Mimic, mysterious multi-powered Shapeshifter.
  • Phantom, invisible Energy Being from the stars.
  • Thermakron, elementally-powered Robot Superhero.
• The Archmage: Earth-Gimel contains several prolific magic-users.
  • Nollius, the elven Evil Sorceror ruler of Avalon, who eclipsed the power of other sorcerers by means of a Deal with the Devil.
  • Causality, a physicist whose analysis and understanding of magical phenomena made her worthy of joining the Global Champions.
  • White Witch and Valerius, both of Global Might.
• The Call Has Bad Reception: The Living Nebula spent decades creating mutants to try and prepare humanity for a far-off existential threat, but eventually it decided to address them directly and created the Energy Being Phantom as a herald. Unfortunately, Phantom could not hear its telepathic communication and is just as unaware of his purpose as everyone else, though he makes up for it by being a hero.
• The Family That Slays Together: The villainous Turbo-Clan, headed by the eponymous Turbo-Man. He made it by impregnating multiple women in a short time frame using his speed, and then abducting the babies to form his crime family.
• The Magic Comes Back: After all magic in the world was banished to Limbo sometime around the turn of the first millennium, during the last year of World War II, Nazi mystics, deciding the Godzilla Threshold had been crossed, enacted a grand ritual that successfully unbanished magic. This wasn't enough to win them the war, but it slowly caused more magical beings to return from Limbo over the coming years, including Nollius and Avalon, Uberwyrm... and eventually, the gods themselves.
• The Omnipotent: Madman, the Mad Scientist responsible for the events of A Champion in Earth-Bet, has such Sufficiently Advanced technology that he is practically this. Good thing he's more of a Great Gazoo.
• The Syndicate: Several.
  • The Combat Network, created by the Super-Soldier-making Mad Scientist Doctor Combat.
  • Golden Dawn, a crime syndicate centered around magic.
• Throwaway Country: Madagascar seems to be this in both Earth-Bet and Earth-Gimel. In the former world, the country was dropped into anarchy by a teenage Control Freak duplicator, and in the latter, it was obliterated by Garzor of the Gashren race as a show of force.
• Tragic Villain:
  • Doc Prometheus. He was a Japanese robotics engineer who fell in with the Yakuza and was Blackmailed into making combat robots for them - until his police detective son was killed by the gangs for digging too deep. Doc Prometheus snapped and waged a one-man Roaring Rampage of Revenge on the Yakuza with a robotic army, uncaring of collateral damage, until he was warring against the entirety of Japan. He was finally beaten and arrested by Titan of the Global Champions, and is now under rehabilitation in Venture City.
  • Turns out Garzor and the Gashrens aren't Galactic Conquerors, but Invading Refugees, fleeing the likes of the Berserkers. Garzor's plan is to use Earth as bait and turn the Solar System into a supernova, just to slow the Berserkers down.
  • Upstart, member of Global Might and Smug Super extraordinaire, is the Sole Survivor of his alien race after it was consumed by the Berserkers.
• Transhuman:
  • Technically, all naturally-born Mutants count, since they were secretly genetically modified in utero by the Living Nebula.
  • The Global Might leader Mordor is this taken up to eleven: the crime syndicates of Megalopolis decided to hit a Mook with every Super-Empowering treatment they could get their hands on - with the result being a Super Strong, regenerative villain. And then he was equipped with technology and weapons.