Hang tight, bug girl. Help is on the way.
Confrontation is a Worm fanfiction by ack1308, published on FanFiction.Net (here
), SpaceBattles.com (here), Sufficient Velocity.com (here), and Questionable Questing (here). It and its sequel, Confrontation II: the Reckoning (FFN; SB; SV; QQ), are complete.
Taylor Hebert's debut as a cape goes worse than canon; Lung is defeated, but she is left unconscious and seriously injured, to be rescued by Armsmaster and healed by Panacea. As a result, Armsmaster's recruitment pitch to the Wards gets a much more positive reception from her. However, this puts her on a head-on collision course with Shadow Stalker, aka Sophia Hess, her partner on the team but her nemesis out of costume...
Confrontation contains examples of:
- Adaptational Relationship Change:
- Taylor's first encounter with Panacea is when Panacea brings her back from the brink of death to full health (rather than Taylor threatening her with black widow spiders and Panacea trying to brain her with a fire extinguisher), leaving them much friendlier to each other.
- Sophia's world is rather turned upside down by Taylor joining the Wards. She and "Buzz" get along great, which startles everyone who struggled to work with Shadow Stalker. Until Sophia and Taylor unmask, at which point Taylor tries to kill her. When they decide that they're still capable of working together in a professional capacity, Sophia ends up breaking off her friendship with Emma and Madison, who aren't willing to leave Taylor in peace.
- Creepy-Crawly Torture: The "bugpocalypse" tactic centers on Buzz covering targets in swarms of bugs where no bugs should go, to make the victim flee the building — into an ambush by Shadow Stalker.Having bugs crawling into places that one did not know bugs could crawl into tended to seize one's attention.
- Distracted by the Sexy: Taylor's first encounter with Aegis has her losing track of the conversation due to his very muscular torso.Way to go, Taylor. Officially a Ward for less than an hour, and already ogling my team leader.
- Dramatic Irony:
- Buzz is the first Ward who's been able to gain Shadow Stalker's respect, and seems to like working with her in turn, startling everyone when they make an effective partnership. Meanwhile, Sophia is the most violent of Taylor's bullies and the driving force behind bullying her in the first place.
- Glory Girl, upon learning that Taylor faced Lung, admiringly says that that must take "balls of solid titanium." Taylor and Amy both wince at the recollection of what her spiders did to Lung.
- Extended Disarming: Taylor hands over her pepper spray, spare baton, folding knife, and brass knuckles, but everyone knows she isn't truly disarmed as long as there are bugs in range.
- Gone Horribly Wrong: Aegis figures that since Buzz and Shadow Stalker are having issues with appropriate force and restraint, and since Shadow Stalker seems to trust Buzz more than any other Wards, the starting point in addressing the issue is to let them talk about it with each other and him in a mostly private setting. When the conversation leads into them realising each other's civilian identities, Taylor attempts to kill Sophia, and Aegis gets officially reprimanded for letting it happen.
- Heel–Face Turn: Sophia never exactly becomes a kind and gentle person, but after the bullying comes out and Taylor ends up as her parole officer, she does make some effort at amends, providing a sworn statement against the other girls and trying to stop them from continuing their campaign.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: Regent's nerve control is well suited to having people defeat themselves. He makes Bakuda fumble a throw with her bombs, which fly too low as a result, bouncing off her windscreen and back into the Jeep. When the explosion clears, there's nothing left but a large hole in the ground.
- I'll Pretend I Didn't Hear That: Panacea heals Lung, but doesn't entirely restore his stamina, figuring that it's no bad thing if he's off his game for a few days, regardless of strict medical ethics, and tells Taylor so — in front of Armsmaster. Since he doesn't actually disagree with the sentiment, though, he says that he'll ignore that.
- I Owe You My Life: Since Taylor saved the Undersiders from Lung, they leave a note alerting Armsmaster to her plight. Lisa later calls in the favour to have Taylor let them walk away after Bakuda's defeat, instead of fighting.
- I Warned You: When Sophia won't stop talking, Taylor warns her that she won't like being made to stop, and when Sophia tries to dismiss the threat, she's interrupted by a bug flying down her throat and sending her into a coughing fit.Taylor: Told you that you wouldn't like it.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: Rather than refusing Armsmaster's offer because she wants to remain independent, as per canon, after her brush with death, Taylor nearly decides to give up hero work entirely, feeling inadequate. (However, since she still wants to achieve good things, she ultimately takes Armsmaster's offer and joins the Wards.)
- Mundane Utility: When Danny reminds Taylor to eat her dinner before the flies get to it, she just laughs at the idea.Taylor: All the flies in this house belong to me. Plus all the other bugs. Every single one. They want to touch my food, they have to ask me first.
- Point of Divergence: Taylor pressed the trigger on her pepper spray canister a moment earlier than canon. By the time she corrected her aim (as per canon) and pointed it at Lung's eyes, it was already empty. Since he wasn't blinded, he had the chance to strike her and then breathe fire over her before the Undersiders took him down, meaning that she passed out from her injuries by the time Armsmaster arrived, and was taken back to PRT headquarters...
- Spit Take: Clockblocker gets Kid Win and Gallant at the same time, when he refers to Armsmaster as "the Halbeard" while they're drinking soda.
- Stab the Scorpion: Shadow Stalker tells Buzz not to move, then fires a crossbow through her chest — but she phased for a moment first, resulting in an insubstantial bolt going through harmlessly, then reverting to solid on the other side and hitting a gang member.Shadow Stalker: You missed one. And you should really learn to trust me.
- Your Mom: Taylor loses her temper and hits an already subdued prisoner after he insults her mother, which gets her in trouble with Aegis. And then he tries to address the situation by arranging a heart to heart between her and himself and Shadow Stalker...
Confrontation II contains examples of:
- Adaptational Relationship Change: Sophia meets Brian Laborn out of costume and likes what she sees, despite Shadow Stalker having a vendetta against Grue. By the time she discovers that he's Grue, they've started dating, and the reveal shocks both of them, but they don't immediately give up on each other.
- Big Fancy Gun: When investigating the site of Bakuda's return to Earth Bet, Miss Militia's expression is serious and her power is in the form of "a rifle large enough to put a respectable hole in a charging rhino."
- Car Fu: When Grue fights from the back of a car-sized dog, Rune fights back with actual cars.
- Crying Wolf: Inverted; the teachers at Winslow have repeatedly ignored Sophia when she was actually bullying someone, but they immediately step in when she's just forcibly telling another bully to back off.
- Dating Catwoman: Clockblocker sees Shadow Stalker and Grue hugging and accurately guesses that he doesn't want to know the details.
- Evil Power Vacuum: With all three ABB capes taken off the board, the Empire 88 starts muscling in on the vacant territory. However, the other gangs aren't content to just let them take it, and form an alliance against them, resulting in open warfare.
- Exact Words: Taylor manages to truthfully explain why Sophia is limping, without revealing the important details ie that they're Wards and she was injured fighting Oni Lee. Sophia is impressed by her sophistry.... huh. The rest of it's basically true. Never knew Taylor could spin a line like that.
- Heel Realization: Sophia has a breakdown, calling herself a monster, after realising that she came within a hair's breadth of killing the only guy she's ever kissed, and would have done it if Taylor hadn't unmasked him.Sophia: Taylor … I'm broken. There's something wrong with me.
- Hoist by His Own Petard: With literal explosives. Squealer and Bakuda join forces to wreak havoc on the city, starting with taking Squealer's invisible tank to destroy the Medhall building. Shadow Stalker knocks them both out and crashes their tank into the wreckage of the building, bringing it down on them and letting them both be consumed by Bakuda's bombs.
- Likes Clark Kent, Hates Superman: Shadow Stalker has wanted to kill Grue ever since she learned that his darkness interferes with her shadow state, but she's really falling for this Brian chap she ran into...
- Malingering Romance Ploy: Downplayed. Sophia genuinely did hurt her ankle when she crashed into Brian while rollerblading, but Taylor is fairly sure that she's milking it to flirt. Brian doesn't seem to mind, though."Well, it doesn't look damaged, and there's no swelling that I can detect," Brian decided, although Taylor noticed that he didn't take his hands off of Sophia's ankle. "But you might want to take the weight off of it for a while."
"Help me to a bench?" asked Sophia, giving him the puppy-dog eyes treatment. - Morton's Fork: Coil splits time before pulling out of his driveway, emerging at slightly different times and turning different ways, but it's all for nothing when Squealer's invisible tank runs over both instances of him.
- Mundane Utility: Aegis probably should have known better than to play ping pong against Vista, whose spatial warping lets her soundly beat him.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
- Taylor is unsettled by seeing Clockblocker taking a briefing seriously.He wasn't even trying to lighten the mood by calling the Director 'Miss Piggy', which just showed how fraught the situation was.
- In the same meeting, Sophia's Character Development has the other Wards wondering if they should call for Master/Stranger protocols on her.Clockblocker: I'm just saying, this new you is taking me a bit of time to get used to. Getting all emotional and stuff? Wow.
- Taylor is unsettled by seeing Clockblocker taking a briefing seriously.
- Put Them All Out of My Misery: Squealer just wants the whole of Brockton Bay to burn in payment for Skidmark's death, starting with the Empire who actually did the deed, but continuing from there to cover all the capes in the city.
- Red Herring: Coil's computer has a "Forgot PIN?" feature if you don't know the password. Using it will present a screen with various ways to supposedly retrieve the password, but it's all a distraction; the real effect is to trigger the base's Self-Destruct Mechanism.note
- Self-Destruct Mechanism: The remnants of the Empire 88 capes come across Coil's abandoned base, and attempt to unlock his computer, but his Properly Paranoid security detects their unauthorised attempts and sets off the base self-destruct, killing them all.
- The Sociopath: Squealer considers Bakuda to have only a tenuous grasp on reality, and that she would "casually stab someone to death over the last chocolate bar in the fridge." But after Skidmark's death, Squealer is feeling rather omnicidal herself.
