Fanfic / Copacetic

"My story was finally over. I had brought the Golden Morning and my reward was life. I found the peace I'd fought so hard for. The world was open to me! All I had to do was stay out of the light, and not draw attention to myself. That would be easy! ...I didn't last a week."

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Warning: spoilers for Worm from here on out.

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Copacetic (FanFiction.net link - but only first few chapters) is a Worm Continuation Fic by Materia-Blade, focusing on Taylor Hebert's life following the climactic conclusion of Golden Morning and a lengthy recovery period. Taylor has her feet under her now, and grimly prepares to face a world she had thought beyond her: that of a normal young woman.

It lasts about as long as you'd expect.

Notable for its subtle, emotionally immersive narrative, Copacetic explores both Taylor's new world, the people in it, her feelings regarding the mundane difficulties of having one arm, and her thoughts on life after the Golden Morning.

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This series provides examples of:

• Actually, I Am Him: A Recursive Fanfiction written by wkz depicts a group of new students touring Skitter's Institute for Gifted Youngsters, as one of the teachers lectures them on its history. Demi wonders how long it will take the students to realize that the teacher is Skitter herself.
• Adults Are Useless: Taylor knows more than most about what is going on the world, including (especially) the adults. Justified as Dalet's cape scene is only in its infancy.
• Always Someone Better: Taylor to...well, everyone, but both Hero and Rhapsody feel this way especially since they gave up or lost everything they'd done before to embrace their current roles and she's basically usurped them. To make things worse, she never wanted to in the first place but ended up in the spotlight saving them or doing what they were supposed to more efficiently.
• Alternate History: Earth Dalet's Centralia, Pennsylvania is a College town where Taylor is attending college, and wasn't abandoned due to a coal mine fire.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse:
  • Some organization is trying to get Reid to pass them info on Taylor by using his family as leverage.
  • Taylor makes them one of her own in response.
• Another Dimension: Welcome to Earth Dalet.
• Anti-Hero: Taylor in spades.
• Asshole Victim: Blight, as well as the teacher killed by Obelisk.
• Backstory Invader: Clinic deals with a Stranger with this power, she can't control it however and is looking for help with it.
• Badass Boast: Taylor makes one after Reid gets kidnapped:
  I am Weaver. You know me. You've seen me. You've heard stories of where I come from. You believe you understand me. That I am this world's friend. You are wrong. Blight… he saw what comes of threatening me. Scion, died by my will. Understand this... You have taken those I would call family. They will be returned. If they are not back in my city, today. I will find you. What I did to Blight, will seem a mercy. What I will do to you will be a living nightmare. You know who you are. The clock is ticking… I can SEE YOU. I can kill you…
• Badass Normal: Taylor, for the brief period before her powers start returning.
• Bank Robbery: Obelisk appears at one.
• Blow You Away: Part of Blight's powers. He used it to spread his toxins and fly.
• Body Surf: Mr. Comeford can possess anyone who he touches for five minutes or more, which allows him to escape the death of his original body.
• Brainwashed: It's hinted that this may be happening to Leanna.
• Break Them by Talking: Taylor defuses a practical mob of people who were on the verge of anti-parahuman violence, including traumatizing one girl so hard she Triggers.
  Is this what I came to see? Is this what you came to teach? Because honestly, go a little bit further. Just a little. Then put on your pointy white hoods. Oh I’ve been paying perfect attention Butler. All I see is a group of old men trying to get their petty revenge on the one person who stood up. Is responsible for saving the lives of every other person in that bank?
  You. Hypothetical situation. Say tomorrow you gained powers. What do you do? Stay quiet and do nothing, become a hero, or start robbing banks? B-Be a hero… Right? Okay. Now you’re a hero. You’ve got some good powers. Maybe you’ve joined up with a few teammates. They’ve got your back. I realize that you fail to see. Let me get to my point and illuminate you. Now, Hero. You’re fighting bad guys. Real bad guys. They kill people for fun and they’ll kill your team if you fuck up even once. They might manage to kill civilians anyway, but if you’re not there then they definitely will. Do you keep fighting them? Do you keep fighting them? Good. That’s good. You’re all alive! She’s saved you and stopped a bomb from destroying every last one of you!
  But everything didn’t go according to plan. This… happened to her. She gave her arm for you. Risked her life... Obelisk attacks the people this time. You’re crippled. Do you let this hinder you? Are you going to let these people die? Oh and you try, Hero… but is anyone perfect? This time you fail. You beat Obelisk, barely. You’re aching. Your legs are broken, and your team fares little better. Despite your efforts these people here on the grass... didn’t make it. The people don’t like you so much anymore. You see, you’ve failed now. Let all their expectations down. Some hero. Couldn’t even save these few people in the grass. You did your best. And you think that’s any consolation? Their friends are dead because you fucked up. Some even hate you; they feel you’re personally responsible for their loss.
  Blight arrives, Your team is dead or dying around you. You’re the only left. The only one standing between Blight and everyone. But he gives you a choice. Walk away. Leave them to him and you can collect what remains of your team… while he kills the people who hated you for failing them.
  Devin Maxworth. Vigilant. Do you fight to save them? The people who’ve threatened you with imprisonment? Who’ve scorned you? Or do you walk away? And that… Is how you make the one person who might’ve been able to save you, turn his back. Don’t you see? Vigilant is your damn hero! He’s human, but he’s all you’ve got! When Obelisk comes again? When another villain too strong for police comes to take your money, your friends, your family, whose hands do you want to put your life in? The man in that video? I would. That man was doing what he thought was right, and I’d be honored to have him.
  I don’t respect a single one of you. You’re entitled to criticize. People make mistakes… even heroes. But is this how you needed to tell him? Is this the best way to avenge your friend? Someone he tried to save? Is it best to discourage good people from even trying?
• Breather Episode: Many of them. Unfortunately, some of them also end up abruptly interrupted by things going to hell in some form or another.
• The Call Knows Where You Live: Taylor is just trying to have a normal life on Dalet.
• Coitus Interruptus: Chapter 30 has Taylor interrupting Danny and Clinic having sex. The situation warranted it.
• Complete Immortality: Mr. Comeford is basically a disembodied soul that can possess other people. As Taylor points out, it's likely that he'll never die and he can't be harmed by conventional means.
• Continuation Fic: A follow up of the original web serial.
• Cornered Rattlesnake: Dalet's military finds out what happens if you send soldiers to protect Taylor and don't warn her.
• Crazy-Prepared: The Guards protecting Hero's workshop had invisible turrets, flame-throwers disguised as guns, and were fully aware she was there despite her best effort to remain stealthy. In the end, they held her back when she tried limiting herself to her own Bug Control power, but they couldn't stop her once she gave up and used an invincibility shard.
• Creepy Cockroach: A large one sitting right behind Taylor is the first sign that Clinic accidentally gave Taylor her powers back.
• Creepy Monotone: Taylor's speech on the stresses of Cape life, backed by personal experience, comes across as Nightmare Fuel to many in her audience, to the point of causing a Trigger Event in the girl she selected as her designated Cape hero.
• Dark and Troubled Past: Taylor comes across as this even to people that don't know just how dark and troubled it is.
• De-power: Accidentally Inverted in Chapter 4 when Clinic heals Taylor's arm. Taylor plays it straight when she learns to remove or modify Capes' Shards.
• The Dreaded:
  • Taylor gains a reputation after killing Blight.
  • Tales considers Contessa this.
• Extranormal Prison:
  • In a way, Dalet is this for Skitter.
  • Hero's also working on one. In the meantime, Skitter is this for prisoners who are being controlled by her.
• Eye Scream: Taylor puts out Blight's eye by ramming a cane through it to kill him.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: Everyone killed by Blight, and Blight himself.
• First-Episode Twist: Taylor starts developing powers.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: As his death approaches, Blight starts to panic and claim that he turned to villainy because his Power Incontinence made it impossible for him to feel anything anymore. Taylor calls him out on his bullshit and says that it's no excuse to be a monster.
• Good Is Not Soft: Taylor comes across as hard-as-nails, but shows compassion to everyone despite this. Even Obelisk. She still has to kill Blight, however.
• The Guards Must Be Crazy: Averted. The Guards for the new Birdcage development are quite competent.
• Healing Factor: Massacre can heal his body by moving earth around.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Taylor. Her powers are creepy and a huge violation of privacy, she's not well liked by most of the other Wardens because she's stealing their spotlight, and after what happened to Hellbelle they really don't want her around.
• Hikikomori: Taylor's Breaking Speech results in the girl she designated a hero, Theresa, becoming a nightmare-ridden shut-in who Triggers as a Tinker from the stress.
• History Repeats:
  • When Taylor learns that she was the intended target of a kidnapping by Dalet China, she realizes that she is seeing the formation of Dalet's equivalent of the Yangban.
  • Earth Dalet's first great Tinker is named Hero.
  • A girl named Theresa is a great Tinker, just like Dragon on Earth Bet.
• Human Weapon: How Leanna intends to use Massacre.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Taylor, for certain parts, just wanted to be normal rather than a parahuman. Eventually she realizes that it just won't happen.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: Taylor, again. Thankfully, this one sticks, and she finds a number of good friends at college.
• Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: Obelisk assassinates a rapist with this. Taylor does this to Blight with a cane.
• It Was with You All Along: A bit of a darker variant. Taylor only realizes that Brian's shard was with her after she had handed it out to someone else. All those times she wondered about him and hoped he was okay.... yeah, she took it poorly.
• Life Energy: Clinic's powers seem to operate this way. Taylor is suspicious due to the fact that this trope is almost always averted in the setting. It turns out to involve biomass.
• Lighter and Softer: Than Worm. Though that's not really saying much. Given the hero community hasn't been forced to deal with the Artificial selection by Endbringer Massacre there are a lot nicer heroes around.
• Line-of-Sight Name: Danny Hebert adopts the Cape name "Eyespy" because a family in a car crash during his Trigger Event was playing "I Spy".
• Mass "Oh, Crap!": Taylor becoming an Entity has this effect.
• Mood Whiplash: The story goes back and forth between college shenanigans and murder fairly frequently.
• Mundane Utility: One college student tells a reporter that one of the nice things about having Taylor around is that you never have to worry about ants. Indeed, people within her range asking her to get rid of a bug infestation in their room or workspace is a frequent occurrence, but she's all to happy to oblige.
  • Danny's power allows him to generate force-fields with surprising dexterity wherever he's looking with his clairvoyance. This means he can protect someone from harm, yes, but it also means he can choke someone to death...or give someone a hug from across the planet.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Taylor gets a few moments like these when she realizes that she's causing triggers.
• Names to Run Away From: 'Blight', 'Massacre'.
• Nightmare Fuel: In-Universe. Taylor's Breaking Speech on Cape life causes a Trigger Event by being this trope.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Taylor sometimes comes across as this, through being a Shell-Shocked Veteran whose speeches and brutal Terror Hero behavior is frightening to others.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Par the normal, every good thing Taylor does bites her in the ass.
  • Taylor's Breaking Speech results in an attendee Triggering and causes Obelisk to fear her.
  • Stopping a mob from forming against Parahumans ends up drawing Blight to her.
  • Stopping Blight ends up outing her as a Cape, leading to Reid's family being kidnapped.
  • Getting Reid's family back ends up letting the world know she killed Scion and scaring a lot of people.
  • Stopping Hellbelle's power ends up alienating her from the rest of the Wards and Wardens, who were already tired of quelling riots because of her.
• No OSHA Compliance: An Aversion of this causes Taylor to be fired from her deli job. Pest Controller powers are bad optics for a sanitary food-service establishment.
• No-Sell: Eyespy No-Sells Blight's powers with his force-fields. Blight is lucky that the other Cape Taylor knows could do this to him, Obelisk, is afraid of Taylor and skipped town that day.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. Taylor is initially disturbed to learn that one of her new roommates is called Sophia, the same name as one of her highschool bullies. Several of Dalet's new heroes take cape names that were previously used in Bet, such as Hero. And TJ, short for Terrence Jay, shares his first name with one of Danny's employees who learns about Taylor's past as a villain. As the latter had only appeared once before, thirteen chapters ago, while TJ had just recently been introduced and become one of Taylor's friends, it can be a bit confusing for anyone who'd forgotten the employee's name when a user posting as Terr_Ence makes several extremely negative comments about Taylor on Parahumans Online.
  • Subverted with Cherish, Butcher Fifteen, whom Taylor eventually recognizes as the original.
• Panacea: Clinic takes this role.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Taylor is a fan.
• Phrase Catcher: A couple times Taylor starts using Earth Bet cape terminology (including the word "cape" itself), causing others to do so after her.
• Portal Door: Taylor starts using these in Chapter 33. One person mentions its something straight out of Kingdom Hearts.
• Power Incontinence: One of the Chinese agents can inflict this with his shard, taking away another's ability to regulate their power. After he did it to Hellbelle, Taylor took his powers away from him.
• Power Perversion Potential: Danny can see anyone anywhere anytime and FROM anywhere, and has accidentally seen people, including his daughter, in various states of undress.
  • Also, after Taylor gets her bug powers back, with a massive (miles!) range boost, she has to remove bugs from the vicinity of people engaged in... certain activities.
• Powers via Possession: Mr. Comeford can possess other parahumans and gain their powers.
• Pretty Butterflies: Taylor makes a necklace for Chloe briefly to assure her that everything is OK.
• Pride Before a Fall:
  • Taylor has to remind herself of this after the thought of being Super-Eidolon came to mind.
  • Leet's Shard from canon was, by Word of God, trying to kill him because it didn't like how cautious he was and wanted a new host. In here, Taylor has it and its revealed that it used to be sapient like Tales and had a massive ego, only now its a mindless bobble with a minute impression.
• Pyrrhic Victory: Taylor defeats Blight and saves most of the civilians. Unfortunately, she had no mask and as such her powers and identity is revealed to the world, and some people are disturbed by the callousness with which she killed him.
• Rapid Aging: Blight's toxins aged someone the longer it was applied. Anyone who it isn't constantly applied to will have the damage melted off painfully, but it's still horrible.
• Read the Fine Print: Taylor thinks to herself that her class really should have done this before she gave them all shards and dropped them in an illusion.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: The President of the United States. Yes, really. his willingness to REWARD Khepri with the Presidential Medal of Freedom shocks her massively.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Taylor pulls one of these on an entire stadium to get them to back off of their cape hating.
  • She also gives one to Blight, telling him that he's the worst villain she's ever seen, and that people like him were always going to get taken down hard sooner or later.
• Richard Nixon, the Used Car Salesman: Dalet's Rebecca Costa-Brown is a low-ranking federal agent.
• Science Hero: Theresa (Hero) became a Tinker upon triggering.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Obelisk runs away from Taylor during the Blight attack.
• Secret Test of Character: The Illusion Walk in Chapter 32 was this for Taylor's first class. Those who impressed her got to keep their powers. With one of them getting Grue's darkness.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: Taylor. Other people notice- a commenter on the YouTube video of her Breaking Speech, unaware of her past as a Cape, assumes she's a veteran of The War on Terror who lost her arm in Afghanistan.
• Shipper on Deck: Sophia (the local one, not Hess) likes setting her friends up.
• Shout-Out: One chapter opens with Taylor and friends watching The Lord of the Rings. Taylor immediately decides she wants a Shelob.
• Spider-Sense: Danny's Thinker power has a passive ability to let him see other people when they are in dangers, for as long as they live. He sees all the possible dangers that Clinic will encounter for eons, but Taylor's abruptly stop after a year, meaning either she dies or becomes immune to precognition.
• Super Power Lottery: Danny ends up with an incredibly powerful Shaker ability that later turns out to also be an incredibly powerful Thinker ability.
• Super-Power Meltdown:
  • The lack of Entities- and lack of Manton Effect- results in some people being killed by their Triggering. One was killed by his poisonous skin. A Fate Worse than Death example is someone who Triggered with a regenerative Brute power because of their Excema and quickly went suicidal.
  • Taylor ends up having to save the life of a girl who Triggers with Acidbath's powers by contacting her Shard.
  • Hellbelle lost control of her powers due to another parahuman and would have burned everything to ashes if Taylor hadn't Mastered her.
• Super-Reflexes: Viligant has these, apparently.
• Synchronization: Taylor now feels the pain of the insects and they feel her pain, making it much harder for her to cope with.
• Terror Hero: Taylor inadvertently defaults to this because of her Pest Controller powers and Combat Pragmatist fighting style.
• Wham Episode:
  • Chapter 20: Danny and Taylor actually talk to each other. Taylor finds out she is, in fact, causing triggers. Queen Admin actually holds a short conversation with her. Taylor hacks a shard to save a newly triggered cape with an out of control shard. Oh, and Queen Admin has thousands of shards waiting - Taylor is becoming an Entity.
  • The end of Chapter 23: another Entity is coming and Taylor and Tales have to fight all over again.
  • Chapter 29: Hellbell's powers are sent out of her control by one of the prisoners she gets a little too close to and Taylor has to do something to stop it, taking her powers and her body's control away from her.
  • Chapter 32: Several of her students now have powers that she handed out without checking, leading to Taylor finding out that she had Grue's shard all along, meaning he had been dead since the point where Scion killed him on the Oil Rig. It takes all her composure not to break down.
  • Chapter 35: Lisa has found Taylor using the Simurgh, however it causes Tales to pull away from Taylor's connection, revealing that she has become the new Entity all along.
  • Chapters 36 and 37: Taylor becoming an Entity causes massive shockwaves.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Inverted by Earth Dalet's President of the United States. Not only is he not angry, upset, or outraged by Khepri, but he goes as far as to give her the Presidential Medal of Freedom for her actions.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Taylor can't go back home again because, as she notes, it wouldn't be a week before everyone is trying to kill her. Tales backs this line of thinking, noting Contessa would find a way to kill them.