Fanfic / Earning Her Stripes

In Earning Her Stripes by ack1308, Sophia Hess manages to get a trio of Cauldron vials during a cape fight, and gives two to Emma and Madison. When trying to figure out what to do with the third, they get an idea on how to take their bullying of Taylor to even greater heights...

Can also be found on SpaceBattles.com (here), Sufficient Velocity.com (here), and Questionable Questing (here).

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This fanfic contains examples of:

• Accidental Truth: Coil, as Thomas Calvert, tries to get the PRT to investigate The Real Thing by claiming they are responsible for the destruction of Winslow, unaware that it's pretty close to the truth.
• Adaptational Angst Downgrade: The setting is generally Lighter and Softer than canon.
  • Panacea's family situation and psychological health are much better in this fic than in canon, because she confronted Brandish shortly after obtaining her powers (with backing from the Pelhams) and made it clear that she'd rather be a rogue than a hero. She's paid a high but reasonable wage for her services, with a surcharge for short notice and a tenfold multiplier if brains are involved, and she has treated Mark Dallon's depression.
  • Riley gained her powers but never joined the Slaughterhouse Nine. She calls herself Nurse Joy, complete with turning her hair pink and collecting animals that she has turned into Pokémon, and is on good terms with Panacea. Otherwise, she's now a surgeon for her area.
  • The ship blockading Brockton Bay's bay was partially moved out of the way by Alexandria, allowing ships to arrive to the city port and salvage most of the ships in the graveyard, so the city economy is much better.
• Adaptational Badass:
  • Emma and Madison get powers of their own thanks to Cauldron vials, and quickly become respected heroes.
  • Brockton Bay's PRT office has much more in resources when compared to what they had in canon, allowing them to do a better work in stopping parahuman crime - even preventing Coil from taking a foothold.
• Adaptational Heroism: Emma and Madison not only become genuine heroes but they begin to realize their vendetta against Taylor is wrong. When Sophia tries to murder Danny, Emma finally stands up to Sophia, drives her away to save Danny, and confesses everything to the Heberts.
• Adaptational Superpower Change: Instead of her canon Pest Controller power, here Taylor has Super-Strength and Stone Wall powers which are later revealed to be pretty much the Siberian's powers.
• Adaptational Wimp: Coil is little more than a power-broker in Brockton Bay, having nowhere close to the resources he had in canon - to the point that he has to resort to sell uses of his power when negotiating with others, and the Undersiders are very much out of his pocket.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Emma lays a smackdown on Sophia.
  Emma: You're the one who tried to kill Mr Hebert, and Taylor and I are witnesses to that. You also held my parents hostage. You are going to prison. Oh, and I'm officially kicking you off the team.
  Taylor: (narrating) I wanted to chuckle at that last bit, but I wasn't really in a laughing mood.
• The Atoner: After they realize how horrible their actions actually were, Emma and Madison begin to make moves to both fix what they have done and earn themselves redemption.
• Awesome, but Impractical: All of Madison's tinker work is big and ultra-heavy-duty, which is sometimes useful but other times gets in the way. When Emma asks about night vision goggles, Madison sketches a design for a helmet that would weigh twenty pounds and contain a microwave beam capable of frying bugs; Emma decides the weight would be too much. She doesn't even bother asking whether Madison could build her a bow.
  A bow capable of taking out a Mack truck with one arrow; sure. One that could also collapse to hang off her hip? Not so much.
• Awesomeness by Analysis: When Piggot learns that Calvert is a cape, it only takes an analysis of the situation for her to make an educated (and correct) guess at his Parahuman power.
• Bait the Dog: Sophia says she'll end her vendetta against Taylor. She then ditches Madison and Emma in the middle of a raid on the Empire, planning to kill Danny.
• Batman Gambit: When The Real Thing realizes the Empire has managed to find the approximate location where Madison stores her Powered Armor, they know the Nazi capes will keep a watch to find out the identity of Blockade, so they set up an ambush of their own.
• Becoming the Mask: In an almost literal example, Emma and Madison begin to embody the virtues of their heroic personas and realize that bullying Taylor is stupid and pointless.
• Brain Bleach: Emma considers the Li'l Mousey's Time Travel Adventures with Li'l Armsy and Ug-Ug the Caveman Cape Kid cartoon to be immortal, "as in, as much as you tried, you could not forget that you'd actually watched it."^note Word of God is that Ravager tried to ridicule Mouse Protector for having voiced Li'l Mousey, to which Mouse Protector responded by tying her up and forcing her to watch the whole series; Ravager never brought it up again.
• Carry a Big Stick: Taylor could certainly fight unarmed, but she later tries out a staff made of "good steel" to give her more options. It has attachments on the end designed to turn it into a fan if she spins it fast enough — but testing that results in a sonic boom.
• Character Development: Emma and Madison not only begin to embrace the joys of heroism, but they are beginning to realize how messed up bullying Taylor is and how deranged Sophia really is.
• Contrived Coincidence: Of all the places Rune's flying concrete chunk could have crashed into, it was Coil's home that got hit, killing him in his "safe" timeline and ruining his plans.
  Piggot: That is definitely a gold-plated coincidence, and no mistake.
• Create Your Own Villain: The Trio's plan consists of them literally turning Taylor into a supervillain so they can "defeat" her, get the credit for it, and have her put away. When Taylor passes out instead of going on a rampage, they spin it as rescuing her instead, but Sophia becomes so hateful towards Taylor that she plans to kill Danny and frame Taylor for it in order to force Taylor into a position where she can take her down.
• Cruel Mercy: While Taylor is all for killing Sophia in order to put an end to the threat she represents to her and her father, Emma manages to convince her not to do it because (a) it would be exactly what Sophia wants her to do and (b) it'll be a lot more humiliating for Sophia if she's still alive, since she'll be left weak.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Taylor vs Sophia. Nothing Sophia does affects Taylor, who manages to punch her in the hip (breaking it) even though she was in her shadow form, and then drags her back to the others.
  • The Real Thing vs Lung and the Empire 88. Firebird knocks out Crusader, Rune, and Oni Lee; Monochrome brings down Fenja and Menja in one move before throttling Lung through his scales, and Blockade manhandles Hookwolf as if he were a rattle.
  • The Real Thing vs Empire 88, Part 2. Firebird destroys Victor in combat, Blockade captures Rune when she tries to run away, and Monochrome lets Alabaster take her to the Empire's headquarters, allowing The Real Thing to capture the Empire's remaining Capes in one go, ensuring the gang's disintegration.
• Dean Bitterman: Blackwell, who refuses to help Taylor with her problems, even tries to claim Taylor is on drugs to deflect responsibility for her own actions, and finally suspends her when Taylor gets fed up with her bullshit.
• Death by Adaptation: Jack Slash died in 2005 when Riley's father blew off his head with a shotgun, because the Nine didn't have the Siberian to protect him.
• Didn't See That Coming:
  • The Real Thing were prepared for Taylor rampaging through the school in all manner of ways, but not simply passing out on the floor in front of her locker.
  • Coil has used a throwaway timeline to get Sophia to tell him who The Real Thing members are, and is already planning to use that knowledge to blackmail The Real Thing. Then Rune accidentally kills him in the "safe" timeline during her fight with Blockade, leaving him locked into the throwaway timeline, where he's promptly foamed and arrested.
• Didn't Think This Through: When Blockade grabs her, Rune throws the concrete chunk she was using as a flying platform and threatens to destroy one house if Blockade doesn't let her go. Blockade points out that, if someone dies, then Rune is likely to be judged as an adult.
• Dramatic Irony: Taylor expects to be able to use The Real Thing's testimony against Emma, Madison, and Sophia.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: Armsmaster tells The Real Thing that no civilians are endangered by a fight between the ABB and the Empire, intending to assure them that they don't need to engage. They take that as, "oh goodie, we don't need to worry about collateral damage, landing in 5."
• Drives Like Crazy: Victor has stolen a lot of driving skills. He doesn't usually go all-out, but when he's really in a hurry, he can pull things most drivers wouldn't dare to try. As soon as Othala hears that they "might be taking corners faster than normal," her eyes widen and she grabs for her seatbelt.
  • March can weave in and out of interstate traffic at over 100 miles per hour, and she takes cops trying to pull her over for speeding as a personal offense.
• Engineered Heroics: When debating what to do with their final Cauldron vial, the trio eventually decides on force-feeding it to Taylor as part of a plan to make her out to be a villain, not only boosting their reps as heroes but hopefully getting her arrested in the process. When it fails due to Taylor accidentally knocking herself out with her own powers, they make it look like they were just passing through and rescued her instead.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Sophia doesn't get why Emma and Madison turned on her. Even though Sophia tried to kill Danny and threatened to kill Emma's parents, all she can see is them backstabbing her.
• Evil Laugh: Lisa lets one out when the Undersiders set out to steal as much money as they can from the ABB and Empire 88's stashes, taking advantage of both gangs having all their capes under arrest.
• Evil Power Vacuum:
  • Director Piggot has been carefully defying this, choosing to slowly make Brockton Bay a poor choice for the gangs instead of taking them out and having replacements move in. When The Real Thing seems like they potentially could beat all the gangs, she asks then to slow down.
  • Lisa learns about the Empire capes all going down abruptly, and grabs the Undersiders to go raid all their stash houses before anyone else can react.
• Exact Words: Danny and Taylor manage to disclaim all responsibility for the destruction of Winslow without technically lying. Danny truthfully says that he was asleep until he was woken up by it, and Taylor just states that she heard the noise and then she had cocoa with her dad until they'd settled down and went back to bed.
• Fake Alibi: Some time before the story, the PRT captured Purity, but Max Anders still managed to convince everyone that he isn't Kaiser, despite being her husband. Deputy Director Renick realises that the sightings of Kaiser and Max Anders in different places at the same time could have been faked by using Victor as a Body Double.
• Fake Weakness: Madison's Powered Armor has large tubes near the joints that seem like an obvious weak point that Sophia lampshades. They're actually decoys, and if someone tries to remove or damage them, they get a face full of live steam, without hurting the suit at all.
• Fatal Flaw: Sophia has wrath. She takes her hatred of Taylor to degrees that put off Emma and Madison, who are starting to realize how hurting Taylor is both strategically and morally wrong. Sophia finally alienates her allies for good by trying to kill Danny in an attempt to frame Taylor.
• Feeling Oppressed by Their Existence: Sophia already hates Taylor to the point of willingly trying to make her look like a villain and get arrested, but after that fails and they end up "rescuing" her instead Sophia eventually becomes so hateful towards Taylor that she suggests framing her for destroying Winslow, and later decides to murder Danny and Frame-Up Taylor for it.
• Five-Second Foreshadowing: When Rune's concrete chunk hits one house in Brockton Bay's suburbs, Blockade notes she's lucky there was no one in the house at the moment. Cut to Coil, who is using his power to interrogate Shadow Stalker in a throwaway timeline while the safe one has him staying at home, only for the concrete chunk to kill his "safe" version and force him into the throwaway timeline.
• Flipping the Bird: Taylor flips Blackwell a double bird after she hits her Rage Breaking Point.
• Foreshadowing: Taylor enters Winslow bracing herself and internally reciting, "I am a fortress. I am impenetrable. Nothing they do can touch me." When she then gets powers, she has invulnerability similar to the canonical Siberian.
• Frame-Up: Sophia attempts to murder Danny Hebert and put Taylor's fingerprints on the knife.
• Framing the Guilty Party: Sophia proposes blaming Taylor for the destruction of Winslow, but dismisses the idea that she might actually be responsible for it.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Madison ends up with Tinker powers from her Cauldron vial.
• Gone Horribly Right: Taylor's force field can stop anything. Including air. Fortunately, the field turns off when she passes out.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: Blockade uses Hookwolf as a very sharp flail against the rest of the Empire capes, after he completely fails to dent her armour. It works so well that Hookwolf flees the scene rather than fight on, which impresses Director Piggot when she hears about it.
• Groin Attack: Firebird hits Victor in the family jewels during their fight.
• Half-Truth: When confronted by the police and the PRT over Sophia's heinous actions, the Heberts, Madison, and Emma talk about the events while leaving out the nitty-gritty details that could land all of them in legal hot water.
• Heel Realization: As time passes, Emma and Madison begin to realize that their actions against Taylor were incredibly messed up and irrational. Their realization is completed when Sophia tries to kill Danny in a last-ditch attempt to turn Taylor into a villain. Emma not only intervenes and saves Danny but confesses everything to Taylor.
  Emma: Were we that bad? I mean, really?
  Madison: Yeah, really. We were talking about framing Taylor for crimes until she got sent to the Birdcage, remember?
  Emma: Oh, right. Wow.
• Implausible Deniability: Max Anders tries to claim he's not Kaiser, even though he was caught wearing his armor and Piggot has enough proof to nail him with a warrant for an MRI, which will definitely prove he's a Parahuman.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Sophia tries teaching Emma to use a crossbow, but gives up in disgust after Emma gets six straight bullseyes, including one where she intentionally ricocheted the bolt off a wall into the target just to see if she could do it.
• Instant Expert: One of Emma's powers is knowing how to wield any weapon. When Armsmaster allows her to test his halberd, she begins to pull off moves that Armsmaster needed months to carry out, and others that he records in hopes of learning them.
• Irony: Taylor notes how ironic it is that after getting Sophia (who has the most experience in fighting crime out of group and claimed to be The Real Thing's leader) arrested, Emma and Madison ask her (who has less experience in crime fighting than Emma and Madison) to become their actual leader.
• Kansas City Shuffle: Firebird does a quick one during her fight with Victor, showing an obvious "weak point" and a less obvious one, knowing Victor will "see through" the former and attempt to exploit the latter, giving her the opening to win.
• Leader Wannabe: Sophia claims to be The Real Thing's leader due to her experience as a vigilante, but quickly proves unsuited to the task and Emma and Madison vote Emma in as the new leader, and later ask Taylor to take the position. Emma even gets reminded of the story she read that said "Any man who says I am the king is no king" when Sophia gets pissed at Madison saying that she thought that Emma was the leader already.
• Man of Kryptonite: Victor's power allows him to take non-Parahuman skills from someone and add them to his own skills. Firebird's fighting skills come directly from her power, meaning Victor can't steal them, and her Instant Expert power allows her to identify the weaknesses of Victor's fighting skills, letting her destroy him in half a minute.
• Masquerading As the Unseen:
  • The Empire doesn't know who Blockade is, but they've narrowed down the area where Blockade's Powered Armor seems to be stored, so they stake it out and watch for anyone who might be going to activate it. A man in a hoodie, carrying a toolbox, definitely fits the bill. It's actually Taylor, using her force field to increase her apparent bulk, and of course when Alabaster tries to ambush her, his gun does absolutely nothing as she chases after him.
  • Kaiser sent Victor out in Kaiser armor while the Empire was committing crimes while he was in a public place with people like the Mayor, in order to provide an alibi to "prove" that Max Anders isn't Kaiser.
• Moral Myopia: Sophia angrily accuses Alan Barnes of not teaching Emma that one shouldn't betray friends — exactly the same thing she caused by essentially brainwashing Emma into betraying Taylor.
• Narrative Profanity Filter: When Emma is fighting against Skidmark (and using her superhuman balance to surf his fields without falling over), "the Merchant leader himself invited her to do something anatomically impossible (not to mention disgustingly perverted) while he dumped a bucket of gravel into the skid-field."
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Piggot has just managed to convince The Real Thing to dial down their attacks on the Empire, as she's managing to use the balance of power to slowly tighten the screws on criminal capes while avoiding the issues that would come from the Evil Power Vacuum that would result from the sudden disappearance of the gangs. Then the Empire blatantly starts to track down Blockade's civilian identity, and The Real Thing changes tracks to "take down the Empire, hard".
• Nigh-Invulnerability: Madison's Tinker power lets her build things that are designed not to be breakable by anything, including other parahuman powers. They're clunky and heavy as a result, but effective; Emma is able to bounce her throwing discs off steel and concrete without even scratching them.
• Pedestrian Crushes Car: Taylor inadvertently does this multiple times, starting with Uber and Leet fleeing the police straight through the park she's in, which is how she realizes that she has powers. The second time, she manages to shield her dad and have him break the car.
• Point of Divergence: William Manton's daughter did not have a bad reaction to the vial he stole for her. As a result, he never had the motivation to become the Siberian, resulting in a number of differences from the canon timeline:
  • Hero is still alive. As a result, Cauldron is more benevolent in their work, and haven't been doing things like the Parahuman Feudalism experiment they run on Brockton Bay.
    • After Ellisburg went totally pear-shaped, Hero helped turn the city into slag.
  • Legend broke off from the Protectorate for reasons unknown to the general public.
  • Without the Siberian's protection, Jack Slash died in 2005 to Riley's father with a shotgun, and the Slaughterhouse Nine has been going downhill ever since, nowhere near as feared as the canon version.
  • The PRT ENE office has more resources in men, support and material. Among other things, Purity, Night, and Fog were arrested a couple of years before, greatly reducing the gang's ability to project force.
• Powered Armor: When Sophia insists that Madison doesn't have a way to fight, Madison steps inside a metal box, which unfolds and rearranges itself into an eight-foot suit with glowing red eyes.
  Emma: Power armour. You made power armour.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Aside from a newfound moral stance, Emma and Madison begin to realize Sophia's idiotic vendetta against Taylor could get them in a lot of trouble.
• Rejected Apology: While Taylor sees that Emma and Madison are sorry, she makes it clear she is far from forgiving them for their hideous treatment of her.
• Relative Button: One of Sophia's (very few) soft points is her family. Coil manages to get her to tell him about The Real Thing's Secret Identities by claiming the latter intend to attack her family.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • Alabaster legs it when he realizes that who he thought was Blockade out of "his" armor is actually Monochrome.
  • Similarly, Rune flies as fast as she can when Blockade flies to meet her.
• Shout-Out: Powers in a test tube, uses a "frisbee shield", is physically perfect. Emma has become Captain America.
• The Sleepless: Emma still sleeps, but she needs much less. She's able to pull an all-nighter pushing cars around, sleep two hours, then wake up fresh and ready to go.
• Spanner in the Works: Coil got Sophia to reveal the civilian identities of The Real Thing, and is ready to discard the "throwaway" timeline where he interrogated Sophia - and suddenly Rune accidentally kills him in the "safe" timeline, locking him into the path that gets him con-foamed and arrested.
• Spit Take: Director Piggot is savvy enough to ensure that she always puts down her coffee before reading the daily "skim sheet" summarizing the past 12 hours. She's glad of the practice when she sees the report of Shadow Stalker going on a crazed warpath.
  If there was anything particularly egregious on the page, she didn't want to be dealing with it and wiping coffee off her keyboard and screen.
• Stone Wall: Taylor discovers she has powers when Uber and Leet accidentally hit her with their car - and the car crumples around her and goes ass over teakettle, while Taylor herself is untouched.
• Stupid Evil: Sophia is willing to endanger herself and her friends' reputations to get one more swipe at Taylor. Emma and Madison's development allows them to realize how recklessly insane Sophia is.
• Sucky School: Winslow; they have to put up a sign in the nurse's office to keep drug dealers from stealing their medication. When Taylor obliterates the whole building, there are no shortage of suspects since pretty much everyone has a reason to hate it.
• Super-Toughness: After getting her powers, Taylor is hit by Uber and Leet's car, fleeing the police at speeds that "went straight past 'unsafe' and got the attention of 'downright perilous'." The front of the car is totaled and the car rolls, leaving Taylor blinking and bemused but completely unhurt.
• Tempting Fate:
  • While watching over the Empire's op to capture Blockade, Rune thinks that the Empire will demonstrate that "Those who played stupid games win stupid prizes." She doesn't realize that it's the Empire that "played stupid games" by trying to track Blockade, and they are about to learn what their "stupid prizes" are.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Winslow is a problem for Taylor, both because it's an awful place where she's constantly tormented, and because Principal Blackwell wants to blame her for being shut in her own locker. So she uses her powers to rip the school off its foundations, hoist it up in the air, then drop it again, shattering the whole place to rubble.
  Danny: I can't say I totally agree with your methods, but you certainly solved the problem in front of you.
• Throwing Your Gun at the Enemy: When Emma fends off an attack by a group of Merchants with guns, she doesn't actually want to kill them, but she's easily able to seize their guns and use them as projectiles.
  The second knife guy (and fifth gang member) stood staring, right up until the pistol (Emma really liked its throwing balance) smacked him between the eyes and dropped him to the ground.
• Throwing Your Shield Always Works: Blockade's power isn't really suited to Emma's request for a bow that could also be used in melee, but she has an idea and instead makes a pair of bracers with attached discs of "good steel". When attached, they allow Emma to deflect arrows or even bullets; when detached, Emma's Improbable Aiming Skills allow her to use the discs as a ranged weapon and even bounce them back to herself.
  "I like it." Emma took hold of the left-hand disc with her right hand and figured out how to detach it. Hefting it a couple of times, she turned to face the nearest wall. Pulling the disc back, she gave it a sharp flick. It blurred across the intervening distance, then rebounded sharply with a loud clang. Reaching up, she snatched it out of the air and reattached it to her left forearm, all in one motion. "Scratch that," she said with a wide grin. "I love it."
• Took a Level in Badass: Aside from gaining physical powers, Emma and Madison also become more confident, even standing up to Sophia and her bluster.
• Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object:
  • To demonstrate that she's stronger than she looks, Taylor tests her power against Madison's "good steel". All previous testing has indicated that "good steel" is indestructible; Armsmaster's nanothorns break when trying to cut it, and even Sophia's intangible state can't get through it. However, Taylor's power basically tells physics to go and sit in the corner. It's difficult for her to bend good steel, taking orders of magnitude more force than ripping her entire school off its foundations and lifting it into the air, but she can do it, and it can't penetrate her force field. (She does speculate, however, that if she extended her field over "good steel", it would become unbreakable even to her.)
    Emma: I wouldn't have thought that was possible.
    Madison: It shouldn't be. Nothing breaks good steel. Nothing.
    Taylor: If it's any consolation, I'm pretty sure my power just says, "More force? Yes," when it's trying to do something like that.
  • When Flechette and two of her colleagues transfer in from Boston, Armsmaster has them test their powers against a good steel sample. Since good steel specifically resists dimensional shenanigans, it thwarts them all; even Flechette's power, which makes her projectiles ignore physics and could kill an Endbringer or pop Scion's body, can neither cut it nor empower it.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Taylor used to fangirl over the idea of meeting Armsmaster. But after becoming a Cape, her former bullies becoming Capes themselves, and her psychotic bully turning out to be a Cape, her meeting with Armsmaster becomes a boring affair.
  But now, it seemed, I was setting a much higher bar for anything to impress me. Madison, in her Blockade armour, could fly halfway across town in a single jump. Emma, my best-friend-turned-worst-enemy-turned-I-had-no-idea-what had powers of her own that made her into an action movie star. Even Sophia Hess, whom I had merely thought was an overly violent jock with a fixation on Emma, was actually Shadow Stalker, an edgelord villain with delusions of heroism. Oh, and I had powers too, courtesy of a Stupid Supervillain Plot™ hatched up by the three aforementioned.
• Villain with Good Publicity: The Trio's scheme involves them invoking this: they plan to be heroes while turning Taylor into a villain they can then "defend" Winslow from.
• Vocal Dissonance: Madison uses a device to distort her voice while riding the Blockade armor, so people will think Blockade is a man. This helps her evade the Empire when they follow Blockade to near a park and they ask the people around if they have seen a man, and Taylor later uses that same assumption to turn an attempted ambush by Alabaster, Rune, and Victor into a complete rout.
• Wham Episode:
  • "Part Sixteen: All In": Sophia tries to kill Danny. Emma finally turns on Sophia and begins to confess everything to Taylor and Danny.
  • "Part Eighteen: Communications": Sophia kidnaps Emma's parents, planning to use them as hostages to force Emma to kill Danny and blackmailing her into turning on Taylor.
  • "Part Nineteen: Hostage Situation": Taylor's powers are that of a canon character: The Siberian.
  • "Part Twenty-Eight: Stupid Prices": The Empire 88's attempt to capture/kill Blockade gets turned into an ambush by The Real Thing and Alabaster unwittingly takes Monochrome to their headquarters. At the same time, a stroke of bad (for him) luck causes Coil to lose his "safe" timeline at the worst possible moment - getting captured by the PRT just as he got Sophia to reveal the identities of The Real Thing.
• Wrong Context Magic: Where it is one of the most fundamental rules of the Worm setting that powers always push their bearers to be more mentally unstable and screwed up, Emma's and Madison's powers for some reason have pushed them towards a Heel Realization.
  • Somewhat justified by the fact that it's natural triggers that have that effect, and that their vials were formulated to make the users more balanced and stable, mentally as well as physically.
  • "Good steel" can somehow resist seemingly any and all dimensional shenanigans, up to and including Flechette's power, which can shear through Endbringers and pop Scion's avatar, and is supposed to be impossible for the Entities to stop.

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