"I think they’re cute."
Taylor's response when questioned about the eyeballs on her tentacles
Taylor's response when questioned about the eyeballs on her tentacles
Starry Eyes is a Worm fanfic by Helnae about how cutting off your face is the best way to make friends. Essentially, it's an Altpower!Taylor story where Taylor's power makes her a skin-covered portal to a mysterious realm inhabited by many beings straight out of H. P. Lovecraft (most notably a shoggoth and a nightgaunt). Taylor can control limbs that they poke out through holes in their skin, so if she cuts bits of it off she can fly like her new friend Melody and use her friend Aria's shapeshifting Combat Tentacles.
As another side effect of her power, Taylor has no idea how freaky she looks when doing this.
It can be found on SpaceBattles
, FF.net, AO3, and Sufficient Velocity.
This fic provides examples of:
- Admiring the Abomination: Panacea is left in awe and ecstatic after she uses her powers to scan one of Aria's (a shoggoth) tentacles. She so admires what she saw that she strives to replicate it almost immediately, creating a tiny shoggoth as soon as she returns home.
- Black Speech: The language spoken by Taylor's friends is this.Vista: The mouths opened, and from them issued a hellish chorus of gibberish.
The same gibberish from another voice cut through the chorus. The new voice was, at its core, recognizably female, but it was hollow and echoing, as if its owner were speaking in a crypt. Countless resonating tones accompanied the voice, some high, others so low Vista heard them not with her ears but with her bones, all gnawing at the back of her mind, feeding the fear that had taken root. - Bad Powers, Good People: Taylor has the powers of various Lovecraftian abominations. She wants to use them to be a hero.
- The Blank: Taylor cuts off her skin and has an endless void of space where her face used to be.
- Death by Adaptation: During his rampage Hookwolf kills Kaiser and Krieg. The former dying sooner than he did in canon, and the latter having not died at all in canon.
- Elseworld: The Void Smiles Back is a crossover between this fic and The Familiar of Zero.
- Eyes Do Not Belong There: Aria has eyes everywhere, even inside some of her mouths.
- Flower Mouth: Aria destroys some dummies in front of the Wards using her many mouths.
- Fluffy the Terrible: Taylor's friends are a Shoggoth, a Nightgaunt, and a mass of sentient snow but are called Aria, Melody, and Rest, respectively.
- Horrifying Hero: Taylor/Starfield is this oh so very much. This is mostly due to the fact that her body is its own Pocket Dimension to another realm, hosting a couple of Eldritch Abominations who allow her to use their many multi-tentacled appendages to her will. Half of the heroes who see her mistake her for a villain simply because she is so mindbogglingly terrifying.
- Humanoid Abomination: Taylor looks like a normal human, but she is basically a skin covered portal to a Pocket Dimension filled with eldritch horrors. Combined with her horrifying appearance when she uses the powers of said eldritch horrors and she definitely qualifies.
- Living Shadow: Melody is described as being so dark in coloration that she looks 2 dimensional.
- Lovecraftian Superpower: Taylor/Starfield’s superpower is to use the superpowers of various Lovecraftian entities by cutting off her skin (she can put it back). Aria, being a shoggoth, gets this the most (she's the one with mouths and eyes in her tentacles), but Melody’s flight has been described as clawing at the air, and Rest is basically a living snowfall that eats sound.
- Musical Theme Naming: The lovecraftian entities Taylor gets powers from are named after musical terms.
- The Needless: Any living thing inside of Taylor’s Pocket Dimension becomes this. Not needing to eat, drink, or breathe. They apparently also become The Ageless as Melody has mentioned to have been alive longer than the normal lifespan of her species.
- Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Taylor’s power essentially makes her immune to how incredibly creepy her Lovecraftian Superpower is.
- Self-Surgery: Taylor cuts her skin off before going out in costume and puts it back on when she's done.
- Torso with a View: Not that it goes straight through her, but any piercing of Taylor's skin reveals the portal to wherever in space that her friends are.
