Whatever she expected when she triggered, it wasn't meeting a short white-haired girl or turning into a hyper-advanced technological platform. Of course when you're Taylor Hebert, things frequently don't go as planned.
— Official summary:
Transposition, or: Ship Happens, is a Worm/Arpeggio of Blue Steel crossover.
In this universe, Taylor's trigger event is somehow interrupted, and she has a vision of a white-haired girl talking to her in Japanese. When she awakens, she finds out that she has become a Union Core and Mental Model of the Fleet of Fog/Experimental Platform X-1, essentially an Artificial Intelligence in a body constructed out of Nanomachines for the unaware. Preparing a costume, she goes out and becomes the hero Relentless, and Earth Bet will never be the same.
Can be found on FF.Net
, Sufficient Velocity, and Ao3.
Transposition, or: Ship Happens provides examples of:
- Absurdly Sharp Blade: Relentless manages to give her new BFS a mono-molecular edge, though she can dull it for weaker opponents.
- All for Nothing: After getting conscious control of her nanomaterial unlocked, Taylor's a little irked that her costume, which she spent months working on, is now redundant, as she can just make it at will.
- Alternate History: Earth Bet's history compared to the Earth the Fog comes from, as Brockton was a shipyard where several ships were built during WWII, but Taylor's Fog included information remembers the ships being built elsewhere.
- All There in the Manual: Has a guide on Ao3. The SF thread also has some information, like Taylor's Fleet Sigil.
- Almost Out of Oxygen: With realistic outcomes. Bullshit nanomaterial powers or not, Tattletale was without oxygen for nearly 10 minutes before Taylor got life support running. Brain damage was guaranteed.
- Antimatter: Taylor uses Squealer's fusion reactor to jumpstart her antimatter production, giving her a power source for her creations and her upgraded body. She's smart enough to use a dimensional fold to make sure that the containment unit won't blow up the city if damaged, of course.
- Barbie Doll Anatomy: Leah because her Cyborg body was a little rushed.
- Beehive Barrier: Taylor unlocks her Klein Barriers during the Lung battle, allowing her to make these.
- BFS: Relentless gets one made of Tinker produced metal from Uber and Leet to use against the Deathwing construct. She uses her nanomaterial to give it a mono-molecular edge and add her sigil to it.
- Bio Manipulation:
- Taylor at one point compares her control over her nanomaterial to self-biokinesis.
- Bizarre Alien Biology: Taylor constructs herself skeletal and muscle systems that are only close enough to human that they can pass for it from an outside perspective.
- Brain in a Jar: To save Tattletale's life, Taylor rips out her brain and spinal cord, keeping it alive while she creates a new synthetic body for her.
- Brain Uploading: Taylor's consciousness has been transferred into a Union Core, which is using Nanomachines to replicate her old body.
- Breast Expansion: In addition to increasing her cup size slowly enough that she can get away with it in her civilian identity, Taylor makes herself more attractive when patrolling as Relentless, even though the armor means no one can see it.
- Broken Masquerade:
- Danny ends up learning that Taylor triggered when she unknowingly crushes a fork in full view of him.
- Somebody leaks civilian identities of most of Brockton Bay's villains.
- Canon Discontinuity: The author has made it clear she did not like how Chapter 2.2 turned out, so she's completely rewriting it, with the Bakuda fight being completely scrapped. She also rewrites parts of chapters if she thinks they need changes.
- Cool Plane: Taylor designs and creates a stealth fighter jet that can go Mach 33 (faster than escape velocity) as a test run for her nanomaterial.
- Cool Ship: Considering the source material it was expected. In Counterpoint 3.2 Taylor makes her first submarine.
- Cutting the Knot: Relentless was supposed to attack the weak spots on "Deathwing", like in the game, to defeat him. Frustrated with the whole thing, she finally stabs the BFS through its head. Leet lampshades the fact that she's not fighting it "right", but the spectacle is enough that he can't complain.
- Entertainingly Wrong:
- When Armsmaster first meets Relentless, he assumes she is old enough to join the Protectorate, due to her height and costume.
- Lot of people think that Relentless is working with a Tinker, because of unusual readings from her costume, and her stealing stuff from Squeeler's vehicle.
- Glory Girl thinks that the Portal Cut was caused by a Bakuda bomb since no one actually saw Relentless destroy the black hole.
- Emergency Transformation: Taylor did this to Tattletale to save her. She ripped out her brain and spine and built a new body from scratch.
- Emotion Suppression: Taylor's emotions are suppressed automatically to keep her more levelheaded when the intensity goes above a certain level. She's aware that she's been more level-headed after her transformation, but she believes it to be because she's no longer having to deal with teen horomones.
- False Flag Operation: Since everyone assumes that Relentless is working with a Tinker due to her armor, Leah decides to masquerade as one to draw attention away from Taylor and to cover up her own Thinker powers.
- Flat "What": Taylor's reaction whenever her Union Core throws something particularly weird at her such as letting her tear apart a black hole.
- Freak Out: Twice in the same scene. First, Relentless has one when Vista shrinks her arm with her powers. Then Vista has a minor one when Relentless pulls out her own spine and shows it to the Ward.
- Gravity Master: Taylor, as usual for a Fog Mental Model. She even manages to tear apart a black hole from a Bakuda bomb in less than couple seconds.
- Grey Goo: Taylor in a nutshell.
- Hidden Depths: As it turns out, Greg is a talented artist with a number of alternate costume ideas for capes. Taylor actually convinces him to post them online after seeing some she liked for her own armor.
- Hijacking Cthulhu: The Union Core connects with (barely restricted) Queen Administrator and permamently steals her from Scion.
- I Am Not Left-Handed:
- Taylor is very careful to keep her full abilities hidden. She knows most if not all of it will come out eventually, but considers keeping her nature as a technically Artificial Intelligence being more important.
- Panacea shows off more of her real powers by rapidly modifying a tree to have it capture Fenja.
- Identity Amnesia: Though she can deduce a lot with her Thinker power, Tattletale is missing most of her memories related to personal details upon her awakening from body transplant.
- Instant Armor: Taylor can make her armor from her nanomaterial. She's a little irked when she finds this out, since she'd spent months making the now obsolete and inferior armor by hand.
- Internal Reveal: Taylor finally learns what happened to Emma during that summer and Sophia's involvement during that mess.
- It Runs on Nonsensoleum: Averted, unlike Tinkertech, everything Taylor makes is derived from scientific principles and can be understood by normal people. Which allows Leah to learn how to make and maintain it.
- Jack of All Stats: Taylor considers her nanomaterial this, and eventually starts creating specialized material (like a diamond-based spine and bone structure) to better protect her Union Core and increase her combat performance, at the cost of some of her Voluntary Shapeshifting ability.
- Logical Weakness:
- Taylor's inorganic body means that she's not protected from the Manton Effect. Vista is able to figure out that she's not normal because her Space Master powers don't register the space she's in as filled with life.
-
Word of God, Leah is going to be vulnerable to EMP attacks due to her brain implants.
- Loss of Identity: One of the themes of this story.
- Taylor often wonders if she's still the same person (or even human) she was before her transformation.
- Tattletale/Leah who lost her memory and body in the aftermath of Lung's attack.
- Marked Change: Taylor's Fog sigils activate when she's exerting himself in combat.
- Meaningful Rename:
- Purity renames herself Radiance after helping the PRT capture Bakuda, signifying her finally leaving the Empire for good.
- Zig-zagged with Tattletale. She thinks her name is "Leah", when in reality it's a mash-up of her birth and assumed names.
- Mission Control: Leah acts as one for Relentless during Counterpoint 3.4.
- Mundane Solution: Taylor finally deals with Emma by going to her mother and telling Zoe that her daughter might not have recovered from the trauma as well as her family thought.
- Mundane Utility: Relentless uses her Armor as floating platforms to move fast around the city.
- Nanomachines: Taylor's body is made entirely of nanomaterial save for her Union Core. During her fight with Lung, she gains the ability to consciously control and manipulate it, and starts making more by consuming the junked ships in the Ship Graveyard.
- Never Found the Body: Lung supposedly incinerates Tattletale, but there were no remains. The next chapter confirms that things are more complicated than they appear.
- New Powers as the Plot Demands: Kind of justified, as the Union Core removes safety blocks and restrains on various systems if Taylor meets required parameters i.e. gets into dangerous enough situation.
- Nigh-Invulnerable:
- Taylor, with her new skeletal and muscular system, is insanely durable.
- Leet's dragon construct was apparently made to mirror Deathwing's own toughness, save for the weak spots marked by lava. Taylor's BFS does jack squat until she really uses her Super-Strength.
- Menja and Fenja become this if they have time to ramp up.
- No-Sell: Even though Taylor's not organic enough to trip the Manton limit, her new state does have a few advantages. Word of God, she's completely immune to Masters and any power that targets organic matter.
- When she meets Glory Girl, not only is she immune to her aura, but she managed to break her invulnerability field by pressing her hand hard enough.
- No Social Skills: Downplayed but Taylor's two year long social isolation means that she misses some unspoken clues, such as the fact that her interactions with Glory Girl can be interpreted as flirting.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Relentless, when Vista asks her if she is a human.
- Tattletale, right before Lung spots her in her cell.
- Glory Girl, when Relentless tells her about leaked identities.
- Older Alter Ego: Relentless accidentally turns into this for Taylor, since Armsmaster thought that she was old enough to be in the Protectorate.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Vista's behaviour during her second meeting with Relentless is rather odd. Shrug of God implies that her Shard wanted to find out why Relentless wasn't protected by the Manton Limit.
- Portal Cut: Taylor can do this now as a side effect of using Klein fields.
- Power Limiter: Taylor has several levels as part of her Union Core. Word of God, they would have been slowly released when enough time passes, though they can be unlocked in emergency.
- Properly Paranoid: Taylor is being careful to keep her new nature as an Artificial Intelligence secret, fearing how people will react. Given Saint's history of antagonism with Dragon, and how he is the one implied to be stirring up anti-Artificial Intelligence resentment on PHO...
- Reality Is Unrealistic: Some of the readers were disbelieving that Tattletale was able to survive with her injuries for several hours. One reviewer (with actual medical training) pointed out that not only was it possible, she would have had high chances of recovery with proper medical care.
- Required Secondary Powers: The Union Core also provides the power the nanomachines need to function, no matter how many are hooked up to it. It's limited in what it can provide in rate and current though, so Taylor uses an Antimatter core for her upgraded body.
- Nanomachine shapeshifting requires very high amount of processing power from the Core and can't be done on-the-fly... unless one has the parallel processing capabilities of QA shard.
- She Is Not My Girlfriend: More like "I don't have a crush on her", said Kid Win about Relentless.
- Shown Their Work: Ensou spent some time researching brain damage, amnesia, bits of neurochemistry and neurology, and checked the timing of tides on a specific date on the East Coast to make Tattletale's situation believable.
- Spotting the Thread:
- Vista notices that Relentless isn't protected by the Manton Effect, cluing her that something is off.
- Danny ends up learning that Taylor has powers when she ends up crushing a fork while angry.
- Once her Shard no longer has a time limit, Tattletale/Leah quickly figures out there is a conspiracy running in the background.
- Super-Empowering: During her fight with Lung the Queen Administrator is hijacked by the Union Core and connected to Taylor, which allows her the ability to consciously control her nanomaterial by taking over the brunt of the processing load, as well as unlocking her other abilities like her Klein Barriers.
- Superpower Lottery: After her fight with Lung, Taylor notes that with her full capabilities and a little work with just technology she has pre-installed, she has a rating in nearly every power category, and many of those rating and potential ratings would be quite high according to the guide.
- Word of God she should have 9-10s in most categories, with Changer, Master, Tinker and Thinker being 12+.
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- Sure, Let's Go with That: Relentless does nothing to dismiss various rumours and theories about her since it helps her hide her true nature.
- Theseus' Ship Paradox: Taylor mentions this when talking to Danny after accidentally outing herself to him, she thinks that she's Taylor, but every part of her body has been replaced by nanomachines...
- This Is Gonna Suck: Taylor's reaction to learning about the info leak of the identities of various Bay villains.
- Transhuman: Transhumanism is a major theme in the work, given that Taylor wonders herself whether she, now that she's basically an Artificial Intelligence in a body made of Nanomachines, can still be considered "human" anymore. Tattletale's Emergency Transformation is another example.
- Pro-Human Transhuman: Taylor is very much this, fighting as a hero.
- Tranquil Fury: Enforced, if Taylor's emotions go out of control, her Core forcibly shuts down emotional subroutines.
- Trauma-Induced Amnesia: Tattletale suppressed her remaining memories in the aftermath of Lung's attack due to all the trauma since her Trigger.Major mental trauma. Self-protective psychological dissociation. Psychogenic amnesia, exacerbated by physical trauma.
- Troll: Taylor has her moments, like when she pulled out her spine and showed it to Vista.
- Voice Changeling: At one point Taylor manages to change her voice to keep the Trio from finding her in the bathroom, and she later uses it to disguise her voice when heroing.
- Voluntary Shapeshifting: Taylor uses her newfound control over her body to alter herself, slowly making her default form more attractive. She later becomes a perfect visual copy of Vista.
- Wetware CPU: The Queen Administrator shard acts like this when it reconnects with Taylor during her battle with Lung, taking over the processing load for manipulating Taylor's nanomaterial. For the shard's part, it's happy that it's getting a real workout for once.
- Wham Episode: Counterpoint 3.4: Somebody leaks info about various villains' civilian identities.
- Wham Line: In Diatonic 1.x.3 we have this gem:Queen Administrator: It had a name. It had previously been of the Warrior. Now, it was of Relentless.
- World's Most Beautiful Woman: Played with. Taylor quickly realises that, though tempted, suddenly making herself drop dead gorgeous would raise a lot of questions from others that she doesn't want to answer, so she settles for improving her looks slowly over months so she can pass it off at being a late bloomer.
- Her cape persona on the other hand she makes so impossibly attractive that no one would ever think that think she was Taylor Hebert. She knows that no one can really see it with her armor, but doesn't care.
