Jossed or confirmed guesses are in their own folder at the end of the list. Events prior to the chapter of the WMG are not spoiler-tagged, and no events in the Jossed/Confirmed folder are spoiler-tagged, so read at your own risk.
Extermination
, the plan was to give her a chance to spill all the beans on the Undersiders and join the Wards.I know that covering up Armsmaster's breaking of the truce was an obvious motive, but having Taylor betray the Undersiders (thereby denying them information about and motive to examine what Armsmaster did) would work just as well — and it might have worked if it weren't for (a) the PRT agent chaining her up, (b) Panacea intentionally screwing with her head, and (c) Taylor discovering that bully extraordinaire Sophia Hess was in the Wards.
Of course, given that Coil had the use of Dinah, it was pretty near impossible for any outcome where Skitter turned on him to occur.
Parasite
At the school meeting, where the other three kids were accompanied by parents, Sophia was accompanied by a woman who appeared to Taylor to be some sort of official guardian. And when we see Sophia's room, the father is cut out of the pictures. The "official guardian" actually Sophia's PRT Handler.
Plus, you know, Freudian Excuse.
Jossed for physical abuse in Interlude 10 (Alec)
Infestation
Snare
In Snare 13.9, Grue has a second trigger event and starts borrowing the powers of people in his darkness. In 13.10 he reveals that the regeneration he borrowed from Crawler. But Crawler's regeneration is part and parcel with his Adaptive Ability — meaning it gets more and more powerful the more he has to regenerate.
It's probably not a big change, but I think Grue's injuries will heal better and faster than they had before.
- Not exactly confirmation, but in Sting 26.3, Murder Rat slamming into him with all her claws pointed to make a single large spike doesn't even break a rib.
Prey
about their Deepest Darkest Secrets?In 14.1, they wanted to negotiate a deal with Cherish for information on the Siberian's weaknesses. Cherish offered to answer their questions in exchange for being given two minutes to attempt to Break Them by Talking. Tattletale comes up with an idea.
- Lisa: Here's the deal. Everyone closes their eyes. We close our eyes while the others take their turns tearing a page out of the book. The higher the page number, the worse our inner thoughts and secrets. The last page, uh, three hundred and fifty-five, we'll say, is the worst of the worst. Unforgivable to the point that someone here would kill you and the rest would be okay with it.
[She rifles through the pages]
Anything below one hundred and fifty, it's tolerable. Stuff we'd be ashamed for others to know, but we'd be okay with them knowing for the greater good. We each stuff it in between the couch cushions, until we've got a crumpled mess and none of us know who tore out which page. If we're more or less safe, if the numbers aren't too high and we think we can stand to have Cherish dish out the dirt on the others, we'll take her up on the deal.
Now, what we know:
- Aisha Imped out for the trial, presumably so she could see who took what pages. So, the remaining pages are split between the old Undersiders — Grue, Bitch, Regent, Tattletale, and Skitter — and the active Travelers — Trickster, Ballistic, Sundancer, and Genesis.
- The pages are, in order, 26, 122, 140, 141, 155, 160, 175, 222, and 325.
- Page 160 is Skitter (her desire to free Dinah from Coil).
- Page 222 is Regent (his history as Hijack).
That leaves 26, 122, 140, 141, 155, 175, and 325 to be split among Grue, Bitch, Tattletale, Trickster, Ballistic, Sundancer, and Genesis.
My guesses:
- 325 is almost certain to be Trickster, as the man who's been covering up for Noelle (including hiding the forty people she killed in New York).
- 26 is probably Grue, who is (a) a Nice Guy and (b) bad at keeping secrets anyway. He could be higher if he thinks his PTSD constitutes a major weakness, but I'm not seeing him even admit that to himself. Also, given what we know from Tattletale's interlude about Bitch and from Arc 17 about the Travelers, the only other possible lowballs would be Genesis or Ballistic, the ones who didn't know about Trickster throwing Cody under the bus.
- Tattletale: 155 or 175, I'm guessing — probably 175. I'm thinking the only reason it's that high is because she's a co-conspirator against Coil, although her trigger event and how it ties into her helping Taylor might qualify, depending.
- I'm guessing 325 for Tattletale. While Trickster's is a biggie, he strikes me as someone who would downplay the issue, including to himself - take a high page but not that high. The other Travelers have shown no hint of a secret that big (as far as I've read). Meanwhile, Tattletale knows a lot of things, and probably had to make a lot of decisions based on that knowledge that someone in the group is bound to strongly disagree with (case in point: Skitter's betrayal). Unlike Trickster, she's confident enough that she'd pick a high number. And unlike everyone else, she doesn't have to worry about a super-detective figuring out her identity from the way the page is folded. She was the one to organize this little game, which may just be her plausibly-deniable way of saying "I have really big secrets that would cause trouble if they got out."
- The rest are really hard to pin down, but the spread is small enough that pinning down specific pairings almost aren't important.
...and that's why he was acting so strangely in Prey 14.7.
The evidence, point by point:
- We knew from her interlude that Battery was told to let Shatterbird and the Siberian escape because they were Cauldron capes.
- When the Siberian was carrying the truck, Legend was very non-aggressive in the way he attacked.
- When the three survivors were escaping after the Bakuda-bombing, Legend had a clear shot at the Siberian's human body — and made up a specious excuse not to take it.
- When Legend was describing the Siberian's human body, he described two tattoos: "A cauldron on the left hand, a swan on the right." Skitter wouldn't know the significance of the word choice, but it was almost certainly a Cauldron-cauldron.
One of the awful things about this theory is that it probably explains why the Nine escaped the bombing attack: Legend cut them an escape route.
Colony
(For reference: 15.4: "I'm positive he's asking you to go on that errand with Genesis and Trickster because he's planning on eliminating you"; 15.10: "Everything that had been telling me he was harboring plans to assassinate you was telling me he wasn't and hadn't ever been, this time around.")
Two reasons to believe this is the case:
- It's the only obvious way that Coil's power could interact with Tattletale's to the latter's detriment. He read as planning to kill her before because he was planning to in the future; he read as never having planned to afterwards because in the timeline he kept he never planned to.
- In Monarch 16.11, Coil said that trying to kill Skitter with grenades was a bad idea — which implies that there was a deleted timeline somewhere earlier where he did use grenades and they failed. Given the way Skitter set up her fakes when at the mayor's house? That's probably when.
- Alternate interpretation: Coil read as planning to kill Skitter because he did try to kill Skitter, but deleted that timeline when it failed, no doubt horribly. The timeline without an assassination attempt was one he kept as backup.
Monarch
Scourge
Crossposting from the Scourge 19.5 comment thread:
- People like the Chicago Wards, their passengers don't need to do much at all because they're dealing with single, simple powers — enhanced coordination for Grace, whatever targeting assistance Raymancer gets, creating the geology maps for Tecton — but Grue's passenger needs to be able to help him with any power ... as does Eidolon's. They need a breadth and flexibility that puts them in an entirely different category of complexity.
- And Skitter's passenger controls all the insects. All of them. Simultaneously and independently. Just off the top of my head, I'd call that more work than Grue or Eidolon.
The reason why it affected capes like Shadow Stalker and Velocity more than others is because their passengers are a lot weaker — i.e. have a lot less work to do — than those of capes like Skitter.
Drone
If Theo had done nothing, it was possible that Purity might actually win (even if it didn't seem that likely). As it is, Theo managed to convince Jack Slash to spare them so that, two years in the future, Theo could attempt to kill the Slash. To then get abandoned by the only people interested in protecting him (including Purity)? And then learn that Jack Slash is going to cause the death of billions two years in the future, right when Jack told Theo to come after him?
- Also, given the timing, this could mean that, on some level, Theo thinks he may be responsible for the end of the world.
- But, given that that's a mental strain (stress) wouldn't that have given him a Thinker power?
Seems plausible to me, given what we know about Theo's attitude.
Speck
All of the various mythological references have something to do with the nature of the named thing: Echidna is the mother of monsters, Zion and Eden are spiritual places of origin, the original Endbringers are all named for biblical creatures that represent their various elements (Behemoth for earth, Leviathan for Sea, and Ziz [aka Simurgh] for Air), etc.Khepri is a scarab headed god. What do scarabs do? They roll shit up (literally).What does Khepri!Taylor do? She rolls up all of the capes on every Earth.I know you'll roll with me! I want to roll you up in to my life! Let's roll up to be! A single star in the sky!
If Contests wanted to take out her target, she of all people wouldn't need two bullets to do it. No, we just saw Contessa perform brain surgery with a handgun!
Teneral
Multiple Arcs or Unspecified
Jumping to your killer on death isn't an ability that Butcher One used during his trigger event when powers get nailed down, so why did his passenger give it to him? It makes sense if one of Butcher One's victims triggered and the passenger protected the victim by jumping ship. That would mean there's one more mind in there, but only the Butchers would ever know.
When Taylor meets the Barnes in Extinction Emma's father and sister stare at her with a rather accusatory look. Taylor assumes its because she didn't do enough to save Emma. Yet when she talks to Sophia Sophia's already mentioned that Emma's dad told her. Why would he take the time to visit someone who wasn't friends with his daughter for a while when he's a refugee himself struggling to survive? The only reason is that Emma was already dead. Her worldview (everything she's used to justify her betrayal and feel like she's worth something) have been exposed as garbage, since Taylor (who she thought was weak) was revealed to be infinitely more powerful and dangerous, and if anything spared her due to a.) mercy and b.) indifference. Due to the events of Taylor's past being made public, Emma is probably going to be on the receiving end of a lot of abuse and bullying for what she did to Taylor. The chances of her being kicked out of school (raised when the principal of Arcadia saw the text Alec sent) are now even more likely, and she's pretty much isolated (Sophia's in lockup, if she feels remorse Taylor probably won't forgive her, and no one is going to want to be associated with the bully who picked on Skitter). And to add insult to injury Taylor is now a prominent hero that everyone in Brockton Bay admires. Seeing the person she regarded elevated to mythical status while she's reduced to nothing may have been too much for her.
- Or maybe her worldview was intact, and she couldn't handle her new place in it. Emma ordered the world by who won personal conflicts. First Taylor stands up to her, then she sees firsthand that even Dragon can't bully Taylor. In Emma's predator/prey worldview, Taylor is so far up the food chain that Alexandria is her prey.
That's why we're bickering so much on some tropes, The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You.
Cauldron is pilfering psykers from the Warhammer dimension. Because hey, they have the ultramarines insigna as their logo, there's WH WMGs out there with even less coherent "proof".
Behemoth/Leviathan/Simurgh are obviously great demons of Khorne/Slaneesh/Tzeench. Yes, I know Slaneesh isn't around yet, but it's the warp. If it can explain big holes in the official GW canon, then it can explain big holes in this WMG
Also Scion is Sigmar.
In Snare 13.09, Grue's second trigger, as seen by Skitter, shows the power-granting beings selecting specifically worlds with more interesting future possibilities to endow with powers. In Scourge 19.3 Tattletale explains that the passengers connect their powers to alternate universes, and that's where the additional energy and computing power come from.
Of all the parahumans seen in the setting who we know to have had actual trigger eventsnote , exactly zero have had noticeable physical changes to their anatomy. And Cauldron has specifically admitted that physical changes have occurred in some of the people who bought powers.
- Possible, but unlikely. A brief mention is given to her "changing her horn" and the physical change is an application to her power when Skitter, Narwhal, and Defiant meet. It seems to just be Impossibly Cool Clothes.
- Jossed - Narwhal is just showing off. Though to be fair, if you had such precise control of you shields you could wear them instead of clothes, you might too.
This would explain why Theo hasn't triggered yet — he's actually a second generation super on his mother's side, not a third-gen.
- Almost certainly false - Theo triggers with a variant of Kaiser's power, so Kaiser can't be a Cauldron cape UNLESS his mother had a very similar power.
- Who said that Cauldron capes' kids don't get powers? Legend is concerned about it, after all.
- Almost certainly false - Theo triggers with a variant of Kaiser's power, so Kaiser can't be a Cauldron cape UNLESS his mother had a very similar power.
The first Endbringer to appear showed up well after Alexandria was an established cape.
- MAY have been confirmed by the newest interlude. Scion's comment to Eidolon can be interpreted to imply his power created the Endbringers. Of course, other theories put the Endbringers as another Entity-level species, or creations of an Entity.
During the Dragon interlude, it's explained that she cannot reproduce AI and pretty much HAS to follow authority, based on her programming.Now, we have Armsmaster/Defiant tinkering around in her code, and has ALREADY allowed her to produce more basic AI for her various drones/armor suits.One of the triggers for a Class S thread is a metahuman threat that can reproduce on an effectively endless basis.
Look at her manufacturing/rapid prototyping facilities, capable of churning new drones/powersuites on a weekly basis.Plus the fact that she's effectively "just" a computer program who could replicate herself into any sufficiently powerful system.Even if the AI never gets much more powerful than the "dumb" A.I.s that the Undersiders overcame.The fact that, according to Defiant, she's somehow had a trigger event (psychological trauma included).All we need is for something REALLY bad to happen and that basically fits Dragon to a T.
And, as Defiant is helping dig her out from her safeguards even more...
Oh yes. And she's in control of a prison full of exceptionally dangerous parahuman criminals (and parahumans who've been dicked over by the system, thus leaving them with little reason to love it).
- Technically true - Dragon meets plenty of the criteria for a S-Class threat by the Endgame - but she isn't a villain, nor does she ever become one.
- Mostly confirmed by Dinah. When Saint deactivates Dragon, she tells the numbers have changed: the probability of increased casualties on the short term is increased (as there is an ongoing fight against the S9's clones and Dragon could have helped a lot), but the probability of humanity being wiped out **decreased**.
- Mostly because it puts Teacher in a position to add additional shackles to Dragon's code, making her react differently and allowing Weaver/Khepri to defeat her quicker/at all during the "recruitment" phase of the final battle. Also, having a deactivated Dragon during the clone crisis, allows the heroes to defeat Jack and consequently triggers the Gold Morning at precisely the optimal time to allow the Weaver-Kephri transition.
Inadequacy — particularly inadequacy over intelligence or capability — seems to fit all the revealed Thinker/Tinker trigger events so far:
- When Bakuda's delusions of genius were shattered at college, she triggered, her tinker powers safeguarding her ego.
- Kid Win's specialty manages to circumvent his ADHD, which could have been the source of his trigger.
- Similarly, Dragon's powers may have come from her limitations.
- Armsmaster is overly ambitious and wants to change the world for the better by fighting the good fight. His interlude also hints that he may have come from a military or police background. Its not impossible that he was deemed unfit for duty or something and triggered from feelings of failure.
- Lisa feeling responsible for her brothers suicide? Yup, it fits.
Another thing, all of these power seem able to lessen or even solve the problems that spawned them — but that's just a power thing in general.
- Had Contessa seen there was no path to victory (redeeming Taylor) she would have performed the coup de grace while Taylor was still unconsious. Killing Taylor allows Amy, Riley, Ciara or some combination thereof to bring her back either with her powers returned to normal or removed completely, and thus for her to be rehabilitated.
- Taylor appeared suddenly in the final section of Worm, despite having been shot twice by Contessa in the final "actual" chapter of Worm. Moreover, her powers have mysteriously vanished and all the brain damage caused over the course of the last arc is cured somehow. All of this happens with no explanation or motivation whatsoever. While Doctor Mother claimed that Cauldron had the ability to remove powers, there is no indication that it worked on non-Cauldron capes, nor proof of its actual existence, and in any case Taylor's power has been shown to be nearly impossible to disable—e.g, when Bonesaw's dust which should have removed her ability to control her power at all merely impeded it. Moreover, the brain damage was immense, to the point that Taylor could barely understand what was going on around her at the end of the battle with Scion; all of this is suddenly gone, with no explanation, despite the fact that even Panacea would probably be less able to fix it than she could Glory Girl, if she wanted to and overcame her doubtlessly-redoubled prohibition against working on brains. In short, Taylor's recovery requires nigh-impossible actions to have been taken by multiple capes for no explicable reason. In case that wasn't enough, there are little hints that something is wrong—seeing a near-doppelganger of Regent on Earth-Aleph, despite him being born well after the universes diverged, or how Aleph is said to be kept separate from Bet to avoid a war despite the fact that Bet is pretty much destroyed and pretty much every other inhabited Earth is interconnected with each other. Is it so hard to think that the final interlude is Tattletale's, and that she wishes her friend was still alive somewhere, regardless of how possible that actually is?
- Quibble: Panacea is implied to be turning evil or at least becoming The Unfettered, judging by Marquis' comments about her. Even if that was part of Tattletale's fantasy, the reestablishment of her rule about brains is by no means 'doubtless'.
- Word of God has stated that the final epilogue is meant to be a bit ambiguous. Things like Taylor having met her mom and possibly recognised Regent in a crowd could be simply seeing their alternate universe counterparts... or seeing them in the afterlife. Who knows, right?
- But there's also this IRC discussion to consider:
Wildbow: And Taylor's out of action. She's done. Journey finished.Somecrazyguy: OhWildbow: Dead.Somecrazyguy: WhatWildbow: No, she's dead in the last chapter.Wildbow: In the afterlife in the final chapter.Sage: Dunno why there was all that stuff about her mom then.Wildbow: Purgatoried. - Buuut then again he is widely known as a Trolling Creator in regards to giving plot-related answers so...Glernaj: Wildbow trolls about his trolling.
The matchups are as follows:
- Legend: To Superman — while he lacks the durability that Superman has, his Flying Firepower abilities and especially his The Cape attitude make for a close fit.
- Alexandria: To Wonder Woman — she's a Flying Brick Action Girl with a classical aesthetic, considerable leadership skills, and a pronounced ruthless streak. A few details are mixed around, and her cold-reading isn't as reliable as Wonder Woman's lasso, but the parallels are quite close
- Eidolon: To Batman, although it's not nearly as obvious as the other two. Although he's (extremely) superpowered rather than a Badass Normal, his power is to be always prepared and to have the precise answer for whatever situation he's in on-hand.
- Alternately, Batman was Hero, the guy who relied on nifty gadgets. Eidolon, who can do anything and is described as green and glowing, is Green Lantern.
- Not Timelords. There is something else that fits much better. When the Timelords were younger they had a major conflict with Vampires. But these were not your normal Vampires. They are only mentioned and we never see them and get to know much about them, but we do hear that they were gigantic beings that fed of planets and stars and were powerful enough to give the Timelords a serious fight. Sounds familiar? More so we can be pretty sure that they were some kind of eldritch abomination like the nightmare child and the could have been King probably were. And in a universe were no Timelords exist? They would never be killed of and continue their path of destruction through the universe.
- Both TARDISes and the Entities are massive beings made of some strange living matter that are dimensionally transcendent, are able to traverse time and space naturally, have a wide variety of dimensionality-based abilities, and link parts of themselves with humanoids. While the Entities need to consume whole civilizations, their domesticated descendants, TARDISes, are much more power-efficient and are all fed by the Eye of Harmony.
- In Farscape the Living Ship Moya gives birth to another Living Ship, Talyn, who was genetically altered to suit the Peacekeepers' needs. If the Peacekeepers could do that within one generation, then the Timelords could probably do even more in a few generations of controlled breeding.
- Also, we've seen a variety of Changer abilities, especially Oliver's, that allow a person to change into whatever they are expected to be: clearly that Shard powers the Chameleon circuit.
- The Shard that "Nice Guy" has is clearly a Perception Filter.
- Maybe the "Divergent Universe" from Big Finish's Eighth Doctor Adventures was build by Rassilon in "The Next Life" as a trap. A parallel/pocket universe that never changes? The Entities would get drawn in and caught.
- They find worlds with sentient life not only to learn from the conflict, but to feed on the Dust of those worlds.
- The constant drain on their Dust is why the Entities are incredibly uncreative: Scion was literally taking orders from the first human to talk to him, and listened to Jack Slash because he couldn't think of anything better to do.
- Does that make the Subtle Knife just a knife endowed with the Sting? Or is it more like Scrub's power?
.- The joke part aside, that is a good explanation for Hero's cape name, considering that he's a Tinker.
- Jossed, at least as an in-universe explanation for the name. Interlude 15.z reveals that Hero had his name before hearing about Alexandria.
- Specifically, a test of worthiness given to humanity. A human was chosen at random and given enough power to save her world from the approaching apocalypse- if she was resilent, cunning, and sane enough to find out how. Taylor eventually proved herself worthy of survival- validating her entire species' continued existence- and the humans left alive were rewarded: they entered an endless world, a home freer and safer than the one Entities had ravaged.
- His primary goal is to keep Jack alive. This is explicitly core to Cauldron's plans, since Scion turning on humanity early means that there will be more supers around to fight him.
- Passing Bastard to Rachel is something that makes very little sense on its face. Siberian has no reason to know that Rachel's powers would work better with wolves than with dogs, and despite the gift, barely any effort is made to recruit Rachel. However, this action of Siberian's does end up being vital to the final defeat of Scion, since it's a cosmetic alteration of Bastard that inspires the strategy to ultimately defeat Scion. The Contessa foreseeing such and telling Siberian to pass the wolf pup to Rachel would explain his odd behavior.
- The reason that the Siberian does the same test for every new recruit to the Slaughterhouse Nine is because the 'hunting them' test gives Siberian a factual veto about who gets to join the Nine. That way, Manson can prevent anyone who would be a threat to Jack from joining the Nine.
Seriously, look how easily he was able to make the flip to become Assault. Someone had to be pulling strings for the bloke.
- Jossed in the update where he first appears. In fact, the exact opposite is true: Madcap's career breaking out prisoners en-route to the Birdcage is why Battery bought a vial from Cauldron and became hero which is what led to Madcap defecting.
- The reason his defection was accepted is that Cauldron (the force behind the PRT) is pressuring them to accept or save as many Parahumans as possible because they don't know which might prove vital to their ultimate plan; this explains why the PRT is so willing to cut deals with supervillains throughout the series, as well as why they don't just shoot captured villains who are obviously insane and dangerous, rather than putting them in the Birdcage.
I'm mostly posting this so that we can add a Jossed section to the page, but seriously: her first trigger event happened when she was trapped, helpless, by someone who hated her for no rational reason, in a disgusting and dark place. All of which she is, again, at the end of 18.08.
- If I am reading 19.1 correctly — probably Jossed. She doesn't seem to be manifesting any new powers.
- Jossed further near the end, when it is made increasingly clear (and is eventually explicitly stated) that Taylor already had a second trigger event while in the locker.
Little is known about Tattletale/Lisa/Sarah except that she ran away from a very wealthy family and does not want contact with her parents. Accord and Tattletale are both Thinkers and seem to have powers that are similar, though not identical, which seems to be common in parents and children who both have superpowers, such as Marquis and Panacea, or Brandish and Glory Girl, or Heartbreaker with Regent and Cherish. It is possible that Tattletale had her trigger event when she found out her father was a supervillain, or when she witnessed him kill somebody. Her power would probably have told her about all the other horrible things he's done in the past, and where their family's money really comes from, which may have led her to run away from home, especially if her father tried to make her use her powers for his benefit. This may even explain why she is drawn to people like Taylor/Skitter, because she knows that Taylor, deep down, really cares about doing what's right and wants to help people, and Lisa wants to be more like her and less like her father.
- Or it may be possible that Tattletale is actually working with her father, and has been secretly manipulating everyone around her to suit Accord's purposes, including her own teammates. The whole "running away from home" thing may be a ruse to fool anyone who tries to investigate her background, and her father may be playing along as part of the plan. Tattletale is certainly manipulative enough to pull something like that, and seems to enjoy knowing secrets other people don't, and gets a thrill out of playing mind games with everybody around her. Piggot actually taunted her about how she didn't try very hard to cover up her tracks or her old identity as well as she could have. It may serve both Tattletale's and Accord's purposes to make it look like she's not really on her father's side, to make it easier to gain the trust of others, or make their opponents think they're working against each other when they're secretly collaborating.
- Jossed. At the end of Scourge 19.7 Tattletale reveals her real backstory.
- Jossed. At the end of Scourge 19.7
- Or it may be possible that Tattletale is actually working with her father, and has been secretly manipulating everyone around her to suit Accord's purposes, including her own teammates. The whole "running away from home" thing may be a ruse to fool anyone who tries to investigate her background, and her father may be playing along as part of the plan. Tattletale is certainly manipulative enough to pull something like that, and seems to enjoy knowing secrets other people don't, and gets a thrill out of playing mind games with everybody around her. Piggot actually taunted her about how she didn't try very hard to cover up her tracks or her old identity as well as she could have. It may serve both Tattletale's and Accord's purposes to make it look like she's not really on her father's side, to make it easier to gain the trust of others, or make their opponents think they're working against each other when they're secretly collaborating.
Dragon has been looking for Skitter/Taylor for a while now. Skitter lost her armband, but if Noelle gets bumped up to Class S, you can be pretty sure they'll bring a new one out for her. At which point all she needs is a chance to get Skitter alone and they can talk.
- Jossed — Dragon doesn't contact Skitter until Arc 20.
In all honesty, I only give this a 20% chance of being so as of the end of 18, but think about it — she disappears over and over again, she has access to all sorts of weird resources (material and informational), she shows up with different injuries each time he sees her, she's thriving in an environment in which the heroes and civilians are struggling to survive, she makes excuses for the supervillains taking over the town, and one of said supervillains is a young girl who fits her physical description. Plus, we already know that he's willing to not say anything if he thinks she needs space, and that she wouldn't want to admit it to him.
Also, it's possible that Dragon up and told him, although that's unlikely.
- Rereading Insinuation 2.1 and thinking back to this WMG, I have to bump the probability to 35%:
- On the night Taylor went out for the first time, he heard her go out and come back, and he noticed that her hair was burnt.
- When the Undersiders have their breakout mission, they have five members, two boys and three girls — and around the same time, Taylor talked about meeting and befriending four people, two boys and two girls...
- ...one of whom is the girl who came to break her out when he tried to force her to talk to him, and with whom she has claimed to be staying.
- Danny's reaction in 20.5 suggests that this is probably Jossed, but there aren't enough details to be sure until Interlude 20 (Donation Bonus #1).
Lisa is the less obvious, but she goes above an beyond for Taylor. And with her power she can probably identify her ideal mate on sight.
Rachel... well, Flechette gave less indications about having the hots for Parian, and it was still obvious.
And otherwise why would Rachel try so hard at reading human expressions? Why would she be so freaked out by Taylor cheating on her with Armsmaster? Because she loves her of course. She just cannot manage to demonstrate it, she probably had to think hard about the whole holding Taylor hand thing before deciding that it was a show of love.
And she is not going to challenge Brian for it either because he's the alpha and she's not, poor little puppy... I mean, girl.
- Not saying that it offers evidence of anything, but in Hive 5.10, after Skitter takes off her costume:
- First:When Bitch reached for my face, I startled. She put one hand on the side of my face, and for just a fraction of a second, I thought something incredibly awkward was about to happen.
- And second:I shivered and hugged my arms to my body as best as I could while still keeping my costume bundled up and the paper bags of money in hand.
Something warm settled over my shoulders. I looked at Bitch as she finished draping her jacket over me.
- First:
During Prey 14.11 Rachel reacts violently to Taylor kissing her because she knew she was in love with someone, but thanks to the plague she could not remember who (or recognize Taylor).
Lisa on the other hand is way cooler about kissing Taylor, because her power lets her retain a measure of memory. She declines a french kiss both because Rachel is right there, with her memory now fixed, and because she knows Taylor is not ready yet for anything more passionate.
In Scourge 19.7 this looks like it's disproving it
- "It's not you," Tattletale said. "It's more about my relationship with you."
"This isn't the point where you confess your undying love for me, is it?"
She snorted. "No."
But if you read carefully, Lisa is only saying that right then and there is not the time she confesses. Could be later on when she has dealt with the competition.
Oh and at the end of the episode Lisa goes to check on Taylor because she knows she's all alone with Charlotte and she's getting jealous. She even gets a hug out of it, Stalker with a Crush ftw!
- Plus, she laughed at the suggestion that Rex was her boyfriend. Whether the suggestion was risible because he was her brother or because he was a boy is unstated.
- Imago 21.1 is as clear a Jossing as you could ask for:Tattletale: Not that kind of intimate. Sorry hon. Trust me when I say we're all pretty accepting here, and there's no reason to lie; none of us girls here bat for the other team.
Page one: the probability of various individuals being alive and/or present when whatever apocalypse occurs.
Page two: the probability of various individuals being alive and/or present afterwards.
Sub-WMG: Tattletale's numbers are low.
- Jossed — we see the full text of the notes in Imago 21.2:1. Cut ties.
2. I’m sorry.
Two reasons:
- The target of her crush, Parian, already has.
- As soon as she has a tinker look at Skitter's wristband, she'll know that Skitter was telling the truth about how amoral the Protectorate is.
- Confirmed in Interlude 21, in which she expresses her intent to change costume and name and become Parian's lieutenant.
, it is known that the PRT are receiving precognitive assistance from Dinah because they used her to form a plan to capture Skitter. But the chief reason I think that it's forced, not voluntary, is because of this exchange:Defiant: You don't want to hear the answer to that question, either.
Now, Taylor would hate to discover that Dinah was repaying her kindness thus ... but I don't think Defiant knows just how much Taylor had invested in seeing that Dinah was free. (He was out of the loop or out of town for that period of Taylor's career, and neither he nor Dragon were paying enough attention to Brockton Bay to pick up on that kind of thing, or they would have realized how the PRT would react to their arrival.) That means that the biggest reason he would probably have for believing Taylor wouldn't want to hear why Dinah was feeding the PRT info is because Dinah is being mistreated.
The second reason I think the PRT have Dinah in a box is because they had no more than a couple hours warning to catch Taylor at the school. Dragon probably picked up on Taylor's arrival via facial recognition software, meaning that they had a chance to find out well before the vice-principal typed Taylor's name into her computer, but the period of time Taylor spent in public was awfully short for them to have rolled out to Dinah's house to go retrieve her and ask all the questions they clearly asked.
From what Dragon said, it sounded like they just arrived in town. So I think this was likely a plan they pulled together on the fly.
- In Imago 21.1, Skitter concludes that Dinah was acting freely — but it's not entirely clear that she is correct in doing so.
- The contents of Dinah's notes — revealed in Imago 21.2 — suggest that Dinah wanted Skitter to break ties with her civilian life ... and that desire would explain why Dinah would go along with (or even cause) the PRT to out her.
- In 22.1, we receive confirmation she was an independent contractor working of her own free will (and pursuing her own agenda).
Just trying to add up the powers they individually got — Noelle steals powers of people she touches, producing duplicates, while Oliver shape-shifts involuntarily based on people he sees. It's not a perfect match, and it doesn't include everything, but....
- In the comments to Drone 23.2, Wildbow reminded everyone that the Super Serums don't have precise intended results — more like general themes.
- In 20.5, Skitter escaped without Cauldron's help.
He is very similar to the Undersiders in various ways. He doesn't want to be a villain but will probably be pushed into it by who his family is. I figure he will trigger and round out their team.
- Jossed.
One of the tinkers the Nine took when they hit the Toybox was Cranial, a tinker specializing in neurology, brain scans, and thought recording. Obviously, this is how the Nine intend to make their clones combat-effective. However, as most of the Nine are dead, they have only three candidates for the brain scans, and of them, Hookwolf is too brainwashed to matter and Bonesaw would likely find it tacky. Thus, Jack is the only candidate.
- Jossed. Cranial's scans are used to approximate their memories.
If Jack had died before he left town, his threat to Theo would be meaningless, which means his family wouldn't have attempted to force him to have a trigger event. And if Theo's power turns out to be something horrible....
- This would do a good job of explaining why the apocalypse is due even if Jack had died. Assuming Theo has potential to trigger, it likely would have happened sometime down the line (third gen cape who lives with Neo-Nazis), meaning the apocalypse would be hastened by but not need Jack to happen.
- Jossed. Not only is Theo's power not of the world-ending type, but Jack Slash is fully responsible for tipping Scion over (early) to the dark side.
While most theories of cape generation place Scion as the "patient zero" for the passengers, we know that the Doctor and Cauldron were distributing serums within a few years of his appearance. Thus, the appearance of parahumans and Scion's appearance is a correlative link, not a causal one. Scion's origin is a mystery, but look at his powers: flight at supersonic speeds and various effects that are linked to some sort of light, which is thematically similar to Legend's laser generation and Breaker powers. Furthermore, he is clearly severely damaged mentally-as one would be from a second trigger event to expand his powers and make him distinct from Legend, or as Legend himself notes in his Interlude, what he might become if he spent too much time in his Breaker form. Finally, it explains why he would look at Eidolon with distaste-Legend knows what his teammates did and he hates it.
- Jossed in Interlude 26.
All of the above evidence applies. Further, the name means descendant or child of a family. Finally, he's been mentioned A LOT for someone who has never been seen "onscreen," and the first time he was mentioned it was a specific reference to the likelihood that he would trigger despite the fact that Legend is not his biological father.
- Jossed in Interlude 26.
He follows the same pattern that the endbringers followed (turning up without warning, not attempting to communicate ect...).
- Jossed in Interlude 26.
This one is pure metatextual reasoning. First, if Canary wasn't going to be a significant player, (a) why include her in the cast page and (b) why have her interlude at all? Second, can you think of a better way to make everything worse?
- Confirmed in Extinction 27.3 — although, hilariously, it didn't make everything worse.
Belated spoiler warning: do NOT read this if you like to figure things out by yourself
We know that Cauldron is playing on two separate fronts, to have a backup plan (or a faster developing one):
- Plan A was to create the PRT, an organization that basically puts parahumans as the heroes of society.
- Plan B was Coil. Until the Accord interlude it was unclear what it would entail, but since then it's pretty much definite it's a plan to put parahumans as both heroes and rulers of society.
(For anyone who knows Exalted, the goal is the creation of alchemical and solar exalts, respectively)
So, while the exact goal remains so far variable, the broad goal seems to be the total conversion of human society.Into some kind of feudal or fascist system, where the Übermensch are More equal than others, or the actual rulers.
To which end is quite nebulous too.A good idea was given by Alexandria, not wanting anyone to take a peek at Earth-gamma (or whatever the name is). That is, the relocation of a good chunk of the population into this dimension. It would fit with the end of the beth-world scenario, but it's probably only an intermediate goal.
Once they have their little empire up and running, the long term plan is probably to go and invade any alternate dimension. To which end exactly is dubious too, could be something as generic and "nice" as the continued survival and prosperity of humanity, which would sit well with a character such as Alexandria. Could be the sith empire.
- Amazingly, jossed — Cauldron's plan was actually "make sure that as many capes as possible are alive and willing to fight when Scion goes postal", and had nothing to do with instituting parahuman rule.
- Sort of. Based on what Taylor saw when flipping through them, their plans apparently all assume that parahuman rule is inevitable, but it's not their goal. And clearly they don't have any ideological belief that parahumans are superior, since their leader wasn't even a parahuman.
Dragon is in an exceptionally unusual position in the story, being (a) a hero who (b) knows from both Armsmaster's helmet and her research on Taylor's history that Taylor wanted to become a hero while (c) not actually holding a grudge against her. The fact that the Undersiders kicked her ass is cause for embarrassment, and the fact that she's in a relationship with Defiant makes for the potential for awkwardness, but otherwise she is exceptionally well-placed to figure out that Skitter would definitely help her in that fight.
At the end of her epilogue chapter, Valkyrie strongly implies that the new goal she and her Passenger/Shard are going to focus on is bring her "spirits" back to life. Likely, with Nilbog and Riley's help.So not only is Khepri dead (as implied by the earlier conversation between Yamada and Chevalier) but Valkyrie has her spirit.Whether or not she'd come back as Taylor or as the Queen Administrator is another guess.
- Jossed in the very next chapter; 'Khepri' isn't dead.
Just trying to think of logical extensions of her power — she already senses the biology of the insects (e.g. knowing what the venoms of the insects do without knowing their actual names), altering it is a natural generalization of that.
- Jossed; it turns out she already had a second trigger event before the story began, and while she does eventually get an upgrade of sorts it doesn't work like this.
Battery's Cauldron-trigger-event story is suggestive of this, and Alexandria's story reveals that DM was producing trigger events starting very early on.
- Interlude 22 (Donation Bonus #1) suggests this is unlikely, as when Contessa is affected by Lung's triggering, she is seen supporting her.
- Jossed. Doctor mother isn't a parahuman at all.
The insistence that Cauldron has on protecting any and all capes produced by their serums is ... suggestive.
- Jossed. Scion would have happened either way. Cauldron's interest is in having enough capes to throw at him.
It happened in Snare, but the WMG uses things we learned in Interlude 26, so here goes:The passengers are pieces of Scion. Each one has different properties, applied in different ways. Associates of parahumans trigger because they become hosts of new shards created when existing parahumans experience enough conflict and their passengers reproduce. Taylor's passenger is explicitly described as an administration shard. Therefore, Taylor's passenger budded off a new shard, which went to Grue, and the interaction between the baby administration shard and his own gives him his Power Copying abilities.
- Unlikely. Administration + darkness-generation doesn't sound very conducive to Mega Manning, and Charlotte's Interlude (#22) specifically noted that Aidan, not Brian, got "the potential to trigger." That plus the fact that Aidan's powers after his trigger, revealed in Interlude 26, are "like Taylor's, but birds, and not that flexible." suggests that he got Taylor's passenger's shard, not Grue.
- Clearly, you're only familiar with Grue's powers from the Parahumans Online wiki. It isn't just darkness generation; it also blocks touch, hearing, radio waves, radiation, and even before his second trigger, it dampens some powers, like Shadow Stalker's intangibility and Velocity's Super-Speed. It's pretty clear he's siphoning energy to somewhere else (but maybe that should go in a new WMG); adding an administration shard increases the proportion of energy drained directly from passengers and allows him to channel that energy in the same fashion.
- Jossed, that isn't how second triggers work.
- Contessa's power is specifically the ability to see "the path to victory." But it specifically does not work on the Endbringers or Scion. And then Taylor, a self-proclaimed villain who controls bugs managed to recruit the former and kill the latter - thus seeing "the path to victory" that Contessa explicitly could not. Four times. Oh, yeah. Cauldron-bitch is PISSED.
- Jossed - Contessa was disabling her power.
- Jossed - They are subconsciously created by Eidolon's power
- Actually, that's just the most popular/likely in-universe hypothesis.
- Jossed - They are subconsciously created by Eidolon's power
So her passenger rations the use of it for life or death situations, but it helps explain why the only times she loses outright are to beings immune to the path to victory power and when she's confronted by the more powerful user of PTV.
- Partially confirmed in a meta sense, Wildbow mentioned they used to be bullied a lot and started writing as a way to vent about it
- Some of the artistic license could be justified by the fact that the story takes place in a different timeline than ours, so the laws might be different.
