Taylor Hebert

[Taylor Hebert]

Character Name: Taylor Hebert, aka Weaver

Character Source: Parahumans book 1: Worm, by John McCrae (aka Wildbow)

Spent Essence: 2000

Character Behavior: Paranoid Swarm-Master

Taylor is remarkably Paranoid. She got her bug powers because all of her so-called friends turned on her, and the primary feature of those powers is a very strong and incognito sensory radius for spying and avoiding threats. Even so, she's driven always towards violent conflict. It's difficult for her to trust, and she takes most affronts as an excuse to escalate the confrontation, often resorting to violence, intimidation or coercion, even when her “opponent” was trying to be helpful, or not meriting such a response – think “Fight or Flight” with the Fight turned up to 12. She arrives in Multerra just after experiencing a heightened state of the above.

She fights using her Master power to control her swarm. While her parahuman ability is controlling bugs, that doesn't mean she doesn't also have a whole bag of tricks up her metaphorical sleeves. She wears a utility belt with personal weapons like an extendable police baton, a gun, and pepper spray, as well as various tools and materials for her bugs to manipulate. Her swarm, too, is quite versatile in its applications and members. She doesn't hesitate to hit where it hurts for a better end-result to a confrontation, as her swarm is often ineffective otherwise.

Items: None

Abilities/Skills:

Swarm Sense

Sense (Hearing, Extrasensory) 5: 1000E (675ft range)
+ Ongoing (500E)
+ Indirect (No Cost)
+ Weakness (-125E)
+ Limited (-250E)
Total cost: 1125E

Taylor senses her surroundings via her Swarm. She has an accurate mental map of the all physical objects in the vicinity since she subtly and constantly sweeps bugs through her surroundings, acting as a physical points in her spatial awareness (much like a radar), and will tag everything of importance with them. She can listen in on conversations if she has a fly or three on each speaker, and knows when anything moves. She can technically see through a bug's eyes, but lacks the ability to comprehend those inputs, so any visual knowledge gained is made obsolete by tactile locational knowledge; She can't tell someone's facial expression, for example, without landing a bunch of bugs on their face.

Weaknesses/Limitations: After an initial sweep, most of the bugs in Taylor's swarm will be occupied in the fight, and as such she'll only keep one or two bugs on each object or creature she deems inconsequential. Thus, blending into the background can allow an enemy to get the jump on her more easily than against most perceptive abilities. In addition, her bugs are ordinary critters and can be killed rather easily by certain manners of area attacks, like bug spray, fire, or lightning, which nullifies both her offensive and perceptive capabilities which would be manifesting through those particular bugs. (This doesn't qualify as “Removable” or “Finite” because it's still very difficult to kill ALL of her bugs, and they can't be used as regular weapons by her opponents if captured.) Her perceptive capabilities thin as more and more of her swarm is destroyed, and become a bit less useful in combat against an enemy that can reliably kill off nearby bugs.

Sting, Bite, Rip

Damage 2 (200E)
+ Ranged (100E)
+ Affects Multiple (100E)
+ Ongoing (200E)
+ Indirect (No Cost)
+ Finite (-100E)
Total cost: 500E

Taylor controls her more dangerous bugs – wasps, venomous spiders, ants, beetles – to attack her enemies in whatever way is natural for that bug. Would be Damage 1, but many of their stingers and mandibles and such have been coated in irritants for extra effect, and her bugs can crawl under clothing and into orifices, making them more effective than, say, a knife, against opponents with any sort of armor. Usable throughout Swarm Sense's range. Continues without complete focus after using, thus Ongoing.

Although her swarm is hard to fully eradicate, her truly dangerous offensive hitters are relatively Finite in number. Between fights she has to replenish her useful bugs, be it by breeding or traveling about and collecting the bugs she finds (pursuant to the local ecology), and to be truly prepared for a fight she must spend time before that fight collecting extras of her dangerous bugs and applying the capsaicin. Her bugs can be killed or disabled in swathes with area attacks, particularly heat or cold, and her capabilities with her offensive bugs diminishes rapidly as they're killed off. Without taking at least a day collecting more bugs and applying their capsaicin (Out of combat), or a short while with access to a base of operations with dangerous bugs stocked away somewhere, this ability's effect will remain diminished indefinitely.

Stick, Tangle, Catch

Debuff 2 (200E)
+ Ranged (100E)
+ Ongoing (200E)
+ Indirect (No Cost)
+ Finite (-100E)
+ Limited (-100E)
+ Activation (-100E)
Total cost: 200E

Some of Taylor's bugs carry thick lengths of prepared spider-silk cord to a target enemy and attempt to trip them up by tangling their legs, sticking their clothes or limbs to a wall, or some other similar detriment to their movement or coordination.

She has a limited number of prepared cords for this purpose, and a limited number of bugs which are strong enough to carry them. The cord is a bit thin and hard to see, but the cluster of bugs is easy to notice as aberrant. The ability fails if those bugs are killed or the rope destroyed, and it takes at least 10 seconds for the bugs to either grab bits of sticky string from Taylor's utility belt (at close range) or to make the journey over to the opponent (at range).

The bugs can be destroyed by all the usual methods; the string can be destroyed by the same. Takes roughly a day to replenish silk; cannot be done at the same time as replenishing offensive bugs, unless most spiders remain intact or has access to a base with extra spiders, but doesn't require full concentration while doing so.

Spider-Silk Armor

Protection 1 (100E)
+ Ongoing (100E)
+ Weakness (-25E)
Total cost: 175E

Armor made of spider silk and reinforced with insect chitin; durable, but quite destructible with fire. Can be repaired with spider silk, taking between a day and 2 weeks to fix depending on the damage, not to overlap with STC recharge time and pursuant to the same limitations re: spiders.

Affinities: Specialized (Indirect)

Master Skills: None

 

[Taylor Hebert]

Physical Description:

Tall and uncomfortably lanky, pale skin, curly black hair. Bit of a wide mouth. Kind of rectangular body shape. Wears glasses, contacts or vision-correcting lens. 20 years old or so.

Image.

Character History:

Pre-Multerra:
Taylor hails from Brockton Bay, a crumbling US Eastern seaboard city on Earth Bet, a world much like Earth Aleph (basically real life) except for the existence of superpowered humans known as “parahumans” or, more colloquially and while costumed, “capes.” Parahumans get their powers by “triggering,” or experiencing some extreme trauma, the nature of which influences what power they get. Taylor triggered off the feeling of intense betrayal by those she once thought her friends, and as such, her power manifested as an ability to precisely control a whole army of tiny “friends” devoid of personality and incapable of ever turning on her. She controls bugs (Well, mostly – she controls any creature with a tiny brain incapable of what we might consider true thought, which is typically bugs but can also be small crabs and such. Giant bugs apply only if they have a small enough brain for her to control them – The giant bugs present on Mesa Roja, for example, would likely not fall under her control.)

Early in her career, she joined a small team of underground villains with the intent of infiltrating them and turning them over to the government-sanctioned Parahuman Response Team. She was branded Skitter by the heroes. They took issue with her methods, and as such she ended up joining the villainous team for good. There, she followed a very “Ends justify the means” approach, trying to work from within the local villainous landscape to improve the city as a whole, becoming a warlord (albeit a purportedly benevolent one?) in the process.

Eventually her civilian identity was discovered and she was forcibly recruited into the Wards (The government-sanctioned hero organization for minors – teenage parahumans were quite common as most trigger events happened in adolescence) and later the Protectorate (Adult heroes). She fought many indomitable powers of destruction and terror, until it all culminated in a single, all-powerful enemy that the combined forces of humanity from across the various dimensions of Earth were only just able to defeat – and with a severely dissociated Taylor right at the center of the Human defenses. After the enemy was defeated and Taylor's usefulness run dry, she was unable to be returned to herself by normal methods, and as such was shot in the brain just so to neutralize her powers without killing her and dumped into a junk dimension, an Earth with no utility but for the consumption of its very existence for energy. An Earth whose inhabitants had been eradicated, and societies destroyed, by the same force Taylor herself narrowly defeated.

But the place she found herself.... Was not Earth. Certainly not Earth Bet, her home, but it wasn't Earth Ceti or Aleph or any of the other known, finite Earths known to man. Perhaps through Contessa's Path to Victory, or some quirk of using Doors left over by a dead man's dead power, or even just the will of the Entities that be, Taylor Hebert, only just returned her humanity, finds herself dumped in the middle of Cevanti's wilderness with greatly-stunted powers. She is confused, afraid, irritated, grateful for her life, and above all, extremely paranoid.