Alea Iacta Est is a Worm fanfic by ack1308, where the recipients of the Navigator and Queen Administrator shards are swapped, giving Taylor a precognitive power and Dinah the ability to manage people and teams. When they join forces, the Bay will never be the same...
Can be found on FanFiction.Net (here
), SpaceBattles.com (here), and Sufficient Velocity.com (here).
This story contains examples of:
- Adaptational Badass: Navigator!Taylor has all of the strengths of Canon Dinah with none of her weaknesses (the only drawback being the need to have dice in order to use her Thinker powers). QA!Dinah, on the other hand, is basically Khepri Lite.
- Adaptational Wimp: Downplayed- QA!Dinah lacks the bug control of canon Skitter or Weaver but still has a softer variation of canon Khepri's powers.
- Ascended Extra: Browbeat is barely a footnote in canon but an important part of the team here.
- Asshole Victim: After learning that Max Anders was Kaiser, no one really feels sorry for his death, at least among the heroes.
- The Baby Trap: A gender inverted example, Max Anders/Kaiser sabotaged Andrea's birth control so he could get her pregnant, but Allfather's disapproval of the relationship means that he never knew where she and Annette were until now.
- Cannot Tell a Lie: If Taylor tries to make a roll and lie about the results, her arm painfully cramps up for a little while before she can even try, her equivalent of a Thinker headache. Even Panacea can't relieve that pain more than momentarily.
- Chain of Deals: Referenced when the duo realizes that they're going have to recruit more heavy hitters, so that they can deal with Coil, so they can then recruit Lisa, so they can recruit Amy.
- Control Freak: Max Anders/Kaiser. Part of the reason Dinah and Taylor's recruitment offer to Purity pans through is that she liked how they were willing to listen to her and give her the space she needed.
- Death by Adaptation: In canon Krieg never died, here he is shot by Andrea.
- Enemy Civil War: After Kaiser's death, the Empire starts to fragment apart, Hookwolf, Stormtiger and Alabaster setting off on their own after Hookwolf tries to have Cricket assassinate Purity, who Hookwolf blames for Kaiser's death.
- Ethical Slut: Andrea, who tells people ahead of time she's not looking for a serious long term relationship. Not that Max Anders got the message...
- Exactly What I Aimed At: Purity's last-gasp attack completely misses Lung, instead blasting a manhole cover and sending a fountain of water into the air. When he tries to jump over the fountain, Janet seizes it with her water control and uses it to imprison and neutralise him.
- For Want Of A Nail: The major divergence is Taylor triggering before the locker incident with a precog power from the Navigator, allowing her to avoid it altogether, and Dinah triggering with a Thinker power from the Queen Administrator.
- Friends with Benefits: Andrea offers this to Danny, at least for a while.
- Handicapped Badass: Janet is missing a hand, but is still an incredibly powerful Shaker.
- Improbable Aiming Skills: A side-effect of Taylor's dice-based precog powers is the ability to basically make dice she throws do whatever she wants, like getting five dice to stack on top of each other without even looking. However, she can't simultaneously control their position and the result, so when she plays Dungeons and Dragons, she has to make trick shots like landing the dice in a tiny designated circle, to ensure she can't fudge the numbers.
- Insane Troll Logic: Hookwolf believes Purity should die simply because she was present when Kaiser got struck by lightning.
- Killed Off for Real:
- Kaiser is struck by lightning and fried.
- Purity kills Hookwolf in self defense.
- Krieg is shot by Andrea with his own pistol.
- Know When to Fold 'Em: After Kaiser's death, Krieg wants the Empire-88 to step back and make it clear it had nothing to do with them as an organization, citing there's no way they can come out of the current situation looking good, merely less bad.
- Law of Inverse Fertility: Andrea is normally careful with birth control, but slipped up when she had her daughter Annette. Later events confirm her suspicions that Max/Kaiser sabotaged her.
- Logical Weakness:
- Taylor's power working through dice and other objects means that while she can avoid Thinker headaches like Dinah in canon, she's powerless without them.
- Turns out metal attracts lightning. Too bad for Kaiser!
- Oni Lee needs line-of-sight to teleport, so to capture him the gang simply directs a cloud of pepper spray into his face, then has Amy knock him out while he's incapacitated.
- Long-Lost Relative: Annette turns out to be Max Anders/Kaiser's daughter, making Theo and Aster her half-siblings.
- Make It Look Like an Accident:
- Janet influences a storm into striking Kaiser with lightning, at Contessa's prompting. Since no one saw Janet, most people assume it was a natural strike.
- Coil did this in the past to the people who built his secret escape tunnel.
- Mama Bear: The Empire isn't entirely sure what to think about Purity's loyalty, until Justin correctly points out that her motivation will be "whoever threatened Aster is going to die."Justin: There is nothing more precious in the world to her.
- Meaningful Name: The fic itself. The title means 'The Die Is Cast' (as uttered by Julius Caesar) and Taylor's powers revolve around dice.
- The Minion Master: Dinah's ability is a Thinker power with minor Master leanings, allowing her to know how to integrate people into a team optimized for suiting a goal, but not actually control them.
- Named by the Adaptation:
- Bakuda's full name is Alice Takawara.
- Browbeat's first name is Lawrence.
- The Mole: Dinah recruits Browbeat with the specific intention that he'll be a mole for the PRT, allowing the team to feed Director Piggot the information they want her to know about themselves. He and the PRT don't know that she knows, though.
- Narrative Profanity Filter: There aren't many healing capes, and the fact that one is a villain (Othala) is enough to convince Director Piggot that the universe has a sick sense of humour. The next on the list, technically, is Bonesaw.Emily's opinion of this fact was obscenely unprintable.
- Necessary Drawback: Taylor's precog power has some limitations, namely on asking things (not percentages) she would have trouble learning without using her power (causing cramps); to reiterate, if she's trying to find out something she wouldn't have discovered if she didn't have her power, she can't find it out using her power. An omake shows how broken the power would be otherwise.
- Not Enough to Bury: Purity's energy blasts can cut through buildings, so a point-blank full power blast to a human doesn't leave much behind.Armsmaster: … as far as I can tell, they've collected enough pieces to determine that it was indeed Hookwolf, and he is indeed dead.
- Parental Marriage Veto: When Kaiser told Allfather that he wanted to marry Andrea, he flipped, and after sending Andrea away, set him up with Theo's mother.
- Pent-Up Power Peril: The first sign of Dinah's power is that unnecessary disharmony, such as her parents arguing without properly talking about their motives, causes her crippling headaches until she fixes the conflict and gets them working together.
- Puppy-Dog Eyes: Annette is able to win Taylor over to join a role playing group in moments.Annette: Say yes, please please please.
- Screw the Rules, I Have Money!: Kaiser is not above threatening to use his fortune and large legal staff to seize custody of his children from their mothers in order to blackmail the mothers into coming back to him.
- Second Super-Identity: Glory Girl helps out the team as "Aeglea" to muddle the waters. It's effective enough that Rune worries about what will happen if Aeglea and Glory Girl ever team up.
- Secret Test of Character: The PRT put Shadow Stalker through one after she attempts to shove Taylor into the locker, to see if she's salvageable or is going to juvie. She fails.
- Squishy Wizard: Both Dinah and Taylor are powerful Thinkers, but they have no direct combat powers. This is the reason they try and recruit Purity.
- Superpower Lottery:
- Taylor's possibly a more powerful precog than even canon Dinah, given that her using dice and the like means that she can avoid Thinker headaches altogether and can even ask questions outside of probabilities.
- Janet triggered with a powerful Weather Manipulation Shaker power.
- The Force Is Strong with This One: Dinah can sense if a person is a cape with her power if she's looking for capes with it.
- Too Dumb to Live: Really Kaiser, going up on a roof and using your Extra-ore-dinary powers during a thunderstorm?
- To add to the stupidity, he was only using a single blade, which made an effective lightning rod, with Amy noting that he would have been insulated from the shock if he had used his full armor.
- Troll: When Annette learns about what Janet can do with fine control of water, her first suggestion is to ask Armsmaster questions while steadily increasing the pressure on his bladder and watching him attempt to politely get away to a bathroom. Taylor doesn't want to admit to being amused.It would be a mean and horrible thing to do to Armsmaster. Did it make her a bad person that she now wanted to see it happen?
- Weather Manipulation: Janet triggered with this power focusing on rain, which Contessa gets her to use to take out Kaiser before he can kill Purity.
- Won't Take "Yes" for an Answer: When director Piggot offers Alice Takawara/Bakuda a deal to rebrand herself and she agrees, Piggot at first assumes that Alice refused.Alice: I'll do it.
Piggot: Yeah, thought not. You'll be transported from here—
Alice: I said, I'll do it! I'll rebrand!
Piggot: You will?
