Fanfic / Hybrid Hive: Eat Shard?

Hybrid Hive: Eat Shard? is a Crossover fanfiction between Worm and Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha, published by ComptrWz on Sufficient Velocity.com (here), and is complete.

When Taylor Hebert is trapped in a locker full of filth, a multidimensional shard reaches out to grant her superpowers — but the connection collides with a damaged and lost Unison Device. Mistaking the connection for an attack, the device consumes the shard and connects to Taylor in its place. Earth Bet now has its very own Magical Girl, and she's going to take the world by storm. If she can ever get the mana equations debugged, that is...

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Hive has tested the following tropes:

• Accidental Murder: The process of consuming a shard necessarily involves Hive making repairs to the host's body, particularly their brain. But it turns out that Amy and her father were both connected to the Shaper shard, which Taylor and Hive had no idea was something that could happen. As a result, when Amy is de-powered, Marquis' connection is broken without him receiving any healing, and he dies in the Birdcage.
• Achievements in Ignorance:
  • Most of Hive's memory was destroyed, forcing her and Taylor to build a magic system based on what little she remembers. Not only do the two succeed, they manage to create spells that the Belkan and Midchildan mages would think impossible, such as instantaneous unblockable undetectable communication, as well as recreating things like dimensional transference beacons that had been considered Lost Technology.
  • Vista, frustrated with the difficulty of constructing spells, accidentally stores a formula in her magical core allowing her to instantly cast it at a later time. Taylor and Hive are both surprised as this is something they can't do.
  • Taylor's math tutor tasks her with prime factoring three large numbers. The numbers are too large for even modern systems to factor in a reasonable amount of time; the tutor wanted to teach her a lesson about the limits of mathematics and personal skill. Not knowing this, Taylor uses advanced Belkan mathematics and algorithms to factor all three numbers, potentially kicking off a revolution in modern mathematics.
  • Alexandria is certain that the President discovering her secret identity and making the Triumvirate stand down from their leadership positions is a deliberate attack on Cauldron. Taylor doesn't even realise she's caused it to happen.
• The Ageless: The Shaper shard's biological manipulation is capable of keeping a human in peak condition indefinitely. Amy is shocked when Taylor points out that they can all now live as long as their minds can keep up.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: After extensive study of what data can be obtained from the shards, Hive comes to the conclusion that they were originally designed to run an immersive MMO video game, and basically lost the distinction between the players and the avatars, as well as expanding out of control. They're now a multiversal threat simply because they consume everything for fuel as they spread.
• Alien Geometries: Missy helps design a spatially warped theme park feature, including an "impossible bandstand", and is quite proud of the results, especially the likelihood of giving visitors headaches.
  The instruments couldn't possibly work in three dimensions at all and he wasn't sure which direction was 'down' to the bandstand itself. Or in general, really.
• Alpha Strike: Taylor tests out her newly available Unison Form by summoning every single training drone she has. (They aren't enough to beat her.)
• Armed with Pepper Spray: Taylor makes sure she retrieves her pepper spray before answering the door to a stranger. Turns out it was a good idea, since he was there for some misguided revenge; the spray hampers him long enough for her dad to arrive and punch him out.
• Assassination Attempt: Unbeknownst to Taylor, her Device can interfere with Coil's power. As a result, he tries in all sorts of ways to have her removed or murdered, from kidnapping to snipers. Against Hive's defensive capabilities, though, all it really gets him is a lot of dropped timelines.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Missy loves the idea of channeling mana into a sword to make it ignite with flames or lightning, but it's very inefficient compared to options like just launching fireballs.
  • With Taylor's help, Uber and Leet could build actual lightsabers, but they know from experience that it's a horribly impractical design for fighting with. When the TSAB finally arrives and gets to try assembling their own "cutting tool" lightsabers, they have to agree that despite the cool factor, they're not actually likely to be a good choice in combat, being ineffective against magic and inferior to a simple shield for defence.
• Battle Couple: Armsmaster and Dragon go after Bastard Son in their Unison form. It's basically a date.
• Benevolent Alien Invasion: When inventing laws for the Empire she supposedly comes from, Taylor inadvertently gives herself an obligation to conquer planets if their living conditions are bad enough. Danny arranges a scan of the affected populations' minds, and it turns out that on some of the worst worlds, like the one where half the population is enslaved, there would be overwhelming support for being invaded if it meant establishing a reasonable standard of living.
  Taylor: ...why did I put those rules in there?
  Danny: Because they're honestly a good thing in the short and long term for the people that you'd be helping.
• Booby Trap:
  • There were quite extensive traps around the Goblin Kingdom, but Crawler takes them out by the simple expedient of hunting them down and deliberately setting off every single one.
  • Amy has a lot of fun surrounding a Gesellschaft facility with six rings of traps, from blocking the road with fake trees that dissolve into extra-thick honey when pushed, to snares that spin people around and send them back the other way, to "an experiment with three lemons and a paperclip that could be highly amusing if it actually worked."
    The brute in the group was apparently weak to losing contact with the ground to anchor themselves when using their strength, the blaster couldn't do enough damage to blow the traps apart properly, and the normal humans were sitting ducks.
    Or in the case of one left in one of the pitfalls, sitting on ducks.
  • PRT servers have anti-tampering measures so sensitive that on at least one occasion it was judged easier to ensure backups were up to date and scrap the servers, rather than remove them from a damaged building.
• The Cake Is a Lie: Lampshaded when Amy would really rather not sit down and talk with her aunt Sarah, but Sarah promises cake afterward.
  Complete with placing the cake in a cake dome on the table in the living room to prove that it was real, as if she’d have lied about there being cake.
• Can't Catch Up: Missy can access most of the same abilities as Taylor, and gets steadily better with practice, but Taylor has a head start and an innate knack for multitasking and advanced mathematics, so she's still much more dangerous than Missy.
  Sherie: The only way you’re getting to her level is if she stops training.
• Cast from Calories: Using mana makes you hungry. After getting knocked out by a test of a magical interference system, which her body instinctively attempted to adapt to, Taylor eats three quarters of a pizza before even slowing down.
• Challenge Seeker: Taylor is unhappy to find herself in a 1-vs-4 tournament match with no reinforcements or substitutions allowed. She would really prefer to face eight opponents for a proper workout. When her request is denied, she decides to turn into a small kitten to keep the fight more challenging.
• Cloning Body Parts: Hive theorises that it might be possible to turn a regular human into a mage by cloning a heart with a linker core support structure in it, removing the person's original heart and replacing it with the clone, then saturating it with mana for several weeks to help it "repair" itself and form a core. For some reason, she's not eager to test this on her friends and family... Uber/Virgil is the first volunteer for the process, so that he can keep up with his partner.
  Hive: Children would take less time due to having less for the support structure to expand into. Once things finish settling after the first three to six days the 'flood with mana' portion could be spread out over multiple disconnected sessions, though a device with field healing capabilities would need to be worn at all times between sessions just in case something went wrong.
• Combat Sadomasochist: Crawler leaps at the opportunity to be hit with new kinds of damage. The mere mention of potentially lethal testing means he's in. Missy's folded-space beam wipes him out instantly, which is at least a useful test, and Crawler had a kill order so it's legally fine.
• Cover-Blowing Superpower: Missy and Taylor put significant effort into designing a less effective version of the Knight Armour spell, one that will shield bones and organs but allow minor flesh wounds and clothing damage, so that it's possible to have protection from serious dangers without raising questions by being completely invulnerable.
• Crazy-Prepared: Team Mana's plans for assaulting the Cauldron compound start with peaceful captures, escalating as needed through various levels of violence, up to potential planet cracking, intentional planet cracking, all the way to "destroy this whole region of the dimensional sea rather than allow an escape." And that's not even their final level of escalation.
  Taylor: Extreme plans in case things go wrong are a necessity.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Many of the techniques learned by consuming shards are rated as just too dangerous to use. The shards themselves apparently didn't care much about the risks inherent in tearing someone apart into individual atoms and rebuilding them later, or constructing bombs that could tear holes in the dimensional fabric, but for those who care about the long-term stability and survival of the planet, lots of things are off limits.
• De-power: Hive can trace the connections of active parahumans back to the shards and consume them, even removing the corona pollentia from someone's brain. Several of the world's prominent parahumans, like Alexandria, really sit up and take notice when they hear about powers being removed — although since Hive is careful about choosing the targets, such as Bakuda and later Shadow Stalker, both of whom were actively attacking Taylor at the time, there isn't immediate backlash.
  • Taylor herself was technically de-powered by Hive, since she was supposed to trigger with powers, but Hive consumed the shard.
  • Vista volunteers to become another Magical Girl, even though it means having her powers consumed. Since it gives Hive more data, it's eventually possible for her to use her space warping again via magic, and learn other magic too, but there's an adjustment and learning period.
  • Taylor ultimately decides to make removal of parahuman powers a condition of visiting most of the infrastructure she's building, after she finds a particular power that, if exposed to enough mana, would turn its host into antimatter.
• Dead Man's Switch:
  • When building a device for a young child, Taylor makes sure to restrict it to defensive spells — with the caveat that if the user is attacked and rendered unconscious, all capabilities are unlocked until the situation is resolved.
    Not quite to the degree that Hive's systems, or even Dragon's, would go to, but still a surprise for anyone who triggered it.
  • Taylor is forced to intervene unexpectedly on an alternate Earth after a parahuman sets up a whole arsenal of weapons of mass destruction to go off if he dies, as a precaution against assassination, then foolishly gets drunk and is killed by a bull, without anyone else being at fault.
    Their rival had immediately gone into a panic because the infection was supposed to be a 'released somewhere, then spread until suddenly people start falling over dead' type thing. Hive had spotted the whole thing a couple months ago, but the shard device kept tabs on the infectious agents and made it difficult to 'disarm' them ahead of time.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Unlike parahuman powers, designing spells requires a lot of work with very complex mathematics, and any errors (which happen to Taylor all the time) will completely stop the spell from working at best. If you're less lucky, the spell may be massively overpowered, fail after travelling ten feet, work backwards, explode in various ways, or hit you in the face with a duplicate of your own left shoe. With the right spells, though, Taylor is able to solo fight an Endbringer.
• Disproportionate Retribution: Taylor responds to an overly pushy dictator with Master powers, by snatching her away and consuming her shard.
  Amy: Are you saying that you just abducted a parahuman dictator instead of just hanging up on them?
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: One of Taylor's experiments, combining telekinesis with Flechette's dimensional power, inadvertently starts a runaway conversion of matter to antimatter. Fortunately, Taylor does all her testing on uninhabited alternate versions of Earth and Mars. Hive later takes advantage of the incident to mine useful materials from the exposed planetary core.
  "Lord," Hive sent a moment later. "It would appear that there are now several pieces of planet where one of the planets you were testing on used to be."
• Entertainingly Wrong: Since Taylor is confirmed not to be a parahuman, theories abound about what's going on with her unremovable Tinkertech necklace. Armsmaster recognises the physical similarities with her cape identity, Minerva — and concludes that Minerva is a clone of her.
• Explosive Overclocking: It's possible to adjust the configuration of a linker core augmentation unit, eg to temporarily increase the mana generation rate for a short-term strength boost. However, doing it incorrectly can cause the whole core to violently explode. Taylor and Hive keep the access keys locked down to avoid temptation.
• Explosive Results: Creating an artificial shard is theoretically possible, but in practice Hive doesn't know how. A simulation of one that they already know can exist nonetheless immediately implodes and explodes at the same time.
• Face Palm: When Missy realises that she could have been monitoring the Machine Army all along, it's only Taylor who's holding off so as not to steal her spotlight, Missy face-palms so hard she leaves a bruise on her own nose. (Fortunately, she has fast healing.)
• Faking the Dead:
  • For political reasons, the PRT decides to publicly announce the untimely death of Vista, who has actually had her shard consumed, although plenty of people know the truth.
  • A corpse of Thomas Calvert is found in his cell, but the lack of blood soon convinces the FBI that it's not genuine. The real one is still missing, though.
• Flipping the Table: Taylor doesn't have audio on her surveillance drone, but she can see that during the course of her dad's visit, Carol Dallon goes from "annoyed" to "throwing the coffee table". Danny is wearing a lesser version of Taylor's magical armour, though, so he's unharmed.
• Fountain of Youth: Some of the remnants of Hive's data include linker core attachments that turn out to be capable of adjusting a mage's apparent physical age. Amy, who has had years of feeling pressured and stressed, throws herself into the opportunity to be a little kid.
• Gilligan Cut: Ethan drags Missy out to the front yard to show off his Frisbee throwing skills. Cut to Missy shaking her head at Ethan having to clean up the glass from the windows he broke with the Frisbee.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Taylor's father suggests that she cannibalise the Boat Graveyard for projectiles to launch at Leviathan. She's concerned that there might be legal complications afterward, but he assures her that for attacking an Endbringer, pretty much anything goes as far as the law is concerned.
  • By studying the Endbringer cores, Hive is able to identify a way to remotely donate them. But it would be such a large explosion as to basically cause an extinction event.
    Taylor: Right. Remote detonation is a last resort thing.
• Grey Goo: When Dragon needs a lot more construction drones, Taylor remembers that she left some constructing more of themselves, and had forgotten to turn them off...fortunately in an alternate solar system.
  Dragon: They've completely consumed around a third of that system's Mercury.
• Happiness in Slavery: Taylor is annoyed to realise that her attempt at writing laws left enough leeway that people are able to voluntarily become pets, servants, or even slaves. And she only realises because of people wanting to become her servants.
  Taylor: There are only a handful of 'pet' and 'slave' requests in the queue and they haven't gotten very far, but apparently being a personal servant to the Queen is seen as a good thing among some groups.
• Heel–Face Turn:
  • Mrs Davis always made it clear that the magical girls in anime are Good Girls. As a result, when Riley sees what Minerva is doing, it stirs something inside her. She proceeds to poison most of the Slaughterhouse Nine, including Jack Slash, and then takes the survivors (Burnscar, Crawler, Siberian) on a road trip to rediscover what it means to be a Good Girl. Taylor sees a news article about them kidnapping Nilbog and assaulting his kingdom, and basically blue-screens.
  • Lung adapts quite well to Minerva's appearance and defeating the Endbringers for good. He reorients the ABB toward urban renewal and ensuring prosperity, expressing the hope that it is now possible to make long term plans for the future.
• I Need A Drink:
  • Brian is of the opinion that the whole messy situation with Aisha's power justifies a beer, but since he's trying to be a responsible guardian for her, he doesn't have any.
  • Director Piggot arranges for Panacea to heal her kidneys just so she can get drunk after the Slaughterhouse Nine remnants systematically destroy the Goblin Kingdom, and she wants to celebrate. She even dips into her "hire someone to kill Nilbog" fund to pay Panacea for it.
  • When Danny is given an inkling of just how many shards there are, he asks if the kitchen has beer.
    Ethan: If it doesn't then it probably won't take long to convince the systems to make some for us.
• I Thought Everyone Could Do That: Taylor is an absolute monster when it comes to multi-tasking, on-the-fly spell editing, and magical combat in general — but she doesn't realise that. It's only when Vista gains her device that Taylor gets some perspective on how far outside the norm she actually is. Even then, she assumes that a properly trained mage would trounce her, but Hive strongly doubts that, when Taylor can control hordes of Endbringer-grade drones while sipping tea in another dimension. Possibly a dimension that pure mana techniques can't easily access. When she devises a standardised system of testing and ranking capabilities, from 0 to 100^note although actually scoring 0 or 100 is intended to be impossible, with even a corpse being resilient enough against weak attacks to score a quarter of a point, she is the only one surprised by her result: 93, compared to others scoring between 30 and 60.
• Immune to Bullets: With Knight Armour up, Amy is able to completely ignore point blank machine gun fire, followed by a shotgun, then faux-innocently ask if the weapons are broken.
  Rainbow: It’s just throwing little bits of metal. I don’t think that's a good thing.
• Improbable Weapon User: Based on lessons learned from shards like Uber's, the kingdom's automatons can devise a combat style for any weapon. Any weapon.
  Fate: To test them, I asked about options for improvising a weapon out of a child's sippy cup and got a surprisingly detailed training plan that included strategies for varying levels of 'filled' and different contained liquids.
• Instant Costume Change: The "Knight Armor" spell can instantly replace Taylor's clothing with magical armour that can look like anything she wants while still providing full-body protection. Unfortunately, her efforts to get the spell working are fraught with difficulties and misfires, from swapping her shirt with her pants, to putting shoes on her hands.
  This time she could still see, which was good, but when she looked down she appeared to be naked. She bit back a scream as she canceled the spell and her original clothing came back.
• Instant Expert: One of the few ways that parahuman powers work better than magic is that they're easier to start using immediately — because the shards aren't bothered by altering someone's brain to make things instinctive. A parahuman might be able to start flying immediately with reasonable success, whereas a mage who wants to fly will first need to master an assortment of protective and life support spells for when they inevitably bury themselves in a cliff, launch into orbit, or splash down in the ocean. Even then, getting a handle on three-dimensional movement can take days or weeks of practice, and it just doesn't come naturally to some people at all, such as Amy, who instead diverges into wall-running and strength-boosted jumps.
• Know When to Fold 'Em: Brad cops some flak from his friends for surrendering to Minerva, but after she single handedly drives away Leviathan, that goes away and people conclude it was common sense. It's easier to escape from a prison than from a casket.
• Lesser of Two Evils: Taylor is impressed by how much the PRT is offering to pay her for the opportunity to study her Unison Device, but she doesn't want to risk them finding out too much and deciding to take it away, so she'd like the option to refuse. Carol Dallon advises her, though, that if they're willing to pay that much, then someone really wants access to the necklace, and refusing the contract will probably lead to them finding a less pleasant option where Taylor doesn't get paid at all — and possibly doesn't even have guaranteed safety.
  Carol: The contract will offer you protection and give you recourse options in the event of problems that you wouldn't have otherwise, and making them pay for your time incentivises them to not waste your time.
• Lethal Chef: Amy feels like it's important to learn to cook for herself as part of independence, despite having access to plenty of food, but her attempts at baking cookies turn out... poorly. Fortunately she only cracked a simulated tooth on the batch that was cooled to 65 Kelvin instead of Fahrenheit, and it wasn't entirely her fault that her cinnamon cookies came out spicy.
  "Who in the world decided that instead of a two-pack of cinnamon that they should market a cinnamon and ghost pepper powder set?"
• Lightning Bruiser: Minerva is given very high Brute, Mover, and Blaster ratings, among a scattering of others, since she can fly at high speed, teleport over long or short distances, take hits from Hookwolf without a scratch on her armour, and create large numbers of high-explosive homing bullets at will. Those ratings are borne out when she single-handedly sends Leviathan into retreat, dodging all his attacks and flooding him with bullets carrying a spell that mimics Flechette's power.
• Literal Disarming:
  • Against a crowd of men firing shotguns at Taylor, Hive's response of shooting off one's arm is actually pretty restrained.
  • A man who straps explosives to his arm and uses them to take a bus hostage was just asking to lose it, really. Taylor doesn't let him bleed out, but she also doesn't grow it back for him.
    Rainbow: Hello mister! You dropped your arm, and you shouldn't leave boom boxes sitting around like that.
• Master of Unlocking: With dimensional trickery and mana-based recognition, it's not difficult for Taylor to produce locks that non-mages simply can't pick. However, for fun and to increase engagement with the public, she does produce a selection of locks as a public challenge to anyone who thinks they can pick them. Level 0/10 is a fairly regular six-pin lock, increasing steeply in difficulty from there, and anything rated above 4 has a mana signature check. It doesn't take long before curious members of the public start setting up filming and trying their hands at it.
  The six-bladed key with a hundred and eight interaction points and a less-obvious mana-in-the-key check was an obvious one to include, and per their statements that it was 'medium-security, suitable for short-term use' she'd given it a rating of five out of ten.
• Mile-Long Ship:
  • The Blueberry One is a triangular starship, five kilometers on each edge, and bigger on the inside. It's designed to have a population of half a million people, but could evacuate three million comfortably. It actually can land, but it creates shockwaves when it does, so generally only on uninhabited planets.
  • Apple class starships are similarly shaped, but seven times longer and wider, seventy kilometres across. Even Taylor has a hard time believing Hive wants to build something that big.
  • And that's not even the theoretical limit.
    Hive: Assuming the Apple series scales as desired, we may eventually want to consider building the Coconut series. It comes in at a thousand kilometers, or one megameter, at the widest point. But I don't anticipate us reaching that point for quite a while, assuming we ever do. The Apple class may be enough for our purposes.
  • Taken to a somewhat ludicrous extent with Taylor/Queen Minerva's personal ship "workshop one". It is a Dyson sphere.
• A Mind Is a Terrible Thing to Read: With the insights gained from consuming Aisha's and Amy's shards, Hive is capable of performing a thorough scan of someone's thoughts and memories at range. However, Taylor is deeply uncomfortable with the idea of using that, even on completely monstrous targets. Their compromise solution is to create a temporary AI, have it perform the read and give them a summary of its findings, then delete the detailed results without reading them.
• More Dakka: Since Leviathan is extremely fast, and her bindings won't hold him for more than a moment, Taylor floods him from all sides with bullets carrying a spell similar to Flechette's power, and even deliberately randomises her aim slightly.
  If the weak spot moved then she wanted a projectile to hit it anyway, so she was aiming more for 'saturate the area that Leviathan was in' than 'hit the weak spot'.
• Mugging the Monster: Subverted when Taylor goes to a convenience store as Minerva, and sees the customer ahead of her do a double-take, before eventually paying for his beer and leaving. A later interlude from his point of view shows that he intended the beer to be just a prop, and was about to hold up the checkout staff as soon as other customers were out of the way — until he saw Minerva walking in and essentially blue-screened, before deciding that he actually does need that beer.
• Mundane Solution: Taylor's magical base in another dimension uses a regular electric stove.
  Taylor: Using energies beyond your current understanding is also doable, but we’ve got a set of tidal generators creating more than enough electricity to power a city and not everyone that visits can manipulate the energies beyond your current understanding. Electricity is fairly straightforward for everyone involved.
• Mundane Utility:
  • Taylor's exceptional multitasking abilities mean that she can use telekinesis to operate four waffle irons at once.
  • Devices can arbitrarily consume and manipulate matter, which means that if you close your mouth to hide the flash, they can remove stuck popcorn bits from between your teeth.
  • Knight Armour provides extreme temperature protection, which means Amy can handle cookie trays straight from the oven without gloves. Unfortunately, it also means she won't necessarily notice problems, such as when she cooled the cookies to 65 degrees Kelvin instead of Fahrenheit. (In a simulation, so she didn't break a real tooth.)
• My Skull Runneth Over: Since Taylor's Unison Device consumed her shard connection, she can still use her canonical bug control when she chooses to. However, without a corona pollentia and gemma in her brain, the multitasking systems aren't on the same level as the shard would have provided, leaving her thoroughly overwhelmed whenever she switches the ability on. She decides to bite the bullet and keep it on for several hours, in order to adapt, but after an hour the Device automatically switches it off again to avoid permanent brain damage.
  Hive: The sheer number of inputs from the insect control systems far exceeded your brain's ability to process, even with the multitasking systems providing outside assistance. ... For your own safety the insect control system is currently locked until you have recovered from this attempt, I estimate that will take at least four days, during which I will also refrain from utilizing the multitasking systems while you’re sleeping.
• Ninja Maid: Suzy/Mouse Protector considers what persona to use, so that people will take her seriously, but not expect her to lead, and settles on dressing as a maid. Her Device looks like a feather duster, and it can clean up messes, but it's also fully capable of dealing with the mess makers, and she herself wears practically indestructible Knight Armour.
  Suzy: It looks like I can customize what gets spit out too?
  Taylor: Of course. Dirt and dust are okay, but I figure that swapping it out for pepper spray or coating someone in containment foam would work wonders too. Dropping the head off of the vacuum for 'accessory hose' mode gives you a simple way to spray liquids or fire solid projectiles as well.
• No-Sell:
  • The PRT tests all kinds of powers and technology on Taylor's necklace, to see if they can remove or better understand it, but almost nothing has any effect at all. Tools bend and break themselves without making a dent, and powers typically can't even register that Hive exists. The big exception is a pair of scissors empowered by Flechette, which would actually be capable of bringing down Hive's shields given time; Hive is surprised and impressed.
  • Taylor is jostled around a bit, and her shields are weakened but not destroyed, by Leviathan detonating a nuclear submarine next to her. It doesn't significantly break her flow, though, and she uses it as an opening to counter-attack. The observers are left agape.
    "Did we just see that?" one of the experts said after a couple of minutes. "Because that looked like Leviathan tried to nuke Minerva with an old Soviet submarine, only for her to use it as a distraction to attack him back and drive him off."
    "If we didn't then I don't know what we did see," the other expert replied.
• Noodle Incident: Missy can't figure out exactly how one of Amy's traps caused a man to end up naked and hanging from a tree.
  Amy had gushed about the trap with lemons and a paperclip working, but that didn’t feel like it explained anything at all.
• On Second Thought: Missy stares in horror when Taylor suggests that they figure out a way to approach Ash Beast safely. Then Taylor agrees that it will have to wait until after Missy has done more of her gruelling, exhausting, often embarrassing self-defence training, which she's doubling to two mornings a week.
  Missy: Can we go back to figuring out approaching the Ash Beast?
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: When Sherie hears that Ethan has avoided starting on the beer before a barbecue, just so he can be sober for talking to the Heberts, she jokingly threatens to call for Master/Stranger protocols.
• "Open!" Says Me: Taylor has the ability to use telekinesis to open any lock. Missy just has explosive punch gauntlets.
  Taylor had commented about manipulating the internals of latches to open doors for her before, which would probably be useful in a situation like this where there was no external keyhole. Missy thought that sounded like it needed more practice and would be annoyingly fiddly. That, and she had no real care about keeping the building intact.
• Percussive Therapy:
  • After facing the emotional and political entanglements of Amy's desire to give up her powers, Taylor starts wondering if intentionally destroying a planet is good for stress relief.
  • One of the attractions at Taylor's theme park world is firing all manner of weapons at Behemoth, who has been transferred there. None of it is powerful enough to do him any harm, but he doesn't mind — a fight is his "natural habitat" — and it's fun for the guests.
• Please Shoot the Messenger: One of Missy's tasks as an intern is to deliver a note to someone who had previously had her carrying paperwork. The note says that personnel paperwork should not be given to interns.
• The Power of Love: Subverted by Amy, who takes a rather literal interpretation of defeating her enemies with the Power of Love. "Love" is the name she chose for her Device, which proceeds to flood the area with multicoloured hearts, rainbows, acorns, squirrel plushies, etc, that seize the target thugs and bind them.
• Power Parasite: Consuming a shard allows Hive to get an idea of what powers it granted, and there's usually a way to reverse-engineer them and provide something comparable using mana. Although in some cases (eg most of Bakuda's arsenal) those abilities get tossed on the "too dangerous to use" pile...
• Power Perversion Potential: Taylor searches online for fantasy descriptions of magic, to get ideas about research directions — then comes across a mention of binding someone with summoned tentacles, and stops looking for more detail.
  A short line mentioning a use of the trick for capturing someone was all she wanted to see, looking for more information online might lead her to things that she didn't want to think about.
• Price on Their Head: Taylor is a bit shocked to hear that there's a five million dollar bounty, half for bringing her in alive and half for Hive. Missy agrees that it's impressive, and says her own bounty only reached one million.
  Vista: Powerful parahumans get bounties thrown on them from various groups, though it seems like the Yàngbǎn are the ultimate source of most of them.
• Professional Killer: Director Piggot has been saving up for years to hire someone to take out Nilbog, but she's unsure she'll ever find someone who can and will actually do it. When the remnants of the Slaughterhouse Nine spontaneously wipe out Nilbog's kingdom, Piggot spends half the fund on paying Panacea for healing so that she can go and get drunk in celebration.
• Ret-Gone: It turns out that combining Bakuda's time dilation bomb effects with mana can greatly increase their output — which isn't a good thing. Hive intends to send a bomb an hour into the past, but can only report that the alternate version of Mars she intended to use has never existed (even though its moons do), and she's missing a bomb but has no record of launching it.
• Safely Secluded Science Center: Taylor and Hive's standard practice for testing new spells is to target or visit an uninhabited alternate version of Earth. This is because the testing not infrequently wrecks said Earth, or in some cases causes it to never have existed.
  Missy: The default assumption is 'planet-destroying'. On account of all of the destroyed planets from previous testing of things that shouldn't have been that dangerous.
• Saying Too Much: The Wards suspect that Missy is Expanse, but to confirm it, they plan to get her relaxed and talking, then casually reference Eagleton and see how she responds. It works — but they start to realise how much fire they were playing with when Missy asks Taylor if she can wipe their memories of the past ten minutes, and Taylor regretfully refuses because it might cause permanent brain damage.
  Dennis: If they come through on that, could we just get her talking about what she's been doing that's safe to talk about? Then when her guard is down just slip in a question about her time as Expanse and see if she answers it.
• Self-Punishment Over Failure: Eidolon is distraught to learn that he caused the Endbringers, and welcomes any punishment. He actually complains that his clothing in captivity isn't a proper prison jumpsuit.
• Skeleton Key: Since Taylor once had to open a lock, Hive does some designing and produces a mana-based object that will reshape itself to fit any lock. It's also possible to use a Device's matter manipulation capabilities to generate a specific key on the fly. Battery later gives her a house key just so that she won't bypass the locks.
  Hive: It should be able to handle pretty much any kind of manual key. Old warded locks, modern wafer or pin tumbler locks, barrel locks, disk detainer locks, tubular locks, slider locks, lever locks, several varieties of punch-card style locks, patterned ferrous material locks, a number of locks that I'm not sure anyone actually uses but were documented in patents, and anything enough like any of those it knows about or combinations thereof for it to work out. Oh, and it can display the combination of several styles of combination lock.
• So Unfunny, It's Funny: Assault is a funny guy, in his own opinion, but there are plenty of people who disagree. He's tried handling serious situations before by writing down the jokes he thinks of, to save for later, but it didn't work out well.
  Ethan: My wife burned the first notebook, my boss burned the second, a coworker burned the third, and my wife burned the fourth after finding my new hiding spot for it. When I switched to a digital file I found that it was being cleared out 'randomly' until all of a sudden new regulations said we couldn't keep that kind of thing on work computers. I tried using a five meg floppy instead, to keep things off of work computers, but every time my wife found out I'd find the floppy stuck to the fridge with a magnet.
• Spit Take: Upon hearing that Minerva can scan the entire planet to find someone from a DNA sample, Velocity chokes on his water.
• Spy Cam: Team Mana is constantly plagued with monitoring devices of all kinds, from approved PRT monitoring for the sake of being able to call for help, to villains trying to sneak gear in, to a box that Cauldron sent with a powerful Tinkertech-based Stranger effect. All of it, however, can be detected and jammed by Devices.
  Vicky: Is it safe to talk about anything here?
  Amy: As far as I can tell, yes. I had a scan done earlier this morning and no unexpected listening devices were detected, no taps were found on the expected ones that would allow someone to listen in, remote override of those has been done just in case, and if someone is firing a laser at any of the windows then they’re doing it from far enough away that I'm assured they'd not be able to actually identify anything. Then Hive did something to the entire apartment to further soundproof it for the day.
• Stone Wall: Subverted for Dinah, who expected to learn only defensive spells, since the basis of her becoming a mage was the promise of being safer, and is surprised to hear suggestions about creating Knight Object knives, or razor-sharp fingernail extensions, in a pinch.
  This wasn't where anything was supposed to go, discussion-wise. "What happened to me focusing on defense?"
  Her mother waved her hand dismissively. "You'd have figured some of this out eventually, and occasionally the best defense is threatening to castrate an idiot."
• Sure, Let's Go with That: When Ethan raises concerns about learning magic from Amy, Missy admits that Amy's attitude to magic can be "less than professional", which he's willing to agree to.
  Ethan: That sounds far more charitable than I was going to go with, so we can go with it.
• Tautological Templar: Hive recommends against empowering Riley, since there is a strong risk that she would then take the view that anything she does must necessarily be good, since she would now be a Magical Girl, and magical girls are Good Girls. And she has no other discernible moral compass.
• Tele-Frag: Amy is baffled by her failed attempts to design a bullet that will create a fake tree bearing edible candy when it hits. Theoretically it's entirely possible, but she always gets a crater. Taylor checks her work and points out that she failed to properly specify the locations of the candies, so they were all trying to appear at the same point.
• Tempting Fate: Danny suggests that Taylor get out of the house for an activity outside of being Minerva, such as "seeing a movie, going out for lunch, or 'finding something new to seemingly accidentally overturn some scientific field'." Taylor is tempted to do the last one, just to teach him not to joke about things like that.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • Missy gets a special shredder to help deal with her fan mail, with settings ranging from "cut into strips" all the way up to "reduce to dust and then ignite the dust in a contained explosion".
    Needless to say, she currently had it in that mode, because who wouldn't? Beyond those tired of the thumps of the explosions, anyway.
  • Hive designs an orbital insertion pod that passes 99 out of a hundred safety tests. But the range of things she tests for is far beyond real-world usage.
    "The one failure was when the pod was intentionally fired into a supervolcano ready to erupt, triggering the eruption, with an 'unfolded'^note ie destroying all dimensions in the manner of Flechette's power asteroid coming down behind it."
• Tim Taylor Technology: Hive is quite interested in how Taylor managed to cut a several-week process down to just one hour, by pouring in "enough mana to power all of New England for a couple of months". It's overall less energy-efficient than taking it slowly, but when energy is abundant and time is limited, it's a very appealing option.
• Torches and Pitchforks: Even killing nineteen of the Endbringers doesn't make Minerva universally popular, but it does raise overall public opinion of her so high that the one person foolish enough to throw a bomb at her property is seized by the crowd and thrown at a police car.
• Try to Fit That on a Business Card: Hayate Yagami is astounded to be introduced to 'Her Royal Majesty Queen Minerva, Iridescent Will of Please Ignore the Secret Kingdom, the Endslayer and the Hopebringer, Destroyer of Worlds, Liberator of Planets, Consumer of Star Systems, Bane of the Shards, Defender of Humanity, Royal Maintenance Technician, Reluctant Leader of the Realm, Accidental Goddess of Escalation', and doubly so upon hearing the explanation of each title.
• Villain Respect: Minerva has a very polite encounter with Lung. He acknowledges that she has beaten Leviathan in a way that he failed to do, and offers his help next time.
• Wall Run: Since Amelia just doesn't seem able to get the hang of flying, Taylor designs a variant spell that basically allows the user to shift the direction of gravity, so they can run vertically up a tree as if it were flat ground.
• You Got Murder: Taylor gets a package that turns out to be a pipe bomb (courtesy of Coil), but it doesn't have any effect on her Knight Armor. After that, she makes sure to thoroughly scan all her mail, so the contact poison with instructions to hand herself over in exchange for the antidote achieves nothing.
• Your Approval Fills Me with Shame: When Legend indicates that Ethan's past as Madcap may have been morally right even if legally wrong, Ethan is disappointed. He's worked hard to build a specific reputation, and now it's officially gone.

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