Fanfic / Ladybird (Worm)

Ladybird is a crossover Fan Fic between Worm and My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, written by Ralph Hayes, Jr..

It can also be found on here on Sufficient Velocity.

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This story provides examples of the following tropes:

• Adaptational Villainy: Glenn Chambers is described as a “delusional, narcissistic ass,” who is not actually that good at his job, in addition to some other vices that were absent from the canonical version of the character, who Taylor found annoying, but was also one of her strongest supporters and even lost his job to help her.
• Added Alliterative Appeal: Chapter Four gives us a cute one. (emphasis added)
  ...I’m going to be getting a little bit of cash every time they sell a cute little purple plastic pony in the gift shoppe...
• The Atoner: Madison comes to regret what she did to Taylor, and desires to atone, viewing Discord transforming her as a chance to do just that.
• Badass Adorable: Taylor is here turned into a My Little Pony unicorn, with all the cuteness it implies. And all the magic badassery it implies.
• Berserk Button: Armsmaster makes it extremely clear that he HATES bullying.
  • Taylor herself clearly has a massive button towards a victim being punished for being harmed and/or unintentionally striking out at their abusers given how strong her Tranquil Fury about Canary's punishment for accidentally maiming her abusive ex-boyfriend is while talking about how kirins represent justice and how they react to unjust treatment (something she very deliberately emphasized when she remembered the details of Canary's "conviction").
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Taylor's magic can create insects significantly larger than normal, like roaches a foot long and bumblebees the size of tennis balls.
• Big Sister Instinct: Taylor is pissed when she overhears Dinah sobbing over her kidnapping and her kidnappers laughing at her. Vista isn't any happier.
• Blatant Lies: Taylor's principal tries to claim that she was the problem student making trouble for everyone. Armsmaster isn't fooled for a minute.
• Blessed with Suck: Vicky admits that everyone thinks that her powers couldn't be anything but wonderful but they're still the result of her having the worst day of her life and getting no sympathy about it, not even from her own mother. Not to mention that now that she has powers, people tend to assume her life is perfect and she's a Spoiled Brat.
  • Madison's first thoughts about being turned into a Pegasus is that she's under this trope. She's well aware that the closest thing she had to friends were Sophia and Emma, who she can now recognize as monsters, and has no reason not to believe that her parents will disown and send her off to at best prison or juvie and at worst, the Birdcage. Not to mention the PRT, in her mind, won't be any kinder, especially since they have Taylor.
• Book Dumb: Greg is mechanically skilled enough to get a piece of Leet's broken Tinker-Tech working, at least temporarily, by fixing a few broke connections and replacing the capacitor system, a PRT scientist even noting that in a world without Tinkers he'd be considered a prodigy, but thinks that being in the 88th percentile of Brutes means that he's weaker than 88% of Brutes, when it actually means that he's stronger than 88% of Brutes, and the rather technical terms that the PRT Power Testing techs use go way over his head.
• Both Order and Chaos are Dangerous: Discord argues that Earth Bet isn't just suffering from malevolent Chaos, but twisted Order as well, citing the current state of China as a particular example.
• Burning with Anger: Canary becomes a Kirin and, thanks to a guard's taunts, promptly goes Nirik and escapes.
• Contrived Coincidence: Taylor arrives in Arcadia just as the literature class starts studying Peter S. Beagle's The Last Unicorn.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: Two of our characters wind up being part of these.
  • Taylor's thrashing of Sophia after triggering is fairly one-sided. Subsequent battles go about the same.
  • Greg Veder should have died from the curb stomp he received from Lung. Instead, Void Cowboy triggers, becomes a pony, and mops the floor with Lung.
• Cuteness Proximity: Taylor has this effect post-transformation. Most notably on Vista, who's a 12-year-old.
  For the first time since joining the Wards her eyes were fixed on something other than Gallant. It was little, it was lavender purple, it had cute little hooves and big adorable eyes and tumbling black locks of mane and tail and a dinky spiral horn from its forehead and it was the most perfectly wonderful thing that Vista had ever SEEN—
• Dark and Troubled Past: Apparently Armsmaster was heavily bullied due to his apparent autism, hence his above Berserk Button.
• Did Not Think This Through: The PRT pockets the majority of the Wards' pay and holds ownership of any patents Ward Tinkerers make, a system Glenn set up to bilk the kids for all they're worth. Only one problem: The Wards are Child Soldiers and thus paying them less than fast food workers would make terrible PR. The reparations they are being forced to pay end up costing the PRT billions, both in backpay and future.
  • Played for Laughs when Dinah lets Clockblocker pick their hero name after joining the Wards, only to realize too late that his suggestion was a set up for a Running Gag.
• Discard and Draw: Some of the capes Discord transformed swapped out their original powers for something else.
  • Noelle and Oliver split a Cauldron vial, which caused Oliver to get some minor and relatively useless powers that should have been Noelle's Required Secondary Powers, which would have made things horrible for Noelle even without the Simurgh messing around in their heads. When Discord made her a Changeling, her shard connection "snapped back" to Oliver, allowing him to create duplicates of himself.
  • After becoming a Diamond Dog, Rachel can make other Diamond Dogs out of normal canines. No indication on whether or not she can buff them up in addition to that yet.
  • Canary apparently lost her Master abilities after becoming a Kirin.
  • Sveta gained Mane-iac-style Prehensile Hair under her full control instead of uncontrollable tentacles.
• Dramatic Irony: Taylor finds it miserably unfair that Madison AKA one of the girls who made her life absolute hell for literally no more reason than because she felt entitled to do so gets to become a Pegasus and thus be as adorable and lovable as Taylor herself. Madison on the other hand sees this as reason for utter panic because she's completely convinced her parents will disown her and try to ship her off to somewhere like prison or the Birdcage and that Taylor will help make this happen.
• Energy Absorption: After he becomes a batpony, Brian's Darkness becomes upgraded, allowing him to absorb light and sound instead of just dampening it, feeding the energy to him to make him faster and stronger.
• Entertainingly Wrong: Greg is initially under the impression that being in the 88th percentile for Brute rating means it's pathetically low. Taylor face-hooves before informing him that this means he's stronger than 88% of all cataloged Brutes.
• Everyone Has Standards: When the Merchants find and loot a facility Leet was using to store some of his old technology, he and Uber warn the PRT themselves that there are goons with Tinker-tech running around.
• Expy: Madame Trelawney, the "psychic" who takes to stalking Taylor because she thinks she is supposed to be Taylor's spirit guide, is an obvious one to the character of the same name from Harry Potter.
• For Want Of A Nail:
  • Amy's feelings for Victoria are under control here because she lost control and confessed to Vicky a few years before the present, resulting in her getting some therapy when Carol heard about it.
  • Taylor, with her father and Carol's help, ends up dismantling Glenn's attempt to turn her into nothing but a cash cow and his system governing the Wards' pay and royalties, ensuring that they get a fair deal instead of the company paying them a pittance while pocketing the rest, not to mention keeping any and all patents that Wards came up with as their property rather than the property of their creators.
  • Dinah's kidnapping is unsuccessful because Taylor and Vista were in the area and took GREAT offense that someone would not only kidnap a scared little girl but LAUGH AT HER to boot.
  • Taylor speculates on the hypothetical scenario of "What if Sophia decided I was useful and let Emma keep me around?" when Madison admits that she joined up with the two bullies for protection; to her dismay, she can't be certain that this wouldn't have led to her being the same kind of Alpha Bitch Madison was under their thumbs.
• Fuzz Therapy: Taylor's new computing teacher explains to her that this is a possible reason why her new friends have been so open and sharing with her. She resembles a pet or a stuffed animal, both of which are used by people going through therapy to confess their feelings without fear of judgment. Despite knowing she has human intellect, her appearance makes people feel more comfortable telling her their life story than they would a normal person.
• Gadgeteer Genius: Greg Veder was able to repair broken tinker tech. Something thought only possible by the tinker who made it. Furthermore, it was Leet's tech, which is already widely considered unreliable and all while only making very minor repairs. PRT researchers stated that if tinkers didn't exist then Greg would have been considered a prodigy. Exaggerated when he triggers, and alongside a slew of Earth Pony powers, he gains a 'tinker' power that allows him to easily understand, repair, and even improve tinker-tech using mundane methods, materials and tech, and terminology others can understand. Meaning he can reverse engineer tinker-tech to be mass-producible... yet it also becomes averted as while he can do all this with 'others' tech, if he tries to create his 'own' tech, a description by Armsmaster of a hypothetical invention of Greg's sounded like something devised by Bloody Stupid Johnson.
• Good Powers, Bad People: Discussed when Taylor is ranting about the stupidity of assuming Amy's father's villainy is inborn. Taylor brings up that there are many nasty ways Amy could use her powers if she was inclined; Amy's Green Around the Gills reaction to the notion of doing so indicates she has no such inclinations and likely never will.
• Groin Attack: Taylor bucks one of the mercs kidnapping Dinah in the crotch.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: Part of why Coil is so mad after ruining his chance to get Dinah is that he only has himself to blame, and knows it. If he had just waited ten seconds before dropping the timeline, he could have tried again, but now he's committed to a timeline where Dinah's in the Wards, out of his reach. This later happens again when the Travelers decide to leave his service and bust out of his lair in such a way that it catches everyone's attention. Coil was actually at home resting in one timeline, but decided to drop it because they'd still escape no matter what he did, and he was hoping to salvage something. He was hoping to at least get his Swiss accounts and the contents of his office computer, but Tattletale was just a bit quicker on the draw than he was, and he was found half-in, half out of his costume hopping to his escape tunnel, the door to which was jammed and the controlling circuity broken. So he gets caught, confirmed as a cape, and they find enough evidence on him to bury him under the Birdcage, as Piggot puts it.
• I Know You Know I Know: In chapter 7, Vicky delivers her backstory with a class/team rival.
  "I’m getting up off the floor, and she looks back and gives me this look, you know? I knew it was her, and she knew, and she knew I knew—"
• I'm Standing Right Here: Armsmaster when Piggot and Miss Militia talk wryly about his utter lack of tact.
• Instantly Proven Wrong: Danny demands to see his daughter, disagreeing strongly when Battery says that he needs to hear some information about Taylor's condition. He barges into the doctor's office, sees his daughter turned into a pony, walks out, and then asks what information she was going to tell him.
• Karma Houdini: Played with. Taylor has a minor breakdown when she realizes that Madison Clements (one of the Three Bitches who spent upwards of 18 months torturing her) has been transformed into a cute fuzzy pony with superpowers; however, Madison views this as a horrific punishment indeed.
• Kirin: Paige Macabee is transformed into a kirin/nirik by Discord. Taylor specifically notes that, according to Chinese legend, kirins embodied divine justice and most commonly appeared to avenge unjustly persecuted innocents. The implications for Paige's conviction are obvious (and probably deliberate on Discord's part).
• Laser-Guided Karma:
  • Sophia, Madison and Emma, just as in the original story, bullied Taylor relentlessly and made her life miserable enough to finally cause her to Trigger. Unlike canon, however, the three end up paying for it in a very swift manner.
    • Madison fares the best of the three, but she still ends up cowering inside a locker from the "scary pony". Later, perhaps in acknowledgement of her guilt and desire to atone, Madison is transformed into a pegasus. To her credit, Taylor forgives her.
    • Sophia gets banged against several walls, disarmed of her crossbows, stuffed in a dumpster, and wrapped in Christmas lights, thus preventing her from being able to use her intangibility powers to escape. Aside from being totally outclassed and humiliated, between Taylor's testimony and the fact that she violated many of the rules set for her probationary period in the Wards, she ends up sent to Juvenile Hall.
    • Finally, Emma gets caught in Taylor's telekinetic grip, and finds herself begging for mercy once she realizes what's happened. Taylor lets her live, but only after violently releasing her frustrations by banging Emma against a wall several times, scaring her half to death in the process. And Daddy Dearest has his hands completely tied about getting Emma and crew off the hook because of the absolute PR disaster upsetting Taylor would cause given her new form and how people react to it.
  • Glenn gets thoroughly trashed by Taylor and not only has his attempts to turn her into a glorified cash cow dismantled but ends up getting his colleagues hating him even further than before because his Financial Abuse enabling has landed the PRT in a Sadistic Choice scenario.
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: A few of the Travelers group get into a discussion and lean their entire stolen van on the fourth wall.
  "You know what's sucked the worst about us being here in Earth Bet? We're in a superhero world. A comic book world," he stressed. A world where crazy super science and flying cars and super-intelligent gorillas and miracles and shit are supposed to be all over the place. We're living in a comic book, which should have been as cool as hell."
  "Except every issue we've been in has sucked," Genesis said sourly. ...
  "I mean, we live in a city with reality-bending technological super-geniuses doing webcasts and the world's greatest healer doing free clinic work and we couldn't even get within shouting distance of them to ask for help. Why? Because reasons, reasons so contrived and stupid they HAD to be scripted— by the Simurgh, or Cauldron or an author who hated our guts. We're living the Isekai dream and screwing it all up.
• Loophole Abuse: Vista isn't allowed to have any weapons included in her official Wards gear. But there's nothing preventing her from "borrowing" the weapons stashed in Ladybird's saddlebags in the field.
  • The PRT can't be associated with unflattering or embarrassing footage of Lung being beaten up by ponies, the kind Clockblocker likes to edit, but there were civilians in the area of the fight that already released, and they leak information like a sieve, so if a private citizen releases it anonymously...
• Meaningful Name: Taylor's cape name is based off her cutie mark, a ladybug/ladybird.
• Mind Screw: The Wards have fanfics written about them. Apparently, a popular ship is Gallant/Glory Girl/Dean Stansfield, and some people write Gallant/Dean: for those not in the know, Gallant is Dean's superhero identity.
• Missing Steps Plan: The Travellers group seems to have a (half-formed) plan, but even calling it half-formed is generous.
  "I thought (the plan) was to get Cody back," Oliver said.
  "Well yeah," Ballistic said, twisting around in his seat. "But I think our brilliant plan may be missing a few steps besides "Get to China" and "Escape from same."
• Mugging the Monster: In Chapter 18 Skidmark decides to rob a bank. Unfortunately, Sparky, fresh dragon Mythos Trigger, is in said bank trying to open a safe deposit box, and Skidmark tries to force him to hand over his stuff before realizing that he's not human, triggering his instincts about his hoard and royally pissing him off.
• My God, What Have I Done?: In Chapter 15, Armsmaster realizes that his speech after Taylor's trigger not only was heard by kids who deserved it but also by kids like Greg, whose whole crimes were being beaten down by the absolute hellhole that was Winslow... he's rather regretful.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain: Having grabbed Dinah, Coil's mercs inform their boss and Coil collapses the other timeline. Seconds later, thanks to one of the mercs asking Dinah what the odds of someone hearing her if she called out were, Ladybird teleports into the van and starts laying a major smack-down on them. Not only can Coil not use the plan again now, like he could have if he had just waited a few more seconds but now Dinah is in the Wards and out of his reach, and his mercs are in PRT custody. Coil even lampshades how he has no one to blame but himself for counting his chickens before they hatched, much to his frustration.
• No-Holds-Barred Beatdown: in Chapter 8, Greg Veder finds himself on the receiving end of a curbstomp courtesy of Lung, a man who can turn into a dragon and fight an Endbringer to a draw. Greg finds himself getting a Pony upgrade from the same place as Taylor, comes out and delivers a beatdown right back at the man who had moments before effortlessly knocked him through a solid brick wall.
• Oh, Crap!: Skidmark's attempt at a bank robbery goes horribly, horribly wrong when he encounters Sparky trying to get a safety deposit box for himself. Sparky is, at this point, a dragon, and more than capable of undergoing greed growth. Much screaming ensues.
• Open Secret: Since talking purple unicorns aren't exactly common, Ladybird's secret identity is no secret at all, and everyone knows it. Taylor even jokes about it when a baby tries pulling on her mask.
• Pass the Popcorn: In chapter 4, Taylor reveals that she smuggled a digital camera into her meeting with the sleazy PR director.
  "Actually..." Ladybird said. She shook out her mane; a tiny digital camera fell out. "It’s amazing where you can hide a GoPro these days," she said smugly.
  "DIBS!" Clockblocker yelped, grabbing the camera and running for the break room. "This MUST go up on the main TV screen..."
  "I’m on the popcorn!" Browbeat said, heading for the kitchenette.
  • Celestia, Luna and Discord indulge in this once the Merchants' bank robbery goes terribly, terribly wrong.
• Paper-Thin Disguise: As part of a joke, at one point all the Wards, with even Miss Militia getting in on it, wear Groucho Marx glasses and pretend to be civilians when Armsmaster and Miss Militia come in to give them a briefing.
• Pet the Dog: Armsmaster doesn't lose any of his gruffness from canon, but here, he very deliberately evokes a karmic chewing out of everyone at Taylor's school who either actively helped contribute to her misery or stood by.
  • Whether intentional or not, Discord's actions have effectively counted as this for many whom he transformed, Noelle and Sveta especially. He also gives a new name to a kidnapped and brainwashed Yangban member.
• Poor Communication Kills: Greg, not remembering his takedown of Lung, after becoming a pony, gets a bit depressed abut his transformation, especially because the techs in Power Testing kept using complicated terms that he didn't understand when talking about his powers, so he didn't realize that being in the "88th percentile" of Brutes meant that he was stronger than 88% of known Brutes, not weaker, for example.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis! / Punctuated Pounding: Punctuated twice so far.
  • Chapter 1 gave us Taylor's introductory fight.
  She floated the girl about a foot away from the wall and slammed her back into it, hard enough to knock the wind out of her. "You were my FRIEND, Emma!" She pulled her out and slammed her into the wall again. “We grew UP together!" Slam. "We did EVERYTHING together!" Slam. “YOU WERE FAMILY!" Slam. "YOU were my SISTER! I LOVED YOU!" Slam.
  • Punctuated by Void Cowboy with physics-breaking, Pinkie Pie style, four-hoofed, six-foot-high jumps onto Lung's unconscious form.
  "I’m sick of everybody LAUGHING at me!" Whump
  "I’m sick of everybody making FUN of me!" Whump
  "I’m sick of everybody looking DOWN on me!" Whump
  "I’m NOT A LOSER!” Whump
  "I’ll kick your ASS if you call me a loser!" Whump
  "I’M VOID—" Whump
  "FREAKING—" Whump
  "COWBOY!!" Whump
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: Taylor learned how to do this quite quickly and has been weaponizing it ever since.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Poor Kid Win finds himself in the Obstructive Bureaucrat variant role in Chapter 10.
  It was an unusual situation, Kid Win reflected to himself. To say the least. After months of working with or rather under the thumb of both the anal retentive Armsmaster and the paranoid PRT, he never imagined he would be put in the role of the obstructing authority figure. But here he was, trying to be the reasonable one and keep a rookie teammate from doing something rash with tinkertech.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Armsmaster delivers a brutal — and well-deserved — one on and to the entire Winslow High School population. Teachers, staff, and students are all called out for having, directly or not, allowed or even helped in the bullying Taylor suffered. The final line sums it up:
    So I would have to say that it is my professional opinion that this entire school is full of nothing but WORTHLESS LITTLE SHITS!
  • Taylor also gives Emma one when her ex-best friend calls her a "freak" while begging Armsmaster and Miss Militia to save her; this ends with Taylor breaking down in tears over Emma's betrayal.
    "FREAK? You and Madison and that bitch Sophia torment me for a year and a half, you beat me up, destroy my things, steal my schoolwork, turn the entire school against me, stuff me in a locker full of rotting tampons. You turned my LIFE INTO HELL for LAUGHS, AND I’M THE FREAK?!"...“You were my FRIEND, Emma! We grew UP together! We did EVERYTHING together! YOU WERE FAMILY!" Slam. “YOU were my SISTER! I LOVED YOU!"..."I loved you..."
• Sadistic Choice: The PRT ends up in one because of Glenn's mismanagement of the Wards. Either they fork over massive amounts of money to the Wards and keep doing so for the remainder of each given Ward's time as a Ward or have the public find out that they're paying the Wards less than fast food workers and have been for the entire time Glenn was in charge of PR.
• Shout-Out: Multiple shouts were shouted here.
  • Carrie gets a Name Drop in Chapter 2 with a comment from Armsmaster:
  "...anyone with the IQ of a gerbil is going to figure out that Shadow Stalker, the Protectorate Ward, is also Sophia Hess— the leader of the most notorious group of bullies since they dumped a bucket of pig’s blood from the gym rafters in Carrie."
  • Batman and his origin story get a No Lampshades Were Hung shout in chapter 9 while somebody is musing on the origins and ultimate fates of baseline human heroes in this particular world. One of the PR staffers later does hang a lampshade on it.
  Carlos: "And thanks to Youtube, everyone now connects the name 'Void Cowboy' with 'that idiot who went out playing Batman in a cowboy suit—'..."
• The Spark of Genius: Inverted with Greg/Void Cowboy's Tinker power. He can understand and repair any other Tinker's creations, and even produce complete instructions on how to duplicate them with mundane science and technology, but any time he tries to produce original work it fails dramatically.
• Superpower Lottery: The inability to return to human form aside, Taylor has so many powers that the techs keep joking about it.
  • The parahumans Discord transformed, with the exception of Noelle (who as a Changeling Queen can shapeshift into her original form as well as a state between human and Changeling, sense and feed on love and other positive emotions, and cure Simurgh bombs. Since she and Oliver drank from the same vial, her parahuman powers instead "snapped" back to him, allowing him to summon an army of temporary clones of himself) and Canary, get their own powers boosted somewhat in addition to what abilities their transformation gave them (for example, Brian's Darkness can now absorb light and sound instead of just dampening it, making him faster and stronger).
• There Are No Therapists:
  • Subverted; Amy's feelings for Vicky actually got dealt with by a proper therapist. Unfortunately, Carol bolted as soon as said therapist tried to get to the real issues of her family.
  • Played fairly straight after Greg turns into an Earth Pony, the PRT budget for counseling is bare-bones as it is, so they can't guarantee him regular counseling without having him committed.
• Unishment: While Vista and Taylor's joint patrols are supposedly this for Taylor scaring Glenn with giant cockroaches, Taylor suspects that Armsmaster, Miss Militia, Aegis, and Piggot were just pretending to punish them with it, pointing out that if they really wanted them punished, they'd do stuff like making them do comms and paperwork. Instead, they got the gear and costumes they wanted and patrols without the older and/or more experienced Wards playing babysitter, leading Taylor to conclude that they are only pretending it's a punishment so as to appease Glenn.
• Uplifted Animal: After she becomes a Diamond Dog, Rachel's powers now allow her to make her dogs into Diamond Dogs as well, permanently.
• Wham Episode: Discord discovers Earth Bet, transforms several more characters, and makes a deal with Celestia and Luna where he goes to the CUI on the condition that he limits his actions to just China.
• World Gone Mad: When Discord makes his deal with Luna and Celestia to be allowed to go to Earth Bet if he limits his actions to just the CUI, he wastes no time in unleashing his usual brand of chaos on the totalitarian region. To the extent that China goes dark.

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