Life's a Total Crapshoot is a Worm Fan Fiction written by Aurora Moon
on Sufficient Velocity. The story begins on the fateful day where in canon, Annette Rose Hebert died in a crash. But instead of dying, she survives, and gains the power to call forth anything with a Wikipedia article... except what she summons is all up to the author and the Random Number God.
See Wiki Warrior for a similar premise.
This fanfic contains examples of the following:
- Behemoth Battle: During the battle against the Endbringer Behemoth, Annette manages to summon Godzilla. Thankfully, everyone at the battle knew not to get in the kaiju's way.
- Bigger on the Inside: Annette pulling the wiki article on Urban Beach transformed a building to have multiple beaches based on real world ones, complete with an entire sea, inside it. It was a while though before the transformed building was visited in the story's Beach Episode.
- Christmas Episode: A Christmas Story Arc, featuring Annette's mother and Danny's uncle coming to visit.
- Follow in My Footsteps: Phyliss wanted her daughter Annette to become a hard-as-nails businesswoman like her, preferably taking the reins of Phyliss's financial businesses in New York. When that didn't seem to take, Phyliss is looking at her granddaughter Taylor instead as a possible heir.
- Giant Woman: Annette becomes a giantess after getting the "Size Change in fiction" article, but only for 5 hours. Thankfully, she manages to escape to the bay itself without causing damage to the city, and decided to clear out all the abandoned ships in the bay while she was at it.
- I Did What I Had to Do: When Annette calls out her mother on being a ruthless businesswoman, her mother's reply insists she had to be ruthless in order to survive and ensure her own independence.
- Infinite Ammo: One of Annette's summons was a Vektor R4 assault rifle that doesn't run out of ammo.
- Karma: Not only is this Taylor's Cape Name, but she later got the power to inflict Laser-Guided Karma of those around her, based on her morals. Villians, naturally, will suffer misfortune, while good people on hard times will become very lucky.
- Logical Fallacies: Several members of the Empire 88 got inflicted with a thinker ability that forces them to analyze the fallacies in one's belief. This includes their own beliefs, resulting in having a voice in their head constantly arguing against their bigoted views. This ability also revealed to them the duplicity of Kaiser, namely that he's only using them for power.
- Powerup Let Down: Due to the randomness, Annette sometimes doesn't get anything useful from her summons.
- Reality Warping: Buildings can be altered or instantly built via Annette's summons, with existing buildings either moved or replaced.
- Robot Master: Annette getting the Wiki article on the Mega Man series gifted several people with the ability to create anything from all the games. This of course includes the assorted robots from the series.
- RPG Mechanics 'Verse: When Annette gets the article of Dungeon Crawling, an underground dungeon with over a thousand floors is placed in Brockton Bay, and runs on RPG logic. Anyone who goes there can actually engage in Level Grinding.
- Rule of Three: After getting the "Tree of primitive Pythagorean triples" article, Annette can end up with a summon that has the combined elements of three articles whenever the author rolls a 3.
- Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing: Discussed in-story, as Annette reads online, to her horror, that there were people who wished that when she became a giant her clothes didn't grow with her.
- Shrink Ray: One of Annette's summons was one of these, which she used to shrink several villains, although the villains were made to revert back later. Later, she gains the ability to alter one's size with a touch.
- Star Scraper: While looking at the area at the docks for a possible future base for Annette's upcoming cape team, she ends up summoning the Pearl skyscraper, which is around 3,500 tall. The Pearl, despite being a lot bigger than there needs, and originally being a place that catered to the Hong Kong public with its malls, recreation centers, parks, hotels, and luxury residences, does become the new headquarters for Automata. A later summon incorporates a fully functional satellite TV station into the building.
- Summon Magic: Annette has brought Real Life historical figures or characters from fiction. Some the notable ones are:
- Historical / Real Life
- Emily Bovell- a Victorian-era physician. The dice roll gave her Healing Hands, and she has become Amy Dallon's mentor once the latter triggered.
- Bradie James - a former National Football League player. The dice roll get him a level of Super-Strength, as well as the ability to heal cancer victims, based on how the real one had a cancer charity.
- Clarence Birdseye - The inventor and entrepreneur who started the frozen food industry. The dice roll is made in a full-fledged tinker, although focused on his specialty of freezing things.
- More recently Elvis was summoned, though due to being combined together with other summonses this Elvis then came from an alternate universe in which he was an Immortality Seeker and eventually became a Lich King. Amusingly enough in the world where he came from, this leads to a lot of Elvis sightings after he fakes his own permanent death to go into hiding, not too dissimilar to real-life tabloid newspapers reporting such things.
- Fictional
- Historical / Real Life
- Super-Empowering: Annette's summons can result in giving powers to herself and/or to anyone around her. In the case of summoning living beings, rolling at least a 20 means that being has some sort of superpower.
- Timed Power-Up: Rolling 1 to 10 means the summon only exists that many hours in the world.
- Too Much Information: Under the effects of an alcoholic drink distilled by Nanny Ogg, Annette reveals, much to Taylor's disgust, how events during a Halloweeen Party let to Danny and Annette getting frisky, and resulted in Taylor's conception.
- Truth Serum: One summon was an area of effect that forced anyone to speak the truth. This led to the Empire 88 members admitting things a bit more openly then intended.
- White Sheep: How Danny sees himself in comparison to his conservative family, who has strong Stay in the Kitchen views in regards to women.
- Wiki Walk: Annette's power is a weaponized and randomized version of this: the author hits the Wikipedia "Random Article" button a number of times and each article is associated with a d30 dice roll that determines how permanent the article's subject is and how powerful the summon is.
