Remnant of a Worm
is a Worm and RWBY crossover by Halfmasked, where a post-Khepri Taylor is dumped on Remnant by Contessa. There is also a list of omakes and a Spacebattles thread here.
Post-GM Taylor in Remnant. Taylor Hebert; villain, hero, monster, savior, Khepri. She awakens in a hospital in Vale. Where was she? What would she do? Who would she be? Hero or villain? Monster or Savior?
This work contains examples of:
- Action Bomb: Taylor devises a tactic that involves coating her insects in Dust and turning them into makeshift explosives.
- Androids Are People, Too: Thanks in part due to her past interactions with Dragon, Taylor was already leaning towards this conclusion regarding Penny from her insect-eavesdropping allowing her to notice the emotions that she was displaying when alone when she learned that Penny has Aura, meaning that by Remnantian understanding, she has a soul.
- Artificial Limbs: Taylor eventually gets a custom mechanical replacement for her missing arm.
- Berserk Button: Taylor's is bullying, more specifically anything that reminds her of what she went through herself when she was in Winslow:
- The reason why Taylor came at Cardin much stronger than she intended: what he did to Jaune with the locker "really pissed [her] off".
- After beating all of team CRDL in defense of Velvet (anti-Faunus racism being another thing that rubs her the wrong way) and reiterating her warning, she also tells off the rest of the onlookers for falling victim to Bystander Syndrome.
- When she then comes to Ozpin and Goodwitch to face the consequences of her actions, she expresses her displeasure at not only team CRDL's behavior, but also the failure of Beacon's staff to address it properly, leaving the students deal with it. Both teachers notice how furious the entire situation made her, despite her apparent lack of emotion.
- Bishoujo Series: It's lampshaded that Beacon is full of improbably beautiful women, much to Taylor's dismay.
- Black Box: Ozpin finds Taylor's damaged and discarded flight pack and sends it to a scientist named Blosson Gleason for analysis. While she cannot figure out how it works, she says its circuitry is so small and complex that it could probably revolutionize Remnant's technology.
- Blade Below the Shoulder: Taylor's new arm has a blade in the wrist she names Stinger.
- Bully Hunter: Taylor makes it clear to Cardin that she won't tolerate him and his team's normal asshole behavior, and when they bully Velvet, intervenes and tells Dove as well, knowing Cardin didn't pass on the warning to his team like she told him to.
- Bystander Syndrome: Taylor calls out the other students in the cafeteria for not intervening with Team CRDL's bullying of Velvet.
- Color-Coded Characters: This comes up when Coco is buying Taylor clothes, choosing primarily gray clothing due to her aura color.
- Contrived Coincidence: Out on patrol after escaping the hospital, Taylor ends up running into members of the White Fang. After learning who they are, she lampshades that of course she'd run into a faction like that.
- Cover-Blowing Superpower: Taylor does her best to keep her bug control powers a secret from the others.
- Cover Innocent Eyes and Ears: Yang, Weiss, and Blake cover Ruby's ears when they realize that Taylor was only a year older than her when she had sex.
- Crapsaccharine World: Having come from Brockton Bay, Taylor finds the order, colorfulness, and cleanliness of Vale utterly unnerving.
- Death Seeker: Taylor suppresses a flare of resentment towards Ruby when she realizes Ruby was the one who saved her.
- Deliberately Bad Example: In-Universe, Team CRDL are still at Beacon despite their bullying largely to be used like this and help rally the other teams together.
- Detonation Moon: Taylor seeing Remnant's moon shocks her, and tips her off that she's not on Earth Bet anymore.
- Doppelgänger Attack: Taylor's Semblance seems to be similar to Sun's in that she creates an Aura-based duplicate of herself, but hers apparently just repeats actions that she's already taken, which Taylor cynically takes as her very soul saying that she can't change and that she's doomed to repeat her mistakes due to unlocking it right after learning about Brian's death. Ironically, though she's yet to realize it, this makes it incredibly similar to Leviathan's water clone.
- Emotionless Girl: Due to her habit of channeling her emotions through her bugs, Taylor seems like this for most people. Yang and Ruby point out that they've never seen her smile and Goodwitch privately worries about how tightly she's bottling herself up.
- Everything Is Racist: The White Fang Taylor targets assumes she's going after them for being Faunus.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: More like "jaded Anti-Villain can't comprehend charity," but Taylor initially sees Ozpin's kindness as some kind of manipulation after all the horrific people she's had to endure.
- Eye Scream: One of Taylor's strategies is to have her bugs get on the Grimm and bite and sting their eyes.
- Faking Amnesia: Ozpin subtly hints to Taylor that she should do this after seeing the surveillance footage of her reacting in shock to Remnant's shattered moon, as a way of explaining any information she may be missing. Considering that she'd been shot twice in the head, it's not hard to believe. She eventually claims that her memories are mostly recovered.
- Fun with Acronyms:
- Team ALAO (Alloy): Annie Huston, Lissa Stewart, Alder Blythe, Onyx Pewter. Ozpin also considered adding Taylor to their team to make it Team TAALO (Tangelo).
- Team RWBYT (Rubinite): Ruby Rose, Weiss Schnee, Blake Belladonna, Yang Xiao Long, Taylor Hebert.
- This omake features the scientists tasked with reverse-engineering Taylor's flightpack trying to come up with a suitable name for it.
- Group Hug: All of Team RWBY gives one to Taylor after they learn she doesn't have any family left.
- Handicapped Badass: Taylor spends the first part of the story without a prosthetic replacement for her arm. She doesn't let it slow her down too much. During her spar with Pyrrha, she takes advantage of her avoiding her right side to land a surprise hit with her stump.
- Ironic Name: Lampshaded by Taylor she learns that Neptune is hydrophobic when he literally jumps out of his shoes when their spar causes a puddle to form around him. She actually gets a much-needed laugh out of it.
- Laughing Mad: After eavesdropping on Ozpin and Ironwood and learning about the existence of Salem, a planetary-level threat, Taylor devolves into this.
- Mirror Character: Taylor and Blake are both dark-haired introverts with a taste for reading and self-loathing tendencies stemming from their respective Dark and Troubled Past. They both also happen to be investigating the White Fang's activities on their spare time. Taylor gains Blake's trust by telling her about her own criminal past, making her realize the similarities with hers (both were in it to try to help people, both eventually left to join the side of the law, and both have regrets about the way things went and want to make up for their past actions).
- The Needless: After using her bugs to observe the Grimm, Taylor learns that they don't eat, drink, sleep, or breathe.
- No-Sell:
- Taylor tries to control a Deathstalker, but finds her power over bugs has no effect on it.
- Having Aura apparently allows the QA shard to ignore Ciara using a power-nullifying Trump power on it.
- Not Me This Time: Taylor thought for months that Contessa was the one who dumped her on Remnant. While she asked her for advice, it was actually the Fairy Queen, and not for some grand plan, either.
- "Not So Different" Remark: Ozpin mentions seeing a lot of himself in Taylor, which he finds "both incredibly concerning, as well as comforting". Taylor on her end, despite being wary of his chessmaster tendencies, sympathizes with him on the topic of how annoying dealing with politics can be.
- O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Ozpin freezes, something Glynda had never seen him do before when Taylor accurately predicts the punishment he had planned for her beatdown of Team CRDL (forcing them to go on a mission together with Glynda supervising).
- Retcon: The author eventually went back and rewrote some parts of the story, like Ozpin making Taylor join a team despite knowing that she doesn't want to, for example.
- Rewrite: In addition to changing some of the plot points, the author also went over and rewrote significant portions of the story to polish things.
- Spotting the Thread: Her powers probably helped, but Taylor noticed that Blake was a Faunus because her bow moved with her ears underneath them.
- Super-Empowering:
- Ruby activates Taylor's Aura to save her life.
- Taylor later starts activating the Auras of her bugs, and her talk with Ciara reveals that Ruby also activated the Queen Administrator's Aura when she activated Taylor's, its Semblance apparently being temporarily gifting Taylor's powers to others. Ciara believes that this Semblance, which Taylor suspects that the QA Shard somehow deliberately manipulated things to get, is the only reason that Taylor can use her old powers to any real extent at all.
- Trapped in Another World: After Contessa shot Taylor, Glaistig Uaine opened a portal to Remnant and put her there to start a new life.
- Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Taylor unlocks her Semblance in the wake of learning about Brian's death.
- Troll: Taylor messes with Tai a bit when she visits during winter break, like saying that Yang had been street-racing.
- Weak, but Skilled: This is why Ozpin recruits Taylor: despite having Aura for a short amount of time, she was able to use strategy and cunning to outwit and defeat an entire group of White Fang operatives.
- What the Hell, Hero?: When Taylor finds out about Jaune's secret that he faked his transcripts and has no warrior training, she convinces him to shape up and get training from Pyrrha by calling him out on being nothing but dead weight and she will not tolerate anyone slowing her or her teammates down.
