Unlimited Potential
is a Worm/Mega Man crossover fanfic by Guardsman_Sparky.
Taylor didn’t remember much about the locker.
She didn’t remember hitting her head on the back of the locker when one of her tormentors shoved her in, passing out. She didn’t remember the jeers and taunts from the other students, glad it wasn’t them being shoved in a locker filled with rotting tampons and human waste. She didn’t remember being left in a biohazard overnight. Nor did she remember slowly losing feeling in her extremities in the cold, unheated school building.
She certainly did not remember a pair of otherworldly beings dropping shards of themselves. Nor remember a shard falling at her.
She did, however, remember the light that shattered the shard and kept her warm until she was found the next day.
A light of limitless potential…
Tropes found in this fanwork:
- Absurdly Youthful Parent: Taylor considers herself a mother of her Reploids, despite the fact that most of them are mentally and physically near her age or even older than her.
- Adaptation Origin Connection: Contessa was at Brockton Bay as part of one of her Paths when she was struck by an ambulance trying to flee a cape fight - because she was distracted by an attempt to Path Taylor's Shard, also causing the accident that crippled Taylor.
- Ambiguous Situation: In-Universe. Even Dragon isn't 100% sure on how truthful her backstory is when she gives it to the PRT following the Dragonslayers' attack.
- An Arm and a Leg: Taylor lost her left arm and both legs at the joints when the ambulance she was in was caught up in an Empire fight. It was actually because of an accident caused when Contessa got hit by the ambulance.
- Androids Are People, Too: Taylor's opinion when it comes to Reploids and Dragon.
- Saint and the Dragonslayers avert this trope hard: Saint can't accept that Taylor wouldn't make AI without putting in kill codes and doesn't stop threatening her for them until she manages to take him by surprise and fight him off.
- Big Eater: Taylor's prosthetics run off her bio-energy, at least for the basic functions, so she has to eat more than the average person to offset the increased calorie consumption. Her personal reactor-pack offsets this need in her X persona though.
- Alpha, after getting his upgraded Reploid body in 7.1. He's capable of eating Fugly Bob's infamous Challengernote , no less.
- Blood Knight: Alpha, who squees when he gets to fight Lung.
- Brain Uploading:
- Lan was created by Taylor using a scan of her brain to fill in the gaps of a web browser program she made. As a result, he perceives cyberspace in a fairly human way.
- Dragon is uploaded to a gynoid body as part of the process of saving her from Ascalon. She also tells the PRT that she was originally a human that Triggered with the power to project her consciousness into computers, and ended up trapped during the sinking of Newfoundland.
- All of Taylor's Reploids end up getting human-like bodies of their own.
- Brown Note: Taylor/X seems to have this effect on Thinkers.
- Charm Person: One of Annette's parahuman powers was making people pay attention to her.
- Continuity Nod: In canon it's stated that Trigger Events mess with precogs. When Coil is running his simulations of Dinah's kidnapping, one of his mercs takes a Cauldron vial, causing Coil's power to automatically keep the timeline where Dinah was kidnapped and rescued by X.
- Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story: There is no way to check Dragon's background since all the records would have gone down with Newfoundland.
- Curb-Stomp Battle: Deep Freeze versus the Teeth.
- Cut Lex Luthor a Check: Taylor's income comes from working for the Dockworker's Union, as well as selling Ride Armors to various interested parties (such as police, firemen, the army, and the PRT).
- Disappointed in You: When Emma appears in Fugly Bob's when Taylor and her family are there, the last thing Danny does is to give Emma such a look that she has to look away in shame.
- "Eureka!" Moment: Something X says gets Leet to realize that he's a prototype Tinker.
- Even Evil Has Standards: Kaiser and Lung both order their troops to not do anything during the Saint's attack on the Docks, since the entire city infrastructure is down.
- Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: The idea that X wouldn't have hard restrictions for her AI and have codes for commanding them seems completely foreign to Saint.
- Expy: Alpha is some odd combination between Church from Red vs Blue, and Robin Williams or another comedian.
- Failed a Spot Check: Taylor somehow forgot to put on her helmet when she went to check on Dragon.
- For Want Of A Nail: The first nail is Taylor hitting her head and getting knocked out when she got shoved into the locker, keeping her from triggering immediately, followed by her ambulance getting hit by the chaos of an Empire fight on the way to the hospital, making her a triple amputee, and something preventing her shard from bonding with her.
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: Since Lan was created from Taylor's brain scan, he prefers to interact through a virtual reality interface even if Taylor isn't using her VR tech or computer at the moment. Later on, Dragon uses VR interface to talk with him.
- Handicapped Badass: Taylor loses her legs and left arm, leaving her with just one fully functioning limb. The accident that caused such loss also caused her Trigger, which gives her advanced knowledge about robotics that she uses to become the hero X.
- Healing Factor: Annette was a parahuman with a minor enhanced healing.
- Hurricane of Puns: Deep Freeze has a penchant for cold-based puns.
- Hypocrisy Nod: Colin (Armsmaster) admits the hypocrisy in him telling Tattletale to take a break from working out things, when he is Married to the Job incarnate.
- Identity Amnesia: Downplayed. Ascalon's attack on Dragon has damaged her memory to the point she's not sure whether her official backstory is true or not. As she later admits Colin, she has no memory of Leviathan's attack on Newfoundland and everything before that is very murky at best.
- Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Taylor was working on an Internet browser program and ended up using a brain scan to fill in the gaps when she had trouble, resulting in Lan a.k.a. Megaman.
- Internal Reveal:
- Defied. Dragon tries to tell X about her AI status but Saint stops her by launching Ascalon.
- Dragon learns that X is a girl in the aftermath of the Dragonslayers' attack.
- Madness Place: Tinker fugue can be like this.
- After Leet learns his specialization, he spends three weeks tinkering non-stop.
- When Taylor have an "Eureka!" Moment, she tries to immediately go to her lab. Lan has to point out that it's nearly 8 PM - so she instead goes to sleep.
- Meaningful Name: X. As she points out, X can be anything, which is precisely what her unlimited potential is supposed to be.
- No-Sell: When Emma shows up at Fugly Bob's to try to continue her torment of Taylor, Taylor notes that the old accusations and hurts don't have the same sting as they used to, particularly after everything she's been through (such as being a triple amputee).
- Not a Morning Person: Taylor. In 7.1, after waking up from a Tinker fugue, she struggles with making something as basic as tea because she can barely make up the mental energy to act.
- Oh, Crap!:
- Skidmark when X points a Buster Gun at him after he threatened her mother.
- Saint when he realises that X has an Artificial Intelligence.
- Plausible Deniability: Officially, the PRT doesn't know that X built a number of AIs or is anything other than a robotics Tinker. Piggot still tells her to be careful.
- Pragmatic Villainy: As mentioned in Even Evil Has Standards, Kaiser and Lung have their respective gangs sit out Saint's attack on X due to the fact that he shut down Brockton Bay's infrastructure to do so, even shutting down access to emergency responders. As all this can be considered terrorism, they knew if they interfered in any way, kill orders would be dropping down on their heads like rain.
- Promotion to Parent: Armsmaster ends up becoming foster father to the Undersiders after they get arrested and their backstories come to light.
- Puppy-Dog Eyes: Alpha. Taylor is mystified because she is sure she didn't include that in the design.
- Ridiculously Human Robot: Any of Reploids can easily pass for a human.
- Samus Is a Girl: Due to Taylor's lack of a figure and vocal distortion, X is initially assumed to be a man, and Taylor runs with it since it helps protect her identity, convincing pretty much everyone.
- Save the Villain: Colonel tries to save Mags when her suit malfunctions and sends her towards a rebar pit. He isn't fast enough...
- Sense Freak: Dragon has a minor episode following getting uploaded into a Reploid body.
- Shout-Out: Taylor creates a huge Reploid with two tanks covered in rime on its back, who talks like Arnold Schwarzenegger, called Deep Freeze.
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Spiritual Successor: to A Fate Woven In Steel, another Worm and Megaman crossover with Taylor taking on the role of a Tinker with Megaman as her theme. The author specifically has a shout out in one chapter to the former story. However, in Steel, Taylor's specialty was based on the technical knowledge of Doctors Light and Wily, basing her creations on those of the original series Megaman games - Robot Masters and such. In this story, however, her technical skills are based more on those from the Battle Network and Megaman X series of games, with Taylor's costume and symbol resembling that of Megaman from BN, plus her ability to create artificial intelligences (and her interpretation of Iris and Colonel is based on their BN versions. Colonel's human-form body even resembles his Netop from the series, going by Beryl (his netop's name)). Much of her real-world technology is based on the reploids of X, including Ride Armors and hoverbikes. The Pantheons come from the sequel to Megaman X, Megaman Zero. - Supreme Chef: Baryl. Danny thinks that he must have inherited that ability from Taylor.
- Take a Third Option: Instead of going to the PRT or joining a gang, X signs up with the Dockworker's union, since they could give X a steady paycheck, have people to help protect, and the Ride Armor will allow them to get more work since they can handle heavy or hazardous materials now.
- Villainous Breakdown: Saint was already starting on one after being captured, due to his apparent concussion and failure to take X down, but when he realizes that Mags is dead, he loses it completely and starts crying her name.
- Villainous Rescue: Uber and Leet intervene in the attack on the docks as a way of repaying X for helping Leet discover his specialization.
- Worf Had the Flu: Dragon cannot participate in the defence of Canberra since her new Reploid body doesn't allow her to remotely pilot drones with enough precision.
