Scion was defeated, his shards fractured and scattered across the cosmos. I could finally retire from the cape life, go to college, make new friends, and live on peacefully in a world without superpowered psychos breathing down my neck. Fate just refused to let me catch a break.
Can be found here
, here and here. Sadly on hiatus.
Tropes:
- Author Appeal
- The author seems to like Brandon Sanderson, Alex's powerset mixes Prof's from the Reckoners with a Coinshot/Lurcher's, and a villain with Deathpoint's powers in blaster form shows up, calling himself Deathray.
- Engineering also gets a significant amount of focus.
- An Arm and a Leg: Alex got a good chunk of his leg crushed during Scion's attack, though luckily his newly acquired healing factor fixed it.
- Awesomeness by Analysis: Valeria/Dagger's power allows her find the information she's looking for more easily, and can even act as a danger sense.
- Badass Bystander: What Alex and Taylor appear to be after taking out Deathray, no one realizing that they'd used their powers.
- Bad Powers, Good People: Before being Mastered, Deathray had been using his powers to perform surgeries.
- Benevolent A.I.: Sally, who was created from a brain scan of Valeria, is, just like her "mother", a good person. Taylor even draws a comparison to Dragon.
- Combo Platter Powers:
- Alex has Deflector Shields tied to metal, sensing said metal, pushing metal away from himself and pulling it towards him, and a Healing Factor. He's actually a little puzzled by how he can't figure out what the coherent theme of his powers is.
- Jon as well, with the ability to act as a voodoo doll to other people's nervous systems, muddle their perceptions, and make copies of himself. Taylor notes that it almost seems to combine Oni Lee, Alec, and Aisha's powersets, though there seems to be some of Megan from Reckoners in their too.
- The Coroner Doth Protest Too Much: It's hard to shoot yourself in the back of the skull...
- Deflector Shields: Alex can use metal to anchor force shields.
- Extra Oredinary: Alex's powers focus on metal.
- Friend on the Force: Maddie for Alex.
- Gadgeteer Genius: Valeria Falacci/Dagger. She was a skilled engineer before getting her powers.
- Handicapped Badass: Despite Taylor's missing arm and her powers being severely limited, she's still the girl who helped take down Scion. She easily takes down a mugger that went after her.
- Healing Factor: Alex has an accelerated healing ability, though it's slowed down from where it was when Scion attacked and he lost a leg.
- Healing Hands: Some kind of effect from Alex's power heals Taylor a bit and restores some more of her power.
- Heart Is an Awesome Power:
- Valeria's power can be used as a danger sense, which has helped Alex out of danger many times when he's out as Noble/Guardian.
- Alex recognizes the value of Taylor's power, even if she's just using it to gather information (which he recognizes as a big part of why he hasn't been seriously wounded or killed yet), pretty quickly when she explains it, and even asks about it, much to Taylor's surprise, since she's used to people dismissing it at first.
- Improvised Weapon: Taylor's used her artificial arm as a makeshift weapon a few times.
- Instant A.I.: Just Add Water!: Valeria created Sally by accident when working on a machine-learning security suite using neural maps of her own brain.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Jon may be a bit of a jerk, but he's also a literal Boy Scout, among other things.
- Mad Scientist: Jon is kidnapped by one who experiments on him and other parahumans. He explicitly compares her to Mengele.
- Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Valeria was already a skilled engineer before getting her powers, and Earth Samek seems to have made a few scientific breakthroughs our Earth hasn't even made not long before Scion showed up, so it's a little ambiguous how much of the stuff she's made is actual Tinker-Tech and how much is from her Thinker power's enhanced data interpretation allowing her to bridge the gaps easier.
- Modern Stasis: It's noted that, aside from Tinker-Tech, Bet is actually less advanced than Samek in several areas, like computing, due to a combination of China's xenophobia causing a shortage in rare Earth metals, Japan's destruction at Leviathan's hands, etc.
- Mugging the Monster: A homeless man tries to attack Taylor with a knife, and she takes him down effortlessly.
- My Significance Sense Is Tingling: Valeria's Thinker powers can be used as a sort of danger-sense.
- Not Quite Back to Normal: Taylor discovers that she can still control a few insects, even after Contessa shot her in the head, and other factors start restoring her powers bit by bit.
- Personality Powers: Valeria, already a genius-level engineer before Scion, gets a power that "highlights: the info she was looking for, allowing her to get to conclusions faster and make borderline Tinker-Tech.
- Psycho Serum: The mysterious Master can boost the powers of existing capes she controls, but even outside of the Master effect it seems to seriously impact their sanity, Deathray being completely different the man that used his powers to perform surgeries that he was before.
- Second Super-Identity: After his "Noble" persona is seemingly killed, Alex reinvents himself as Guardian.
- Weirdness Magnet: Taylor just cannot help getting involved in cape stuff.
