Okay I Like Exactly ONE Doctor Who Post Because I Think Billie Piper Is Cute And Now My Feed Is Only

(poll suggested by @germesthegenie)

if you're wondering what THE BUG MEANS (no relation to the slug), i'm referring to the point in the oil rig battle where taylor gets turned into a giant bug by her lab rat vial.

i love spoilers so bizarre and vague that they don't actually explain anything. like these people just saw a tv adaptation of 1.1 they don't even know what a trigger event is like why are we explaining how contessa dies

make sure to tell me what you think and why you think it!

I have not given up on this btw!

Make sure to tell me what you think and why you think it!

And *that* is why I can't read the story again past the start of the Moon Gems arc. It's too tragic for me. The ending is so bittersweet and unsatisfying; I'm glad that it's the way it is, but I still can't ever read it again.

sometimes i think about when phos was torn to shreds by her own family, being manipulated by the lunarians, and buried in a hundred different holes for hundreds of years

and like

everyone just moved on. no one cared. not the lunarians she was trying to help, not the family she loved. just left with her own hatred to soak in.

there really isn't that much i find relatable about phos. i'm very solitary. but that stuck with me.

never put any stake, positive or negative, in others. it will inevitably fester and leave you worse.

YES, the inspiration to write is returning! The ideas... they flow.

Finallyyyy

The first post, about which undersider would be on the Down With Cis Bus

Not included in this poll: Jess & Mike, who died and quit respectively before the Undersiders ever existed.

i would do "which member of breakthrough?" instead of "which member of new wave?" but i think making up a story about down with cis is more a new wave thing than a breakthrough thing, on account of breakthrough having two (and a half) canonically transgender members. even if ward victoria is personally more likely than worm victoria to do it

(also this theoretically would take place sometime after the bank robbery. if it's one of the ones who died during leviathan then during the time between the bank robbery and new wave's dissolution)

Make sure to tell me what you think and why you think it!

all of these options (excluding the explicit atheist ones, and possibly modern pagan ones) imply a significant detachment from serious religious beliefs, meaning she is functionally atheist/agnostic/theist(?) but was raised with nominal observance for the practices of whatever religion.

Note: Yule is a germanic pagan religion that is observed during the same part of the year as christmas, it was largely defunct but experienced a modern revival as either a secular, christmas-adjacent holiday, or an explicitly pagan celebration.

Make sure to tell me what you think and why you think it!

This sounds amazing! I wasn't sure if you had me for a while there, but as it kept ramping up I was absolutely drawn in by the imagery. Unfortunately my current fic is consuming my soul but I'd absolutely read this if it was realized. Super cool concept.

Apparently cluster focused fic ideas just what my brain is on right now, so fuck it, here's a half formed premise. Let's start with two changes to canon. First, New Wave doesn't get Marquis. Second, when Anette dies, Danny triggers with some kind of power that interferes with his emotional regulation - let's say a Breaker state where he becomes a swarm of insects but his conscious decisionmaking basically turns off while he's in it - he acts on whatever his conscience or unconscious intentions were at the time he went Breaker. And let's say there's a lingering impairment after he changes back proportionate to the time spent transformed.

With a power like that, it's very easy for him to get on the bad side of the heroes, and with that plus his anger, easy for him to start taking it out on them. So let's say he throws in with Marquis. Taylor doesn't know what Danny's been up to, but he's getting more and more angry and id driven, both for mundane grief reasons and because he's not taking enough time to rest relative to how often he's using his power.

After maybe a year of this, it comes to a head. One day, while Danny and Taylor are out for a fun day together on the Boardwalk, they bump into New Wave doing some PR demo, introducing Shielder or something, with a still-unpowered Victoria cheering the loudest to cover up how much the shame of getting passed by her little cousin is eating her alive. And the sight of this happy family that he's come to blame for the destruction of his own happy family life makes Danny snap. Second trigger, seeing red. He wants to annihilate them. He goes Breaker, and now his swarm is massive, composed of giant, monstrous, and lethal bugs, but his control is even worse. Massive collateral damage. He has just presence of mind to have some of his bugs shove Taylor somewhere she'll be safe from the crossfire - which just so happens to be into a dumpster.

And he goes scorched earth on the boardwalk, especially on the New Wave capes who have been knocked flat by the trigger vision and cannot defend themselves.

By extreme misfortune, Marquis is also in the crowd, in civvies. He wanted to do some quiet recon on his longtime enemies' newest addition, and thought he'd take Amy with him both as a teaching moment and for a fun outing. He goes out like a light when Danny's second trigger goes off, and he gets trampled by the crowd trying to flee and gets caught in the bug apocalypse crossfire.

So we have:

Taylor, alone and trapped in filth, who has spent a year watching her dad pull away and become angrier and angrier, who's still had Emma turn on her as in canon, and has just seen her dad turn into a biblical plague and, as far as she can tell, literally thrown her away.

Victoria, seeing her family at the mercy of a murderous supervillain, utterly powerless to defend them and with years of feeling impotent and like a disappointment to her family having just been brought to an indignant fever pitch by being the literal only person in her family not to have powers.

Amy, whose father has almost certainly kept her fairly isolated for her own (and his) protection, watching the only person she feels she has in the world, who always seemed invincible, bleeding out in front of her.

Boom, cluster trigger.

The trigger event knocks Danny out of his Breaker state, and they're able to contain him before he does much more damage. Most of New Wave survives (maybe he gets Carol? Maybe Eric?) and he goes to the Birdcage. Amy saves Marquis. Through cluster bleed through, she finds Taylor in the aftermath - and thank God for that, because who knows how long it would've taken for someone to find her otherwise. Once Marquis understands who her father is and what's happened to her, her connection to Amy, he takes her in.

And that sets the stage for the story. Amy and Victoria, villain and hero, the embodiments of an old and deep rivalry, and Taylor, the daughter of the man who nearly killed them all, caught between her desire to do good and her family connections to villainy. Tie them all together with cluster bleed through, kiss/kill dynamics, some power mediation, add in social dynamics and pressures, interactions in their civilian lives - it's a stew of rich possibilities.

And that's not even touching their powers!

Honestly, runebears, at least the ones in Limgrave, aren't all that tough once you understand how they work. I hit em when theyre not moving and dodge when they start lifting their paws, haven't died to one yet. Even when that fucker Patches teleported me to the Mistwood, l just crouched and walked between bushes until I was out of the woods.