How Taylor Hebert Agreed to Be a Slut [Worm/Slut Life]

It's your story, so feel free to have "being a Kryptonian" not count as a single power.
But know that some/many disagree.

About going out to collect bugs, that's just another reason why One Month might be smarter (each of four compass directions for collection flights perhaps? Cheesing the teleporter for 16 hours range perhaps by airliner or similar "public transportation", to get basically anywhere on that world...).

About paparazzi, this is probably going to be one of the few Slut Life runs where massive aerial battles with reporters and their drones will be a prime attraction over sex.

 

So you're saying 'Being Eidolon' or 'being Scion' is a power?

Even on Bet, people talk about the power sets a parahuman has. Each ability is a separate power.

 

I seem to remember something about "you can pick the powers of any fictional character"... and since Superman's other powers are all expressions of "Kryptonian Physiology"... you get where this is going.

 

The "Powers" section says "Pick any combination of three powers from any combination of sources listed below."
The End Notes says "You can also choose powers that people have from television, animation, movies, books, games, etc."

It does not say "you can pick the powers of any fictional character".

In any superhero RPG anywhere, powers come in a list. They are separate from one another. You don't get packages as 'one power'. It doesn't work that way.

"Alexandria Package" is a figure of speech, not a real thing.

 

What version of the CYOA are you using. I'm looking at 3.0.3 and the Rewards section about super powers says "Pick any combination of three powers from any relevant CYOA"

In which case, wouldn't it be based on the terms and definitions used in the CYOA you pick? The Worm CYOA for example does have Alexandria listed as a single option on the powers list.

 

I'm using 3.1.3.

I haven't looked at the Worm CYOA for a very long time, if ever.

In any case, I (and about any superhero publication out there) define "power" as 'one thing you can do'.

Flight is a power. Strength is a power. Flight and strength and super-durability and super-intelligence does not constitute a single power.

 

If you're going to be really technical, Alexandria's powers is:

Control of a temporal-locked crystalline (at least IIRC all of her cells crystallized) puppet body.

Everything else is just an expression of that one power.

That might or might not work for rewards... BUT...

Actually, I was going to game Race Change to be a Kryptonian Dog, like Krypto, but the description shut me down

Sigh, woulda been a great exploit.

*edit-Actually, found a way to become Kryptonian!

You can't give yourself powers, but you can turn yourself into another humanoid species, ie. Kryptonian.

Then all you'd need to do is spend some time under a yellow sun.

Ummm... Taylor will have a Teleporter and Personal Teleporter... She could do 4 hours around where she is, 4 hours on the other side of the planet, 4 hours in a Brazilian jungle (or does Australia have more deadly insects? I know Australia has the deadlier animals, but insects?), and 4 hours on a planet in a completely different universal cluster (give Taylor the bugs from Starship Troopers! Actually... why hasn't that been done before? Now I gotta look around to see if there's a Starship Troopers/Worm cross...).

Remember the teleporter is capable of interplanetary and interdimensional transportation.

*edit, found 1 Starship Troopers/Worm cross on FF.net.... but it's in spanish, and a 2k word oneshot... Actually surprisingly readable with google translate...
https://www.fanfiction.net/s/10359165/1/Arácnido

 

Okay, the exploits are cool but ... seriously? Twisting semantics to get what you want?

And no, Alexandria's body isn't temporal-locked, nor are her cells crystalline. That's fanon of the highest order (she needs to breathe, and she has blood to take oxygen to her brain).

As for becoming Kryptonian, nope. " It doesn't, however, mean you can give yourself super powers - you can only control what you already have or can have."

You can become an elf, a dwarf, an orc, etc ... but you don't get any special powers from that form. If you became an elf, for instance, you wouldn't automatically get supernatural capabilities.

So sure, become Kryptonian. They're human to x many decimal places. No change necessary. Don't expect any powers out of it, though.

Australia has the funnelweb spider and the redback, which is related to the black widow. Both of those have killed people. She'd be more likely to grab things like fire ants, bullet ants, and bugs that can carry them to the target.

As for Starship Trooper bugs, 1) they're kind of obvious, and 2) wouldn't it suck if they only looked like insects (which is all they do, because insects can only get to a certain size).

 

I can't remember the name of the spider atm, but in Brazil there's a spider that makes Spiderman look like he has slow reflexes.

This spider will, if you swing a broom at it, jump up on the broom, run up the handle, and bite you before you're even done with the swing. It's venom kills within 5 minutes (from a bite on the hand) and there's no possible cure (I suppose if you cut your arm off fast enough...).

Taylor's control works off neural complexity, doesn't it? Taylor might not be able to control the Brain Bugs, but she should have no problems with the drones.

 

Urban legend. No spider actually has enough venom to seriously endanger a healthy adult. Make you sick, sure. Multiple bites would kill you, sure. But one spider, one bite? Nope (I did research on this).

On the other hand, scorpions are arthropods as well ...

 

It's been shown multiple times in the comics that injecting Kryptonian genes will give a human Kryptonian powers. So if you use Genome Control to add those Kryptonian markers?

That said, I really don't care about the exploit one way or another Guardian54's post just got me thinking into ways to make it work that would actually be feasible. It's more of a thought experiment on my end.

Considering I got that info about the spider from a discovery channel educational program... I'll try and look it up the type of spider.

*edit- It might have been the Brazilian Wandering Spider, but I can't find anything about it's reaction speeds... And the venom isn't as bad as was described in the show (though it did kill the same way, by shutting down the muscles that control the lungs). Although 1 bite CAN kill you rather quickly... If it injects all it's venom... Which it won't do 99% of the time.

 

Worth noting, she controls 'bugs' as defined by QA, which doesn't actually include many things that are bugs, while controlling many things that are bug-like.

In the case of Starship Trooper bugs, she would be able to control them if QA decided they met her criteria.

 

Well, I agree with you both, depending on both semantics and mechanics. For instance, kryptonian powers have been described as a result of their bodies instinctual control of the strong nuclear force, but their bodies only do that when organelles in their cells are hit by certain frequencies of energy. So everything Superman does is supposed to flow from one source of power, AKA limited manipulation of the strong nuclear force. The strength, toughness, speed... everything is supposed to be just a part of that. Now, how that explains the heat vision seems especially sketchy, but supposedly that, too. In... silver age, I think, the writers seemed to tend to just call whatever new thing he did a 'super whatever'. Super Weaving, instead of 'I'll weave these steel rods together in an instant using my speed and strength!' I'm not sure what that says for my argument.

Or, telekinesis. Jean Grey's telekinisis is supposedly separate from her telepathy, though both are mind powers, but it's using her telekinisis that she's able to fly, grab and throw things, move things, and could even give a fairly good impression of super strength.

Another good one for telekinesis is Alex Mack, though I'm specifically talking about Diane Castle's Alex Mack stories. Her primary powers from the show were force limited telekinesis (just a few pounds at first, topping out around 200 I think), the ability to turn into a silvery amorphous blob (and a touch based ability to pull others harmlessly into her blob form and spit them out later), and the ability to generate electrical powers and fire them like a lightning bolt (but ignores actual electrical charge rules and hits its target). In Diane Castles stories, which admittedly is fanon, but that IS a form of fiction, all of her powers were discovered to be simply quantum scale telekinetic manipulation. She fakes super strength by using her telekinesis on whatever she's touching, she flies by picking herself up, she can move her amorphous form around by shoving and twisting it into shape, and she assumes that form by fucking with the van der whals forces, which turns her amorphous and gives her the look of liquid mercury. Even the electrical generation is just telekinetically pulling electrons around and shoving them at a target. Even her limitations are theorized as just random imperfections in how her brain can process her abilities.

So yes. If I saw a list of powers that had things like

Fly
Enhanced Strength
Telekinesis
Amorphous shapeshift
Electrical bolts

I would classify them all as different powers. But if I saw a list that, say, had

Limited strong nuclear force manipulation
Limited quantum scale telekinesis
Brain hooked up to an otherdimensional fragment of space whale supercomputer the size of a continent

I'd be like, oh, neat, what can each of those do? And then it becomes kind of arbitrary, and is usually limited to 'examples from fiction'.

 

Another way to game the system, one way or the other, is Chakra from naruto, or other similar power. It's an energy generated by you that explicitly warps reality, primarily limited by knowledge and skill at manipulating it. Drawbacks include running out can kill you, and it seems to be tied to your fitness and metabolism, a finite resource. Also lack of Knowledge.

How would "Perfect" apply to that? Perfect innate chakra control? Unlimited Chakra, or just running out doesn't hurt? Make you like Naruto at the end of the manga (able to use all affinities, including combining Yin and Yang)?

Could a use of Education or Lifetime Learning teach you techniques? or would Perfect take care of that too?

Also, unlike most "powers" in comics, Chakra is explicitly the reason for everything in Naruto, even the particularly weird nonsense bloodlines (the excuse being the bloodline allows innate manipulation of chakra in a way that is beyond most/all others)

 

Chakra's got a genetic component, especially where bloodline limits are concerned. That said, Chakra's also an external factor that was introduced to humanity via the Divine Tree. Which means SL could introduce it the same way (or possibly just give you a Chakra Fruit, in which case you'd basically be Kagura).

Though if you're gonna go that route, how about things like Spiral Power, becoming a Spider Totem in the Great Web (like pretty much every spider themed hero/villain in Marvel)... There are dozens of examples of single-powers-with-multiple-uses.

Or just go all-out with Perfected Energy Control/Manipulation (notice the lack of specification of what type of energy, meaning you get them all), with energy conversion as a second power (to convert one form of energy to another and work in tandem with the perfected ability), and for a third power... something akin to a thinker power giving you instinctive/intrinsic knowledge of the usage and application of energy (or possibly an understanding of vectors akin to Accelerator's from A Certain Magical Index, just without the vector control, which is handled by the perfected power). Beat Behemoth at his own game!

---

*edit- I just had something pop into my head... Just how much would the cost of actually using a public Teleporter or using a Teleporter service to send Annette back home be? Because there are sizable cash rewards in SL, and it might not even be that expensive.

I could easily see it being the equivalent cost of a plane ticket. And if that's the case... A bean counter may have made the choice to save $500, not realizing that Taylor would view that as basically forcing her mother to cheat on her father (by being a contestant), since she simply doesn't know the costs involved, rather than the pocket change it essentially is...

And couldn't Taylor (or more likely Tori "I made the promise, I'll make it happen!") have just found a current/previous contestant with a Teleporter, and ask to use it? lol.

 

The teleporter seems to require teleport beacons. I presume for the game show purposes they are only keyed to return to home, or at most in-city beacons.

And she'd of course have to carry breeding populations on herself and settle them into the terrariums after she gets back to her apartment.

To paraphrase someone else on why spiders rarely use any venom on humans: "Why the fuck would you waste your horribly expensive venom on this gigantofuckasaurus you have absolutely no chance of eating? Just giving it a little bit of pain is enough to make it or its kind averse to you in the future, instead of leaving yourself defenceless against things you actually COULD kill and eat."

(the key word there is "gigantofuckasaurus")

New headcanon: The Shinju Tree and later Moon are actually part of an Entity. And Kaguya is totally not-Khepri right down to the control freak tendencies...

Cindy is in the other fic, this fic has a different guide.

 

Personal Teleporters need a beacon (specifically a full Teleporter), full Teleporters do not.

And if during the show the Teleporter is locked down (which, it seems, should only be for active contestants, non-contestants shouldn't get locked out of locations they can legally go to), I also said previous contestants who have a Teleporter via New Home (because you can get it free as part of the New Home reward), of which there are likely hundreds if not thousands

Actually a Spider will rarely inject all its venom against ANY prey. It has more to do with protecting itself from predators than anything else, since venom is very costly (biologically) to produce for spiders.

fixed.

---

I just realized a MASSIVE benefit from this New Home post-show setup, and a really good reason to take ALL the clothing options on top of the clothing replicator.

If a contestant comes back for another show/season/whatever, the ONLY clothing option you'll need is "Old Clothes".

Yea it's 5 points, but you can easily make that up with Insidious Personal Stylist (nothing in the contract says you have to wear what the stylist suggests)

 

New Home only gives you the Basics for free.

Entertainment is not a sub-section of Basics, so you still need to pay for the teleporter.

 

My point about past contestants who have the Teleporter is still valid.


*edit- Finally got around to fixing up that omake I wrote a few days ago:
https://forum.questionablequesting....-slut-worm-slut-life.7638/page-6#post-1967123
Fleshed parts of it out some, especially the ending, and fixed the grammar.

 

Seeing as there's no rule against modifying your body again after the show is over, I would probably have gone with an all body modification route, and chosen perfect Biokinesis as a superpower, sure it's going to suck to be limbless during the show, but you can reverse all of it with Biokinesis, and how much it suck, is comparatively mild for how many points it gives.

Or if Permanently mean you aren't allowed to regrow them post show, you can select a Tinker power with a specialization in prosthetics, you will need telekinesis as well to make the prosthetics of course, but telekinesis is a very useful power anyway, it's sure that you may use prosthetics, as you can choose to have the show give you some, not choose to have the show give you permission to get them.

Or just load up and up on Lewd tattoos, they aren't noted to be required to be permanent, which mean that they aren't required to be kept post show, so just take a whole bunch of them, and use biokinesis to rebuild you body.

You can also take all the drugs you can bear to suffer though while on the show, perfect biokinesis mean you can either destroy the nanites post show, or if that's not allowed, you can alter your biology to be immune to them.

A whole lot of gaming the system can be done, by taking options that are mainly unappealing, because they don't get reversed at the end of the show, and then taking a power that allows you to reverse them yourself, after all the contract don't say you have to keep what Slut Life did to you.

 

I personally suspect one of the actual worst things the Slut Life people do is not let you know how much shit costs in their world, and what your options after the show, or even during the show, are.

A workstation grade computer costs 40 credits. 40 credits at the end of the show are worth 10,000,000 credits at the LEAST. Why would they make a computer so expensive? Because watching someone sit around shitposting or playing vidya is probably boring to watch, the small subset of the population that likes streamers notwithstanding.

30 credits gets you Cash Money, which lets you spend your paychecks during the show. How much does a workstation grade computer cost on that planet? I bet it's not more than a few thousand dollars, probably less. Just the hardware should be dirt cheap, you're probably paying for software licenses. Nowhere in the description for computer or cash money does it say you can't just buy your own computer after a few weeks of work. But getting contestants to waste credits on a computer is probably a great way to reduce the expenses they spend on producing the show.

As for lewd tattoo, why not electropigments or chromatophores for the skin? New tattoo or new corporate logo every day! A new way of handling the slut writing. Camoflauge after the show.

Is there an official slut life thread somewhere where we can dump all our ideas in together? I mean, I'm reading all the slut life threads anyway, but it makes coherent discussion kind of disjointed.

 

Having enough cash to buy a computer, and being allowed to use said computer while on the show are 2 entirely different things.


As for the tatoos... Just use the cash SL gives you to get them removed. Or in Taylor's case, Panacea could potentially remove them.


And now I want to see Panacea in SL. "and a final warning to all our owners for this contestant. If you do something she really doesn't like, she can liquify you with a touch. Yes, that includes when your genitals are touching. Be advised."

 

Panacea would be wholly incapable of dealing with SL. Except maybe if she was forced to go insane on a purely machine-life planet and eventually goes insane (or bored of insanity) enough to loop right back to sanity.

"Amy Dallon had to be tortured to sanity" may well become a meme that she herself would propagate if she ever rebuilds herself instead of having to be put out of her misery. Then the sane one learns that she's the 9135478194th iteration of Amy Dallon's initial state to run through the program because the others all committed suicide one way or another.

EDIT: Yes, this is mostly sarcasm. Note the huge number.

 

Significant Other.

Enough said.

 

EDIT: Please note this is Fanon Sarcasm Mode (the number of digits I used in previous post are insufficiently obvious)

1. Feels guilty over making a Vicky clone that is mentally addicted to her (or is after first touch with how bugfuck nuts Panacea is).
2. Murder-suicide or double suicide ensues.
3. Rinse and repeat
4. ??????
5. N iterations (using clones, power-included) later, Amy actually hits the minuscule probability of not going insane by the end.
6. Gets shown the graveyard of failed iterations of her initial state.
7. ?????
8. N^N iterations later, Amy ends up passing that hurdle, either due to the graveyard collapsing into a black hole, or random variation causing this iteration to work.

Amy is the sort of lunatic you bring into a porn studio only if you want to film very creative guro. Aegis could also be a good choice.

 

Question.... Have you actually read worm, or are you basing all your knowledge of the universe on the various fanfictions? Because there is precisely one point in Worm where Amy can be considered "crazy." It only lasted a few hours, and was right after being mindfucked by Bonesaw.

Granted for a decent chunk after that she was far from mentally healthy, but she wasn't insane. And by the end of the fic, she was perfectly sane again.

Early-on in Worm, Amy is basically just a severely overworked, on the verge of burning out, abused/neglected (depending on your definitions) child, with a severe (power-induced) crush on her adopted sister.

Also, SL could actually help Amy get over her mental block on working on brains. After all, that type of thing is commonplace around SL.

The sad thing is, her brief stint of insanity wouldn't have even been a major problem, if only Vicky had just listened to Amy when she said to stay away because she'd hurt Vicky if she touched her right then.

 

She's not even severely overworked, as it's fanon that she works at the hospital all of the time. While she does visit at nights, that's when she has insomnia or can't sleep for some reason. The on the verge of burning out is probably more of her power affecting her because she's only healing.

 

...I suspect the grossly overinflated number of iterations in my first example isn't obvious enough (it's all massive sarcasm on how badly off one of IIRC Ack's favorite characters was, not to mention a recent debate on "Ship Happens" over on SV where I said that a nearly-dead Tattletale could be saved by Amy if Panacea ever pulled her head out of her ass enough to heal a villain who'd been burnt badly by Lung... and then got dogpiled by "would absolutely prefer TT be built a new machine body than be let near that yawing pit of crazy").

Carol, a criminal lawyer, failed so hard at raising Amy to know the difference between right and wrong that she never managed to get Amy to pull her head far enough out of her ass to do some brains (with a mountain of waivers). No, really, "after fixing his drug addiction, he managed to pull himself out of depression! Good for you, you just fixed his brain!" is NOT advanced social-fu (by how I could think it up)! I'd call that massive psychological abuse (not neglect, because it's to a very dangerous individual, you don't treat a normal kid the same as you treat a walking superweapon, which any form of biology control whatsoever definitely is to anyone with more than half a working brain). Alternatively...

Spoiler: Carol if she had a lick of sense in actually teaching Amy to be a HERO

Carol:"You can sense brains, yeah? Okay, sense this corpse's brain. It's not working, is it? Now sense this living person's brain."

Amy: "Uh, he has serious heart problems... which I just fixed."

Carol: "Is there a difference between the brains?"

Amy: "...Yes?" *has no clue what she's referring to*

Carol: "The doctors gave the man with heart disease a few hours to live without your help. You have just managed to change the future state of his brain from dead to living. Congratulations, you have just done brains. Oh, and even though you might not have connected every single nerve exactly correctly in fixing his heart nerve defects that they only recently noticed, his heart is at least probably working fine now. You have just handled nerve tissue to alter the state of his brain. And that woman you treated for vulvodynia due to a nerve miswire last week... she's no longer depressed and..." *checks notes* "huh, her husband complained that she's a bit of a nymphomaniac so far, but expects it will pass. You have demonstrated the ability to alter nervous tissue and fix brain problems. Combining the two should merely take some more practice."

Amy: "And what if I get it wrong?"

Carol: "And people who recover naturally from brain injuries are completely unaltered? I've seen enough cases to know that's a big lie, but their families are still VERY glad to have them back when they recover because they KNOW to expect changes! If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, smells like a duck, tastes like a duck, and was and will be a duck, then it IS a duck. But on a more basal, biological level" *mentally grumbles about amount of research and consulting with Vicky she had to do to compile this argument* "What is the purpose of a chicken?"

Amy: "Uh..."

Carol: "A chicken is a fertilized egg's way of making more fertilized eggs. As long as the equipment" points between legs "is taken into action then the rest is just boosts to effectiveness, like suitable behaviors such as language skills or social skills or whatever. And you usually don't alter the genomes except MAYBE to fix major genetic diseases, do you?" (wording varies by Panacea's spectrum of treatments). "I'm saying these things because criminal lawyers do have occupational burnout, just like medical practitioners"

And then there's the "Vicky if as book-smart as she's supposed to be would hint to Amy that a cheaper i.e. more plentiful food supply would reduce crimes of desperation" problem. Unfortunately, Vicky's intelligence is definitely Informed Ability trope (IIRC that's the name) as touching a biokinetic--and Vicky KNOWS--when she's clearly mentally unstable is Darwin Award tier.

 

OK, I have to repeat after reading that... Did you even read Worm?

And seriously? TT had minutes to live and was more than minutes away from shore with Taylor the only one around, how could Amy have made any difference from the other side of the city; not to mention everyone thinks TT's been burned to literal cinders, so they wouldn't know to call her.

 

She's not overworked so much as pushing herself harder all the time, to meet some imaginary standard.

And given who her parental figures are, it's not hard to figure out who (accidentally or on purpose) supplied that standard.