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artbyblastweave · 2 years

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Team Fortress Two: Parahumans Edition

Like eight different people asked about the specific powers I had in mind for the wormverse iteration of Team Fortress. Here’s the reddit write-up, updated and expanded, now with additional Ms. Pauling and Administrator.

(Read more under the cut; this absolutely got the hell away from me. This is so so long)

The Scout: The Youngest of Nine Brothers, The Scout triggered as a One-upmanship thinker/brute/changer; his power is the manifestation of “anything you can do, I can do better.” He can designate a broad area of human endeavor- usually, the extremely broad field of "athletics"- and, after a few hours of practice, will become slightly more competent at it than the most competent person in his company. Applying this power within his family dynamic bumped him up to about the level of an Olympic athlete. In the company of eight other parahumans his athleticism pushes into the superhuman, allowing him to make impossible standing jumps and run at the pace of a slow-moving car for hours on end without tiring.

Scout is loosely aware of his power, but he isn't aware that he can consciously apply it to anything other than his physicals, and furthermore hasn't caught on to the scaling mechanic at play. This has enabled his Casanova wannabe tendencies, as he subconsciously uses his power to become slightly more socially competent and charming than whoever he's currently attempting to woo. The emphasis, though, is on slightly- Scout’s power is optimized for groups approximately the size of the one that prompted his trigger event. In extremely small groups- three or less- his enhancements, physical, social or intellectual, tend to short out at inconvenient times, and if he currently associates himself with a truly massive group, his power simply doesn’t activate. The defining element is scrutiny- his power is nothing without an audience that Scout, on some level, esteems.

The Soldier: An anti-GesselSchaft vigilante who was motivated to travel to Europe and attack the group in the mid-90s out of a rabid patriotism mixed with an “End-of-History” Ennui, soldier triggered after his incredibly poorly-planned attack on the group-which went well at first due to sheer dumb luck- ended when he tried to escape from a burning, Nazi-infested hovercraft using a homemade bedsheet parachute. Torn between panic at his impending splattering and his heartfelt conviction that his plan was utterly foolproof, Soldier triggered with a subtle but versatile brute/breaker power that shields him from harm in direct proportion to how bad of an idea his plan was.

The result of Soldier’s power is that an enormous number of incredibly stupid game plans are lubricated and made viable for The Soldier, and only for The Soldier, and never for the reason that he thinks his plan is currently working. His power shields him from the incidental blast damage of using high-explosive weaponry at unsafe ranges, it allows him to blast jump hundreds of yards with only minimal charring, and in addition it’ll shift his weight and density on the fly to make the bad landings less impactful. Blasting a horn to “rally the troops and strike fear into the hearts of his enemies” has limited effect on morale, but it does temporarily render him resistant to the smattering of gunfire now headed his way. Less overtly, it allows him to survive on a diet of expired rations and keep overtly rabid Racoons as pets with no ill effects.

Soldier survived his trigger event with only a sprained ankle and has yet to realize that his power is more complicated than a simple low-level brute rating; This largely due to the fact that a mental complication of his always-on breaker-state is that he’s literally psychologically incapable of self-critique, and thus always barreling forwards in search of a plan so patently awful that even his power won’t be able to cover the deficit.

The Spy: Soldier was in fact a brute-oriented ping of a more-mature European cape, The Spy, who was also in the Gesellschaft base that day on an unrelated job. The Spy has a stranger power that increases the efficacy of his disguises in direct proportion to how unconvincing they are. The use of a paper mask with someone's likeness on it is sufficient to convince viewers that The Spy looks exactly like that person. Not that he is that person, mind you, but that he looks exactly like them; the effect doesn’t extend to his voice, and shatters if he attempts to do anything that the person he’s impersonating wouldn’t be physically capable of doing.

Unique on the team in that he’s actually very good at mercenary work and spycraft sans powers, Spy triggered midway through his career when a job went south and he was forced to attempt a “knock-them-out-and-take-their-clothes” gambit on a guard with a comically ill-fitting uniform. Spy actively resents his power, feeling that it forces him to make a mockery of his distinguished profession and behave like a boorish amateur, and providing him only marginally better coverage than the ill-fitting uniform should he face real scrutiny. Indeed, Spy is only really effective because he combines his power with a genuine talent for martial arts and sabotage; he got more of a power boost from the access and connections being a middling parahuman provided him than from the power itself, and he benefits massively in the field by being surrounded by a group of massively flashy morons who distract from his flimsy disguises.

The Heavy. A Russian dissident arrested on trumped-up charges of being an unregistered parahuman, along with his entire immediate family. After orchestrating a breakout from a Red Gauntlet internment camp, he triggered during the grueling trek to a pre-arraigned extraction point, pushing himself to collapse after giving all his rations to his ailing family.

Misha triggered with a brute power that exaggerates positive input on his body. Eating a spoonful of food meets his caloric needs for a week, eating a normal meal induces an extremely powerful short-term healing factor, consistent low-level exercise makes him strong enough to carry an artillery weapon free-hand, and various medications work positive effects on him almost instantly (in line with his own perceptions of what the medications ought to be doing!) While essentially set for life himself, his power does nothing to meet the needs of those around him; this pushes Misha to throw himself on the grenade as often as possible in order to resolve situations quickly and keep those he views as under his protection out of the line of fire. Misha is a major driver of Scout’s power, and his innate receptivity to medical intervention also gives him good power synergy with....

The Medic. An Implant Tinker, Dr. Humbolt is capable of building almost any kind of tinkertech device imaginable, as long as the device is mostly or completely embedded inside a living person. This includes the normal set of Bonesaw-like durability enhancements, bone reinforcements, organ meshes and the like, but it also extends to more esoteric technologies like teleportation recall modules, internally-mounted skin-tight forcefield generators, and (in one-notable case) rapid onset clone gestation within the target host.

At one time a decently competent transplant surgeon, the medic triggered after being abducted by Gesellschaft and forced over the course of weeks to try and implant looted tinker tech into other captives. (Gesellschaft had no real expectation that this would work; it was as part of an experiment in causing a tinker trigger.) This culminated in a kludged implant backfiring and vaporizing both the current patients skeleton AND the supervising Gesellschaft doctor; resulting in a do-or-die sense that he either had to come up with something his captors would find usable NOW or get shot to death. He was saved from having to respond to the situation only by the soldier falling through the skylight wrapped in a makeshift bedsheet parachute.

Medic’s power has a surface-level armorfaceyness to it; he triggered because he couldn’t make tinkertech implants and got a power that let him successfully make tinkertech implants. Under the surface, however, his power is laced through with an allergy to respectable, replicable procedure, which he actually valued fairly heavily pre-trigger; he triggered as part of what (he) perceived to be a search for a process but instead got a trigger that let him jump straight to a successful outcome, that he himself has limited under-the-hood understanding of. There’s no process he can figure out that will make his captors let him go; there’s no innovation he can make that can become general industry practice; there’s no way to divest himself from his work. His singularly useful ability forces him to constantly append himself to cape teams that can protect him and act as vectors for his technology, lest someone press-gang him into circumstances similar to that of his trigger event. This has had deleterious effects on his mental health and professionalism; why bother taking shit seriously if it’s almost certain to pan out agreeably? All else being equal, why not do buckwild shot-in-the-dark things with whale glands and baboon uteri? In for a penny, In for a pound.

The Engineer: Dell Conagher was an early beneficiary of the “skateboard trick” tech boom instigated by the tinkers; prior to his trigger, his small, fly-by-night engineering firm was able to make a small fortune by observing shard-enabled robotics in the field and then working backwards to create extremely advanced conventional prosthetics, automatons and security systems based on observed principles. Unfortunately, a search for funding brought him into the orbit of the nascent Elite; a subsequent falling out lead to Conagher’s remote workshop coming under siege from a group of Elite legbreakers. Rather than a straightforward smash-and-grab, the Elite sent a group of strangers, night-hag-style environmental breakers, and movers, intended to harass Conagher into insanity over days or weeks; the goal was to send a message. They’d unfortunately failed to account for the fact that Conagher was completely insane and had wired his house and workshop to the gills with security countermeasures and booby-traps, resulting in an extended tit-for-tat siege. Although he put up a decent fight, Conagher’s limited countermeasures began to run dry, and he triggered out of fear that he’d overcommitted, that he’d overestimated his own ability to counter parahuman abilities through conventional engineering, and that they were going to take everything that he’d worked so hard to build.

A Siege Tinker. Conagher specializes in building resource-Un-intensive, quick-to-deploy, hardy, easy-to repair defensive emplacements, and emplacements that make it easier to repair other emplacements, such as teleporters and dispensers; his combat specialty is squeezing blood from a stone, lowering the overhead of committing to, or retreating from, a fight. The tradeoff is that he has extreme difficulty expanding the total number of discreet emplacements included in his set-up, having a much easier time iterating upon and gaining razor-thin margins on the performance of his handful of existing devices; working down the alternative tech tree of a weaponized prothesis delayed his progress for years in other areas, and his power curtailed his ability to think about non-tinkertech designs without his thoughts drifting back to his defensive emplacements. His power solved his inability to defend his valuable work by sharply curtailing how much work he can do that’s valuable enough to need defending.

The Pyro. An individual of imprecise origin and ambiguous gender, The Pyro was Dell Conagher’s business partner, bodyguard, and possibly either his ward or his relative. Noted for never appearing in public outside of their full body protective gear and gas mask; ostensibly related to their work with Dell’s company as a chemical engineer, although it was commented on more than a little that they apparently never took it off.

The Pyro was caught up in the siege that caused Dell’s trigger event was in charge of running maintenance on Dell's various defensive measures during the seige, both before and after his trigger event, as well as contributing jury-rigged incendiary weapons to flush out the encroaching strangers. However, the stress of playing whack-a-mole refueling the more energy-intensive machines under fire caused them to trigger with a bud from their associate. The Pyro is a shaker with the ability to increase the longevity and energy output of chemical reactions within a certain radius. Pyro is a lowercase t tinker, using an arsenal of makeshift incendiary weaponry only made practical by their power. Their homemade flamethrowers can be fired continuously for hours, and the fires they set burn abnormally long. In their hands, a flare gun or a can of gasoline gains output equivalent to a military firebomb. If they superheat a blade, it'll retains that heat for hours on end. Crucially, their mere presence in a vehicle allows it to run for thousands of miles on fumes.

The Pyro’s powerset is nominally complementary to that of the engineer; much of his tinkertech was built in conversation with Pyro’s ability to enhance the battery life and fuel efficiency. The downside, though, is that the power induces a Burnscar-adjacent form of delusional pyromania. When using their power at a low burn, Pyro is calmed and mildly elated; when using their power to amp up explosions and wipe away intruders in a cleansing fire, Pyro is both Euphoric and detached from reality. This is because, as a response to Pyro’s immediate situation, the intended use of the power is a knot-cutting, scorched-earth anti-stranger measure, meant to flood an environment with heat that burns hot enough and long enough to scour all life, probably at the cost of whatever (abstract, probably not really worth it) value you were defending that area over in the first place. Anything Pyro does with the power that’s more subtle than that is downstream of their continued attachment to their partner.

The Sniper. The brainchild of an undersea tinker collective off the coast of New Zealand, The Sniper had a rough go of it as a kid. His mother, a callous fermentation tinker, modified his biology so that all of his excretions were violently acidic and lightly alcoholic, essentially making him a bargain bin Newter. Then his father, a propulsion tinker, loaded him into a rocket to see if he'd designed a user interface intuitive enough that a three-year-old could operate it.

He hadn't. At the age of three, Sniper triggered with a thinker power related to calculating the angles and trajectories of moving objects in times of great chaos and stress. His newfound abilities allowed him to merely crashland in the Australian outback instead of plowing into Ayers rock and dying instantly. He roamed the bush as an urban legend until he was adopted by a pair of kindly farmers. Although his power proved almost useless for competitive shooting in a controlled environment, he realized at a young age that reckless, life-or-death attacks on the local wildlife brought out the best in his abilities, and eventually realized that he had the chops to cut it as a mercenary in the States. A loner by nature and inclination, the fact that his power only functions optimally when things have gone to hell essentially forced him into the company of Team Fortress, whose baseline idiocy provides a comfortable cushion for his power.

The Demoman. Originally a competent but unpowered demolitions expert, The Demoman triggered with a bud of The Soldier's power after an ill-advised drinking game between the two of them was interrupted by a surprise Behemoth attack, which Demo was then forced to face with a bad case of alcohol poisoning. Prior to meeting Soldier, Demoman’s life had been defined by aggressive mercenary rigor, inculcated by and shaped in reaction to strict militant parents. He drew firm lines in the sand in regard to his work-life balance, never letting the boisterous party-animal tendencies he formed out of rebellion leak into the strict hours he kept as a mercenary, until Soldier finally wore him down during a middle-of-nowhere-shit-shift. His trigger was thus heavily influenced by a sense that the first time he’d ever indulged himself while on-call had been smacked down hard by a karmically-inclined universe.

In addition to increasing his overall durability, Demo’s Brute/Thinker power causes his aim, courage under fire and overall competence to scale up to superhuman levels based while intoxicated.... and to sap to below what he was capable of pre-trigger when he's sober. His power carried him through the crisis of his trigger event with ease, but now forces him to constantly mix business with pleasure, constantly drinking on the job to maintain any semblance of competence. An additional complication of the power- which took some time to become obvious- is that any information or skills that Demo acquires while either drunk or sober becomes gated, hazy and slippery while in the opposite state, resulting in an almost Severance-like dichotomy of personhood. The sheer amount of personally important events that have happened to him on the job thus encourage Demo to stretch his buzz further and further outside of work-hours, pulverizing his ability to effectively compartmentalize or maintain a work-life balance; turning him into the always-on-call hypercompetent soldier they wanted in a way his still-living mother finds repugnant.

The inaugural Team Fortress lineup was formed in the aftermath of the shitshow at the Gesselschaft base; Soldier, Medic and Spy were joined by Heavy, who had been hired by Spy’s handlers in the EU as a last-ditch extraction option should things go south in the exact way Soldier caused them to. The swath of carnage the quartet generated during their escape both demonstrated their power synergies AND painted them as a unit in the eyes of Gesselschaft and the collective parahuman underworld, incentivizing them to hang together out of self-preservation. After returning to the States following a running fight through Europe against Gesselschaft, the Team picked up The Engineer and The Pyro when the duo hired them for a retaliatory strike on the Elite’s southwestern holdings, picked up Scout while cooling their heels from that stunt in the Northeast, were approached by Sniper after becoming a sufficiently-renowned laughingstock that he realized the potential power synergy, and finally picked up Demo for a gig that required a bomb guy and then just sort of kept him around.

The team became truly untouchable, however, after they picked up Ms. Pauling.

Ms. Pauling is a buck-passing Thinker; She has a PTV-style ability to redirect the fallout, blame for, and censure of wrongdoing; in any given situation, she knows who to throw under the bus in such a way that she’ll walk away clean. She knows what evidence she has to plant, and where, and what steps she needs to take to make sure she isn’t fingered while executing the frame job; she knows what to say, and in what intonation, to make people believe or at least not interrogate her transparently flimsy alibis. Her power works best when actively and intentionally used to someone else's detriment, although it can muddle through if there’s no obvious scapegoat for a disaster besides Ms. Pauling herself. The Primary beneficiary of Ms. Pauling’s power is Ms. Pauling; however, she’s capable of expanding her self-conception to include any organization or group of people she’s reasonably attached to, folding them into her getaway plans. A born company woman, Ms. Pauling labored for years prior to her trigger as an assistant at an international industrial concern whose corporate ethos she truly believed in; she spent years smoothing over scandals and allegations of corporate malfeasance in good faith, only to realize when it was too late that by making her the relentlessly loyal face of the company’s crisis response, her bosses had deliberately maneuvered her into position as a scapegoat when the bottom inevitably fell out and the SEC closed in; her attempts to throw her bosses under the bus using her new power was thrown off by her ingrained subconscious attachment to the company, resulted in her coverup mostly bouncing off and destroying the lives of hapless third parties; this incited a break into moral nihilism on Pauling’s part.

In the aftermath of her trigger, Pauling was recruited by a powerful Cauldron Cape known as The Administrator. The administrator was a Master/Brute who could stave off her terminal illness by visually observing violent conflict; the act of observing the conflict would also increase the bloodlust and durability of all observed participants while also stunting their critical thinking skills. The Administrator used her immense inherited corporate wealth (with which she had purchased the cauldron vial) to funnel dozens of powered and unpowered mercenary teams into pointless scrimmages over utterly useless remote properties through a host of shell companies so that she could feed off their violence via a mass surveillance wall; Team Fortress was one of many teams pulled into the set-up. Pauling was tasked with using her power to cover up the immense corporate malfeasance necessary for the plan to work; she was strung along with the promise that the immense violence was in service of a higher purpose this time. (This was partially true; the op was Cauldron-enabled and guided, with the intention of generating an experience mill for villains and mercenaries.) Pauling fell into Team Fortresses orbit because they both made good scapegoats for her power AND frequently got into jams that the Administrator would order her to get them out of; when the Administrators’ set-up inevitably imploded, Pauling remained attached to the team as an unofficial tenth member for a lack of anywhere better to go.

In the years following the end of the Gravel Wars, Team Fortress has roamed North America as a subdued mirror of the Slaughterhouse 9. Mildly heroic if mercenary in their ambitions, there’s no situation they can’t make worse through their cartoonish disregard for consequences, and no consequences that Pauling can’t find a way to make everyone else's problem. The team maintains a strange doublethink brand-image; they’re small-timers, they’re harmless, they’re clowns, they’re unstoppable, they’ve never failed a job (never succeeded, either.) You don’t want them involved; you want them on your side if they ARE involved. They fight for the highest bidder; they almost always end up fighting the highest bidder; you can hire them, but you shouldn’t, but you’ll only learn that the hard way because thanks to Ms. Pauling the story at the end of each job is never, ever about how the team is a risky hire.

#parahumans #worm #wildbow #team fortress 2 #worm fanfiction #the scout #the soldier #the heavy #the medic #the sniper #the spy #the pyro #the demoman #the engineer #tf2 #thoughts #worm crossover

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