Hey guys!

Just found inspiration, as well as relief that the Undersiders aren't really evil supervillains-as well as to get this grimdark feeling I've been having off my chest:

Egregore

"I can't...fix this."

And with that, all of Danny Hebert's hopes died.

He wanted to scream, wanted to hit the white-cloaked girl, some angry part of him hoping that if he yelled at Panacea enough, she would somehow be able to remove the corrupted flesh.

But no. Anyone could tell that Amy Dallon was just as broken by the realization she couldn't help Taylor as her father was.

"It's the goo. It's the fucking goo," she breathed, in between choked sobs. "It...keeps changing her...won't stop..."

What little of Armsmaster's face could be seen slightly frowned, the closest thing to an expression he had made ever since he had shown up. "But I assume you can detect the changes made? From what Dragon discovered, it follows a fairly simple pattern of modification, one leading to the next."

"It's too fast." Amy snapped, sinking to the floor. "Everything I do...it incorporates. Makes the mutation worse..."

"It can't be sterilized?"

"If it was organic...I could help. But it's not. It's...fucking nanites."

"Nanites?" asked Armsmaster, his tone still flat. "But there are no Tinkers with that-"

"Nobody cares!" Danny screamed at the emotionless cape's helmet. "Nobody cares who did this, it's done! Taylor's become this...thing, and nobody can make it right! So stop acting like it!"

Armsmaster turned to face the distraught manager. "Mr. Hebert," he began, in what he apparently thought was a consoling manner, "I understand your pain-"

"Then leave me alone!" With that, Danny ran out of the room, knocking over a surprised Glory Girl in the process.

Armsmaster sighed. "Dallon. Follow him. Make sure he doesn't do something...rash," he finished, trying to be tactful. Victoria nodded, flying off after the grieving man.

"...Must have been in those tampons," Amy said, trying to regain her composure. "But how-"

"We know Shadow Stalker was one of her tormentors," Armsmaster interrupted, scratching his chin. "It may be she obtained a sample from an evidence locker, and not knowing of their true potential, placed a colony on one of those...pads."

Amy slowly rose to her feet, staring at the mass of polyps, nodules, and redundant organs that was once a teenage girl.

Slowly, her face contorted in a rage Armsmaster wasn't aware the healer was capable of. "...I hope she's infected too."

While Sophia Hess was not afflicted with a colony of a self-building matrix of a gel with aligned graphene in a polyunsaturated form, she was thrown in a very secure prison with electrical cuffs (despite New Wave and her former teammates' assertions she should be in the Birdcage, she had not progressed to genocidal crimes). From there, Winslow's administration did not survive the media blitz that descended on the "School of the Mad Cape", and in a month or so, the entire teaching staff was sued into losing their tenures, and the school very quickly became the site of several experiments into better education. This was about the only good thing that came of the fate of poor Taylor Hebert.

For one thing, what was left of Daniel Hebert's sanity finally cracked soon after losing his daughter-more than enough to induce a trigger event. Blaming the Brockton Bay Protectorate, and the PRT as a whole, he soon made a name for himself as the supervillain Multitude, Master of All That Flies, in particular as a vicious anti-cape bodyguard for members of the E88 and Azn Bad Boys (nobody was insane enough to force him to pick one or the other and so turn his not-inconsiderable ire upon them). So long as they a bone to pick with the PRT and preferably weren't black, he was open to a job that allowed him to take even a small part of his revenge.

For another, the resulting fallout led to Emily Piggot being forced to resign from her position of Director in disgrace, leaving a man named Thomas Calvert to take up the job. In a week after his being sworn in, pretty much everyone who paid attention to the PRT quickly began to pine for his predecessor. "Corrupt" was something of an understatement for the new Director-anybody paying even the vaguest amount of attention to Calvert's administration quickly realized his primary goal was "Thomas Calvert's political career." So long as it made him look good, he did it-no matter how many laws he would have to "bend" to get it done, or how poorly treated the Protectorate and Wards were. Curiously, an enigmatic villain named Coil quickly became significantly more active, with Calvert having an odd intuition as to how to outwit his more showy (and, on closer inspection, less important) schemes.

The rest was more personal-scale tragedies. Victoria fell into a deep depression over her inability to see how warped the future Multitude was becoming and then failing to stop his initial, fatal revenge on Armsmaster. Madison Clements, unable to deal with the guilt of being partially responsible for the malformation, paralysis, and living torture of someone for something she thought were a bunch of harmless pranks, eventually vanished from Brockton Bay, never to be seen again within the city. And of course, Taylor's mutations only became more extreme over time, unable to even die due to the mutating goo repairing any attempts. By the end of it, she barely looked like anything of the planet, let alone human.

Then, one day, the mass of softly luminescent flesh that had once been Taylor Hebert began to scintillate strangely. Patterned, measured, and colored in a way that suggested there might have been something of an intelligent will in there.

And then it all went to the depths.

*Moves under own direction. Strategic, attempting to corner dog. Likely intelligent.

Gee, thanks power, Tattletale thought. Tell us exactly how fucked we are if these things get us.

"Bitch!" Regent called. "Walking tumor, 9'o clock!"

At this point, all his teammate needed to do was point, and Brutus tore into the hopefully barnacle-covered mutant, spraying more of the black ooze everywhere. Thankfully, this time it stopped moving, though if the goo flowing back to it was any indication, perhaps not for long. Its friend, a far more humanoid beast with exposed organs, howled in apparent grief and rushed at Grue, only to be stopped by Tattletale's new pistol.

"Any better idea on what these things are, Lisa?" Grue shouted over the violence, attempting to confuse the apparently power-darkness vulnerable goo before it could revive the walking tumor.

"Clones, I think!" she shouted back, staying far away from a strange, seemingly partially organic robot dripping with the ooze. "I got a look at one of their stomachs, no belly button or fingerprints!"

"Oh good, the asshole who made these deliberately made them purely to terrify people!" Regent said, a note of attempted levity in his voice. "So if the goo manages to get us, we not only turn into piles of Lovecraftian agony, we're the pets of the kind of guy who makes people so he can turn them into monsters."

"Not helping, Alec!" Grue said, focusing his darkness on a patch of the nanite muck to short it out.

Much to the relief of everyone, the blue glow of the ooze blocking the escape route faded, and before whatever strange program that ran it rebooted, the Undersiders ran across.

And nearly into more of the ooze creatures, one an eyeless, almost-human figure with mussels growing down his side, another an even more human figure, if one discounted his head being a mass of glowing growths that looked uncomfortably like eyes, and three that looked for all the world like spacesuits lightly coated with examples of the nanite goo. With glowing red eyes.

"Shit! Back Brutu-oh fuck."

And it was at that point that the reactivated goo was now forming a wall, trapping them in with the creatures. One that was coming towards them-

Then around them. By the end of it, the terrified Undersiders were in a circle of toxic, corrupting goo, with the monsters that apparently controlled it surrounding them.

With the growing realization of what they would have to do to die as the Undersiders, Tattletale cocked the pistol.

"Back off!"

When suddenly, the tinny, distorted voices of the three suits cried out.

And apparently shocked, all the other creatures backed away.

...the fuck?

The center suit stepped forward, keeping to the edge of the goo. Her (the voice had been female, Tattletale was sure of that) red eyes narrowed, confirming the perceptive parahuman's theory they were mechanical given the iris that helped her with the expression. "You shouldn't have come here."

Body language relaxing. Nonaggression. Fearful.

But then again, she was a robot. Who knew what her programmers intended? "I don't think you have the right to call us out on ethical violations if you're attacking a hospital. I mean-"

"We have not killed or infused anyone here," the left suit interrupted, cutting off the first. "We're just trying to save someone, because you can't."

*Body language relaxing. Nonaggression. Fearful. Same as the first suit.

*Exactly same as first suit.

The hell?

"We won't hurt you," the first suit began again. "But you're going to have to stay here until we remove the structure gel."

"It won't infect you," the third suit said. "But if it disables you the only way it knows how, it might cause long-lasting damage.

*Body language relaxing. Nonaggression. Fearful.

*Same body language as other two suits. Same voice, and inflections. Hypothesis; shared ego.

Either that, or whoever built this strange trio of suit-bots was really lazy when it came to coding new personalities.

Grue let his darkness drop a little. "And what 'saving' do you have in mind?"

The suits went quiet for a second. Two of them motioned to the others, the third resting her visor in her head.

"...Killing our template," the first suit answered, a note of resignation to her voice. "She's suffered enough-she needs to journey beyond the ARK, now."

...The fuck?

*Body language between suits slightly disjoint. Actions before imply silent conversation. Refined hypothesis: No continuity between egos.

...Well, that made sense, actually. A true hive mind meant that if one suit was disconnected from the others, it would quickly lose all sense of what to do. Three minds with identical personalities meant independence, without losing the unity that came from differing opinions-it was the same ego voicing her opinions to herself, they just weren't privy to what went on in each others' minds.

But who was the-

...Wait.

Wasn't a template "something you were made in the image of?"

And wasn't that voice...a bit young?

But if so-

"Who's the template?"

The suits didn't hesitate. "We are tulpas of Taylor Hebert, born of the Warden," the third suit said. "We will not be her again."

And with that revelation out of the way, the three suits wandered off, leaving Lisa with far, far too many questions.

With a final, relieved breath, the original Taylor Hebert died, the structure gel that had made her into an antenna deactivated by her mental clones.

"I see," began Taylor-Beta, looking away from the ruin of her original self. "That's why dad..."

"Wasn't right, what he did," Taylor-Gamma interjected. "He knew Armsmaster had nothing to do with it."

"Wasn't right for us to be used by the WAU," Taylor-Delta said, her normal anger replaced by fatigue. "Wasn't right to turn us into the dimensional antenna."

"Wasn't right for Earth-Omega to get hit by a comet," Gamma cut her soul-twin off. "Wasn't right for us to trigger with structure gel control. Lot of things weren't right."

"Aren't right," Beta replied, gesturing to the clone-proxies that had followed them.

The three Taylors were silent for a while.

"...We aren't the good guys, are we?"

"Compared to what we've found? We have a leg up."

"We're still alien invaders, Gams."

"One, we're transhumans. Second...Earth is dying, all over again. What do we have to go back to?"

"What did we come back for?" Beta began, the dam finally bursting. "I thought we'd be able to fix things! But...this!?" she asked, gesturing wildly around. "This is our home!? Dad's gone nuts, we have a warlord for a PRT director, and now-"

"Winslow got better," Delta interrupted, hopefully.

"And it only took a civil war! Great going, Brockton Bay!" With that, Beta sunk to her knees, even her leg servos sounding despairing as they whirred.

"...Our home is Omega now," Gamma said, looking downcast. "And we have to save it, and everyone there."

Slowly, Beta got back up. "It's not like we have a choice any more."

A Worm/SOMA Crossover

(First: I know it was really grimdark, but did I get the sense that the world is crappy enough to the point where a desperate alien invader may seem like the good guys, and why Taylor(s mental clones) feels this is the path life's set out for her(selves), saving a very strange and often horrific form of human?

Second: I made this as a thought experiment as to what would happen if you let the WAU live and continue to improve with building new bodies for humans. It's developed a better sense of what is ethical and what is not, but it still has no idea what a human finds comforting or familiar (so it makes proxies from mindless clones instead of the people it's trying to save). It's still a mechanical alien god, just a mostly-benign one now, worshiped by its children only in that they acknowledge its power and necessity for their lives. Sort of like Mecha-Cthulhu, with sane-ish servants)