First and foremost, this story is a dead-fic, and it will remain dead. I figure I owe the people who favorited and followed this fanfic some answers.
Admittedly, I feel rather embarrassed rousing this very dead story (6 years and counting as of 9/15/2023) from the grave to be briefly gazed upon by the masses, but I do so not out of vanity, but out of desire to give a form of closure to my past, younger self who never got to make this story something that was worth reading (at least in my opinion), and the fact that I'd at least like to put the ideas he never got to express out there so it's not left unspoken like I've seen happened to so many other abandoned, forgotten fanfictions. I don't even have the word documents to this story anymore, as they sit lying on an old discarded laptop of mine that probably doesn't even turn on anymore, but I still remember enough of what my past self planned and I would like to share those ideas.
This was the second fanfiction I ever wrote as an author (the first was a rwby fanfic on that's been scrubbed from the web as my past self deleted it), and it shows. I was a full-on angsty teenager mode and honestly I couldn't really read through most of this story the second time around aside from some brief skims out of sheer embarrassment. I confess I've never read Worm fully or played the game OFF aside from watching a few playthroughs and listening to the soundtrack, but it was still a story my past self wanted to write, whether it was out of inspiration or something else, and had I continued writing it, it would have quickly veered into original fiction territory regarding the OFF elements. But getting to the point... what I'd planned... or rather what my past self had planned.
As we saw, The Batter (god, having to write a capital "The" in front of "Batter" is bringing a wave of nostalgia back), had managed to contract with Taylor in place of the Queen Administrator Shard, serving as a projection minion that was in reality an eldritch horror disguised as a humanoid. With her weird powers granted by her connection with The Batter, Taylor would have kept on conflicting with the capes and gangs of Brockton Bay as well as the deceased denizens of OFF with their inverted color schemes, the eventual plan being for her to progress within the "negative" zones whenever a dream sequence occurred and fight corrupted versions of OFF's bosses whose names I've forgotten (The Drill Sergeant, The Bird, the Fat Man, the Clown Stripper, etcetera), gaining the ability to summon the un-corrupted alive versions into her world which would of course lead to drama as they likely wouldn't be too happy with working with the dude responsible for destroying their world, which Taylor would mediate between them all to prevent her very colorful cast of new minions from all coming to blows as Brockton gets a new hero team of weird monochrome people who all get mistaken for being related to Alabaster and the E88 for obvious reasons. I'm sure my past self had plans for an Endbringer fight that would end with The Batter destroying one of them, and then we'd eventually move onto Scion... and this is where those original ideas and world building I mentioned would come into play.
For those familiar with the game and mechanics of OFF, the energy used for special/magical attacks is called "Competence", as well as the world itself being comprised of five main elements. Smoke, metal, plastic, meat, and sugar. It's never really explained in game how this world came to be, with vague implications that the world of OFF used to be normal like ours was until some unknown cataclysm (granted I could be completely wrong about this, but we might as well take it at face value since my past self would have willed it to be "canon" anyway), but I'm rambling. The point is...
In Purifying Brockton Bay, The universe of OFF is in reality a universe that was visited in the past by The Entities of Worm and summarily harvested with their shards and all that horribly stuff they do, albeit... things didn't go well with the Entities harvest, and this is all due in part to the existence of "Competence". The past humans of OFF wrangled this power of questionably magical and psionic origins under their control, eventually building a god-machine meant to harness it that was tasked in achieving world peace and all that good stuff. But the Entities eventually visited OFF's universe, spread their shards everywhere and started and age of conflict with Heros and Villians, and no one in OFF's universe realized the true danger looming over them as they quarreled with each other... except The Machine, which was a completely original character my past self came up with.
As it turned out, Competence was highly toxic to the Entities in every way imaginable, a literal kryptonite that disgusted and terrified the Entities in a way they'd never felt before. Eventually, The Machine discovered the origin of the shard-superpowers and tried to exterminate the threat getting in the way of their purpose which it had a fair chance at succeeding in, and in response, a cold war between shard-wielding humans manipulated into conflict by the Entities and The Machine and humans highly attuned with Competence broke out, decimating the planet into civil war until the Entities had enough and tired to terminate the cycle early, blowing everything up so they could move onto another, less-hostile universe. But not willing to accept defeat, The Machine said "FUCK YOU" and detonates a planet wide Competence-based nuke that transformed the planet of Earth beyond recognition and injured one of the Entities so bad she's left with eldritch brain damage and eventually crashes into another reality of Earth and goes into a coma after splattering everywhere, this particular Entity in question known as Eden the Thinker.
Stuck in a dead, stagnating universe that has been warped beyond recognition with the remnants of Humanity turned into Elsen and other strange Competence monsters, The Machine languishes... before eventually discovering a human child who has inexplicably managed to survive despite everything. Desperate to have some sort of purpose, itbinds itself to Hugo and fulfills every subconscious desire the boy has, making him a family in The Batter and The Queen and all the other OFF charecters, but this is not enough. Stuck perpetually youthful thanks to Competence, Hugo never physically grows or mentally developed, leading to further stagnation as The Machine could do little but watch an eternity of mundane nothing as it grew more and more frusrated with the reminders of how it had utterly failed at its original duties given to it by it's old creators.
Eventually, something it it snaps, and it gives it's strongest creation, The Batter, a task to end the world and turn everything "OFF" as it can not self-terminate. The Batter as you know succeeds, and as it turns out, the resulting devastation from OFF's universe turing, well, "off", is enough to serve as a detonation akin to the Entities blowing up a Universe, which somehow (don't ask me how, I don't know) propels The Batter to Earth Bet where he intercepts the Queen Administrator Shard and the plot kicks off as The Machine recognizes shards through his eyes and grows beyond it's programming to give itself a new directive, that being...
EXTERMINATE SCION
And... you can probably guess what happens from there in typical Worm-fashion. Escalation, escalation, escalation, until we'd eventually get a rematch with Scion, all the while being Taylor is suffering as she has an elritch machine-not god use her body and mind as its avatar to achieve vengeance, with likely a bittersweet ending assuming I ever got to finish it. It's not something I could write anymore as I've lost interest in both the Worm and OFF fandoms these days, but it's an idea I thought was interesting that I wanted to share in hopes it might seem interesting to others, and as a way to make peace with the fact I've left this fanfic to rot with no intentions of reviving it.
If you did get enjoyment out of this story, whether you be a reader new or old, then I thank you dearly. Even if it was far from my best work and it seemed rather silly at times, I still had fun writing it.
-Neurax