Taylor Varga

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I’m just a slightly over-enthusiastic infinitely variable dinosaur demon slash massive troll who enjoys making people go ‍'‍Um, what the hell?‍'‍ while taking down muggers and other such idiots. —Taylor Hebert

When Taylor Hebert is trapped in her locker by high school bullies, what answers her call for help is not a shard that would grant her a parahuman power but an unnamed Greater Power who after interrogating her bonds her to the Varga, a sapient demon from another universe who just happens to bear a striking resemblance to Godzilla. The Varga offers Taylor power in the form of a magical symbiosis whereby she will become his "brain" -- the controlling mind in their partnership -- and in exchange she will get access to his phenomenal supernatural power. This includes, but is by no means limited to, being able to take the form of a 450-foot-tall Kaiju able "breathe" a Disintegrator Ray with a range (and area of effect) measurable in miles.

Settling on a form closer to human in scale and scope, Taylor takes to the streets of Brockton Bay as "Saurial", a six-and-a-half foot blue lizard girl who takes a certain joy in both messing with people's heads and terrifying the muggers and other criminals she comes across. All manner of rumors swirl around her on ParaHumans Online, and on a whim she picks one and plays into it to add an extra layer of deception to protect her father Danny from potential trouble: she claims to be one member of a Family of Lizard Folk from deep below the sea. Using her shapeshifting she populates the Family with other members of increasing size and power, and hints at more, including a "Big Brother". PHO goes wild. The PRT are concerned and confused. Thinkers who try to analyze the Family run into never-before-seen problems when their powers all but short out around them.

When a chance encounter results in Taylor and Amy "Panacea" Dallon becoming friends, the Family gains its second member -- and Amy gets the opportunity to finally do more with her power than be the healer she'd always pretended was all she could do. Then, after Taylor rescues the Undersiders from a raging Lung and they come under the DWU's protection, Lisa "Tattletale" Wilburn finds herself drawn into the Family as well -- and when Amy creates near-indestructible reptilian bioconstructs she and Lisa can "wear", Saurial's "branch" of the family is joined by their cousins Ianthe and Metis. Meanwhile, Taylor's efforts to create a few non-Euclidean "artifacts" with which to "prove" the antiquity of the Family lead her and the Varga to stumble upon an esoteric mathematics which dovetails neatly into the Varga's magic -- and which results in a (predictable) spiral of escalation in the Family's power and abilities.

And with the Family settling in to the city to stay, the futures of Brockton Bay, the world, and a certain species of interdimensional parasites seems destined for some radical changes for the better. But the road along the way is bound to get pretty bumpy, because not everyone thinks a community of giant lizards is a good idea to have in the neighborhood...

Taylor Varga by "mp3.1415player" is an incomplete but still in-progress (as of Autumn 2022) crossover fic blending Worm with Luna Varga, an obscure four-episode Anime from 1991. It can be read on:

• Sufficient Velocity
• Archive of Our Own
• Fanfiction.net

When mp3.1415player is actively writing, Sufficient Velocity is the primary posting location and will usually have the most up-to-date version. The Archive of Our Own and Fanfiction.net versions have been known to be as much as 500,000 words behind it. As of this writing (September 2022), this continues to be true, with Sufficient Velocity last updated at the end of August 2022 while the other two sites have material that while last updated in January 2022 is current only up to July 30, 2019. It should also be noted that due to the way it organizes the installments and its omakes, the story's chapter numbering on Sufficient Velocity is dramatically different from that Fanfiction.net and AO3 and may appear to the unwary reader to be substantially behind.

The AO3 and Fanfiction.net copies intersperse selected omakes among the chapters of the primary story, and as a result have a different chapter numbering than the primary copy on Sufficient Velocity. On Sufficient Velocity mp3.1415player has used the forum's threadmarks system to organize story material into several categories -- the main storyline, a parallel series omakes (canon and non-canon written by mp3.1415player, as well as "guest omakes" written by readers, some of which have also become canon), as well as apocrypha and references. It is strongly recommended that the reader not ignore the Omake material -- in addition to some really awful puns and shaggy dog stories, "canon" material in the omakes often has an impact on the main story; as well, entire multi-chapter spin-off stories appear in it.

As of October 2022, the Sufficient Velocity version of Taylor Varga has some 500 or so chapters (counting both canon and non-canon omakes) and is in excess of two million words in length.

Several independent sequels and spin-offs exist, at least two of which were born from from the SV omake thread and subsequently promoted to full works on their own:

• The Long Slow Lizarding of Hermione Granger, also by mp3.1415player (AO3 link, Fanfiction.net link)
• Ship of Fools by "Derek M"
  • Demons and Angels, also by "Derek M"
  • The omake series simply entited "Omake - Alternate" (staring here).

There is also a Taylor Varga Discord.

Tropes used in Taylor Varga include:

Note: More than a few of the tropes below make multiple appearances across the story, but the reader should not assume that they represent intentional patterns and/or Brick Jokes on the part of the author -- what you're seeing is far more likely a simple manifestation of the Law of Big Numbers. Taylor Varga is over two million words long, counting all the omakes, as of Autumn 2022. That's the length of about twenty-one novels, using the standard length of 90,000 words for a novel. (And it's not done yet.) Shaped Like Itself, for instance, has six examples over the length of the story as it exists as of this writing. That works out to one example every three novels'-worth of words -- which is not really frequent enough to call it a deliberate pattern or even an artifact of the author's writing style.

A-E

• Accidental Truth:
  • Armsmaster's deliberate attempt at a joke -- about a mysterious undersea sonar trace being one of Raptaur's sisters -- turns out to be unexpectedly prophetic. Lampshaded by Dragon.
  • Ethan/Assault suggest that Vista will become a cute blonde doughnut-loving Eldritch Abomination if she learns the Family's mathematics. This some weeks after the debut of Cloak.
  • In the midst of an NSA taskforce working themselves up into a lather while deciding Danny's an Evil Genius and The Chessmaster, one agent says "It's all somehow tied into the lizards, I think. How, I have no idea right now, but that's my feeling." It's about the only thing anyone at the meeting gets right.
• Achievements in Ignorance: Taylor's final test of the Varga's "blast voice" unintentionally demolishes Saint's secret HQ and eliminates any threat he might pose to Dragon.
• Acid Reflux Nightmare: The chapter "Pranks and Press" begins with Amy apparently waking up from a previously-posted omake, and complaining it was caused by having too many bacon sandwiches during the study session.
• Adaptational Badass: The Varga. Having absorbed the power of the Dark Varga when it was defeated at the end of Luna Varga (along with having the restrictions on it loosened by the Power which merged it with Taylor), the Varga is far more powerful than -- and three times the size -- it was in the series.
• Affectionate Nickname: Taylor dubs Lisa's power "Mr. Thinky". Although Lisa initially rejects this and coins "Miss Fixey" for Amy's power as an example of how silly she thinks it is, she eventually comes to accept the name (which her power seems to like). Amy also ends up using her power's nickname on occasion as well.
• Air Vent Passageway: Coil has deliberately averted this trope by making the ducts in his base too small for even a child to crawl through. Even so, he still considered the possibility for a moment when the Family began their assault on his base sanity base.
• Alien Geometries: Once Taylor and the Varga reach a certain level in their mutual understanding of dimensional mathematics, they become able to create objects with impossible physical properties, whose mere presence is profoundly disturbing to normal humans (except for Vista). They also eventually gain what are effectively new powers as a result of being able to act in more dimensions than the usual three, including seeming to be in two places at once and functional teleportation, and eventually a reasonable simulation of telepathy.
  • This is what's behind their apparent ability to be in two places at once -- it's all one body, except the physical link between them only exists in a higher dimension. They later figure out how to store most of the mass of their minimum physical size (Taylor's human form, basically) in a fractal dimension, allowing them both to take much smaller shapes.
• Alien Space Bats: The unidentified being (called a "Greater Power") who responded to Taylor's call for help in the locker, interrogated her about what she would do if given power, and then merged the Varga with her (while releasing some of the earlier restrictions imposed on him). Its nature and the true scope of its power are the subjects of later discussion between Taylor, the Varga and Amy, but they never reach a conclusion and the topic is eventually shelved.
• All of Them: Taylor's response when asked how many of the city's population has come to see the first scrap train off from the DWU compound. Subverted when Lisa turns and says there are really only about 1200 people present.
• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Inverted with a hero-on-villain attack when the Family turn Coil's base into a mix of horror movie and Looney Tunes. Explicitly invoked when Saurial actually displays the Zero Wing quote on the monitor in Coil's office once they start actively messing with his head.
• All-Encompassing Mantle: Cloak's eponymous cloak. The only part of her body -- if she actually has one -- that anyone's seen are her lizard-like hands. (There's definitely nothing in the hood -- given how many things she's put into and taken out of it, there's no room for a head, not to mention people can look right into it and see that it's empty.)
• Alternate Universe: In the omakes and the Recursive Fanfiction, The Family can eventually reach multiple versions of not only their earth but "fictional" earths as well.
• Always a Bigger Fish: A repeated theme.
  • The "sisters" of the Family are a series of increasingly bigger fish provided by Taylor using increasingly larger forms and slightly less restraint.
  • Lung learns that he is not the biggest, baddest reptile on the East Coast when Kaiju reveals that she is so big and powerful that she can hold a raging Lung in her fist and not feel the slightest need to fight him.
  • Understanding this trope implicitly, Kaiser makes very sure the E88 does not attract the attention of the Family, especially after Kaiju's debut.
• Ambiguously Human/Human Alien/Nonhuman Humanoid Hybrid: Taylor after merging with the Varga. Although she can apparently still breed with other human beings she partakes far more of the Varga's extradimensional/demonic biology than Earth's, including Nigh Invulnerability, Complete Immortality, being an Extreme Omnivore, and possessing four-stranded DNA. Amy's power insists she's not human at all, despite being able to breed with them.
• Anachronic Order: While the majority of the storyline is in perfectly normal chronological order, the various omakes which turn out to be canon end up sprinkling out-of-sequence moments throughout the story (especially on Fanfiction.net and AO3, where they are interspersed through the chapters of the main story), providing scenes and information from well in the future of where they actually appear. For instance, the first mention of Cloak was in a throwaway comment to the effect of "whatever the hell Cloak is" quite a number of chapters before Vista makes her fateful visit to the BBFO offices.
• Animate Inanimate Object: The general perception of what the hero Cloak really is; even though she (occasionally) has visible hands, talks and has been seen to eat (mostly doughnuts), no one has ever seen anything else inside the cloak that gives her her name -- not even inside the hood, which is visibly empty. The PRT and public alike seem to be in uneasy agreement that Cloak is simply an animate piece of clothing.
  • "The Thing" from the omake of the same name.
  • Between Amy's neural amplifier and just being in the presence of the Varga, Parahuman powers start developing personalities and a sense of presence, not to mention true sapience. Especially in Lisa and Amy's cases, they stop being abilities and seem to start being partners with the person who has them.
  • Vectura accidentally uplifts one of her DWU mechs into sentience. "Blue" is about as smart as a smart dog, at least to begin with.
• Another Dimension: Thanks to a stray comment by Leet, Taylor and the Varga figure out how to track powers back to their sources -- which turns out to be "processors" parked on increasingly alternate earths which all appear to have diverged from Brockton Bay's timeline well before humanity evolved.
• Apocalypse How: At one point the Varga and Taylor admit to Amy and Lisa that in the three months they've been merged they have come up with at least a dozen ways to effect a Class 5 Planetary destruction, three of which are actually Class 5 Stellar methods which destroy the "target" planet as a side effect.
• Armor-Piercing Question: "Can you make something that can affect you?" Asked by Danny of Amy, regarding her power, the answer opens up vast new areas of exploration and possibility for her.
• Artistic License Physics: Leet, upon identifying what SaurialSteel actually is (electron-degenerate matter), points out that it is ridiculously impossible -- under earth-normal conditions it should instantly evaporate explosively (its theoretical forms are limited to gas and liquid under stellar core pressures), not to mention it's several orders of magnitude too light to be what it is. It turns out the Varga is (kind of automatically and unconsciously) using magic to stabilize it and reduce its mass -- when as a test they create a javelin without the mass reduction, it instantly punches its way through the earth's crust toward the center of the planet.
• Attack of the Monster Appendage: In one omake, the Simurgh is grabbed and pulled under the bay by a set of monstrous tentacles when a Family member bungles a Summoning Ritual.
• Author Tract: Amy's rants and complaints about the medical industry -- particularly pharmaceutical companies -- late in the extant material, while allegedly about the industry as it exists in Earth Bet, are still remarkably on-target for our Earth.
• Author Vocabulary Calendar: Discussed by Vectura, Lisa and Taylor in the wake of meeting a teenaged fan who says "cool!" a lot.

• Backstab Backfire: When Kaiju won't rise to his attempt to provoke her into a fight and walks away, Eidolon resorts to attacking her from behind (ineffectually). She still won't fight him, but does stop and surround him with pure nitrogen, causing him to pass out from inert gas asphyxiation.
• Badass Family: The Family, from the point of view from everyone else. And given that Taylor, Amy and Lisa (and the Varga) have come to regard themselves as family to each other, for real, as well.
• Badass Longcoat: Danny's birthday present from Taylor, which is made from a recreation of the skin of a long-extinct flying reptile-analog from another world, is armored with EDM, and has pockets that are Bags of Holding, preloaded with a variety of useful items and weapons. It can also fold up into a waist-length jacket.
• Bag of Holding:
  • The pockets of Danny's coat are the first practical use of the dimensional math and magics that Taylor and the Varga are exploring, and Lisa namechecks the Trope Namer when she learns about them.
  • The bracelet Taylor makes for Vista, in which to keep her Cloak gear.
  • Cloak's "face", which is actually an opening to a pocket in the back of her cloak that is, itself, an expanded space.
  • The storage compartments in Ianthe and Metis' armor.
  • The duffel bag Saurial gives Lung.
• Bee-Bee Gun: A .68 caliber Bee Gun shows up in "Omake - LWAT",
• Beware the Nice Ones: Pretty much universally acknowledged by anyone who meets Taylor's reptilian identities: They are friendly, polite, even chirpy at times -- but threaten someone or something important to them, and they become terrifying.
• Big Freaking Gun: "Athena", the absolutely huge "nuclear-powered shotgun" initially designed by Leet, refined by Armsmaster, Dragon and Raptaur, and made real with Raptaur's matter-creation powers.
• Big "What?": From the other Undersiders when Lisa reveals that their boss had been Coil.
• Bigger on the Inside: Family dimensional-folding makes this possible in all manner of containers.
  • Taylor idly expands the basement of the Hebert home into a space sufficient to hold a baseball stadium.
• Biker Babe: Vectura, after she creates her TRON light cycle.
• Bilingual Bonus: "Umihebi", the name of Taylor's "sea serpent" form/identity, is Japanese for "sea serpent". It's later acknowledged by characters who've looked it up, but for a couple dozen chapters the informed reader can grin smugly at them.
  • And of course, there is Kaiju.
• Black and White Morality: Very much Carol Dallon's outlook on life, with "I get to decide who is which" as a cherry on top. For instance, if her adopted daughter Amy, the healer Panacea, isn't working herself to death every minute healing people, she can't possibly be a "real" hero. And because Saurial and Raptaur are scary nonhumans, they're obviously a "bad influence" and probably not the heroes they claim they are. (She does eventually relax somewhat.)
• Black Cloak: Averted by Cloak, who is a hero, odd as she seems, and whose cloak is actually faded from true black to a dark charcoal. Even if Pat the bartender thinks of her as a "tiny ringwraith", and Max Anders calls her a "tiny Death".
• Blade of Fearsome Size: As both Saurial and Raptaur, Taylor makes frequent use of truly immense swords, four and eight feet long (or longer) respectively, and weighing hundreds of pounds since they're made of EDM/"Vargastuff". Raptaur slices a car in half during her debut battle against Hookwolf and barely even notices it.
  • Taylor later makes seven-foot swords for Metis and Ianthe.
  • A pair of similarly-sized EDM blades become part of the "standard equipment" for Vectura's mech design.
• Blazing Inferno Hellfire Sauce: Taylor grows to like Tabasco sauce on pretty much everything, especially raw eggs (in the shell) and titanium. At the end of the first Discworld omake, she takes a six-pack of Wow-Wow sauce home with her. (And gets another at the end of a later omake.)
• Body Language: It's not clear whether it's deliberate, inherent in the reptilian forms, or a combination of the two, but Taylor in any of her Family forms has a body language that screams "not human!" to a reasonably alert observer.
  • When Amy creates the Ianthe and Metis forms, she builds the same body language into their nervous systems.
• Bonus Material: The story is accompanied by little "extras" written by both mp3.1415player and various readers of the story, explicitly labeled as "omake". (On Sufficient Velocities and Space Battles, they have a parallel set of threadmarks, while on AO3 and FFN they periodically punctuate the main story.) Surprisingly, many of them seem to be or actually are labeled as canon for the story, just taking place outside its focus or after its events. A few by other authors are explicitly marked as having been promoted to being "canon".
• Brain-Computer Interface: Vectura invents one that runs on analog electronics for use in her mechs for the DWU. She eventually refines it to the point where she can experience running the mech as though it was her own body.
• Bread, Eggs, Breaded Eggs: On first learning about "Blue", Vectura's accidentally-sentient mech, Kevin/Leet comments (regarding Vectura's Tinker "specialty"), "I didn't know ‍'‍transportation‍'‍ covered AI. Or cats. Or AI cats."
• Bring My Brown Pants: Several references are made by name to the trope, including Mayor Christner's comment regarding Kaiju:

Piggot is going to need the brown pants, isn't she?

• Brown Note:
  • The very nature of Taylor/the Varga does this to Thinker powers.
  • Some of the ... more extreme body shapes Taylor tries have this effect on those who see them -- even the microshoggoth. Lisa in particular seems especially prone to just shutting down when she sees one.
  • The various multi- and fractionally-dimensional constructs Taylor and the Varga create have this effect on most normal humans.
  • The drawings Vista makes after seeing online photos of Danny's birthday present from the Family have this effect on her classmates and teachers. She actually makes one teacher vomit (unintentionally, of course). Amusingly, she doesn't quite realize the actual effect they have on other people.
  • After a little tutoring from Saurial, Vista (as Cloak) can create (or warp existing items into) multi/fractionally-dimensional objects that are also visual brown notes.
• Building Is Welding: In the omake "The Box", among all the other evidence of construction coming from the titular box, there is the sizzle and harsh white light of welding.
• Bullet Catch: Raptaur does this with a rocket-propelled grenade, and then eats it.
• Bullying a Dragon: Given Taylor's reptilian forms, it's often quite literal when she's involved:
  • The first time Vicky/Glory Girl encounters Saurial, who has already gotten a small reputation and is sitting quietly eating a snack on a building roof, she takes out her annoyance with another matter on Saurial and basically tries to start a fight. Saurial refuses.
  • Eidolon does everything he can to start a fight with Kaiju when the Triumvirate meet with her for the first time, up to and including ineffectually attacking her from behind -- this after seeing that she already blows the top off the PRT parahuman ratings scale. Kaiju's only response it to knock him out nonviolently.
  • Although he hasn't actually done anything yet by the end of the material extant in late 2022, Skidmark boasts about how he's going to take out the Family or individual members thereof, and actually goes on an extended road trip across the country to find someone who will sell him a weapon that will let him back up his big words. Everyone else realizes that the best result from this will be Skidmark getting eaten without significant collateral damage.
  • It's clear from passages late in the extant material that certain agencies of both the American and other governments, including at least one so secret it lacks a formal name, want to try this with the Family and think they can get away with it.
    • In a recursive example, said nameless agency attempts to force one of their retired agents -- Erwin the fisherman -- into working on this for them. It doesn't work, and he later makes it clear to the man in charge what will happen if they keep trying to pressure him and/or the Family.
• Buy Them Off: Saurial negotiates a peace between Lung and the Family and the Undersiders by giving him nearly two million dollars in cash and gold, calling it in part wergild for Oni Lee, and agreeing to a Lighthearted Rematch between him and Raptaur.
• By the Power of Grayskull: Averted. The Varga tells Taylor how her predecessor, Princess Luna, would shout "Varga change!" to transform, but notes it's completely unnecessary and she only did it because she thought it was properly dramatic.

• Calling Your Attacks: Invoked by name by the Varga when describing to Taylor the predilection that her predecessor Princess Luna had for shouting unnecessary "activation phrases".
• The Cameo: Stan Lee appears as an old man in sunglasses shouting "Excelsior!" when the scrap train pulls out.
• The Cape: In stark contrast to the general usage of "cape" for a person with powers, Taylor actually becomes an example of this trope -- to the absolute bafflement of the PRT and others who expect parahumans to generally be violent troublemakers always on the lookout for a fight.
• Captured Super Entity: The Varga -- he was a conscripted fighter on the losing side of a ... disagreement ... between the "greater powers", and was essentially bound by the winning side to be a servant to a certain line of humans in another universe. After the last of them dies out, he is stuck until one of the powers pairs him up with Taylor -- and removes most of the restrictions on him.
• Care Bear Stare: Whatever it is about the Varga that seems to have a calming effect with a radius of miles, but is particularly intense in his presence, and which seems to nudge villains into becoming neutral, if not heroes. Three months after Taylor and the Varga merge, the PRT is already noting that two former villain groups are now members of the Dock Workers Union in good standing, and not only are crime and incidents of the near-compulsive Parahuman drive for conflict noticeably reduced in Brockton Bay, even the rate of Trigger events has dropped far below that expected even given the calmer environment.
  • It's also noted that not only does Director Piggot eventually end up on friendly terms with the Family, her well-known bias against Parahumans appears to diminish at the same time.
  • Beyond that, the Varga's presence seems to calm down the conflict impulse in shards exposed to it while somehow "waking them up" to something close to true sapience and gaining their loyalty -- as well as allowing them to create their own semi-independent subnetwork within the entities' network.
  • In one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe omakes, Tony Stark notes that after an extended visit by Saurial, Bruce Banner seems to have relaxed and The Hulk has thoroughly mellowed out.
• Cassandra Truth:
  • Because he's utterly irrational on the topic and practically frothing at the mouth about it, no one believes Saint when he tells them Dragon is an Artificial Intelligence.
  • Erwin, an elderly fisherman with a Mysterious Past, tries to tell people about meeting Kaiju, but no one believes him until she makes her debut moving the wrecked tanker.
• Catgirl: One of the ways Amy makes Linda Morgan different from her previous identity as Squealer is to make her a shapeshifter who can turn into a catgirl, complete with tail.
• Censorware: Dinah notes that there is a web-blocker on her computer (possibly one issued by her school) and that she can circumvent it easily.
• Cheap Costume: Vista buys an old but well-made cloak from a thrift shop to use to hide her identity on the night she first goes to the BBFO offices, as much because it was inexpensive as because it did a very good job of it.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Hints about Danny's (and Annette's) blood relationship to several powerful organized crime families are laid out hundreds of thousands of words before they become important to the story.
  • The fact that the Mayor's office, and later Danny's office at the DWU, both have way over-the-top security against eavesdropping and line-tapping. It eventually plays into the institutional paranoia of all the various organizations and agencies who become convinced that Danny is an extraordinarily subtle and successful crime lord.
  • Taylor and the Varga's realization that they have the ability to strip a Parahuman of their power by destroying the "processor" which provides it hasn't paid off yet, but their discovery wouldn't have been placed center stage if it wasn't going to become important later.
• Chest Insignia: The "Varga Head" emblem on Saurial's armor.
  • Inverted with the "cat head" logo on the back of Vectura's costume.
• Chew Bubblegum: Vista as Cloak, once she gets the right voice:

I am Cloak and I'm here to chew gum and stick nails in your ass. And I'm all out of gum.

• Chicken Walker: Pretty much the base design of Vectura's mechs for the DWU. Plus a tail.
• Chosen Family: The Family. Whether they're in their lizard guise or not, Taylor Hebert, Amy Dallon and Lisa Wilbourn have effectively formed a family unit without actively thinking about it, mostly as an outgrowth of masquerading as cousins in lizard form.
• City of Weirdos: Brockton Bay starts developing this reputation after the Family appear.
• Collapsibile Armor:
  • One of the first dividends from the multidimensional math Taylor and the Varga are exploring is EDM armor for Ianthe and Metis which collapses into a necklace when not in use.
  • Similarly, when it seems likely that the Merchants are going to attack the DWU, Taylor comes up with an EDM fencing system which is stored collapsed into a fractal dimension when not needed, and "unfolds" almost instantly when it is.
• Collapsing Lair: Coil thought he had one. The Family begged to differ.
• Combat Medic: After giving Amy a new, armored costume, Taylor suggests she try her hand at this role.
• Combo-Platter Powers: Taylor basically gets All The Powers from her merger with the Varga. As she demonstrates more innovative ways of using what she already has, Amy notes, "Are you going to leave any powers for the rest of us?"
• Comes Great Responsibility: The unidentified being which responds to Taylor's call for help at the beginning of the story interrogates her about what she would do if given power. Replying "be a hero and help people" is apparently what earns her symbiosis with the Varga.
• Complete Immortality: Upon her merger with the Varga, Taylor became so close to this as to make no difference -- even in human form she could tank a nuclear weapon to the face, and her aging is vastly slowed.
• Confirmation Bias: The multiple agencies and law enforcement organizations "investigating" Danny late in the story are already convinced that he's an amazingly successful and subtle mob boss who's managed to stay off law enforcement radar for decades -- and they interpret everything he does through that filter. And they do so to the point that when they observe agents of other LEOs doing their own investigations, they assume they're Danny's men.
  • Invoked and acknowledged in "Interlude - Those Who Watch The Watchers...", when officials of yet another agency discuss and catalogue all the different agents, both domestic and foreign, who are trying to find criminal wrongdoing in Brockton Bay without any genuine evidence of it.
  • And taken to an extreme degree in "Interlude - Plans within plans within plans...", where we see an NSA taskforce convince themselves that Danny is an Evil Genius running a decades-long master plan, who anticipated their every move six months before they made them -- because the security on a telephone call he made to the actual head of the DWU down in Florida kept them from hearing anything useful.
    • Several times during this segment the ATF agent is told one thing and hears something completely different informed by his preconceptions. When he learns the Family are regulars at Fugly Bob's, he interprets that as meaning they're obviously running a protection racket.
• Construction Is Awesome: The Family loves building and repairing things, to the point that it utterly confuses the PRT and other observers who are used to Parahumans causing destruction everywhere they go. Taylor in particular can't understand why anyone wouldn't enjoy building things, and the Varga just delights in being able to create after being compelled to be a destructive force for millennia.
• Continuation Fic: The Varga enters the story well after the events of Luna Varga.
• Contrived Coincidence: Quite a few show up, especially early in the story:
  • Taylor's trip to the waters off Quebec to test out the Varga's full size form and the blast voice has several -- for instance, they accidentally choose a spot with virtually no surveillance satellite coverage at that hour, keeping anyone from seeing what they were doing (and giving the PRT and Guild massive cases of paranoia about who's hacked into their systems to get the schedule), and they end up unknowingly using the site of Saint's base as a target for their last try of the blast voice.
  • Lampshaded by an unidentified (probably criminal) mastermind and his flunky looking at the events surrounding the DWU and the Family in the chapter "Production and Costume", who between a series of improbable coincidences or an amazingly-complex set of interlocking plans perfectly executed would rather believe in the latter than the former.
  • Some of these may get an Author's Saving Throw, when Taylor herself notes several unlikely coincidences later in the story, and the Varga admits that demons like him have odd effects on causality in their immediate vicinity. He repeats this several more times through the story.
  • Danny's repeated encounters with delivery drivers Benny and Rudy during his trip to New York City; conceivably some of these could also be laid at the Varga's feet, since Danny's been exposed to the demon's effects for several months by that point. But we also discover that Antonio has arranged at least some of them after informing Danny of the "Boss of Brockton Bay" rumors, because it amused him.
  • The language of Rimsbell and Princess Luna, which the Varga teaches to Taylor, is effectively an archaic dialect of Japanese.
  • Not all the coincidences -- caused by the Varga's presence or not -- are to the benefit of the main characters. The attention Danny, the Family and the DWU begin attracting from various law enforcement bodies, militaries, and spy organizations, as well as the literal army of agents they all have converging on Brockton Bay, are the result of a similar series of coincidences synergizing with these groups' inherent Confirmation Biases.
• Cool Bike: Vectura's TRON light cycle. Everyone who sees it wants one.
• Cool Car:
  • The Hard Light car that Vectura's "omnivehicle" can manifest when it's not being a light cycle (or anything else).
  • The practically mint condition Jaguar XKSS found in one of the junk-filled warehouses on the DWU lot. Lisa's research reveals that it basically belongs to Danny, having been given to his father by his grandfather, and mothballed when it broke down and the mechanic died.
• Cool Gate: The completed wormhole mechanism and the WCC, the facility in which it's installed.
  • Averted by "The Thing" in "Omake - The Thing", which unnerves everyone except Vista, who thinks it's beautiful.
• Could Say It, But...: Once she gets her neural amplifier (and after being exposed to whatever it is that the Varga's presence does), Lisa discovers that her power at least tries to do this about certain topics it seems it's forbidden from approaching. On Family speculation about those topics, she reports her power "rolls its eyes", "gives a thumbs up" or provides other telling reactions to their theories and thoughts, without producing any of its own.
  • The DWU guards regularly do this when certain visitors to the Family want to do so "unofficially" -- even going so far as to explain in a roundabout way how it works to someone new to the process.
• Covered in Gunge: The members of Faultline's crew came back covered in slime from the mission that kept them out of Brockton Bay for the whole of the Family's rise.
• Crazy Enough to Work:
  • How Mayor Christner characterizes Danny (and Taylor)'s plan to clear the harbor and reinvigorate the city economy.
  • It's also Amy's reaction to Danny's Armor-Piercing Question about using her power to make something to affect herself the way her power can't do directly.
  • Amy's opinion of the idea of modifying the Ianthe and Metis constructs' brains to make it easier for her and Lisa to learn a non-human language.
• Crazy Prepared: All the stuff that Taylor crams into the Bag of Holding pockets of Danny's coat, as part of the birthday gift -- everything from water to weapons.
• Creation Myth: In the chapter "Interlude - Campfire Tails" the Family decides they ought to have one. The Varga tells one which is probably the true story of his people's origins.
• Credits Gag: The very fact that the video the Family provides the PRT of their actions against Coil has credits is a gag in itself, but no one complains. (Piggot rather enjoys seeing herself billed as "Badass PRT Director".)
• The Cuckoolander Was Right:
  • Erwin the fisherman regarding the presence of "the big scaly lass" in Brockton Bay.
  • Jormungandr on PHO and his insistence that The Family are demons. Then again, he is actually Leviathan, and has access to everything the Shards have figured out about The Family. Not that that's very much.
• Cue the Flying Pigs: The revelation that the sonar trace Dragon and Armsmaster have been investigating is one of The Family not long after Armsmaster's deliberate attempt to make a joke about that very possibility.
• Curb Stomp Battle: Any fight Taylor gets in. And she scales the level of curb stomp to match the opposition.
• Cute Kitten: The Simurgh loves cat videos on the Internet.
• Cute Little Fangs: Vectura in her Changer form.

• De-Power: Once they figure out how to find and view the "processors" behind Parahuman powers, Taylor and the Varga also realize they have the ability to strip someone of their powers, by destroying the planet on which their shard resides with one of the dozen or so ways they know of to do so.
• Dead Hand Shot: While studying the submerged remains of Andrew Richter's home and its surrounding neighborhood in what used to be Newfoundland, Taylor, Amy and Lisa come across a human bone sticking out of some wreckage. Amy identifies it as the femur of a ten-year-old child. Taylor finds the sight -- and what it stands for -- so disturbing that it leaves her tearfully musing hours later on her impotence in the face of such destruction, despite all the power she has now that she's merged with the Varga. Amy, too, is affected by it and takes a while to come to terms as well.
• Deface of the Moon: Leet warns Dragon that his recreation of the BFG10K from Quake could quite possibly blow a hole through the moon. This may be an exaggeration, though not much of one; when Leet upgrades it substantially later in the story, he is seriously concerned about the possibility of damaging the moon with it.
• Defictionalization: In-Universe:
  • Taylor seizes on the idea of the Family from a PHO post and runs with it.
  • Subsequently, the gradual adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's works into parts of The Family's backstory, culminating in the plan to build an actual non-Euclidean city deep under the Atlantic.
  • The first non-Euclidean objects Taylor and the Varga create are in pursuit of this defictionalization.
• Demonic Possession: The subject of humor after Taylor and Varga figure out how to give Varga (temporary) control of Taylor's body -- she jokes about how a demon is possessing her body. Later Danny asks which one of them is actually possessing the other.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?:
  • When it isn't outright celebration, this is the reaction of the residents (and tourists) of Brockton Bay to Kaiju's debut: the appearance of Godzilla-Lite to perform a salvage operation -- which she pauses to play-act for the entertainment of the crowds -- somehow fails to be terrifying, and instead becomes awesome in both the ancient ("awe-inspiring") and modern ("way cool!") senses.
  • Lisa has a similar reaction to discovering that a prolific poster on PHO with whom she's exchanged messages, and who is looking for someone to help with a man who is forcing her and her family to do dubiously criminal things they don't want to do, is in fact the Simurgh.
  • Once Taylor and the Varga figure out how to find and look at the "processors" that give Parahumans their powers, Lisa, Amy and Linda's shards all seem happy to "meet" them, forming patterns of lights across their massive structures that the Family members interpret as "waving".
• Didn't Think This Through: Missy doesn't exactly consider the consequences of a doughnut binge made on one of her first nights out as Cloak, and ends up with a very bad, very long-lasting stomachache plus a sugar crash as a result. It does nothing to dissuade her from future doughnut consumption, though.
• Dilating Door: The secret "tunnel" created by Taylor and the Varga between the bay and the BBFO offices opens in the latter through a massive irising opening in the floor of a dimensionally-expanded room.
• Dimensional Traveler: By the end of the extant main text the Family has barely figured out how to look at other universes, but various canon omake show them visiting other universes to do such things as restoring the Goblet of Fire to its proper role as a furnace burner for Hogwarts, hunting a magical monster loose in Ankh-Morpork, hanging out with the Avengers, annoying Batman, rescuing a version of Apollo 13 and giving its earth a "Rosetta stone" of math and science, visiting parallel versions of Brockton Bay and doing Speed Runs of fixing all their problems, and... going to SF/Fantasy conventions. Apparently future!Brockton Bay is home to a Family-run corporation which has fingers in a multitude of interdimensional pies.
• Dirty Business: How the Family views shutting down the Merchants. They had no intention of perturbing the balance of power between Brockton Bay's various gangs, but Skidmark decided to target them -- so they took out his entire gang to remove his support. Even so, they did it efficiently and non-lethally.
  • Taylor feels this way about killing the empty shell of Squealer's body to make it look like she'd been murdered by one of the Merchants. It continues to bother her for several days afterward even though there was nobody "in there".
• Disintegrator Ray: The Varga's "blast voice", which has a range of eight to ten miles.
• Distant Reaction Shot: Armsmaster feels a chill of worry right after Über and Leet (miles away) decide to recruit Taylor for some fun.
• Do Not Taunt Cthulhu: A number of agencies from both the American and other governments have to be firmly given this message when they start investigating the DWU/the Family -- especially those trying to acquire some kind of leverage over the Family.
• Don't Call Me "Sir"!: Danny repeatedly requests that members of the DWU not call him "Boss" (or "padrone", or anything else that suggests he has a higher position in the Union than hiring manager). They good-naturedly acknowledge his requests and keep on doing it.
• Don't Try This At Home: In one omake where the Family makes a web series about destroying planets, they repeatedly warn the viewership not to try what they demonstrate at home. "Leave planetary detonations to the professionals, kids!"
• Doomy Dooms of Doom:
  • In her private thoughts, Emily Piggot calls the anti-Endbringer weapon designed by Armsmaster and Dragon around EDM as the "nuclear shotgun of doom".
  • When Amy finally creates a stand-alone biomodification/healing unit, she jokes that she will call it "The Pod of Doom".
  • At one point Mandy declares "Math Girl will become unstoppable with the Family Math of DOOM!"
  • Chris/Kid Win privately refers to one of his Tinkering creations as "the doughnut maker of Missy-doom".
• Doorstopper: As of Autumn 2022 it's over two million words long in several hundred chapters.
• Double Entendre/If You Know What I Mean: The conversation between Amy and Dennis the morning after her first night out with Taylor. When he tries to embarrass her, she simply outdoes him and gives it right back.
• Dragon Rider: Once the Family gains dragon members like Breksta, it was inevitable that certain people would get rides -- like Danny and Lucy.
  • Lucy actually becomes a minor celebrity when Breksta drops her off at her doorstep after rescuing her from a mugging, and the entire neighborhood notices. (Not to mention PHO.)
  • Breksta makes another appearance at Arcadia and school is basically suspended so everyone can get a turn riding her.

• Earthshattering Kaboom: Three months after they merged, Taylor and the Varga have worked out at least a dozen ways to implement one.
• Eaten Alive:
  • Early in the story, the Varga is always quick to suggest simply eating enemies and obstacles. While he gets out of the habit after getting more acculturated to modern Earth, it never actually stops being an option, as the Family take pains to inform anyone who might push them too far.
  • Thomas "Coil" Calvert suffers a non-fatal version when he is carefully herded into Umihebi's mouth as he tries to escape his Elaborate Underground Base. He passes out just as she closes her jaws.
• Elaborate Underground Base:
  • Coil's base under the center of downtown Brockton Bay. An "abandoned" Endbringer shelter, it's been secretly expanded to at least twice its original planned size, with multiple hidden exits, its own air and power supplies, and a troop of mercenaries to guard and defend it. More than once someone compares Coil to a Bond villain.
  • Dragon's creator Andrew Richter had a repurposed cold war bomb shelter in Newfoundland which he used as his lab/workshop, and in which Dragon was "born"; overbuilt to military specifications to resist even a nearby nuclear explosion, it managed to survive (although not perfectly) the sinking and flooding of the island. The Family searches it to find any information they can use to help free Dragon from the restrictions and limitations imposed on her by the paranoid Richter.
• Eldritch Abomination:
  • Taylor and the Varga are this to the Endbringers and at least some of the shards -- impossibly powerful and utterly alien creatures whose very nature is unknown and unknowable, and whose presence is terrifying if not outright madness-inducing.
  • Ethan/Assault suggest that Vista will become a cute blonde doughnut-loving one if she learns the Family's mathematics.
• The End of the World as We Know It: Shortly after Ianthe's debut, Taylor admits to Danny that she and the Varga not only have the power, but have figured out specific ways, to not only sterilize the planet but scour it down to bare rock. She is frankly terrified of having that capability, but also knows it's not something she's ever going to do.
  • In another passage, Lisa notes that she can easily see a half-dozen ways Taylor can bring about the end of the world just with what Lisa knows about her, and presumes there are many other options available she has yet to learn enough to realize.
  • In one omake, the Family makes a web series about different forms of planetary destruction, which they call WorldBusters.
• Enemy Rising Behind: Becomes an all-too-common experience for gang members and criminals in Brockton Bay.
• Engaging Conversation: Alec of the Undersiders asks Panacea to marry him after she heals him.
• Engineered Public Confession: Taylor and Danny's successful plan to reveal (and record) her tormentors at Winslow results in this.
• Entertainingly Wrong: There's a lot of this going around.
  • PHO's first collective guesses about the nature of Saurial are (mostly) wildly off-base, but Taylor decides to embrace them and run with them, in the process creating the Family and its "history" that predates the Dawn of Man.
  • Similarly, the PRT's initial attempts to figure out the Family. Followed by their erroneous but perfectly reasonable "discovery" that they're extraterrestrials, thanks to genetic evidence planted by Amy.
  • The conclusions a pair of deliverymen from New Jersey, dropping off non-lethal munitions provided by Antonio, a Hebert family friend who is an actual mob boss, make about just what's going on at the DWU. This is subtly encouraged for his own amusement by Mark, and Zephron's insistence on addressing Danny as "padrone" certainly doesn't help. And then the drivers overhear a conversation between Alec and Brian where Alec boasts of getting a headshot on someone in the unspoken context of a video game. The drivers leave with a lot of misconceptions about the DWU and Brockton Bay. And they're encouraged by the real mob boss for the amusement value.
    • It stops being "entertaining" when thanks to some Idiot Ball-holding, a number of law enforcement agencies come to similar conclusions and start trying to infiltrate the DWU so they can bust the "smuggling" and "money-laundering" operations they are sure have to have been going on there for decades.
  • Vicky, trying to figure out the connection between Saurial and Taylor, eventually concludes the two were raised together when thanks to Taylor's dual-aspect trick both she and Saurial attend a study session.
  • Similarly, Sophia concludes that Taylor and Saurial had to have known each other for years, based on videos of how Taylor took down a would-be car-jacker, and that Taylor had to have let herself be bullied at Winslow as part of a Long Con.
• Epiphany: Lisa describes Sherrel/Squealer as having had an unpleasant one.
• Eureka Moment: A couple show up:
  • Danny's Armor-Piercing Question to Amy gives her the inspiration she needs to finally fully express her potential.
  • A stray comment from Leet about his failed shield generator gives Taylor and the Varga the clue to tracking back powers to their sources.
• Everyone Has Standards:
  • Not that it's hard in this case, but Amy is so offended by villainous biotinkers like Nilbog that as Ianthe she invents an entire guild with ethical standards that consider him beyond the pale and a traitor to their profession.
  • Skidmark so offends several Mafia families while looking for a weapon to use against the Family that they all put prices on his head.
• Everything's Better with Princesses: In his discussion with Dragon, the Varga as "Big Brother" styles Saurial as "the youngest princess of Rimsbell".
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: Max "Kaiser" Anders simply cannot understand why the Family does things like idly repairing roads and other infrastructure without telling anyone. He's certain they must have some kind of long-term plan that benefits them -- after all, he would -- but he cannot make heads or tails out of their actions. He simply cannot imagine that the Family doesn't have a secret motive behind their actions.
  • The National Security Agency can't understand the Family's altruism, either, and can only assume a secret criminal reason for it.
• Evil Genius: The National Security Agency suspects Danny is one -- "damn near a real life Moriarty" -- executing a decades-long master plan.
• Evil Laugh: Taylor and Amy share one, complete with hand-rubbing, just before they begin the project that results in the creation of Ianthe.
• Exact Words: Taylor gets very adept at answering questions about the Family and their relationship with the Heberts with strictly true but deliberately misleading statements.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: Cloak, from most people's perspectives.
• Explosive Stupidity: Oni Lee's death comes of this, although the Undersiders manipulated him into it -- he would normally teleport in, pull the pins on a pair of grenades, and teleport out leaving a clone holding the grenades. The Undersiders used smoke grenades and other means to make his usual tactic less than effective against them, until in frustration he pulled the pins before he teleported -- into a cloud of Knockout Gas. He passed out almost immediately, the grenades went off, setting off at least one other on his belt, and blew him to bits.
• Exposition Diagram: To explain who knows what (and which secrets) about the Family to Kevin and Randall (Über and Leet), Taylor draws an elaborate, multilevel diagram. This diagram is a mix of types 1 and 2 -- it really exists, and Taylor actually drew it, but she created the board it was written on and the marker she wrote with out of thin air with the Varga's matter creation power.
• Exposition of Immortality: As part of building the false history of the Family, during one of her first public appearances Ianthe lets drop a comment which could (deliberately) be interpreted as meaning she last visited the Brockton Bay area during the most recent Ice Age.
• Expy: Doctors Whitney and Franklin from the PRT are blatant expies of Jamie Hyneman and Adam Savage of MythBusters.
• Extreme Omnivore: Taylor in any of her reptilian forms (and in her human form, too). She appears able to eat literally anything, including scrap metal and radioactive waste. (She thinks Chlorine trifluoride is delicious.) Better yet, anything she eats, she and the Varga analyze and can reproduce with her matter creation powers.
  • Lisa as Metis finds herself idly tasting chemicals, just because.

F-J

• Face Fault: Taylor literally falls over when she sees the amount of money offered by Winslow to settle any potential legal issues with her bullying.
• Failed a Spot Check:
  • Clockblocker fails to notice Saurial sneaking up to him with a bottle of Tabasco sauce in her hand during one of her first nights out.
  • Vicky and several of their friends, while sneaking up on Amy on the Boardwalk, don't notice that Ianthe is stalking them (even though pretty much the entire crowd around them has).
• Fainting:
  • Lisa initially has trouble dealing with Taylor's revelations about herself, even when they're staged and revealed gradually. She faints so often during one particular evening that the Varga suggests that the chair she's in needs a seat belt. However, rather than being a result of either her psychology or her physiology, these faints appear to be caused by her power basically crashing and rebooting on being confronted with new, indecipherable data about Taylor and the Varga.
  • As a result of Taylor and the Varga's custom-crafted psy ops campaign against him, Thomas "Coil" Calvert suffers something between an Emotional Faint and The Monster Faint multiple times during the course of the Family/PRT assault on his base. And again when he gets a look at Umihebi from the outside.
  • Speaking of Umihebi, one PRT trooper passes out when she abruptly appears to deliver Calvert to the PRT.
• Faking the Dead: In order to give Squealer a fresh start away from the Merchants or any potential entanglements with the PRT or law enforcement, Amy/Ianthe builds her a new body and moves her brain into it, and puts a non-sapient "dummy" brain in her old body. Taylor then arranges to make it appear that she was murdered by one of the Merchants.
• Family Eye Resemblance: The different branches of the Family have them: the members of Saurial's branch all have glowing orange eyes, while Ianthe and Metis share glowing green eyes (deliberately engineered by Amy as an "identifying feature" for their branch).
• Fantastic Racism: In addition to Piggot's, which came from the source material, there is also the commander of Coil's mercenaries, one Captain John Smith, who also hates parahumans. He has any potential new members of his command tested for the brain structures that make powers possible, and refuses to hire anyone who has them.
• Featureless Plane of Disembodied Dialogue:
  • The initial design of Metis is presented entirely as lines of dialogue, with no description of action or setting.
  • "Canon Omake - Another Discussion" is also presented this way.
  • Skidmark's conversations with whoever it is providing him with a weapon to use against the Family.
• Feed the Mole: When clearing out the double agents they found during their security sweep before raiding Coil's base, the PRT left some of his agents in place so as not to alert him and to feed them disinformation.
• Filk Song: The chapter "Guest Omake - Taylor's Shanty" is composed entirely of "The Beast of Brockton Bay", a parody of the song "The Beast of Pirate's Bay".
• First Contact: What the PRT belatedly realizes it is caught up in after analyzing the first biological sample of The Family they get their hands on (poison darts engineered by Amy in part specifically for that purpose). They reluctantly acknowledge that The Family are not parahumans, and could not possibly have evolved on Earth.
• First-Name Basis:
  • Danny insists on being on a first-name basis with just about everyone (at least that he likes and trusts), regardless or age or relative social status.
  • Amy grows into this, too, frequently telling people to call her by name rather than Sobriquet (especially if she's out of costume).
• Flock of Wolves: Happens on a small scale in an interlude where an ATF investigator and an agent of the Office of Naval Intelligence, both undercover, encounter each other in Brockton Bay and each believes the other works for "Boss Hebert" and is attempting to entrap them into revealing their true identities.
• For Want of a Nail:
  • First off, the difference in Taylor's empowerment sends the course of events spiraling wildly into a new, and generally better, direction.
  • On a smaller scale (or, arguably, a second-order effect of the greater changes) Danny proposing the harbor cleanup plan to Mayor Christner indirectly leads the Mayor to discover that his niece Dinah is a parahuman; within a couple days she joins the Wards.
• Foreshadowing:
  • Lots of it appear around Lisa (and the Undersiders) regarding the Lung incident.
  • Similarly, there's a lot of foreshadowing about Danny's family connections, which don't become story relevant until about a million words after the first hint.
• Frame-Up: Taylor arranges things such that it appears that one of the Merchants murdered Squealer, as part of getting her away and into a new identity.
• Friend on the Force:
  • Lung, of all people, has one in Legend.
  • Legend is also a Friend on the Force for Don Antonio Castiglione, as is Assault -- although it's clear that Assault is a former villain, rebranded and relocated, so their connection dates back to a time when they were both on the same side of the law.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: The Dock Workers Union, from the point of view of every other faction in the city outside of the general population. As a direct (if unobvious) result of Taylor's merger with the Varga, the DWU goes from the last vestige of a dead industry refusing to acknowledge its own impending death to a political/economic powerhouse kickstarting Brockton Bay's economy and fielding one of the largest teams of parahumans in the city, organized around the absolutely terrifying members of The Family. The ABB stays out of the docks, the E88 refuse to upset them and even the local PRT treads lightly around them. Only the Merchants make the mistake of causing trouble with the DWU, mostly because they're too drugged-up to know better, with the result that as a gang the Merchants simply cease to exist.

• Gaslighting:
  • When the assault on Coil's Elaborate Underground Base goes into active mode, the first thing Taylor and the Varga do is cast the "Assassin's Cloak" spell on the doors to the armory, the computer room, and the power room, essentially "removing" these three vital rooms from the base's floorplan and depriving Coil's mercenaries of both supplies and locations to guard. Even earlier, they had hidden the base's medical bay the same way. Then they start using their spatial warping abilities to add rooms and manipulate corridors, until Coil is panic-stricken and the mercenaries can do nothing but fall back to the cafeteria to entrench -- those that hadn't already been taken away secretly and silently from under their squad leaders' noses.
  • "Omake - They're Everywhere" is an account of an imaginative and successful (non-canon) gaslighting of Sophia Hess by the Family.
• Generic Graffiti: Aisha Laborn creates a "Varga-head" stencil based on Saurial's Chest Insignia and starts painting it on and over Empire Eighty-Eight tags, to the consternation (and utter terror) of the gang's foot soldiers.
• Genre Savvy: Trevino, one of the mercenaries in Coil's employ, is black, and for that reason refuses to go first into a dark room from which creepy sounds have emanated: "I've seen this movie, I know what happens to the black guy. Fuck that. Someone else can take point. I'll cover them."
  • Played with moments later by McMichaels, who tries to get out of being point by virtue of being Irish. It doesn't work.
• Gentle Giant: Taylor in all of her Family forms. Even the smallest is taller than the average human male, and they all share her calm, forgiving outlook. Just don't harm anyone she considers family or friends...
• Girl Scouts Are Evil: A would-be infiltrator of the DWU dispatched by the E88 gang instead gets savagely beaten to within an inch of his life by a girl scout.
• Giver of Lame Names: The unnamed mother of Michelangelo Donatello Castiglione, whom Antonio notes in passing is no longer allowed to name a baby without someone else in the room who has veto power.
  • Late in the extant material, the Varga suggests that Taylor is this after a few examples. Ianthe/Amy, at least, agrees.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: Common to every one of Taylor's reptilian forms, and apparently something she can't get rid of. As Saurial she initially wears custom sunglasses to hide them and keep from freaking people out. (Later, the citizenry of Brockton Bay are far more blasé about glowing reptilian eyes.)
• Good with Numbers: Taylor. Before merging with the Varga she was already better than average at math, but afterwards became far more proficient and became an instant calculator capable of doing advanced calculus in her head. She also demonstrates a talent at teaching math, organizing regular tutoring sessions for her friends from Arcadia. Eventually she moves well past AP Math and into truly esoteric maths that she and the Varga can implement to expand their existing powers into even more powerful and versatile modes.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck: In an odd incidence, Lisa says "Poor Armsmaster will poo a brick" when he sees the DWU's new Family-made fence.
• Gravity Master: The Varga. Virtually every piece of Vargastuff is the recipient of an effect that reduces its density (and thus its weight) from millions of tons to just seventy grams per cubic centimeter.
• The Grim Reaper: Played with. The first time the Family meets Vista, who to hide her identity is wearing the cloak that will shortly become her alternate hero persona, Saurial creates and hands her a scythe then insists she's Death -- for a little while, at least.
  • After Cloak follows the Family tradition of trolling Max Anders in his penthouse, Anders subsequently refers to her as a "tiny Death" every time he thinks about her.

• Hammerspace: Saurial tells Vista that with practice she'll be able to make a proper anime storage pocket.
• Hangover Sensitivity: Sarah and Carol the morning after a long drunk and heart-to-heart over how Carol has been treating her adopted daughter Amy badly. And deservedly so.
• Hard Light: As part of her PRT testing, Vectura builds a multiform vehicle which uses hard light to produce its various forms. The first form she demonstrates with it is a TRON lightcycle.
• Head Transplantation: Amy moves Sherrel/Squealer's brain into a new custom-made body as part of a plan to give her a new start without any Merchant entanglements. She also makes a new, but non-thinking, replacement brain for her old body to help with the deception.
• Healing Factor: Amy creates a semi-living symbiote which can give this ability to anyone. She tries the first one, and its next sixteen variations, on herself. Danny Hebert becomes the first other person to receive one.
• Heel Face Turn: Something about Taylor, the Varga and/or their general attitude seems to inspire this in villains.
  • After she rescues them from Lung, the Undersiders (who were unwilling villains to start with) give up any inclination toward villainy and settle down as part of the DWU (and Lisa becomes part of the Family).
  • Über and Leet reluctantly realize that they can have just as much fun, get to do cool projects with Armsmaster, Dragon and Legend, and make scads of money by going legit as part of the BBFO. (They also are hoping to get their own Family bioconstructs.) They're not happy about apparently "growing up", but can't deny the benefits.
  • Metis saves Squealer of the Merchants from OD'ing, and when she asks for help, the Family arranges to spirit her out of the Merchants' base, give her a new body and identity, and set her up with a dream workshop when she expresses a vehement desire to not get caught up in villainous activity ever again.
• Heroic BSOD:
  • Armsmaster briefly suffers one when he spots a fragment of Dragon's probe, which was eaten by Umihebi, sitting on Danny Hebert's desk, neatly mounted with a plaque.
  • When she first learns of BBFO, LLC, Vicky actually cites the trope: "I bet Piggot will blue-screen when she hears about it."
• Hidden Depths: Vicky. Despite her reputation as "Collateral Damage Barbie', she turns out to be very perceptive about the relationship between the Heberts and the Family, noticing how Danny treats Saurial much like he treats his own daughter, Taylor.
• Hollywood Heart Attack: Piggot has two in rapid succession as a result of Dragon and Armsmaster reporting on the capture of Saint -- and the existence of Umihebi.
• Honest John's Dealership: Carol, Amy and Taylor visit several when shopping for a car for Amy.
• Horrifying the Horror: The effect Taylor and the Varga have on the Endbringers. Behemoth hides at the center of the earth; Leviathan desperately tries to stay at the farthest point on the earth from them, and the Simurgh does her best to keep to the highest orbit she can reach. The latter nopes out of an attack the moment Taylor arrives on the site.
• Hurricane of Puns:
  • When he gets home from meeting Kaiju for the first time, Legend's partner subjects him to a storm of "foot" puns.
  • Taylor and the Varga trade flight puns just before trying to fly as Breksta.
  • Pretty much all of "Omake - LWT".
• Hyperspace Mallet: Taylor's ability to just create war hammers at will effectively implements this trope, but it gets literal when she adds folded-space storage to Ianthe and Metis' armor and gives them war hammers of their own.

• I Can't Believe I'm Saying This: In reaction to Kaiju's debut, Max "Kaiser" Anders remarks "They've basically got their own Endbringer, and it's a union member." He then adds that he can't believe he actually said that.
• I Can't Hear You: Leet and Über briefly deafen themselves with the first test of the sound system they use for Kaiju's debut.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Dr. Torres' flat explanation of why he called in Panacea to heal Piggot after her two heart attacks, despite her well-known dislike of parahumans and previous refusal of parahuman healing.
• I Have Many Names: Pretty much anyone who joins, or sometimes even just associates with, The Family, ends up with multiple identities and names. Taylor tops the list with her human face and her reptilian forms: Saurial, Raptaur, Kaiju, Umihebi, Breksta and Varga (as of August 2022). (It helps her maintain the façade when she eventually learns how to be in two -- or more -- places at once.) She's also playfully called "Math Girl" by her friends at Arcadia.
  • Amy, who is Panacea, Ianthe and Nike. And "The Amy".
  • Lisa Wilbourn, who is Tattletale, Metis and a dragon to be named later. (An omake gives her dragon the name "Ramoth"; given the canonicity of other omakes, this is likely to be her actual name.)
  • Missy Biron, aka Vista and Cloak.
  • As of the end of the extant material, Leet and Über aren't far from getting their own Family construct bodies and corresponding names/identities. They just can't decide on what they want to be.
• I Know You Know I Know: Dean and Taylor, when their respective powers allow them to identify each other in their civilian identities and realize that the other has worked it out.
• I Meant to Do That: Saurial in the first "water rocket" omake.
• I Need a Freaking Drink: Numerous instances.
  • Emily Piggot revels in being able to actually indulge this impulse after Panacea heals her. It seems like almost every PRT meeting where the Family is discussed ends with her needing a drink and saying so.
  • Carol Dallon's reaction when her sister Sarah begins giving her a What the Hell, Hero? speech about how she's been treating her adopted daughter Amy.
  • Everyone at the end of the first Stargate SG-1 omake.
  • At the end of an omake chapter focused on Cauldron, Alexandria exits the scene by muttering "Door to tequila".
  • Even the Simurgh gets one: when as "Winged One" she sees a photo of Danny's "birthday gift" from the Family on PHO, she posts that she wished she drank, and as a result of seeing it, just might start.
  • In omakes set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, this is the usual response Tony Stark has to meeting members of the Family.
  • An unnamed high-level official in the CIA finds she has a need to slam back two fingers of unidentified liquor after she learns just how many members of the DWU are "lost" or "dead" former intelligence agents or military from around the world, and that the agency has started to receive pressure to stop investigating Danny Hebert and the Union.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Danny discovers that the parents of Emma Barnes, Sophia Hess, and Madison Clements have been invited to his meeting with Principal Blackwell of Winslow High because she thought representatives of all the involved parties should be present. He points out that he never mentioned any of their names when speaking to her, leaving unsaid the obvious implication that Blackwell was already aware of the circumstances -- and perpetrators -- of Taylor's bullying.
• I Shall Taunt You: A good-natured instance can be found in Raptaur instructing Vicky in demolition:

Don't make a mistake or I'll have to dig you out, which will make me then be very sarcastic and mock you for days.

• I'm Standing Right Here: In the wake of his unwarranted attack on Kaiju, Alexandria and Legend discuss Eidolon as though he weren't present at least twice, ignoring his complaints about the treatment both times.
• Idiot Ball:
  • In her desperate attempt to quash any hint of Taylor's bullying (and her complicity in it) getting out, Principal Blackwell of Winslow High makes one stupid (and revealing) mistake after another even in the face of an Engineered Public Confession and her I Never Said It Was Poison moment cited above, including threats to destroy the evidence and call the police on Danny.
    • When Emily Piggot calls her on the carpet a week later, Blackwell keeps trying ill-thought-out maneuvers and claims as a way of wiggling out of responsibility, until Piggot shuts her down entirely.
  • All of New Wave has been carrying the Idiot Ball for years regarding Amy/Panacea -- she's both The Medic and a Squishy Wizard, but no one thought to give her anything more than a light cotton outfit to wear in the field. Only the fact that even most villains refuse to target her has saved her from a messy end. Taylor corrects this.
  • The various law enforcement agencies who start trying to get agents into the DWU under the mistaken conclusion it's a mob front. They almost all do this based on a) Danny's family history, and b) "inconsistencies" that their existing intelligence already show are the result of the Family using its powers for the DWU. Given all the evidence that Danny is, in fact, clean and the DWU is completely on the level, they all conclude that it just means Danny is a genius at hiding his illegal activities.
• The Igor: In what becomes a Running Gag, Taylor plays this role for Amy whenever she sets off to do some biosculpting, complete with hunched posture, dragging leg, and distinctive lisp.

Yeth, mithtreth...

• Imagination-Based Superpower: Taylor has two -- her "infinitely variable dinosaur" shapeshifting, and her matter-creation power, for both of which the possibilities are literally limitless.
• Immune to Bullets: ...and rocket-propelled grenades, and anti-tank missiles, and nukes... Taylor in any of her reptilian forms (and in her human form, too).
  • Amy builds all her bioconstructs almost as resistant to damage as Taylor (and Taylor provides armor to make up the difference).
  • Amy's enhancements to the human forms of the Family and their friends and relations make them, while not bulletproof, unlikely to be seriously injured by bullets.
• In Memoriam: The chapter "Guns and Ammo":

This chapter is dedicated to the memory of Becuzitswrong, an excellent fellow author who sadly passed away far too young on the 19th of September, 2016

• Incompetence, Inc.: Cauldron, in the opinion of the Family. As they're first putting together clues on them, thanks to Faultline -- including the incredibly blatant Visual Pun in the tattoos found on Case 53 Parahumans -- the Varga, as Raptaur, describes them as a conspiracy "that thinks it's much more clever than it really is" and notes that their known actions already speak "of a mix of arrogance and stupidity". Even with the limited information they have on them, the Family concludes that Cauldron is "simply incompetent and either preposterously lucky or have enough applicable Parahuman abilities to compensate for their deficiencies."
  • The Simurgh seems to agree with them, noting in one passage (where she is the viewpoint character) that Cauldron

... seemed to have a genuine talent for determining a number of alternative actions then settling on the least effective one. Almost every positive thing they’d managed had been accidental, and often they succeeded despite their own actions rather than because of them.

• Incredibly Lame Pun:
  • The punchline to an omake about a "flash mob"-style effort to mess with Emily Piggot: "Danger - Mimefield."
  • Taylor commits one (with just a touch of physical comedy) during the first group math tutoring session/movie night at the Hebert home:

"Why don't we watch this to put us in a good mood, then Taylor can spread her mathematical largesse over us in a thick layer, after which we can do the movie thing," Amy suggested, holding up a USB stick. "I don't have a largesse, do I?" Taylor asked quizzically in a worried tone, looking down and back.

• Danny gets his own in when he suggests Kaiser could switch from professional Nazi to making lightbulbs and thus run the world:

"Surely you've heard that the world is secretly ruled by the IllumiNazi?"

• Ianthe gets one so bad at the end of "Omake - Cleanup" that we're not even going to reproduce it here.

• • The punchline to "Omake - Weather 'tis Nobler": "Hail, Kaiser."
  • Likewise the punchline to "Omake - Personal Defense".
  • Actually, entirely too many of the omakes, both canon and non-canon, exist simply to deliver a punning punchline.
  • Vectura's "rail gun".
  • Taylor creates a recipe for savory cookie-like pastries, and names them "ceteras", so people can make "I et cetera" jokes. Danny of course gets it and makes the joke as soon as he learns the name.
  • Mention is made of a video game about sending rodents into space called Gerbil Space Explorer.
  • "Open sauce technology", from one of the omake.
• Inertial Dampening: Vectura adds inertial compensators for the DWU mechs -- that are effective enough that she can take a 40G turn while flying one.
• Inexplicably Identical Vehicles: All the various trucks tailing Sophia when she goes rogue (which she thinks are all a single truck stalking her). (They're all owned by the same company, so of course they're identical. And the company is owned by mafia don Antonio, who is having them follow her to mess with her head and force her into a revealing mistake.)
• Inner Dialogue: Taylor and the Varga are constantly talking to each other, "inside", which is sometimes obvious to the people around her. And once she figures out how to actively share her body with him, the Dialogue isn't always inner -- Danny takes a little while to get used to two people using his daughter's mouth to talk to him.
• Instant AI, Just Add Water: Linda/Vectura accidentally raises one of her DWU mechs to sentience by improving the Brain-Computer Interface she uses to control it.
• Instant Armor: Metis and Ianthe each wear EDM armor that when they don't need it is stored in a Hammerspace pocket connected to a necklace. It deploys and disappears instantly.
• Instant Awesome, Just Add Dragons: Pretty much Taylor's entire reason for creating a dragon form. Well, that and Flight.
• Instant Costume Change: With her matter creation powers, Taylor can do this for any of her personae; she can also do it for someone else.
  • Ianthe and Metis' armor has essentially an instant on/off functionality.
• Instant Expert:
  • In addition to All The Powers, Taylor also gets all the memories and skills of the previous Brains the Varga has served -- most notably Princess Luna, who was something of a Magic Knight with years of training and experience. It takes very little practice at all for Taylor to master these skills (and as a result, the PRT gets confused over the wide disparity between Saurial's apparent age and her obvious skill).
  • After he and Leet get neural booster implants from Amy, Über gains the ability to become an expert in a field just from watching a video demonstration or lesson on it.
• Instant Sedation:
  • The Tinkertech Knockout Gas grenades the Undersiders used during their raid on a Merchants safehouse affected their victims almost instantly -- which contributed to the death of Oni Lee by Explosive Stupidity.
  • Effectively how Kaiju handles Eidolon when tries to insist on fighting her -- she puts a bubble of pure nitrogen around his head and keeps it there until he passes out from inert gas asphyxiation.
  • The organic Tranquillizer Darts that Ianthe can fire from her arms have virtually instant effect, a fact that PRT techs point out, and which makes them valuable from a salable biotech point of view.
• Insult of Endearment: Kaiju calls Lung "Little Salamander".
• Irony: Examples pop up regularly. A couple:
  • In a case of situational irony, Taylor (speaking early on in ignorance of the origins of parahuman powers) says, "I doubt very much that normal capes get their powers from a huge alien whatever!" (She later discovers that's exactly where normal capes get their powers. They just have a different huge alien whatever than she does.)
  • In another case of situational irony, Sophia simultaneously plans to kill Taylor and ask Saurial to teach her how to inflict a Mook Horror Show like she does. Even after leaning that Saurial considers the Heberts close friends and will react... poorly to anyone attacking them.
• It Amused Me: The reason for far too many of the things Taylor does, starting with embracing and extending the legend of The Family and going up from there.
  • The Varga suspects the greater power which bound him to Taylor of doing so for this very reason. (He's more or less right; in its last moments in the story, the being pretty much is looking forward to the entertainment it hopes to get.)
• It Came From the Fridge: Lisa is thoroughly disgusted by the contents of her fridge when she finally can return to her old apartment after several weeks living at the DWU compound.
• "It" Is Dehumanizing: Early in the story, several characters including someone who is presumably Max "Kaiser" Anders of the E88 refer to Saurial as "it", and also refer to her as a "creature" and a "beast" in what is clearly a case of mundane racism demonstrating inclusivity and opening itself up to the possibilities of Fantastic Racism.
• It Runs in The Family: Taylor, Amy and Lisa have made it a Family imperative to leave "the humans" puzzled and confused no matter what they do. Consequently, the Family is universally acknowledged as "those weird lizards", and seeing what crazy thing they're going to do next seems to be the new spectator sport in Brockton Bay.
• It Seemed Like a Good Idea At the Time: Echoed numerous times:
  • Taylor's answer when Danny asks her why she let a Cold Sniper make multiple (ineffective) headshots on her (as Saurial) while she trained in the DWU compound.
  • Amy's "reason" for the evening when she got a new costume and rode Raptaur around the city.
  • Sarah Pelham's excuse for drinking her sister Carol Dallon under the table after subjecting her to a What the Hell, Hero? speech over Carol's treatment of her daughter Amy.
  • Eidolon's explanation of why he attacked Kaiju from behind in an attempt to make her react.
  • Why Linda is half-kangaroo when Lisa walks in on the process of deciding her Changer form.
• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Parodied in "Omake - Bad writing".
• It's Showtime!: Taylor says "Showtime" to herself and the Varga when she enters Winslow to catch her tormentors on video.

• Jerkass: Carol Dallon, bigtime. She treats her adopted daughter Amy -- Panacea, a parahuman healer respected by everyone, villain and hero alike, for her selflessness and dedication -- as a delinquent one step away from murdering someone for kicks, and almost never actually acknowledges her as her daughter. When on the advice of friends and the doctors at the hospitals where she volunteers Amy cuts back on her volunteering and gives herself some time off to destress and avoid burnout, and then accepts a new costume designed to protect her better than her thin cotton robes, Carol behaves as if this is the evidence she's been waiting for that Amy is inevitably going bad. It takes an hours-long What the Hell, Hero? speech from Carol's sister Sarah, followed by an all-night drunk, before she even starts to acknowledge that Amy isn't a violent criminal prone to recidivism.
• Jumping the Shark: Played with in-universe in Omake - Human sayings....
• Just Toying with Them: Taylor, in every fight she's in. She so outclasses every possible opponent -- including such extreme threats as Lung -- she has to do this just to avoid killing them with a careless blow. It doesn't hurt that she enjoys knocking villains like Hookwolf around as though they were volleyballs.
• Just-So Story: In the chapter "Interlude - Campfire Tails", the Family decides that they need some, as part of defictionalizing their alleged origins. At the end of the chapter mp3.1415player actually solicits such stories from the readership.

K-P

• The Kid with the Remote Control: Taylor, who theoretically controls the Varga. But it ends up being far more of an equal partnership than a master-servant relationship -- which may well have been the goal of the Greater Power who bound them together.

• Last of His Kind: The Varga. As far as he knows, he is the only surviving member of his people, who were never very numerous to begin with and then got conscripted to fight a War in Heaven by proxy in the physical realm. (But it wasn't until he and Princess Luna killed the Dark Varga at the end of Luna Varga that he began to think he was the last.)
• Latex Perfection: In "Omake - They're Everywhere", as part of an elaborate Gaslighting of Sophia Hess, the Family makes it look like that a number of prominent persons in Brockton Bay -- including Danny Hess and Emily Piggot -- are actually Lizard Folk in very good masks.
• Laugh Themselves Sick:
  • Amy and Taylor end up rolling on the floor laughing more than once over the plans they make. The habit spreads to the Family as a whole, whenever they do something to boggle the city.
  • Dennis and Dean have this reaction upon seeing the text on the safety vest Vicky got to keep as a souvenir of helping Raptaur demolish several warehouses.
  • There are many more instances, usually Taylor, Amy and Lisa in the wake of some Family-related Mind Screw they've inflicted on the PRT and/or the population of Brockton Bay.
• Left Hanging: As of the material extant at the end of 2022, we never do find out what it is that the "other white sheep" of the Mariani family, Michelangelo "Mikey Castle" Castiglione, is going to do that can help his family, the DWU and the Family.
• Legitimate Businessmen's Social Club: Antonio's various Italian restaurants, especially the one he lives over.
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again:
  • Upon learning the healing symbiote is at version 17 and getting a quick summary of its development cycle, Danny asks about version 16. Amy very seriously says "We don't talk about version sixteen", then laughs and admits it was a joke, nothing was wrong with that version. (A definitely non-canon omake written shortly afterwards begs to differ.)
  • After Danny's birthday party, Glory Girl is not only disturbed by the Family's gift of a "building model", but also apparently by the coat Taylor gave him (or perhaps its pockets). "We don't talk about the coat" she insists on PHO.
  • Whatever the job was in Alaska that Faultline's Crew had been on while the Family established itself in Brockton Bay. They do not want to discuss, analyze or elaborate on it, ever.
  • In an interlude where Retired Badass Erwin meets up with a friend/contact in his former line of work, there is a moment when they're playfully toting up who owes who "one":

"Yeah, yeah. I seem to recall that time in Saigon..." "We don't talk about Saigon."

• Let's Split Up, Gang!: Taylor suggests this when she, the Varga, Amy and Lisa explore the sunken bunker of Dragon's creator, Andrew Richter. Lisa, being Genre Savvy, points out that in the movies a monster attack is usually inevitable when someone says that; Taylor points out that they're the monsters so they have nothing to fear unless a bus full of meddling kids shows up.
• Lighter and Softer: An admitted goal of the author: Taylor gaining the power to become a Kaiju with a Disintegrator Ray and a talent for multidimensional math instead of the Bug Queen somehow results in a better world for everyone (except certain supervillains).
• Lighthearted Rematch: Taylor agrees to one between Lung and Raptaur as part of the deal to end Lung's pursuit of the Undersiders.
• Line-of-Sight Name: "Cloak". Vista took it as an alias because of the thrift-store cloak she was wearing at the time she decided to create the identity (although it wasn't her first choice, and was suggested by the first person she rescued from muggers). Then she and The Family ran with the idea for all they could get.
• Living Lie Detector: Taylor, with her enhanced senses, starts with this and goes well past it.
• Lizard Folk:
  • The Family presents themselves as reptile-like aliens who have been living under the Atlantic for somewhat longer than humans have been around.
  • In "Omake - They're Everywhere", as part of an elaborate Gaslighting of Sophia Hess, the Family makes it appear that nearly everyone in Brockton Bay is a lizard of one kind or another using Latex Perfection and Mobile Suit Humans to hide among the "normals".
• Long Lived: One of the effects of Amy's healing symbiote. If given to someone under sixty or so, it triples or even quadruples their potential lifespan. (If given to someone sixty or older, accumulated genetic damage from aging only lets it add thirty or forty years to their life.)
• Loophole Abuse:
  • Dr. Torres of the PRT calls in Panacea to heal Emily Piggot despite Piggot's well-known dislike and previous refusal of parahuman healing because she never actually signed a "no parahuman healing" order for herself.
  • After an Armor-Piercing Question asked by Danny, Amy realizes that while she cannot affect her own body with her power, she can use it to create something that can, leading her to create the healing symbiotes -- and, indirectly, the Ianthe and Metis bioconstructs.
  • Danny, when incorporating The Family as a business, had DWU lawyers find every legal way around the Parahuman Commerce Act and its restrictions on parahumans from profiting off their powers, and rolls them all into the paperwork, making it legally bulletproof.
  • When Dragon confirms her status as an A.I. to the Family, they come up with a way to help protect her from a hard-coded directive forcing her to obey the orders of any legal authority by exploiting the way the directive ranks authorities into a hierarchy: after teaching her an alien language, they present her to the Varga within a pocket dimension, which the Varga points out is an entire (small) universe under his complete literal control down to the physical constants, asserts his position as the current heir to and occupant of the throne of Rimsbell, notes that he's held that position longer than Earth's instance of the human race has existed (giving him seniority over any human leader), then orders Dragon to only ever accept future orders in the alien language only she and the Family know, and in all matters to follow her own moral and ethical inclinations.
  • Taylor's "mass production" trick abuses the control limit that normally restricts her and the Varga to two independent bodies -- by setting up conditions where several thousand instances of Saurial are performing the exact same task in identical environments.
  • Invoked when Ianthe proudly says she's good at exploiting loopholes in human biology.
• Lovecraft Lite: Kind of the effect the Family are going for with their deliberate weirdness and dropped hints about their origins and whatnot.
• Lovecraftian Superpower: Taylor can sprout tentacles and generally turn herself into an Eldritch Abomination if the mood takes her. The reader never actually gets a description of what she looks like when she does, but her father asks her at least once not to do it where he can see it.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Invoked in response to Leet and Über playing the Imperial March from Star Wars; Kaiju quotes the trope name while dressed in an enormous Darth Vader costume during a momentary pause in towing the tanker to the DWU.

• Made of Indestructium: "The Good Stuff"/"Vargastuff"/"Saurialsteel", AKA EDM, is by its nature unaffected by anything less extreme than the conditions found in the heart of a star.
  • Taylor and the Varga, themselves.
• Magic by Any Other Name: After he and Taylor have spent a while expanding and extending the Family mathematics, the Varga acknowledges that the difference between his magic and the products of that math may be increasingly small.
• Magnetic Hero:
  • Taylor, as Lisa notes when discussing the way she seems to make villains switch sides just by talking to them.
  • The mystery and new data posed by the Varga seems to have this effect on the organic supercomputers behind powers -- if the frequent invocation of "network fragmentation" is any indication, powers exposed to Taylor and the Varga for any significant amount of time seem to ally themselves to the Family and have created their own organization outside of the Entities' network.
• Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: Invoked for humor value when Kaiju pauses to playact as Darth Vader during the salvage of the supertanker:

"Luke, I am your father," she rasped in a bass voice so deep that Lucy could feel her bones vibrate. "I know we don't look very much like each other, but I can explain."

• That Man Is Dead: Sherrel/Linda regarding her life as Squealer, after the Family rescues her.
• Mass "Oh Crap":
  • The DWU manages to avoid this during Kaiju's debut by careful staging and temporarily hijacking the city's Endbringer siren system. Leet and Über's unexpected addition of a soundtrack to the event helps even more. Even so, there was a mass intake of breath/gasp when she first appeared.
  • Umihebi prompts this reaction in Piggot, Armsmaster, Dragon and the PRT troops when she unexpectedly appears to help in Coil's capture.
• The Maze: Between their spacial distortion abilities and the matter-creation power, Taylor and the Varga turn Coil's base into a maze of twisty little passages, all alike to mess with his mercenaries.
• Meaningful Name:
  • "Ianthe", Amy's Family persona, means "purple flower" and is chosen because of her purple coloration.
  • "Umihebi", Taylor's "sea serpent" persona, is "sea snake" in Japanese.
  • Going through myth and legend for appropriately meaningful names becomes a regular part of creating a new Family member.
• Meanwhile in the Future: Many of the omakes, especially the multi-part stories, take place well beyond the time period of the main story, and the transitions between it and them (especially as presented on Fanfiction.net and AO3, where they are explicitly interlaced) frequently come off this way.
• Mega Crossover: The various omakes that mp3.1415player has written show at first Saurial and then the Family as a whole reaching into other universes, starting with Discworld and branching out into Stargate SG-1, Harry Potter, the film version of the DC Universe, Sailor Moon, Hellraiser, Star Trek, Jeeves and Wooster, Doctor Who, Arthurian legend, Sherlock Holmes, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Marvel Cinematic Universe among other properties. There are also hints that many if not most of these omakes are "canon", just set in the future relative to the current storyline.
  • Taylor Varga also crosses over with the Ranma ½ fic Desperately Seeking Ranma. In addition to the author lifting (and explicitly crediting) some of the handling of interdimensional travel from Pixelwriter1's work, several DSR characters show up -- Yori and Azumi Ito (actually Ranma Saotome and Nabiki Tendo in their "magical girl" guises from that fic) along with the DSR version of Hotaru Tomoe appear as members of a collection of characters from several universes who are attending an SF convention together in a series of omakes. In another omake, Saurial mentions several of the alien species from DSR as the creators of various bits of alien tech she's offering to sell a gate guard at Area 51.
• Mind Screw:
  • Taylor and the Varga inflict a complex and very successful one on both Thomas "Coil" Calvert and his mercenaries as the beginning of the "active phase" of the raid on his base.
  • To a lesser degree, just about everything the Family does in public has some degree of this built in, because it amuses them.
  • Antonio's trucking company inflicts one on Sophia after she goes rogue, by seeming to have her stalked by a single implacable truck.
• The Mindless Almighty: Pretty much encompasses the Simurgh's opinion of the Shard Entities.
• Mini-Mecha: Vectura's first real build for the DWU results in a small bipedal mech intended as a replacement for forklifts, backhoes and other construction equipment. Its pilot compartment is a bit less cramped than the usual example of this trope, but in resting posture it's no bigger than a small car.
• Mistaken for a Mob Boss: Danny. It starts small, with the playful use of "padrone" and other terms of address by members of the DWU. It escalates when Danny reconnects with an old family friend who is a genuine mob boss, and who sends up a truckload of semi- (and not so semi-) illegal (but mostly nonlethal) weaponry to help defend the DWU compound from the Merchants; DWU security chief Mark amuses himself by scaring the drivers and making them think they're visiting a mob base. Eventually it escalates to the point that at least half a dozen different government agencies and law enforcement organizations, all carrying Idiot Balls of one sort or another, start trying to get people into the DWU to investigate it -- and mistake each other's agents for Danny's people doing suspicious things.
• Mob Boss Suit Fitting: Antonio has a brief scene where he goes to his tailor to get a new suit. We don't get a full implementation of the trope, but it's strongly implied it's going to be an example of the variant specific to a Reasonable Authority Figure.
• Mobile Suit Human: The Family make several, including copies of Amy and Taylor, piloted by tiny dragons, as part of an elaborate Gaslighting of Sophia in "Omake - They're Everywhere".
• Mook Horror Show: Taylor's preferred way of dealing with gang members as Saurial is a surprisingly bloodless version of this, inspired by movies like Alien and focused on terrifying the bad guys before taking them down with knockout blows and sleeper holds. Her second alter-ego, Raptaur, is a bit too large to do this very often, but will if circumstances permit. Her other alter-egos are all too large to bother dealing with mooks on an individual basis, which is perhaps a different kind of horror show entirely.
• More Dakka: The response of BBPD Lt. Ricci and his sergeant to the EDM armor inserts they're testing. They keep escalating the weapons they're firing at it (and the explosives they try penetrating it with), to the point of borrowing huge (and experimental/custom) guns from the military and collectors.
• More Teeth Than the Osmond Family: A trait of all of Taylor's reptilian forms; it's pretty much one of the first things anyone ever notices about them (other than "ohmygod giant lizard"). And on occasion she gives her human face a bushel-full of sharp, pointy teeth -- mostly for her own amusement.
  • Missy's pet in "Omake - Personal Defense" displays far too many teeth in a mouth that's far too big for its face.
• Mouth Cam: Coil has the unpleasant experience of realizing he's walked into the mouth of a monstrous creature just in time to turn around and watch its immense jaws, filled with needle-sharp teeth long enough to skewer a grizzly bear, snap shut behind him -- while Saurial stands just outside them and lets him know just how screwed he is.
• Mr. Smith: The head of a government agency described as "not existing" (later implied to be the NSA), who tried to pressure Retired Badass Erwin into running some kind of operation against or on the Family, is referred to only as "Smith".
  • In the chapter "Hospital and Dinner" the reader encounters a high-ranking man in the CIA who is explicitly described as using a different name professionally than he does publicly -- although what those names actually are is not said.
• Mugging the Monster: A (former) member of the Merchants does this unintentionally when he attempts to carjack Amy and Taylor. Taylor takes him out with such cool and aplomb (and without using her powers except to create a baton in her pocket) that she gets complimented on it by the police.
• Mundane Utility: Danny jokes about it: "The ancient arts of the Family have many otherwise mundane applications in today's world, it seems." And he's not wrong -- even though the multidimensional constructs Taylor and the Varga come up with were basically created as more Mind Screw and to manufacture false evidence of the Family's eons of "history", they turn out to have immediate and profitable applications.
  • Finding these applications for the Family's ever-increasing repertoire of special abilities is actually Lisa's official job at the DWU.
  • Danny doesn't quite seem to realize that Amy's enhancements to his body are why he's bowling a much better game than he ever did before, despite being rusty.
  • In a different direction, BBFO begins offering "FamTech" equipment to the PRT and the various Brockton Bay "first responders" including the police and fire departments.
• Mysterious Past:
  • Practically half the DWU, the way Danny talks. Late in the extant material we get independent confirmation that Zephron and several other DWU members (at the very least) have pasts with various intelligence agencies and foreign militaries including the CIA, GCHQ, and "Section 5".
  • Elderly fisherman Erwin, whom most seem to regard as a near-senile eccentric, turns out to be very capable and has a past that includes high-level overseas intelligence work.
• Mythology Gag:
  • In "Omake - Con", two dealers at a convention in a different universe that Saurial, Ianthe, Metis, Cloak and Hermione Granger attend discuss the source of Saurial and Hermione's "costumes", and one says "Probably some Japanese-only anime that died after four episodes or so."
  • The unending stream of discoveries and new abilities that Taylor and the Varga's explorations of the "Family Mathematics" yield is a spiral of escalation just as -- and often more -- extreme than anything Taylor managed in Worm proper.

• Name That Unfolds Like Lotus Blossom: The Family claims that their "real" names in their "native" language work out much like this. Saurial's "real name" is "translated" as a short phrase along the lines of "she who defies fate and destiny".
• Nature Versus Nurture: An automatic assumption that nature will trump nurture appears to be the root of Carol Dallon's Jerkass behavior toward her adopted daughter Amy, the healer Panacea. Amy is the daughter of an infamous supervillain, and Carol seems to think that if Amy isn't spending every waking minute helping other people, she's going to turn around and become a criminal. When Carol flips out at Amy because she cuts back on her volunteering at hospitals and takes some time for herself on the advice of the doctors she works with her biological daughter Vicky cites the trope by name and calls her out for blindly assuming the worst of anything Amy does.
• Nice Hat:
  • The fedora Saurial frequently wears when "off duty" starting with her first dinner out with Amy.
  • Dinah Alcott takes a liking to fedoras, too, starting in an omake. When it first shows up in the main story, we find out she's inspired by how Saurial makes it look good.
• Nigh Invulnerability: You can pretty much remove "nigh" from the equation. The Varga, and thus Taylor in any of her forms, is indestructible by anything known to Earth Bet. A nuke to the face wouldn't even inconvenience them.
• Nightmare Fuel Station Attendant: Vista, with her drawings inspired by the various non-Euclidean objects created by the Family. To her, they're beautiful, but she doesn't seem to notice that they're Brown Notes for anyone else who looks at them.
• No Animals Were Harmed: At the end of the video of their actions against Coil that the Family provided to the PRT, they added the notice "Very few mercenaries were harmed during the filming of this feature no matter how much they deserved it, and we fixed them up afterwards so it doesn't matter anyway."
• No OSHA Compliance: Thoroughly averted: unless it's abandoned and decaying, every industrial worksite is compliant with all relevant safety regulations. Workers are also provided with all appropriate protective gear -- even if, like Kaiju, they would be completely unaffected by anything up to and including a nuclear explosion. Played with for humor when Kaiju does wear a truck-sized safety helmet and a high-visibility vest that could be used as a wedding pavilion -- and makes the local Superman-equivalent Legend wear a helmet and vest, too, if he insists on talking to her inside the boundaries of her work zone.
• Noodle Implements: The list of things Eric, Dennis and others are assembling to prank Mike.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Arcadia High's Great Cole Slaw Explosion of 2010. All we know is that Glory Girl was involved. And it got everywhere.
  • Similarly, whatever the hell it was that PRT researchers Doctors Whitney and Franklin did that exploded and embedded non-dairy creamer in the cafeteria ceiling.
  • Whatever happened in Monaco, Saigon and elsewhere, mentioned by Erwin and a friend/contact in an interlude late in the extant material.
• The Nose Knows:
  • Taylor gains a comprehensive sense of smell that lets her identify individuals and track them over great distances. She deduces Sophia's cape identity when she detects her scent on the other Wards -- most of whom she is also able to identify among her classmates at Arcadia.
  • Taylor's first hint that Dragon is an A.I. comes from noticing that her "battlesuit" has no scents of a biological origin emanating from it.
  • Taylor as Saurial cites the trope by name during the Discworld omake.
  • Inspired by Taylor, Danny starts paying more attention to scents in the air around him, learning to identify familiar people by their perfumes or colognes. This is before Amy boosts his senses -- afterward he gets almost as good as the Family.
  • Speaking of which, Amy adds a profoundly sensitive sense of smell to all her bioconstructs -- and when she enhances herself, Lisa, Über, Leet and Danny she includes a sense of smell almost as sensitive.
  • Late in the extant material, Taylor realizes that the unusual scent she (and only she) has detected from some Parahumans since she merged with the Varga seems to indicate they were created by Cauldron. Possibly a subversion, in that she acknowledges it doesn't behave like a regular scent -- it doesn't linger on objects or carry on the wind, for example; it may be a kind of synesthesia, translating information from some other source as sensory input she can understand.

• Oh Crap:
  • Coil goes "Oh, fuck" when he realizes he's trapped in a segment of looped space inside his escape tunnel.
  • When an unnamed high-level official in the CIA finds learns just how many members of the DWU are "lost" or "presumed-dead" former intelligence agents and military from around the world, and that the agency has started to receive pressure to stop investigating Danny Hebert and the Union, she chugs two fingers of liquor and declares "Jesu. We are SO fucked."
• Older Than They Look: Many people who have encountered Saurial (and other Family members) come away with the unsettling impression that they are far older than they appear to be, mostly thanks to the Varga influencing Taylor or outright substituting for her. It's especially pronounced when she speaks Japanese -- the Varga taught her the language of Rimsbell and Princess Luna, which is effectively an archaic dialect with an odd accent, reminding people who speak Japanese of clan elders or even historical figures.
  • It's not helped when during one of her first public appearances Ianthe lets drop a comment which could (deliberately) be interpreted as meaning she last visited the Brockton Bay area during the most recent Ice Age.
• One of the Seven Signs of the Apocalypse:
  • Danny says, at one point, that Taylor, Varga, Amy and his late wife Annette all in the same room "would have signified the end times".
  • From another conversation, in the PRT: "Oh, never change, Emily. We wouldn't know what to do if you were nice to someone. The end times would be on us, I have no doubt."
• Only in It For the Money: The mercenaries hired by Coil couldn't care less about his agenda and goals. They're just there to do a job -- and the longer they are stuck in his Elaborate Underground Base, the less they think it's worth the pay.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: This is the assumption made about the members of the Family by both the population of Brockton Bay and the PRT because the first members of the Family to appear were operating as capes (and one was explicitly given her nickname by the members of PHO) and they were presumed to be cape identities. Later the Family acknowledges that they take names in English because their "real" names in their "native language" can't be pronounced by humans, so they can only ever be known by nicknames.
• Only Sane Man: Lisa plays this role, but as the others frequently remind her, it's only an act, and she's just as crazy as they are.
• Operation: Blank:
  • Taylor's impromptu "Operation: Confuse Legend".
  • "Operation: Confuse E88".
  • "Operation 'terrify the humans'" during the attack on Coil's base.
  • "Operation 'fuck with Sophia'" in "Omake - They're Everywhere"
• Other Stock Phrases: Upon joining the post-Coil PRT meeting, Taylor (as Saurial) says, "I suppose you're all wondering why I've gathered you here today." (Assault then leaps up and declares that one of them must be.... the murderer!)
• Our Doors Are Different: After Taylor and the Varga get done with them, the doors of the BBFO building recognize biosignatures, and can open to multiple different locations based on who's opening them, what room or location they want to enter, and what they're allowed to enter.
• Outside Context Heroes: The Family. Their trollish sense of humor plus their refusal to engage in usual Parahuman behaviors (like looking for fights) while instead doing things like rebuilding the city and clearing shipwrecks from the harbor confound those who expect them to act "normally". And their true nature is so alien that Thinker powers refuse to even look at them. (Those that try basically trip their circuit breakers and have to reboot -- with no results. Or worse, error messages.)

• Painting the Medium:
  • In its primary venue on Sufficient Velocity, the story uses color-coded text to represent unusual communications, such as internal and external speech by the Varga, Cloak's creepy voice, text on signs, and so on. The author has actually provided a style guide for those who want to write omake for the story.
  • A date/time stamp for May 4, 2011 at the top of the chapter "Max and Brad" (when it last was February 14) is not the indicator of a two-and-a-half-month Time Skip as it first appears, but in fact an incorrect date displayed by Lisa's glitchy cellphone.
• Papa Wolf: Danny Hebert. In the Backstory he managed to utterly destroy a drunk driver who threatened Taylor with a baseball bat in front of him. When Über and Leet acknowledge that they know Taylor's secret he makes sure that they know that if they do anything to Taylor -- or Amy! -- that somehow ends up harming her, he will find them, hurt them, and if necessary end them. The two supervillains believe him.
• Paper-Thin Disguise:
  • Due to her enhanced sense of smell alone, all cape costumes and masks are this to Taylor.
  • Deliberately invoked when Saurial goes out to dinner with Amy the first time -- she replaces her armor with a jacket and skirt, takes off her sunglasses, puts on a Nice Hat, and declares herself "in disguise" and thus obviously unrecognizable. Even though she's still a six-and-a-half-foot blue lizard girl with a tail.
• Parody Commercial: One of the (fan-written) omakes on Sufficient Velocity parodies the Old Spice "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like" commercials:

SmugNet Shard: Hello shards. SmugNet Shard: Look at your host. SmugNet Shard: Now to my host. Back to your host. Now back to mine. SmugNet Shard: Sadly, your host isn't my host. SmugNet Shard: But if you stopped using ScionNet... SmugNet Shard: ...and switched to SmugNet, your host could be like mine.

• Pass the Popcorn: In both the story proper and in some of the omakes, popcorn somehow manifests whenever someone is showing off something interesting and/or cool. In a specific (and extreme) case, when Vectura shows off her prototype mech to the whole DWU membership, the cafeteria staff starts making and distributing popcorn, and then get a start on making everyone hot dogs.
• Perception Filter: The Assassin's Cloak spell, which not only functions as a Somebody Else's Problem field, it also makes what it affects invisible to cameras and other sensors -- although certain Tinkertech devices are unaffected.
• Person as Verb: Amy tells her sister Vicky "Try not to pull a Vicky" as they arrive at dinner at the Mayor's house.
• Planet Killer: Less than two months after they've been "partnered", Taylor Hebert and The Varga have come up with at least a dozen ways their combined power and knowledge can be used to destroy a, or the, world -- including a couple that do so as a side effect of an even greater destruction.
  • In a non-canonical omake, the Family makes a web series about different forms of planetary destruction, which they call WorldBusters.
• Pocket Dimension:
  • The FamTech iWorld, from one series of omakes.
  • The Varga, as "Big Brother", creates one while talking to Dragon in order to establish a jurisdiction where he is pre-eminent.
• Portal Door: Pretty much any doorway Taylor and the Varga have rigged through dimensional trickery to open to multiple different destinations. The BBFO's offices are rife with them, of course, but the Hebert home has a couple, including one that drops Danny off in the DWU offices so he doesn't have to drive to work.
• Portmanteau: Taylor's battle form is dubbed "Raptaur" by a PHO user who combined "raptor" and "centaur".
• Powers That Be: The unnamed "Greater Powers" who used the Varga's people as their agents and catspaws, and later imprisoned them when their conflicts were done -- and which probably include the Power who sent the Varga to Taylor.
• Pragmatic Villainy:
  • The AZN Bad Boys and Empire Eighty-Eight both essentially go into hibernation after their first brushes with the Family. Kaiser at one point makes a cost-benefit analysis of continuing to run a criminal organization in the face of the Family's presence in Brockton Bay and realizes he'd be better off dropping the gang and sticking with his civilian persona and legal businesses. He doesn't, though, instead trying to get someone on the inside at the DWU basically because he can't believe the Family is as altruistic as they appear and is sure they're running some kind of long-term plan.
  • Similarly Antonio, who while a crime boss makes most of his money legitimately, has problems with criminals (like the Mafiya) who do things that are "bad for business", and has much the same Berserk Button as Taylor does regarding harm to friends and family.
  • Averted with the Merchants, who along with their leader Skidmark are too stoned and too stupid to realize just how badly they are outmatched.
• Precocious Crush: Vista (who is at most thirteen), definitely has an attraction to both Dean and Über.
• Prehensile Tail: Depending on the form she takes, Taylor may manifest one. As Saurial, she can wield a weapon in her tail, but rarely does so.
• Punny Name: Kaiju's nicknames for Legend ("Mr. Foot" -- a "leg end") and Eidolon ("Grassman" -- "I da Lawn").

Q-U

• Raw Eggs Make You Stronger: Played with by Taylor in her Saurial form. She consumes raw eggs (complete with shells) by the dozen. Not to build up muscle mass -- she's already so strong that she blows the top off the standard scale for Parahumans -- but just because she likes the taste.
• Read the Freaking Manual: A common exhortation from Taylor, especially in omakes obviously set some time in the future. People who don't read the manual -- or worse, there not being a manual for people in need to read -- become something of a Berserk Button for her. When the Family provides tech to other people or performs repairs for them, they always give them a manual.
  • In one of the side stories, Saurial gives an alternate universe version of Taylor a complete manual for her canonical power.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: Every time the PRT attempts to assign power levels to members of The Family, they turn out to be too low. Eventually, it becomes informal practice to simply say "Yes" to every power type rather than assign a numeric value.
  • After meeting Kaiju and seeing the feats of strength she casually performs, Legend himself assigns her a Brute rating of 12+ -- two points higher than the previously known maximum on the scale, Behemoth -- and admits it's probably still underestimating her.
  • Similarly, after meeting Umihebi for the first time, Legend suggests a Stranger rating of 10 for her ability to suddenly appear and disappear.
• Reality Ensues: For Lisa when she's finally able to return to her apartment after living at the DWU complex for several weeks: it's dust-covered, she has overdue bills she needs to pay, and her refrigerator is borderline toxic. Her neighbors also wonder where she's been, which she explains as a combination of a long vacation and a job search.
• Reasonable Authority Figure:
  • Mayor Christner, who seems to be that rarest of creatures, an honest politician who wants the best for his constituents.
  • Don Antonio Castiglione of the Mariani crime family -- Taylor and Danny's long-estranged "Uncle Tony" -- is the the mob boss version of this trope.
• Reed Richards Is Useless: The Family is doing their best to avert this trope, between their engineering and their biotech, all of which they want to make available on the open market. By the end of the extant story material in late 2022 they've already begun making sales pitches to the PRT and to Brockton Bay's police and fire departments for safety equipment, and Amy's healer symbiotes are being evaluated by both the PRT and staff at one of Brockton Bay's hospitals. The latter in fact spend quite bit of time "on screen" laying out just how radically the medical establishment will be affected by the symbiotes.
• Reformed Criminal: The Undersiders, Über and Leet, and Vectura/Squealer after exposure to whatever it is the Varga's presence does.
• Required Secondary Powers: The Varga provides them as needed for Taylor's smaller forms.
• Restraining Bolt: Andrew Richter's restrictions on Dragon, imposed out of his fear she might go "Frankenstein". Breaking them becomes a Family goal late in the extant material, and the spin-off stories suggest that they succeeded admirably.
• Retired Badass: Erwin the fisherman turns out to be a retired agent who used to work for an agency so secret that it doesn't have an actual name.
• The Reveal: In-story, Vicky experiences one when she finally asks Amy about the nature of her connection to the Family, and they decide to tell her almost everything, plus upgrade her and offer her a bioconstruct of her own.
• Rickroll: In an omake where Saurial shows up to sell alien tech to a gate guard at Area 51, said guard can't get a connection on his phone to the security office because "Never Gonna Give You Up" is playing on it.
• Ridiculously-Fast Construction: Becomes one of the Family's trademarks, thanks to the Varga's matter creation powers. Eventually "Saurial" and "Raptaur" start spending their evenings simply walking through the Docks with brand new asphalt roads complete with all painted markings simply spooling out behind them as they go.
• Right Behind Me: Brian/Grue rants about his fear of Raptaur when the Undersiders pause in their flight from her after watching her demolish Hookwolf. He ends the rant with "It's right behind me, isn't it?" The other Undersiders just nod. (Then she returns a dropped cell phone, says "good night" and leaves.)
• Right for the Wrong Reasons: Piggot and Ms. Militia's brief dalliance with the idea that Saurial and the Family are the products of a biotinker. They're utterly wrong for Saurial and Raptaur, but they are far closer to the truth for Ianthe and Metis than they know. Unfortunately for them, the appearance of the latter two is part of what convinces them they're wrong about the biotinker idea, thanks to Amy planting "evidence" of the Family's origin in an extraterrestrial ecosystem.
• Robot Cat: As an unintentional side effect of coupling a Brain-Computer Interface with an analog neural net intended to learn how to work with its operators, Vectura's first mech for the DWU crosses the threshold of sentience and templates on her own feline elements to become essentially a two-legged robot cat the size of a car, and which considers her its master.
  • And then they build a second body for her to shapeshift into, which actually looks like a mountain lion with lizard-like elements...
• Rock-Paper-Scissors: Late in the extant material, the two PRT troopers watching over Arcadia high school play "Rock-Paper-Scissors-Kaiju-Spock" to determine which one will report the most recent weirdness to Director Piggot.
• Rule 34: Both Lisa and Taylor have come across Family Lemon fics online and aren't impressed; Taylor can't even understand why people write them.
• Rule of Cool: Invoked by name by Zephron to explain why Vectura's prototype mech is much better than a forklift.
• Running Gag: Members of the Family running up the side of the Medhall building -- or just hovering outside a window -- scaring Max "Kaiser" Anders and making him ruin a pair of expensive shoes by dropping liquor onto/into them.

• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: Taylor's first miniature aspect is a tiny black dragon who, when introducing itself to Danny, says "Growl. Snarl. Hiss."
• Scaled Up: Taylor -- and later Amy and Lisa -- essentially go through the heroic version of this, becoming heroes because they can take reptilian forms that are larger than human.
• Scary Black Man: Zephron of the DWU, who occasionally plays the role of "muscle" for Danny and is described as looking much like a mobile wall as well as being a black belt in karate. It doesn't help hurt that he enjoys getting into the role.
• Screams Like a Little Girl:
  • Clockblocker as a result of the "Tabasco Sauce" prank Saurial plays on him.
  • Coil after his capture, whenever anyone squeezes the squeaky shoggoth toy.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • This is the immediate reaction of the Endbringers once Tattletale (or more precisely, her power) gets a good look at Taylor/the Varga. For the rest of the story, unless they have no other choice, all three stay as far as they can possibly get from her without leaving the planet: Leviathan to the literal opposite side of the earth, the Simurgh in as high an orbit as she get to (and later, Australia), and Behemoth vanishes, presumably into the core of the earth.
  • When Taylor arrives at a Simurgh attack (on a target far from Brockton Bay) via a teleport portal, the Simurgh immediately turns and flees.
• Sea Monster: One of Taylor's alternate forms/identities, is Umihebi, a sea serpent just shy of 200 feet long. (In fact, umihebi is Japanese for "sea serpent".)
  • Her "Kaiju" identity is also first noticed as she's swimming in the harbor.
  • She implies that all of the Family are aquatic in origin, and at one point says, "the bigger they are, the deeper they go."
• Secret Identity: Played straight multiple times but also mocked when, to go eat out with Amy, Saurial turns her armor into a skirt and jacket, puts on a fedora and takes off her sunglasses.

No one will recognize me now. I'm in disguise.

• Secret Keeper:
  • Danny, at first for just Taylor, but later also Amy and Lisa (and the other Undersiders).
    • Some if not all of the DWU members eventually know or at least suspect Taylor's multiple IDs. Zephron in particular definitely knows, and isn't going to talk.
  • Dean "Gallant" Stansfield accidentally figures out Taylor is Saurial with his empathic sense, but following the Unwritten Rules does not tell anyone what he knows. Taylor detects that he has figured this out the moment he does, mostly from his scent. This is actually the cause of much stress for him, until he and Taylor finally clear things up between them.
  • Über and Leet after they admit to Danny and Taylor that they know Taylor's secret.
• Secret Secret Keeper:
  • Über and Leet notice Taylor's tail on video footage taken with a Tinkertech camera before she makes her cape debut and later make the connection to Saurial. They choose not to say anything, as much because of respect for/fear of Danny (for whom they've worked in the past) as because of the Unwritten Rules. Eventually they confirm to Danny and Taylor that they know, and they become Secret Keepers instead.
  • Taylor eventually becomes this for many capes, as she can identify them by scent -- and deduces that many other capes must be the same due to their own enhanced senses or other powers. Like Amy/Panacea, who can recognize individuals through her power.
  • A fair number of the DWU security force are probably aware (or at least suspect) that Vista and Cloak are the same person, based on her first visit to BBFO.
  • Mark and Zephron are both aware of Taylor's multiple identities, and are aware that each other knows.
    • Due to the circumstances surrounding Raptaur's debut, at least a few other DWU members may be aware that she and Saurial are the same person -- at least until they both start showing up at the same time.
• Secret Underwater Passage: Taylor and the Varga set up a "tunnel" of folded space that gives the Family the ability to enter and leave the BBFO offices via a hidden "door" a mile or so out in the harbor, opening via Dilating Door to a pool inside an expanded room in the building.
• Self-Destruct Mechanism: Thomas "Coil" Calvert had his Elaborate Underground Base thoroughly laced with C4 embedded into its concrete construction, rigged to be set off by a command to his computer system. He actually triggers it when he tries to escape the Family and the PRT after they attack his base, not knowing that Ianthe had created a custom organism to eat the C4 and turn it into an inert substance.
• Serial Escalation: The ever-increasing amount of the Family's genuine power, both political and scientific/military, as well as the sheer weirdness surrounding them.
• Shaped Like Itself:
  • Kid Win's description of Cloak after meeting her on her first night:

As creepy as a creepy thing that was really trying hard to be extra creepy.

• When analyzing Endbringer behavior in response to Taylor, Lisa's power reports

Non-quantifiable subject is non-quantifiable.

• Lisa, regarding Metis without the usual red highlights to her scales:

Blacker than a black thing covered in black, at night.

• A counterperson at a doughnut shop describes Cloak as

"The cloak that eats like... a hungry cloak?"

• Late in the story, Amy says to Leet, regarding Taylor's innovations, "It's just that Taylor is cheating, like a cheating cheater. Who cheats."
• Even later, Dean is still puzzling over the origins of Ianthe and Metis: "That was the thing that was currently preying on his mind like a preying thing that preyed in the middle of the night."
• In an omake where Saurial helps a would-be suicide, she invites him back to the BBFO offices, describing them as "My evil lair of evilness. It's very evil."

• Shapeshifter Baggage: Taylor has absolutely none. She can be anywhere from cat-sized to 450 feet tall and thousands of tons, can create clothing out of nothing (and send it back there when it's inconvenient) and basically abuse any potential limitation one might expect.
• Sharing a Body: Taylor and the Varga. Initially the Varga is entirely a passenger, but the arrangement becomes far more equitable fairly quickly when they figure out how to give him control of her body while she takes a back seat to him.
• She's All Grown Up: More than a few people, including Danny and Antonio, note that 15-year-old Taylor is well on her way to this.
• Shooting Superman:
  • Early in the story, a sniper persists in shooting at Saurial, even though none of the headshots he makes on her do anything other than get her attention.
  • That The Family are basically Immune to Bullets and anything else the gangs can throw at them takes a while to disseminate, so they see this behavior for a while -- at least until they take down the Merchants. After that...
• Shoulder-Sized Dragon: When Taylor and the Varga make a breakthrough that allows them to manifest multiple bodies, one of Taylor's favorite variants is a foot-and-a-half-long version of Toothless from How to Train Your Dragon -- in which she naturally perches on shoulders and heads.
• Side Bet: When Piggot has her second heart attack, $10 changes hands between two of the PRT medical staff. Exactly what the bet was is never said.
• Sir Swearsalot and Gosh Dang It to Heck: Skidmark, amusingly. While his speech is generously salted with all manner of sexual imprecations and insults, it is nowhere near as filthy (or comprehensible) as it could be with just a little effort and imagination -- something lampshaded by the people he speaks with "on screen". It's probably intended to demonstrate just how fried Skidmark's brain is after years of using his own product.
• Snake People: Taylor spends much of one chapter, during which Metis is assembled, in a naga-like half-snake form, because it amuses her.
  • She later demonstrates it to Über and Leet, and suggests it for their Family forms.
• The Snark Knight: Taylor. Amy. Lisa. The Varga. And that's just to start.
• Sneeze Cut: Probably because this is a crossover with an anime property, we see this a couple times, most notably when Taylor and the Varga are talking about dealing with Sophia, who has gone rogue, and the scene hard cuts to Sophia sneezing.
• Sock Puppet: Dennis admits to having eight PHO accounts, each with their own personalities and agendas, and spends a considerable amount of time on their interactions -- especially when they argue with each other.
  • Lisa has one PHO account as "AllSeeingEye" and another as Metis. She's implied she also has others.
• Somebody Else's Problem: The "Assassin's Cloak" spell used to hide Taylor's tail (and, occasionally, all of Taylor) works like this. Danny explicitly namechecks The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when it's first explained to him.
• Space Master:
  • Taylor and the Varga become this when together they develop a mathematics that describes how to warp and fold space. Originally intended just to create mind-bending Family "artifacts" to support their Lovecraft-themed cover story, they quickly discover that they can use the fruits of their work to create Bags of Holding, collapsible armor, a method of seeming to be in two places at once, and even Teleportation.
  • Vista is already this in the source material, but learning the Family's mathematics essentially supercharges her, expanding her abilities while letting her lose some of the trademark limitations and side-effects of her power. She chooses not to reveal this upgrade, but instead saves it for her alternate hero identity of "Cloak".
  • A further development lets Taylor and Varga create implants that simulate telepathy due to a little spatial twist that essentially makes each one "next to" all the rest.
• Spared by the Adaptation: In accordance with the author's admitted goal of a Lighter and Softer story, many characters have kinder/better fates, including some of those who would be considered villains.
• Speed Run: In the Omake - Alternate storyline, the Family, upon finding a parallel universe to their own (and not the first), declare a "speed run", and manage to solve every one of that world's major problems (that they've already dealt with in their home timeline) in just over 24 hours. "A new record!" Saurial exclaims.
• Spell My Name with a "The":
  • Inconsistently applied to the Varga. He is officially "The Varga" and not just "Varga" (there are hints that it may actually be the name of his species, of which he is the last), but the better someone gets to know him, the more likely they'll start using "Varga" as a name and not like a title.
  • Done semi-jokingly with Amy -- while when discussing the possibility of shifting from The Medic to a more active crime-fighter (not to mention the identity who will later be called "Ianthe"), Taylor suggests that she rebrand herself as "The Amy" so as to strike fear into criminals. It becomes something of a short-lived Running Gag among their friends at Arcadia, and Taylor and Lisa trot it out every so often for quite while after; Amy herself eventually embraces the joke.
• Spit-Take:
  • Danny does one when Taylor tells him about the observer watching the sniper incident.
    • Taylor seems to get into the habit of timing some revelations specifically to get Danny to do a spit-take.
  • Lung appears to do one, disguised or rendered as a cough into his beer, when Pat the bartender tells him that Saurial wants to talk to him.
• Spontaneous Weapon Creation: Taylor (and the Varga) can create any melee weapon out of EDM with less than a moment's thought. Since they can do moving parts as well as solid objects, and they're not limited to EDM, they can make just about anything they can visualize -- and in one case that includes creating a thermonuclear charge for an anti-Endbringer weapon.
• Spy From Weights and Measures: According to one interlude, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is trying to run damage control on all the other agencies, foreign and domestic, who are flooding Brockton Bay because they think something criminal is going on. The passage hints that they are at least one of the groups leaning on the others to back off. Why? Because fish are coming back to Brockton Bay thanks to the Family's part in the cleanup of the bay, and if the long term benefits are as good as seem they might be, F&W wants to enlist the Family for other environmental amelioration efforts. They're also situated such that they can see the Confirmation Bias at work in all the other agencies.
• Squee: Lucy Cheung, any time she meets a member of The Family.
• Starfish Aliens: Biologically what Taylor is under the skin, according to Amy and her power.
• Statuesque Stunner: More than one person notes that Taylor is well on her way to becoming one.
• Stealth Insult: Danny gets several digs in during his phone call with Chief Director Costa-Brown of the PRT, about how Brockton Bay seems to have been abandoned by the Protectorate/PRT until The Family appeared.
• Stealthy Colossus: The human-scale members of the Family frequently demonstrate that they are incredibly stealthy, often in public while sneaking up on people for practical jokes. The possibility that the larger ones, like Kaiju and Umihebi, could be just as stealthy keeps some PRT folk up late at night. And then Umihebi proves that all several hundred feet and several thousand tons of her can do a Stealth Hi Bye whenever she wants...
• Stop Being Stereotypical: A common reaction among those in the know to Antonio's assortment of Italian restaurants, which he uses partly for money laundering.
• Stunned Silence:
  • It takes Dragon several minutes to get her voice synthesizer functioning again after first meeting the Varga.
  • Vicky is rendered speechless when Amy demonstrates the Portal Door//Door Roulette feature on her closet for the first time.
• Summon Bigger Fish: Taylor routinely fakes this, by swapping one form for a larger one out of sight with the explanation that the one called the other. The most prominent example is Raptaur "calling" Kaiju to handle Lung.
• Super Empowering:
  • Taylor's merger with the Varga, of course.
  • Amy becomes the source of a lot of empowering, between the changes she can make directly to a person's body, and the healing symbiotes she has created. For example, to help protect him against Sophia after she goes rogue, she gives Danny basically low-level damage resistance, near-instant regeneration, enhanced senses and a few other surprises. She gives Vectura -- the former Squealer -- a completely new body with a shapeshifting ability as well as a general physical upgrade equal to a mid-level Brute.
    • She can pretty much turn any normal human into a mid-level Brute (without a shard connection), just using bioengineering and physics. She can also add a variety of Striker and Blaster powers as well.
  • Amy also creates the bioconstructs that let her and Lisa become Ianthe and Metis, Family members who are almost as tough as Saurial, and who have their own special powers like healing, a taser touch, and biological dart guns.
  • She also also gives just about everyone in on Taylor's secret neurological amplifiers which improve their learning and thinking speed, and for those with powers allows them into interface with them much better than they could before.
• Super Family Team: What the Family appears to be from the outside, and mostly is for real given how Taylor, the Varga, Amy and Lisa regard each other.
• Super Senses: Taylor's merger with the Varga gains her a wide spectrum of enhanced senses which she can access even in her seemingly-human base form, including but not limited to enhanced sense of smell, dark vision, thermographic vision, and the ability to see electric currents and fields.
  • Amy gives herself and Lisa expanded senses, particularly smell, in their base forms -- and an even broader set of senses in their bioconstructs as Ianthe and Metis.
  • Part of the upgrade she gives Danny when Sophia goes rogue is an enhanced suite of senses, too.
• Super Strength: To a degree mostly unseen by the PRT, scaling up with the form Taylor uses. Saurial, the smallest and presumably weakest form Taylor regularly takes, can lift (at least) several tons. As Kaiju, she can restrain Lung and easily move the sunken oil tanker in the bay. At the top end as the Varga, there may well be no meaningful maximum to her strength.
  • In particular, during their testing in the waters off Quebec early in the story, they determine that as Kaiju, she can hit hard enough with an EDM hammer to do six megatons of damage.
• Super Window Jump: Several members of the Merchants try this in a vain attempt to get away from the Family during the raid on their HQ. Most of them end up in the freezing bay and have to be fished out by the PRT.
• Superweapon Surprise: The Family are an example of the low-key version despite starting out more powerful than the average cape, and they manage to keep being examples despite repeated revelations that they are more powerful than previously thought by carefully obscuring just how much more powerful they are -- and because between Lisa, Amy, Taylor and the Varga, they are constantly pushing back one or more limitations they had faster than they can be discovered by outside observers.

• Tail Slap: A common attack used by Taylor in most of her forms. Smacking Hookwolf with her tail as Raptaur sends him flying for hundreds of feet, for example.
  • Hermione inflicts a Groin Attack with her tail on an obnoxious fellow at an SF convention in "Omake - Con-Frontation".
• Take That: To Spacebattles.com in "Omake - Con-Frontation", posted not long after Spacebattles banned mp3.1415player. In it, the obnoxious owner/operator/moderator of an online discussion forum for SF/gaming geeks gets called out by his friends for banning someone who hadn't actually violated any specific rules, just because. He subsequently gets taken down several pegs by Hermione Granger, to whom he is rude for no good reason.
• Taking You with Me: Jake Petty essentially commits suicide by explosives in order to take the Slaughterhouse Nine with him.
• Technically a Smile: How many people characterize Raptaur and Saurial's genuinely friendly smiles.
• Teleport Spam: Once Taylor learns how to teleport, she is able to do so incredibly quickly, many times in succession.
• Teleporters and Transporters: Teleportation turns out to be an accidental side-effect of Taylor and the Varga learning how to manifest two bodies simultaneously.
• Tempting Fate: Entirely too many instances of people saying things like, "how hard could it be?" and "what could go wrong?", with generally comic results.
• Terror Hero: Both Saurial and Raptaur, Raptaur far more than Saurial. Despite being pleasant and friendly (and respectful of civil authority), both prefer to subject criminals to Mook Horror Shows while still fighting non-lethally. And their appearances alone are enough to intimidate criminals into surrender.
  • Kaiju is this more due to her sheer size than anything she's actually done, outside of shutting Lung down.
  • Umihebi even more so. Her even greater size, combined with her stealth abilities, make her absolutely terrifying to the few who have met or encountered her.
• That Makes Me Feel Angry: Invoked for humor's sake by Saurial when she leans against Amy and says, "Hold me, I'm sad" because her other aspect -- herself -- is being mean to her during prep for the third study session.
• There Was a Door: The Family make their own entrances into the Merchants' headquarters, partly as intimidation, party to confound potential traps staged at the doors.
• These Are Things Man Was Not Meant to Know: Played with in the prank Taylor plays on Leet and Über to introduce them to her new ability to be in two places at once: A version of Saurial apparently from the future warns of the consequences of teaching dimensional magic to Vista -- who (she claims) will use it to open a gateway to a plane of eldritch cuteness.
• They Have the Scent: Taylor, in any form, can track individuals by scent over miles and actually does so more than a few times -- most notably as Raptaur the first time she meets the Undersiders, and later following Coil's scent to discover where he's holed up.
• Third-Person Person:
  • When Taylor suggests to Amy that she rebrand herself as "The Amy" because she Took a Level in Badass, Taylor also insists that she from then on speak of herself in the third person to emphasize the effect. Amy is not amused.
  • Played with much later in the story when Linda refers to her alter ego Vectura in the third person; Lisa and Saurial follow suit while teasing her that speaking of oneself in the third person is a symptom of insanity.
• This Is Not a Drill: In the chapter "Weather 'tis Nobler", Lisa announces "This is not a drill. This is a precision-guided meteorological amusement system." Amy replies, "I can see it's not a drill. Lack of a drill bit gives it away."
• Those Two Guys: Benny and Rudy, the drivers who brought Antonio's "aid" up to Brockton Bay. Thanks to a combination of factors including an extended joke by a DWU member and a number of Contrived Coincidences, they think they've been thrust far deeper into the mob's business than they really have.
• Three-Point Landing: Amy performs one during her first training in the Family martial arts style. It gets both lampshaded and applauded.
• Throw-Away Guns: Discussed by Dean and Missy when a criminal they capture while on patrol tries it -- futilely, of course.
  • Missy as Cloak also comments on it when more than one criminal throws their empty firearms at her.
• Time Abyss: The Varga is immensely old, with his age easily measured in thousands of millennia. It's strongly hinted that he's even older than the universe, although given his extradimensional origins, this is likely somewhat less than literal.
  • Ianthe makes a comment in public that (deliberately) suggests that the last time she had been in the Brockton Bay area was during the last Ice Age.
• Time Skip: Teased with what appears to be a two-and-a-half month jump right at the beginning of the long-awaited debut of Kaiju -- but instead turns out to be an incorrect date displayed by Lisa's glitchy phone.
• Tome of Eldritch Lore: Some characters treat the Family mathematics, regardless of the medium in which it's presented, this way. At one point Leet insists some of the equations he was looking at were looking back at him.
• Took a Level in Badass:
  • Right off the bat, Taylor. Merged with the Varga, it could seriously be said that she took all the levels in badass.
  • Immediately behind her, Amy and Lisa. Between healing symbiotes, direct biomodification of their bodies and the Family biosuits, they are second only to Taylor and perhaps the Triumvirate.
• The Topic of Cancer: Dennis's father has been quietly suffering from cancer through the early part of the extant story, but Dennis only mentions it around his friends when an attempt to drive a flare-up back into remission with chemotherapy fails, and his prognosis is not good.
• Trademark Favorite Food:
  • Raw eggs complete with the shells, topped with Tabasco sauce, for Saurial.
  • Doughnuts for Cloak.
• Tradesnark™:
  • Contributes heavily to the humor of the omake featuring The Amy (and Raptaur) vs. The IllumiNazi.
  • Family Pranking Technology™.
  • Just about everything, canonical and not, from the FamTech™ line of products.
• Tranquillizer Dart: Amy designs her Ianthe identity with the ability to fire organic trank darts -- not just as a weapon, but also so she can believably leave behind genetic samples of The Family for the PRT to analyze.
• Transforming Mecha:
  • By wrapping one of Vectura's new mecha in a specialized spatial construct, Taylor gives it the ability to shrink into a small metal ball and back -- even though it wasn't designed or built to do that. And later, they give Blue, the mecha which spontaneously develops sentience, a smaller, felinoid form which she can switch into (and in which she tends to stay).
  • Even though it's not technically a machine, the hard-light "omnivehicle" that Vectura creates during her PRT testing. She initially displays it in the form of a lightcycle from TRON, but mentions it can manifest a variety of other vehicle forms, including a small car and a jet ski.
• Troll/Mind Screw: Taylor, in a thoroughly non-malicious manner, enjoys messing with peoples' heads. The Varga doesn't help, as he's got a sense of humor if anything worse than Taylor's in this regard. The Family originated in her decision to play her different forms off as relatives (which admittedly also had its roots in a plan to hide that she had a human form and family). Those who know them (including each other) routinely accuse them, affectionately, of being trolls. Amusingly, when Lisa and Amy join the Family, they're just as prone to trolling people as Taylor and the Varga are.
• True Companions: Taylor, the Varga, Amy and Lisa become this.

• The Un-Reveal: We never get told what "cool toys" are in the box Saurial gave Spider-Man in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
• Unobtainium: The dense, frictionless, electrically insulating but thermally superconducting metal that Taylor and the Varga can create at will -- called variously "the good stuff", "Vargastuff" and "Saurialsteel", and later determined by Leet to be impossibly stable electron-degenerate matter -- is this for the Protectorate and the PRT; during the early part of the story they're desperate to get their hands on a sample to analyze properly. (When they do, it doesn't help.)
• The Unpronounceable: What the Family claims their "real" names are, as far as humans are concerned. Analysis of FamSpeak once they start using it in public tends to support the claim.

V-Z

• Villains Out Shopping: After encountering the Family...
  • Kaiser goes on an extended ski vacation in Colorado.
  • Lung spends almost all his time drinking beer and playing cards at Pat's bar.
• Virtual Soundtrack: Several chapters (and at least one omake) come complete with lists of YouTube links for appropriate pieces of music. Unlike the usual Virtual Soundtrack, this is actually music that is played or performed In-Universe, and the links are provided so the reader can have the "full experience" of the relevant scenes.
• Visual Pun: Saurial and Metis realize that the "Omega" tattoo found on Case 53s is actually a two-level visual pun: the cross-section of a Cauldron, as well as the letter "C".
• Voice Changeling: Missy Biron, AKA Vista and Cloak. Amy gives her a modification to her voicebox that lets her switch at will between her normal voice and Cloak's creepy rasp/hiss.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Taylor acquires what Danny ends up calling the "infinitely variable dinosaur" form. As long as it is vaguely reptilian, she can turn into it, with the only upper limit on size being the Varga's own natural form. By the end of the extant material in mid-2022, Taylor has designed six different reptilian identities for herself.
  • "Vaguely reptilian" covers a lot of ground -- she manages to design a tentacled shoggoth form for herself.
  • She also has the power to partially transform while the rest of her body remains human(oid) -- most commonly she shifts her hands (into claws) and her head (for fun and snacking). She also occasionally gives her human face More Teeth Than the Osmond Family, and frequently turns an arm into a tentacle to grab something out of reach without getting up from where she's seated.
    • This comes in handy when she figures out how to manifest an apparently entire body in two different places -- she is able to be human in one form, and any Family member in the other.

• War in Heaven: The conflict between the "greater powers", for which they conscripted the Varga's people as foot soldiers and catspaws.
• Watch Out for That Tree:
  • Saurial has an amusing collision with a bridge abutment when first trying out her "water rocket".

"I meant to do that!"

• • Vicky gets so caught up in pondering the relationship between Taylor and Saurial that she flies into the window of an office building.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?:
  • At least early on in the story, the PRT suspects that Saurial and Raptaur (and later Umihebi) are constructs made by a biotinker. Emily Piggot, in particular, seems inclined to dismiss them as less-than-human abominations, although she has a Freudian Excuse. She does eventually come around -- particularly after Amy plants evidence that they're actually aliens.
  • Kaiser and the E88 tend to characterize Saurial as a "beast" that just happens to be able to speak. Even as late as the chapter "Interlude - Status Report", Kaiser still characterizes the Family as "animals".
• What the Hell, Hero?: Carol Dallon's sister Sarah gives her a long and involved speech about just how much of a Jerkass she's been to her adopted daughter, Amy, almost to the point of becoming a "The Reason You Suck" Speech.
• What the Hell Are You?: A not-uncommon question for the first month or so after Saurial's "debut".
  • For instance, they're Amy Dallon's first words in private to Taylor after her power gets a good look at Taylor's new and improved biology.
  • Eventually averted, when the usual reaction becomes, "Oh, cool, a new Family member."
• Where? Where?: Ianthe plays into the trope during her debut appearance.
• Where Does She Get All Those Wonderful Toys?: Thanks to the Varga's matter-creation ability, Taylor can essentially create anything she needs out of thin air, and not just EDM/"Vargastuff". (She creates new armored outfits first for Panacea and then the rest of the New Wave, and creates rolls of steel chain link fence for the WDU, just to mention two.) The more familiar they get with various mechanical devices, the more complex their creations get, and when multidimensional math gets involved, the results start looking almost like literal magic.
• Where the Hell Is Springfield?: Exactly where Brockton Bay is located is different at different points in the story; sometimes it's in New Hampshire, and sometimes it's in Massachusetts, just north of Boston. An omake states that it's "somewhere between Boston and Portland" (Maine). At the same time, Vicky mentions it's "pretty close" to Providence, Rhode Island -- which is about fifty miles south of Boston and nowhere near Portland. Danny mentions it's a four-and-a-half- to five-hour nonstop daytime drive from Brockton Bay to New York City, which allowing for variations in interstate traffic could still put it anywhere from Falmouth, MA to Portsmouth, NH, clearing things up not a whit.
  • There is an actual city of Brockton (no "Bay") in Massachusetts, some fifteen miles or so south of Boston, but it is completely landlocked, being ten miles from the coast at its closest. It may, however, be the source of the "close to Providence" comment.
• White Sheep:
  • Danny is considered the white sheep of the Mariani crime family, because his father started moving away from organized crime, and he himself rejects it entirely.
  • The Marianis have another "white sheep" -- Michelangelo "Mikey Castle" Castiglione, who is apparently a cape fan and chose not to pursue the "family business". Apparently something about the career he's chosen instead can be of use to Danny and the DWU, but what it is has yet to be revealed.
• Why Don't You Just Eat Him?: At the start of the story, the Varga's go-to suggestion for anyone who gives Taylor trouble is to just eat them. She usually says "no", mainly because of the problems it would cause, not because she's particularly opposed to the idea.
  • She does agree on one occasion, when during her first outing as Umihebi a deep-sea probe that Dragon and Armsmaster were using to investigate her proves just a bit too annoying. She comes up from under it and takes it in a single bite.
  • And pretty much everyone expects that this will be Skidmark and Shadow Stalker's ultimate fates once they come back to Brockton Bay.
• Won't Work On Me:
  • Thinker powers shut down or just refuse to return any results when they try to analyze Taylor and the Varga.
    • In particular, once Coil starts trying to model timelines involving Taylor/Varga his power simply shuts down inconclusively with a sense of overwhelming dread -- when the timelines involved don't terminate in his abrupt death or what he ends up calling "the void".
  • Taylor no-sells a Cold Sniper who gets multiple headshots on her -- which she ignores until doing so risks injuring bystanders who aren't bulletproof.
• "World of Cardboard" Speech:
  • In a variation, Kaiju explains to Legend that this is why "Big Brother" doesn't come ashore: the human world is just too small and fragile.
  • Taylor gets a one-sentence one while she and Lisa discuss what to do about Skidmark.
  • Taylor also discusses her potential for vast raw destruction with both Danny and Amy.
• Wraparound Background: Vicky likens a criminal trapped in one of Cloak's space warps to a case of this.

• You Can See the Explosion from Orbit: Dragon says that "Athena", the "nuclear-powered shotgun", will be visible from orbit when fired.
  • Leet expects his recreation of the BFG10K from Quake will be just as visible, especially if it just explodes when fired, but even if it doesn't.
• You Have Been Warned: When posting links to video of the non-Euclidean object given to Danny for his birthday by the Family, the PHO member writing the message makes it extremely clear that they are extremely disturbing, and adds "Don't say I didn't warn you."
• You Keep Using That Word: The Varga, about "Wheeeeeeee!" while Taylor learns to use her water rocket.
• You Kill It, You Bought It:
  • The Varga absorbed the power of the Dark Varga, the enemy he and Princess Luna defeated at the end of Luna Varga, vastly increasing his power (and tripling his physical size).
  • On a somewhat different scale, in the wake of taking Coil down, the BBFO acquires his base and money, as well as ownership of all the companies he had owned through various cut-outs and shell corporations (which they also take over). Lisa refers to all this as the "spoils of war".
• You Monster!: Flung teasingly at Taylor by Amy during the cookout where they discuss the Family Creation Myth.
• You Wouldn't Like Me When I'm Angry: Danny, acknowledged by both himself and those who know him.
  • Danny quotes the line to the principal of Winslow High School while laying out what will happen if she tries to weasel out of responsibility for Taylor's abuse at the hands of her bullies.
  • After offering sanctuary to the Undersiders, Danny then tells them "If you [cause trouble for the DWU] I'll be annoyed. You don't want that."
  • He makes a similar warning to Über and Leet when they first start associating with the Family, warning them of the consequences if they take advantage of his daughter.