Stepping on Worm

Chapter One

by Skysaber

aka Perfect Lionheart

OoOoO

Worm is a grimdark superhero universe where anything that can go wrong, will. It's nasty, and would require whole books to adequately describe how screwed up it is. But even appearing there with no powers, it is still possible to fix that mess.

So, appear penniless and powerless in that environment. And go to work.

OoOoO

Jared awoke on board a bus surrounded by other school kids. Doing a quick self-examination, plus catching the bus window at the right angle to see a bit of his reflection, showed he was the same age as the rest, either at the top end of Elementary school age, or just starting Junior High.

Either way, clearly a pre-teen. Ten or eleven, Hogwarts starting age, basically. That, or graduation age for a Konoha genin. The girls on the bus around him were flat as bean poles, except one or two early starters, and most kids didn't even know what a pimple was yet.

He himself was dressed nicely but not expensively, in winter garb and with a backpack full of school supplies at his feet. The class schedule was a wadded up note crammed deep in a narrow pocket, so obviously had not been glanced at in months. That alone placed him somewhere near the middle of the school year, which matched with the heavy coat he was wearing, as well as the clumps of snow visible on the ground outside.

Other than normal wear on the books and empty notebooks, there was no other clue as to his situation, not even a school ID card. No wallet, no phone, no superspy tools, no home address or lunch card, not even a note explaining his situation.

Checking out the other passengers, they were all ignoring him. However as he looked around he saw the rather obvious clues that indicated this was a city bus, not a school specific one - that, and the rather narrow age ranges of those kids around him, told him that he was at least among Junior High students, instead of sharing space with kindergartners.

Frankly, the kindergartners would have been an improvement. Little kids were nice and willing to answer all sorts of questions guilelessly that older kids would mock or ridicule. Things like, "What city is this?" "What school are we going to?" or "What country are we in?"

All useful information that he did not currently have.

Jared made the effort necessary to get up and move among the other occupants while the bus was still moving in order to make it to where the bus schedules were kept handy for this and all of the connecting lines, grabbing one for each since he didn't even know what bus he was on.

At least they cheered him up by offering the first bit of useful information. He was in some city called Brockton Bay.

He'd never heard of it.

So that made first priority information. Thankfully, he saw the answer right outside of the bus' window, and immediately pulled the cord requesting that the bus make the next stop, which it did so immediately.

Jared got a lot of funny looks from a lot of people when he snagged up his backpack and made for the doors of the bus, both the bus driver and the other kids his age giving him the 'I know this isn't what you are supposed to be doing' glances as he separated himself from the pack, but he didn't care about that.

Making sure to exit by the front door of the bus gave the little redhead opportunity to turn around and note what bus line he had been on before it had a chance to pull away, and pulling out a mechanical pencil he made note of that on the appropriate schedule, then he noted the time. Taking care to check out the nearest cross streets even gave him what direction it had been going, which he made note of too, just in case those data points turned out to be useful.

Then he was darting up the steps to the Brockton Bay Central Library, through the doors into the well-heated building beyond, and immediately diving into heavy research with the kind of purposeful 'dedicated student' air that made adults automatically assume that whatever he was doing, it was respectable and he had official permission to be doing it.

Sometimes not trying to hide was the best form of concealment.

Still, it took him almost no time at all to find the newspaper racks and nail down several important details as to his new situation. One was that the city of Brockton Bay was in New England, USA, which the newspapers claiming it was in New Hampshire not terribly far from Boston.

That established an important baseline on which to work from, as clearly if he'd been in one of the really wiggy universes like Warhammer, or Equestria, things would have different names. So wherever he was, it was based on the classic Earth.

It couldn't *be* the classic earth, because the newspaper front pages were filled with news about the various parahuman goings-on that were going on.

From newspapers he switched to the computers, finding an open station easily. With the general concepts revealed by a quick skim of several newspaper headlines he at least had a better idea of what to search for next, and it took him no time at all to prove that whatever superhuman world this was, it wasn't DC or Marvel, as none of the familiar names turned up anything on a search.

A librarian strolled by, clucking happily at the busily working student, having checked over his shoulder and found him on the local version of wikipedia earnestly devouring the serious subject of history.

Sometimes respectability was it's own shield, as if Jared had gone for the magazine racks and started to read comics or sports, he would have been rousted within minutes; just like if he'd been cruising a mall or hanging out on a street corner, authority figures would have been on him at once. But nicely dressed, being quiet and studying history, he passed completely without notice.

Jared snorted as, through the corner of his eye he caught the librarian who had passed him by rousting a gang member from another booth who, from their conversation, been trying to break through the computer's protection so he could surf porn.

~Idiot. Try thinking with something other than your gonads,~ the studious redhead directed his mental scorn towards the gang member as a security officer was called to help the librarian haul him away.

Although the same security officer gave Jared a glance, his age being obvious and this being a school day, the ten year old was quite obvious working, not goofing off. In fact Jared made an extra effort, those few seconds he was under examination, to drag out one of his notebooks and a homework sheet and start obviously working on some school project. At that point the guard walked away, convinced that no kid would skip school just for the purpose of doing homework.

As the guard walked away, Jared hid a grin. This was routine for him. He'd been bored to tears with the slow pace of public school lessons, and so for years had worked out the best place to skip class was the local library, reading books. Actually, the only place better than the public library had to be the school's own library, when it had one. For some reason no one suspected the quiet, studious kid who came in to read and study was skipping class to do so. Those habits were appallingly easy for him to slip back into now.

Over the next several hours the librarian checked in on him with increasingly large gaps in between visits, as each time she found him hard at work learning. Although her semi-regular visits were enough to scare off a brown-haired girl who had come in around lunchtime, and obviously did not care for the scrutiny.

By her age and height, mid-teens and nearly six foot, that girl would ordinarily been able to pass herself off as a scrawny adult from a distance, so if she was ducking out of high school, which she probably was, the amount of attention drawn would have been atypical for her, but for a person of Jared's current ten or so years, that attention was mandatory.

A full day of heavy reading got him some serious, if broad-scope, information.

He found the divergence point from normal pretty easily.

Back during early 1980 the first supervillains appeared. It was around Afghanistan, during the Soviet-Afghan War. The Chinese funded resistance movement had been shattered the year before, only to be suddenly regalvanized under the leadership of a man of solid gold, dressed in robes reminiscent of a Chinese emperor, and his first act on the world stage was to bury a Russian tank division in glass using waves of fire from his hands.

This new golden man spoke little, but when asked his name he had reportedly replied Tian. So the Chinese proudly proclaimed he was called Tian Shu Zhu, after their god of sun and wind.

With him on the battlefield, Chinese troops never lost. They were squashing the Soviets by the numbers and would have won quite handily save that only months after Tian's first appearance the Soviets got their own cape to equal him. She was black from head to toe, and not African black but inhumanly black, like the surface of ink or tar or a starless void, and she wore a gown in the Russian Imperial style composed solely of ice crystals.

They called her Lady Winter, and boasted that Russians never lost a war when winter was on their side. She was the first cape to appear after Tian, but far from the last.

And the first place they clashed was in Afghanistan.

Russian troops had seized and held the cities. Then there were two rebel groups, the one funded by China had been resoundingly defeated in open battle the year before, and would have disbanded entirely had Tian not appeared. Then there was the rebel group funded by America and the West, which quickly dwindled to insignificance as both China and Russia started to throw any capes they could find, draft or hire into the conflict.

Thus, the War in Afghanistan became known as the First Cape War, (he noted 'cape' being the local slang term for anyone with super powers).

Technically, War in Afghanistan still was the First Cape War, because they hadn't stopped fighting there yet, over thirty years later. Although the landscape of that country had been blasted and rearranged so many times they didn't even bother to map it anymore.

And it was pretty much a stalemate. Where Tian brought firepower to any battlefield, Lady Winter brought wit. She was impossible to outmaneuver, and so cunning were her strategies that people joked that when she was around, the only things Tian hit were the targets of his practice range.

Both were national treasures, although still clearly villains, as they tended to act like a mix of all the worst parts of Doctor Doom and Darth Vader - and the worst part was that came pretty darn close to what those countries each expected in a leader, so they were fine with that. Each could easily have seized total control of the country they represented if either had been at all interested in anything save running their armies.

Now the two clashed but rarely in person. After years of fighting both had settled down and been more or less content to sit back and lead. But from the point of their arrival other super beings began appearing across the globe, more or less evenly spread by geography.

As for the rest of the world, bleak was a good word for it.

This world was not a happy place. Government had somehow gotten involved in the heroing business, and managed it just about as well as they did the local DMV - which is to say, about as badly as something can be managed. Villains outnumbered heroes by a significant margin. Some sources said three to one, others claimed eleven to one. Either way, the heroes did not have any kind of success rate worth remarking upon, not like he'd expect anyway.

Put a villain or a catastrophe in front of Batman, or any other classic comic book hero, either DC or Marvel, and the problem is going to get fixed. Not so here.

On this world, the heroes had about as much effect on villain crime rates as the police of a classic earth did in the war on drugs. They made some arrests now and then, making a big deal about each of them, made some places marginally safer than others, but overall Inspector Gadget would make for a fine example of success and ingenuity compared to the government-run hero teams. They were a joke.

Also, Jared got the strong impression that the government's attitude was "work for us or be a villain", which would explain both the vast disparity in numbers (when frankly most kids growing up would want to be heroes), and the government-run teams ineffectual natures, as throw enough bureaucracy on it and you can stifle anything.

Even Superman would be a putz if there was a whole book of procedures that had to be followed, regulations hamstringing him left and right, and he had to fill out reams of paperwork before taking any action. That sort of thing would drive nearly anyone to be a villain, just to escape the "yet another wageslave" approach to having super-powers.

But enough about that, Jared had enough experience with government corruption to see all of the signs here. You did not have to have worked with NERV in an Evangelion universe, to know better than to trust government outright, as too often bad guys took over the show. Even in the DC universe, Lex Luther became president. And Marvel's civil war started with government deciding they needed to run the hero show, when one of the greatest, long-term villains of the setting was a senator.

When heroes start taking orders from villains, everyone suffers.

Jared was canny enough to recognize those very same warning signs here. Several very dark and dismal universes started to go bad only once the villains got in charge - and frankly, this looked like one of them. He couldn't think of anything else that could explain how maximally screwed up everything was, especially in the hero situation.

Bleak indeed.

Basically it was an entire world full of bad guys, and he had yet to find a good one. Frankly it was giving off waaay too many vibes reminding him of the Evangelion universe. They even had periodic monster attacks causing massive casualties and property damage!

It was the sort of thing to make one long for a giant robot team, but of course they didn't have one.

It was enough to cause Jared's eyes to narrow at the screen. This, he concluded, could not be allowed to stand.

Before he'd been running on basic principles. If lost, find out where you are. That was the same whether you had just moved to a new city, or whether you got catapulted into a realm of chaos and madness like Warhammer. Survival depended heavily on understanding one's environment. There hadn't been any need to get his emotions involved because really, why bother getting emotional over a problem when you could instead be fixing it?

A broken shoelace is not resolved by getting upset about it. Don't even bother. Just replace it. And, once you'd been through as many terrors and trials as he had, lots of problems started to feel fairly minor in comparison. He'd been tortured by experts and lost everything he'd ever loved. And that was *BEFORE* he'd started writing stories! Getting tossed into a totally unfamiliar universe was relaxing by comparison.

Now though? This place needed fixing. It needed it in the worst possible way.

And, though he tried not to get in the habit of quoting villains too often, in this case one quote by the Batman movie's Joker was just too apt. "This town needs an enema!"

Yeah, among the things this place desperately needed was someone to invent a sense of humor for it.

After several hours of nonstop study learning the basic principles of how and why powers worked, according to the experts, Jared called a momentary halt, leaning back and giving a minor thought to the growing hunger of his body before dismissing it entirely. Food was of trivial importance when contrasted with obtaining basic local knowledge, or else how were you to know if you were the equivalent of a Jew to the local Nazis?

And this world HAD Nazis. Lots of them. Europe was basically lost to them.

No, find out what the danger spots are first, the things that set people off, because only by knowing them can you avoid them.

On a Marvel world, don't let anyone think you are a mutant. In DC, don't go near Gotham. Anywhere else, find out what the local equivalent 'gotchas' are before you step in one.

Not that he was going to say he was any kind of expert on the local environment. Even after spending hours getting a read on their situation, Jared was quite willing to acknowledge that his new knowledge was a summary at most. One day, no matter how well spent, wasn't going to give much more than an overview. Months were required if you want to know enough to pass as a native, and years to be any kind of expert on a world.

He was never going to be expert, and that did not bother him at all. No, the thing that distinctly concerned him was as his research time ate up the day, the question grew more and more concerning: what was he going to do with himself once the library closed?

That was sufficient to cause him to shift focus, putting long term details and knowledge on the back burner for now, and focusing more on his immediate situation. Now he was regretting not having taken that bus all of the way to his school, as there he could have gotten into the office, made some excuse to 'confirm' his home address, and thus known where he was supposed to spend the night, if he had any supposed relatives, etc. But such an option was closed to him for now, although with the notes he'd made about the bus route and time, that was probably something he could do tomorrow.

Until then, he had a night approaching and just a few hours to prepare for it before he lost access to his major source of research. And even the most preliminary skims of the news proved that Brockton Bay was not the sort of place one wanted to spend a night outdoors.

As near as Jared could tell, he had been dropped in place without powers, and penniless, in a world where entire cities got destroyed on a quarterly basis. And, of all of the places that he might have been dropped, barring those strictly uninhabitable, Brockton Bay was in the running for the worst according to the online chat. The local Gotham.

One does not try to sleep on a park bench in Gotham at night. There are less painful forms of suicide than that.

Newly spurred on to study, Jared delved more deeply into the city specifically, looking for data he could use, and that brought him quickly enough to references to the local heroes and villain teams (and he made note again that this world's slang appeared to be to call anyone with superpowers 'capes') with links to something called Parahuman Online, which a tentative foray into quickly had the redhaired child wishing that he'd discovered it hours ago.

It had a wealth of information, and Jared had barely dipped into it before coming to a complete stop, staring at the screen. Brockton Bay had a villain team (actually they had so many it was scary), but among the local villains were a couple of losers called Uber and Leet, who were not taken seriously by anyone. Gaming geeks with super powers, but that was not what floored him.

No, Jared was staring at the screen too stunned for words because he saw that Leet's power was that of an inventor, who was supposed to be able to make anything once.

ANYTHING!

Obviously, some people were just not using their imaginations properly if they thought that was a lame power. The eager new arrival spent the next forty five minutes avidly going over the duo's list of crimes and accomplishments before he dared conclude that Leet had never made a device like he'd want. Then the boards made it stupidly easy to get in touch with the supposedly wanted villain team.

So Jared whipped up a quick throwaway email address, and sent:

"Subject: New Game, Start?

To: Uber and Leet

From: New Player

I've got a game for you to beat. Are you interested in the challenge?"

Jared sent it off with confidence. The boards even mentioned that sometimes Uber and Leet worked for other villains, so he was confident they'd be easy to convince. Ready to spend the rest of the evening until the library's closing doing more research, he settled in to more learning, only to be surprised to receive an email alert barely minutes later.

Their reply was somewhat affronted, so he sent back:

"Subject: Re: New Game, Start?

To: Uber and Leet

From: New Player

Not interested in conflict. I've literally got a game for you to play, which, if successful, could result in money, money, money by the pound as the least of all possible rewards. The really fun stuff doesn't bear mentioning over email."

A minute later, he was forced to send another reply:

"Subject: Re: New Game, Start?

To: Uber and Leet

From: New Player

No, I'm not offering anything pervy. Get your minds out of the gutter!

Look, according to the boards you guys sometimes take mercenary contracts, right? While I am not going to admit to anything even vaguely illegal online, if I had such intentions, I am offering to hire you both to use your abilities for mutual profit and gain. And it's even game related.

Everyone keeps their pants on. No 'no touch' zones are violated, and the yaoi fangirls would be bitterly disappointed over how utterly uninteresting they would find my plans."

Sending that off with a frustrated sigh, at least he got his confirmation back quickly that they were willing to set up a meet to discuss it in person.

Now if only he could figure out where this Fugly Bob's place was.

OoOoO

The glass door swung open easily from the weight of her leaning on it, and the warm air of the inside of the fast food place greeted her face as the girl halfway limped, partly hopped to a chair at one of the mostly-clean tables.

Taylor winced as she sat down, not even recognizing the restaurant she was in, but the pain in her foot demanded her attention, so she relieved it by taking a seat.

Being tripped at school, she'd nearly fallen, but only saved herself with a slight wrench to one ankle. It hurt, but wouldn't have been that bad if she'd been able to rest it at the library after leaving school like she'd originally planned.

But no, the librarian had been hovering today, and rather get caught by a truant officer she had made haste out, only to discover that her bus pass had been in the pocket of the folder that Sophia and the other bullies had stolen, so she'd been in for a long walk home. And what had started as a minor ankle twinge was now throbbing as though really hurt.

"Excuse me?"

Taylor looked up from rubbing at her swelling ankle and couldn't believe her eyes when she met eyes with Amy Dallon, alias Panacea, most famous healing cape in the world, who had apparently entered the restaurant with her sister Glory Girl. And here she was nursing an injury right in their path!

"Are you alright?" came the gentle voice and concerned tones of the healer.

Taylor wordlessly shook her head, holding out her ankle, too in awe of being so close to so famous a person to respond adequately by voice, and afraid of squeaking if she tried.

Taking that as permission enough, Panacea laid her fingers on the swollen ankle thus exposed. Moments later Panacea's eyes widened a bit and she controlled her reaction to avoid outing this person as her power fed her information on the person she was healing, as she realized the girl was another cape.

OoOoO

The abandoned warehouse that was their current lair wasn't much, and certainly not worth fixing up given how often they had to move base suddenly. But at least the dust had been controlled by spraying down the small office areas with a garden hose before moving in.

Uber was surfing with a sandwich in one hand and a slurpee on the desk beside the mouse and a half empty bag of chips when he blinked and called out, "Hey, Leet, look at this."

"I'm *busy*!" came the reply of the tinker actively tinkering in the next room.

"You'll want to see this, some dude is calling us out." Uber replied, taking a firm bite of his sandwich.

"Just one more weld."

Moments later Leet's head came around the corner of the doorframe that led to his personal laboratory and workshop, forehead still creased by the strap of the welding mask he'd been wearing for hours. "What's up? I thought you were going to leave me alone until I finished the Voltron rig?"

"You started that?" Uber looked up, nonplused, as he stopped leaning back and took his feet off the second chair next to the desk. "I thought we'd agreed to go with a battlemech instead?"

"I know, I just couldn't resist the: one robot, five lions," the scrawny tinker returned with a grin. "We've got the space, and with the new smelter we've got all of the steel I want, just picking up scraps from the trainyard and boat graveyard. So why not go really big?"

"Maybe because we'd need five pilots and have only got two?" Uber asked.

"Oh," Leet's grin vanished away as he recalled what the winning argument had been. "Yeah, but where are we going to get the plastics I'd need for the myomar fibers for an Altas or a Devastator?"

Uber shrugged. "Maybe we can score some from another empty warehouse Anyway, take a look at this."

"Wouldn't be enough to build an Urbanmech," Leet groused under his breath as he read over his teammate and best friend's shoulder. "Some bastard's calling us out?"

"Looks like that," Uber quickly typed a reply.

"Now that's a come on," Leet decided, once they had a reply back moments later.

"Sure looks like one," Uber agreed, confidently sending a stinging rejoinder across the web.

Both broke out laughing when they got a reply.

"Okay, so it wasn't a come-on," Leet wiped a tear of laughter from his eye.

"So it's a job. Do we look into it" Uber's eyes glittered as he reached for the mouse.

"With an opening like that, how could we not?" Leet grinned.

OoOoO

Fugly Bob's was one of those wonders, a small shop not driven out of business by the chain stores. That sort of place survived on their quality and local reputation.

And they were worth it.

Jared had arrived hungry, walking in through the doors to find a single mom embarrassed by her bratty kid throwing a tantrum. She'd just agreed to get the whiny little snot a chicken burger instead of the perfectly good plain burger lying untouched on the booth table before him, when Jared appeared at her elbow, all helpful and innocence, offering in a polite and respectful tone to carry that burger to the trash for her if they didn't want it.

Yes, it was begging, but it netted him a burger, for which he was grateful. And it really was that good.

His meal was about halfway demolished when the supervillains he'd contacted arrived. Uber and Leet came in costume. Jared guessed he should have been expecting that, the call out was to their superhero identities after all. His seat was near by the front door, so before they could call much attention to themselves, he called out a movie quote just enough for them to hear, "Greetings, my excellent friends."

Uber and Leet glanced at each other, obviously a bit put off, not expecting to be met by a kid, before Uber's eyes started sparkling and he shrugged and declared "Leetness knows no age," and they both slid into the booth with him.

Actually, if Jared was any judge of character (which he was) their comfort level even increased; to be dealing with a younger kid gave them the sense of advantage and put them at ease, where an older person would be viewed as more of a credible threat.

Part of Jared's clothing was a pair of gargoyle sunglasses he hadn't worn in years, but between them and the bulky winter weather clothing that everyone around wore, could be taken for a costume just as easily as it passed for normal clothes.

Bright sun on snow did call for sunglasses, after all.

"Be excellent to each other," the ten year old redhead smirked as he gestured the much older teens to their seats as they took places in the booth. He was not as strong on video game quotes as he ought to be for optimal dealing with these guys, so he was gambling on the fact that the line between movies and games had grown awfully blurry. Most good movies inspired games, and quite a few popular games had movies based on them.

"Party on, dudes." Uber grinned, showing that he'd caught the movie reference.

"Would you like to play a game?" Jared asked before either of the two villains could question him, controlling the flow of the conversation. The particular intonation and cadence being very specific to another movie.

Leet blanched. "It's not going to be global thermonuclear war, is it?" showing that he too had caught on to the movie quotes.

The newcomer to this planet glanced at both teens through his sunglasses, before tossing a file folder onto the table in between them. "Your mission, should you choose to accept it."

It had been easy enough to empty out one of the school folders in his backpack and get a few sheets of almost-new copier paper from the library. That had given him materials to put his pens to good use, and draw up exactly what he wanted them to build, along with how, broken down so the steps to conclusion even came with a sort of game adventure feel.

One thing Jared's research had made clear was that this was not the sort of a world where a homeless, penniless ten-year-old could expect to survive. Not without powers, anyway.

So he'd plotted out how to solve that little problem.

Leet's eyes grew wide and round as he read over the material, and he started twitching with excitement as he declared, "Dude that is SO epic!"

Jared finished the last of the burger before the duo were done reading his papers. When they looked up, he challenged. "So, do you take the blue pill? Or is it the red pill, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes?"

"We are SOO in on this!" Leet declared.

OoOoO

Author's Notes:

So a Worm AU (not like fanfiction isn't *all* AU, but still).

The silly thing is, I had no intention of ever touching the Worm universe, just like it can be hard to convince someone to pick up a dog turd bare handed.

Still, a lot of people had been making a lot of noise over some self-insert challenge to the universe, and I am very interested in self-insert stories. But even so I was avoiding Worm until The Grum started in on the genre. Now he is one of those people who are worth reading no matter what he writes. He can turn a dog turd into a diamond.

Exposed that far, I ventured just a touch further to read some of the self-insert storylines, and some of those were good. I even went so far as to look over version one of the Worm CYOA self-insert challenge. But aside from a few vague notions, that would have been the end of it, as the whole place is just dripping with evil. Except one of my other few friends decided to write his own response to that challenge, then invite me to do the same using his setup to see how our works would turn out different.

So, eh, dripping with evil just became a target rich environment. I'd say who this friend was, but that would give away the build I am using. Although I did make a few changes to my friend's initial setup, mostly to make it fantastically more difficult, as it was just not enough of a challenge to tackle this world, starting out with my own superpowers.

Oh, and those of you in the know have already noticed there are two of the ultimate big bad in operation, not just one. So yes, I made "the Lovers" addition to my setup. So we have both ultimate villains it takes dozens of worlds worth of heroes to defeat lying around, and the one hasn't lobotomized himself for grief over the absence of the other. So both are at full health and full power, acting in concert to stir up conflict and carry out their plan.

It just wouldn't be fair not to give my enemies a sporting chance, after all.

I haven't even bothered to spend any of the points I ought to have gotten for that, either. Maybe I will later, but first I want to kick this world a few times in the teeth just using my ability to reason things out.