intensely curious about Leap
(See, I told everyone I was still working on these)
After being marooned in Amphibia in 2013 in the aftermath of Gold Morning, Taylor Hebert has spent seven years as a cautiously-tolerated mercenary exterminator. Drifting around the outskirts of amphibian society, she uses her partially-recovered power as an "I win" button against the predatory insect megafauna threatening the outlying settlements Newtopia doesn't give a shit about, using the remains of her costume to obfuscate her species during business transactions. Her semi-comfortable rhythm of monster-hunting, self-flagellation, bitter loneliness and occasional shopping trips is upended in year seven by rumors of creatures loose on the continent who apparently look a lot like her; out of a combination of paranoia, curiosity, grief, and loneliness, she resolves to look into the sightings to see if parahumans from Earth Bet are still after her ass.
The three humans in question are parahumans; they aren't from Earth Bet, and they weren'tparahumans before they got to Amphibia. By entering Amphibia with an active shard connection, Taylor inadvertently led other free-floating, now-off-the-rails passengers into the dimension. both the Amphibians and the local wildlife have been developing powers in small numbers, though not in sufficient numbers to overshadow the already rampant deathworld fuckery, and not with a high survival rate.
It's in this context that Anne and Sasha undergo a two-person cluster-trigger during the season one finale at Toad Tower; Marcy triggers sometime in season two.
- Anne, floored by her friendship with Sasha abruptly collapsing, struggling in the moment to live up to her own self-appointed role as community protector, triggers with a changer primary and a thinker secondary. She has Gallant-style emotion-vision that allows her to perceive the general perceptions and opinions that others hold towards her; her changer power allows her to tap those perceptions, with varying degrees of intensity, to fuel mutations that allow her to live up to the expectations of observers.
- Sasha, doubly floored by the degree to which she's misjudged Anne and her ability to control her, feeling as though she has no choice but to commit to a confrontation lest she look weak, triggers with a Thinker primary and a changer secondary. Sasha is a bargain-bin Tattletale; she has the ability to intuit what people want, immediately and broadly, and (depending on her shard's happiness with her) gets some idea of what she would need to say to turn those desires towards her own ends. Her changer secondary causes subdermal musculature alterations and reinforcements in her upper body whenever she feels like her social position is being jeopardized, with a particular eye towards increasing grip strength.
- Marcy, reeling from her canonical guilt at engineering the situation, feeling lonely and isolated, and comparatively well-informed about powers due to her connections to the Newtopian Government, ends up undergoing a master trigger event that's heavily flavored by her realization that her friends underwent a cluster trigger that she wasn't part of. Marcy's power allows her to summon facsimiles of Anne and Sasha, which start out extremely true-to-life in both appearance and mannerisms but rapidly degenerate on both fronts the longer they remained summoned, gradually taking on aesthetic characteristics sourced from whatever media Marcy's been thinking about a lot recently, and bottoming out psychologically as the unconvincing Yes-men seen in the core dreamworld. Not coincidentally, the facsimiles also become more powerful as they undergo this degeneration, picking up minor powers and becoming stronger, faster and harder to put down. To add insult to injury, the facsimiles become extremely difficult to summon when Anne and Sasha are actually present, meaning that Marcy is handicapped should she ever attempt to rejoin the group.
After consulting the sagelike advice of @ameliadallon, the broad outline of a plot is as follows;
- Taylor first encounters Marcy sometime in season 1, either when both of them simultaneously show up to troubleshoot the same monster, OR when Marcy is sent by Andrias to troubleshoot Taylordue to Taylor’s vigilantism presenting an unknown and delegitimizing element (she’s taking care of problems Newtopia doesn’t give a shit about.) Marcy and Taylor have one of those initial-misunderstandings-ultimately-resulting-in-a-teamup situations; Taylor comes extremely close to partnering up with Marcy for the long term, but gets driven away by the red flags hung from every corner of Andrias’s castle and a growing conviction that she doesn’t have the charisma necessary to convince Marcy that Andrias is playing her. One other important beat- and another major contributing factor to Taylor deciding to leave Marcy to it- is that Marcy is notably able to intuit from the sparce details Taylor provides that she probably used to be a superhero, and her over-enthusiastic prying into the details of Taylor’s past life drives Taylor up the wall, nearly to the point of breakdown.
- Taylor next runs into Sasha circa early season 2, after the toad tower debacle; Sasha, with her newfound thinker power, is quick to exploit Taylor’s antipathy for the Newtopian government to try and turn her towards her incipient coup, but is also cagey enough about why she’son the outs with the government to raise Taylor’s suspicions. Taylor, for her part, is equally-suspiciously cagey about who she is, how she got to Amphibia, and how she’s controlling the bugs; she’s also got enough lived experience that Sasha reads as the unholy amalgamation/second coming of Lisa AND Emma simultaneously, and she pretty quickly cottons on to the fact Sasha is leveraging a social-thinker power in order to try and manage her. After a short-lived partnership in which both parties are trying to surreptitiously pump the other for information, they break ranks when Sasha crosses the line in some as-of-yet-undefined way, possibly involving treating her subordinates as tools in a way Taylor resolved to stop doing at the end of GM. Taylor strikes out in search of the third Human in the hopes that this one goes more reasonably.
- I’m out of specific plot beats at this point. But the interesting thing about a Taylor Hebert/Anne Boonchuy dynamic is that Anne, fundamentally, is a moral sponge and a people pleaser, thrown into the company of another human with a kind of perspective that doesn’t really exist in the principle cast of Amphibia. Everyone Anne takes cues from in canon, for good or Ill, is either a native who’s inured to the horrors of Amphibian society (the Plantars) or an outsider undergoing a similar trial-by-fire as her. Taylor, having gone through a full 3-act character arc already, offers a cynicism and utilitarianknot-cutting brutality that would have advantages and disadvantages for Anne. On the one hand, Taylor’s knee-jerk suspicion of authority would be a very useful framework to adopt given the raw volume of backbiting maniacs Anne blithely stumbles across in canon; on the other hand, Anne’s brushed-upon-in-canon Atlas-complex-in-the-face-of-the-end-of-the-world would get unimaginably worse with Taylor around to give her pointers.
- One provisional plot-point I had kicking around in the back of my head- at the end of season 2, when they get portaled back to LA, the LA they end up in is onpost-GM Earth Bet, complete with Bohu-death traps and eternally-tortured Jack Slash; from there, There Is A Reckoning, as the party has no way of returning to Amphibia without the resources of cape groups that have good reason to see Taylor dead.
(Credit as well to @i-sell-nightmares, who contributed on the powers.)
