r/Parahumans

Ok so my D&D group are apparently all fans of Worm and want to give Weaverdice a try…

The DM made the mistake of letting us pick our characters from the existing cast in Brockton Bay at the story start instead of rolling up our own characters.

We each talked to the DM privately to choose our characters and figure out our stats. I go last. I try to pick Grue turns out he’s taken… ok I pick Tattletale also taken.

DM confides in me that everyone picked a member of the Undersiders… no one else knows this.

With that in mind who should I play?
Rules:
(They must be in Brockton Bay at the start of the story)
(They cannot be named Amy Dallon)
(They preferably should be able to work with the Undersiders)

Been listening to We’ve Got Worm podcast and DAMN bruh these guys from the get go were on Taylor’s ass for all of her decisions 😭 me personally i was just surprised I saw her as complicated but I never felt her being as bad as some people describe her?

Like theres not often much I feel I would’ve done differently so I struggle to judge her that harshly, or actually I more or less would’ve been one of the other Undersiders who didnt have any noble goal and was doing the shit just because lol

But does anyone think Taylor could’ve done far better and how exactly she should’ve done things differently?

View Poll

Previous post
(Super mild spoilers for Worm, mild spoilers for the Old Testament)

The biblical character Abraham is referenced twice in Pale, once as Musser’s first name, once as Charles's last. 
All three agree to commit child sacrifice (Abraham by binding Isaac, Musser in his demands from Reid and Raquel, and Charles with Yalda + the kids eaten by the Choir + many more), but I think the author points out something deeper - not their sacrifice, but their confidence in making it. 
When God tells Abraham to kill his beloved son just to prove a point, Abarham basically says - “Here I am, motherfucker. Let’s do this!”
The prose[16] in Genesis does a lot to emphasize Abe’s instant obedience, his complete lack of hesitation - you could go as far as saying that Abraham is beyond a doubt.
In the original context this doubtlessness is championed, while in Pale it’s the exact same doubtlessness that’s vilified. 
Musser's doubtless adherence to the 'it is what it is' perspective perfects his villainy: He takes people's guardians and lovers with the same guiltless thrill I feel when stealing someone's last Defuse Card in a game of Exploding Kittens
When confronted by the girls, he justifies his actions with the fact that he’s been in the game longer than they have, something that I’ve heard from so many shitty bosses that I can’t even choose an example for this essay. 
It’s so easy to imagine a real life slave owner using the exact same argument, which is barely even a parallel - Musser is a slaver, cut and dry.
The girls are the opposite of the “Abraham” archetype, champions of doubt. Not in themselves, but in the rules they were given. After all, doubt is the first step towards awakening. 
But what is the awakened person supposed to do, when confronted with people like Abraham Musser who are forcing their eyes shut? How can we change their minds? 
According to Lucy, we can’t. 

>“Ignorant people won’t have a wake up call.  They’ll invent reasons.”

So what can we do, instead? 
I don’t know, but here’s what Avery does: She keeps herself safe from the Abrahams while focusing her efforts on radicalizing the Isaacs. 
The interactions between Raquel and Avery are some of my favorites in the book. Raquel only knows the Musser way of doing things and the cutthroat norms of practitioner society at large, but she still feels that something is deeply wrong. She tries to ignore her doubts, tries to obey, and it’s exactly that obedience that stands like a wall between her and Avery. 
Let’s go over a conversation between the two and see how Avery builds a bridge over that wall.

>“I swore an oath to hold the fort.  Please leave, or I’m going to order the familiars to attack,” Raquel said.
Avery reached into her pocket.  She scribbled on the blank spell card.
“If that’s a practice-”
“It’s not,” Avery said.
She crossed no-man’s land.  Closer to dangerous Others.  Her eyes were down on the card.
Through Snowdrop, she was aware of how tense many of the goblins were.  How tense Verona and Lucy were.
“If you hug me I’ll have one of these Others tear your head off,” Raquel whispered.
“Okay,” Avery said.  “Let’s not do that then.”

I laughed out loud at that part, at the way Raquel’s graphic threat is contrasted by Avery’s quiet  assertion of non-aggression. I can imagine the flat tone in which Avery says it, her eyes just slightly wider. 
Note that Avery doesn’t submit, doesn’t back down, but at the same time doesn’t admonish or point out that it isn’t nice to threaten people with having their heads torn off. She kindly stands her ground. 
Both of these girls are conflicted. Avery is aware of the danger but her heart’s breaking for Raquel, who’s arguably more lonely than Avery had been at her worst and more abused than Verona has ever been. Raquel is dying to get that hug, but not only is she terrified of what Abraham would think of her, she’s terrified of what she’d think of herself.   

“Can you base this speculation in the text in any way?” 

I mean, besides the fact that primates need hugs, and this ape hasn’t been getting any? When offered a hug earlier Raquel refused but didn’t say she didn’t want one - only that it would get her in trouble. Also, she keeps sharing her emotions with our girls, which is (checks notes) not something you do with enemies, and then quickly admonishes herself for doing that. 
Let’s see how Avery bypasses Raquel’s internal conflict:

>She held out the card.

>Raquel took it.

>“That’s our emails.  I’ve been in touch with a bunch from the Blue Heron.  Just like, saying hi, keeping one another up to date.  That’s me, Verona, and Lucy.  Write an email, send Verona a cute cat picture, ask for a movie recommendation.  I dunno.  Send me pretty much any email, just so I have your address.  Even if you don’t know what to say.  That’s all you have to do.”

Avery opens a line of communication, leaving it to Raquel to make the next move, and leaving her nothing to argue against. Quoting the Tao Te Ching, the softest thing in the world overcomes the hardest thing in the world. 
(Eat shit, Toadswallow.) 

Avery, specifically, stands out against the many Abrahams in Pale, because while they sacrifice others for their own benefit, Avery sacrifices her own safety for others. 
The most sublime act, according to Blake[17], is to set another before you. I think Avery would agree. 
I think Taylor would agree, too, and that’s one of the reasons that I find Avery the most similar to Taylor than any of the author’s characters that I’ve read. The running doesn’t weigh into this, as they run for completely different reasons, but their refusal to abandon someone in need definitely does. 
It’s easy to see the similarity between Taylor sticking her neck out for Charlotte and Bryce to Avery sticking her neck out for Raquel but the differences, as always, are more interesting than the similarities - while Taylor feels a “sadistic glee” at rotting someone's balls off, um, for the kids, (which is ironic, considering what an Abrahamic character Taylor is), Avery never feels anything remotely resembling joy while hurting people. 
If there’s any deep psychological need that Avery’s satisfying under the guise of ‘doing good’, it’s her need to be connected to other people, which just isn’t that bad, even if it is a reaction to her long period of suffocating loneliness. Like Verona, Avery treads the line between pathology and reasonable adaptation, making the reader question whether the line even exists. 
Let’s go over what it is that Avery has adapted to. 
The problem for a middle child of three is having the oldest child drawing parental attention by breaching new frontiers, while the youngest simply requires attention in order to survive, thus leaving the middle child with the bottom of the barrel. 
Continuing the author’s tendency to optimize existing formulae, Avery is not a middle child of three - she’s a middle child of five, which is possibly “twice the middle child”. She’s got two siblings drawing attention from above, and two from below. From above Rowan’s fighting for car rights and having his first girlfriend, and Sheridan’s just being a pretty normal teenage girl with all the dread that brings. 
From below Declan is abusing his parents’ preference for peace over justice, taking that peace hostage until he gets what he wants, while Kerry works under the long-internalized assumption that screaming is the only way for her to get attention. 
As if that isn’t enough, Grumble, by his very existence, siphons even more of Avery’s parents’ time and energy.  
This, on paper, explains Avery’s loneliness, but I didn’t really get what she was going through until the dinner scene. She’s trying to get her family to not-watch the reality show she hates, and even though it’s her turn to choose, even though her parents have accepted the mission of making Avery feel less lonely, Avery’s desire gets trampled by her horde of siblings.
(Also, do North Americans really watch TV at dinner? Seems to me like a waste of time that could have been better spent arguing.)
It’s exactly this experience of drowning in loneliness that makes Avery’s kindness shine so bright - while Verona chooses to distract herself and cling to her existing friendships super hard, Avery makes the Naruto-esque decision to never let anyone be this lonely, because she knows how horrible loneliness feels. 
Even within her own family, Avery insists on doing good, which is more impressive than it sounds. I have a nephew that grew up as a middle child of three (easy mode, compared to Avery) and now he’s one of my favorite people in the world - kind, intelligent, and capable of impressive perspective shifts. But when he was Avery’s age, this guy was absolutely intolerable - sacrificing everybody else’s wellbeing to get the attention he needed. 
Avery could have done the same, but she chose not to.
During the elementary school nightmare where the girls meet Charles, Avery is thanked by her dream-mother for “being good”, and is awarded with a kiss on her forehead. This reads to me like an accurate representation of the past. 
In Avery’s present, she’s no longer thanked for being good - her behavior is taken for granted and she’s basically negatively rewarded by getting less attention than her troublemaking siblings. 
It’s very cool, to me, to see an issue that I’ve been made aware of at the age of maybe seven finally being criticized, and criticized so sharply. Moreover, this fundamental systemic issue is paralleled for the reader’s convenience with failures of Ontario’s real life society as well as its practitioner one.
These parallels are even harder to miss when Declan molests Verona and then throws a tantrum when rightfully accused. Judge Connor is swayed by this tantrum, allowing Declan to make the first Claim instead of the two older, better behaved girls. 
It’s only after Avery refuses to participate in a trial that is set against her that she’s given a chance to make her case to her father. She uses that chance to point out a greater societal issue: Declan’s decision to bump into Verona’s chest is a part of a cascade of increasingly misogynistic behavior, like Declan expecting Amber to accept his friendship even if he keeps it secret from his male friends. 
Note that when Declan accuses Avery of being “PMS’ed” he’s doing more than just being a little shit - he’s effectively projecting a perspective in which Avery is physiologically incapable of reason because she’s a woman. 
That’s an extremely powerful act of speaking that the little shit has learned somewhere, and is now free to utilize without being aware of the philosophical implications.
Avery, unlike Abraham, expresses doubt in the system she’s a part of, insisting that things can and should be better.

>“You need to deal with Declan, Dad,” Avery said.  Standing on the ladder, she was of eye level with her dad.
“We need equilibrium.”

Speaking of speaking, “we” is a very interesting word. It can mean “everybody involved” and it can mean “your mother and I”. In this case Connor uses a “we” that sounds like the former, but is actually the latter. 
What Avery needs is to be equally respected. What Verona needs is to have her complaint taken seriously and her future safety guaranteed, AT THE VERY LEAST. What Amber needs is someone to tell Declan that it’s deeply wrong to treat her as a member of a lower caste. 
What all of the trio needs is for grown men to stop ogling their chests in public - men who were probably boys like Declan, who were left to gain momentum on this pattern by fathers like Connor. 
The reader is invited to speculate as to the origin of Verona's dad's unconscious (?) assumption that the women in his life exist solely to serve his needs. 
(You know, now that I think about it, “Boys will be boys” has a very similar ring to “It is what it is”.)
Connor claims that his reason for not disciplining Declan more strictly about his language is that:

>“That was half the boys I knew growing up and all of them grew out of it.“

So what? Why let them “grow out of it” instead of radicalizing them while they’re young and malleable? 
Because it’s work that Connor doesn’t want to do. 
Let’s compare this to the cases of sexual harassment that we’ve seen in the the Blue Heron Institute - Nicollette is exposed to constant unwanted advances from buttholes like Seth, but it’s not like Alexander promotes this stuff. 
He even tells Seth to STFU - but only when Alexander feels disrespected by the molestation of his indentured servant. McCauleigh and Fernanda, whose casual harassment doesn’t offend Alexander, are left to their own devices.
Connor is not Alexander, but he chooses a similar strategy. He’s willing to tackle women’s suffering at the hands (and shoulders) of men, but only when it inconveniences him. 
He prefers to “softly challenge” Declan not because it brings long term change, but because it minimizes the amount of work that he needs to do today, something that Verona very nearly points out.

>“Does challenging him softly work?” Verona asked.  “Because I’ve been getting the vibe that this has been an ongoing thing.”
“Verona, please go home,” Avery’s dad said.
“No.  Not while Avery needs backup.” 

This segment isn’t about Verona, but I have to express how much I adore her quiet bravery - it’s hard for her to stand up to a father, considering what a father is to her, and yet she does, and even more impressively she does without lashing out, without freaking out, without losing her cool, all the while making it clear that she’s there for Avery. 
Which may or may not make it a little easier for Avery to be the person she wants to be - even faced with this injustice, Avery does not hate, she does not rage, and she does not terrorize. 
She still loves her father, she still sees him as doing his best, she still has faith in him. She expresses her frustration, makes her case clearly, and when she isn’t listened to she gets up and leaves.
Like with Raquel, she keeps the line of communication open, she doesn’t insult or attack. 
She demands what’s rightfully hers which, again, is more impressive than it sounds. 
I know people who are kind like Avery and they always get taken advantage of, always struggle to stand up for themselves. People who have assimilated the pattern of setting other people’s needs before their own find that pattern hard to break, even when they’re clearly being used. 
So how does Avery break that pattern? By appropriating her deeper, stronger pattern: helping people in need. 
She first speaks up to her father to defend Verona, but once started on this pattern, she finds her voice, finds it in her to point out injustice for herself. Eventually she points out that if Connor was willing to pay Verona for tutoring Declan that means that Avery isn’t being paid for the work she did.
This happens naturally, but these situations where Avery stands-up-for-herself-for-others can also be created artificially. 
Miss gives Avery a piece of information to trade with the Garrics, and because Miss is a sweetheart (Please, God, don’t let this be a Mahō Shōjo Madoka Magika twist), asks that Avery haggle for a fair price. Avery, who would otherwise be inclined to give the info as a gift and hope to be given a gift back, trains her "standing up for yourself” muscles not for herself, but for Miss. 
But even as she fights for what she deserves, she remembers that “Things don’t have to be this way” (the opposite of “It is what it is”). 
When Walt Garrick pretends to be skeptical about Avery’s intel (an obvious haggling tactic), she muses that everything could have been so much easier if it was just her and Jude working together to decide on a fair price. Walt trying to take from Avery as much as he can while giving the least, is only one step removed from Musser simply taking whatever he can.
The library scene gives us a different perspective on the same problem - the librarian suffers because shitty parents are letting their children cause chaos in the library, knowing that she has no power to stop them. They’re sacrificing her happiness because it makes their day a little bit easier, in the same way that every time Alexander forswears someone he sacrifices their whole life because it makes his own life a little bit easier.
This conflict between self-sacrifice and other-sacrifice doesn’t just exist between Avery and outside forces, but to a degree between Avery and the rest of the trio. After Charles escapes Ray’s custody, the girls need to decide whether to bind Jabber and dematerialize Ken against his explicit lack of consent, or leave themselves weaker by leaving these strategic weak points exposed. All three feel the temptation to sacrifice others to ensure their own safety - how easy it would make things for them. 
But the price of this other-sacrifice is setting a precedent, starting a pattern. Every time they choose safety over justice they make themselves more likely to make the same choice next time, leading them to a situation where they finally become a ruler like Connor, putting justice in second place to peace, and becoming the thing they swore to vanquish. 
I assume you’re familiar with this kind of story.
Interesting thing about the discussion about dematerializing Ken - I’d expect the main conflict here to be between Lucy and Avery, but it’s Verona that pushes for the forceful solution, while Lucy pushes back against it (mostly out of fear for the local Others’ response, I think). 
Why is it Verona that pushes for the use of force? Because it’s not your everyday Verona - it’s a Verona that’s terrified of reuniting with her dad. An irritable, constantly groaning, lashing out Verona. 
This is a very consistent throughline for the author - how it’s harder to be heroic when you’re terrified, when you’re in pain, when you’re suffering. 
But Avery is suffering too, and as if she wasn’t heroic enough, this suffering makes her even more heroic.  
Maricica’s gift to Avery, relatively early in the story, is the knowledge that Kennet has not even a single girl that she could have a happy relationship with. Seeing this reality damages Avery, destabilizes her. You could even say that when you gays into the abyss- 

“Please don’t.”

Ahem. Anyway, Maricica using a fantastical element to illuminate a real world statistic is a beautiful way to use fantasy to show a problem real people suffer from, one that a well-meaning-but-ignorant person might not recognize.
Unlike Lucy and Vernoa who start dating and not-dating, respectively, Avery doesn’t even get a chance at that. Like many things in Avery’s life, it’s massively unfair, particularly considering how lonely she’d been before, how much she’d like to quench that thirst for companionship. 
For me, the scene that communicated that thirst the clearest was the one where Avery sees Zed and Brie kissing in the supermarket, and realizes how lonely she is; how deep and intense her unmet need is, a need for… not romance, according to her, but a companionship.
Soon after this she crawls into bed with Snowdrop, but being hugged by the coolest motherfucker on the planet does not quench that need at all. 
But why doesn’t it? There are several possible reasons. 
One is that Snowdrop was made from Avery, at least in part, created in her image and likeness. My first instinct was to compare Avery&Snowdrop to God&Adam, but that doesn’t really track. Unlike God, Avery had very little control over the final product that is Snowdrop. Snowdrop is part Avery but she’s also part Opossum. 
No, a better analogy would be that Avery feels towards her familiar like a mother feels towards her child - your child, who is in many cases your favorite person in the world, is a version of you with a whole bunch of other elements inside of them (which once again winks at “The horror of being composite”). 
On a very visible level Avery acts like a mother to Snowdrop. A hippie, lenient mother, but a mother still. It’s easy to be reminded of the image of Avery standing next to Ramjam with her hands on her hips, making sure that he doesn’t peer pressure Snowdrop into headbutting nails.
(Should I even compare Avery’s parenting style to Abraham Musser’s? How she insists Snowdrop belongs to herself and all that? I trust that it’s pretty clear at this point.) 
The problem is, the closeness and warmth that you feel for a person that you summoned into being doesn’t really compare to what you feel when held by an equal. 
Consider that even though Jasmine confesses that Lucy brings her life, Lucy doesn’t fill the space that a man would. It’s not about sex, not even about the excitement of courtship and romance, but about having the committed partnership of an equal. Snowdrop is great, but she’s not an equal to Avery. 
Another explanation is that Snowdrop is too cool. I said before that Snowdrop is the coolest motherfucker on the planet, and I’d like to take a detour from the main theme of this essay to talk about that for a bit. 
Snowdrop has two desires: 1. To make her friends happy and 2. To fuck around doing dumb shit. 
Every single action she takes satisfies one of these desires - she never thinks whether the time she’s spending pranking goblins and getting pranked in kind could be spent elsewhere; she never thinks about her actions' long term effects or her moral duty as a member of society. 
The character of Snowdrop is one that enjoys all of the benefits of a cool villain, the kind that you lowkey envy for being able to freely pursue what they want, but also the benefits of a Sam Gamgee-esque sidekick, that would do anything for the beloved protagonist. This is a super interesting character engineering, creating something that is cooler than any real life person could be. 
And that might be why Snowdrop can’t quench Avery’s loneliness - she’s not a real person. 
If practice is a metaphor for writing, Avery is a teenager that writes stories about a champion of friendship and loyalty to alleviate her own loneliness. Writing this character comforts her, but at the end of the day, she still goes to sleep alone. 
Writing a character like that could also be a great way to reach out and make connections with others, as happens when Snowdrop strengthens Avery’s relations with Kennet’s Others, possibly symbolizing the author’s feeling of being connected to the community through his characters.
(However, one would be tempted to speculate about the choice to have Avery create a champion of valor and have the people that celebrate her the most be a bunch of literal goblins. What could WeebsBane be trying to tell the readers here?[18])
Just like Verona’s losing herself in the ecstasy of practice could be read as a statement of the addictive potential of writing, Avery's relationship to Snowdrop can be read as a statement about how we can use writing to alleviate our own loneliness.

“Like you do with me?”

To a degree. You do make the work of writing an essay less lonely, but I originally summoned you because you make it easier to communicate the harder points.

“You seemed to be doing fine without me so far on this segment.”

Yeah, because this essay was relatively straightforward so far. Wanna help me wrap it up?

“Sure.”

We didn’t need the library scene, we didn’t need to read about characters like Musser or Charles to know that people like this exist - we run into them all the time. People who’ve simply made the decision to stop caring. About strangers, about their co-workers, even about their own family members. As individuals they can be infuriating, but as a social phenomenon they are terrifying.
And someone’s gotta do something about it. 

“Who… Who’s going to do something about it?”

Ain’t no one here but you and me, friend. 

“But what can we do? Like, realistically, what are we supposed to do about that?”

Realistically? Focus on people, not demographics. 

“And do what?”

I don’t know, but I think we can take a few moves from Avery’s playbook. 
What does Avery, whose name is amalgamation of “fair” and “wise”[19], do, when running into people who actively try to care less? 
She refuses to accept that “It is what it is”, she refuses to point fingers and make excuses, refuses to sacrifice others’ happiness for her own. 
She’s kind to people who are being difficult, honest with people who say the opposite of what they mean, and smart enough to disengage from people she can’t change. 
She builds bridges where she can, and when she can’t she takes on the heroic challenge of working on herself, making herself stronger and wiser so she could help more people (and also so that she could make straight girls swoon, which is also valid).
Avery leans on her friends for help, but she doesn’t whine, and doesn't accuse them when they can’t be there for her. 

“And you’re expecting me to be like that?”

I can’t tell you what to do, that’s the whole point. But to me, Avery is a mythological character - I can’t be like her, but I can try, and she reminds me that I can try. 
Like Abraham is the perfect protagonist for Genesis and the message it tries to convey, so is Avery perfect for Pale’s core message.  
And I think that’s the end of this segment. 

In the next I’d like to discuss how, as much as I praise Avery’s perfection on the level of character construction, like the biblical Isaac….
I Have Some Questions About the Execution
(Which I'll post as done as soon as I'm done editing it for the bazillionth time)

Footnotes:

[16] In Genesis 22, God tells Abraham “Abraham!” and Abraham responds with “Here I am.” 
That’s a very strange interaction to include in the text because A. it gives the reader zero information and B. Ink and skins to write on were REALLY expensive at the time.
So why is it here? 
In the next verse, God tells Abraham to sacrifice his son, his only son, the one which he loves, Isaac, and Abraham doesn’t even argue - he just goes and does it. 
How do I know that he doesn’t argue? Because it doesn’t say that he does. In the previous verse I was notified of things as mundane as Abraham saying “Here I am” when called, so an argument, were it to occur, would have to be reported as well.

"Wouldn't it be easier to just write - And then he went and did it without arguing?"

Man, I don't know. Take it up with Søren Kierkegaard.

[17] Not the one from Pact. The other one.

[18]  Just kidding. Or am I?

[19] Avery literally means “counsel of Elves” but according to a stranger on Reddit, shouldn’t be taken literally but as “beautiful” + “wise” or “fair” + “wise”. 

“Kinda feels like you’re forcing this one.”

Yeah, a little.

Edit: THE SITE CAN BE REACHED AGAIN! I'LL BE BACK TO READING WORM!

I was in the middle of reading worm and just finished a chapter but trying to load the next one only ended in an error message. Trying to load a previous chapter or reloading the one I was on currently also didn't work.

I wonder if it is just on my end or if the site is down :(

Btw it's my first read. So far I'm enjoying it

The first Siberian orders one beer. The second orders half a beer. The third orders a quarter beer. The fourth orders an eighth—

The bartender, a very powerful Thinker, says, "Manton of all people ought to know his limits," then pours two beers.

Assuming an alternate universe where Taylor is captured and tortured by the S9 instead of Brian do you think Taylor would WANT to be euthanized or do you think she would want to continue living?

What's the most creative, degenerate, and broken uses for Chevalier's matter manipulation power that you can think of?

I'm playing a D&D character in a modern science fantasy setting that has the ability and I have several ideas for uses, wanna help me think of more? ;)

Currently re-reading Worm and now that I know where things are going, it's been getting me thinking about what I thought would happen on my first read.

My biggest prediction was that Taylor's second trigger event would turn her into her swarm. I didn't really have any predictions on how it would take place, but after she lost her vision, it made me think about how much of her consciousness she gave to her swarm that I thought it was leading to her losing herself completely to it and just existing as a hivemind of bugs.

Has there ever been an official reason as to why Shadow Stalker hated Grue so much?

I remember that she once hit him with a crossbow bolt, but was it just because he’s a villain or was there more to it?

For me I would use Danny Phantom as a great example of a Breaker. Someone who has to shift forms in order to access an array of abilities.

Danny Hebert is Coil specifically not that Thomas Calvert is Taylor's dad

So it's been a while since I read Worm and I haven't read Ward (not sure I will, Pact's ending kinda bummed me out too much and I've heard Ward might not be as good as Worm but anyway).

Given that when a Parahuman triggers, their memory of what they see during their Trigger gets wiped from their memory and Skitter didn't instictively know how her powers work. Is it possible for a Parahuman to go several years if not their entire life not knowing they have powers?

I'm reminded of Vista who seemed to just instictively know how her powers work yet, apparently, she doesn't know the full extent of how to use it.

Or how Dauntless didn't know how his charge power works until months after he'd been a hero.

And... Damn, there's a third character but I can't remember now (I really wish It was Imp, that'd be perfect if thats the case.)

I havent read ward yet but im trans and when picking my new name i chose theressa for my middle name bacause i love worm and i love dragon but it recently occured to me that wilbow likes to hurt me and id just like to know if dragon goes crazy and tried to kill all humans or something in ward.

As title. If a Cape Second Triggers at the same time as a Cluster forming, would/could they be a part of it?

Just a weird thought I've had thinking up some ideas for how a vampire Cluster could work.