Something I've wanted to talk about, and something I intend to cover with Tortuga the Fanfic is Capes and 'old age' relatively speaking.
The Thinker and the Warrior arrive around 1980, and its sorta doubtful how many triggers happened that first day as Scion was getting settled and Eden was crash landing. What we know for certain is that the same day Eden crashed, Fortuna got her power and promptly lobotomized Eden. It appeals to me to think of Fortuna as the first parahuman considering both her conceptualization of her power as 'The Path', in the sense that she needed to be the one to take the first step on something that'll set the future of Earth Bet and adjacent dimensions both in motion and in stone. We know that Earth Bet considers Vikare as the first parahuman, at least to those who don't consider Scion to be the first, so if there were other parahumans active from around 1980 they would've been considered first or second or what have you if they were more notable. The world does not know about Contessa and largely remains ignorant of her all the way through Gold Morning (i still have yet to read Ward so she might become known to the public).
We can therefore place Contessa as probably the one person who has been a parahuman the longest, all the way up to our 2011 start date for Worm and many fanfictions. If I remember correctly, she was around eleven years old when she got her shard. Young but not too far from the usual teenager trigger area. Influenced more by her shard, like Bonesaw (who was even younger iirc, like six?) and granted breadth and depth. Her entire life was guided by her power after all. She'd be 42 as of 2011.
I've mentioned Vikare but in the spirit of preserving my own time from wiki-diving and yours by reading, I think I'll dismiss the dead heroes who don't have a long career. Of those that pass that filter off the top of my head there's Vikare who had a 7 year career from his meeting with Scion in 1982 and his death in 1989, and Hero, who must've been given a vial somewhere around the same time since his vial was one of the first batch extracted, so lets also give him 1982 as his vial point. They probably took a year to figure out how or even if they should extract powers from Eden's dying body, and Hero was one of the first ten vials they tested and he coincides with Scion appearing above the ocean so 1982 makes sense to me, and his death in 2000, giving him a 18 year career. If there are other capes with long careers that died before 2011 I'd love to hear it, considering both the topic of this post and the interest Tortuga herself would have in the longevity of other parahumans and their careers. Hopefully you'll begin to see why she'd care.
Of the living (as of 2011) heroes and villains who have had long careers, we've got a few that spring to mind. The surviving members of the Triumverate, Eidolon, Legend and Alexandria. Doormaker was in the same batch as Hero was, and there were six survivors, five having no complications, Doormaker being the only unmutated one. Doormaker, Hero and a "girl who can teleport" who probably died before the start of Worm. There's also one who might have been Eidolon in the first batch since Contessa refers to him as "Only one was a little harder to figure out, coming with a fog around him." and that honestly sounds like Eidolon's whole schtick. Lets throw Legend into that first round as well. We know Alexandria came later with a private visit with Doctor Mother and Contessa in 1986. Alexandria meets Hero, Eidolon and Legend in 1988 where they formally create the Protectorate (team) to counteract the rise of natural triggers creating more Villains than Heroes, and the tone of their introductions to eachother seem to imply that Alexandria is the impressive rookie out in Los Angeles and has been pulling a good track record in her two years since getting a vial. So, that gives us Eidolon and Legend starting in 1982~ and therefore 29 years of being parahumans/capes and Alexandria 25 years of being a parahuman/cape.
Off the top of my head on the villain side I think Uppercrust might be the only one that springs to mind. He's been dying of cancer/unspecified medical problems since his trigger event and I sorta recall him being an older man. I don't have a start date but I assumed, and intend to write it into Tortuga the Fanfic, as him having around 20ish years of being a cape and running the Elite to pay for his medical bills.
I'm honestly drawing a blank on any other heroes/villains. But these seem to be the most important to point out. Everyone else who is alive but a veteran hero either has a shorter career or died before they could break that barrier of 20 years. Hero was probably the greatest Tinker of all time and even he couldn't make it past 20~ years. The ones who do make it past that barrier are a man who can have any feasible power, a woman who literally cannot be harmed except by an all-or-nothing power, and a man who can transform himself into a light breaker form to cheat death and regenerate. Uppercrust might even be outright apocryphal from my reading of Trailblazer. I don't actually know of any villains that have been around since the 1980s in Worm, which makes a lot of sense actually. They're not likely to survive the increased attrition rates of Villains relative to Heroes and independents.
So now we come to the point of my post. Tortuga triggers the afternoon of Vikare's death, 1989, from the traumatic mixture of a dysfunctional african-american home life, a decade and a half of institutionalized racism, squashed daydream fantasies of heroes like Vikare rescuing her from both of these, and the neglectful discharge of a gung-ho police officer responding aggressively to a domestic disturbance call. As of 2011 she has been a parahuman for twenty two years, and at the start of our story, has come out of a restless retirement that began in 2009 after an attack on Mexico City by Behemoth on May 14th shook her confidence in her ability to stay in the game for two years. She has been a mercenary cape for twenty years, moving across the southern united states, central and south americas working for villians, freedom fighters, heroes, villainous heroes, the people and governments all across this range.
A question she is asking herself is; how long can she keep rolling the dice? She's outlasted the best Tinker in the world, which she supposes means that title would pass to her, if not at least making her the most experienced tinker in the world and she's rapidly coming up behind the most respected, most experienced and longest running parahumans, a gap that is more likely to shrink over time as Alexandria, Eidolon and Legend continue to actively work as Heroes and fight Endbringers. Without finding any Villains who I can point to in the text or canon and say "They've lived longer and been more experienced" that would leave Tortuga as the most experienced Villain in Worm (or at least the fanfic.)
A lot of our protagonists in the Worm fanfiction community are teenagers. This is largely because our favorite protagonist, Taylor, is herself teenaged, but it seems like the setting favors young children to young adults fighting for their lives against a system designed to force them into conflict and their inevitable confrontation with the end of the world. How many fanfics take the perspective of an older cape as center stage? An older woman, an older parahuman who perhaps has a better sense of self than our angst ridden, fresh off the trigger protagonists. Someone who has maybe gotten over a few of the things that turned her into a parahuman in the first place. Someone who has at least turned some of her wounds into scars.
My main motivation for this is rooted in my own age. I'm getting older. There's a metatextual bend to my intent here. I'm probably not alone in the idea that if I could give fifteen year old me some advice, it would probably look and sound very similar to how I want Tortuga to mentor Taylor in this story.
When I first read Worm, I was Taylor's age. It gripped me tightly with how much I found myself reflected in her. As an older woman now, I certainly read Worm wishing I could put my hand on Taylor's shoulder and say "No. None of this is normal. Children shouldn't have to fight wars. You need someone on your side, someone who can help you not have to carry it all on your shoulders. You need to take time to be with the people you love before you look around and can't find them anymore because you've been fighting your way forward."
There's a sobering thought to this. I will grow older, but Taylor Hebert, in the text of Worm, will stay the same age. Forever. Nothing I do (except a trip to Canada and a recreation of Stephen King's Misery. joke.) will change that.
But I can give her a version of her story where she had someone, an adult, who wasn't out to get her, who gave her every piece of advice she could as she needed, and would advocate for some reason and accountability. It's the kind of story I would've liked for myself, and some of the best advice I've gotten on writing stories is to write for myself.
So that's two of the many things I want to address in this story I'm writing up. Age, and how to survive it when the odds are stacked against you, and Youth, and what I wish I could've said to a younger me being said to Taylor. We were both 16 in 2011. I'd like to think she's in Earth Aleph, facing the same things we are. Getting older.
