#thomas calvert
MAJOR WORM THE WEB SERIAL SPOILERS
I can’t believe I just realized that all of Taylor’s first kills were Directors of the PRT.
First was Thomas, who became Director after Piggot.
Then Director Tagg.
Then Alexandria who was revealed to be Directer Costa-Brown
So an interesting thing about Coil is that his vial-given power is something very, very much in line with the kind of power he’d have gotten if he was a natural trigger.
Thomas Calvert shot his CO at Ellisburg because he was afraid that the CO was going to climb the ladder too slowly and get him eaten. He expresses uncertaintyin Piggot’s interlude about whether or not this fear was unfounded, but the crucial thing is that in the face of not knowing (thinker trigger!) he shot him just to be sure, and subsequently blew up his own life. This is the kind of thing that would realistically cause a person to ruminate endlessly on the road not taken, just how Lisa was ruminating endlessly in the wake of what happened to her brother. The question of whether he really made the best choice, whether what he did was really necessary,really worth the obvious tradeoffs.
Now, for a while, this made me think that cauldron vials were looking for things in their recipients lives that could have been a trigger event, had they been capable of connecting at the moment of truth. This is a theory that tracks for Alexandria and Eidolon, but falls through for, say, Battery.
No, the broader and more inclusive model for the cauldron vials is that they work more like (don’t kill me) RWBY semblances, coalescing around the broad thesis of their hosts lives, finding some big sticking point in their mindset or approach to life and latching on like a remora. Battery’s focus on cause-and-effect. Sundancers fear of the spotlight despite how well she does in it. Trickster and his tendency to replace and shuffle others around for his own benefit. Echidna and her gamer-girlishness/slash/eating disorder. It’s the stuff going on in their lives- not necessarily a crisis point, but what they’re thinking about.
Thomas Calvert must have spent quite a bit of time thinking about how he shot that guy. Maybe guilt. Maybe just regret about the negative consequences.
This is, ultimately, the core of Thomas Calvert. The need to be sure.The need to act with as much information as possible, as securely as possible, in order to act with wild abandon once you’re sure you’ve secure enough to do so. It’s running through every facet of his life. It’s not a coincidence that the man runs a company that builds Endbringer Shelters in his civilian identity, It’s not a coincidence that he gets along with notorious control freak Accord, it’s not a coincidence that Cauldron thought he’d be a good pick for an experiment to see if a cape could become the evenhanded tyrant of a whole city, and it’s definitely not a coincidence that one of his first big plays is kidnapping a human magic-8 ball that he can shake relentlessly for more confirmation whenever he’s feeling antsy about his prospects.
