Danny Hebert

Danny Hebert is Taylor's father. He works for the Dockworkers Association as head of hiring and spokesperson.

Personality
Perhaps related to being a union man, he understands the position of people around him and respects their individual perspectives, his daughter included.

He has an enormous temper that he has been able to keep in check, inherited from his father and given to his daughter in turn.

Taylor
While he loves his daughter this is tested throughout the story. Sometimes she thinks he is afraid of her.

Despite the distance between him and his daughter, he is a loyal and caring father. He trusts her even after learning of her secret and rocky ascension as a cape.

Annette
He truly loved his wife, they completed each other. He still left her place on their shared bed empty.

Appearance
Danny is a tall, thin, balding man with dark hair. He has large eyes, glasses, and a weak chin. He has green eyes.

Abilities and Powers
Danny is not a parahuman, because of this he has no powers, though he had the potential to trigger and almost did several times. He is an able administrator and negotiator however, and occupied a high stress position at work as head of hiring.ghostofthefallen: Danny is the spokesperson and head of hiring at the Dockworker's Association but I assume that means he has a boss, is there any more information about that or where Danny position is in the work hierarchy? Also how well known would he be to the PRT leadership? Wildbow: Basically it's a voluntary position, member of an organization (Docks' general labor union) that defends & protects the interests of the organization. That includes negotiating & enforcing the deals made & standards held, ensuring to some degree that things are in compliance with laws (doesn't mean he's a lawyer- just that he's well versed in the law for matters like this - probably has some lawyers on tap), he'll stand by union members when issues arise, makes sure everyone's on the same page about changes, what the rules are, expectations, etc, and pushes the union's values. It's a high-stress position. Heavy communication with often stubborn people (both on his side & otherwise)- he's not the union leadership but the link between them & the union member and between the union & the potential employers. In a situation like Brockton Bay's, he's basically playing a part in ensuring that people get a fair shake, favoring seniority and fair employee laws in a situation where it'd be very easy for things to slip into a 'lowest bidder, shittiest employee, shitty employment treatment with high turnover' situation. It very much requires ensuring that people don't flake off or try to cut in front of the lines, so to speak. It also means he's the first person to be yelled at when there's no jobs to be had as people stick with the union. Reyemile: So if it's a voluntary position, what's he doing to earn money? Wildbow: Voluntary not in the 'volunteer work' but in the 'nominate yourself' sense. [Edit with afterthought: it’s worth stressing he could be supplanted if the association thought he was doing a bad job and someone else wanted to step up.] Union collects membership dues (part of the yelling-at), he gets paid for helping and he's a member of the organization himself, so he does work as well (more yelling-at if he's deemed to favor himself or his friends). - Conversation with Wildbow on Discord, Archived on Spacebattles.

If he had triggered, depended on the event that caused him to trigger, he could receive a number of powers based on the Queen Administrator Shard.

If he triggered due to Annette's death, he would become a Master with control over a rat swarm morphed into the form of his wife, which over time he can change into a variety of different and flexible forms beyond simply swarming his opponents and slowly approaches the level of control of Taylor.

If he triggered due to believing he failed as a father to Taylor, he becomes a Changer/Thinker who regurgitates all but the bare minimum of food needed to function into highly intelligent and durable rats which he has explicit control over. It is rather hard to kill the rats that he creates. He has a more generalised control over various rodents, but he has a much easier time controlling the rats he vomits up. He can see through their eyes, sense what they sense, and use them to control the other, general swarms. However, the more rats there are, the smaller his own perspective is, relative to the combined sensory input of all the various rats.

If he triggered due to abuse from his local government, failing his fellow workers and a belief that the city is seemingly hostile to him, he will manifest as a generalised Stranger/Master. Within a 3-4 mile range, he can cause people to become irritated or frustrated, using various small creatures such as insects, arachnids, rats, birds, and fish as vectors for his emotions. If he focuses on a single person, people and animals become irrationally angry at that person. Their life becomes ruined as insects and rodents collect inside their homes and cars, and everyone they meet becomes hostile or even attacks them. With such a power, he could largely remain impossible to find, if not for his anger that eventually causes him to confront the people he is angry with.

Background
Danny considered his own father to be a serious bastard with breath-taking anger issues, something that Danny had inherited.Danny’s father had been a powerful, heavyset man, and Danny hadn’t gotten any of those genes. Danny had been a nerd when the term was still young in popular culture, stick thin, awkward, short sighted, glasses, bad fashion sense. What he had inherited was his father’s famous temper. It was quick to rise and startling in its intensity. Unlike his father, Danny had only ever hit someone in anger twice, both times when he was much younger. That said, just like his father, he could and would go off on tirades that would leave people shaking. Danny had long viewed the moment he’d started to see himself as a man, an adult, to be the point in time where he had sworn to himself that he wouldn’t ever lose his temper with his family. He wouldn’t pass that on to his child the way his father had to him. He had never broken that oath with Taylor, and knowing that was what kept him contained in his room, pacing back and forth, red in the face and wanting to punch something. While he’d never gotten angry at her, never screamed at her, he knew Taylor had seen him angry. Once, he had been at work, talking to a mayor’s aide. The man had told Danny that the revival projects for the Docks were being cancelled and that, contrary to promises, there were to be layoffs rather than new jobs for the already beleaguered Dockworkers. Taylor had been spending the morning in his office on the promise that they would go out for the afternoon, and had been in a position to see him fly off the handle in the worst way with the man. Four years ago, he had lost his temper with Annette for the first time, breaking his oath to himself. That had been the last time he had seen her. Taylor hadn’t been there to see him shouting at her mother, but he was fairly certain she’d heard some of it. It shamed him. The third and last time that he had lost his temper where Taylor had been in a position to know had been when she had been hospitalized following the incident in January. He’d screamed at the school’s principal, who had deserved it, and at Taylor’s then-Biology teacher, who probably hadn’t. It had been bad enough that a nurse had threatened to call for a police officer, and Danny, barely mollified, had stomped from the hallway to the hospital room to find his daughter more or less conscious and wide eyed in reaction. Danny harbored a deep fear that the reason Taylor hadn’t offered any details on the bullying was out of fear he would, in blind rage, do something about it. It made him feel sick, the notion that he might have contributed something to his daughter’s self imposed isolation in how she was dealing with her problems. It took Danny a long time to calm down, helped by telling himself over and over that Taylor was okay, that she was home, that she was safe. It was something of a blessing that, as the anger faded, he felt drained. He climbed into the left side of the bed, leaving the right side empty out of a habit he’d yet to break, and pulled the covers up around himself. - Exerpt from Gestation 1.x

He eventually met and married Annette, and fathered Taylor Hebert, when they were both relatively young.

He joined the dockworkers association rather young.

His wife was killed by a car accident because she was distracted by her phone, causing him to distrust cellphones.

After his wife's death he spiraled into depression, and Alan Barnes had to intervene to get him to care for his daughter properly, although he still had some difficulty. Out of spite during an argument, Emma Barnes claimed she heard Danny confess that he thought Taylor was inadvertently to blame for Annette's death - Taylor had failed to call her when she was supposed to, and he suspected Annette had been trying to call her when she had her car accident.

With His wife's death he disconnected and wasn't able to take care of Taylor luckily his friend Alan was able to pull him out of it.

Story Start
Heard his daughter sneak back into the house after being out late. He hoped nothing bad happened to her while she was out.

Taylor later called Danny and let him know she had made a few friends. Said friends later brought his daughter home after she was apparently wounded in a bombing.

Post-Leviathan
Had to deal with his daughter leaving the house.

Post-Slaughterhouse Nine
Was slowly recovering from the birds scream, and went to the mayoral debate with his friends and his daughter. Things did not turn out well at all.

Post-Echidna
After the incident at the school when Skitter's identity was released, Danny blamed himself for Taylor and was deeply shocked and upset after hearing what she had confessed to doing.

Was there when she turned herself in. He defended her against Tagg, likely aware of the pressure he was trying to apply, and strongly rebut his suggestion Taylor was unsupported, poetically stating his belief in his daughter as a good person. He tried to defend her when Rebecca Costa-Brown's interrogation tactics led to Taylor snapping and lashing out.

Was there for the hearing that got her into the Wards.

Post-Timeskip
Kept in contact with Taylor and helped the Dockworkers union get better with the economic influx.

Post-Gold Morning
Evacuated to Earth Aleph with his recovering daughter, apparently.