#tera egbert

It follows Tera Egbert, the adopted daughter of June and Karkat. She is a dorky, opinionated power scaler who struggles to relate to her parents. More specifically, her dad. Karkat has been content to retire into a loving house husband now that he doesn't have the future of his race riding on his shoulders, but his lower stakes life has resulted in his trauma fully pushing itself to the forefront and manifesting as full on PTSD. A mixture of stubborn pride and self loathing defeatism have prevented Karkat from seeking therapy even at his wife's insistence, which culminates in him unintentionally using his daughter as an emotional crush to manage his issues. This is not intentional on Karkat’s part but it is a consequence of him failing to admit he has a problem and confront his issues.

This has given Tera a substantial hero complex regarding the people she cares about. She views it as her personal sole responsibility to care for and protect the people she cares about on her own, because that's the role she's been playing for her father all her life. Whether they think they need help or not, Tera sees it as her duty to provide. Which brings us to the premise of the series. Two of Tera's online friends are from the original Pre-Scratch Earth that the story started on. So, when it looks like SBURB is about to hit Earth C again, Tera pulls some strings to get two copies of SBURB sent back in time to her friends, intent on bringing them into a SBURB Session so that they can survive the coming apocalypse.

These two friends are Zack Krueger and Alex Mercer.

Zack is a harmless, goofy dork characterized primarily by being into R rated media at way too early an age and trying and failing to be an edgy gritty anti-hero. Characters like Spawn, Kratos, and Black Suit Spider-Man make up half his personality and he tries to project an air of coolness and maturity by creating his own mashups of Skillet and Three Days Grace songs (poorly) and creating rock AMVs for Disney Villains. He's also Gay and is very oblivious to his own blindingly obvious crush on Tobey Maguire's Spider-Man (specifically with the Black Suit) and Hayden Christiansen's Anakin Skywalker. It is perfectly normal to have a shrine to them in his bedroom he swears.

Zack's arc comes in when the game actually happens and the apocalypse arrives, giving him the edgy anti-hero backstory he wanted and forcing him to realize "hey, this sucks actually".

Alex Mercer is a young transmasc who named himself after the character from [PROTOTYPE]. This is despite the fact that the world ended before [PROTOTYPE] had the chance to come out in the Homestuck universe. Meaning that he saw the trailers and decided that, on sight, the main character was literally him. Unfortunately, Alex lives in early 2009. His primary basis for what to base his idea of masculinity around comes from his black ops mad scientist father and the online Call of Duty lobbies he spends hours in. It generates an incredibly toxic definition of masculinity in him that he needs to work to unpack over the course of the story. Despite his self seriousness though, Alex is as cringey as his friends. He unironically thinks his hours of playing COD have prepared him for realistic real world war and he refuses to play any game not rated M. At his core, he's ultimately just a misguided thirteen year old learning to be a man with a good heart around his rough edges.

Finally, there is Zeta, a fellow Earth C denizen. Time for backstory!

On Earth C, Gamzee is still aiming to push the word of the Mirthful Messiahs and intends to do so by turning Earth C into a planetary cult. But, he can’t do it himself, as he’s pretty universally recognized as a Devil figure in Earth C’s mythology, so he needs an in.

The plan: make a fankid of two of the recognized Gods, then have her preach the Messiahs gospel to lend it authenticity. To this end, he steals DNA samples from Tavros (Gcatavrosprite more specifically) and Jade, sets up shop in an abandoned ectolab, and gets to work.

Zeta is the result of all his hard work. Literally raised from birth to be the perfect JadeTav fanchild. The logic behind this is twofold. One, he wants her to integrate into the group of Gods on Earth C in order to either converting them to his beliefs or kill them if they can’t be converted. Finding out you have a daughter and she wants to form a connection is a pretty good way to set up for that. And two, in his own weird way, Gamzee views this as him doing Tavros a favor. As far as Gamzee is concerned, forcing Tavros and Jade together by revealing they have a kid is just him giving Tavros the relationship with Jade he always wanted. The fact that both of them are disgusted by this idea of his doesn’t really compute in his head. Because him making a kid of them without their consent and attempting to manipulatively matchmaker them is fundamentally fucked and they’re both put off from Zeta as a result, even though it isn’t her fault. So, he just uses the couple’s rejection of Zeta to further indoctrinate her. “Obviously, if your parents weren’t faithless heretics, they would actually love you.”

He even raised Zeta to be as appealing a potential daughter as possible, forcing her to take up the hobbies her biological parents had at her age, despite her lack of interest or ability. She heavily struggles to wrap her head around science and math that Jade likes and relies on her online friend, Tera, to explain it to her. And she just cannot get into Fiduspawn or Pupa Pan for the life of her, despite Gamzee forbidding her from watching anything else.

Zeta's name is because Gamzee just went "Jade’s into science shit, right? Zeta's a sciencey name probably." But, it's also a result of her being Gamzee's only successful cloning attempt. Gamzee doesn't really get ectobiology and trying to combine human, troll, dog, cat, and First Guardian DNA is messy. His earliest attempts just melted into goop immediately after birth and Zeta's the only one to make it to her age without dying from other complications. There's a green pond of ectoslime behind Tera's house, where all the failed attempts go. Hundreds of them. She was forced to assist the clown in disposing of her "siblings" that didn't survive their genetic complications and she has frequent nightmares that her mutations and lifelong genetic conditions might claim her too. She doesn't want to wake up at the bottom of the slime river, tied to an anchor. "Zeta" references her being the only survivor of the sixth batch of kids to be made. Even now, she suffers complications. Those rotten grey dog ears on her head are vestigial and don't actually do anything, and she's chronically exhausted and in chronic pain all the time. Side effects of being a mismatched hybrid.

She is, of course, forced to play SBURB with Tera once she learns that's a thing and, separated from Gamzee for the first time in her life, she's able to unlearn her indoctrination and learn what a healthy family looks like through her new friends. One day, she'll scrub off that facepaint and choose her own name.

Nonbinary arc? Yes. Nonbinary arc. Meet Sage.

Tera: Aromantic Bisexual and Transfem. Specifically of the "doesn't feel any romantic attraction or get into any romantic relationships but still feels sexual attraction" variety.

Alex: Omnisexual and Transmasc

Zack: Gay

Sage: Nonbinary Timegender and Omnisexual

Finally, some basic information on the rest of the Earth C crew. June, Dave, Rose, Roxy, Kanaya, and Lara (Jake) are all transfem. Dave still just uses Dave though. Can't change the classics, chicks dig Dave. Vriska and Karkat are transmasc. Sollux is bigender.

As the game enters full swing and the end times are underway, they have their own problems do deal with, as Earth C faces an invasion....