The Secret Return of Alex Mack

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The Secret Return of Alex Mack is a Mega Crossover Fanfic by Diane Castle focusing on the title character of the 1990s Nickelodeon series The Secret World of Alex Mack. It is a sequel to her earlier fic, The League of Extraordinary Women, and is launched by Alex Mack's efforts, once she returns to her own world, to find the local counterparts to her teammates from the previous story, and to establish a genuine superhero identity for herself in order to protect her friends and family while she continues to help people with her powers. Along the way she becomes affiliated with a small, unconventional government organization created to deal with supers, which results in her going from a small-town local hero to a global one, and lets her begin assembling a team of extraordinary individuals -- many super-powered, some not -- around herself.

And it also leads to the discovery of a worldwide conspiracy to kill off 99% of the world's population...

The Secret Return of Alex Mack can be found here.

As a Mega Crossover fanfic, The Secret Return of Alex Mack incorporates elements from the following works:


In-Universe works which affect the plot in one way or another:


A Brane of Extraordinary Women

Other works in this 'Verse: (Warning! Spoilers for The Secret Return of Alex Mack abound!)

There is also a guide to significant individuals being written. Again, there are spoilers here:

And there is artwork there, too.


Tropes used in The Secret Return of Alex Mack include:
  • Action Girl: Alex, Hanna, Jo, even Shar. Hanna's code name is "Action Girl".
  • Actor Allusion: Scattered here and there throughout the story:
    • The brunette pixie cut that Alex adopts to distance her appearance from that of Terawatt just happens to be the look that Alex Mack's actress Larisa Oleynik was sporting as of her appearances in Mad Men in the early 2010s.
    • When discussing with Willow how different she appears from her adoptive parents, Jack O'Neill tells her:

You, on the other hand, look like your last name ought to be Flaherty or Hannigan or O’Clancy.

    • Alex thinks Jack could cosplay as MacGyver because he resembles the actor.
    • Buffy Summers is a former ice skater, and her boyfriend is named Freddie.
  • All Jews Are Ashkenazi: Averted: While Willow's parents are explicitly identified as Ashkenazi Jews, it's used as a descriptor to differentiate them from being generic media Jews.
  • Alternate Universe: Alex's knowledge of certain persons from several other universes prompts and often helps her attempts to make contact with their counterparts in her own universe.
  • Amazon Brigade: Terawatt's superteam, named after the Justice League, in which women outnumber the men at least two to one, depending on the exact deployment. Klar is often The One Guy when they're in the field.
  • Avengers Assemble: One of Alex's goals through much of the story is finding and bringing together the native counterparts of the women with whom she worked in another universe during the events of The League of Extraordinary Women. Along the way she ends up with a genuine superteam forming around her.
  • Badass: Hanna is a very classic badass. Alex doesn't quite realize (or believe) it of herself, but she's one, too -- to the point that many people thank that she's the single most powerful and dangerous individual on the planet. (She might not be, but you couldn't tell it from what she's accomplished.)
  • Badass Adorable/Killer Rabbit: Shar, as "Pyre" -- an eight-year-old capable of killing Gojira...
  • Badass and Child Duo: Terawatt and Pyre during the Gojira arc. Played with in that Pyre has had her powers longer and is more dangerous than Terawatt.
  • Beautiful All Along: Eliza Thornberry, who gets her braces off, her braids brushed out, and sports contacts instead of her glasses after hooking up with the SRI.
  • Beware the Nice Ones: What the SRI in general think of Alex -- a sweet, innocent kid who you'd think would run home crying if you were mean to her, but who is actually an unstoppable force of nature -- and who doesn't quite realize she's as impressive as she is.
  • Blessed with Suck: Klar is permanently invisible, and because of this is blind in the visible spectrum (although he can see in infrared). And until the SRI reproduces the effect on a sheep (from which clothes of invisible wool can be made), he must go on ops completely naked.
  • Blob Monster: Fought by Terawatt and the SRI in Downington, Pennsylvania.
  • Bond One-Liner: Hanna starts making these toward the end of the story.
  • Book Dumb: Alex, at least initially. Intimidated by her elder sister Annie's scientific brilliance, Alex slacked off in middle school and early high school. However, inspired by the events of League (and given lots of tips on how to manage schoolwork better by Willow Rosenberg, Hermione Granger and Sam Carter) she began taking her studies far more seriously, with outstanding results by the middle of the story.
  • Boy Band: In-Universe example: towards the end of the story, Alex discovers to her complete mortification that a boy band called "The Click Five" has a top-40 song about Terawatt.
  • Buffy-Speak: The majority of the story is told from Alex's point of view, and the narration, while not first-person, is rendered in a voice that is clearly intended to reflect her personality and thoughts. As such, it's presented in a very low-key Buffy-Speak, in which the "insufficiently educated" aspect is slowly subverted through the course of the story as Alex takes her studies increasingly seriously (see "Yay, SAT vocabulary!" under Running Gags below).
    • Hanna eventually develops a kind of neo-"Valley Girl" manner of speaking -- partly from Willow, partly from Alex, and partly from other sources -- when she's not on-duty and is "just being a teenaged girl". Subverted in that it's more a deliberate choice made in order to better fit in with her contemporaries than a natural evolution of her manner of speaking.
  • Busman's Holiday: Alex comes to realize that trouble seems to lurk, waiting for her anywhere she goes for any reason. Lampshaded toward the end of the story:

Jack grumbled, “You’d think you could go one stinking vacation without finding trouble.”
“Yes sir,” Alex agreed unhappily.

  • The Cameo: Several of the sources in the list above contribute characters who just make a couple small but plot-relevant appearances.
  • The Cape: Terawatt. She's the archetype of the Cape for her world.
  • Captain Ersatz: Local versions of various DCU characters begin appearing, most notably Bruce "Batman" Paine.
    • Riley Finn is pretty obviously supposed to be the local analogue to Superman. (Or one of them; Terawatt eventually becomes the "godlike global savior" archetype in the public eye, which means she's also an analogue to Superman.)
    • And there's evidence that the local version of Selena "Catwoman" Kyle is more than just the trophy wife of a Greek billionaire.
    • The North Korean super-squad are based on various members of the Legion of Doom.
    • Thanks to one incident toward the end involving metal bracers, Willow Rosenberg seems to partake of at least a bit of Wonder Woman.
  • Chekhov's Armoury: Numerous and well-executed, often taking the form of seemingly-irrelevant Funny Background Events or inconsequential parts of someone's Back Story when they first appear.
    • One good example is a telekinetic combat move suggested to Alex by Jack O'Neill, the idea of which Squicks her at the time. Fifty or so chapters later, it's exactly what she needs to save herself in a tight situation -- and later becomes her tactic of choice for taking down an enemy without killing them.
    • Another is the series of slapstick sitcom mishaps that occur to Alex's friend Louis and his girlfriend Marsha.
    • Yet another is the fact that Jack O'Neill was a foster child.
    • The number of people in the Macks' neighborhood who have become shut-ins or suffered some kind of disability over the previous year or three.
  • Child Soldiers: What Jack O'Neill can't help but see Alex and the other super-powered teens in his command as, and feels guilty about it. It comes to a head when Shar manages to get herself onto the battlefield against Gojira; it doesn't matter that she's the one who actually took down the foe, Jack goes ballistic about an eight-year-old in combat and she gets banned from even getting near to any future SRI operations.
  • Clark Kenting: Alex makes an extensive effort to visually differentiate herself from Terawatt. Terawatt's masked costume incorporates platform boots, a padded bra and a shoulder-length light-blonde wig along with subtle makeup (actually coloration on a saran-wrap-thin sheet of plastic that adheres to her face, for near-instant application) to appear older and much taller, and she deepens her voice and speaks in a manner she sometimes thinks of as pompous. Meanwhile, in her "civilian" identity, she's gradually dyed her hair several shades darker than her natural blonde and cut it pixie-style, and habitually wears flats to appear much shorter than Terawatt. Terawatt also tends to hover anywhere from a couple inches to a foot and a half off the ground at all times just to reinforce the illusion of height; most observers think she's in the vicinity of six feet tall or more.
    • Played with a bit, also, in that Terawatt occupies a role in her world much like Superman's in the DCU -- and her secret identity is a journalist. (Well, journalism student.)
    • Averted several times by persons (most notably Sheila Rosenberg and Margaret Walsh) who put together a lot of little details -- her chin, her gestures, a few other things -- and figure out her identity.
  • The Conspiracy: The Collective. From the internal politics we occasionally see, they act something like a cross between a Mega Corp and a Nebulous Criminal Conspiracy.
  • Deadpan Snarker: Jack O'Neill.
  • Defictionalization: In-Universe: Shar combines her fire powers with training in Shaolin Kung Fu in order to learn how to do "firebending". Oddly, it seems to work. And after this point, she only ever refers to her powers as "firebending".
  • Determinator/Plucky Girl: Alex. No matter how tired, scared, hungry or hurt she is, she just does not stop doing what is right and necessary.
    • Shar, for all that she's still in grade school, is turning out to be the same.
  • [[Disney Princesse]: On a trip to Disneyland, Alex finds (authorized) Terawatt merchandise being sold alongside the various Princesses, and objects (privately) that she's not a Disney princess.
  • Elaborate Underground Base: Averted in that the SRI operates out of several perfectly above-ground military bases and office blocks.
    • Played for Laughs with the backdrop Alex literally cut-and-pastes together for use in videoconferencing, which shows a huge Batcave-like base that most of the SRI knows doesn't really exist.
    • Played painfully straight by various bad-guy headquarters, most especially the complexes under the Spencer mansion and the Umbrella building during the Resident Evil segment. Lampshaded and mocked by both O'Neill and Alex.
  • Fantastic Racism: The Collective's attitude to "homo inferior" -- basically anyone not a super of some variety, no matter how minor.
  • Foreshadowing: "You stay. I go. No following."
  • Free-Range Children: Eliza Thornberry; upon hearing about her, Willow Rosenberg muses that the Thornberrys make her usually-absent parents look like micromanagers.
  • Funny Background Event: Also Funny Off-Screen Events -- almost all are Chekhov's Guns waiting to be fired.
  • Genre Savvy: Jack O'Neill, often hilariously so. Alex, too, to a lesser degree at first, but she rapidly catches up with him.
  • Getting Crap Past the Radar: In-Universe example -- pretty much any conversation that involves both Jack and Willow includes something along these lines from either or both of them.
  • Gosh Dang It to Heck: While other characters can and do swear colorfully, Alex continues to use only terms suitable to her original audience on Nickelodeon.
    • Also, Jack tries to tone his language down to this level around Shar.
  • Grappling Hook Pistol: Action Girl has two, courtesy of the Batman.
  • Grey Goo: The last gasp of the remaining members of the American bloc of the Collective is an attempt at a nanobot-based plague which goes "worst case" -- and is only stopped by Shar sacrificing herself.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: Less obvious than most, and all over the story. The "Orphans", Hanna, and the man-apes in the Congo, just to name a few.
  • Hands-Off Parenting: Willow's parents, effectively, although it was in part motivated by their knowledge that she was exceptionally mature and capable even at an early age.
    • The elder Thornberrys.
  • Heel Face Turn:
    • Victor Cready
    • Azure Crush
  • Heroic BSOD: Alex after Shar's Heroic Sacrifice, to the point that she wants to give up being Terawatt.
  • Heroic Sacrifice: Partially possessed by intelligent nanobots, Shar uses her powers to set off a small fusion explosion in order to stop a Grey Goo disaster.
  • Hurricane of Puns: Chapter 155 ends with Willow and Alex making "cat" puns about Selina Kyle.
  • An Ice Person: Yuki Sato. And an unnamed North Korean super.
  • Immodest Orgasm: Alex has trouble sleeping when Jack and Willow share the room next door.
  • Impossible Hourglass Figure: Built into Alex's Terawatt uniform as part of the disguise. Apparently blatant enough that Saturday Night Live didn't think it was exaggerating things too much to put Pamela Anderson into a Terawatt costume.
  • Incredibly Lame Pun:

"I'm Buffy... the Empire Slayer."

  • Insistent Terminology: Jack insists on prepending "Tera-" to almost everything in Alex's life, including the "Tera-mom" and the "Tera-dad". He takes a perverse joy in Alex's annoyance with it, and eventually it starts spreading to other members of the SRI.
  • Insult Backfire:

Jack pretended to sniff like he was crying. “You’ve become sneaky and underhanded, just like me! I’m so proud!”
Willow fussed, “Oh stop it. And nobody’s as bad about this stuff as you are.”
Jack beamed, “Thanks!”

  • Invisibility: Klar's only real power.
  • Kill It with Fire: Shar's primary powerset, along a smattering of classic psychic powers.
  • Large Ham: Trish's friend "Nature" (real name: Wendy).
  • Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex: Charlie O'Neill encounters this trope when his girlfriend Hanna "Action Girl" Heller involuntarily injures his hand with her thighs when he manually stimulates her to orgasm.
    • Hearing about this, Alex wonders how other superstrong people, specifically Azure Crush, manage to have sex with their partners without hurting them.
  • Massive Multiplayer Crossover
  • Meta Origin: Hypothesized at one point by Alex's father, who suspects the existence of a master "powers on/off" gene that not everyone possesses, along with other genes that influence the powers a person might gain; if they have the master gene, and are exposed to the right kind of biochemical or other agent, they gain powers.
    • On a different level, a large number of superhumans and monsters directly owe their existence to Dr. Margaret Walsh and/or her research.
  • Metaphorgotten: From chapter 127:

And speaking of boys, she really didn’t want to hear about Azure Crush and her naked blue body, but the December issue of a certain filthy magazine was already out, and selling like hotcakes, or maybe really filthy hotcakes with naughty pictures drawn on the tops.

  • Mind Over Matter: One of Alex's powers is telekinesis, which she uses in increasingly inventive ways. It later turns out that most if not all of her powers are actually TK, operating on different scales.
    • Louis' girlfriend Marsha develops TK after exposure to biochemical-laden mud.
    • "Solstice"/Ayananta from India.
    • Carriette White.
    • In fact, many supers turn out to have some variety of TK behind their apparent powers.
  • The Mole: Both subverted and played straight.
  • Mood Whiplash: The aftermath of the Carrie White incident is the first instance of this we see in the story, but is nothing compared to what happens after Shar makes a Heroic Sacrifice to stop a Grey Goo disaster.
  • Mundane Utility: Alex figures out how to charge rechargeable batteries with her lightning, and uses this to keep her cameras, cell phones and other gadgets going at all times. She also uses her TK to clean, and pick locks.
  • Mythology Gag: Yuki gives Gojira its name because, she says, "It swims like a whale and it walks like an ape." "Gojira" (which was Americanized into "Godzilla") is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for "gorilla" and "whale", and was originally the derisive nickname of a worker at the studio where the Godzilla films were made.
  • Noodle Incident: We get a lot of these in regards to Jack and Willow's relationship. For example:

Jack casually said, “Hey, a bet’s a bet. Remember what you did to win our little bet last week? First one to the restaurant?”
Willow insisted, “Hey! I paid for the dry cleaning on your uniform afterward. And the steam cleaning for your car interior. And I bought a whole new bottle of olive oil.”

  • Obfuscating Stupidity: Appears to be Buffy Summers' primary skill for coping with life.
  • Oh Crap: Danielle Atron gets two "Oh crap" moments in her final confrontation with Terawatt -- first when Terawatt walks completely untouched through the first salvo of weaponsfire which Atron expected to utterly annihilate her, and then when Terawatt manages to hit her with a GC compound that will make her physically split into two individuals -- while she's wearing a suit of power armor.
  • Older Than They Look: Terawatt in the final epilogue, when we learn that Alex's powers apparently include arrested aging, and that 71 years later she still appears to be in her mid-twenties.
  • Omnicidal Maniacs: The Conspiracy is an entire organization of these, planning to kill off 99% of the world's population. However, they are doing so to prevent what they see as an inevitable Malthusian catastrophe.
  • One Steve Limit: When the Macks take in Charlene "Charlie" McGee, they start calling her "Shar"; within the story this is part of hiding her identity from Shop agents who might still be hunting her, but on the meta level it's probably as much because there was already a character named "Charlie" in play.
    • Averted with the probably-inevitable collision between Dr. Samantha Carter and Dr. Samantha Finn.
  • One-Woman Army: Terawatt, more because of her Determinator qualities than because of sheer power.
  • Open-Minded Parents: The Macks, who learned of Alex's powers in the finale of The Secret World of Alex Mack, and have been nothing but supportive of her decision to be a public superhero upon her return from the events in The League of Extraordinary Women.
  • Person of Mass Destruction: Shar is described as being a living WMD. In a note at the end that chapter, the author explicitly references this trope as a "correction".
  • Pop-Cultured Badass: Jack O'Neill. To an absolutely ridiculous degree.
    • As her isolation from any human culture at all is rectified, Hanna begins to become one of these as well.
  • Promotion to Parent: Jo Lupo -- among others -- observes that Alex's relationship to Shar is more maternal than like the "older cousin" the cover story makes her out to be. And when planning for college makes Alex realize that she and Shar are going to grow apart...

Alex smiled and kissed her on the top of the head, because Shar was already too busy for Alex a lot of the time, and as Shar got older, and discovered boys, and found new stuff, she’d get more and more busy. Alex suddenly had to swallow a lump in her throat and blink away some tears. She needed to talk to her mom and see if her mom felt like that all the time these days.

When Shar makes her Heroic Sacrifice to stop a Grey Goo disaster, it utterly devastates Alex for this reason.
  • Puberty Superpower: Alex tells her parents that she doesn't plan on getting pregnant, even after marriage, until someone can guarantee this trope for her children -- as opposed to, say, with powers at two. Or in the womb.
  • Reckless Gun Usage: Studiously averted with everyone in the story who is supposed to know how to use firearms; everyone realistically adheres to Gun Safety protocols.
  • Recursive Fanfiction: The Secret Return has inspired nearly a dozen other writers to add their own contributions to its 'verse.
  • Running Gag: "Yay, SAT vocabulary!" and variations thereon.
    • Alex's eating habits.
    • Willow remotely changing ring tones on people's phones.
    • "Can I firebend them?"
    • Shar overhearing private conversations from two floors away, through closed doors. And commenting loudly.
  • Secret Identity: After returning from her extradimensional adventure in The League of Extraordinary Women, Alex designs a superhero identity for herself. The story is basically about what happens once she begins using it in public. The story also deconstructs the trope by showing how difficult it is to maintain a comic-book-style secret identity even with a government agency and a genius hacker helping cover for her -- and even then at least two people still put together all the details available to the public and work out who she is.
    • Shar chooses a hero identity -- "Pyre" -- and makes her own costume in imitation of Alex's.
    • Hanna ends up wearing a mask and her hair differently when on operations to protect her privacy.
    • Eliza Thornberry takes "Shaman" as a codename; her sister Debbie designs a costume for her.
    • Andrew Clements decides on "Ultraman".
  • Shooting Superman: Seen especially in the Congo op, where the warlord and his soldiers persist in emptying their guns at Terawatt even though it's obvious that nothing is hitting or harming her. Ends with the warlord trying futilely to hit her with his now-empty submachine gun.
    • Taken up to 11 in Terawatt's final confrontation with Danielle Atron.
  • Shown Their Work: Castle has made a point of doing enough research (or perhaps using her own knowledge) to make the jargon and exposition of experts in various fields -- including IT, physics, biochemistry, genetics, even the economics of being a freelance photojournalist -- accurate and plausible.
  • Shrouded in Myth: Outside of the SRI, her team and her family, no one really knows the limits of Terawatt's powers. For instance, few people know that the SRI uses the last two operational SR-71 "Blackbird" planes to get her where she's needed fast and assume she can fly at supersonic speeds.
  • Spit Trail Kiss: Between Louis and Marsha after the first time he sees her in her Mack-made Terawatt costume.
  • Static Stun Gun: Alex uses her lightning powers to knock out targets on several occasions, and at least twice uses a fake "prop" stungun to hide the fact that she did so while in her civilian identity.
  • Super Speed: One of Andrew "Ultraman" Clements' core powers.
  • Superhero Paradox: Inverted. All the villainous individuals and organizations already existed before the start of the story, and most of the superheroes become such to oppose them. In particular, Alex chooses to become a superheroine mainly because there's already a supervillain out there already -- Danielle Atron -- who had attacked her and her family, and who was manufacturing other supervillains to do her dirty work.
  • Take a Level In Badass: Alex, continuously, without ever really noticing.
  • Take Over the World: One of the goals of the Collective -- once they clear out a pesky few billion people here and there.
  • Those Wacky Nazis: The ultimate genesis of the Collective is a World War II-vintage effort to clone Hitler. Along the way they discarded a lot of the Fascist baggage but kept the megalomania, and substituted a Fantastic Racism for their original variety.
  • Throw-Away Guns: The Congo warlord who tried to throw his submachine gun at Terawatt after emptying its magazine.
  • Title Drop: In chapter 212 -- just not for this story:

So Alex ... explained all about the secret world of Alex Mack. It took a while.

  • To the Batpole: Inverted: Alex's father installs a pipe from the Macks' garage into the town storm drain system so that Alex can leave the house in "puddle" form and reappear as Terawatt pretty much anywhere in town.
    • Later, the SRI do much the same for the apartment they arrange for her to live in while attending college in Washington, DC.
    • And of course, there's the Teraverse's version of the Trope Namer.
  • Training From Hell: Alex puts herself through this, slowly ramping up the difficulty as her physical and psychic limits grow. For example, by the middle of the story she's doing 100 upside-down sit-ups every morning by holding herself to a wall with her TK. Plus martial arts training from another super. And her academic schedule could be seen as just another form of this.
  • Transformation Sequence: Played with. Alex basically dives in her liquid form into a gym bag holding her costume, and pretty much just flows into it, then comes back out and returns to human shape.
    • However, people watching find the change to be startling and the difference in personality and presence between bubbly, slightly insecure Alex and the stolidly confident Terawatt to be profound and even a little unsettling. To the point that some suggest it's actually a case of Multiple Personalities.
  • Twin Tails: Hanna wears a clip-on pair as part of her disguise during the Korean op.
  • Unspoken Plan Guarantee: Several instances, often disposed of in a single sentence along the lines of "she told them what she had planned, and they all agreed".
  • Utility Belt: Alex gets one as a gift to add to her Terawatt costume after her first couple ops with the SRI, mainly to hold energy bars, but also a couple of useful toys.
  • The Verse: Variously called the "Tera-verse" or the "Alex-verse" by the authors contributing to it.
  • Weaksauce Weakness: Terawatt needs food badly. Even when not using using her powers Alex burns, as she puts it, "stupid amounts of calories". And using them? Makes her absolutely starving in almost no time flat. When the India op had her going for seven hours straight with no breaks and no meals, she ended up so hungry that she was almost incoherent and stumbling when it was over. (But even so she still managed to keep a nuclear missile from obliterating Moscow by disassembling it in flight.) One of the biggest reasons she wears a Utility Belt is to have someplace to keep energy bars on her while in uniform.
    • Orphans are killed by the compound which gave Alex her powers; just splashing them with it is enough.
  • What Happened to the Mouse?: Despite Alex's repeated claims that Hermione is important and necessary to her plans, she all but vanishes from the story as it rolls to its climax, and doesn't even get a mention in the Where Are They Now? Epilogue.
  • Where Are They Now? Epilogue: Two, one for most everyone other than Terawatt, and one for her.
  • Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Invoked word-for-word by Alex as the kind of person she doesn't want to turn into as a result of her experiences with the SRI.
  • World of Action Girls: While overall the gender ratio of supers in the Teraverse seems to be close to 1:1, the core super cast of the story is predominantly female.
  • Yiddish as a Second Language: Willow's mother uses so much Yiddish in her brief appearance in chapter 138 that the author has to provide a glossary at the end. There's even more surrounding Jack and Willow's wedding, but it's not footnoted.
  • Younger Than She Looks: Alex as Terawatt; she's deliberately designed both the uniform and the persona to give the impression that Terawatt's in her middle twenties. When people first learn her secret identity, one of the most common reactions is to comment on how young Alex seems in comparison to Terawatt. Inverted into Older Than They Look in the final epilogue, when we learn that Alex's powers apparently include arrested aging, and that 71 years later she still looks to be in her mid-twenties.
    • Played with for laughs when a disguised Shar (all of eight and three-quarters years old at the time) is identified as a "54-year-old midget" to someone who doesn't have clearance to know her real identity.
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