The Teraverse

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
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"How do I become a hero?" More than one person has asked me this, and I think this is a really great question. You do not need superpowers to be a hero. There are everyday heroes all around us... All you need is the morals and the strength to ask the question you already posed.
—Terawatt, in Chapter 73 of The Secret Return of Alex Mack

The Teraverse (also called the "Alexverse") is a Shared Universe Fanfic setting created essentially by accident by author Diane Castle, with the publication of her Alex Mack fanfic The Secret Return of Alex Mack between 2012 and 2014. The story of how Alex Mack transformed herself from "a kid with powers" to her Earth's counterpart to Superman inspired a whole raft of other fan writers, who began creating their own stories set in the same world (with Castle's permission).

At its core, the Teraverse started out as a blend of The Secret World of Alex Mack and a highly variant version of The DCU in which counterparts to the characters of the latter are starting to appear (not necessarily in familiar forms) at the turn of the 21st century. As writers joined the project and added their own ideas to the 'Verse, it quickly evolved into a world that only superficially resembled our own before the advent of Terawatt, and which had a secret history of metahumans and weird science dating back centuries or even millennia. Along the way a world that started out with a mostly Black and White Morality became somewhat more nuanced, but never to the point of excusing its villains and their depravity.

The Teraverse does not yet have a dedicated home page, but a listing of its fics is included on the home page for Castle's intersecting series A Brane of Extraordinary Women, and all of the fics in it can be found on Twisting The Hellmouth. Also, Spacebattles.com hosts [discussion area for the Teraverse.] With the number of contributors it possesses and the rate at which stories in its 'Verse are being written, it may come to rival Undocumented Features in size and scope in only a few more years.

As of November 2016, the stories in The Teraverse include:

The Teraverse overlaps with Diane Castle's series A Brane of Extraordinary Women, which chronicles in its various parts events which take place in several different universes, of which the Teraverse is only one.

There also exists a Who's Who in the Tera-Verse guide, listing characters, organizations and locations in a format similar to that seen in "official" guides to The DCU and the Marvel Universe. It can be found here. (Warning! Spoilers abound!)

Finally, artwork for the Teraverse can be found on the home page of A Brane of Extraordinary Women.

As a Mega Crossover fanfic, The Teraverse incorporates elements from the following works:

In addition to the sources already incorporated into The Secret Return of Alex Mack, the Teraverse also includes elements and/or characters from the following works:

  • The Karate Kid. Both Daniel LaRusso and Julie Pierce are mentioned as the current teaching grandmasters of the Miyagi-Ryu.
  • Kim Possible. Although KP is an In-Universe work, there is a dimensional counterpart to Shego in Siobhan Bri, and one to Kim in Trish Chabot.
  • Men in Black. Agent K has a counterpart in the Teraverse, but there are no aliens, so he was never an MIB. Oddly enough, there was still a Men in Black movie.

Some of these may be thoroughly transformed and not obvious. For instance, the Unversal monsters are more homages than direct imports.


In-Universe works which have some influence on the events of one or more stories include:

  • Kim Possible. Despite this being an In-Universe work, the Teraverse has a dimensional counterpart to Shego in Siobhan Bri, and one to Kim in Trish Chabot.
  • Men in Black. Despite the existnce of a dimensional counterpart to Agent K in the Teraverse, there was still a Men in Black movie, whose iconography and codenaming conventions the ISERB have appropriated.


Tropes used in The Teraverse include:

In addition to those tropes present in The Secret Return of Alex Mack, the stories in the Teraverse make use of the following:

  • All Myths Are True: Shar is given the choice to go to either the Christian Heaven or Valhalla after she dies. (She chooses both.)
    • Centuries of weird biosciences are responsible for at least some creatures of myth being real, or at least made real after the fact.
  • Anime Catholicism: Very much averted by It's Just A Habit, which depicts a very real Catholicism.
  • Bad Habits: Averted by Sister Marie of the Order of Sainte Jeanne, who is a genuine nun who happens to have super powers.
  • Cameo: Alex/Terawatt herself makes surprisingly few appearances in these stories, and when she does it's almost always as a supporting character.
  • Giant Enemy Lobsters: Larry, Darryl and Darryl, the bus-sized lobsters that appear in Boston, led by the Merman.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: In addition to the products of Nazi weird science, there are also Lord Deathstrike's lizard-men and wolf-men.
    • The Merman.
  • Lower Deck Episode: Several stories shift the focus to the less-prominent members of the SRI, and let us see just how badass they can be on their own.
  • The Men in Black: Field agents of the ISERB have sort of fallen into using the MIB look and feel, lifted from a Men in Black movie which appears to have been similar to the one in our time line.
  • Meta Fic: A couple of the stories include or are actually glimpses at In-Universe fan works, including content posted on "Twisting the X-Men", the counterpart to the series' host site Twisting The Hellmouth in a world where Buffy Summers is a real person but not a Slayer.
  • Nuns Are Spooky: Although she actively works to avoid this trope, Sister Marie of the Order of Sainte Jeanne does sometimes give off this vibe -- particularly in a moment in It's Just A Habit where she castigated the mayor of San Diego for trying to politicize her, then flew into a church whose doors opened for her apparently on their own.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different: Lord Deathstrike's "wolf-men". They don't actually change, physically, but are in all other regards basically Hollywood-style wolfmen.
  • Psychopomp: The girls whom Shar meets immediately after her death in Ye Shall Not Die Alone.
  • Weird Science: Much of it dating back to Those Wacky Nazis. The summer 2016 story Dirty Science is about a US military team set up to recover and protect artifacts of weird science, some of which was created "off the books" as part of Operation Paperclip immediately after World War II.
    • Some of it is even older. There's the work of Hugo Danning in the very early years of the 20th century, and Salazar's alchemical experiments with the radioactive meteorite he found some centuries earlier.
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