OOC Information:
Name: Michi
Age: 23
AIM: yumesukidesho
E-MAIL: pebbleintheocean@gmail.com
IC Information:
Name: Terezi Pyrope
Fandom: MS Paint Adventures: Homestuck
Timeline: End of Act 4
Age: Assumed 6 Alternian solar sweeps (~13 human years)
Appearance:
Terezi is an adolescent Alternian troll, and as such, she shares all the physical features of her race. Her complexion is a light shade of gray and her hair is black, worn down to her shoulders and curled outwards. Sharp teeth and horns are also typical of trolls, but Terezi's teeth are fairly nondescript: short and uniformly even. Her horns are also short and conical, deep orange at the base while fading to a yellow hue at the tips. She wears a pair of vivid red shades, which ironically enough match her eyes exactly. She has no pupils as far as we can tell.
She has a feminine figure similar to humans, but the details of any sexual characteristics are still a mystery. As far as wardrobe is concerned, trolls have absolutely no concern for fashion. She wears a black T-shirt and black pants. Her T-shirt is plain except for the zodiac symbol of Libra written in teal on the front. Her shoes are the same delicious color of red as her glasses.
Abilities:
It's important to note first and foremost that Terezi is blind. She's not capable of seeing anything. Instead, she was taught by her lusus to develop her own "sight" through a kind of synesthesia. Instead of directly seeing the colors around her, Terezi can smell, hear, and taste them. Thus, she "sees" the world in scent, sound, and flavor. Granted, this ability is nowhere near perfect. The image presented to her is blurry at best, like someone trying to paint a
detailed picture with
a sponge. However, her sense of taste undoubtedly paints a stronger picture than her sense of smell, so she seems to be able to "see" better when she's capable of licking the object she's looking at.
Terezi's fetch modus (her means of storing items in hammerspace as per the norm of the series) is unknown at the moment, but her specibus (weapon allocation) is canekind, meaning that she is only capable of using canes in battle. If she doesn't sucker some poor sap into making her a cane, she will likely just crack off a tree branch somewhere.
As far as fighting ability goes, Terezi is fairly high on the echeladder. From her point in time, the trolls have completed their session, so it is assumed that she has defeated her denizen, which is like the final boss of her world. Together with the other trolls, they defeated the Black King, which could be considered the final boss of the game. Suffice to say, she's no pushover in combat.
She has no special abilities as far as canon has shown. In fact, another character specifically stated that she has no special abilities, so we're pretty safe on that topic.
Personality:
First and foremost in Terezi's mind is her concept of justice. Despite living in a society where survival of the fittest is practiced from a young age, Terezi has developed a set of strict moral values--at least for a troll. These boil down to a belief that the innocent should be left unharmed, while the guilty should be punished to the fullest extent available. There is very little gray area in her world view.
She often envisions herself as a vigilante meting out payment to the 'bad guys' that deserve it. She takes special interest in "orchestrating the demise of the wicked", especially if it involves a great deal of subtle mind games and a worthy adversary. This holds true for both her real life and the make-believe ones that she plays out through roleplay, which happens to be one of her favorite hobbies.
Despite having no powers, Terezi is very good at manipulating people. Unlike most other trolls, she is observant and quick to pick up on what bothers people the most. She has no problem twisting any sort of emotional weakness to suit whatever her agenda might be, given that it doesn't involve innocent bystanders.
She also doesn't put a lot of stock in the concept of friendship itself and it doesn't bother her to use it as part of her tactics, but she does care about her actual friends a good deal. Deep down, she really is a good person at heart, but that's a side of Terezi that most people don't see.
When she's not in her rare serious-business mode as described above, Terezi enjoys getting a rise out of just about anyone. If she can find a chink in a person's mental armor, she will often exploit it in a mostly good-humored fashion. However, she's careful not to push the banter to the point of being legitimately offensive.
In Alternian culture, a caste system based on blood color (called the hemospectrum) decides the nobility of each troll. For the land-dwelling trolls, red is the lowest, followed by orange, then yellow, then green, and blue is the highest. (Think of a typical rainbow. No, really.) Terezi falls under a semi-high rank with teal blood. Of the 10 land-dwelling trolls that we've seen, only three trolls rank higher than her.
Typically, this rank is a very big deal. For Terezi? It means nothing. She doesn't seem to care about this color-based caste system. Ironically, despite her being somewhat of a highblood, she is obsessed with the color red, and frequently calls it the most delicious color. Among the people she likes and associates with are trolls with blood from nearly ever color of the spectrum. She befriends all of colors. All of them.
History:
On Alternia, troll eggs are created en mass by a giant mother grub through a complicated process involving a incestuous slurry of genetic material. Ancestry is impossible to trace, and once hatched, the trolls face a series of grueling trials that are meant to weed out those less fit for survival. Afterwards, those remaining are typically left in the care of a lusus--a guardian creature of some kind. The lusus acts as a parental figure and usually teaches the troll the basics of what to do and what not to do, while the troll learns to provide for/feed it. It's a mutually beneficial relationship.
That's not what happened with Terezi.
In a lab situated on a meteor floating around a large blue planet in a distant part of space, Terezi was created--along with eleven other trolls--as a infant(larva) clone of her future self. This paradox clone was then teleported to a different meteor and hurled through a portal in space to crash land on Alternia in the past, where she would grow up unaware of the strange time shenanigans that actually caused her birth.
Even apart from her incredibly unorthodox creation, Terezi had a peculiar upbringing. First of all, she lived in a tree. Trolls are required to construct their own living quarters at a young age, as there are no adult trolls actually living on the planet. Terezi decided that instead of building a normal ground structure, she would build a treehive.
Furthermore, she had no lusus--or rather, her lusus wasn't born yet. Instead, there was a large set of scales positioned in the woods near her treehive. This had been there since before she could recall. On one side of the scales sat the skull of an ancient mother grub, and beneath that a doomsday device. On the other side sat a teal dragon egg with Terezi's future lusus sleeping inside. Even though the lusus was still unhatched, Terezi could communicate with it when she was dreaming. After her accident, this is how Tereai's lusus would teach her to sense the world around her without sight. When the dragon did hatch, the doomsday scales would tip and the device would be activated, signaling the end of the world.
But this wouldn't happen for quite a few years solar sweeps.
As a young troll, Terezi would often engage in extreme roleplaying games with her friends. She and Vriska formed Team Scourge--which Terezi saw as a dynamic vigilante duo. They would take down the bad guys and it was agreed that Vriska would be allowed to feed them to her lusus. Terezi trusted her friend not to harm any innocents.
During one particular session against Team Charge, which consisted of their friends Aradia and Tavros, Vriska used her mind control powers to force Tavros off of a cliff. Fortunately, he survived, but the fall broke his spine and he could no longer walk. Both Terezi and Aradia were outraged at Vriska's actions.
Aradia attempted to seek revenge by using her powers to summon the dead. She sent the spirits of all the trolls that Vriska had killed in the past to haunt her with the intent that she might feel a little remorse. It was very effective, at least until Vriska used her mind control on Aradia's almost-boyfriend, Sollux. The haunting stopped when he was forced to kill Aradia.
Terezi had enough by this point. She enacted her own punishment, which cost Vriska seven of her eyes (she had eight, originally) and one of her arms. (The flashbacks to this incident have ended here so far, but present conversations have implied that Vriska got back at Terezi as well. It's very possible that she could be responsible for Terezi's blindness, which also resulted from this incident somehow.) At some point, it was agreed that the cycle of revenge needed to stop, so a truce was made not to backstab one another anymore.
Even with the truce, they never played a game together again--until Sgrub.
Sgrub was a game that Aradia (now existing as a spirit, please don't ask how) found in an ancient ruin and gave to Sollux to compile into something playable. She originally passed it off as a means to save their planet, which would soon be under attack by meteors. Each player would be responsible for building up the home of the client player they were connected to (like a reality-warping Sims game). There would be gates to pass through, enemies to face, and in the end, a final boss whose form/dificulty would depend on what they prototyped their kernelsprites (ingame guides) with. Each player when entering the game would also be transported to their own a small world within the Medium (the realm of space that all of this takes place in), and the goal of the game was to protect the giant blue planet (the Inciphisphere) that existed at the center of their ring of worlds.
Sollux planned to create two teams in competition with each other and selected Terezi as the red team captain. However, Karkat usurped the position from her. Truthfully, she let him, since the leader position is only important in deciding who enters the game first, and this meant she could build on his house, instead of the other way around. It was the safer bet.
During the course of preparing to play this game, Karkat in a fit of stupidity ran a computer virus that Sollux had made. It cursed him and all his friends with misfortune, which manifested as the death of all their lususes. Terezi managed to see hers for all of five seconds after it hatched--just before it was struck down by a falling meteor. The dead lusus was then prototyped into her kernelsprite to guide her through the game.
Since the trolls' game is supposed to mirror the kids' game, a lot of the shenanigans that occurred are left to the imagination--which is fine, since they're fairly unimportant. The important part is that the trolls met up with Jack, an agent with a vendetta against the Black Queen. The Black Queen serves as one of the final bosses of the game, so the trolls worked with him towards this mutual goal. It succeeded, and the trolls were left with only the Black King to contend with.
They dispatched the Black King after much effort, which should have won the game. It didn't.
Something went wrong, and the trolls were forced to run for their lives. They ended up taking refuge in the same asteroid belt that they were created in. It was here that they discovered exactly what happened. In another session of the game, set up exactly like theirs but being played millions of years in the future, there was a group of four human children (John, Dave, Rose, Jade). Somehow, these children had managed to mess up their game so badly that the trolls session was affected by it as well.
Obviously, the trolls were outraged. They began harassing the children, and because of the timeless nature of the Medium, they could pick any point in time to talk to them. At first, it was out of anger, but eventually they began to try to find a way to derail the children's session.
Terezi's attempt was by far the most successful. She befriended the boy named John, and under the guise of being helpful, sent him to his death. Because of this, John couldn't pull Jade into the game, so she died with the rest of Earth. It's uncertain if this actually fixed the trolls' problem or not. Ether way, it doesn't matter because Dave went back in time and stopped John from listening to Terezi's advice, which put the future back on track.
During this time, Terezi was also trolling the other three children, but in a less productive manner. After Dave throws his own corpse out the window and Terezi makes fun of him for staring at his own blood, she's brought into Facility.
Roleplay Sample - Log:
The ground was hard when Terezi awoke. Not that it wasn't usually hard, but typically her face wasn't pressed flush against it. She ran her fingers along the smooth tile, then pushed herself onto her knees...and had to fight down an abrupt bout of panic.
It was missing. The licorice wafer scent of the lab building, the charcoal blackness of the Veil, the acrid taste of those computers and wires that Sollux fussed with--it was just gone. She couldn't smell anything. She couldn't taste or hear anything for that matter. Even the frantic clacking and heckling of the other trolls was gone. What the hell was going on??? There was nothing here!
No, that wasn't right. There was something. Something was there, it was just... bland. It was incredibly bland, like... paper! It was like opening a pack of fresh computer paper and having a taste. (Not that she would ever do that...again.) There was substance, sure, but the taste and smell were so bland--so dull--compared to the Veil that she almost didn't catch it.
Coming to this realization settled Terezi's nerves. Being in a room meant she wasn't dead, right? Standing, she took a step towards the wall and placed her hand against the smooth surface. She just needed to assure herself that she wasn't imagining things. Starch white, cream white, yogurt white. She had to concentrate on the metal furnishings--cold and bitter--just to keep her bearings straight. This was going to drive her crazy. What kind of shitty room was this?
Roleplay Sample - Journal:
Translation is given below!
YOU KNOW
NORM4LLY 1 TH1NK TH1S WHOL3 WH1T3 ROOM TH1NG WOULD B3 R34LLY H1L4R1OUS 1F 1T W4S DON3 TO SOM3ON3 3LS3!
BUT 3V3N ON M3 1 GU3SS 1 C4N T4K3 4 JOK3 ONC3 1N 4 WH1L3
TH4T 1S 1F W3 W3R3NT ON 4 R34LLY T1GHT D34TH D3FY1NG SCH3DUL3
SO TH1S GO3S OUT TO WH1CH3V3R DUMB4SS D3C1D3D TH4T TH1S W4S 4 F4NT4ST1C 1D34
1F YOU COULD L3T M3 OUT?
1 WONT H4V3 TO COM3 SN1FF YOU OUT 1N TH3 M1DDL3 OF TH3 N1GHT TO SL1T YOUR THRO4T
>8]
Translation:
YOU KNOW,
NORMALLY I THINK THIS WHOLE WHITE ROOM THING WOULD BE REALLY HILARIOUS IF IT WAS DONE TO SOMEONE ELSE!
BUT EVEN ON ME, I GUESS I CAN TAKE A JOKE ONCE IN A WHILE.
THAT IS, IF WE WEREN'T ON A REALLY TIGHT DEATH-DEFYING SCHEDULE.
SO THIS GOES OUT TO WHICHEVER DUMBASS DECIDED THAT THIS WAS A FANTASTIC IDEA:
IF YOU COULD LET ME OUT?
I WON'T HAVE TO COME SNIFF YOU OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT TO SLIT YOUR THROAT.
>8]
Questions? Comments? Crazed and creative statements? Those go here.