terry

terry is part of a story i created when i was 13-14, called the lightning dog. she wascreated to be roscoe's friend at the beginning of the story, but as i added the time travel elements, she became more important. she never was supposed to be considered roscoe's daughter by the story, but growing up i realised that this is who she is to him, so she is referred to as such, as well as ros' favourite child.

this summary will follow terry's life in chronological order, rather than the order of events taking place in the story.

terry's parent's were two foxes living on the same island as roscoe's pack, from before roscoe arrived. the island is always crawling with monsters which the resident animals cannot identify. the two foxes has a litter of cubs, whom got sick. terry was the only survivor, and her parents wanted to keep her safe. they had proven to be ill themselves, so they made the difficult decision to give her away to the pack.

the monsters are recognised immediately by roscoe for being demons which have not found a mortal body to possess, but have managed to manifest a physical form through means that he cannot discern. i never thought up what the symptoms of this illness when i was child. it would be cool if it were a "turn into monster" type thing, but i don't think that would work with the established demon lore. regardless, terry is magically immuna, and even though her parents are concerned about spreading the disease, they never do it.

by this time, the lightning dog —roscoe— had already become pack leader. the two foxes met with him to explain the situation, and roscoe begrudgingly took the little cub in. he knew she would have a hard time growing up if she were apart from her parents, but they offered him no other way. he offered to at least give them a comfortable place to die, to take them in, but they refused.

roscoe was a single parent of 3, with no idea how to raise children. things got quite chaotic while terry, cyril, and phinny were kids. as they all grew, they formed their personalities and started to cause less overall trouble, except for terry.

being raised a fox in a pack of dogs, terry was marginalised by default. roscoe has always taken terry's side every time conflict arose because of this, earning terry the title of roscoe's "protégé". both terry and roscoe disagree with this and argue that they're family.

as roscoe starts growing old, their relationship changes. now that roscoe is seen as senile by more and more pack members, terry has started to defand him instead. she makes a point out of telling everyone that her and cyril can't make decision, since they're not in charge. despite this, terry is and always has been the first to argue with roscoe when he makes a decision that is potentially dangerous or immoral.

terry never knew what to make of roscoe's ramblings. he often told her and cyril of a character named "ace", who was to come for cyril. "ace" would surely kill terry as well, because "that's what he does". she never truly believed in these things, but the fact that her father did, and so arduosly, made her doubt her stance. he was growing more restless about "ace" by the day.

one fateful day, roscoe claimed that he had talked with ace's brother, and that he would help stop ace. he begged terry's sibling, phinny, to let ace's brother posess his body so he could defeat ace, and phinny categorically refused. angry, roscoe disowned phinny. he told his remaining children, terry and cyril, that they must run away. ace is coming for cyril, and he would not stop under any circumstances. cyril and terry chose to humour roscoe, and pretend to run away.

the plan was simple: circle the island a few times, until roscoe calms down and sees that ace isn't real. then they could work on repairing roscoe's relationship with phinny, if there even was any salvaging possible.

as soon as they left their home, cyril started hearing things. he quickly changed his stance, saying that ace was real, actually. they fought about this, and in some way i hadn/t figured out when i was 13, terry ends up poisoning cyril, and then herself. she can hear cyril talk to the voice in his head, saying that he would agree, if ace would save terry. once cyril "agreed", his eyes glowed, and he finished terry off without further word.

terry woke up in hell, though she did not understand it completey. she had no idea how the conflict ended, what happened to her father, to cyril, to phinny, to her pack. as she started to wander around, she started to understand how hostile this new environment and all its inhabitants were. she had to do a lot of sneaking around in order to save her furr, she realised.

not long after waking up, she found roscoe. she was devastated to see he had also died and ended up in hell, but went to him anyway. he was roscoe but also was an entirely different dog. he had none of the wisdom of her father, but also none of his senility. she didn't understant what was happening, but befriended him anyway.

together, they decided that they would not turn into demons, like everyone else. they would help eachother escape torture, and maybe even find a way out, if there was one. this plan went decently well, until roscoe decided to start dating ace. terry was understandably horrified and decided to associate less with roscoe.

time in hell passed incredibly slow, and terry started to no longer see a point to fighting the process of turning into a demon. the weight of it all had finally broken her. her body transformed little by little every day, until she finally became a demon. roscoe hadn't stuck around to see this. she figured that was better, to not see her disgraceful end.

due to the non-chronological nature of the story, some things should be made clear in the narration: the roscoe that terry meets in hell is the past version of roscoe, and not the guy that raised cyril, terry, and phinny. please don't cancel me on twitter.

(will add more if i remember more)

the 2020 revamp is how i would write the story now if i could bother. i like to think it would be a sitcom.

terry is roscoe's niece or something, that he gets custody of unexpectedly. she hates the idea of changing schools, is understandably traumatised by her parents' death, and absolutely does not want to live with her new math teacher. being a teenager, she wants to piss off this new guy, but somehow has a hard time actually getting him bothered. he has other problems and can't find it in him to be anything but supportive towards terry.

she initially doesn't want to have anything to do with hims, but learns to tolerate her new legal guardian after multiple times that he stands up for her when she gets in trouble at school.