Nova Terra

November Annabella "Nova" Terra, designated Agent X41822N, was a ghost who served the Terran Dominion. Born into one of the Terran Confederacy's wealthy and powerful Old Families, she possessed a rare degree of empathy that masked the telepathic abilities her parents kept hidden even from her. After rebels murdered her family on Tarsonis, her powers erupted uncontrolled, drawing her into the Confederate underworld and then into the Ghost Program, where she became one of the most powerful covert agents in the service of Arcturus Mengsk and later Valerian Mengsk.

Old Family heiress#

Nova Terra was the youngest child of Bella and Constantino Terra, one of the Confederacy's rich and powerful Old Families, living in the Terra Skyscraper in Tarsonis City. Regarded as the golden child of the family, she possessed an empathy generally lacking among the Old Families and a strong belief in fair play. Unknown to Nova, much of that empathy stemmed from telepathic abilities her father knew of but concealed. Her parents kept her powers secret even from her, telling her only that she was empathic, and avoided the wranglers who normally conscripted psychic children into the Ghost Program. At her fifteenth birthday party she learned she was psychic by reading the lecherous thoughts of a suitor.

As attacks on the Old Families escalated, Nova's parents agreed to send her away to safety on Tyrador IX. From the departing vessel she felt her parents' minds as anti-Confederate rebels killed them, and she disembarked to find the rebels murdering her family and their employees. With her powers elevated by the trauma, she unleashed uncontrolled telepathic and telekinetic force, destroying a large section of the skyscraper and killing her would-be murderers along with hundreds of nearby people. The destruction marked her as a valuable prospect for the Ghost Program, and Director Ilsa Killiany assigned wrangler Malcolm Kelerchian to bring her in.

The Gutter#

Traumatized and near suicide, Nova fled to the Gutter, a criminal warren as far from her old life as she could get. There she fell into the orbit of the crime lord Julius "Fagin" Dale, who recognized her psychic potential and sought to control her. When she refused to serve, Fagin ordered shopkeepers not to feed her, confident starvation would bend her, but after four days she easily killed the enforcer sent to murder her. Fagin acquired a psi-screen that rendered him immune to telepathy and surrounded himself with armed addicts and children, ultimately forcing her surrender by threatening to kill the children one by one.

Fagin used Nova as a loyalty detector and assassin, killing those who failed her tests, while overuse of the psi-screen made him steadily more unstable. Kelerchian eventually located her and, with the marine unit known as the Annihilators, moved to extract her amid the chaos of the Sons of Korhal assault on Tarsonis's orbital platforms. As Fagin ranted, Nova forced his lieutenant to shoot him, and Kelerchian let her read his mind, learning that becoming a ghost would mean a memory wipe. She saw this as an incentive, wishing to forget the deaths she had witnessed and caused.

Ghost training#

Nova was taken to the ghost academy on Ursa, starting at a disadvantage from months of abuse and malnutrition. Her experiences in the Gutter had taught her self-reliance, a strength that became a weakness in team training, and she initially let her teammates fail rather than cooperate. Over time, through conflict with rivals and the mentorship of Gabriel Tosh, she learned teamwork, even helping a struggling trainee pass a literacy test.

Her training brought her into the orbit of Project Shadowblade and the spectre program, and into the Battle of Shi, where her team rescued Old Family children only to have the entire team but Tosh memory-wiped on Arcturus Mengsk's orders. Nova completed her ghost training in a record two and a half years. As a final assignment, Mengsk personally sent her to kill Cliff Nadaner, the terrorist who had led the group that murdered her family. She eliminated him using only her mental powers, and upon graduation received a memory wipe, becoming a ghost single-mindedly focused on serving the Dominion.

Hunting the spectres#

After missions against the Koprulu Liberation Front and others, Nova was attached to Nova Squadron and sent to Altara to investigate the disappearance of a fellow ghost and a wrangler. There a hydralisk damaged her face mask, exposing her to terrazine that began reversing her memory wipes and granting flashbacks of her past. She discovered that the missing ghosts were being taken by spectres of a rebellious Project Shadowblade, and that the wrangler she had come to find was Kelerchian.

The investigation led through an attack on Arcturus Mengsk's palace at Augustgrad, where Nova protected the emperor from the attacking spectres led by Tosh, to the station Gehenna, where she uncovered that Colonel Jackson Hauler was in truth the traitor General Bennett, who had been turning resocialized terrans into psychic weapons. Nova killed Bennett with the aid of Tosh and the technopath Lio Travski, freed Kelerchian, and came to understand that the wrangler loved her and that she returned the affection, a feeling her many memory wipes had never let her acknowledge. She ended the operation having captured numerous spectres, who were imprisoned in New Folsom Prison.

The Second Great War and after#

During the Second Great War, Nova moved in an unauthorized solo operation to assassinate Gabriel Tosh and end his spectre program, then working alongside Jim Raynor's Raiders. She contacted Raynor directly, warning that spectres became psychopathic killers, exaggerating the danger to forestall a prison break. Raynor was ultimately convinced to destroy the spectre training facility, and Nova killed Tosh remotely as he argued with Raynor and Matt Horner. She later led the Dominion raid on Research Station EB-103, where she captured Raynor after Sarah Kerrigan escaped.

In the years after the End War, Nova served Valerian Mengsk, infiltrating the Umojan fortress called the Keep to recover files linking him to the Moebius Foundation, and afterward declining a voluntary memory wipe when he chose to make the documents public. She later became entangled with the Defenders of Man, a separatist group that had used her as an unwitting tool, wiping her memory after she discovered they were luring feral zerg to Dominion worlds with psi-emitters. Recovering her memories through terrazine supplied by the Tal'darim Highlord Alarak, Nova helped Valerian expose and capture General Carolina Davis, the conspiracy's leader. When Davis escaped and made a final stand at the Cerros Shipyards, Nova killed her against Valerian's direct order, and the emperor chose to let his agent go.