| Clay Terran |
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| Solomon Starbuck |
| He was a good guy -- always there to pick me up when I was down. No one loved life as much as him, that's for sure. |
Clay Terran was an astronaut the best friend of Apollo Justice. He was murdered after escaping from a sabotaged rocket launch.
Justice and Terran in middle school.
In middle school, Terran was crying alone after his mother had died. He was approached by his classmate Apollo Justice, who knew the pain of having no mother. Justice encouraged Terran to stand tall and yell, "Clay Terran is fine!" After the pair took turns yelling their names and that they were fine, they soon found themselves laughing together, and the two quickly became very close friends. They told each other of their dreams, with Terran wanting to become an astronaut and Justice wanting to be a lawyer. Terran and Justice occasionally visited the Cosmos Space Center, where they met the famous astronaut Solomon Starbuck, whom Terran began to look up to as a mentor.
Justice reached his dream first by passing the bar exam, but after starting well, he soon found himself unemployed after his boss was arrested for murder. However, during this dark period in Justice's life, Terran kept encouraging him, and Justice soon found himself under the employ of the famous Phoenix Wright.
HAT-2 sabotage
- Main articles: The Cosmic Turnabout and Turnabout For Tomorrow
Clay Terran's mugshot.
Terran managed to achieve his dream by becoming an astronaut at the Cosmos Space Center, and was scheduled to join Starbuck on the HAT-2 flight. However, the agency's director Yuri Cosmos became aware of a bomb threat made against the rocket, and so conspired with Terran to stage the launch in the duplicate rocket in the Space Museum. This meant that the two astronauts would be safe from any bombs that went off in the real HAT-2 launch site. Starbuck, who was suffering a form of posttraumatic stress disorder due to his previous near death flight on HAT-1 (which had also been sabotaged), was left unaware of their plan for his own safety and drugged with his medication.
Sure enough, a number of bombs went off, and Terran began carrying a drugged Starbuck back to the main building. Upon finally reaching safety, he collapsed due to the exhaustion of carrying someone in a heavy space suit while wearing one himself. It was then, trying to rest on the floor, that he was stabbed in the chest and killed.
Both Starbuck and Athena Cykes were accused of the crime, but Apollo Justice and Phoenix Wright proved that both were innocent, and that the true culprit of both Terran's murder and the Space Center bombing was an international spy known only as "the phantom".
Personality
Terran was described by Justice and Starbuck as a good friend who would cheer them up in times of need.
Name
- His full Japanese name means "blue earth".
- His English surname "Terran" is derived from "Terra", which was both the name of the ancient Roman goddess of the earth (the ancient Greek equivalent being "Gaia") and the Latin for land, earth, ground, or the world. The word "terran" is used as an adjective in modern English to describe anything of the Earth, with "Terran" often used in science fiction to refer to humans.
- "Clay", his English given name, is a mineral from the earth.