Brenda Del Vecchio

Player Name: Zippy
Personal LJ: sparklemagpie
E-mail: sparklemagpie@hotmail.com
AIM: calamityzippy
Other characters currently in-game: None
Who referred you to the game?: 50% of the Mod Team

Character Name: Brenda DelVecchio
Canon source: Blue Beetle
PB: None

Personality:
Brenda is a very passionate and driven sort of person, who applies herself to her own problems and those of others with loyalty and focus that belies her age and lack of experience. Becoming a hero has only increased her already feverish drive to 'be on top of things' as her responsibilities have expanded exponentially with the power bestowed to her by the alien scarab beetle that has made a permanent home on her spine.

Brenda as a civilian is extremely dedicated her academics in particular - a straight A student and consummate over-achiever since kindergarten - and she has channeled those skills into research and organization on an epic scale when it comes to her 'career' as the third Blue Beetle. She obsessively re-reads her predecessors notes, wants to study every angle of a situation before getting into it in the desperate hope of gaining an advantage. Although Brenda is very good at what she does considering how short a time she's been doing it she holds herself to the standards of big-league heroes who have made fighting crime their life's purpose. She feels inadequate in the shadows of legends like Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and especially her predecessor, the second Blue Beetle, Ted Kord.

She tends to deflect difficult topics of conversation with denial, humour, or changes of subject if she can. Sass, bristling anger, and sarcasm are a vital part of how she copes with her life day to day. She's no Peter Parker but she holds her own in the well-timed quippishness department.

Though not as mightily moral as many heroes Brenda has a sense of right and wrong that runs marrow deep. She has her selfish, angry and vindictive moments but she is fundamentally a good person and it shows in the actions she takes more than the words she says. She's not a good mediator, usually not the calmest person in the room when shit goes wrong, and she is very willing to harm people in order to get an ultimately better outcome for everyone involved, but ferocious and unyielding protection for the vulnerable is what she wants most to provide and she excels at it.


History:
Brenda DelVecchio was born in El Paso, Texas, to Maricela and Thomas DelVecchio in April of 1991. She inherited her mother's looks, but with her father's northern-bred ginger colouring, a pretty, precocious little girl who lived up to every legend about a redhead temper from her very first day on earth.

In kindergarten she met and befriended Jaime Reyes and Paco Tejas, two boys who would be with her through thick and thin in the years to come. They remained stalwartly at her side through grade school's usual tussles and drama as well as the more problematic issues Brenda came up against at home.

At age twelve Brenda lost her mother to heart disease after her long illness had pushed their family to the brink financially, physically, and emotionally. By thirteen she had lost her father to alcohol, although he at least was still alive.

The first time her father struck her Brenda told herself that he hadn't meant it, he was too drunk, wouldn't even remember it, it was just the alcohol. She told herself the same thing every other time it happened. Wearing long sleeves in summer became standard and though Paco and Jaime urged her to try to leave Brenda quietly shook her head, tucked her chin down to her chest and asked them not to say anything.

The trio made it through to high school, Brenda keeping her high marks and priming to leave the nest as soon as she could graduate. College seemed like a safe haven just waiting for her, and she applied herself rigorously to her schoolwork, determined to get a scholarship to somewhere far away from her dad and all of the painful memories of home.

In grade ten, when Brenda was sixteen, she Paco and Jaime took a shortcut home through a lot under construction after school. When she and Paco got into a scuffle they stumbled on what seemed to be a rock shaped like a scarab beetle. Though she was not exactly a fan of bugs the stone was foisted on Brenda when Jaime's little sister saw it and ran away screaming. Jaime's mother asked him not to bring it into the house and Paco had already headed home himself so Brenda was charged with caring for it on Jaime's behalf. She took it home with her, leaving it in her bag, but overnight the stone disappeared...

Brenda was puzzled the next morning but didn't have time to worry about it. She left for school in her usual manner, unaware that the rock - actually a piece of alien technology called a Scarab - had woken in the night, burrowed inside her body while she slept and grafted itself to her spine.

That day Brenda first encountered Probe and Damper - members of a local gang of magic users and meta-humans called the Posse. Probe, sensitive to others abilities and thoughts, had mistaken Brenda for a metahuman as well and offered her the chance to join their group. Brenda declined with polite confusion but the Scarab reacted poorly to being scanned with magic and it telekinetically attacked Probe, damaging her mind and leaving her bleeding from the nose. Damper, who had been keeping their conversation private with his power of erasing people from notice, promised Brenda that she would be sorry and that the Posse took care of their own.

Not long after the Posse followed Brenda on her way home from school, cornering her to demand retribution for the apparently serious injury of Probe. Brenda tried to fend the group off with her basic hand to hand skills but was soon overwhelmed. In her desperation the Scarab finally pushed through to connect fully with her body and she found herself armoured up, fending off the group with weapons she didn't even understand how to operate. For the first time the twittering voice of the Scarab rose in her ear and after beating up half the group with mechanically enhanced strength and laser weapons Brenda shot off into the desert after finally convincing the alien in her brain to RUN instead of fight.

Out on the mesa's Brenda touched down and had a FIT; a screaming argument with the alien voice in her head about what the HELL was going on. The Scarab was reticent at best, overwhelmed by Brenda's anger, fear and awe, but finally as she calmed down it was able to give her a little more, snatches of its own damaged understanding of its duty. It was to protect her, she was supposed to be very important, it was here to help... and that was all it could explain. In many ways the alien bug was just as lost as she was.

Later that evening Brenda sneaked back into her house through the back door, shedding her armour in the flower bed beneath the kitchen window and trying not to scream as the retracting plates burned her skin. Skirting for a thousandth time past her father passed out on the couch she made it upstairs only to lay awake in bed, staring at the ceiling, feeling more than a little insane about the day's events.

The next day dawned, deceptively normal. Brenda tried to put the whole mess out of her mind but her thoughts lingered constantly on the Scarab's now silent voice.

The next night Booster Gold sought Brenda out, and took her to meet Batman.

Booster had been to the future, where he had learned that Batman would seek out a space dwelling entity known as Brother Eye and fail. But he had also learned that the Scarab which had formerly belonged to Booster’s close friend and team mate Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle, now attached to Brenda's back, was the one thing capable of finding the Brother Eye satellite, or even seeing it at all.

Brenda was terrified and reluctant on account of not knowing how to WORK her armour, but the Scarab twittered in her head; assuring her it was more than capable of the task. Deciding that she had to at least TRY to help if the big name heroes were so desperate that they were actually asking for her to pinch-hit, Brenda went into space with Batman and his carefully assembled away team.

The Scarab saw where Brother Eye was hidden between the folds of time and space in a gap called the Bleed. The Scarab had no trouble pulling the rogue satellite back into proper reality. Brenda together with Black Canary and Green Arrow charged past the satellite's defences to destroy Brother Eye's dimensional stabilizer, preventing it from escaping outside reality again. Once Batman's team had sent Eye plummeting Earthwards the Green Lanterns attempted to help everyone get off the station and fast before it exploded.

The Scarab was terrified of being taken into the custody of the Green Lanterns and it mimicked its enemy’s abilities, shifting Brenda out of reality, keeping her in the Bleed between dimension to protect her from the explosion and from 'capture' by the lanterns. When Brenda vanished from sight and sense, the clock ticking down, the JLA members were forced to abandon the satellite and their missing friend.

The shock wave from the dimensional stabilizer's destruction dilated time, affecting everything close enough. To Brenda her space between reality and nothingness had only lasted for a couple of minutes; on Earth, however, a whole year passed by without her, an immensely rude awakening for Brenda when she came back down to Earth in the desert outside El Paso.

Guy Gardner was nearby and his lantern ring read the Scarab as an enemy. After all she had been through in what to her was the last 12 hours Brenda was stressed to her limits, and when Guy attacked her she lost her temper completely.

She forcibly grabbed control of some of the armour’s weapons, able to wield their full strength for the first time as the Scarab cooperated happily with her desire to do harm to the Lantern. After blasting half the desert into rubble in a construct on beam cannon clash that drew news speculation and crappy home video footage of the distant light show from all over El Paso, Brenda pinned Gardener down and pulled her face armour back to scream at him for attacking her out of nowhere and to ask him what the hell his problem was. Stunned to find a 'just a kid!' under the mask Guy backed down, but told her he hoped no one else pissed her off too much.

Brenda slowly made her way home, partly in flight with the amour but mostly on foot. She and the Scarab got into a nasty argument along the way home and it subsequently decided that maybe she should just walk home if she didn’t need it.

After raiding a donation bin for ill-fitting clothing and being given a ride into town by a kind truck stop owner, Brenda finally unlocked her front door and walked in on a strange family having dinner in her old living room. After stammering a frightened apology Brenda bolted and ran the six blocks to Jaime's house in tears.

When Alberto Reyes opened the door and found her sniffling on the stoop she couldn't even get out her usual apologetic hello before he was hugging her. The whole Reyes clan descended on her in a rush, hysteric with shock and joy.

Up in space, to her mind, she'd been gone for five minutes. On Earth, in normal time, she'd been gone for a year.

Everyone had suspected that she had run away; a lie she let them believe at that moment out of being unsure how to explain the truth. Paco and Brenda's Aunt Amparo were both called right away... and Mrs. Reyes then had to be the one to tell Brenda why her father wasn't on the list to be called. In the year she had been gone Thomas had struggled more and more with his drinking. He had become gravely ill and finally died of liver failure a month before her return.

Brenda's first few weeks at home after that crushing news were numb and nearly solitary. She spent her time curled up in a hastily assembled room that Amparo had cleared for her, overloaded by everything that had happened. The Scarab, knowing that she was furious at how it had disrupted her life and robbed her of her remaining family, went quiet and dormant, no longer responding to her attempts to communicate with it.

Brenda began to feel in its absence as if she had genuinely had a mental break, walked out of town and come back with a year of repressed memories and a wild delusion filling in the gap. Thankfully it took less than a week for her to cross paths with the Posse and be reminded by their anger that her previous encounter with them had been very real. The Scarab re-emerged to help her defend herself when the gang cornered her and Brenda threw herself to the task of researching it afterward, determined to find out all she could about just what she was dealing with.

Despite her intent to lay low however she found that she just kept getting into the thick of things. Knowing that she had the power to intervene when various crises stuck close to home led to a feeling of responsibility to help people when she could. And thanks to the Scarab - imperfect though her control of its abilities was - she could do SO much more than she ever could before.

Brenda started covering up bruises with long sleeves again, hiding the aftermath of tussles with violent gang members, as well as occasional monsters and at least one natural disaster... The news in El Paso was always buzzing with sightings of the 'Blue Knight' her armoured figure caught at first in blurry photographs and surprisingly sharp cell phone videos.

The idea of properly taking up Ted Kord's mantle as the Blue Beetle didn't quite take root in her until the JLA found out that she was still alive from Guy Gardener. Oracle contacted her, hopeful that she would accept their help, but Brenda was still hurt at being abandoned to die on the Brother Eye mission and wary of further conflict between the Scarab and the Green Lanterns. She declined the offer (less than politely) and resolved thereafter to pick up Kord's legacy and build upon it, working solo as the new Blue Beetle.

Well, almost solo. Her decision to take a heroine's path finally led her to return to where she had crash landed in the desert after the conflict with Brother Eye. This time she came accompanied by her best friends, bringing Paco and Jaime down with her into the black glass crater left by her landing, finally feeling she understood enough herself to let them in on her secret. Pulling the armour on before their eyes she started at the beginning...

Paco and Jaime took Brenda's transformation in remarkable stride, stunned that the 'Blue Knight' that had been spotted here and there around town was their friend but by the large they responded with enthusiasm, wanting to help Brenda investigate her new situation and find out what to do with all her new power.
The first big lead for them to investigate dropped right in their laps on that same night, waiting for them when they emerged from the crater; Peacemaker, a big tough tattooed ex-soldier who had a special connection to Brenda and to the scarab long before meeting them, finally, in person.

A year prior Peacemaker had stumbled onto a Bialyan pyramid that happened to be the same one Dan Garrett had found the Scarab in decades before. While inside, he accidentally came into contact with alien technology which forcibly downloaded the Scarab's database in his mind. This database was what was missing from the Scarab, its instruction manual so to speak; that was why it didn't know its mission beyond protecting Brenda. It was taken away from its ship with only a partly functioning AI and missing its higher instructions, including the ones needed to take control of its host...

Rather than being a creature onto itself the Scarab was damaged alien technology relying more than it ever normally would on its AI to cope with its lacking programming.

A few weeks later Brenda was headed out on a road trip to find one Dan Garrett - a descendant of the first Blue Beetle that she had dug up on the internet. She was accompanied on the trip by Jaime and Peacemaker, Paco stuck behind taking summer school classes.

Dan Garrett, it turned out, was Danielle Garrett, the original Blue Beetles granddaughter who thankfully agreed not to pursue legal action to get the Scarab back from Brenda on finding out that the artefact was fused to the girl's spine. She did however happily give Brenda all the information she could about the Scarab via her grandfather's notes.

In the end it was Brenda's investigation of some truly bizarre cattle mutilations taking place outside of El Paso that would provide the biggest lead on what the Scarab really was. Her confrontation with the monstrous creation responsible for the cattle deaths led her straight to the Reach, the alien race who had created the Scarab and left it - quite deliberately - on Earth.

The Reach as it turned out were galactic conquerors. Initially, the Scarab had been programmed to be obedient to the Reach, and to subordinate its host's will to them. The Reach intended to present the Scarab's host as Earth's protector, before moving to establish their influence over the planet.

However, during the centuries the Scarab had spent on Earth, it had been first cut off from its core instruction manual and then over time infused with magic just from being on the planet and in the possession of so many heroes... The exposure and subsequent corruption of the device prevented the Reach from controlling it. With Brenda's thoughts, feelings, emotional attachments and sense of morality acting in place of the programming it was missing the Scarab had started to develop its own free will and a genuine connection with its host. Its growing friendship with Brenda, volatile though it had been in places, had overridden the Reach's deepest programming.

Peacemaker, however, DID have the programming and the Reach were quick to capture him and implant a scarab device, attempting to take control of him and use him to destroy Brenda and her apparently independent device in turn. Fate intervened however in the form of a lantern ring that chose the AI of Peacemaker's scarab to wield the yellow light of fear for the Sinestro Corps, bestowing it with responsibility for a space-sector which included the Reach home world and thus its empire.

As official lantern of its sector Peacemaker's Scarab set off to destroy the Reach's greatest current threat - Brenda. In a bid to save Peacemaker who had been taken over by the Reach Scarab and then trapped beneath the web of fear the ring had imposed, Brenda donned her armour to interface with the other Scarab, connecting with Peacemaker's mind in the process and helping him break free of the controls placed on him. Gathering enough footing for a final stand, Peacemaker cut the Reach Scarab from his back, inflicting a grievous injury that he was lucky to survive. From her connection with him Brenda's Scarab had also regained the programming it had been separated from, able to operate more clearly and giving Brenda full access to the armour’s systems and variables.
Despite their failure to end the threat that Brenda posed Reach went forward with their intention to take over Earth without the Scarab and its host to help them.

They did this by immediately making peaceful contact with Earth's governments, getting themselves some DAMN good PR and appearing to do nothing threatening whatsoever. As far as the rest of the planet was concerned, the Reach were peaceful 'galactic traders'. Their secret bases and technology were hidden away, out of phase with the rest of the world the way Brother Eye had been, and Brenda with the help of the Scarab was the only one who could see them.

Wisely still seeing Brenda and the free-willed Scarab as the greatest possible threat to their plans, the Reach spent their 'peaceful' time on Earth attempting to eliminate both of them through the use of third parties that would deny any connection to the Reach, including many of Earth's super villains. Brenda likewise threw her all into finding a hole in the Reach's defences and discovering what they were planning certain that it couldn't be good.

Over the course of her investigations and conflicts Brenda clashed again with the Posse, but this time she wound up teaming up with Traci 13 and intervening against a demon to save the life of Damper and Bonita's baby girl. The good deed of saving Alina's life earned her some good graces with the crew, which over time developed into a strong friendship and the occasional team up, members of the Posse using their own powers to assist her.

Eventually Brenda's identity as the Blue Beetle was revealed to her Aunt Amparo - and Amparo's identity as the crime boss La Dama revealed to her in turn - when Brenda, Jaime and Paco stumbled on a magical artefact in Amparo's office that transported Paco to another planet when he picked it up. Brenda armoured up and went after him - on camera unbeknownst to her - leaving Jaime behind to deal with her Aunt. Amparo insisted on calling in her own help from magical and other sources trying to decipher the mystery of the Mother Box while Brenda and Paco spent a harrowing day on a heavily booby trapped planet attempting not to die with the help of the New Gods Lonar and Metron.

Upon their return Brenda found her Aunt's office crammed with Jaime plus three scientists, two mages, and a personal swat squad. A long and heated discussion ensued between aunt and niece that eventually boiled down to a semi-comfortable stalemate. Although Brenda was deeply uncomfortable with her Aunt's criminal connections she had to acknowledge that Amparo had been doing her best to scale back her criminal dealings, not just since Brenda's return home from being missing, but since before then, since her mother first fell ill and Amparo had first realized that she might be called on one day to keep her sister's daughter in good care. Amparo continued to scale back the worst of her criminal involvements and Brenda continued to work as the Blue Beetle but with the added support of her Aunt, each keeping the other's secret identity as a sort of mutual collateral.

Amparo's knowledge of her secret identity led to Brenda getting all kinds of exciting new gear and support for her hero career - a car of her own, a new computer to keep her research and growing villain database up to speed, and perhaps most importantly to Brenda, the privilege of being moved into her Aunt's pool house which was tantamount to having her own apartment. (Or, as Paco saw fit to call it, Beetle Cave.)

Eventually the Reach recruited Lobo to prevent the launch of a rocket containing anti-Reach technology. Brenda teamed up with the Teen Titans to make sure the rocket lifted off safely and was afterwards invited to Titans Tower, so she could hang out with the Titans team, get in on some of their training, and learn how to really fight without the civilian geared attitude of her akido instructor or the inconsistent timing of Peacemaker's otherwise useful lessons. Brenda took them up on the invitation shortly thereafter and found herself taking a few days out from El Paso helping the Titans fight off their evil future incarnations.
Finally, with the help of Jaime and Paco, Brenda and the Scarab managed to uncover the Reach's underlying scheme - the world-ending disaster in the making that they were orchestrating behind everyone's backs. However, disrupting the plan meant destroying all its parts and thus any evidence of the scheme, leaving the Reach still free to try again.

The Scarab had developed even further by now into an independent, free-willed entity in its own right, taking the code it was called by among the Reach as a name - Kahji Da. Together, Brenda and the Scarab devised a plan to bring the Reach down before they tried conquering Earth again. The plan was not without its flaws however and Brenda bid Paco, Jaime and Amparo a tense farewell, not entirely sure that she was going to come back in the end.

Brenda used Kahji Da's ability to access the Bleed between space and time to launch simultaneous personal attacks on three Reach installations on Earth, subsequently allowing herself to be captured by the Reach. After an initial violent interrogation got them nothing, the Reach stepped things up a notch and set about using an orbital laser to try to kill her family. Though they escaped harm thanks to the intervention of Traci 13, everyone on the Reach vessel, Brenda included, believed them to be dead....

Brenda reacted with expected rage and grief, attacking most of the Reach soldiers present and injuring many before being forcibly brought down. Reach engineers promptly tore Kahji Da from her body once she was pinned and set about analyzing it, but determined almost immediately that the Scarab was clearly dead and empty... as far as they knew.

Meanwhile, Brenda was thrown in a holding cell only to escape shortly thereafter, imbued with all the knowledge that Kahji Da had to offer that he had downloaded into her brain before being taken. Stealing clothes from Reach guards and a maintenance vehicle to ride on Brenda went charging for the engines. Sure that there was a plan in play to destroy or cripple their flagship vessel the Reach were forced to shut the engines down, in turn revealing the vast ship and its waiting invading forces to Earth below when the cloaking devices were no longer running.

Meanwhile Brenda's actions, all pure deceit and misdirection, had given Kahji Da who had been faking its dormant state the chance to hack into the Reach's computers and broadcast their invasion plans worldwide...

As angry queries and demands for surrender poured in the Reach ship's leader - the Negotiator - saw no way out. He ordered Earth's destruction, but Brenda and Kahji Da intervened there as well, stopping the Reach's 'world rippers' before they could be activated, though at the cost of their own chance for escaping from the self-destructing Reach vessel. At the last moment when Brenda and Kahji Da - now rejoined - were resigned to their sacrifice, Booster Gold appeared through a rip in time and space to snatch them from the edge of oblivion.
Returned to Earth Brenda quickly found, to her relief, that Amparo, Jaime, Paco and their families were still alive and well, that the Reach forces that had invaded El Paso were retreating. All the research, planning, fretting and sacrifice had paid off in a big 'holy shit we saved the world' kind of way.
Confidence bolstered by her ability to save the world and not die in the process Brenda continued after the end of the Reach to patrol El Paso on a regular basis, building an identity as a hero of the city's own that could be looked up to and counted on.

In the midst of an evening patrol was where she was just before she ended up sharing a dimension with the Posthumans.

How does your AU differ from canon? In canon Brenda's friend Jaime became the Blue Beetle and she was involved in his exploits as a teammate and friend. Their roles have essentially been reversed here making Brenda into the hero instead which complicates her life and relationships in alternate ways.

Strengths:
Brenda is fairly skilled when it comes to hand to hand combat, having taken some martial arts prior to gaining the scarab beetle. Sans armor she's a serviceable combatant, self-trained to the relative level of an upper-mid-level belt in Akido. She's also had come combat training from the Titans and Peacemaker. Armored up with Kahji Da to help her she is faster and stronger but at roughly the same level of skill.

Speaking of Kahji Da, he is an extraterrestrial Swiss army knife fused to Brenda's spine, featuring various charming and handy settings like beam cannons, particle diffusers, and other theoretical weapons that Brenda has never tried to use because they come saddled with footnotes about projected fatalities and possible theological implications. Kahji Da can armour Brenda's body head to toe, providing her with a filtration and life support system that allows her to survive in even the harshest of climates and up into the vacuum of space.

Weaknesses:
Rashness and a nasty temper are just part of Brenda's personality. They bite her in the ass about as often as you would expect. Kahji Da does not always obey Brenda's commands because they do not always agree. Although their wills are usually fairly well aligned he can still hijack her body for his own purposes fairly easily when the armor is on and he can force her limbs to move and such. Underneath the armor Brenda is just a normal human girl and she can still be hurt or killed all too easily if someone can get at her. Kahji Da has some degree of healing ability but there's only so much it can do.

Preferred drop-in point: Manhattan please!

What are some of your plans for this character in their new environment?
CRIME FIGHTING TEAMUPS WITH OTHER HEROES (cause she hasn't done all that much of that yet). Also dealing with her trauma of being being dimensionally displaced for a second time and how nuts she will be about having to be a hero without Jaime and Paco to back her up. :(

First Person Journal Sample:
[Brenda's voice is hoarse, but threateningly steady on the other end of the line. She's working from the other side of a dense protective filter that scratches out location and other information. Alien technology is useful like that...]

Sooooo, is this WHOLE PLACE full of these bastards in black who think it's a great idea to dog pile on the new hero in town? Because if this is what you call a welcoming committee in this dimension I am not too goddamn impressed. I've been to intelligently hostile planetoids that didn't try this hard to kill me on sight!

I didn't even get one WORD out before I was getting shot at, they dented the hell out of my armor, and now I'm spending my first night here hiding in alleys, hacking my way around this network to get some information on these Gestapo bastards...

[An explosive exasperated sigh and the sound of shifting plating jamming up comes over the feed in the background.]

I'm sure it's a long shot that anyone will recognize the name, but I'm the Blue Beetle, and I would really appreciate knowing who these psychos that just tried to kill me are and where I am if at all possible.

Thanks.

Third Person Sample:
Brenda slogged into her bedroom, feet dragging as she closed the door behind her and took a look around. The place was neat as a pin, but it was hard to be anything else when she had so little to her name just yet. Sadly it wasn't a unique state given how many times she'd had to move in the last two years. No space she lived in had fully felt her own since she had moved out of her childhood home to her Aunt Amparo's place.

Her day today had been long. She's walked around most of the city nearest her apartment, resume dropping and wearing nice clothes for the task. Which meant her feet were KILLING her, damnable nice interview shoes!

Toeing off her neat black heels she padded over to the bed, wiggling her bare toes with every step and flopped down on it, considering a shower, a snack or getting some sleep and weighing each in order of her desire for it. Finally deciding on a snack first she reached up and unbuttoned her blouse, grabbing her comm and it's hands free earpiece off the bedside table as she worked her clothes off. She hooked the ear bud over her ear and dialed up Jaime's number.

"Hey amigo, how goes to good fight?" She greeted him with a grin even though he couldn't see her, digging a comfy t-shirt out of her lone laundry basket and slipping it over her head.

It's not really going in his favor today...

Brenda stopped cold in the midst of unbuttoning her skirt. Kahji Da twittered in alarm in the back of her head, trilling off warnings left and right, alarming things like 'human voice mimicry detected' with a list of possible species.

Brenda's hand snapped up to her ear, pressing the earpiece in tighter as she ran back to the bedside table to get the main unit, double checking the number, pulse pounding in her ears. Shit shit shit SHIT!

"Where's Jaime? WHO IS THIS?!"

You know. You tell his family their son is in good hands, hmm?

And with a click the connection went dead.

Brenda choked down a frustrated scream, tearing the headset out and throwing it against the wall and storming out of the bedroom. Kahji Da was locking armor into place over her torso by the time she had pulled open the front door.