Betsy Braddock

## Personality

Quick-witted, smart, funny, and effortlessly polished, magazines interviewing Betsy at the height of her young modeling career were right to call her likeable and charming. She is still all of those things, but beneath it all she is tempered steel and has an edge. Betsy is fiercely protective of her family and her friends, as well as her teammates, and she will go to the mat without hesitation for them.

## Powers

Telepathy and limited precognition

Betsy’s telepathy is mostly defensive (providing her with a type of immunity to mental attacks). It is more difficult for her to impose her will on others or to get to protected thoughts. Even though she has trained herself incredibly well, and this handicap is minimal, it is still there. Extensive use of aggressive telepathy renders Betsy weaker, and can even cause her to fall unconscious.

Unlike other telepaths Betsy has the ability to channel her mental energy into a psi-blade, which appears in the form of a red dagger protruding from the back of her hand. It’s generally used by being thrust into the opponent’s neck to short-circuit his/her nervous system. Also unique to Betsy’s telepathy is the ability to create psycho-blasts. Unlike the mental bolts used by other telepaths, the psycho-bolts are an actual physical manifestation of Betsy’s powers. They will physically hit, and generally knock down and injure, an opponent.  Betsy’s pre-cognitive abilities are limited at best, nearly non-existent at worst, and hardly consistent. They are a secondary, latent mutation. On the rare occasion when they even kick in, it is such that she can rarely even tell what she’s looking at, let alone affect the outcome.

## Talents

Betsy is smart, beautiful, and has a killer walk. She also has a decent baseline of computer skills - both run of the mill, and aggressive thanks to S.T.R.I.K.E. - and martial arts training. In addition to her experience with computer languages, she is also fluent in: English, French, German, and Japanese. Beyond that, she has an uncanny ability to read people, something which was true even before her telepathy manifested though the telepathy certainly doesn't hurt.

## Interests

Though naturally an introvert, Betsy loves people and her interests reflect that she is someone who truly sees depth and beauty in others. She enjoys fine art, theater, music, and fashion. More than that, she enjoys taking them in with friends or others who have the interest. Betsy also enjoys literature and poetry, and if she writes her own you will never know it.

## History

Dr. and Lady Braddock had three children: James “Jamie” Jr., and twins Brian and Elisabeth. The Braddock family was among the richest families in England, and none of their children ever wanted for anything. Elisabeth, or Betsy as she preferred to be called, attended some of the finest primary and secondary schools in England.

When she was thirteen, the statuesque Betsy was approached by a modeling agency. More inclined to make a name for herself than to use the name her parents had given her, Betsy chose to join the modeling world. Already 5'9", with bright blonde hair, and striking blue eyes – she quickly became one of the stars of the teen modeling world. Her education was handled by private tutors. Betsy would have been quite content to continue modeling had not the Hand and her mutation intervened.

While abroad, modeling, Betsy was kidnapped by the Hand, her captors demanding a handsome ransom from her parents. The attic over the youth hostel that served as their front was filled with little more than mattresses and the bodies of dead or unconscious other victims. It was there that her mutations manifested. Though she thought it a dream at the time, her first moment of precognition was her seeing a vision of her own body lying dead on a mattress. She psychically screamed, drawing the attention of telepaths in the employ of S.T.R.I.K.E. back in England. She screamed aloud as well, resulting in frightened members of the Hand rushing to make her stop. In their panic, they went too far. As she lie dying, Betsy saw the body of another young woman, who she later learned was named Kwannon, lying comatose in the bed nearest her. In a moment of sheer desperation, she pushed, moving her consciousness to the only body in the room she could reach that might stand a chance of making it through the night.

She came to face-to-face with a team from S.T.R.I.K.E., who had heard her psychic cry for help and had come to rescue her. Of course, they were interested in a bit more than just liberating a youth hostel of kidnapped women. They had a job proposition. In exchange for training in her mutant gifts, S.T.R.I.K.E. wanted her to serve Her Majesty's government. Betsy grasped the lifeline she'd been thrown.

At S.T.R.I.K.E., Betsy joined the Psi Division, serving alongside a dozen or so other telepaths. After a few months of training, she felt confident enough to write and then call her family, to inform them that she was alive but needed to disappear. She has not spoken to them since. Her assignments at the beginning were fairly administrative - finding other mutants, keep track of intelligence - but she was good at them, and she advanced rapidly. By the time S.T.R.I.K.E. agents began dropping dead, she had already been sent into the field with Pete Wisdom, another young recruit. Pete and Betsy have decided to find out how and why - preferably before they became the next targets.