Tessa 'Tesla' Brown and her treecat Toroid. *Scamper*, went Tessa as she chased the bunny. *Poof*, went the bunny, down a hole. "You get back here!" she yelled frustratedly after it. Finally exhausted, she plunked herself down on the ground with a sigh. "Cutebunny doesn't wanna play with me." She pouts mildly for a moment, then brightens. "I know! I'll build something to catch the cutebunny!" As she tinkered away busily, as only a seven-year-old-going-on-eight child can, she heard a *bleek* from behind her. Hey, what's that? she wondered. And as any seven-year-old-going-on-eight would, she turned around quickly to see what the noise-maker was. That's funny, she thought. There's nothing there... Maybe it's hiding! Under the bushes she looked, but nothing. Into the bunnyhole she looked too, but even her MegaWatt4200/B penfloodlamp couldn't see anything very far down. She looked up into the trees at the edge of the park into the clear focused eyes of...what? "Oh...." she whispered as something, no *someone* flooded into her mind without warning. She sank slowly to her knees, trying to sort out what was happening. Someone was invading her mind!... but, it didn't *feel* like an invasion... somehow it felt... right. Like a fuel tank of a hovercycle being filled up for the first time, or when she'd reach without looking for a part and she just *knew* without looking that it was the right one. Or the way a toroid felt to her 'touch', a perfectly coiled sphereoid with a focal point just *there*, filtering out all the nasty interference. She'd tried to build one for herself once, a great big donut of wire that she wore around her head for a whole week. It hadn't seemed to help though, and all the static stayed firmly put in her head. Over time she'd learned to ignore it, and her mother had breathed a large sigh of relief when the head-donut had disappeared back into Tessa's workshop. Write with Praxx. Some months later: "Come on 'Roid! We'll be late!" Tessa cried as she floored the 'cycle. (basic idea here is that somehow her parents get wasted just before she turns 8, she doesn't know who killed them or why and has pretty much blocked that set of memories completely, except the part about seeing the pretty explosions from over the hill beforehand and the neat craters afterwards. Toroid knows the truth as he dealt truehandily with the ones that went after Tessa, but he's not telling.) I figure her parents were tech/weapons specialists. got attacked by Prosek's forces to steal stuff, they set the workshops/stores to blow and tried to make a run for it, but a stray shot blew the whole thing too early (here she meets up somehow with Azi and the rest of the gang. She learns Glitter Boy systems rapidly, to their extreme happiness at first, and dismay soon after.) well, I'm thinking that Toroid knows at least generally who killed her parents and he started subtlely trying to guide her towward their enemies maybe Asi was chasing down the group... and on her way back came across Tesla and 'Roid, thought she was some kid that had wandered into a war zone and decided to mother-hen her out of the way. Of course somewhere in there Tesla gets her hands on a GB and learns the systems fast enough to to a tad of tweaking I figure she's been around GB's now for about 2 years, that would give her enough time to get her skillz to the point where the are.