Frankie Guidicini

[Frankie Guidicini]

The Handler

Name: Francesca Ellanor Guidicini
Nickname: Frankie
Classification: Unknown/Part Human
Gender: Female
Age & Birthday: 112, August 5
Appearance: Frankie is not intimidating to look at in the least. Her stature is small, and her body can be described as slight. She has brown hair that she keeps neat and tidy, and her eyes are a copper color that reminds one of a hawk's or eagle's stare. Her skin is very pale and it is unmarred by scars or wrinkles thanks to her healing factor. Her body build can sometimes be described as emaciated. She is very androgynous and thinks of herself as a human beanpole in shape. Her fingers are long and almost spindly. Her elbows, knees, and chin all seem to be made of sharp angles. Frankie's body is not soft.
Attire: Frankie mostly wears plain dark colored clothing, usually black turtle-necks and slacks. The colors are unassuming and don't draw too much attention, which is a dressing habit she has kept from her former days in espionage and her period of being a recluse. She also wears dresses on a pretty frequent basis, and they are usually older in fashion with longer skirts and sleeves. She always wears a thin golden wedding band on her left ring finger. When a mission comes along, she wears something that is much like a leather jumpsuit that allows her thorns to eject freely and the leather allows the blood to be slicked away. At night, she wears a black silken nightgown and a black silken robe over that if she's going to be out of bed for any reason. Frankie never shows any skin above her shoulders or ankles unless it is absolutely necessary (so far it has never been necessary). She is very modest in every form of dress.

The Creation

Name: Bones
Power List:
Healing Factor
Thorn-Shaped Bones
Super Strong Bones/Grip
Detailed Power:
Frankie has a healing factor that allows her to heal any wound in a matter of seconds. The healing process produces an acid that she must regurgitate, and it eats through anything if it is not diluted. Simple water dilutes the acid and neutralizes it. Because of this healing factor, Frankie has not aged past her twenties, and has long life. Frankie can die, but it would have to come from massive trauma like her head getting lobbed off, her body being cut in half, et cetera. She would also die from drowning or suffocation. The healing factor is an ability she was born with; she does not know how she received it or why.
Frankie also has thorn shaped bones with sharp edges that she can push out of the sides of her arms, front of her legs, back of her hands, and the heels of her feet at will. Her healing factor is important to this process because she must heal every time the thorns push through. She can slice and dice with these thorns at an incredibly fast rate. Because of these bones and their ability to be ejected and retracted, her skeletal system is strong and dense. Most of her weight is attributed to this dense skeleton. Because of her skeletal system being so dense, she can crush bones in her grip or with her punches. It takes a serious amount of force to break one of her bones.

The Potential

Alignment/Occupation: Senior BPRD Agent
Weapons: Frankie is a weapon.
Personality: Frankie has an abrasive personality. Throughout the years she's become cynical, and doesn't hesitate to let her feelings be known about someone, somewhere, or something to anyone. She isn't known for having a heaping amount of fun that will leave her laughing like an idiot, but every now and then she does like to have a few drinks and relax. She feels more at ease with the men-folk at the Bureau. She views today's women as convoluted and narcissistic creatures.
While she is abrasive, she isn't without her kindness too, in her own way. She respects anyone who has made one devotion in their life and stuck to it, like members of the clergy. She idealizes love and will press people to discover and experience it for all it's worth. Frankie is usually very brisk and short with people, especially on missions, but if she takes a liking to a person, she will adamantly defend them. One thing she has always prided herself on is being a loyal person to those whom she holds in high regard.
Skills: Embroidery and the breeding of an upper class lady of the early twentieth century. She can also speak German, Italian, French, Spanish, Chinese, and Russian from her days of being a spy. She has extensive training in the art of espionage and is a former political assassin. Frankie has had many years to train and perfect her art of fighting. She is lethal in combat.
Strengths: Frankie's healing factor may make her impossible to kill (so far she has taken five bullets to the head and survived) using methods that are not extraordinarily violent.
Frankie's psychological training is very developed: she will focus on the task at hand until it is accomplished and will handle anything that is thrown her way in the meantime.
Since she's been 'executed' and left for dead so many times, she can recover from a traumatic event fairly quickly.
Weaknesses: If something were to ever happen to Frankie's healing factor, or if she were ever to receive a wound that couldn't be healed, it would devastate her. This is a woman who has never been sick a day in her life, and has never been in pain for a sustained amount of time. If anything were to happen to her healing factor, Frankie would be left with a practically non-existent immune system that would leave her extremely susceptible to any germ. Any unhealing wound would shatter her; she is not psychologically prepared to deal with a vast amount of pain that lasts.
Frankie can die of suffocation or drowning, or she figures it that way. If she was to be suffocated or drown, her body would not be able to heal itself into producing the oxygen needed for survival. She has not tested this theory out (Obviously!), but it makes sense.
Frankie is susceptible to emotion; in particular, love. Love is a great treasure to her. Any emotion that is kind or positive is extremely valued by Frankie.

The Story

History: Francesca Ellanor Guidicini was born on the day that her mother died in 1898. Her father was an Italian diplomat and her mother was an English lady. Francesca's birthplace was Glastonbury in England, which had mythical healing properties attached to it dating back to King Arthur's days. For some reason, when Frankie came through the birth canal, she had thorn-shaped bones lining her arms and legs, and they were ejected, cutting her mother Ellanor up from the inside out. Ellanor began to fade fast even though the midwife was trying to stem the bleeding. The babe was wailing and covered in blood, but Ellanor asked to hold her, and asked that Francesca's father Franco come into the birthing room. Franco was horrified at the sight of his daughter and, being a staunch Catholic, he believed her to be a demon. He made to grab the babe and dash her brains out, but weak and pale Ellanor bade him to take care of her, love her, and forgive her. Ellanor died with Francesca in her arms, and it was only through her bidding that Franco did not kill what he thought to be a demon. Once Francesca was fed goat's milk and calmed, the thorns retracted. She took on the appearance of a normal baby, but when she spat up acid and not milk, the true nature of what lay inside of her was still revealed.
Francesca was raised in the countryside by her father who showed all outward appearances of a loving father. Franco did love the daughter that he named after himself and his wife, and he did as best as he could for her, but he would always resent the fact that it was because of her that his Ellanor was gone. He treated her as normally as he could, and usually he had no problem thinking of her as normal. Only when Francesca became alarmed did the thorns eject, and when she was calmed they would retract. She was tutored privately by a governess sworn to secrecy, and grew up with only her father (who was often absent to London), governess, and the house's servants for company. It was through servant's gossip that Francesca learned of how her mother died, and she began to feel that her father loved her out of a sense of duty to her mother, and not because she was his daughter.
When World War I struck, Francesca's father was torn. Britain, France, and Russia were allied in the Triple Entete while Italy had sided with Germany and Austria-Hungary in the Triple Alliance. While Franco was indeed an Italian diplomat, his daughter had been born and raised in Britain and was British to the bone. Franco debated whether to flee to Italy while he had the chance, but his love for his daughter and the country he had lived in for more than twenty years prevailed. He pledged his allegiance to the Union Jack and renounced his Italian citizenship. The British government were wary that he was a spy in their midst and so he offered then seventeen year old Francesca as a spy to the British government. He explained her strange abilities and how they could be of use and the fact that he had also taught her to speak Italian didn't hurt either. Francesca agreed to it because she now saw how much her father truly loved her by choosing to sacrifice his Italian citizen-ship to stay in the country that had been her home. It was also made clear to Franco that if he was an Italian spy, his daughter would suffer the consequences.
There were sects in the British government much like modern day American BRPD that Francesca was assigned to, and she was taught how to control herself and her thorns. Frankie (her named had been shortened and made 'more British' by several of the blokes and ladies that were fellow 'freaks') was a top candidate to become a spy with her healing factor (since she couldn't die from wounds as far as they knew), and was shipped all over the world. If ever she was found out by the enemy governments, she would give no information but allow herself to be tortured and then 'executed'. She would vomit the acid up and lay prone until her body was disposed of in whatever manner, and then she would traverse back to Britain and give His Majesty's government information of the spied-upon country. This took extensive psychological training and preparation on Frankie's part, and she dealt surprisingly well with being 'killed' a few times during the war.
After the Great War was over, Frankie was sent to continue spying on other countries and sometimes she would be ordered to assassinate government officials. Her heart wrenched when she was first told she would become an assassin, but as she looked at it, it was for the greater good. If she could kill one person to prevent another Great War, she would do it. Her father had retired from public life back to Glastonbury after the war, but now that Frankie had seen the world, she wasn't going to return home any time soon. Her father didn't know exactly what her job entailed, but he supported her and the niche she had fit into.
In her early twenties, Frankie met an English doctor named Henry Hyde after a particularly messy assassination attempt at a banquet in Russia. The doctor was attending the banquet as a guest of the host, and Frankie had sliced through a Bolshevik officer's windpipe in a private room, but he was still able to stumble into the banquet hall. Henry tried to save his life, and while Frankie watched from the edge of the room, she was touched by the compassion of the man. While her occupation was only about the destruction of life, Henry's was about saving it. Frankie found Henry after the corpse had been removed from the ballroom and the doctor had washed up. After several chance meetings afterward, the pair fell in love and were married. Henry did find moral qualms with Frankie's profession, but he loved Frankie, not her job. When Frankie became pregnant with their daughter Stella, she and Henry settled into a quiet life in London, with Frankie rarely going on spy or assassination missions afterward. The next two decades were the happiest times of Frankie's life. The small family frequently visited Stella's "Nonno Franco" in Glastonbury, took vacations on the coast, and enjoyed their lives. The only sad time Frankie could remember during that period was when her father passed away in the winter of 1938.
World War II shortly followed, and while Henry had aged and his hair was turning white, Frankie still looked like she did the day they married. Stella met an American named Alexander Jones and when he returned to America in 1940 following the attack on Pearl Harbor, eighteen year-old Stella went with him as his wife. It was only Frankie and Henry in their London flat, but they were both happy Stella was in America when the bombing of London by the Germans followed that autumn. Though he had retired a few years before, Henry acted as a doctor to the brave souls who heeded Churchill's call to defend St. Paul's Cathedral from the falling bombs. These courageous souls would throw bombs from the roof of the cathedral before they exploded, for Churchill said that St. Paul's Cathedral must stand as a defiant symbol to the Germans. Henry was killed dragging a wounded woman to safety on April 15, 1941. After the funeral, Frankie disappeared without a word to anyone. She could not handle the heartbreak of losing the only man she had ever been in love with.
For the next thirty or so years, Frankie roamed the continent of Europe like a stray animal. When her clothes would wear out, she would steal a new set from the back of trucks or clotheslines. She wasn't one for fashion; she just made sure the clothing was modest. There was nothing left for her to do other than wait for a death that would never come. She finally accepted that she would not soon be following Henry into the dark night, and one close call with a group of nationalists hiding in the Black Forest of Germany reminded her that her grief was allowing her to get rusty. She honed her combat skills alone, her body becoming a precise and fatal weapon against others.
In the late sixties, she regretted leaving without even telling Stella. Stella would be in her forties by now, and Frankie decided to find her daughter, and try to make amends. Frankie wanted to be reunited with what was left of her family, and she started making her way west.
Frankie was found in the cargo hold of a ship by the BPRD in September of 1973. They had been called in after she was shot as an intruder by members of the crew and hadn't died. The Bureau offered Frankie a position, but Frankie declined. She had come to America to find her daughter, not become embroiled in espionage or whatever they wanted her for. To aid her decision, the Bureau found Stella instead. Stella had died a few years earlier of cancer. She had given birth to a son a year after Henry's death and named him after her father. Frankie felt a longing to go and find him, but she would be a stranger to him, and Stella had probably thought her dead anyway. Her search was over, and Frankie was crushed. With gentle prodding, Frankie joined the Bureau. Shortly after, there was a bit of a conflict between the UK and the US government over her because she technically hadn't been discharged from British service. As a compromise between the two governments, she was sent to Russia to keep an eye on the Soviets. Britain discharged her just recently, and she has returned to the BPRD in New Jersey.