Alias: Blue Beetle
Allegiance: Independent
Sex: Male
Race: Mexican human
Age: 17
Height: 5'9
Weight: 145 lbs
Appearance: Jaime Reyes is a teenage Hispanic male with short black hair and brown eyes. He usually wears casual clothing: sweatshirts, t-shirts, jeans, and the occasional hoodie. When he imploring the powers of the Khaji-Da, he resembles an insect in a black and blue full boy suit, precisely like his namesake. The alien artifact known as the Khaji-da takes the appearance of a Scarab beetle on his back.
Personality: Blue Beetle seems to have a relaxed, mellow attitude when it comes to most situations. People often find him odd because he appears to talk and argue with himself on many occasions, when it is actually the Blue Beetle Scarab interacting with him. He dislikes the Scarab's artificial intelligence, and is constantly at odds with it, and sometimes refers to it as an 'inner demon'. He disagrees with its suggestions on most occasions, as it finds lethal courses of action preferable to capture and restraint.
Goals & Ambitions: Jaime has decided to dedicate his new abilities to protecting the public and fighting against the more nefarious members of society.
Abilities & Equipment: Presently bonded to Jaime's spine, the Blue Beetle Scarab gives Jaime access to the Scarab's powers whenever he chooses. The Scarab can, and will, use its powers of its own accord; Jaime, however, can override the Scarab if need be. Should Jaime fall prey to a mind-altering power, the Scarab will take control of the armor. The Blue Beetle scarab is the most powerful weapon of all the Blue Beetles, and Jaime has had the most unique powers and has fully bonded with it. The Scarab won't hurt nature unless reasoned with and it causes Green Lanterns to act violently towards him and defends itself in response.
According to Jaime, the Scarab has a number of 'options' beyond those listed below, some of which are apparently capable of destroying a city.
Artificial Intelligence: Normally, the Reach's command sentience parameters, stored in a Scarab's database, give a Scarab sentience and serve to make it obedient to the Reach. An infusion of magical energies sometime in the distant past altered the Scarab, denying the Reach control. When the Scarab's infiltrator mode was triggered, the Scarab was able to develop its sentience without being in service to the Reach. It also had the opportunity to access the programming of other Scarabs as well. As a result, the Scarab has its own mind, with full access to its own programming,
- Symbiotic Synaptic Interface: The Scarab's nervous system is bonded to Jaime's, letting the two share their thoughts and emotions. The Scarab communicates with Jaime as a voice in his mind (which sounds like Jaime's mother). No-one else can hear it.
- Scarab Mindlink: The Scarab can mentally communicate with Scarabs that have not integrated with a host. It can also interface with Scarabs which have created full infiltrators, although this requires Jaime to breach the infiltrator's armor.
Tracking Systems: The Scarab can track anything which produces energy, be it biological, technological or mystical. It can track anyone Jaime met since it bonded with him, from at least seventy miles distant.
Scarab Sight: The Scarab can scan the people Jaime encounters, informing him of any major physical conditions (such as pregnancy). It can identify and scan metahumans. It can identify people related to those it's already encountered via genetic analysis. The Scarab is able to identify thought-patterns, enabling it to see if something is sentient. It can identify matching energy signatures, letting it see if the energy patterns were developed from the same basis. It can also see extra-dimensional objects. It is continually aware of the electricity in the surrounding environment.
It can perceive magic, see how a magical effect can be dispelled, and see through magical concealment.
The Scarab's scans can cover at least a five mile square. It communicates the information it gleans to Jaime in a manner he can understand.
- Temporal Flux Detection: The Scarab can detect changes in the timeline affecting the Blue Beetle legacy; to Jaime, this manifests as intense static.
Network Connection: The Scarab can establish a connection to communication systems, enabling Jaime to speak to the person on the other end.
Clothing Manifestation: The Scarab can create clothes for Jaime, apparently from recycled waste and skin, which melt when he takes them off.
Concealment: The Scarab is capable of concealing itself from 21st century technology (though Skeets, from the 25th century, was able to find it). It can shut off cameras and microphones in its vicinity. The Scarab has blocked a magical attempt to probe it, lashing out at the person who tried.
Healing
Host Reconfiguration: The Scarab can modify Jaime's body to a certain extent (e.g., offering to give him extra fingers), although just how far the modifications can go is unknown.
Blue Beetle Armor: The Scarab can create a distinctive suit of armor in response to Jaime's thoughts, or when it deems use of the armor necessary. Once the Scarab dispels the armor, it retracts back into Jaime's body.
- Superhuman Strength
- Superhuman Agility
- Environmental Protection: The armor allows Jaime to survive in a variety of hazardous environments ranging from Earth orbit, to the timestream, to the Bleed. It can survive extreme temperature and pressure. It can survive the heat and impact of atmospheric re-entry without seeming damage, even when the earth around it has been turned to glass.
- Armor Reconfiguration: The armor can reconfigure itself to create a wide array of tools and weapons, including an energy cannon, a sword and shield, a grappling hook, an energy blaster, claws, wings, and a set of large powered blades attached to the hands, over a foot in length, that can shear through tree trunks.
- The armor's equipment is mutable to a certain extent, most noticeably in the wings; initially, they were composed of the same solid 'carapace' which comprises the rest of the suit, but later, they began manifesting themselves in the form of a colorless, translucent material. Whether this is because of changes in the suit's capabilities, or because Jaime intended the alteration, has not been made clear.
- Partial Armor Manifestation: Jaime can manifest parts of the armor - like the energy blaster - without needing to manifest the whole suit.
- Wing Shields: The armor can create a pair of wings, enabling Jaime to fly and hover. They can also double as shields, should the need arise.
- Jet Propulsion: When in flight, the armor can manifest a 'jet engine', enabling Jaime to fly at greater speed, at the expense of close maneuverability.
- Energy Manipulation: The Scarab can shape and manipulate the energy it stores for a variety of effects, including energy blasts, energy cocoons, small-scale solid constructs (shields, chains, etc.), and 3-D holograms. Its energy shields can block a Sinestro Corps ring's blasts.
- Antagonist Adaptation: The armor can tailor its blasts for use against specific opponents (e.g., Kryptonite radiation against a Kryptonian, suppression blast against a mob). The blasts can penetrate a Green Lantern ring's shield. The armor can call up anti-magic effects against magical opponents. By the Scarab's own estimation, it can even develop countermeasures that can take on the Spectre.
- Energy Bubble: The armor is able to create a temporary energy bubble around Jaime and/or people nearby. The bubble shields those inside from outside attacks, but prevents them from leaving. A Flash who tries to vibrate through it will find themselves blasted by the bubble.
- Vibrational Frequency Manipulation: The Scarab can negate the vibrational frequencies of extra-dimensional objects, pulling them into this reality. The area of effect of this latter is unknown; it has been seen to affect objects at least the size of Brother Eye. According to the Reach, this should be impossible.
- The Scarab can also shift Jaime out of phase with the universe, making him invisible and intangible to anything apart from Reach-tech.
- Bleed Diving: Jaime can shift into the Bleed, the space that connects the various universes. He can utilize the Bleed's unique properties for various effects, such as instantaneous teleportation, or shifting back in time a few minutes to appear in more than one place simultaneously. At best, he has only enough energy to dive into the Bleed three times in quick succession.
- Translation: The armor can translate Mother Box communication into a form comprehensible to Jaime.
- Waste Disposal: While wearing the armor, Jaime finds that he doesn't need to go to the toilet, though he does still need rest.
Green Lantern Corps: The Scarab sees the Green Lantern Corps as the 'enemy'. In Jaime's first few days as the Beetle, the Scarab did everything in its power to get him away from the Lanterns - up to and including shifting him outside the universe. As Jaime's experience with the Scarab's armor has developed, the Scarab has taken a more aggressive approach against the Lanterns, urging Jaime to kill them.
The Green Lantern rings, for their part, fear the Scarab, responding in different ways depending on their wielders (e.g. John Stewart's sparks, as if afraid, while Guy Gardner's induced what can only be described as a 'super-migraine', along with an intense desire to kill the Scarab's bearer).
Truce With Nature: The Scarab will not hurt nature, or the magical creatures thereof (beings who draw their power from the Green, for example), of its own volition.
Alien Sentience: The Scarab's sentience is distinctly alien; while it won't hurt /nature/, it has shown no such reluctance when it comes to humans, being willing to injure or kill them. Fortunately, Jaime has so far prevented it from killing anyone.
Reach Tech: The Scarab's armor can be breached by the weapons of other Scarabs. Equally, however, the Scarab is able to breach other Scarabs' armor.
Originally, the Scarab was unable to attack the Reach and their technology. Jaime overrode the Scarab's programming, 'reprogramming' it so that it was able to fight the Reach.
Magic: While the Scarab is aware of magic, it doesn't understand it. It's able to perceive, absorb, and disrupt magical energies, but little else. As a result, creatures of magic are often a significant challenge. The Scarab can't analyse certain mystical creatures, and so is unable to develop countermeasures for them. When faced with certain other mystical entities, such as the Spectre, the Scarab panics, offering Jaime ever more powerful weapons to take them on.
Magnetic Shielding: Strong magnetic fields block the Scarab's ability to track DNA.
Dispelling The Armor: Dispelling the armor originally caused Jaime intense pain. As time has passed, however, Jaime has found the process getting easier.
Personal History: When the mystic scarab of the Blue Beetle landed in El Paso, teenager Jaime Reyes found the strange bug-like artifact. That night, the fabled scarab found a new symbiotic host by fusing to Jaimeās spine. Jaime awoke babbling alien languages and hearing unintelligible communications from the scarab. It was trying to tell him that whenever he faced danger, the scarab would expand to create a super-powered carapace around his body.
At first, these changes left the boy frightened. But as he used the Scarab's powers more and more, he eventually started to become comfortable with his newfound abilities. His struggles to keep his normal life and superhero life separate caused great stress for his hard-working parents and younger sister, prompting him to reveal his secret identity to them. Soon, Jaime eased back into some semblance of normalcy with support from his family and two best friends, Paco and Brenda. After sharing his super-powered secret with his family and friends, he became El Pasoās super-powered protector from threats both criminal and magical.
Occupation: Adventurer, student
Family: Alberto Reyes (father); Bianca Reyes (mother); Milagro Reyes (younger sister); Alejandro Reyes (grandfather, deceased); Elena Leal (maternal grandmother)