Breena Innes is a beautiful butterfly. So said her best friend once, in second grade. And though she is not possessive of brightly coloured wings to dance on the breeze, it is not an inaccurate description. She is a slight young woman with a certain level of grace, and she's a little bit flighty. That's where any similarities to quiet, peaceful insects end however.

She was born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. Four days before Hallowe'en, she came along while her parents were visiting family. They weren't expecting her yet; a month early, she arrived like a shrieking whirlwind, already opinionated and a trifle impatient. She kept her parents in Scotland for nearly two months before the doctors deemed it safe for her to travel, and her parents got word from the United States government that their daughter wasn't considered a citizen of Scotland.

Once she was able to get into the US, home for Breena was Walworth County, Wisconsin. Her family had a picture-perfect house with a beautiful view of a pretty lake. Everything you could want for a perfect life. The Innes family was soon joined by Breena's baby sister Rosaleen. Rosie came exactly on time, with no complications, and was deemed the quiet one, while Breena was always introduced by her mother as 'my wild child'. This, naturally, left the eldest feeling a bit of resentment toward her younger sibling. To know that her mother thought of her as wild, as 'uncontrollable' was enough to make her declare out loud that she hated the dark haired little girl that looked so much like their father.

But, as so often happens in stories like this, all it took was a traumatic event to forge a strong bond between the sisters. In the case of the Innes siblings, it was a surprise pregnancy. Rosaleen, sweet and perfect Rosaleen, wound up having quite a few notches on her Fendi belt, and her last 'boyfriend' had gotten her in a family way on the first day of the summer camp they were both counseling at. By the time they parted ways at the end of August, she was nearly three months along, and he was calling her a whore. When Breena found out, she not only offered to drive her sister to the doctor, she also contacted the summer camp to get the father's address. She never told Rosaleen exactly what she did or said to the boy; all Rosie was told was that it had been taken care of. And sure enough, that very day the boy's parents had contacted Breena and Rosaleen's parents, letting them know that, whatever happened, there would be support from them. And it was Breena, ultimately, who convinced their parents that Rosaleen being pregnant at seventeen was not the end of the world. And that if she wanted to keep the baby, they could all help the young mother until Rosie got into the swing of things. It was because of this that, when the baby came along, Rosaleen did indeed keep her. She named her Noelle -- Breena's middle name.

When the baby came, it became all to clear to Breena that their once perfect little house was becoming far too crowded. To say nothing of the fact that Walworth County, while being picturesque and one of those little towns you think only exist in storybooks, didn't have much to offer by way of post secondary education. In fact, the nearest university was nearly an hour away. At nineteen years old, she was beginning to feel cooped up. She'd been working at the library in town since getting out of high school, but was starting to long for something much, much more than that. She wasn't sure what she wanted to do with her life yet, but she knew it wasn't this. And she knew she couldn't find it in Walworth County.

The day that Breena announced her departure from Wisconsin was rainy and dismal. Her parents didn't take it well; privately, away from Rosaleen, they told Breena that she had been the one to sing the praises of having a baby in the house. It had been her who had said they would all work hard to help Rosie out to take care of Noelle. And now, just as everyone was settling into a baby-friendly routine, she was leaving? They tried everything to get her to stay, but in the end they could see that in Walworth County was a glass jar against which Breena's wings were beating. And so they eventually packed her up and, on the morning of her twentieth birthday, she got into her sometimes unreliable green VW Bug and set off on the 19 hour drive to one of two places that young women fled to while looking for excitement; LA.

She expected to glide into life in LA seamlessly, but this was not the case. She had only been in her dingy little apartment for a week and a half before she was robbed. She messed up her days when it came to street parking and her car got towed. Groceries were expensive and checks bounced. Her application to UCLA was denied because she'd filled out some of the forms wrong. She couldn't find work, no matter how hard she pounded the pavement. It seems that whatever could go disastrously wrong... did. Used to the quiet life, she had come to find that now that she was in the heart of a loud, noisy city, she didn't like it. It was too chaotic, and it was too hard for her to adjust. Feeling flighty and a bit like a failure, she began looking into moving for the second time in six months. This time, however, she decided that perhaps her mother had been right about something; perhaps she should have a plan before she picked everything up and moved this time. So she looked into schooling, spending countless hours pouring over college websites and fliers, trying to decide on what courses to take. She applied to a handful of schools all across the country, and rewrote her résumé so it might be easier to find a job wherever she landed.

Soon, like a puzzle slowly coming together piece by piece, so her life began to take shape. She got an acceptance letter from the University of New England, which she immediately accepted. Her parents came to the city with Rosaleen and the baby to help her pack, and after searching the internet for awhile, they found her a cute little apartment in Maine a little less than an hour away from her campus. It was on the other side of a long bridge, on Alice Island. The move went even smoother than her first, because this time she made the trip with her sister sitting beside her in the car, and her father driving a UHaul behind them. And Maine was wonderful; it had the newness she had craved, but it wasn't crowded enough to overwhelm her. Her apartment was in a good neighbourhood, which set her mother's mind at ease. Before they left, her parents treated her to a shopping trip that filled her cupboards, and left her with enough money to keep her going until she got a job. Which, thankfully, happened soon; after a few interviews around the island, she got a job as a receptionist at some non-descript office that not only payed her enough to live, but even offered medical and dental.

Seasons changed. The days got shorter, the nights got longer, and Breena began to flourish. By the time her next birthday came around, she'd decided what she wanted to do with her life; after organizing several functions for her new friends and for work, she'd discovered that she had quite a knack for it. And so she'd decided to change her major, get her communications degree, and go into event organization. That was the formal title, anyway. To her friends and family, she proudly announced that she was going to be a party planner. It was mildly hilarious to see the expressions on her parents' faces at Christmas when she announced this. After all, planning parties was great as a hobby, but for a living? It was only her sister's voice of reason that kept Hunter from locking her in her childhood bedroom and refusing to let her go home again.

Party planning is not an easy industry to break into. When she wasn't making it as an independant worker, adverising on Facebook and pinning fliers to coarkboards around town, she decided to go legit. She got a business license, convinced her parents to lend her the money she needed to rent an office space, and began to comb the streets and go headhunting, looking for others to join her new company. To this day, Butterflies and Bowties is hardly flourishing, but was recently declared 'up and coming' in the local newspaper. So there's still hope she won't have to make another big change in her life, and will get to continue doing the thing that actually makes her happy.

♥ Has the barest hint of an accent, picked up from her father and her grandparents. It only really comes out when she's around them, or when she's upset.
♥ Has a late night addiction to the home shopping network.
♥ Sometimes she wishes she could just be a housewife and kept woman.
♥ Can not pick up the rules to poker, no matter how many times they're explained to her.
♥ Had her first kiss during a game of spin the bottle, with her best friend's little brother.
♥ Has a collection of different versions of Monopoly.
♥ Has always wanted to play the piano, but just can't make her fingers do the thing.
♥ Would rather drink beer than wine, and prefers whisky to fruity cocktails.
♥ Was taught how to shoot a bow and arrow when she was very young, and was on the archery team in school every year until graduation.
♥ Is a member of the SCA, and has won archery tournaments, but got her arse handed to her at rapier combat.
♥ Would love to become better at fencing, but just doesn't have the time required to dedicate to it.
♥ Learned how to sew in order to make costumes for the SCA, and now she makes a lot of her own clothes.
♥ Dreams of one day planning a massive wedding. The kind that shows up in the society page, and is envied by people all over the country.
♥ After starting her company, she had to work part time for Dominos Pizza, taking phone orders for a San Antonias restarant from home, just to keep her bills paid.
♥ Has a short fuse, and the tendency to stay upset about the littlest things for the longest time.
♥ Will fight you for the last pint of Cookie Dough Dynamo in the grocery store freezer. Don't test her.