From a security agent to bonding with an alien symbiote, Scream is as deadly as they come. Her trustworthy human side, Donna Diego, seems to be in control up until she slays all of her symbiote siblings.
Security Agent to Alien Bond
Donna Diego is born in Brooklyn, New York City, New York. She grows up to attend college, graduate from cosmetology school and train in the United States Army. She becomes a security agent at the Life Foundation, an organization dedicated to providing high-security residences for the wealthy after an apocalypse. The Foundation’s psychological testing failed to detect she was schizophrenic, and she became one of their top security agents.
In San Francisco, the Foundation captures Eddie Brock, AKA Venom, and extract five “seeds” from his alien symbiote and artificially aged them to maturity; hoping to use the adult symbiotes to protect their holdings, they give them to Donna and her colleagues Trevor Cole, Leslie Gesneria, Ramon Hernandez and Carl Mach, AKA Clong. The Foundation sends the symbiotes, which they dubbed Strike Agents, into combat situations around the Los Angeles area to test their abilities. At an LA mall, Donna encounters and battles Peter Parker, AKA Spider-Man; when he proves to be more of a challenge than she expects, she flees back to the Life Foundation’s base, inadvertently leading Spider-Man there too. She and her colleagues battle Spider-Man and the escaped Brock in the Foundation’s Mojave Desert base; Brock turns the machine that had artificially aged the symbiote seeds on Donna and the others, aging the symbiotes into dust. The Foundation revives the symbiotes and re-bonds them with their hosts, but the agents, now troubled by the Foundation’s methods, strike out on their own.
Shape-Shifting Symbiote
Donna’s symbiote grants her superhuman strength, allowing her to lift 5 tons. The alien creature also grants her superhuman durability and endurance. It can shape-shift, taking on the appearance of any item of clothing, disguising her features, or rendering her invisible. She can use her tendril-like hair to entangle or strangle her foes, and also has razor-sharp claws and teeth.
She is trained in armed and unarmed combat and sometimes wields a sonic knife. Like the others in the symbiote race, it is vulnerable to heat and sonics.
Venomous Opposition
Donna, alongside her fellow symbiotes, goes up against Spider-Man and Venom but the resulting defeat that they suffered, leaves all the symbiotes turned to dust. Though Donna and her symbiote siblings survive, they seek out Venom to get help with controlling their symbiotes but he eventually hunts them down and kills each of them.
While Donna is allied with her fellow symbiote siblings to understand their newfound “others”, her symbiote’s urge to kill becomes too great and she slays them all.
Tenuous Allies
Working at the Life Foundation, Donna is one of five employees that get chosen to bond with symbiote seeds from Eddie Brock, AKA Venom. The Foundation sends Donna and the others out on combat missions to test their abilities and she becomes one of their top Strike Agents.
Donna allies herself with Venom to understand her symbiote and learn how to control it better. She works with him to defeat the alien Xenophage and they ally with James Howlett/Logan, AKA Wolverine, along their journey. However, Venom begins hunting symbiotes and ends up being one of Donna’s most deadly foes.
A Symbiote’s Story
Having trouble communicating with their symbiotes and resisting their violent urges, and the Foundation defectors chose Donna to seek out Brock in New York City, hoping he would help them. Venom, troubled by the killing sprees of his spawn Cletus Kasady, AKA Carnage, was unwilling to help, and he tried to kill Donna to rid the world of his spawn. Ben Reilly, AKA Scarlet Spider, saved her and defeated Brock, who was subsequently separated from his symbiote and taken into custody at a high-security government facility; Donna and her fellows broke him out, but he remained uncooperative. Donna soon found herself unable to resist her homicidal urges and killed Leslie with a sonic knife. The others assumed Brock, who had escaped, was the murderer; Ramon found Brock, but Donna stabbed him in the back and blamed Brock. Captured, Brock finally agreed to help the survivors, but Donna snapped and murdered Trevor and Carl. Venom reunited with his own symbiote and defeated Donna, leaving her for the authorities.
Gaining her freedom in the wake of a symbiote invasion of Earth and apparently gaining control over her murderous impulses, Donna found that some symbiotes had remained with their human hosts, surviving the invasion force’s Venom-induced mass suicide. She befriended two of them, Zeena Hodges and George Strickland, and helped them adapt to their new status and search for other symbiotes. Before long, however, Hodges and Strickland were killed by the symbiote-hunting alien Xenophage, and only Venom’s intervention saved Donna from a similar fate. Reasoning the Xenophage would have had a way to track symbiotes, Donna sought out his ship; she found it, but so did two curious skateboarders, Jerry and Rocky. Jerry accidentally activated the ship’s tracking systems, and it sought out Venom. Brock had been swallowed by the shape-shifting Dark Rider Dirt Nap, who used Brock’s form to infiltrate intergalactic holding company Landau, Luckman, and Lake in the hopes of finding his enemy Wolverine. The ship flew into a warp chamber at LL&L and ended up between realities; Dirt Nap promptly devoured Donna, allowing him to take her form. He found the symbiote difficult to digest, however, and when Venom attacked him, he regurgitated her. Alongside Wolverine, Venom, Jerry and Rocky, and Dirt Nap’s other regurgitated victims, Donna escaped the collapsing dimension in the Xenophage’s ship, leaving Dirt Nap and his ally, extradimensional terrorist Chimera, behind. They used the ship’s symbiote tracker to find Carnage, and thus Earth. Back on Earth, Donna eventually adopted the alias Scream.
Though Venom began hunting symbiotes and after he killed Scot Washington, AKA Hybrid, he went after Scream. Leading her into a trap, he stabbed her to death with a heated dagger.
