Hope Hynes

[Dr Adjective]

Name: Hope Maeve Hynes
Gender: Female
Age: 17
Grade: Senior
School: Southwest Red Rock High School
Hobbies and Interests: Baseball, soccer, comic books, superhero films, school newspaper

Appearance: Short and slender, Hope is five feet tall and weighs about 100 pounds. Her overall build could be described as petite or boyish, thin and generally lacking curves. Most notably, both of her arms each end a few inches below the elbow, having been amputated early in life due to disease: due to this she wears prosthetics that replace her forearms and hands, and is very rarely seen in public without them. Hope is ethnically Irish-American, with naturally fair skin that is usually lightly tanned from plenty of time spent out in the sun, and wavy red-orange hair kept in a short, messy curtained style reaching down to around her jaw. Hope has a heart-shaped face with large and round bright green eyes, a slightly upturned button nose, and dense freckles covering her cheekbones, nose, and forehead.

Hope's fashion sense could be described as tomboyish, and she's typically seen in shorts and t-shirts, replica sports kits, and sneakers. Most of her shirts refer to comic book characters - her favourite mimicking the Arc Reactor on Iron Man's chest - whilst her sports teams of choice are the Boston Red Sox, Portland Thorns, and Las Vegas Golden Knights. In cooler months Hope often wears her Letterman jacket, earned playing on the school's soccer team, whilst in the warmer ones she often wears a replica baseball shirt over her t-shirt. Her choice of attire is strongly informed by her disability: she prefers loose fits and short sleeves, elasticated waists, and most of her footwear is either slip-on or velcro rather than laced.

Hope's prosthetic arms are Open Bionics Hero Arms, made from nylon polymer and designed with a flat and angular form factor, bold colours, and a prominent status indicator light on the back of the hand, embracing an obvious mechanical visual style rather than mimicking an organic limb. They can be customed with replaceable outer covers, with Hope generally preferring a red-and-gold style based on Iron Man's armour suit.

Biography: Hope was born on the 23rd of January in Las Vegas, the second child of local couple Kieran and Aisling Hynes, who own and operate an Irish pub close to the Las Vegas Strip. Hope's name was initially a point of some contention between her parents, with her mother wanting to choose a more traditionally Irish name as she had with Hope's elder brother Seamus, whilst her father preferred a more typical modern and English option. Ultimately Kieran got his way with his daughter's given name, whilst Aisling was given the concession of passing her own mother's name on as Hope's middle name, Maeve. A little over a year after her birth, Hope's name became grimly appropriate: her symptoms began as merely clear distress with no clear signs (initially assumed to be teething pains), before progressing to chronic vomiting, and unusual skin blemishes. Her parents first took her to a local doctor's office, where she was diagnosed with meningococcemia, and soon thereafter she was given emergency antibiotics and rushed to hospital. Within the hour, petechiae appeared across Hope's body, and by the end of the day discolouration and swelling had begun spreading from her extremities. Although doctors were optimistic about Hope's chances of survival, if she did survive they predicted a strong likelihood of needing to amputate limbs to prevent the spread of gangrene. After two weeks on life support Hope's legs had been saved, but both of her her arms had needed to be amputated below the elbow, an outcome that was ultimately considered to be an extremely lucky one. The case was well publicised in local media and had a small footprint in national news. Fundraisers helped the Hynes family afford Hope's extensive care needs, though their savings were still quickly drained. A regional campaign for meningococcal vaccines also ensued, with Hope's story used to encourage inoculations.

Having survived infancy, Hope was raised much as her elder brother was, give or take some additional support with motor tasks. As devout Catholics, her parents raised both Hynes children with values most Americans might describe as conservative, taking them to church every Sunday and emphasising ideals like love of God, family and country; politeness and courtesy; charity; and the sanctity of human life. In particular Hope was expected to be demure and feminine, whilst Seamus was strongly encouraged towards pursuing sports in additional to academic success. Per the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, when Hope grew old enough she was mainstreamed in education and attended a regular kindergarten and elementary school, with some personalised support to help her participate, such as the use of a laptop with speech-to-text software for writing tasks. Until the age of ten, Hope used simple passive prosthetics, intended more to reduce social friction than for actual function. Even so, she found herself othered by her infant peers and had few friends before moving on to middle school. However, her social life began to improve there, in some part due to her upgrading from non-functional arms to myoelectric "bionic" ones: British startup Open Bionics had connected themselves to Hope’s fundraising and awareness campaign early on, and in a much-publicised move offered to provide her with a pair of their new “Hero Arm” prostheses, even inviting her to their headquarters at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory for a tour. Hope was thrilled with not only the extra utility, but also the aesthetic improvement. Rather than hiding her disability with lifelike imitation limbs, she was excited to lean into the futuristic style and began taking more pride in herself.

Around the same time, Hope had been developing a love of film and television media as hobbies she could easily partake in without being limited by a lack of dexterity, in particular she became a big fan of the Marvel Cinematic Universe and chose to style her new prostheses after her favourite hero: Iron Man. With a significantly improved capability to handle the books herself, Hope quickly got into superhero comics soon afterwards, particularly enjoying the stories of super-scientists using their smarts to stand equal to the physically or magically gifted and help humanity along the way. Growing older and more able to appreciate it, she also took an interest in baseball, at first as a means to bond with her father before coming to sincerely enjoy the sport for its own sake too. Though Kieran Hynes had a particularly conservative attitude to masculinity that made him emotionally distant much of the time, time spent with his daughter at local Las Vegas Aviators games or watching the Red Sox on TV gradually became a treasured connection for both of them. In particular, Hope quickly took an interest in the statistics and records of the sport. With her bolstered confidence, Hope quickly found friendships at middle school among the nerdier kids who shared her interests, whilst her agreeable attitude and a consistent politeness instilled in her by her parents made her generally well-liked if not necessarily popular. Though her social life had improved greatly, Hope's optimistic plans for the future were called into question by her middling academic results. She would often declare her intention to be a real life Tony Stark, to get into MIT and work on new and exciting prostheses to help more people like her even better than she had been helped, however her test scores were consistently weak in mathematics and the sciences, with teachers reporting that Hope seemed to struggle to maintain focus for long periods or to memorise important details.

COVID-19 restrictions were difficult for the Hynes family, with their primary source of income tied up in the pub. Even with her parents taking a lax attitude to occupancy restrictions in periods they weren't forbidden from opening at all, the business suffered heavily during the pandemic and with little in the way of savings built back up over the prior 13 years money became increasingly tight. Over the space of that year, Hope gradually began to perceive a growing resentment from her struggling family: though never directly stated, she began to realise that her brother worked as hard as he did because a scholarship would be his only realistic way into most colleges; that each time her parents complained of going without things, she was the reason their accounts were so empty. For most of the lockdown period, Hope secluded herself in her room. She passed the time with film and comics, online correspondence with friends, and trying to think of ways to change things and feel like less of a burden on the family who had given up so much for her sake. At first, her searching brought her to the Heroic Imagination Project (or HIP): created by Dr. Philip Zimbardo of Stanford Prison Experiment infamy, the organisation was founded with the goal of countering Zimbardo's observations of the Prison Experiment by teaching people "everyday heroism" techniques to avoid the bystander effect and step up in challenging situations. Attracted by the notion of emulating her comic book heroes and improving her confidence, Hope enrolled in an online course which taught skills to identify, and act not only decisively but wisely in, challenging situations.

Eventually, Hope came to realise that the major exception to her difficulty internalising facts and figures was her fixation on baseball statistics; though she struggled to reproduce the quadratic formula on command, she could easily bring even obscure career stats to mind or remember exactly how an exceptionally rare edge case in the rules should be adjudicated. Of course, missing the manual dexterity of real flesh and blood arms, Hope knew she had no chance of participating directly in the sport, but she did decide on two directions to take her apparent talents: once she enrolled in high school, she would attach herself to all things relating to varsity sports by way of helping behind the scenes, commentating games, and reporting results in the school newspaper; and she would pick up the one sport she knew she’d be able to participate in unhindered: soccer. High school was a time of major change for Hope. Having spent the last few months of lockdown restriction learning everything that she could about soccer and somewhat-arbitrarily choosing teams to support (the Portland Timbers of the MLS, and Portland Thorns of NWSL), she tried out for the Rattlers and made the team, though she stayed on the bench until Junior year, at which point she was moved to the first team as a midfielder. Alongside this, she joined the staff of the school’s newspaper, spending her early years helping to collect statistics, before eventually being named a sports correspondent in her own right in Sophomore year, focusing mostly on her main areas of interest: soccer and baseball. Though her academic results remained generally poor-to-middling, Hope began to succeed more in English language and literature, leading to a strong sense that her future would lie in sports journalism. With her expanded horizons, Hope made many new friends at Red Rock, and began to question many of the positions her parents had taught her to hold. While her relationship with her parents grew more strained over their passive-aggressive disapproval of her taking part in school sports and mingling with queer and liberal friends, Hope in turn grew closer to those very friends. Across her high school years, she also tried to put into practice what she'd learned from HIP, with varied results: her efforts to intervene in other people's problems won her some appreciation, but plenty of hostility as well.

Advantages: Hope has above-average fitness, with good stamina and running ability gained in her time on the Red Rock girls’ soccer team. Her unthreatening appearance and manner will also make her easier to trust and cooperate with as she poses little danger to her physically capable peers. Her small size could also be an advantage in hiding or traversing tight spaces.
Disadvantages: With her small stature and disability, Hope can offer little resistance in a physical confrontation and may be seen as an easy target. Being dependent on battery-powered prostheses for all but the most basic manual tasks, Hope will struggle to wield any tools or weapons even with the use of her prosthetic hands, and be almost incapable of any complex task without them.