| Hope |
 |
| Name: | Hope Summers? |
| Gender: | Female |
| Place of Birth: | Alaska |
| Age: | c. 19 |
| Aliases: | The Messiah |
| Origin: | Mutant |
| Origin Earth: | Earth-616 |
| Present Location: | New York |
| Occupation: | Student |
| Team: | X-Men |
| Alignment: | Hero |
| Significant Other(s): | A great big firebird |
| Powers and Abilities: | Copy Mutations, Kick start latent mutations, Alter Existing Mutations, bonded to the Phoenix Force |
| Portrayed by: | None |
- First mutant born after Scarlet Witch's altering of reality. Born in Alaska to unknown parents, later adopted by Nate (Cable) and Hope Summers (d.).
- Destroyed Cerebro in a massive psionic burst.
- Bishop and the Purifiers attempted to assassinate her, killing her birth family, to prevent a deadly war
- The Marauders abducted Hope and delivered her to Mr. Sinister (Mystique)
- Hope healed Rogue and awoke her from a coma at a touch.
- After defeating the Marauders, Cyclops gave Hope to Cable to raise in the future for her own protection. Bishop continues to hunt her down.
- Cable and Hope Summers (adoptive mother, d.) raise her for 7 years in a tiny commune.
- Bishop systematically destroyed settlements while searching for Cable and Hope until they had nowhere to flee.
- An insectoid attack on New Liberty, Hope's home, displaced the family into the wastelands for months.
- Bishop murders Hope's mother in front of her.
- Bishop and Stryfe (Cable's clone) allied to locate and capture Hope in an ambush.
- Cyclops assembled the X-Force team to recover Hope and Warpath.
- Archangel and Apocalypse intervened to prevent Bishop from killing her and Stryfe from transferring his soul into her.
- Hope chooses to remain in the present rather than time-jump with Cable, interruping his transportation. She ends up jettisoned into the future, separated by two years from his final landing point.
- She spends nearly two years living on the street by her wits until Cable located her.
- Bishop continued to harry Cable and Hope through the future, forcing them to hide on a spaceship and spend two years adrift, locked in a stasis sleep.
- Now 16, Hope traveled back in time to the present at the Xavier Institute for Higher Learning to gain an education. She landed in a warzone.
- Hope was caught in the crossfire between the Purifiers, Bastion and his followers, and X-Force, who sought to eliminate her.
- After a positive identification, X-Force was retasked to bring her safely to San Francisco. They took damage from Bastion's Men and the Purifiers while Cable and Hope fled.
- Rogue and Nightcrawler transported Hope back to Utopia. Bastion failed to prevent Nightcrawler teleporting her to safety at the cost of his life.
- Bastion's contingency plan threatened to unleash 170,000 Sentinels on Utopia. Cable sacrificed himself to shut a time portal while Bastien struck at the X-Men.
- Hope defended the X-Men by channeling the Phoenix Force in a supernova blast that annihilated Bastion.
- Emma observed the Phoenix power signature upon Hope in the aftermath.
- Thanks to Cypher, she learned her birth mother's identity as a firefighter in Alaska, but little about her father.
- Hope collected the new mutants detected by Cerebro to assemble into a new team, mirroring the formation of the X-Men.
- She offered guidance and teaching to each mutant who struggled with uncontrolled abilities.
- She stabilized their powers through touch, a demonstration of her emerging mutation. The side effects were not wholly ideal: Teon bonded with her as his master, a situation she wasn't comfortable with.
- The team returned to Utopia/San Francisco to learn to control their powers and train together.
- Hope met Charles Xavier, and expressed her concerns about a groupthink mentality causing society to view mutants and humans as separate from one another, instead of being one species. Her history of social activism began during the period leading the Five Lights.
- The Lights experienced growing pains that impacted her deeply: Idie slaughtered the Hellfire Club, and Kenji couldn't forgive her for borrowing his powers during a Morlock invasion.
- Kenji convinced the Utopians Hope was a lethal threat, splintering the team permanently. A heroic sacrifice broke the mind control effects, but Hope left the sanctuary disillusioned.
- Hope manifested powers of the Phoenix Force on Utopia, and Cyclops refused to inform her about the signature.
- The Avengers tracked the power signature and demanded the X-Men surrender her to prevent the Phoenix from taking a vessel, triggering a violent conflict.
- Hope attempted to travel to the Moon to engage the Phoenix Force, but was thwarted by Logan contacting the Avengers and the Phoenix shattering to five hosts.
- She accompanied Scarlet Witch to K'un-Lun, a mystical city where she received training in discipline, deeper power control, and meditation.
- Cyclops, possessed by the Phoenix Force shards, invaded K'un-Lun. She defended the inhabitants when Scott fell to the Dark Phoenix, and combined her strength to Scarlet Witch's.
- Mirroring Scarlet Witch's powers, Hope ascended to the White Phoenix and broke the 'No More Mutants' spell triggered at House of M. The regathered shards were then scattered widely throughout the world, repopulating mutants lost since M-Day.
- Hope surrendered the Phoenix Force rather than become corrupted by a desire for power and influence, healing its broken state.
- Hope returned from K'un-Lun to study at the Jean Grey School, more certain of her purpose in the world, but deeply affected by the potential loss and renewal of the Phoenix Force.
- After a year of hard study, she graduated from the Jean Grey School and prepared to join the X-Men.
- Hope began to suffer from visions of her foster father warning her about the future to come. These visions begin to appear on screens around her - televisions, cameras, computers.
- She started to pass out at the signs of the future events, hearing the voice of the Phoenix warning her of the battles to come.
- During the Secret Wars, the resurrection of the Phoenix Force in Cyclops knocked Hope into a catatonic trance that other students tried to disrupt.
616MU - Then and Now
- What Hope remembers may not be fact.
- All she knows, the trance in fact represented a communion between Hope and the greater cosmic force. She learned then her destiny was not complete. Her role as the all-in-one mutant, or the Messiah, or the vessel for the Phoenix Force constituted only part of what was meant to be and do.
- She tumbled out of reality and literally fell from the sky into the forked universe, trailing flames all the way down, and awoke to a very, very changed world indeed.
- After figuring out her bearings, Hope set out to find the other X-Men and, if possible, what counts as her family and associates. There is a place for her in this world.
Without a good grip on her emotions, Hope is more than dangerous. An uncontrollable power flare might cause damage and potential loss of life, and she wouldn't be able to look at herself in the mirror knowing she murdered innocent people. Therefore she keeps a pretty strong rein over her emotions as best she can, especially having seen what happens when she loses control. She went thermonuclear, backed up by the Phoenix Force, at the loss of her adoptive father. That said, she is far from fully emotionally mature.
At the end of the day, Hope wants to know what lies behind everything. Her life has never offered much opportunity to take control of her own destiny. She has long been the tool of others. Now freed somewhat of these restrictions because her adoptive father disappeared and the world has changed, she longs to know the meaning to life and the answers for all those nagging questions of 'Why?' This is the first time in her life when she has had the leisure to be able to pursue explanations. She can explore and study and wonder.
Let's be clear up front that Hope is -not- an idealist. She is far too gritty and realistic by upbringing for that. She nonetheless believes that things are going to turn out for the better, and in the better nature of humankind. In the dark when all other lights have gone out, she will be the one whispering the words to steady your nerves and show there -is- a way through. It may only be a 3 percent chance, but 3 percent is better than no percent.
Life is not us versus them scenario. Dividing people to conquer them seriously sets her off, given she has watched time and time again how united factions achieve so much more than those downtrodden souls isolated from their communities. Utopia did Hope few favours during her time there, but it notably revealed she does not see anything different between humans or mutants. In her eyes, they're one and the same. Such convictions run bone-deep and, in a sense, represent that all life holds an equal value in her eyes. Everyone is precious. They do not have a specific worthiness because someone happens to possess mystic powers while another does not. As such she is very much a team-player and bridge-builder. Hope pushes hard to bring people into the fold rather than excluding them on various prejudices. Chances are fair to likely she will not share these viewpoints. She doesn't hesitate to challenge them either. Because of her intense beliefs, Hope usually sticks up for the underdog when she feels they are being harrassed or put upon.
Hope's upbringing makes her extremely independent-minded. She dislikes being told what to do or how to do it. Any attempts to place barriers around her simply invite her to smash through them. Restrictions only beg for workarounds, and she deeply resents being pigeonholed on the basis of age or experience. 'We know better than you' will never be something she respects on the surface. That's not so say she will not listen, quite the contrary. But expect a barrage of questions or some functional motivation beyond 'Because I said so' as a reason to comply.
No one ever taught her 'children should be seen, not heard.' She speaks up when something matters to her, and often in a snarky tone of voice when called for. Rank and position do not apply to her, She doesn't have those social graces. Truth trumps soothing your feelings.
Anything she considers her responsibility, Hope defends with a vengeance against all comers. It comes from the us vs. them days when Cable kept her two steps ahead of their enemies. She witnessed the immense sacrifices made by her adoptive mother, Nightcrawler, and the Five Lights. Leadership of a team gave her a deep, abiding appreciation for protecting and supporting those to the very best of her abilities. As a Phoenix Force vessel, she has a tendency to see the sanctity and value of life. Put all these together, and Hope is going to move mountains to guard others evne at cost of her life.
No matter what happens, Hope is going to get through it. It may drain her resources and take every last iota of mental discipline she has, but Hope is not your run of the mill teenaged girl. She knows how to deal with living down the barrel of a gun, and she is chronically disaster planning to stay prepared. She received every advantage a very skilled adoptive father could offer her to survive the worst someone could imagine.
Very few people would be willing to release the Phoenix Force at its full power. Hope did. It offered her everything under the stars while corrupted by the maledictions performed by previous hosts. She turned that aside. Given the very real opportunity to dominate the world under the firebird's auspices, she shook her head and let the flames return to space where they belonged. In that moment she proved something — something valuable, no doubt, to the cosmic force of life. It shook her to her core, but showed the resolve she has.
- Live. Frankly Hope has never had the opportunity to fully and truly be herself without living in someone else's shadow or according to their agenda. Other mutants made decisions for her before she was old enough to own those choices. Other forces demanded she take directions which she had no control over. When she steps up to lead teams or take on difficult roles, so often she serves another's agenda instead of her own wishes and dreams. In truth she doesn't even know what her dreams -are- ever since she released the Phoenix Force and felt its shining fire in her soul again. She needs to explore what it means to be Hope Summers, not just The Messiah or the tool which achieved a certain end.
- Self-Discovery. Hope is someone's daughter. Someone's sister? There are fundamental questions about herself she holds no answers to, pieces of a life she cannot place together, and without them there lies a very big chunk of herself missing. The family she discovered in Alaska may or may not be related. No one stopped to really find out if they shared genetics or simply were a matter of convenience, a cover, or something else. For all that she knows, Hope could be Laura Spaulding's child or a created cocoon puppet of the Phoenix Force and she longs to know who she is — and maybe *why* she is.
- Direction: The Phoenix Force still has a purpose for her. Hope still holds a purpose beyond the restoration of powers that were stripped during the disasters of M-Day. Beyond the wars that sliced and spliced reality, she has a destiny to meet. She has absolutely NO idea what it is. That bothers Hope at some level, as it would nearly any girl on the cusp of true adulthood. Something grand and dark and powerful is happening, and she needs to find her place within its scheme.
At her core, Hope is exactly what her name stands for. She is the light burning in the long darkness, shining a benevolent warmth upon others wherever and whenever she can. She intends to protect the world by assuring humanity, mutants, and everything in between has a peaceful, thriving sanctuary to live within. As she can, she wishes to keep external threats from overspilling upon her people and diminish conflicts by actively seeing resolutions that don't involve solving everything with a burning hammer.
In other words, she has power mimicry which has caused others to describe her as a "mutant voodoo doll" or "all of us." Hope possesses the mutant ability to mimic and copy the powers of mutants within proximity to her. This range differs considerably, but tends to be a city block up to a mile radius. Higher concentrations of mutants will greatly amplify the abilities her mutation replicates.
These powers can be consciously controlled, so she does not accidentally trigger them. Targets do not suffer undue effects, nor is their energy drained or concentration affected because Hope doesn't borrow the power. She replicates an idealized version instead. Multiple manifestations may occur at once, so she might grow claws, gain scaled armour, and see in the dark together. They may superficially or functionally alter her appearance. She has no upward limit to the number of powers she can duplicate or manifest simultaneously.
Hope manifests these abilities at their highest potential, and seems immune to any side effects of the mutation. For example, Rogue's draining touch did not affect her. She would use the fully matured ability of a nascent mutation or an uncontrollable ability, unless that power remains fully uncontrollable in its 'corrected' form.
For the most part, Hope does not retain these powers permanently. Mimicked abilities last as an echo, fading out depending on her sympathetic connection to the target, distance, and overall usage without replenishment. At other times she can display replicated powers long after they have faded in an uncontrolled burst, which indicates she might be capable of tapping into gifts long after exposure. It is unknown whether she can duplicate an ability permanently due to a close connection to a target.
The upper limits of her abilities have not been explored. Hope's control is heavily dependent upon her emotional state and overload due to too many mutants or emotional instability may cause the fluctuating power levels of 'echoed' powers to be a danger to the environment or others around her. Particularly unpleasant side effects cause her serious discomfort or trauma, especially if they are entirely new (e.g., phasing, causing other's nightmares, experiencing a target's worst fears).
This power serves purely TP and RP-oriented purposes with staff approval only.
A side-effect of Hope's primary mutation allows her to jumpstart a nascent or regressive X-gene in any mutant by touch. She does not have any conscious control over thie process; it simply happens when she makes initial contact lasting at least three seconds. Exogenesis works only with skin-to-skin contact, much like Rogue's touch cannot function at range.
The target's mutation emerges in its initial form and stabilizes at a mature enough level that he can use the abilities. At the same time, Hope's echopraxia activates at the ultimate form per usual, which may be especially uncomfortable for both of them.
Hope cannot control the outcome of this kick start. Once it happens, it happens.
This power serves purely RP-oriented purposes, and TP benefits as necessary. Staff approval ONLY.
A side-effect of Hope's primary mutation allows her to correct imperfections in an emerged mutation. She can affect mutants who have stunted abilities or have not reached their peak potential. To Hope this feels simply like 'smoothing out' their aural energies, removing knots or erasing barriers she encounters while she concentrates at a psychic level. With experience this is less of an intuitive process and more of an active effort, though she still requires absolute concentration in a controlled environment to be able to use it.
Note that Hope has absolutely no control on how these powers manifest or what they do. If the process works — and by no means does it always work, this is purely at staff discretion — she is merely helping someone realize their potential. She can't make something out of nothing, either.
Several knowledgeable mutants, from Cable to the Scarlet Witch, have called Hope part of the Phoenix Force. She manifests telltale signs of the Phoenix: her telltale flaming aura and raptors imprinted on her irises have occurred since infancy. She demonstrates the ability to use some fairly advanced telekinesis and telepathy, especially during times of great duress. Her unbridled telekinetic force stopped a bullet shot at her adoptive father in midair. She's thrown warnings telepathically. Whether these abilities are a separate encoded power of her mutation or Phoenix vessel related, she doesn't know.
Is she actually part of the Force? She has no idea. Its relevance on her life became slightly different when she released a huge portion of cosmic power rather than keep it. All the same, the firebird suggested it wasn't done with her, her destiny being unfulfilled. Delightful! Because it hasn't already messed with her life a thousand different ways since her birth.
During times of immense emotional distress, typically anger or fear, Hope has shown the full flaming raptor aura, and detonated psionic fire at others. In the past, she reached her peak wearing the white uniform of the Crown, though it is undetermined whether she can maintain this again.
When possessed by the Phoenix Force, Hope serves as its vessel and in turn allows the Phoenix to experience embodied life. She has access to its suite of powers (as determined for TP purposes).
Whether or not she can still manifest these powers is at staff discretion.
The very nature of her powers mean she has to constantly shift and change strategies in a situation. As such, she sees a perpetually altering universe as a completely normal thing. By contrast anything too static is likely to confuse Hope at some level. Every environment is fluid when she might sprout claws one moment or develop the ability to talk to plants the next. For Hope, that's life. She has extremely malleable thinking and adapts hyper-rapidly to a changing suite of abilities. She's one to roll with the punches or go with the flow because that's all she has ever done.
Many mutants look to Hope with a great sense of hope for the future. Factions have outright declared her the messiah of their kind. No pressure, right? She doesn't exactly agree with this or like the attention. All the same, she has a certain stature among Earth's mutant community that gives her the opportunity to speak, persuade, and flex that considerable influence. Naturally it goes both ways. When she mucks up, they sit up and take notice. If anyone is likely to be the figurehead for a cause, guess whose name shows up whether she likes it or not.
Hope's powers measure as an Omega level mutation. She is a power mimic with enormous capacity to tap into. That very power makes her an appealing target for frightened humans and enemies coveting her genetics. Even her allies fear her falling into the wrong hands. She has trust issues and let's say nothing of her powers being cripplingly socially.
The Phoenix Force marked Hope as a favourite vessel whenever it stops by the Earth. The Phoenix bonded with her. Now, she /might/ be considered an extension of the Phoenix Force itself. No one really knows what that entails, least of all her. She does benefit from certain powers and signatures of the Phoenix Force, especially when emotionally distraught and acting in defense of the things she really cares about.
While she has not reached the symbiosis of Jean Grey, she stands as a possible White Phoenix of the Crown as witnessed when she released the Phoenix Force upon cleansing it. It still possesses her to an extent and she manifests standard powers upon its approach to Earth.
Death is not something which Hope is likely to experience for long. Phoenix Force hosts have a nasty tendency of reappearing after shivering on death's doorstep for a while, and she is particularly likely to be resurrected by the Phoenix Force given her rather close bond. This is something which Hope has never experienced and for the most part has little knowledge about, given her adoptive family has neglected to inform her about what Phoenix vessels often do.
As a student at the Institute and a card-carrying X-Man, Hope benefits from the team's resources, the Danger Room, and allies prepared to pitch in when it counts.
The best way a girl has to stay out of trouble is by remaining out of its line of sight. In Hope's world that means lying low, zigzagging or not being where a foe expects her to be. She has a gift for dodging attacks by markedly stronger or nastier opponents, partially by always remaining slightly out of reach. This skill has saved her from more than a few scrapes but in no way makes her immune to trouble, only representing her capacity for dodging, deflecting, and escaping.
Let's be frank: Hope is never going to be the best hand-to-hand combatant with the likes of bigger, nastier monsters out there. But she can hold her own with a fairly broad array of martial arts techniques cobbled into a personal style that favours finesse and avoidance. Her experience in Ku'n-Lun refined her techniques into something taking full advantage of her current skill set, so against a typical seasoned human, she can expect to come out with the upperhand. When empowered, depending on the nature of her abilities, she might prove unexpectedly versatile. fighting mean.
She's seen people in many stressful, emotional situations. Hope is pretty good at reading how people act and react, then corresponding these to their likely emotional state. Stronger emotional tells that she picks up with ease tend towards temper and subterfuge, meaning she's much more confident guessing early that a seemingly nice person is about to snap or harbours deep rage than picking out two friends with hidden feelings for one another.
Hope learned to fire multiple types of guns, including some not even in existence yet, from the best in the business. Her talents come from outright practice in the field of war, where a bad shot would spell the difference between life and death. A string of bullet casings hitting the ground is a familiar melody from adolescence. She may be a teenager, but she can hunker down for an impossibly long shot with a sniper rifle through a breezy day and still make the calculations to hit her target. Pistols and semi-automatic guns were Cable's stock in trade for her, and she is more than comfortable using them to conventional, archaic weaponry. This also applies to modified energy weapons working on the same principle as a firearm.
One really big caveat: Hope does NOT like attacking things in general. She has impressive (for her age) skills with a gun, but that does not translate into reaching for a sidearm the instant things get hot. She respects life far too much.
Survival often relies on getting in or out of a location quickly. Hope is very good at forcing her way out of confined spaces, picking locks or assessing a weak point in a security system. If all else fails she never hesitates to bash down a door or make a door where there wasn't one. For getting in, she similarly assesses a path of least resistance with considerable ease.
When something seems off, Hope tends to feel that in her gut. She listens to the feelings others are often trained out of paying attention to. When the hair on the back of her neck goes up, she heeds the warning. If she has a 'good feeling' about something, she follows course accordingly. This is no mystical sixth sense, merely that refined awareness common to those in warzones and widely exposed to every form of trouble imaginable.
Hope knows how to speak English, with passing skill in Mandarin, German, and French taught to her by the Lights and others. Given the nature of her telepathic powers, she is far more likely to start 'reading' or 'speaking' through a symbiotic psionic connection wherever possible.
She can center her thoughts and discipline her unruly mind using Ku'n-Lun and eastern traditions, particularly Buddhist practices. These are not highly refined yet but they do allow Hope to build stronger concentration than she might normally have.
She excels at getting multiple things done at once with minimal loss of focus or precision. Of course, the more she takes on, the less effective she will be. Telepathic powers are good for parallel tracks of mental activity but she can handle herself quite well without any psychic abilities. In high pressure situations, being able to fire, look for an escape route, and chew bubblegum at the same time is a win.
Hope loves free-running. She takes a thrill in skimming along the city from an angle or vantage most people never imagine. Give her the freedom of leaping from a balcony or scaling a wall any day. A bit of telekinetic oomph sometimes saves her from her own mistakes.
It's hard to pull something on someone who was raised since birth to notice things. She pays attention to her surroundings for the little elements that stand out: the person in the same cafe seat, the guy who fidgets too much, the sudden silence where there ought to be crickets chirping. Much of this comes reflexively but when Hope actively concentrates on her surroundings, she is good at finding the little details others overlook.
Combined to her natural leadership abilities, Hope is very good at engaging parties with a different view from her own. It's not only what she says but how she says it. When tone and chosen terms matter, she presents an idea with alternatives in a way that others can find particularly compelling. When there are difficult issues to thrash through, her persistence and patience serve her well to broker a deal that all sides may find palatable, even if it often serves her interests.
Hope is very good at concealment and sneaking about. Stealthiness is really the art of not attracting attention, and in turn, stalking or tracking others. For a number of years, it spelled the difference between scraping by and ending up dead. She can avoid leaving a trail behind her and blend into a crowd in urban or wilderness settings. One might think a redhead doesn't blend into Beijing at high noon, and you'd normally be right, except she has a clue how to make people look past her presence with simple techniques like covering up her hair, and much more elaborate ones. The mind sees what it wants to see, this is a principle she lives by.
When it comes to unusual technology, Hope has a leg up given her time-hopping experience. She has extensive training on how to maintain and operate technological devices from a near-future equivalent, especially those with a survival or weaponry element. For example, she possesses a device Cable created which can suppress her mental signature from Cerebro, and she's fully capable of making repairs or tinkering with its specifications. Obviously the longer she has to tinker and experiment, the better she can manage. Anything from pre-2000s she reasonably has little experience with, and treats as highly anachronistic. With a bit of understanding how something should work, she can juryrig or hotwire a solution, find a way to overload a system, or make the device function towards ideal capacity.
It's damnably difficult to push this girl into doing something she does not want to do. Suggestions and raw charm don't have the effect they often do on people her age once she gets her heels in. When Hope knows what she wants, she pursues it with unfailing certainty. Her vision gives her a nearly indomitable will upon setting her mind to something. Unsuspecting individuals might be outright shocked to learn how adamant her soul really is. Perhaps the best example of this was releasing the full might of the Phoenix Force /while/ it was trying to persuade her to tip towards unleashing its full power, as she banished it. If she can withstand that, avoiding another glass of wine isn't going to be very hard.
Even paranormal efforts to nudge her in a given direction require considerably more effort to secure, and that assumes she has not engaged any form of telepathic or borrowed abilities to resist.
In crowds, Hope gets itchy. This becomes more apparent when surrounded by multiple mutants because, like it or not, she will start to exhibit their power suites in refined qualities. Among an X team or the Avengers where she knows their talents, she anticipates the effects well enough. Now imagine being surrounded by a number of villains with the capacity to melt flesh and things get much more complicated. She doesn't like crowds a great deal, and that aversion spikes by a magnitude when the crowd happens to be a mob or hostile.
Cable instilled a real sense of paranoia in his adoptive daughter. Watching her adoptive mother die in front of her in no small part damaged her innocence.
Hope would never admit to it but she trusts very few people. She wants to shield herself from the inevitable need to pull up stakes or trouble following her into town causing harm to those she cares about. Hope genuinely believes her presence can inflict collateral damage on the unprepared.
Hope lacks a normal, modern Western upbringing. Her childhood was spent on the run and jumping through time. She scraped by in a futuristic city and prisoner on a spaceship.
All those experiences common to other Americans her age are completely lacking. She doesn't know a lot of what her peers take for granted. How do you pay for the rent? What is a transit schedule and how do busses work? What on Earth is an Android phone, and how is it different from Apple, and why bother with these things anyways? The basic questions of late adolescence and early adulthood are peculiar and frivolous to her, in some respects. It means that she is an oddity and may not show appropriate empathy to the "petty" concerns of her friends. After all, when her concern for the least 5 years was evading the Marauders or some other murderous force, she might have little sympathy about someone's worries they can't afford the extra expensive designer coat they want.
The idea of plenty and shopping malls and functioning buses is entirely new to her. She stands out for not knowing what to /do/ about these things. And this can hurt her.
Several mutant factions believe Hope is no messiah at all, but a doomsday figure at the centre of prophecies and nasty smear campaigns. The Purifiers wanted her dead on the belief — no fact, just belief — she would play a key role in murdering 1 million humans in six seconds. A good number of them still maintain she needs to be destroyed or eradicated. Many more simply have negative views towards anyone declared as a 'messiah' or a 'protector,' especially nowadays with gods running around. It garners her far too much attention she'd rather not have, and for the likes of powerful opponents with sinister intent, she is a plum target. She is a polarizing figure within the larger community.
When she's channeling the power of the Phoenix Force, the signs will appear. The flaming outline of the raptor, the emblem in her washed out eyes, right down to the appearances to the Phoenix's favourite host (Jean), Hope cannot disguise these factors. Who do you think all the bad guys are going to target pronto? That's right. And who might all the Phoenix Force's enemies chase after? You know who…
Much like a Richter scale notices vibrations, Hope produces a measurable psionic aura that registers with other telepaths when she taps into her telepathic powers. Her Omega level status tends to elevate the strength of the signature, especially when she taps Phoenix Force-fueled powers.
Hope has known only seven years' artificial peace in her life. She knows people died to keep her safe, and many more attracted by her abilities wish her harm. Bishop and Bolivar Trask flat out want her dead. The Shi'ar Empire, if they knew, would like another Phoenix host expunged. She's a flashpoint for hostile causes and they would not hesitate to remove her from the board if they could. That weighs constantly on her conscience. Every action has to be tempered with the awareness the other shoe is /going/ to fall, and probably squash those she cares about.
The origins of Hope Summers, if known to anyone, aren't something they talk about. Her name belongs to the woman in the future that Cable (Nate Summers) married. Her own is lost to the sands of time. Even the record available of a Laura Spalding, firefighter, is sketchy and poorly connected to Hope at best. She has no idea whom she is, whom her people are, and how she came to be. For someone who stands on the cusp of adulthood, her identity is deeply dented by *not* knowing these fundamental questions. For all she knows, her father is Satan and her mother was a machine.
Hope doesn't have a job, she doesn't have a functioning family, and she certainly does not have some cache of a million dollars stored away. She wasn't exactly reading stock tickers in the future to make use of later when she stepped back in time.
IC Events
Logs posted after 0216-09-22 involve another player of this character since this version of Hope was retired on that date.
30 Jan 2017 14:14 (2017-01-29) Ninjas in New York
15 Aug 2016 20:38 (2016-08-14) Amanda Meets Hope Summers
Gallery
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