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As a little child, back when there were still many heroes roaming the streets of Freedom City, Hope Masters was abducted, alongside several others, by a mad scientist. All her young mind understood was that they needed test subjects for their insane experiments, so they just took random people off the street. Thankfully FORCE Ops came to save the day, but not before little Hope got accidentally exposed to strange energies during the ensuing fight. It was one of the last times FORCE Ops would be seen before they vanished. This one event would shape not only her views on heroes, but also her very future, for years to come.

Strangely she seemed fine despite it all, just chronic headaches. Or so it seemed at the time. Fast forward to about a decade and Hope had grown into an attractive and intelligent young woman. But life had not been kind to her, nor Freedom City for that matter. Ever since her rescue she'd looked up to the heroes and couldn't understand why they were the ones hunted when the actual bad guys moved unopposed. This only got reinforced when her mother, a prosecutor for the city, was brutally murdered when Hope was 16. No one was ever charged, the criminal never even caught.

And the heroes? They'd grown too few, with the only ones left were often as bad as the criminals they fought. The good ones, the ones who could have stopped it safely, were long since gone; having retired... or died... or just vanished. The city was growing more lawless.

But she'd always been perceptive and intuitive, even as a little girl. And had been slowly grown increasingly so ever since her rescue. It was often like she could read the mind of those around her; she could tell when they were lying to her, what they were planning to do. So she knew what the cops really planed to do when they came for her father. All he'd done was try to get the cops to look deeper into his wife's murder, to reopen the case, instead he'd found himself arrested on charges of assaulting an officer and of criminal fraud. He never made it to his court hearing. But who could she tell? She was just a 17 year old girl about at the end of her high school career. Once more, how would she explain just what she knew? So she stayed silent, fuming about the injustice of it all.

You think this would've taught Hope to just keep here head down, but no. Without her parents she was forced put herself through law school by modeling as a part time job. All the while her powers continued to slowly grow; a fact she kept as hidden as she could for fear on what might happen to her should it even come to public light. By the time she graduated and passed the BAR she was capable of not only reading minds and influencing others actions, but was beginning to show telekinetic abilities.

Still undaunted, despite her fears, Hope joined the D.A. as a junior prosecutor after graduation. She hoped to work to clean up the city from within the system. Sadly she didn't realize just how extensive the city's corruption ran until after she joined. Prosecutors being outright bribed to tank cases for the mafias. A.D.A.s complicit in gambling rings and prostitution. City aides getting high at their desks just to cope. Worst of all was just how the office was using the Mayor's anti-vigilantism ordinances to bully witnesses into silence at the direction groups like SHADOW or the Crime League.

By her second year in the office Hope had had her fill of it all. But only after she'd have to use her own powers to defend herself and seen how her office rushed to the defense of her would be assailant rather than her. In-spite of the rampant corruption, she'd developed a reputation of regularly getting to the truth of the cases she worked; often by secretly using her own abilities. All much to the inconvenience of her superiors, even though she was both technically and legally in the right.

As she was leaving the office one night, a Mafioso made-man, brandishing a gun, began threatening her the moment she was out of view of the security cameras. His mind was like an open book to her, he'd been hired by one one of the A.D.A.s she'd "inconvenienced". Hope lashed out with her mind in anger and frustration, the gangster went down, she reached to retrieve the man's gun, and only then did any nearby officers arrive. But rather than the gangster getting arrested, she was the one given the ultimatum; resign or face charges of assault on the poor, innocent, man... She quit two days later.

But though they'd gotten rid of her, it wouldn't be the last they'd see of her. The gloves were now off, and Hope would no longer play by their rules. She scraped together what money she could, and opened a private practice of her own. It was small, but she could us it help those being ground under the system's jackboots. Better yet, since the system couldn't be trusted, she'd moonlight as a costumed vigilante in between cases; bring back a little old school heroics, like the ones that had saved her life so many years ago.

In the end, all we can do is Hope and Dream for a better tomorrow...