Wearing the Cape

Who wants to be a superhero? Hope did, but she grew out of it. Which made her superhuman breakthrough in the Ashland Bombing, just before starting her freshman year at the University of Chicago, more than a little ironic. And now she has some decisions to make. Given the code-name "Astra" and invited to join the Sentinels, Chicago's premier super-team, will she take up the cape and mask and become a career superhero? Or will she get a handle on her new powers (superstrength has some serious drawbacks) and then get on with her life plan?

Astra has finished her training and is now a full-fledged Sentinel, but things are not going well. She suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, and the public revelation of her relationship with Atlas has caused her popularity to nosedive. To complicate things, the Teatime Anarchist's intervention has changed the course of events - leaving her with lots of knowledge about the way the future was before the Big One, a complete future-history that is now out of date.

Things are relatively quiet in the great metropolis of Chicago. Astra, a.k.a. Hope Corrigan, is able to breathe a little, to hang out with her friends, and even to attend classes (where her professors are starting to think she is a myth). But Blackstone is loading more training and responsibilities on her, and converging events threaten the compromises she has made to balance her superhero career and student life. Worse, a new super villain has come to town, and it will take all of Chicago's capes to defeat the threat of the Green Man - if he can be defeated at all.

It's been just weeks since the state funeral for the Sentinels, Atlas, Ajax, and Nimbus, lost in the Whittier Base Attack. Astra, Hope, is recovered from her own injuries. At least physically. Mentally... not so much, but she feels ready to actively wear the cape again. Which is good since, between the revelation of her short-lived relationship with Atlas and her virally pungent public comments on the current political debate over breakthrough registration (the National Public Safety Act), she needs to raise her profile. But she's better now, steady, ready for anything. Or is she?