Glimmers of Hope

Hope. Hope for the future. Hope for a better world. People needed to know there were still those who were doing what needed to be done. Hope was a good name for her Hero identity.
 
People didn't know she was that Hope. Hope was a heroic figure who stood tall and proud, who flew through the air and was capable of great feats of strength. Her friends however knew her as Sabrina Sage, introvert, quiet, shy. She clutched textbooks to her chest to hide her femininity as she walked the hallways of her first year of university, head down, a few swaths of hair escaping her librarian bun to obscure her large frame glasses. It took some effort to disguise her movie star good looks with not much more than posture and demeanor, but she'd gotten pretty good at it.
 
Sabrina wasn't her real name either though. She and her guardian, Eric Anders, had gone to great lengths to create the deep cover identity of Sabrina, so as to create an even deeper distance between Hope and her true identity. She was born Ishtar Ninurte. However official records showed that her parents had moved back to Iran, just before the vanishing and Ishtar went with them. The fact that some girl named Ishtar, supposedly living somewhere in the Middle East collected revenue from a trust fund, was utterly irrelevant to any who snooped.
 
That her parents had moved was however also a fiction. They too had vanished in the vanishing. They had garnered a small fortune in life which Ishtar inherited, and while most was now invested in some long term stocks, enough paid dividends to net her a decent income of around $200K a year, more than enough to support her secret identity of Sabrina going to university. Eric was a banker possessed of great skill in his profession, along with apparently, some shady past. She'd never have been able to create her Sabrina identity without his help, and he saw to it that Sabrina had a generous scholarship which more than paid for everything, without any paper trail linking that money back to its actual source, Ishtar's trust fund.
 
'Sabrina' pretended to pay attention in class, but she didn't much need to. She had already learned most of the subject matter for her first year classes in Geology and Astronomy. Instead she listened with an ear bud to radio traffic with a scanner tuned to police and fire. Out of class she would regularly check breaking news with her phone for any big emergencies happening elsewhere. It didn't much matter where on Earth an emergency might happen. Her flight was good enough she could get anywhere, fast.
 
She started small. The cops knew they were 'supposed' to arrest people like her, but they weren't terribly enthusiastic about doing so for the 'vigilante crime' of rescuing two small kids and their grandmother from a burning skyscraper. Nor were they in a position to do much when she got a burning ferry to shore before it sank. The corporate media wouldn't run stories about it of course, but there was a brisk underground in the hacker community that ran VPN spoofers that a great many people surreptitiously subscribed to, and the social media that functioned through them circulated video that individuals took with their phone. Truth did get out.
 
Things did get a little heated sometimes though, if she needed to spend too much time at a scene. Like that time a dam in India had cracked and she held it from rupturing till they were able to open the flood gates and drain it enough to keep it from bursting. The local cops couldn't do anything, but emergency forces (Viper) had had enough time to be 'called'. Even they however weren't about to stop her while she held a dam together. When it got to the point where she was no longer needed, they also didn't have the means to stop her from flying away. She could move a lot faster than they were prepared for.
 
She knew there were still a few other supers around who weren't villains, but for understandable reasons, most did their best to keep a very low profile. She had no idea how to contact any of them. Maybe one of these days, she would bump into one or more of them on her little adventures.