Younger Than You Think/Iriña Blake

Iriña is the main character of the Plot Babies idea Maybe I Am That Young But That Doesn’t Mean You Can Abduct Me!, later written under the title Younger Than You Think.

She's young, but has the mind of an adult; and gets abducted by people who were hoping for a "forever baby".

Medical

She has a medical condition, Cullen-Wellerman Syndrome, which means that she is physically incapable of sleep. Most children with this condition die young. Any kind of sedatives would result in vomiting, seizures, brain damage, and eventually death; while if she doesn't sleep, the accumulated chemical imbalances would have killed her eventually. But she was given an experimental drug by Uncle Chad, her next door neighbour, who used to work for a major pharmaceutical company. The drug was designed as an antidepressant, but was never released because it can have side effects quite similar to CWS, causing patients to die if they fall asleep during the withdrawal period. Chad realised that for someone who already had CWS, the drug would allow her to keep on functioning without sleep as well as significantly boosting her learning ability.

Intelligence

During the story Younger Than You Think, Iriña is coming up to her sixth birthday, but still looks about three or four because her growth was inhibited by some of the other drugs doctors tried her on as a baby. The doctors are unsure whether she will always be small, will grow up two years 'behind' normal development, or will catch up with the average ageing process some time during her teens.

Because of her enhanced intelligence, combined with the ability to study with Chad and/or read books while her parents were sleeping, she became incredibly intelligent. She has an adult mental age and the emotional development of a late teen; and has recently been accepted for a scholarship to Harvard Law School starting later this year. If she keeps on doing self-study overnight, some of the professors expect that she could pass the bar exam at the age of eight, becoming the youngest lawyer ever.

Turtle Mode

Because of Iriña's lack of sleep, the memory centre of her brain works slightly unusually. She has near perfect recall, being able to remember any scene in her past exactly, as long as she can reach it by following her memories backwards from the present. Her memory is only limited when she has to remember something more distant, and has to bring it back without having time to think backwards over everything that has happened since then. The way she treats all her memories as a continuous chain also means that she has panic attacks if she finds that she can't remember something. In the story, this is triggered both by the gap in her memory when she was sedated (and was lucky to survive), and when she was shocked by her sober recollection of her thoughts and perceptions under the effect of hallucinogens.

Abduction

Iriña was kidnapped by company Forever Baby, who initially believed her to be an older teen with a growth disorder which would make her look like a toddler for the next twenty years. Such children are highly prized by certain rich clients, who want the experience of caring for a baby or toddler without the child growing up. They were disappointed when they found that Iriña's apparent and real ages are so close, because this means that she is likely to grow up normally even if mentally regressed to match her apparent age. But they did regress her anyway, finding that her enhanced learning ability makes her incredibly susceptible to hypnosis. She is conditioned to see Seamus and Sylvie Hārden as her "Mommy" and "Daddy"; and not to think back beyond the present day or attempt to remember anything that they tell her to forget. Her memories are still there, but Lyle realised that she could be given effective amnesia by encouraging her to not think of those memories.