Appearance: Standing at 6'1 with a body that isn't overly sculpted but is definitely in shape, Matthias is a good-looking guy. He is fair-skinned but his hair is dark blonde and his eyes are a very dark brown, always looking like they're haunted or at least hiding a secret. He dresses more for comfort than for style, practically living in his jeans and throwing on pretty much any t- shirt that's around, as long as it's clean. But that doesn't mean that he's messy about his appearance, he in fact pays a lot of attention to his looks, always making sure his hair is well-kempt and that he's clean-shaven, though he tends to always have a little bit of scruff despite his best efforts. This is done less for the sake of vanity and more to present the image of togetherness so that there can be no doubt in anyone's mind that he would be a suitable guardian to his siblings.

Persona: Justin Hartley

Personality: Matthias is a hard-working, determined person who is serious about life; he does have a sense of humour but it hides deep under the facade of collected calm he shows to the world. He is mature far beyond his years but secretly wishes for nothing more than to let go and be a normal kid, take a girl to prom, that sort of thing. He feels as though he has the weight of the entire world on his shoulders, but through excellent skills of compartmentalizing, he is able to show little of the stress he feels every day of his life.

Biological Father	Unknown
Biological Mother	Danielle Hughes, deceased (Nicki Lynn Aycox)
Half-Brothers	Alexander Hughes, 14, student, lives in Eureka, CA (child actor); Benjamin Hughes, 8, student, lives in Napa, CA (child actor); Jacob, deceased at age 2 (child actor); Christopher Hughes, 6, student, lives in Eureka, CA (child actor)
Half-Sisters	Sarah Hughes, 14, student, lives in Los Angeles, CA (Scout Taylor Compton); Leah Hughes, 12, student, lives in Napa, CA (child actor)

Danielle Hughes			Alexander Hughes	Sarah Hughes	Leah Hughes
			Benjamin Hughes	Christopher Hughes	Jacob Hughes

Pets: N/A

Friends: TBA

History: Matthias' mother Danielle was brought up by a single mother, and started rebelling against her from a young age, acting out at every opportunity. Danielle was fourteen when Matthias was conceived, and she didn't know who the father was, only that it could be one of five guys, a couple from school and a few older guys she'd met around town, including one man in his thirties. This was the last straw for her mother after putting up with various forms of rebellion for years, and she kicked Danielle out of the house. At first she had been sure she would have an abortion, but once her mother abandoned her she decided to keep the baby, partly to prove to her that she could start her own family and didn't need her, but mostly because she felt like she had no one in the world and thought a baby would love her uncondtionally and make her happy. Danielle had been using drugs recreationally as a young teenager and getting drunk quite frequently, but she quit both after she was kicked out of school, more due to lack of money than because of concern for her child. She lived on various couches for several months, some belonging to Matthias' potential fathers, some to girlfriends or drug associates. She did some drugs while pregnant with him, but rarely as she didn't know anyone who would give her free stuff more than once. As a result, Matthias didn't suffer any health consequences, and was born healthy soon after Danielle's fifteenth birthday. She had met a guy shortly before his birth who had offered to take her off Ambrose Island, and she jumped at the opportunity, hating the small town and the occasional meetings with her mother that was bound to happen there.

Within a few days of Matthias' birth, Danielle was paying the price for the naive idea that a baby would make her life happy and perfect. She didn't even attempt breastfeeding, and she never had enough money to purchase enough formula, diapers, and clothes for Matthias, let alone take him to a doctor when he needed it. By the time he was two months old, she was completely overwhelmed, and she left him with an eighteen-year-old friend who had a toddler of her own, promising she would be back in a week and planning to go to her mother for help; she did, but her mother told her she'd long since given up on Danielle.

Ashamed and depressed, that week she was supposed to be gone turned into months as she hooked back up with her druggie friends and started using far more than she ever had before. The friend that had been looking after Matthias finally tracked her down and insisted that she take him back since she had met a guy and was going to marry and leave the state. Danielle took Matthias, now nearly a year old, and again they bounced through many different houses, sleeping in people's basements or on their couches. Danielle met a guy shortly after her sixteenth birthday and started dating him, and the two had nearly a year of near-stable living with him, until they were thrown out when he discovered that Danielle had been cheating on him with his best friend.

Danielle turned to prostitution as a source of income, and while she was making more money that she'd ever seen, she had no time to care for Matthias, and he was often left with her friends and even sometimes her pimp or the other working girls. Time passed and by the time Matthias was two they had an apartment and a roommate that had a day job to whom Danielle gave a discount on rent if she would watch Matthias when she worked at night. Matthias was a serious, intelligent child and loved the roommate much more than his mother, often calling her "Mommy" when Danielle wasn't home. When he was three years old Danielle found herself pregnant again, and decided to keep this child as well. This baby's father had asked her to marry him and she'd accepted despite the fact that she'd only known him two months, but Matthias looked forward to having a father. However, that fell through when the guy lost interest at the beginning of Danielle's second trimester, and left her for another woman. Danielle was heartbroken, and when soon afterward she overhead Matthias calling their roommate Mommy, she lost it and kicked the girl out.

The following years were extremely difficult, and by the time Matthias reached his tenth birthday he had five siblings, all to different fathers, none of whom had stayed around even to see the births of their respective children, let alone help raise them. Danielle was more of a baby factory than a mother, and her drug use had gotten increasingly heavy, with brief spurts of being clean that corresponded roughly with her pregnancies. Matthias did most of the work of raising his family, and tried to present the image that his mother was acting as head of the family, even though in truth she was often gone for weeks at a time. He used the library at school to order groceries and anything else so he could spend as little time as possible at stores where people might wonder where his mother was, and he worked from morning until night to make sure all his siblings were clean, healthy, had their homework done, and loked presentable at school so no one would suspect that Danielle was rarely home. Later that year Danielle became pregnant for a sixth time, and this time the father did move in with the family, and it seemed like he really wanted to help out and take care of all the children, not just the one he had on the way.

It was soon apparent that their latest father was not the type of person they wanted to have around, because when he wasn't ordering the kids around and treating them like his personal slaves, he was beating their mother to within an inch of their life. Both Danielle and Matthias conspired to keep this a secret from the younger children, concocting elaborate scenarios to explain the bumps, bruises, and scratches that decorated their mother's body for most of the latter half of her pregnancy. The baby was born strange, however, owing to the fact that Danielle hadn't gone off drugs as she usually did when she was pregnant, and both she and the baby's father had used right through the pregnancy. The baby, Christopher, suffered extreme withdrawl symptoms, and screamed constantly. The pressure got to be too much for his father, whose temper grew worse and worse by each passing hour. Within the first forty-eight hours of their youngest brother's life, the fourth child, Jacob, who was nearly three at that time, developed an extremely painful ear infection and was just as loud as Christopher. Rather than taking his anger out on his own infant son, his father screamed at Jacob to shut up and slapped him quite hard several times, knocking Matthias into a wall when he tried to stop him. One night, in a narcotic haze, he grew sick of Jacob's whining and Matthias awoke to the sound of his mother screaming and begging. In the living room hefound his "father" holding Jacob out of Danielle's reach, his hands around the toddler's neck, Jacob's face turning blue. Both Matthias and Danielle tried to stop him while the other children cowered in fear and cried, but it was too late, and Jacob died. Their "father" took Jacob's body with him and they never saw him again.

After that, things went much the same for the family; Danielle's drug use got worse and she started leaving for months at a time instead of weeks. She found a boyfriend who liked to do the same thing, and they moved in together if you could call it that, since they were never really home. The guy had a daughter, Chelsea, who was Matthias' age, and for the first time he felt like had a friend who really undestood him. That friendship soon turned to a romance and they ended up having sex. Chelsea's father found out and dumped Danielle, who blamed Matthias for Far from feeling guilty about the situation, Matthias yelled at his mother for the first and only time in his life, and told her exactly how unfair it was that she kept leaving them like that. She stormed out, and though afterward she made a bit of an effort, things soon slipped back to the way they were before. He never saw Chelsea again, and he sincerely regrets it.

Matthias continued to take care of things at home, skipping adolescence and going right to the responsibilities of an adult. Three years passed and during his first year as a teenager, Matthias came home to find police officers waiting for him. They sat him down and told him that his mother had died of a heroin overdose, and that his siblings were being collected from school and all of them were to be taken to social services. Matthias went with the officers, and was put into the foster care system along with his siblings. Because of the large size of their family and the suddenness of their arrival, the kids were all split up into different group homes and emergency foster homes. At first this was supposed to be temporary, but there had always been a shortage of foster parents willing to take sibling sets, let alone a family of six children. Matthias fought vainly with his social worker to find them a place to live together, and soon realized that he would have no power or say over what happened to his family until he turned eighteen, and even then he wouldn't necessarily be able to change anything.

Matthis tried to keep track of his siblings as they all moved through the system, some getting longer-term placements while others bounced from home to home. After a string of short-term placements, Matthias ended up in the home of a lawyer and his wife, and when they heard his story they advised him that the best chance he had to get his siblings back was to get legal status as an adult and prove himself worthy of having custody. Matthias learned all he could about legal emancipation and gained it soon before his sixteenth birthday, two full years before he was due to age out of the foster care system. He struggled with keeping a job and attending school as well as finding a place to live, until he received a letter from an attorney on Ambrose Island, which informed him that his grandmother had died and had left her house and belongings to his mother. Since she was dead, ownership automatically passed to Matthias. For the first time in his life, he had something more than the clothes on his back to call his own. He moved into his grandmother's house, the mortgage for which had been paid off years before, and finally felt that he had a foothold towards his goal of proving to the state that he could look after his family.

Since moving to the island, Matthias has taken his plans seriously and has completely turned his life around. He manages to hold down two jobs while attending high school, doing well in his classes, and enrolling in extra- curricular activities. He plans to go to college, but not before he has reunited his family. He knows, only due to his constant harassment of their social workers, where all of his siblings are, and is particularly petitioning for custody of his youngest brother, who at six years old has ended up in an institution for children with disabilities, and his oldest sister, who at fourteen has had a series of bad foster homes, each one worse than the last. Though his ultimate goal is to have all five of them come to live with him on Ambrose Island, he realizes that it will be a slow process. He has made friends in his community, particularly with his neighbour across the street, Bobby Oren, who in a sense took Matthias under his wing after hearing the horror stories of his youth. He gives him work whenever he can and has taught him how to survive in the tough neighbourhood, but most of all the two have a rapport that approaches a father-son bond, though Matthias tries no to think about it like that. Despite his difficult past, Matthias strives to have a positive outlook on life, and works hard to form a positive future for his family.

Vehicle: Red 1998 Ford F150 Half-Ton Pickup.

Job: Cleans boat hulls in the marina- lousy work but great pay; he also goes deep-sea fishing in the summers for excellent pay.

Neighborhood: South Ridge, 65631 South Street