User blog comment:Sprinklemist/Sprink Talks About Stuff/@comment-1874924-20110702041147/@comment-1874924-20110704180939

It's not like I'm planning to use Richard myself, and he doesn't appear in any other stories, so you can do whatever you want with him. I just wanted to give you an idea for a character with a Sprink-like backstory, but with a specific burden that you presumably hadn't used before. The level of detail in his bio is just me thinking about the logical ramifications of his deformity.

I agree that he shouldn't be muscular, although that doesn't mean he couldn't be strong. (Some of the world's strongest people are wiry.) I don't envision him doing a lot of strength training, though, because the main purpose of his workouts is to keep him supple, and putting on a lot of muscle mass would tend to defeat that goal. I envision him as being a Duncanesque wiry, as opposed to a Haroldesque skinny.

The length of Richard's arms is mutable. I didn't want his arms to be entirely absent, because I envision him being able to at least touch his fingers to each other across his chest, and 4-inch arms seemed to be more or less the minimum that would allow that. On the other hand, I do think it's important that he not have elbow joints. My own arms are about 9 inches from shoulder to elbow, so that's probably your upper limit unless you want to make Richard noticeably taller than average. (I envision him as being of more or less average height, but there's no reason he couldn't be shorter or taller.)

When phocomelia affects the arms, the hands are often stunted as well, but this isn't uniformly the case; and to be able to function in a TD-style competition, I figured that Richard would have to have normal (or at least, nearly normal) hands and wrists. Otherwise, he would be using prosthetics, which is a whole 'nother can of worms.