Seraph Thorne doesn't have as tight a grip on reality as he think he does. Putting it lightly, he is very special. This is because he is a prodigious savant - and a monster of one at that. An undocumented one, but one nonetheless. Savant syndrome is the name given to a rare condition in which someone with mental disabilities, more often than not in the form of autism, demonstrates certain abilities far greater than the average. Seraph was born with Asperger's, but has gone undiagnosed because of his neglectful upbringing, so even he is unaware of it. If you aren't aware, Asperger syndrome is a neurodevelopmental disorder similar to autism. It's characterized by difficulties in social interactions, but differs from autism by relatively unimpaired language and intelligence. Savant syndrome can also be caused by severe head trauma to the outside of the left temporal lobe. Seraph suffered this damage when he was eight. Damage occurs to the left side of the brain, with higher-level memory circuits sustaining damage. The parts of the brain that are undamaged are needed to compensate, as are the lower-level memory capacities. The brain 'rewires' and fixes itself, and dormant abilities from the newly wired area is released.
Seraph was a congenital savant who also, through a sick twist of fate, became more of a savant after suffering brain damage. Unbeknownst to anyone, by the age of two, Seraph could mentally and accurately calculate seven digit addition, subtraction, multiplication and division faster than anyone with a calculator could. By the age of four, he had pi memorized to 4891 digits. When he was five, he had mastered the English language but almost never even spoke. When reading books, he would spend up to 20 seconds reading a single page and have it memorized. He would go to his local library or his school's library, and read through books at an unholy pace, having memorized 1592 books by the time he was eight, each from reading just once. At the age of six, he became a polyglot, mastering French, Italian, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Japanese and Esperanto. But he never used the languages he learned until he was twelve. He was seven when he started playing the piano, being able to recite Tchaikovsky's 'Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy' after playing around with the keys and having heard the piece once from a cartoon.
In the present day, he is akin to a monster. On top of the 9 languages he knew prior to the crash, he learned 6 more: Korean, Indonesian, Icelandic, Norwegian, ASL and BANZSL. It took him one week each to master those languages. He has memorized pi to the 23,416th digit and has no use for a calculator. When reading books, it takes him 5 seconds to read a page and have it memorized. He now has 12,986 books memorized. If you were to give him a pencil and a subject to draw, he'd be able to draw it with life like accuracy after only having looked at it once. His intellectual and artistic abilities are far superior to anyone currently living.
His abilities are wasted on him, however. After over a decade of physical and mental abuse, he truly believes that he is lesser than everyone. No one has ever told him he was amazing, because no one ever knew. He never showed anyone what he could do. He never wanted to show anyone. It wasn't because he knew he was special, it was because after years of abuse, he knew better than to draw attention to himself. It was supposed to be no different at Vincennes. He had no intention of showing others what he could do, but... he was kind of stupid in that regard.
For example, he would play the piano in the recreation room. In his mind, he was just mindlessly tapping away at the keys, not making anything special. But to everyone who heard him play, however... it was a different story entirely. Seraph made it a routine to play the piano when everyone he knew was busy. He'd enter the recreation room at the same time, play for half an hour, and leave. He had no problems with this routine when he first started, because the room was always empty when he entered. After a few days however, he noticed a tall, handsome student was already in the room, studying at one of the tables. Seraph would've mistaken her for a guy if he wasn't at Vincennes. Not wanting to play in front of others, he left. He didn't know that the girl, Nina, was there to listen to him play. Nina would always study in the recreation room, but one day she entered while Seraph was in the middle of playing. She wasn't just listening to his song. She was feeling it. There was so much raw emotion coming from his music as he played furiously without rest. Nina was overcome with a hurricane of unbridled rage and unimaginable grief being conveyed through his music, and she fell in love with it instantly. She had thought that if she arrived earlier than he did, she would be able to listen to him from beginning to end, but he left as soon as he saw her, so she made sure to enter right after Seraph started playing.
She thoroughly enjoyed Seraph's piano playing, and she wasn't the only one. Many girls ended coming to the recreation for the sole purpose of listening to his music. Sometimes he would create a classical masterpiece that would put the likes of Liszt, Beethoven and Chopin to shame. Other times, he would play ethereally, thrusting listeners into a fantastical world of tranquillity. Some days he would play using complex hybrid key signatures, and other days he would play a whole song in the key of C and sound just as good. Listening to his piano was like listening to an entire symphony. On rare occasions, he would even sing while playing. He once joyfully played and sang about him struggling with depression, and followed the line 'I only want to die' with a groovy piano solo. If you didn't understand English, you would think he was singing about something happy. That was a common theme Nina noticed about Seraph's music whenever he sang; Their depressing and dark lyrics were in stark contrast to their catchy, upbeat music. For someone with such a low and gravelly voice, it was amazing how he could sing so clearly. Even his vocal range was amazing. He could sing higher than most girls in the school choir could. Everything about his music was filled with unbridled emotions and personal experiences, and listening to him sing about what he was going through was absolutely heart-breaking to everyone who heard it. Everyone except for Seraph, of course.
Seraph was oblivious to all of this. He was so laser-focused on playing that for the entirety of his performance, he blocked out the world around him. He would frequently do this in his daily life, as well. If he was sure the people he knew weren't around, he'd lose himself in mundane thoughts and start talking to himself. He'd often blurt out thoughts like, 'why have humans evolved to put food in a cavity where we smash it with 32 bones, only for a meat tentacle to push it down into a pool of acid?' or 'I don't think there's any actual reason the alphabet needs to be in order.' He would drop such remarks and continue hobbling away. This would understandably confuse those who were around him at the time, and they all thought he crazy.
The autism kinda makes sense. I had a feeling his actual capabilities were off the charts since he had that entire soliloquy over ocular albinism (which was really cool to know btw didn't know the blue was from Rayleigh scattering) . He also severely has his priorities borked to heaven and back since he took a literal gunshot wound through the hand but since he had the brain freeze first he focused on that instead. I had a feeling his piano recitals were gonna be hyper depressive but great since his stats are at the level of too op plz nerf, but I'm sad nobody close to him remarked about how good his playing was.
The aspergers kinda does shine through, like with noticing implicit gestures and not recognizing them, a large reliance on hindsight to process social interactions, and how he is able to talk without realizing he is still playing, though that last one may be guesswork on my part since I tend to do simple stuff like rocking and other weird motions while people are talking to me. I have straight up walked around a piece of furniture for entire conversations and didn't really register that fact until much, much later.
All in all, I appreciate the fact I'm actually catching symptoms of who Seraph is as a person that he is letting drop without realizing how ridiculous it is. I mean, just the fact he caught a random, dangerous ball and sidelined it because he was already doing something speaks volumes, especially since he didn't register it like a normal person would and went back to iterating his story.
I may have rambled too much. I am enjoying myself though.
learning so many pi numbers is silly, with only 40 or even less you could accurately calculate what you need in the universe, after that they are useless
The f*ck did I just read? Damn, Seraph is actually like an archangel or something like his name says lol.
Thanks for the chappy!