The Man with the Mandelbrot Mind

by **SecretSquirrel** November 3rd 2013, 1:29 pm

Leonhard Alexander Booth
Office Employee

Basic Biography

Real Name: Leonhard ("Leo") Booth
Renegade/Hero/Villain Name: Leonhard ("Leo") Booth
Title: Employee of the Federal Government
Alignment: True Neutral
Age: 22
Gender: Male
Race: Caucasian, Northern European
Hair: Blonde
Eyes: Light blue
Height: 5'5"
Weight: 120 lbs
Blood type: O-

The Looks

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He is a thin, small, aryan example of the master race. He hates that, so he often dresses poorly with jeans that are too wide and long-sleeved shirts and sweaters, in hopes of hiding how thin he really is. Despite his attempts to run away from the third-riech poster-boy body he has, he is really quite attractive.

His voice is very soft, his motions are slow and deliberate. His body is sharp and contained, and he is non-threatning behvaior in his body language.

However, his job requires a pressed shirt and slacks, with a tie. He hates ties. Wearing them every day reminds him of himself, and as a result, his shoulders slump and his spine bends from the weariness.

The Legacy

Personality:

Leonhard is a huge proponent of self-improvement. He doesn't believe in education, social engineering, or government work. Yet, he works for the FBI. He doesn't really enjoy it. In fact, he doesn't really enjoy anything anymore. He has come to realize that he has nothing but contempt for his peers.

He is largely distant and unfocused, and is in a dire need for a challenge or a goal. Currently, he satisfies himself through rigorous and lengthy research. He's found it fun to play with investments and the stock market, but he has no idea what to do with the money he makes.

He is bitter about his appearance, and he rejects and renounces the ignorance of his parents, but can't escape the fact that, no matter what he does, he looks like a nazi. He can't stand that.

What he does know is that there is a tension in his brain. The back of his mind is tight, irritable, and bored. He needs something to push himself, because he is finding that unlike most people, who stop learning and settle down as they age, he is finding himself ever-hungry for knowledge.

History:

Born to a family in a rural town in northern Indiana, Leonhard Alexander Booth believes he is a normal human being.

Leonhard Alexander Booth's brain is quite possibly the greatest pattern-recognizing machine in the solar system.

He is not a normal human being.

As a kid, he believed in almost every religious or phisophical belief system that he could find, and has subsequently abandoned the aspects that do not hold up to further observations. The 'religion' he has currently has adopted a logistical nihilism derived largely from the studies of modern economics. He is well-read, with an insatiable desire to learn about the world. He was not successful in elementary school, but in High School he started getting incredible grades for very little work. His first ACT score was a 15. His second was a 32, and this third was a perfect 36. His brain is a snowball that is on its way to becoming an avalanche.

He is completely unaware he has this ability, but he is aware that his intelligence is far above average, though "human". He participated in an FBI contest as a High Schooler that puts students to the test to break a complex data encryption code. Several students around the US broke the code, and each were allowed an interview with a group from the Data Decryption Center. In the interview, each student was given a new encryption to break, and had 24 hours to do it. He did it in 45 minutes. He was two years too young to have entered the contest, and forged his credentials. The forgeries were obvious, but the work was true. He was that good. He was told that after high school, he could work for the FBI if he wanted to. This is what a google search for his name will commonly reveal.

His father is the Mayor for their small town. He is also deeply involved with the local KKK chapter. He spent most of his life working in a steel mill, before opening his own mechanic shop You can surmise how he became mayor. He is proud of his son for being a fine example of genetic superiority, and nothing else.

As a high school freshman, his mother was diagnosed with an aggressive, liver cancer. It quickly metastasized to the brain. He studied extensively and after observing hundreds of similar cases, tried to convince her to seek certain treatments, certain that it would cure her. The treatment costs, cumulative, would number in the millions of dollars, and his family was relatively poor. Acquiring the money, even in the form of debt, was virtually impossible. Despite his research and knowledge, the funds were not available and his mother would not risk his own financial future to continue her life longer. She accepted basic radiation and chemotherapy instead, still at a heavy (but manageable) cost, and he watched her body and mind slowly degenerate until she no longer recognized his face. She passed away his senior year of high school, and it has left his shallow and depressed ever since. He doesn't speak to his father anymore.

Since graduating high school, he opted to take the job offer with the FBI. His pay (about $80,000 a year) keeps him working. He has a desk in the FBI Chicago Branch where he works to break numerical encryptions and codes, but he has also offered his services to solving other crimes. In his spare time, he self-teaches himself US Law, physics, chemistry, and other studies, and is finding that as he gets older and has more experience, he learns at an incredible rate.

Unknown to anyone else, he's been putting his paycheck into foreign exchange markets, and has, with trial and error over the last 3 years, turned it into a considerable sum that he could live comfortably off of for at least a decade. His investments have snowballed over hte last three years and he can, with a broker and a computer, earn himself between fifty to a hundred thousand dollars in a week at any point in time, with some level of risk. He feels it as an achievement of understanding. He is just now realizing his potential, and with each new achievement, his separation from the people around him grows larger. His alienation from the weak, unintelligent, and inconsequential people around him grows larger as well. He no longer solves encryptions to help people, but because it remains a challenge. His ambitions are slowly growing to match pace with his abilities.

No one has ever suspected him of being "super" human, yet, but as he becomes better and better at his job and as his ambitions grow larger, it may become more and more important for him to keep his capabilities secret.

The Powers

Power 1: The Mandlebrot Mind

Leo's brain can recognize patterns, whether they are numbers, events, or actions he observes. That is all. He has a good, but otherwise normal memory. That is important, because it seriously limits his abilities: he can recognize patterns in the data, but acquires the data like any other normal human does: the 5 senses. These too, are completely normal.

The most important strength of his ability is in estimation. If he observes an event more than once, he can begin to estimate the cause of the event. The more often it happens, the more accurate his estimation. The Monte Carlo method that his brain employs to deal with changes in the environment around him allow him to derive, eventually, the cause-effect relationship for theoretically anything without prior experience or knowledge.

For example, he can go to a crime scene and look around it. Even if he has never seen a crime scene before, he can observe similarities and patterns (such as a broken vase, an unlocked window, boot marks on a table) that he could guess as to what happened (a fight between an intruder and the homeowner). This requires that he observes these things (if he doesn't take the necessary time or pay close attention he will miss details) and there are at least a few indicators of the event he's trying to observe. If he only sees one or two indicators of what could have happened, it is not a pattern, and he has to rely on normal human intuition.

But, after observing enough crime scenes, he will see even bigger patterns in the evidence and be able to make accurate guesses based on the previous observations. This means that while he isn't very experienced, the longer he spends observing or doing something, the better he gets at it, at a significant rate.

This doesn't mean that he can do calculation however. He can estimate based on experience, but his ability with accurate mathematics is no better than the average human. That is, to say, he still needs a pen and paper to add up numbers. He can become amazing at calculating a particular formula over time through practice, but that's because he is able to recognize the patterns in the formulas he's already solved by hand. And no matter how good he gets at it, it's just an improvement of the technique and not the ability to solve it, entirely, in-head.

His abilities suffer depending on diet, emotions, and other aspects of his physical body though. Fueling this brain is difficult, and he eats 5-6 small meals a day, and metabolizes quickly. It's not terribly unusual, but in order for him to use his abilities on a truly complex system, he would need consistent and regular nutrition, consuming and metabolizing glucose at a significant and constant rate that would be obviously outside the realm of normal humanity.

His body is small, rather frail, and fleshy. Some of the superheroes out there could pop his brain like a balloon and he would fall down dead, no different from any other "normal" human. He has no regenerative powers, no protection, nothing except for his beautiful mind.

No one has ever cut into his brain, but if they did, they'd find a normal, healthy brain on the surface, with an increasingly complex micro-molecular structure the deeper they go.

Power 2:

Power 3:

Power 4:

Grid
Intelligence: 8 (he believes he is a 4)
Occult: 0
Strength: 1
Speed: 2
Durability: 1
Ability: 0
Fighting Skills: 2
Magic: 0
Spells: 0
Flight: 0
Wealth: 4

by **Arcana** November 3rd 2013, 11:47 pm

Approved until stated otherwise

The Man with the Mandelbrot Mind

The Man with the Mandelbrot Mind

Re: The Man with the Mandelbrot Mind