People with super powers
Since time unremembered there have been those among us who have stepped forth with skills, abilities, genius, perceptions, and attributes far beyond the norm. In many cases these have stemmed from some sort of genetic predestination, or even defect, leaving the bearer of these powers with significant shortages in other areas. Yet many are not born into these powers, but rather have them thrust upon them.

Just like any super hero origin story there are those nondescript individuals who have undergone some accident or life changing event which has caused them to go through a dark tunnel to emerge from the other side with powers they cannot explain. Far from the realm of comic books, this has proven to be a very real thing, and there are those out there who have gained remarkable skills and abilities from things that should have very well killed them.

When it comes to suddenly developing superpowers, many are those who acquire these inexplicable abilities through some form of injury or physical trauma sustained in an accident, causing some untapped power to surge forth from within. In 1979, a 10-year-old boy named Orlando Serrell was playing baseball when a ball smashed full on into the left side of his head, knocking him senseless. Although at the time he merely shook it off and continued to play, in the coming days he would suffer severe headaches that were at times so painful as to be debilitating, becoming more frequent as time went on. Despite the incredible relentless pain throbbing in his head, Orlando kept the headaches a secret from his parents. After a few days of this, the headaches abruptly stopped, the sea of pain gone, and it seemed at first that everything had returned to normal, but Orlando was about to discover that he had gained a strange new talent from the incident.

Orlando Serrell
It soon became apparent that the boy had developed an incredibly sharp and detailed ability to perfectly remember pretty much everything he saw or experienced with remarkable accuracy, including the most mundane things such as weather on any given day, what he had eaten, done, or worn, everything, for every day of his life. On top of this, he found that he could also perform the rather impressive feat of being able to calculate and correctly give the day of the week for any calendar date in the future, even if that date was far off over the horizon. Orlando became a media sensation at the time, and in later years he has gone on to contribute to medical studies that hope to determine just what it was that triggered these newfound powers. Considering that he had never had any talent even remotely similar to this before being hit in the head with that baseball, doctors hope that by studying Orlando's brain they can figure out just what area of the brain was jarred and activated by the injury, which could lead to further understanding the brain's ability to produce this sort of genius and perhaps how to tap into it.

Another serious injury that led to extraordinary abilities was experienced by a humble, nondescript furniture salesman in Tacoma Washington named Jason Padgett. One night in 2002, Padgett went out drinking at a bar and as he was leaving to go home he was jumped and severely beaten by two muggers, getting kicked repeatedly in the head and body and suffering a concussion and ruptured kidney in the process. In the following days he realized that his vision was off somehow, and that everything he looked at seemed to be infused with various strange geometric shapes and lines which he at first did not understand, making the world pixilated in a sense. He began drawing and painting what he was seeing, and it was only later that someone realized that these were not just random designs, but rather complex mathematical formulas in visual geometric form, called fractals. He was essentially seeing the geometric forms of everything through the lens of mathematical formulas, visualizing the world in the myriad wondrous shapes that these created.

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