kruskal kaprekar d3 | fin

Coarse black hair dances messily across the top of his head, sticking up at the edges. He keeps it cut fairly short, just long enough for it to have a slight curl at the ends. His eyes are large under thick, straight eyebrows, and set deep within their sockets. A prominent nose and a mouth often curled into a smirk complete the ensemble of his face.

A 6'0" height is fairly tall by District Three standards, a testament to his genetics and relatively wealthy upbringing. His voice is rather piercing with a bit of a nasal tilt, with each of his sentences punctuated as if it was a demand. Broad, sepia-toned shoulders narrow down to fairly lanky limbs, although he's starting to fill out around his arms and legs as he matures. He has long arms and thick fingers, which are often found clutching a pencil or a stub of chalk.

Having ditched the T-shirt-and-jeans look not long ago, Kruskal now populates his wardrobe with collared shirts and nicer pants, hoping to dress like the older researchers he sees around the university. Just like them, however, the hem of his shirt is often covered in chalk dust from long brainstorming sessions in front of a blackboard. He's a bit embarrassed by it when he notices, which isn't often. 

Success. That was what he liked to define himself by, whether they were high marks or scribbled theories or his diligence itself. He refuses to see himself as inadequate. When he finds errors in his proofs, he obsesses over the equations until he can find a way to fix them, scrambling for footholds in the firmament that makes up the theoretical basis for his discoveries. His mind churns furiously like the gears in the district's clock tower, and he's capable of juggling many different ideas in his head at once. The only place where he falls short is performing mental calculations. At this point in his work, he encounters so few numbers that his arithmetic has nearly grown rusty, and although it bothers him when others notice this deficiency, he has about a hundred other things more important to spend his time on.

With his competitive nature, he fits right into the cutthroat culture that the elites of District Three engender. Nothing gets in his way when he chooses to make something his goal. To be fair, most of the ones who do are idiots anyways. He loves his work, fitting his district stereotype of industrious researcher like a glove, often becoming so engrossed in investigating a new idea that he forgets to eat, or sleep, or attend meetings. 

Unlike the others in his district, however, he has no interest in practicality. With a deep passion for mathematics, he knew it was unlikely any of his theorems would be put to use in the real world; indeed, he disdained those who only cared about how their inventions would be useful. Factory monkeys, all of them. A theorem, in and of itself, was a thing of elegant beauty, a work of art. To ask after its purpose was akin to questioning the function of a symphony, or a painting. Mathematics is the highest art form. All other sciences are merely pale shadows that use these discoveries.

The elegant beauty is what captivates him, draws him in to study such structures, to visualize in his mind twisted dimensions that did not, could not, exist in the world he lived in. As addictive as alcohol and as potent as morphling, to use an analogy for those who preferred to partake in such baser desires, such was Kruskal's choice of mathematics as his drug. The structures he studies are constantly swirling in his mind even when he is not actively working, and his thoughts tend to drift off to his research when he is otherwise unoccupied. He'll get distracted by flashes of insight into whatever problem he's currently working on even when he's not supposed to be unoccupied, and it's easy for him to tune out people or situations that fail to hold his interest. 

This tendency, as well as his general lack of experience with social etiquette, has not garnered him many friends. He can talk for hours about his research or about mathematics in general, but unfortunately that does not generalize to other topics or to small talk in particular, which he finds to be an utterly confusing societal norm. It doesn't stop him for wishing he were better at it, however, as he knows that such skills were important in order to get ahead despite how often the officials claimed their positions were determined based on merit alone. Even if other people's behaviors didn't seem to make sense to him, he knows that they had to make perfect sense to themselves, and he would need to learn to pretend to play by their rules.

Discussions with other people exhaust him, and he prefers to work alone, savoring the silence and solitude where he could have the freedom to make the leaps and connections he wanted without having to interrupt his train of thought to explain it to someone else. His mind turns feverishly at a pace many people find hard to keep up with, and he's never been patient or understanding enough to want to help them keep up. In fact, he can get downright possessive of his work, afraid that watching eyes will spoil the perfection that he always seeks in his papers. He hates to publicize his discoveries until he's certain his proofs are absolutely airtight.

His parents, Cheren Kaprekar and Bianca Dijkstra, met in their university days, both of them working at an internship in a small research center specializing in experimental physics. After a long courtship, they married shortly after Cheren had graduated from college and landed a well-paid teaching job at one of the higher-end schools of the district. Kruskal's arrival was an unexpected but welcome pregnancy for Bianca, despite the inopportune timing that forced her to give up a lucrative career path doing tests in machine learning and natural language processing. 

Bianca dotes on her son, who is the couple's only child. Having had a rocky relationship with her own father, she is determined to let her own offspring pursue whatever he wanted to study. Kruskal was drawn to mathematics by nature, and works through the curriculum at a rapid pace, quickly surpassing his classmates and soon his own parents, who are unprepared for his constant curiosity and thirst for knowledge.

During his years at school, he always brought home good grades, but never really got along with the other students. He's often a bit of a smartass, liking to respond to others with snark and sarcasm. In these regards, he takes after his father, who was often quite impatient in his youth. On the flip side, however, being surrounded by other kids with similar subjects of interest meant that he never quite felt out of place, either. His parents were proud of his achievements and awards, although a bit worried that he always seemed too busy and occupied to make any friends. All that mattered to him was pursuing the ideal of understanding and seeking the truths that his equations were hiding.

This changed when he entered high school. With all the changes happening to himself and those around him, he began to realize the importance of the "softer" skills he used to dismiss before, which he would now have to catch up on if he wanted others to see him the way he wanted to be seen - he'd often been accused of being callous or emotionally distant. Determined not to let this lack of understanding hold him back, he learned to quietly observe others, hoping to absorb their mannerisms and use them in his own interactions. He hasn't altogether succeeded in doing so, but not from lack of trying.

Nowadays, Kruskal is entering his last year of school, while doing research on the side with one of the more theoretically-inclined professors at the university. He loves mathematics and all it has to offer, secretly wishing that he'd been born into District Six so people wouldn't keep pressuring him into choosing a more useful career. While juggling his research and schoolwork, he enjoys exploring other subjects, whether they're subfields of mathematics itself, or other branches of science. He hopes to one day understand the tenets of algebraic geometry, but so far all of his attempts to penetrate its mysteries have only left him confused.