(no subject)

[aworldonfire]

[ Abilities / Skills ]

They say that, when you lose one sense, your body heightens the remaining ones as a means of compensation. For Matt, this is absolutely true, and to a superhuman level, thanks to the effects of the chemicals that caused his blindness in the first place. While for anyone else, this might be just as crippling as being blind, however (imagine trying to do anything when you can hear bugs crawling around in the dirt outside, when your sheets feel like sandpaper on your skin for how soft they really aren't, and so on and so forth), thanks to his training with Stick as a child, he has honed these senses into a finely tuned weapon as good as, if not better than, his missing sight.

Individually, he's capable of the following things with his remaining, heightened senses:

Hearing: Matt can and has used this ability to eavesdrop on conversations across a room or judge the number of people in said room by following heartbeats. He has been known to use his hearing to gauge the physical well-being of friends and enemies alike, again, able to focus on heartbeats and breathing to make sure someone is still alive, or noting that someone has a broken bone just by how it sounds when they move. He can tell, without fail, when someone is lying to him, based on the cadence of their heart and the sound of their voice, and knew something was wrong with Karen, near the end of the season, just by the subtleties of her inflection. He also uses his hearing to great effect, while tracking people, able to focus on their personal sounds (the sound of James Westley's watch, for example) to the exclusion or at least muting of all others.

Smell: In canon, Matt was able to pinpoint someone's location, several floors above him and through several walls, based on the smell of their cologne and cigarettes. He could tell his partner had had onions for lunch, a few days previous, or that he had spent time with their secretary recently, based on the lingering smell of her perfume. He knew that a man was dying of cancer, just based on his personal and probably obviously wrong scent, and so on and so forth.

Taste: Notably, Matt could tell when Claire had reopened her stitches, after the beating she suffered at the hands of the Russians, by catching the taste of her blood in the air.

Touch: Most of Matt's spatial awareness comes from this, allowing him to judge distances, feel where an object is, and dodge projectiles based on how the air feels as it moves around him and others. He can sense the body temperatures of others (so, even without accounting for his other senses, he might be able to tell he wasn't alone in a room, just based on the difference in heat signatures) and can follow vibrations, such as those caused by footsteps, to tell where someone else is in relation to him.

Certain things may still be beyond him (like telling the color of something, or being able to read something on printed paper because modern printing techniques leave no impressions he can follow), but all put together, they create, paraphrased from his own words, an impression of sight, not unlike a world on fire. It's what allows him to operate as a vigilante, and it at least helps with his natural charm when it comes to flirting and friendship.

While these abilities are, as previously mentioned, superhuman in nature, however, Matt won't be entirely crippled, in entering coming to the islands. He may not be winning any fights he starts or jumping off any buildings, without, but he still years of training to fall back on. He still might be able to tell when someone is lying to him, for example, by listening for any suspicious pauses or out of place words in their speech. He might be able to find a door, albeit at a much shorter distance, without fumbling for it, by feeling out where the air currents change, for another. (Seriously, go stand by a doorway, close your eyes, and tell the writer that you can't feel a difference in the way the air moves.) Long story short, he can and will cope.

Finally, in terms of mundane abilities, Matt is, if not an accomplished lawyer from lack of experience, at least possessing of the ability to be one, having graduated summa cum laude from Columbia Law in New York. He is a well-trained martial artist, incorporating many forms into his fighting style, and acrobat, and has decent deductive reasoning skills that help him tackle cases on both a legal and vigilante front beyond just hitting someone until they give him the information he needs. He knows a number of meditation tricks that help him shrug off pain in a fight and heal faster, afterwards -- not a true healing factor, in the case of the latter, not superhuman, but enough that his injuries don't look as bad as they should, which helps him keep going even after a bad fight or spin a story to explain why a blind guy has all those cuts and bruises. He can't have a punctured lung if it heals so quickly, right? Something like that would keep a person down for days, right? Right. And lastly, Matt speaks Spanish fluently.