"Perhaps not. But they did teach me to love learning," Hank shrugged. "And encouraged me to pursue the studies I enjoyed most instead of their favorites." He twiddled his thumbs, glancing over at her hand as she touched him. It was so odd.... he wasn't used to being touched peacefully, his parents weren't overly affectionate and he remembered more times being hit by bullies than hugged by his relatives.
He shook his head at her questions about them, though, and took a breath as he tried to think of it. "They thought it might have been a congenital defect," he said slowly. "So they took me to the best doctors they knew. The first two had no idea what to do or what caused it, but the third said he'd heard something about some old wartime study and recruitment of people with 'useful congenital defects'. He wasn't an expert but told them to be careful, since there was no good information on who was conducting the studies and that rarely bodes well. Not to mention it was hard enough for me to be advancing through the grades at a faster rate. My feet... they're hideous. That's not something anybody decided, it's just true, and it's always been safer and easier to keep them hidden. Even if it does make me look like a cartoon."
He turned towards her when she spoke of others, and couldn't help the gleam of interest that took him. "I would love to meet others who are... gifted," he said. "I've been searching for them in my own world but even here.... I mean. I knew there had to be others. That's why I got into genetics in the first place, but you can't do much with only one sample. I'm a bit bored looking at my own genetic code."