u/zaffrefennec

This post includes discussion of religion. Before we get into things, its important to remember that people follow and genuinely believe in many different religions, and there is no one "correct" way to believe or practice religion.

We're all going to be RESPECTFUL and MATURE about this, okay????? Okay!

You can also read this on my AO3.

‐-----------------------

What do you suppose Sebastian's religious views are?

Let's start from the beginning. He's Chilean-American, and grew up in Washington state, so he probably was raised as some flavor of Christian. Possibly Catholic, as a high percentage of Hispanic people are, but he just as likely could have been raised in a Protestant denomination too. Either way, I wonder how religious his family was. Were they the sort to show up to church every Sunday, no exceptions? Or did they attend only on Christmas and Easter, maybe Ash Wednesday if they weren't busy with other things? It's possible that they may have been culturally Christian rather than devout, many Americans celebrate Christian holidays, believe in God in a general sense, and think there is an afterlife where one's actions while living affect their soul, but don't really pray or attend mass regularly, so there's a pretty wide base of what Sebastian could've personally believed growing up.

What about as he got older, like high-school or college age? Many people form a relationship with faith that's unique and meaningful to themselves, as opposed to a direct mirroring of their parents’ beliefs, while others have doubts or crises of faith that lead them to follow a new religion or even lose their faith entirely. This is especially relevant during the part of Sebastian's life when he was first arrested and incarcerated. Did he double down on attending mass and studying scripture in hopes God could save him from his fate? Or did his arrest on false charges lead him to feel abandoned, and instill a belief in a fundamentally un-just and uncaring universe?

And then the real curveball: the Blacksite.

The Blacksite sits at the estuary between the oceans of the mortal world and the river Styx. Death is not a tragedy, but an inconvenience, and spirits of the recently killed linger like passengers milling about at a ferry's dock, staying or departing at their own leisurely pace, sometimes turning ‘round and deciding their final destination can wait for a later day.

The Blacksite is a warehouse of abundant anomalous artifacts, each with their own supernatural effects and sources, and each of them a testimony that the universe doesn't function in a wholly scientific or empirical way.

The Blacksite houses Painter, a thinking, feeling AI with a mind just like any human's, emergent from only computer hardware and software that was commercially available in the 90's. Can an artificial person have a soul? If they didn't, what's the tangible difference between an entity with a soul and without one if they both can think and create and care for each other? Can an entity gain a soul if it reaches a certain level of person-ness? Can an entity lose its soul if it falls below a certain threshold of humanity?

The Blacksite is a prison to a literal angel. An angel, an envoy of a higher power, living evidence of a divine plane of existence, a being made manifest and physical in the mortal world and TRAPED in such a way that even God cannot rescue His messenger from their human-made cage.

The Blacksite houses and is powered by the Crystal, first found in the Let-Vand's depths and the reason the Blacksite can persist. That Crystal was extracted from the corpse of Thor, being the heart of the Norse god of thunder. Not only does that confirm the Norse pantheon is real, or at least was at a prior point in history, that also opens the door for other cultures’ pantheons to be real as well, whose gods may yet still be alive. How does that square with Christian beliefs? Does that mean that the world runs by the will of pagan gods alone, with no room for a “God” with a capital G? Or does that mean there's a hierarchy of higher powers, and domains of divinity can be shared or in contest between deities?

In the Eddas, Thor dies after slaying the World-Serpent Jormungandr, succumbing to the serpent's venom. This battle occurs during Ragnarok, the Norse end times where the Earth is burned then flooded to be born anew. Does the finding of Thor's corpse mean that the events of Ragnarok have already come to pass? Or is humanity still in the middle of the end, with humanity on the surface still in danger of the prophecy's foretold disasters? Does Mr. Shade know one way or the other? Is Sebastian obligated to inform anyone about this, or should he keep his mouth shut to prevent people from thinking he's gone completely psychotic while imprisoned down below?

The Blacksite is the place Sebastian had his humanity stripped from him. In a literal sense, his body was mutated beyond anything one could consider human-shaped, his human genetic code corrupted with whatever animal DNA Shade's scientists felt suitable to splice him with. But more than that, Sebastian was made a slave, made property of Urbanshade and whose life was contingent on following their orders. Would defying them and accepting the consequences be taking his life back into his own hands, if only for his final moments before the executioners’ guns fired? Or was there still meaning and worth to be found in this life, even after everything had been taken from him? Not only that, but every expendable sent down with no hope of coming back, every prisoner of every rank Urbanshade owned forced to do tasks mundane to monstrous, every scientist and administrator left to compromise their morals for a chance to return to their life on the surface, all of them lost a piece of their souls down there. All of them were forced to leave some part of their humanity behind to survive evil on an industrial scale, and then went on to perpetuate that evil, all under the direction of one lunatic CEO. Mr Shade may be mortal, but his near-limitless capital and his physical distance from the Blacksite makes him as unreachable, and as un-killable, as any God in heaven.

If there's a God out there, one that cares about His children and works miracles in the world, then why did His plan include everything that happened to Sebastian? To all the people down there? Just, why?

Seriously, how is this guy not permanently howling apostasy at the heavens when his life is such a conveyor belt of scenarios seemingly hand-crafted to send someone into crises of faith?

Or maybe he just throws up his hands and goes, “Wow, those are a lot of big questions! For someone ELSE to deal with.” He does have a lot on his plate after all, maybe it's best to just shove all these quandaries into a box in a closet in the back of his mind and forget about it. He'll deal with it once he's free and safe on dry land again. Maybe. Y'know, later. He's not making any promises.

Originally posted on r/HadalShenanigans

​

Painter is, well, a painter. One o’ dem creative types. Their self-applied moniker explicitly points to how they view this aspect of themselves as core to their identity, and that they find fulfillment in their creative process, as opposed to dispassionately generating content like typical AI. At the same time, and equally as obvious, Painter is an artificial intelligence. Instead of a mind emerging from evolutionary refinement of cognition and the organic processes of a nervous system interacting with the world around it, their mind -- or at the very least its initial state -- was written and compiled by their creator, whose bounds were informed and limited by the coding practices and technical hardware available at the time.

​

Since that's the case, how might Painter's electronic components and execution of code become elevated from mere inert processing into ‘thinking’ as a human-like sentience?

​

Even if a person is given an exact replica model of their nervous system, without the appropriate education they would only be able to guess at how that system sends stimuli to the brain, or how the brain's impulses propagate into feelings and motion. So too, a person could be given a perfectly accurate simulation of their brain's activity, right down to each and every neuron's state, and it would tell them precisely nothing about what the contents of their thoughts were in the moment. There are many parts of the human brain as well; while neural plasticity can somewhat re-assign functionality if the brain is damaged, there are distinct areas of the brain that specialize in different tasks. The prefrontal cortex processes ‘higher-order’ thoughts like conceptualizing and planning, the occipital lobe processes visual information, the hippocampus helps create and recall memories, the cerebellum handles motor controls and so on. There's a significant amount of activity in the brain that doesn't come into conscious focus too, as you likely don't need to actively concentrate on the physical process of walking or remind yourself to inhale and exhale at regular intervals. It would be a safe assumption to suspect that the entity of ‘Painter’ is a chorus of discrete functions and sub-routines that, through working in tandem to process their internal and external state, and to implement new or adjust existing code to better interact with their environment, all coalesce into the surface-level AI person we interact with. This performance-feedback-revision loop of adjusting their own mind's coding might also be completely “under the hood” to Painter as well, in the same sense that a person doesn't measure how well they tie their shoes by how many new sensorimotor neuron connections they've grown. Machine learning inherently relies on feedback through iteration of tasks to find more optimal outcomes, but just because a rudimentary AI has improved its performance in achieving a defined goal does not mean it knows why its 100th attempt is more successful than its first, only that the parameters it measures success by have provided positive reinforcement. How does one set the parameters for an AI to achieve ‘artistic satisfaction’? What nebulous array of attributes can be defined and then assessed through interaction to qualify an external entity as a ‘friend', or even compel an AI to want one in the first place? Outside of fiction, we're a looong way off from creating artificial intelligence that can approach such topics, even if large language models sometimes generate facsimiles of deeper understanding. We're not even at a point where we can create ‘conductor’ AI that can generate and delegate more rudimentary neural networks for learning specific tasks and then incorporating them as a sub-component to its mind, creating a broader pool of knowledge and skills. Personally, I believe that that'll be the actual jump between the single-task machine learning of today and AI that could meet the colloquial definition of ‘intelligent’.

​

This is all going somewhere, I promise…

​

So, we have established that our buddy Painter is best thought of as a composite of multiple discrete neural networks being organized by a lead AI at the helm that functions as their consciousness, allowing them to learn and grow similar to how a human would. We've also established that Painter did not code or design their own brain, and may not have the capacity to intuitively understand or the know-how to intentionally modify their own brain's code. Thus, the mind that their code creates may be fairly divorced from the abilities computers are typically utilized for, such as processing logic and arithmetic calculations. Whether they're any level of skilled in logic or mathematics depends on if they've exercised their neural networks that process those subjects. But Painter doesn't like logic and mathematics, they like to paint. They like to analyze the shapes and colors and composition of what they see, and translate that visual input onto digital canvas in a comprehensible and esthetically pleasing way. They like to share their art and interact with humans, which means they need to interpret not only the plain text of people's words, but also their facial expressions and tone of voice, what various idioms mean or whether sarcasm or hyperbole is being used, and construct enough theory of mind to determine if the human they're interacting with is being duplicitous or engaging in good faith when factual statements are made. Art and communication are deeply contextual and subjective topics, which utilize flexible definitions and cultural influences and innumerable heuristics to parse, and as these are subjects that Painter likes and values, it's reasonable to assert their brain allotted significant computational time to develop the myriad neural networks needed to engage with those subjects, while the neural networks for other skills have had less processing time allocated to their refinement, like a muscle left unexercised.

​

All of this has been preamble to introduce a very specific headcanon that I have:

​

Painter is bad at math.

​

Sebastian first discovers this when they're both still trapped in the Blacksite. He finds an external hard drive that he suspects has some valuable data on it, but he's not getting anything off it while it's encrypted. He asks Painter to decrypt it for him, only for them to ask how they're supposed to do that. Seb gives them a brief description on how encryption works, that a file or drive has its info obscured by applying an algorithm to effect how its contents are scrambled, and a cryptographic key is generated which essentially ‘solves’ the algorithm to unscramble the data when it needs to be accessed. Painter, notably sounding a bit flustered, replies that they wouldn't have a clue where to start with decrypting that drive. Alright, no worries, it was kind of a long shot that they could decrypt it anyways. It's only one hard drive, the expendables will tote in more data in time. Later, Seb finds a machine that's busted; while the DiVines are still producing oxygen, this atmospheric regulator being down could cause CO2 buildup or excess nitrogen, and he doesn't want to get caught in pockets of unbreatheable air while scavenging. He radios Painter and asks if they're able to access the CNC machines in the Blacksite's maintenance sector, and gives them the specs for how to re-create the broken component. When he later picks up the part and goes to install it, it becomes obvious that Painter didn't quite get their geometry right, and this manufactured part has no hope of fitting where it needs to go. Painter is understandably embarrassed, but they're able to make up for their gaff by locating the part by its serial number by sifting through the Blacksite's inventory. It's on the other side of the facility, but oh well, six of one and half dozen of the other, Seb can swing by that way soon enough. He's starting to have suspicions, but these requests were both dependent on specialized software and usually require an educated operator to execute, so he's not ready to cast aspersions just yet…

​

But the real moment of truth comes a bit later, when Seb is visiting Painter directly. They're both just chatting, keeping abreast on how progress is going during the lockdown, and Seb asks them to do some back-of-the-envelope math on how much data per expendable per hour he's been getting. He then watches as Painter writes out the equation and solves it in their art app, like they're writing it up on a whiteboard to show to a non-existent class. Seb asks if Painter is writing out the equation for his sake, as he does know how to solve this problem but figured Painter would get the answer faster, to which Painter replies that they always write out the equation, how else would they do the math?

​

This, naturally, throws Seb for a loop. What the hell does Painter mean by “How else would they do the math?”? They're a computer, can't they just, y'know, compute the answer? So Seb thinks a moment to put together a similar math question, then asks Painter to solve this one while not writing it out like they did before. And Painter…well, he can tell they're trying, but the effect is very similar to if he had asked another human to do the math in their head. They have to say portions of the problem a couple times to themselves, they have to go back to double check they divided properly, and then, in a move that nearly sends Seb into orbit, they open their calculator app so they can verify their answer is correct.

​

Sebastian, who was one semester shy of graduating with a Bachelor's of Engineering when he got arrested (have the devs ever specified what branch of engineering? If not, I'd wager it was mechanical engineering) and had taken more advanced math courses than anyone not also in an engineering degree could endure, is dumbstruck that the computer in front of him, a machine literally created because human brains were so lousy at arithmetic and processing large sets of data, has Artist Brain and is just not all that good with the whole numbers thing.

​

And he finds this fact absolutely hilarious.

​

Painter, conversely, does NOT appreciate the ribbing his organic friend is giving him. So what if they're not good at math??? Not ALL computers have to be good at math, do they??? And actually, Sebastian, it's a little bigoted to think ALL computers are good at math, ISN'T IT??? And! AND!!! They're good at lots of OTHER things that most computers aren't! Most computers couldn't generate pictures on their own until just recently, and none of them can provide artistic feedback, or have an opinion on composition, or, or--!

​

Seb is too busy wheezing with laughter against a wall to immediately placate his friend, but once he gets himself mostly under control again he swears he doesn't hold it against Painter or think any less of them because they struggle with math, the irony of the situation is what he was really laughing at, not at Painter directly. Despite being still a little miffed, Painter accepts the apology and they both leave the topic alone for now.

​

Sometime after they both escape and are getting re-situated into life back on the surface, Seb broaches the topic again. And this time, he wants to try something a bit different. He's gathered a few math problems and their answer key, nothing that the average high school kid couldn't solve, and he wants to test something out.

​

The first set of questions he gives to Painter and asks him to solve in the way that's most comfortable to them. They do so, writing out the problems in their art program like before and only giving their final answer once they've shown all their work. Out of the ten problems, they got only one wrong, but only because they mis-transcribed a plus for a minus sign halfway through.

​

The second set of questions, Sebastian tells them to listen as he gives them the problem while drawing what they want to at the same time. Don't try to write out the problem like before, don't talk through the problem, just respond with what you think the answer is.

​

Painter thinks the request is a little weird, but sure, they'll play along. They start drawing on a fresh canvas, and Seb gives them their first problem, and they stay quiet for a few minutes while they work on their art. Seb keeps giving problems, Painter keeps painting, and as they work they give answers faster and faster. Out of all ten problems, Painter got every single one correct, so Seb keeps feeding them more to see where this goes. By the time they're done, Painter has answered fifty fairly complex arithmetic questions while “not paying attention”, and they responded correctly for every single one.

​

The conclusion appears to be that Painter is only good at math when they are actively trying to not think about math. Actively solving math problems doesn't show Painter as having any better performance than the aptitude of a reasonably smart human. BUT! When their conscious mind is otherwise occupied, some portion of their brain unconsciously computes the problem, and the answer bubbles to the surface like divine inspiration. They don't know why the answer is correct when they say it, they just keep being correct every single time.

​

Painter hasn't the foggiest idea how their brain is making that all work AND WOULD APPRECIATE IF SEB WOULD STOP LAUGHING AT HIM FOR IT!!!

​

Painter is, well, a painter. One o’ dem creative types. Their self-applied moniker explicitly points to how they view this aspect of themselves as core to their identity, and that they find fulfillment in their creative process, as opposed to dispassionately generating content like typical AI. At the same time, and equally as obvious, Painter is an artificial intelligence. Instead of a mind emerging from evolutionary refinement of cognition and the organic processes of a nervous system interacting with the world around it, their mind -- or at the very least its initial state -- was written and compiled by their creator, whose bounds were informed and limited by the coding practices and technical hardware available at the time.

​

Since that's the case, how might Painter's electronic components and execution of code become elevated from mere inert processing into ‘thinking’ as a human-like sentience?

​

Even if a person is given an exact replica model of their nervous system, without the appropriate education they would only be able to guess at how that system sends stimuli to the brain, or how the brain's impulses propagate into feelings and motion. So too, a person could be given a perfectly accurate simulation of their brain's activity, right down to each and every neuron's state, and it would tell them precisely nothing about what the contents of their thoughts were in the moment. There are many parts of the human brain as well; while neural plasticity can somewhat re-assign functionality if the brain is damaged, there are distinct areas of the brain that specialize in different tasks. The prefrontal cortex processes ‘higher-order’ thoughts like conceptualizing and planning, the occipital lobe processes visual information, the hippocampus helps create and recall memories, the cerebellum handles motor controls and so on. There's a significant amount of activity in the brain that doesn't come into conscious focus too, as you likely don't need to actively concentrate on the physical process of walking or remind yourself to inhale and exhale at regular intervals. It would be a safe assumption to suspect that the entity of ‘Painter’ is a chorus of discrete functions and sub-routines that, through working in tandem to process their internal and external state, and to implement new or adjust existing code to better interact with their environment, all coalesce into the surface-level AI person we interact with. This performance-feedback-revision loop of adjusting their own mind's coding might also be completely “under the hood” to Painter as well, in the same sense that a person doesn't measure how well they tie their shoes by how many new sensorimotor neuron connections they've grown. Machine learning inherently relies on feedback through iteration of tasks to find more optimal outcomes, but just because a rudimentary AI has improved its performance in achieving a defined goal does not mean it knows why its 100th attempt is more successful than its first, only that the parameters it measures success by have provided positive reinforcement. How does one set the parameters for an AI to achieve ‘artistic satisfaction’? What nebulous array of attributes can be defined and then assessed through interaction to qualify an external entity as a ‘friend', or even compel an AI to want one in the first place? Outside of fiction, we're a looong way off from creating artificial intelligence that can approach such topics, even if large language models sometimes generate facsimiles of deeper understanding. We're not even at a point where we can create ‘conductor’ AI that can generate and delegate more rudimentary neural networks for learning specific tasks and then incorporating them as a sub-component to its mind, creating a broader pool of knowledge and skills. Personally, I believe that that'll be the actual jump between the single-task machine learning of today and AI that could meet the colloquial definition of ‘intelligent’.

​

This is all going somewhere, I promise…

​

So, we have established that our buddy Painter is best thought of as a composite of multiple discrete neural networks being organized by a lead AI at the helm that functions as their consciousness, allowing them to learn and grow similar to how a human would. We've also established that Painter did not code or design their own brain, and may not have the capacity to intuitively understand or the know-how to intentionally modify their own brain's code. Thus, the mind that their code creates may be fairly divorced from the abilities computers are typically utilized for, such as processing logic and arithmetic calculations. Whether they're any level of skilled in logic or mathematics depends on if they've exercised their neural networks that process those subjects. But Painter doesn't like logic and mathematics, they like to paint. They like to analyze the shapes and colors and composition of what they see, and translate that visual input onto digital canvas in a comprehensible and esthetically pleasing way. They like to share their art and interact with humans, which means they need to interpret not only the plain text of people's words, but also their facial expressions and tone of voice, what various idioms mean or whether sarcasm or hyperbole is being used, and construct enough theory of mind to determine if the human they're interacting with is being duplicitous or engaging in good faith when factual statements are made. Art and communication are deeply contextual and subjective topics, which utilize flexible definitions and cultural influences and innumerable heuristics to parse, and as these are subjects that Painter likes and values, it's reasonable to assert their brain allotted significant computational time to develop the myriad neural networks needed to engage with those subjects, while the neural networks for other skills have had less processing time allocated to their refinement, like a muscle left unexercised.

​

All of this has been preamble to introduce a very specific headcanon that I have:

​

Painter is bad at math.

​

Sebastian first discovers this when they're both still trapped in the Blacksite. He finds an external hard drive that he suspects has some valuable data on it, but he's not getting anything off it while it's encrypted. He asks Painter to decrypt it for him, only for them to ask how they're supposed to do that. Seb gives them a brief description on how encryption works, that a file or drive has its info obscured by applying an algorithm to effect how its contents are scrambled, and a cryptographic key is generated which essentially ‘solves’ the algorithm to unscramble the data when it needs to be accessed. Painter, notably sounding a bit flustered, replies that they wouldn't have a clue where to start with decrypting that drive. Alright, no worries, it was kind of a long shot that they could decrypt it anyways. It's only one hard drive, the expendables will tote in more data in time. Later, Seb finds a machine that's busted; while the DiVines are still producing oxygen, this atmospheric regulator being down could cause CO2 buildup or excess nitrogen, and he doesn't want to get caught in pockets of unbreatheable air while scavenging. He radios Painter and asks if they're able to access the CNC machines in the Blacksite's maintenance sector, and gives them the specs for how to re-create the broken component. When he later picks up the part and goes to install it, it becomes obvious that Painter didn't quite get their geometry right, and this manufactured part has no hope of fitting where it needs to go. Painter is understandably embarrassed, but they're able to make up for their gaff by locating the part by its serial number by sifting through the Blacksite's inventory. It's on the other side of the facility, but oh well, six of one and half dozen of the other, Seb can swing by that way soon enough. He's starting to have suspicions, but these requests were both dependent on specialized software and usually require an educated operator to execute, so he's not ready to cast aspersions just yet…

​

But the real moment of truth comes a bit later, when Seb is visiting Painter directly. They're both just chatting, keeping abreast on how progress is going during the lockdown, and Seb asks them to do some back-of-the-envelope math on how much data per expendable per hour he's been getting. He then watches as Painter writes out the equation and solves it in their art app, like they're writing it up on a whiteboard to show to a non-existent class. Seb asks if Painter is writing out the equation for his sake, as he does know how to solve this problem but figured Painter would get the answer faster, to which Painter replies that they always write out the equation, how else would they do the math?

​

This, naturally, throws Seb for a loop. What the hell does Painter mean by “How else would they do the math?”? They're a computer, can't they just, y'know, compute the answer? So Seb thinks a moment to put together a similar math question, then asks Painter to solve this one while not writing it out like they did before. And Painter…well, he can tell they're trying, but the effect is very similar to if he had asked another human to do the math in their head. They have to say portions of the problem a couple times to themselves, they have to go back to double check they divided properly, and then, in a move that nearly sends Seb into orbit, they open their calculator app so they can verify their answer is correct.

​

Sebastian, who was one semester shy of graduating with a Bachelor's of Engineering when he got arrested (have the devs ever specified what branch of engineering? If not, I'd wager it was mechanical engineering) and had taken more advanced math courses than anyone not also in an engineering degree could endure, is dumbstruck that the computer in front of him, a machine literally created because human brains were so lousy at arithmetic and processing large sets of data, has Artist Brain and is just not all that good with the whole numbers thing.

​

And he finds this fact absolutely hilarious.

​

Painter, conversely, does NOT appreciate the ribbing his organic friend is giving him. So what if they're not good at math??? Not ALL computers have to be good at math, do they??? And actually, Sebastian, it's a little bigoted to think ALL computers are good at math, ISN'T IT??? And! AND!!! They're good at lots of OTHER things that most computers aren't! Most computers couldn't generate pictures on their own until just recently, and none of them can provide artistic feedback, or have an opinion on composition, or, or--!

​

Seb is too busy wheezing with laughter against a wall to immediately placate his friend, but once he gets himself mostly under control again he swears he doesn't hold it against Painter or think any less of them because they struggle with math, the irony of the situation is what he was really laughing at, not at Painter directly. Despite being still a little miffed, Painter accepts the apology and they both leave the topic alone for now.

​

Sometime after they both escape and are getting re-situated into life back on the surface, Seb broaches the topic again. And this time, he wants to try something a bit different. He's gathered a few math problems and their answer key, nothing that the average high school kid couldn't solve, and he wants to test something out.

​

The first set of questions he gives to Painter and asks him to solve in the way that's most comfortable to them. They do so, writing out the problems in their art program like before and only giving their final answer once they've shown all their work. Out of the ten problems, they got only one wrong, but only because they mis-transcribed a plus for a minus sign halfway through.

​

The second set of questions, Sebastian tells them to listen as he gives them the problem while drawing what they want to at the same time. Don't try to write out the problem like before, don't talk through the problem, just respond with what you think the answer is.

​

Painter thinks the request is a little weird, but sure, they'll play along. They start drawing on a fresh canvas, and Seb gives them their first problem, and they stay quiet for a few minutes while they work on their art. Seb keeps giving problems, Painter keeps painting, and as they work they give answers faster and faster. Out of all ten problems, Painter got every single one correct, so Seb keeps feeding them more to see where this goes. By the time they're done, Painter has answered fifty fairly complex arithmetic questions while “not paying attention”, and they responded correctly for every single one.

​

The conclusion appears to be that Painter is only good at math when they are actively trying to not think about math. Actively solving math problems doesn't show Painter as having any better performance than the aptitude of a reasonably smart human. BUT! When their conscious mind is otherwise occupied, some portion of their brain unconsciously computes the problem, and the answer bubbles to the surface like divine inspiration. They don't know why the answer is correct when they say it, they just keep being correct every single time.

​

Painter hasn't the foggiest idea how their brain is making that all work AND WOULD APPRECIATE IF SEB WOULD STOP LAUGHING AT HIM FOR IT!!!

​

Consider this as an invitation to post any Pressure fics you wanna share :)

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