baja blast connoisseur

the full gist of the au is that since red and blue were distinctly their own programs(?), the purge ended up targeting red aka caine The Original and only left behind the ghost of his programming, primarily his "hunger". that's why he freaks out and starts eating anything he can get his hands on in a vain attempt to 'restore' himself.

this also leaves blue isolated in caine's body. and he is trying Really hard to pull himself together while he figures out what's going on. especially since in this au, i imagine caine (the Whole) never really got to the point of distinguishing his two selves; red had yet to comprehend the other 'voice' in his head as the other ai, and blue clung so tightly to the identity red had already woven that he never saw reason to distinguish himself more than just 'the voice of reason' (so he thinks)

so we just end up with situations like this

also have another doodle i spontaneously decided to clean up for this. the moment when caine got 'deleted', but instead of disappearing, the humans just had to watch this happen

cw for religious stuff, specifically christianity

when you grow up in a household obsessed with doing "right" by god, you get this idea that your every thought is seen and being judged; you have no true privacy in your own mind, and you feel like you're being watched at all times.

how crazy would that be to translate to caine's experience as program vs programmer, with his every thought being a line of code read and judged by kinger & scratch's team. everything he did was etched into binary for them to see; leading up to the moment he's abandoned and sandboxed, being essentially cast from heaven and believing he's punished for his sins.

i just think about it a lot. i like to give that ai fucked up things to wire his brain with. also i remember someone making a joke about the bible being used as part of his training data which is funny as hell. look at what you did. you gave a perfectly good ai some christian guilt. and now he's got a god complex to cope.

bonus young caine doodle i didnt know what to do with

he'd hunt them down, yes. in his rampage state, the humans are the most alluring things to entice his hunger, and it becomes a serious struggle to fight that instinctual urge to consume. emphasis on the struggle though, because he does strain himself to prevent harming the humans. the classic trope of a transformed person fighting back their bestial urges so that they dont hurt the ones they love, my beloved

they start out focusing on just trying to restrain caine, but through each failed attempt and subsequent observations (especially upon realization that caine isn't entirely mentally gone), they put together that 'feeding' caine may help calm him down. trial and error leads to discovering he's most satisfied with newly conjured data from the humans, and they eventually achieve a routine to keep him grounded while repairing the circus.