#the arm isn't actually getting enough blood & the nerves are through the port's nerves so it may actually be more painful than the automail

[rizalismyotp]

Not to mention the constant pain!! He probably sleeps so long and deeply in part because holy shit less pain?

ok so just let me cook for a second.

so fma (b and the manga) address that the reason ed is kind of short is that he's essentially been providing nutrients for al's body the entire time al's in the armour. but just think for a moment how whack that actually is.

so when else do people's bodies tend to provide nutrients for another? during pregnancy. but normally during pregnancy your growing a baby, ed was trying to grow a fucking teenager, and this was during his early to mid teens. like pregnancy in itself is fucking risky as shit, but this shit? it's a miracle that ed and al both made it to the end of the series especially when you consider how ed was living.

like ed and al were constantly travelling and sure sometimes they ate good when they stopped with the hughes family or with pinako or winry, but fuck most of the time? ed was definitely living off takeout, which isn't exactly going to provide the most balanced diet. so like nutritionally ed's already shot himself in the foot.

physical exercise is a hard one to judge because some of the reasons pregnant people are told to avoid strenuous exercise as it can lead to the baby overheating or risk causing physical harm to the baby, so there's some factors that probably won't affect al's body as it's not likely to experience the same physical sensations as ed. but exercising while malnourished is probably the bigger issue.

we add in the fact that ed wears heavy automail especially earlier on. to the point that dominic was like "you know these can stunt your growth right." so like ed's body was probably just screaming like 'how the fuck do you expect me to grow under these shitty conditions'

but it's just like no wonder this fucking bitch was so cranky all the time. he's hungry, constantly pushing his body past his physical limits, and he's got the threat of the end of the world hanging over him. god it's amazing that mustang only ever got yelled at by ed because bruhhhhh I would have stabbed mustang on my first day.

yeah I bet that ed has the deepest sleep of his life after the promised day. like he's got one less automail arm, and his brother's no longer stealing all his nutrients. yeah man's gonna be waking up from that sleep so whacked out that he doesn't even know what year it is.

[one-of-us-must-be-crazy]

Ok forgive me bc this isn't even from your list but... technological quirks for Samuels? I was watching the good place and the AI character in that show gets "drunk" from proximity to strong magnets. Does he have any issues like that? Magnets, radio interference, etc. Can you dropbox into a synthetic's mind? Can he connect to bluetooth? All questions that plague me.

I HAVE SO MANY OF THESE. I ended up brain-blanking last night becuase it was A Day and also A Night but anyway. 

Samuels, like the later marine models in canon, can connect wirelessly to various devices and networks; which means that if there’s a system for it, he can tap into it, and both wreak havoc or do helpful things like turn the lights on or off. This is basically bluetooth. Once he turned off Ripley’s music after the third time Mr. Roboto came up on ‘shuffle’ in an hour. 

He’s automatically, partially due to the wireless ability and partially becuase of his heightened senses, knows if a person he’s talking to is a person or a synthetic.

There’s nothing that can make him drunk, short of overwhelming his systems. Not to be a complete romantic sap but Ripley does it to him sometimes, his sense of logic that sits at the forefront of his mind ebbs away enough for him to sound a bit silly, tipsy. 

Becuase of the way that his vocal system is structured, he can’t cry, sing very well, and it takes him a LONG time to be able to mimic anything that sounded like human laughter. The weird noise and motion he made when he first tried out laughing sounded frankly horrifying, with Amanda collecting herself quickly to try and smile encouragingly “That wasn’t bad,” “That was horrible.” “Yeah keep working on it.”

With few exceptions, he can’t deny a direct order from his owner. When Ripley talked (threatened) WY into signing him over, she had him write her in as his owner, as much as she hated it. Better he has to listen to her to take the trash out than WY ordering him to get rid of a risk to the company and snapping her neck. 

This is stolen directly  from the book The Mad Scientist’s Daughter by Cassandra Rose Clarke, but around the same time that Weyland Yutani started to make all models fully lifelike in appearance for purposes of sneaky and otherwise unsavory goals, a few graduate students thought it would be HILARIOUS to program the machines printing the soft tissues to include ‘blood’ vessels down south, among other abilities. And a lot of nerve sensors. After the shit he and Amanda went through the least they deserve is having the robot able to orgasm. Beyond that I don’t give a fuck. It’s fanfiction. It’s garbage fanfiction. Leave me be.

During the uses of this bit of coding, if one or both parties involved go too hard at it, his voice goes to static. He’s not damaged, but the first time that happened Ripley flipped out “ARE YOU OKAY?! CHRIS? CHRISTOPHER PLEASE–” “I’m….fine…sorry,” and he’s so ashamed of it at first, hating to show what he is so obviously in any situation, let alone when he’s with her, but she likes it. Once she finds out that he isn’t injured, that its just a quirk or a glitch, she gets very smug about it “I broke you :) “

Obviously he doesn’t get mental illness, but his mind processes their trauma by adapting security programs; he feels something like anxiety as his logic programs tell him that there could be something wrong, that there isn’t, but there could be, and that he needs to patrol their apartment. Rewriting this adaptation takes both personal effort and a lot of external reassurance from his new companion.

He has photo-perfect memory, almost like a film, of everything he’s experienced and can view or upload playback of it in video form. E v e r y t h i n g. 

I have no idea how long a synthetic’s charge lasts for, so I wrote that once a month or every other month he tops off his power with a short recharge, to avoid having to spend multiple days unconscious recharging when he runs out entirely. A hidden port in his arm can connect to a wire for either phsyical computer connections or charging. 

Androids have a power-save mode during which they’re only vaguely aware of external stimuli for the sake of self-preservation (and of their operators, that should they be called on they can wake themselves and come to the humans’ aid). Internal temperature drops slightly, and processors slow down, while software programs shut down entirely. It’s similar to what a human would think of as ‘relaxing.’ Samuels uses this most nights to go to bed with Ripley. He wakes up from this with zero drowsiness.

Or of course there is a full shutdown, which is much harder for a synthetic to get out of, much closer to actual human sleep than power-save. Normally he’ll program if for a few hours, but only if he’s genuinely in need of running updates or diagnostics, or at risk of overheating, as he doesn’t like ‘leaving’ her alone for that long. During this, he doesn’t have any sound or vibration or the vague feeling that could be compared to a pulse, and Ripley tries to pretend that his more-or-less-dead appearance doesn’t bother her, so he can still wake up in bed like normal. 

Like any technology, a synthetic will eventually be out of date and incompatible with new updates. In theory his core processors and memory could be removed and replaced into a new body, and they’ve already done this once upon returning to Luna.  

Synthetics AI is adaptive, and while Samuels was already one of the “mistakes,” models that have become sentient during development, he’s very very VERY obviously Not Human the more you talk to him. Five, ten, twenty years after he’s been living like one however, he’s nearly indistinguishable from a human being in his words and behavior.

Becuase he can tap into wi-fi, he cheats at trivia games. Ripley could have killed him for it, but now they’re the champions at her favorite bar’s trivia night, and have won a lot of free alcohol, so she doesn’t mind.

I’ll post more as I think of them, becuase for some reason I feel like I’m forgetting a few of the main ‘rules’ I wrote.