Editing Genius The Transgression/Chapter One: The Cosmos (section)

===The Breakthrough===
''At Last I Understand''

A genius' Breakthrough―the moment she stops being a normal mortal, however naturally gifted, and becomes Inspired―is often a traumatic experience, though it is rarely sudden. Over the course of weeks, months, or even years, a mortal's perspective begins to change. Ideas that once made sense become dubious, unintuitive, even suspicious, while new notions seem to leap unbidden into the person's mind. These might be dismissed as madness, if the ideas don't work, or unexpected leaps of intuition, if somehow they do, but the nagging suspicion remains that the ideas are coming from Outside, that somehow they are not one's own.

Most reasonable people, at this point, retreat from the strange revelations: they shut themselves down, force themselves to go about their day-to-day lives, and if they're lucky or determined, they won't experience a Breakthrough at all. They will live out their little lives like the rest of us. But some rush headlong toward these new experiences, while others cannot or will not escape them, perhaps seeing answers there that have eluded them before. This is how a genius is born.

The first few months after the Breakthrough are traumatic and infuriating: Inspiration, for all its brilliance, fears the light of day. Answers that seem so obvious as the genius labors by night in rented laboratory space turn to nonsense when shown to one's fellows. Many geniuses think they are going mad. Their friends almost certainly think so. Isolation and madness set in as the Breakthrough drags on: the genius is Inspired, but lacks any ability to produce something. He is not yet a maker of wonders.