Defaults are applied to any subject, regardless if it has its own parents. They are stored under the default subject type. There are per-type defaults, such as default:<type>, that are only applied to <type> subjects, and global defaults, stored under the subject default:default, that are applied to every subject. Defaults are only queried once at the lowest priority in subject data calculations, using the type of the subject that data is being calculated for, not any of its parents. For example, if a permission was being queried.