Trope-a-Day (R): A Form You Are Comfortable With

A Form You Are Comfortable With: Both straight, and sort of.  The minds vast and cool and incomprehensible swishing about in the middle layers of the functional soup that is the Transcend do generally adopt comfortable avatar forms when it’s time to visit people who can’t quite apprehend them.  The ineffable postsophont entities in the upper layers of the Transcend, on the other hand, have real trouble becoming that small, and tend to rely instead on intermediaries, or simply vastening the merely sophont into something large enough to understand them – which works fine at the time, even if it leaves you afterwards with at best a bunch of now-incomprehensible memory in your head, however satisfying it may have been at the time, or at worst, a bad case of godshatter.

(It’s also a technique often used for first contacts, but post-contact, would-be sophisticated non-starbound species are expected to get over their morphological prejudices, m’kay?  And also, sometimes, their perceptual difficulties.)