A question asked on my worldbuilding list: Any strange or even silly rights enshrined in law in your cultures? Alas, most of the rights found in the Empire are relatively conventional; for the strange and silly, it’s much easier to look in the realms of bizarre tradition and ancient,
Hellgate: The three long-range stargates leading to the Ancal Drifts and Koric Expanse constellations, home of the Leviathan Consciousness, an aggressively hegemonizing perversion that will eat your mind-state for breakfast on its way to devouring your entire civilization. Even civilizations otherwise at war with each other cooperate enough to keep
Hegemonic Empire: The Empire, absolutely. Since the old days of the Consolidation Wars back on the homeworld, the consensus culture of the Empire (individual exceptions like the Imperium Bellipotent and a few grumpy occasional reanimators of the Doctrine of the Ecumenical Throne notwithstanding) is pretty sure that military imperialism has
Heavyworlder: Yes, but this universe is hard-SF enough that they do reflect the “compact, stout, and short” version of the trope. Of course, seeing as eldrae are all height-advantaged anyway, even the heavyworlder clades are still looking humans in the eye. There are also lightworlders, of course, and Fan Service
Hearing Voices: If a regular person hears voices in their head that aren’t themselves, that probably means they’re insane. For any one of trillions of transsophonts, on the other hand, it means that they’re talking to their muse, that computer that lives in their head and works
Voice of the Legion: The Transcend has, for those rare occasions upon which the metamind Itself elects to speak through one of its members or an emissary, mastered the art of generating this from most kinds of regular speech organ. Subverted inasmuch as it’s neither has to, nor is
The Virus: Hegemonizing swarms is the term for the kind of Hive Mind that does this (most are perfectly benign non-coercive Fusions) – for as long as they exist, anyway, inasmuch as hegemonizing swarms, like Space Pirates, are acceptable targets for just about everybody. The greatest and most long-lived of these
Blue Skinned Space Babe: I wasn’t actually going to bother with this one, but having been reading this: …recently, and noting the registry of blue people, well. There are some. Eldrae blood is blue, a lovely shade of deep indigo, which has a lot to do with the particular
Space Pirates: Type I is occasionally possible, thanks to the constraints of economically favorable trajectories, refueling stations (around gas giants), and the stargates themselves making it at least possible to lie around in somewhat-disguised- bearing in mind the constraints covered under Stealth in Space – ambush for merchant shipping to show
Those with a curiosity as to how Eldraeverse FTL travel (which is to say, stargates) interacts with causality, time travel, etc. might well be interested in the comment thread starting here: Trope-a-Day: Portal Network
Stealth in Space: There ain’t no stealth in space. This applies especially to lighthuggers, inasmuch as an antimatter torch at high burn can be detected for light years even if you’re not the star system that it’s pointed at. If you are, all the more so. Much
Neglectful Precursors: Often played straight: see Black Box, Living Relic, Sealed Evil in a Can, etc. Of course, in fairness to them, most weren’t planning on going extinct or otherwise disappearing from the galactic scene.