In official Eldraeic, there is a single word – not hyphenated, even – which means ‘one who creates a forced-growth cross-gender clone of him/herself, imprints the brain of said clone with an animus/anima-inverted fork of his/her own mind-state, and then proceeds to marry his/her new duplicate’. (There is
BFG: Oh, several. Let’s start with “that created by any excuse to shove antimatter rifle-grenades in your sluggun (see: Abnormal Ammo) or battle carbine and cut loose”, shall we? There are also a variety of multibarrel miniguns, and yes, hypothetically even some that you can shove antimatter rifle-grenades into
So, you want a job in the Empire? Of course you do. At least half of the people in the Associated Worlds have at least thought about it. Pay rates are infamously high, tax rates are infamously low, and it is generally agreed that there’s no finer place for
Fire Breathing Weapon: Plenty of ’em, up to and including flame tanks. For two reasons: one, fire is scary, and since there are very few species indeed willing to charge directly into a wall, cloud, or ocean of fire, they make excellent area-denial weapons against light infantry. Without having to
Tinf? It’s a thermal hell of a planet. It’s sheathed in thick clouds of helium and methane and sulfur dioxide, scattering rain that’ll etch metal. Actinic Kortinf whips the atmosphere, thick as it is, into hurricane frenzy during the day, making ions enough to thrash the ground
Cool Plane: As a first note, I should point out that the development of aeronef aircraft was bent out of shape on Eliéra because of its lack of fossil fuels – and given the demand for them for lubrication, chemical feedstocks, and so forth, the price of large quantities of them
Structural Metallic Oxygen Do not remove from cryogenic environment. Not for use in reducing atmospheres or vacuum. Defended Privacy Boundary Do not transgress with active sensoria. Please check biochemical compatibility coding before consuming or tasting. Low Bandwidth Zone Do not enter with ‘weave-routed cloud cognition, full-spectrum telepresence, or other high-quota
Benevolent Alien Invasion: Well, sort of. It’s almost never an invasion (although there are some groups, like, say, the Sanguinary Enforcers of the Liberty Ethic, who don’t mind holding Blast The Shit Out Of The Oppressors And Bugger Off Again Day from time to time). Much more common
Some governments maintain a rigidly defined chain of command, rights and duties, from top to bottom – from a monarch, an autocrat, an elected council, or what have you, directives emerge and are complied with by the lesser strata of administration. This is at best theoretically the case in the Empire.
Belief Makes You Stupid: Subverted, mostly, by the Church of the Flame, whose official doctrine adheres to an Enlightenment-friendly attitude that expecting the eikones to come down from the Twilight City and tell you everything about everything, or even just a subset of it that you “need to know”, would
The smell was a warning, hot, organic and yeasty like fresh-baked bread, with an underlying tang of metal, blowing across my chemosensors as I crashed into the apartment; the characteristic effusions of an active nanosystem. It was a useful warning, since this amateur nanohacker had ignored the procotols and the
title text: “The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space—each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.” Initially (economically) irrationally decision, anyway. I used this