Cousins, sisters, brothers, partners, commensals, and any other clan-affiliates you see fit to share this with: Whatever you’re doing, drop it, get off your branches, and get to Torqat in the Csell Buffer right now. Bring anything that can fly and hold mass. Flagrantly was scouting a heat signature
Literally Shattered Lives: What cryoburn ammunition (see: Abnormal Ammo) could do, ideally – but it’s really hard to pull off outside laboratory conditions.
Liberty Over Prosperity: Outright inverted, from most perspectives. The Empire with its tiny apathetic example of The Government is also, by any reasonable standard, the polity with the largest amount of cashy money sloshing around at all levels of its economy, while its economists mutter smugly about ‘deadweight loss’, ‘artificial
Some people have an issue or two with science, because it keeps saying no to all their fond notions. Geocentrism? Turns out that not only is your world not the center of the universe, but it’s an insignificant speck in the middle of undreamt vastnesses and eternities. Souls, destinies,
Libation for the Dead: In a variation. Just as the eldrae burn their dead (to free the spirit, whose nature is of fire, from the body, whose nature is of wood), the equivalent of libations for the dead are burned, not poured out. (Thus, they’re also usually of quite
Letting Her Hair Down: This trope is essentially enshrined into standard eldrae etiquette, (especially for women, although long hair is de rigeur for both sexes); whether one wears one’s hair up or down is universally understood as a signifier of whether one is busy working (and therefore should not
Today’s question for Dr. Science is, “What are starports for? Lots of starships call at my hab, and we don’t have one.” Starports and starships have surprisingly little to do with one another. If there were only starships and drifts, and perhaps the odd rock, we’d have
Leave No Witnesses: Mostly averted. Given the prevalence of vector stacks (allowing reinstantiation), muses, lifeloggers, pervasive surveillance, and so forth, the sensible criminal finds it much more convenient to so arrange their affairs that it doesn’t matter that they were witnessed. Sometimes, nonetheless, played disturbingly straight, by those people
Leave Behind a Pistol: This is not, it should be said, Imperial policy when dealing with the former great or good who have gone bad but still retain a shred of honor. It is merely Imperial practice.
Captain’s log, 11204.9. We’ve come alongside the eighteenth belt mining facility in our securing patrol of Ódeln System. On our way in, we tracked what appeared to be a merchant freighter inbound to the station, presumably lacking the delta-v to go elsewhere. Well, it wasn’t a
Le Parkour / Combat Parkour: Something of a standard part of the skillset, even for getting around normally, in the modern era. This tends to come from three places: one, common exposure to how one gets around in microgravity; two, lots of habitats and inhabited planets/moons having less than “standard”
Latex Space Suit: Yep, these (‘skinsuits’, as opposed to ‘hardsuits’) are in common use – by the civilian spacer, anyway, who has no use for, for example, vacuum-sealed hardshell combat armor – although without the ridiculous semi-Stripperiffic elements (Sheer, you say? Heh. That fabric may contain pores, but it also contains MEMS,