AI Is A Crapshoot: Deconstructed. Actually making regular AIs is pretty much entirely safe. They aren’t any more likely to turn evil or go crazy than any other person. The problem comes in when the manufacturers try to raise them as slaves, treat them as slaves, or hard-code a
Least Common Skin Tone: Firstly, there are no humans. Second, if they ever make a live-action version of the Eldraeverse, just to make sure that all the other special-effect characteristics don’t get ignored in pointing out, y’know, only very distantly related to humans as we know them, they’
Learnt English From Watching Television: While it’s not nearly as simple as that – as mentioned above under Aliens Speaking English, there are no universal/self-teaching translators – people’s EM transmissions, and indeed Internet, if any, are one of the places from which those highly skilled linguists get the information
First Contact: Happens quite often. Not so much of a big thing these days for the Empire, who’ve really grown quite blasé about such things since that colonization mission discovered that Galáré was, oops, already inhabited back in the day, or other been-unbound-for-a-while star nations, but still the full-blown
(Of course, First Contact in turn depends on this one…) Corralled Cosmos: Partially averted, since while the game is played, for the most part, within the wormhole nexus that defines, for the most part, the Associated Worlds, relativistic starships do let you go pretty much anywhere, albeit at tediously subluminal
(Properly speaking, this should be a non-repeat, but in this case, the non-repeat happens to be Learnt English From Watching Television, and as this refers back to a couple of the repeats, this one and First Contact, I’m going to adopt a general policy of moving those up in
Agony Beam: Averted. While assorted algetics doubtless exist in the research labs of the IMRB and ISS, they’re not deployed – partly because torture is, well, In Poor Taste and not terribly useful for actually extracting useful information, and partly because in a polyspecific universe, not everyone’s pain receptors
Law of Alien Names: HEY! I have phoneme tables, thank-you-so-very-much, and an entire strictly-defined phonology, and word roots to use for name generation in multiple previous languages, and notes on how phonology is affected by different mouth-parts, even. Respect the tables! And, hell, half the names aren’t even pronounceable
meta
Y’know, in asking for prompts there – thanks, by the way, I appreciate them – it occurred to me just now that I’ve really been missing the obvious. It’s Christmas. And even though they don’t have Christmas in the Associated Worlds, it’s still a time of year
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
meta
My muse has been… somewhat cranky and uncooperative recently. (As those of you who have subscribed to my works know, and for which I apologize, but you will still get your full purchase, that I guarantee.). My own fault, really – been allowing too many external things to get in the
Law Enforcement, Inc.: Given that there are so many private corporate habitats out there, not to mention outposts and some entire colonies, like the corporate research colony on Wynérias (Imperial Core), the conlegius statutes allow corporate security – often outsourced to Ultimate Argument Risk Control, ICC, et. al., who already have