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
Absolute Xenophobe: There are some species that might feel this way, but almost none that try to act accordingly on the interstellar scale; in general, pissing off the entire Galaxy, or even that small piece of it that constitutes the Associated Worlds, is not survival-oriented behavior (see Genocide Dilemma, when
Abnormal Ammo: While regular pistols, snipers and carbines (the three principal kinds of slugthrower) just fire flechettes chipped off an ammo block, a sluggun (or a military grade carbine that comes with an undermounted sluggun), while usually firing big slug-spikes of dense metal as an anti-materiel weapon, can instead fire
Hello, new people! If you haven’t seen any of this before, this is my worldbuilding/writing blog, in which I talk about the universe in which I work.  It’s recently been moved here from another site, which is why you can find some archive content older than this,
trope-a-day
This also serves as the introduction to this series of posts.  As I’m porting them over from the old Tumblr at which this used to be hosted, I’ll repeat here what I said there: Welcome to the first of today’s literary announcements. So, I’ve set off
eldrae
I’m posting this one out of order, mostly because I’m finding more and more coming up in the list that reference it – the psychological differences between the eldrae, and indeed the Imperial, on the street and the humanity we’re used to and their effects on their sense
trope-a-day
Fantastic Caste System: Subverted. While the Eldraeic concept of darëssef is often glossed as “caste” in translation, and while the nine groups of acquiescents (those who serve higher powers), aesthants (those who create beauty), executors (those who plan and implement), hearthmistresses (those who maintain; despite the way the name comes