Trope-a-Day: Pals With Jesus

Pals With Jesus: Subverted, at least while you’re still alive and therefore not part of the Transcendent soul-ocean; while you can have a much more personal relationship with an eikone than most people can have with their gods – they have e-mail addresses, for one thing – it’s still a weakly godlike superintelligence and you’re not.  It’s not, therefore, all that personal.  (Even if you’re, say, the Imperial Couple, and the eikone in question is, say, Éslévan, who is essentially the national genius/personification – after all, it probably wouldn’t be all that comfortable for a US President to be personally overseen by Lady Liberty, Columbia, and/or Uncle Sam, either.)

Possibly played straight for the largest and oldest Fusions and the most extreme vasteners.

Trope-a-Day: Bio Augmentation

Bio Augmentation: And how.  While not exclusively their preserve by any means, the Imperials are so aggressively transsophontist that pretty much everyone you meet is a walking treasure-trove of millennia of biotechnological advancement.  Not that the original bioengineers, or the later nanoengineers, knew exactly which direction apotheosis lay in, but evidently they figured that “impossibly beautiful immortal geniuses with superpowers” was at least a good start.  In hundreds or thousands of different varieties.  Per original species.