trope-a-day
Trope-a-Day: Rainbow Pimp Gear
Rainbow Pimp Gear: What, you think every planet has its vegetation/sky/ground the same color? On some planets – say Saturn’s moon, Titan – burnt orange and fuchsia are camouflage colors.
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trope-a-day
Trope-a-Day: Racial Remnant
Racial Remnant: Most notably, the trilateral londian, who are also an unusual case because while the modern Londian Wanderers are clearly descendants, both genetically and culturally, of the elder-race of the same name that used to dominate the Londian Traverse, they don’t know exactly how they ended up that
trope-a-day
Trope-a-Day: Putting on the Reich
Putting on the Reich: While the Imperial Military Service has been known to like peaked caps (although not in the current uniform), capes, trenchcoats, jackboots, eagles – well, the-local-animal-which-for-our-purposes-let’s-call-a-wyvern, actually, but any raptor gilded and put on top of a standard probably counts – lightning bolts, and calling rapid interface drop-troop
trope-a-day
Trope-a-Day: Puppeteer Parasite
Puppeteer Parasite: Mostly not naturally (due to the aversion of No Biochemical Barriers), but infectious neuroviruses can do a damn good impression of this – which is the sort of thing that makes defense planners twitchy, but no-one’s done it on a large scale yet (as mentioned under Alien Invasion)
trope-a-day
Trope-a-Day: Punctuation Shaker
Punctuation Shaker: Averted. Those punctuation marks have meaning in the Constructed Language. Specifically, the acute indicates a long vowel, and the umlaut-that-is-really-a-dieresis indicates that a vowel is to be pronounced separately from the previous one, rather than as a diphthong. Any wandering apostrophes you may see exist because I’m
trope-a-day
Trope-a-Day: Public Execution
Public Execution: How things were done historically in the Empire – not for entertainment or bloodlust (they were generally rather solemn affairs), or for intimidation, but rather because of the transparency principles enshrined in the Imperial Charter; while the Imperial government might have lawful occasion to kill criminals, it was thought
trope-a-day
Trope-a-Day: Psychic Static
Psychic Static: Amusingly enough, since the operating principle of telepathy/empathy is, as mentioned under Psychic Powers, WiFi, psychic static is actual static. As a bonus side effect, this makes aurorae even more spectacular, and indeed downright trippy.
trope-a-day
Trope-a-Day: Pstandard Psychic Pstance
Pstandard Psychic Pstance: The psychokinetic kind exists, as does the one-handed gesture version when using techlepathy. In neither case does it have any actual power-related function whatsoever, and you can use either without doing the gesturing. The former (see: Magical Gesture), is done purely for the sake of flamboyance, or
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Trope-a-Day: Proud Scholar Race Guy
Proud Scholar Race Guy: The eldrae might well wear this hat among the Imperials – after all, they do love knowledge – had they not run into the galari, who, in the closest thing to a hat that I intend to appear, are entirely qualified as Proud Scholar Race… ah, Crystals. Subverted
trope-a-day
Trope-a-Day: Proud Merchant Race Guy
Proud Merchant Race Guy: This and the next couple of tropes are difficult, because, well, it’s just not all that hatty a universe. The Imperials are notorious for their pro-commerce attitudes (see: Blue and Orange Morality) and – especially on Seranth (Imperial Core), one of the Worlds’ largest tradeworlds (see
trope-a-day
Trope-a-Day: Projected Man
Projected Man: A common representation-format for artificial intelligences (and other infomorphs) – although a majority of AIs do not use biosapience-shaped avatars, preferring more abstract neomorphic shapes – and telerepresentation users both. In some cases, may not be a simple trigraphic (hologram, to speakers of non-deeply-SFnal English who don’t realize the
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Trope-a-Day: Hard Light
Hard Light: Not strictly speaking. What there is is the ontotechnological extrapolation of photonic molecules, quantum wells, programmable matter, and various other cutting-edge concepts until they resemble something like the reality graphics (and, indeed, the Eldraeverse calls them reality graphics) seen in Vernor Vinge’s A Fire Upon the Deep