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Capital Letters Are Magic: They are indeed: prominent local examples include the Flame and its opposite, the Darkness, in their theological senses. This, though, is Translation Convention for the Eldraeic augmentative affix, in a language that somehow doesnât have an augmentative affix. It means âqualitatively, not quantitatively, more soâ
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Bunny-Ears Lawyer:Â A highly individualist society, near-universal self-employment, and other similar factors lead to plenty of these, yes.
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Bright Castle: Oh, theyâve got lots of these. One of the quirks of having to lead by sheer force of arĂȘte rather than force is that it helps to build a bloody impressive seat to impress people with your leadership qualities from; as such, generations of castle architects have
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Bold Explorer: While I shall leave specific examples to individual fics and so forth, they have a lot of these in the Imperial Exploratory Service, and especially in the first-in scouts and volunteers to crew (as infomorphs) far horizon probes. You have to be a little bit crazy to go
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Body Backup Drive:Â Standard practice in civilized transsophont space, using cloned replacements grown specially â or, for budget body use, travel, or temporary copies, any one of a large number of premade âvatjobsâ. These replacements are designed never to be fully sophont on their own, though; their brains are designed to
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Boarding Pod: What, this? (See here for details of â rare â use.)
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Blood Sport: This, obviously, gets much easier when you have noetic backup technology to ensure that you donât run out of people quite as fast as you otherwise might. Even so, in the Empire and other civilized polities, this is usually limited to martial arts competitions where death is
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Blood on the Debate Floor: Itâs not usual. That said, it has nonetheless happened and occasionally still does, especially in the early days when any hint of the sort of sentiments that led up to the Drowning of the People reoccurring would tend to lead rapidly to the defenestration
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Blade Below the Shoulder:Â Some types I and II exist; the former because a strap-on âweapon podâ is a standard accessory for quick-draw weapons, some of which might as well be blades, and the latter because â well, while theyâre as impractical as concealed weapons as any other cybernetic implant,
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Bizarre Seasons: EliĂ©raâs seasons arenât actually all that bizarre, but they are more complicated than the standard model. It has something resembling our earthly seasons (based on the binary system it occupies, rather than non-applicable axial tilt: it is summer when the planet is between the stars, increasing
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Bizarre Alien Sexes:Â While the eldrae started out with the standard two (male, female), biotechnology has since added two more to their repertoire (neuter, hermaphrodite). And the standard taxonomy of sexes in their language, which has to cope with other species, includes two more â the most common mappings of other-species
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Bizarre Alien Senses: Well, hell, who doesnât have some sort of bizarre senses? Especially since it gets very tricky if you count the whole electromagnetic spectrum as one â i.e., âultravisionâ and âinfravisionâ are both strict subsets of âvisionâ. As, for that matter, is sensing gamma rays â and other