All The Best Wenches Have One

Inspiration obvious.
If you haven’t already, go read
Girl Genius.

wrenchhammer: the largest size of wrench, suitable for leaning on, requiring a backsling to carry, and used for such tasks as unbolting the lids of reactor cores, dogging down the doors of pressure chambers, or tightening the bolts securing the drive chain of an elevator that runs all the way through the planet.

Its soubriquet comes from the blunt and spiked faces added on either side of the wrench socket, suiting it admirably to belaboring particularly heavy machinery or doing the needful should one encounter any of the various beasties lurking in the deep tunnels of the Eliéran crust.

Rumors of a militarized version of the wrenchhammer (the “warwrench”) designed for the Imperial Legions’ combat engineers are just that – rumors, based on rookie pranks and the occasional mock-up hanging on mess walls. Not that the standard model hasn’t cracked a few heads from time to time.

– engineering_jargon.text

Trope-a-Day: Nerds Are Sexy

Nerds Are Sexy: In the Empire, almost universally so.  It’s an emergent consequence, and an entirely predictable one, of certain other cultural characteristics: see, for example, For Science, Serious Business, and Wrench Wench.  Also, thereby, self-perpetuating.

Fic-wise and other-reason-wise, see also Nice Labcoat.

Trope-a-Day: Wrench Wench

Yes, just like this. (Image from Serenity: Those Left Behind)

Yes, just like this.
(Image from Serenity: Those Left Behind)

Wrench Wench: Oh, my, there are a lot of these.  There are, of course, perfectly valid in-world reasons for this (population demographics and their effect on employment patterns; never having acquired human cultures’ weird attitudes about men’s and women’s work; the cultural stigma attached to not knowing how things work and being able to fix/upgrade whatever; and a noticeable and very widespread cultural case of Nerds Are Sexy), but, y’know, so long as people are going to try and diagnose my opinions and preferences from my writing, I might as well admit to this one…

*cough*

(Also, of course, the 93rd Imperial Legion (Combat Engineers) “The Wrench Wenches”. Which is also, unsurprisingly, an example of Amazon Brigade.)