Fanfic / The Open Door

Note: This is a noncanon sidestory to Thousand Shinji, and as such, will contain unmarked spoilers for it. You have been warned.

The Mega Crossover non-canonical side-story to Thousand Shinji, The Open Door (alternate links) takes place twenty five years after Thousand Shinji, after Earth has been unified and Canon 40K technology introduced. At the beginning, a "representative" of Tzintchi is sent to negotiate with Kyon in Haruhi's universe, the eponymous 'open door'. It goes on from there and gets progressively crazier as more and more universes are drawn into it via the new Chaos Gods' quest to defeat the Necrontyr and the C'tan.

Officially dead.

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This work provides examples of:

• Aborted Arc:
  • The war against the C'Tan and the Necrontyr foreshadowed in the predecessor series never happened, and the whole story's premise (finding new allies and better technology) was quickly forgotten in favor of writing New Chaos stomping over weaker universes.
  • Asuka's scheme to inevitably turn Starbuck into one of her followers was hinted in the very beginning of chapter 68 and never touched upon again. Starbuck did not even show up in the next chapters, and Asuka's plan was never revealed.
  • In chapter 68 New Chaos steals a spaceship of the canon 40,000 universe, drawing an Inquisitor's interest.
  • Inone early chapter, Shinji let his canon counterpart keep the Spear of Longinus because he had a plan. That subplot was never touched upon or mentioned again.
  • The board game that the Chaos Gods were friendly playing against each other as a way to build up their army got completely forgotten after the first few chapters.
  • Back in 2009 the author stated that he had batted around a bit the idea of doing the actual sequel to Thousand Shinji, narrating the conflict with the Necrontyr and the C'Tan without any multiverse hoping. As declaring the fic dead, he mentioned that his final -and unrevealed- idea would have really written him in a corner if he had written it down.
• Abusive Precursors:
  • The House of the Lords of Time, ancestors of the Time Lords, who created canon 40k.
  • The Voidborn may also count, as they are directly or indirectly responsible for numerous EldritchAbominations. Oh, and they slaughtered entire universes worth of people.
• All There in the Manual: The main story is fully readable on its own, but following the Word of God helps quite a bit.
• Alternate Universe: Chapter two clearly shows that canon Neon Genesis Evangelion still exists as a separate universe from the native Thousand Shinji one, while later chapters also show that canon 40k also still exists. Comments by the author have also indicated that he considers the other Eva/40K fanfic as part of the multiverse as well.
• Always Chaotic Evil:
  • The whole human race, considering all humans worship Chaos gods and are self-proclaimed evil.
  • All the Necrontyr and the C'Tan are portrayed as utterly evil, despicable and irredeemable in order to justify New Chaos' actions.
  • After playing it completely straight for dozens of chapters the author decided deconstructing the trope in the Forgotten Realms chapters.
• Author Appeal: Academia Nut really likes Iron Maiden.
• Back from the Dead: Alicia and Precia Testarossa.
• Backup Bluff: Lars, a demon of Chaos, is accidentally transported to a plane full of devils. However, the devils are terrified of Chaos Demons, and Lars uses this trope as well as the fear they have to keep them from killing him, and signing a binding contract with them, saying that Chaos will not invade their home. Once he's not in danger of getting attacked, he reveals that, despite what he insinuated, he's lost, cut off from his people, and has no idea how he got to this plane to begin with. But because the devils are Lawful Evil, and they signed a contract with him preventing them from attacking him, it leads to epic-level facepalms and groaning from the devils at how easily they were tricked.
• Badass Boast: Quite a few — one that stands out is when the Stiletto first encounters The Borg. After The Borg give their terms of surrender, Rong-Arya's response?
  "We are Chaos. Raise your shields and give us a good fight. We will sacrifice your souls to our gods. Your culture will burn. Resistance is amusing."
• Badass Bookworm: Washal the Pale.
• Bad Powers, Bad People: One of newChaos's issues.
• Battle Couple: Shinji and Asuka -and his other wives-.
• Berserk Button: You do not hurt children while New Chaos is around. If you do, you deserve what you get.
  • Also shown with the charmingly named Praxis warship The Bombardment of Delhi. It's summed up with just one line: "Arya had been born in Delhi."
• Beware the Nice Ones: "Right now Belldandy was saying, 'Hurt Keiichi here and I'll introduce you to an eternity of pain'."
• Bigger Stick: It is impossible to deny that New Chaos owes a lot of their superiority to the canon 40k tech available to them... but there are even bigger sticks out there, and newChaos either treads very lightly in their universes or simply does not go near them at all. This avoiding of bigger fish has allowed them to avoid serious threats thus far, and makes them look unbeatable, perhaps unduly.
  • The author has mentioned that New Chaos would lose badly were they to go up against the world of Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann.
  • Lars knows that he is a demon, but he is flat-out terrified of Belldandy.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: What standards New Chaos appears to have, such as a nigh-Fettered absolute devotion to the protection of children and punishment of their abusers, is contrasted with horrifically anarcho-libertarian laws or lack thereof, near-Unfettered approach to combat and a variety of what are humanly seen as atrocities. The sheer contrast in their extremes of behaviour has driven people both in the audience and In-Universe to blanket label them as evil.
• Brick Joke: Back during Thousand Shinji, Shinji jokes that if he keeps converting people to Chaos he should have a pamphlet printed to make things faster. Fast forward to The Open Door and the first thing the Chaos Marines do after pacifying a colony is start passing out copies of the pamphlet that Shinji envisioned.
• Break the Haughty: At one point, a guinea pig drow mage is "plugged" into the Weave and gets a shock from seeing the power of Humanity from Lars' native universe.
• Car Fu: More accurately, supertank fu; in the first simulation against Ashley and her Eva, Scipio popped a wheelie to get the Eva off, while in the simulation against the Necrontyr, Ashley created a ramp using her Eva's AT field for Scipio to land on the Necrontyr barge.
• Card-Carrying Villain: The main characters and their troops identify themselves like "evil". Intriguingly they still complain when someone else labels them like "evil"... which makes no sense because if they don't consider they are the "good guys" then why does it bother them being regarded like the "bad guys"?
• Charles Atlas Superpower: While they do eventually get cybernetics and mutations, Divine Assassin training was supposed to bring out the full human potential.
• Chekhov's Armoury: Academia Nut set down a few possible universes to visit early in the story, as well as starting some subplots off that never fully manifested.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Kyon in the interlude chapter.
  "Fuck, they won't even let a motherfucker swear where I come from!"
• Combat Pragmatist: New Chaos always sends out superior forces to recon in force other universes, feeds enemies false information to make them fall into traps and predictable behaviour, and refuses to stick around for straight fights against factions that can be genuine threats. It is quite weird when you think that Asukhon -a Goddess of War that used to demand challenging and fair fights to quench her bloodlust- supports fighting dirty.
• Combat Tentacles: Part of Lars' arsenal, apparently part of standard daemon "equipment".
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Both played straight and breached. Often, the outnumbered New Chaos forces triumph, but the Alicia versus Nanoha + Vita fight has the outnumbered side on the ropes until a retreat to The Cavalry is made. It could be a Deconstructed Trope, as the conversation between Ali, Rong-Arya and Toji reveals, since their low population forces them to equip every soldier well and feel each loss more severely.
• Continuity Nod: Chapter 62 refers to a beyond-screwed-up military clusterf**k as a "Tokyo-3" — a term that was coined during the latter chapters of Thousand Shinji. Also, Shinji apparently got 'round to writing that "Chaos - Fuck Yeah!" pamphlet mentioned in Thousand Shinji...
• Cool Ship: The Stiletto.
• Cosmic Horror Story: The story can be seen as a discussion on how (relatively) benevolent Eldritch Abominations ascended from humans may treat their followers. Certainly some of the people they visit, like the Erinyes, see them this way, as incomprehensible Outside things.
• Cosmic Plaything: Lars.
• Creator Backlash: By Word of God, The Open Door is not a real sequel but a non-canonical side-story (he even called it The Open Door: Thousand Shinji Gaiden) and it was supposed to be a silly tale where New Chaos travelled to other fictional universes beating people that both did and did not deserved it (because they are jerks), and it was not meant to really go anywhere, and he had absolutely NO long-term plan. But then it somehow got serious, the Lars arc started out, he opened up too many plot threads and the story ballooned and got out of his hands. He started to get tired of his own story, of people who disliked the fic and of fans who speculated about it and asked him to continue, and he finally lost interest. It is very telling that even though he published chapters 72 and 73 in Stardestroyer.net he he never uploaded them to Fanfiction.net.
• Creepy Child: Gunnhild. Made out of a combination of the accumulated evil of a soul eater that draws in ambient emotions spending a while in Hell, the daemon that spent that time in the Ah! My Goddess Hell, the soul of a Drow cleric, and a hyperactive goddess. And she is both creepy and awesome. And likes practical surgery.
• Culture Justifies Anything: Alicia attempts to defend the soul-eating thing by citing differences in their cultures.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • The Defence of Bloodhaven. Tens of thousands of Ori warriors versus an Evangelion, 600 Space Marines, a Black Magician Girl, a few dozen Daemons and a frigging Primarch. No contest.
  • The Stiletto tanking nBSG Cylon city-killer nukes even without its shields, slaughtering the invited boarding party and then taking out two Resurrection Ships with a single shot.
  • When Lars got pissed, the Nesme Siege quickly turned into this. Including Lars EATING three gods and forcing the gods to parlay out of raw terror. It was at this point that reviewers started getting unhappy.
  • The battle with the Praxis is like this, culminating in Rong-Arya wiping out their entire civilization. With a video.
• Dark Is Not Evil: New Chaos... kind of. They're less evil than what they're fighting, anyway.
  • Skuld.
  • Alicia. Yes, that Alicia.
• The Dark Times: the Extinction War definitely qualifies.
• A Day in the Limelight: Lars' subplot arguably started as this and expanded to a full-on month.
• Death of the Old Gods: In Thousand Shinji the Old Chaos Gods sacrificed themselves in order to create the New Chaos Gods and defeat the C'Tan. Here the New Chaos Gods learn that an alternate version of their predecessors exists elsewhere in the multiverse and have devised an elaborate Gambit Roulette to manipulate the inevitable war between the Old gods and the New gods for their own benefit.
• Demonic Possession: New Chaos does this as part of officer training.
• Depleted Phlebotinum Shells:
  • Hi, pit fiend. Meet Chaos-runed, Skuld-enchanted god-killer shotgun shell fired from Skuld's mentally shadow magic-crafted eight-gauge. Bye, pit fiend.
  • And most of the Underdark.
    • No, no, no.. The Underdark went up errr... down when the 'everything in, nothing out' spell blocking the entry to Skuld's cul-de-sac finally went boom in thermonuclear fire. the pit fiend exploded shortly before that, and may have triggered it, but its death didn't even disturb the roof.
• Despair Event Horizon: Quite brutally crossed
• Didn't See That Coming: Tzintchi has inherited Tzeentch's flaw, and sometimes the newChaos forces encounter things they fail to foresee, whether or not they pay for it.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Lars accidentally does this when he shoots one of Lolth's breasts off.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: When boiled down to its essence, the story is basically one group of Eldritch Abominations' quest to find a way to Punch Out an opposing group. Lars also takes down three deities from the Forgotten Realms after Skuld enters the portal to the Far Realms.
• Dramatic Thunder: Buffy's appearance at the end of chapter 35 is underlined by a convenient bolt of lightning.
• Eldritch Abomination: The heroes. Fortunately, they're far more benevolent... for given values for benevolent. Opposing groups also show up, such as one creature from the Far Realms.
• Elite Army: The New Chaos forces know very well that they don't have the numbers to match most foes in a fair fight, so they use their superior technology very aggressively. It helps that they ALWAYS choose to attack weak adversaries can not retaliate.
• Emotion Eater: Lars. It seems to be a natural daemon ability. He can't turn it off, either. Even if he wants to.
• Even Evil Has Standards: The new Chaos Gods have "laws", if they can be even called that, so anarchic they would horrify many a self-proclaimed anarchist and their attitude towards combat approaches The Unfettered levels, with brainwashing of POWs being seen as a valid tactic. However, they will not tolerate human trafficking or abuse of children, amongst others. Considering who they used to be, it makes sense. In fact, child murderers get to visit the Hall of Torments after their demise. Deconstructed Trope, since this partiality towards children doesn't stop them in the least from doing horrible things to anyone who isn't one - or, for that matter, from indoctrinating said children to believe anything they do is just and right. This can come off as quite warped to other races they encounter.
• Evil Versus Evil: Features this as its driving conflict, depending on how you see the factions. In one corner, you have the C'Tan, a race of Eldritch Abomination Energy Beings obsessed with wiping out all life in the universe and their mortal servants, the Necrons. In the other corner you have New Chaos, the collective forces of mankind led by their own set of Eldritch Abominations and willing to do anything and everything (short of harming children) to ensure their own survival. This is more properly a mix of Black-and-Gray Morality with this trope, though New Chaos crosses the Moral Event Horizon too frequently to be anything other than Another Shade Of Black.
• Expy: Academia Nut has said that Washal the Pale's battlemech resembles "a combination of an Enforcer III and a Firestarter Omni". Also, the Whispered resemble the group of the same name from Full Metal Panic!, amongst others.
  • Some have compared newChaos to a much darker version of The Culture, what with both being dangerously powerful civilisations trying to influence others.
• Fate Worse than Death: The fittingly-named Hall of Torment is used for people whose evil is deemed by the New Chaos gods to deserve the worst punishment.
• The Fettered: New Chaos very nearly approach The Unfettered, but one of the things holding them back from total freedom from limits is their utter devotion to the protection of children, justified as three of their godly pantheon were formerly adolescents at the Dysfunction Junction. Those who get caught abusing children find that the question isn't whether they're gonna get fucked up... but how bad.
• From Bad to Worse: The Time of Troubles, is much, much worse than in canon Forgotten Realms. And the Buffyverse segment involves, among other things, Warhammer 40,000's Horus.
• Gambit Pileup: What is happening in the Forgotten Realms universe. Word Of Academia Nut even linked to that article.
• Genius Bruiser: The Sons of Kensuke describe themselves as being more gadget- and tech-oriented than the other chapters.
• God Was My Copilot: Asukhon adopts a mortal form to experience Assassin Corps training and comes out a lot more respectful of "these hard asses" taking the training.
• The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: The setting has developed into a situation like this with dozens of sides in all three corners. Most notably, the main characters are the Bad or the Evil depending on your opinion of them (They definitely aren't the Good, not with Nanoha and the crew around to be compared against them).
• Gory Discretion Shot: Whatever happened to Selvetarm is not known... and Academia Nut insists on having it that way, for readers to imagine for themselves.
• Grand Theft Me: What happens to Marella.
• Hand Cannon: Fusion pistols.
• Heroic BSoD: Fate goes into one after learning that Alicia and Precia are not dead. Readers waited for Academia Nut to get to the consequences of this, but he never did.
• He Who Fights Monsters:
  • New Chaos might be trying to stop the C'Tan from eating all the souls of humanity and enslaving the universe, but they don't seem to have a problem with their own people eating the souls of their enemies. Right, Alicia? To be fair, souls eaten by New Chaos followers join the amalgam of souls inside the Chaos Gods whereas the souls devoured by the C'Tan cease to exist.
  • While the Necrons are Omnicidal Maniacs, the Unscrupulous Heroes/Villain Protagonists fighting them are themselves highly culturally and militarily aggressive. Their aspiration to and failure to achieve The Unfettered status only serves to blacken their image further in the eyes of some.
• Hollywood Cyborg: Cybernetic augmentation is rather common. Comparisons are made when the Stiletto crew meets the nBSG crew.
• Homage: The Ghost Riders, complete with the wind "singing" the theme.
• Humongous Mecha: Washal the Pale appears in this to fight Marella's silverfire golem. New Chaos is now mass-producing Evangelions.
• I Am Not Left-Handed: The Colonials are told to do this against the Praxis.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Discussed. "Your Blood War can be summed up with the two most evil phrases my people know. .... You devils however have 'Because I had to' on yours." And yes, the author has declared evacuating to another universe to not be an option.
• Incendiary Exponent: On Rong-Arya. "Worse yet, there was one human female that appeared to be on fire with no ill effects who was mowing through Centurions single handed...."
• Inertial Dampening: Present on the Stiletto and presumably other New Chaos spacecraft. Also part of Space Marine armour to allow them to use their rail launchers.
  "A ship can't pull 10,000 Gs without some form of inertial compensation."
• Infernal Retaliation: Appears on an iron golem that had been set on fire to little effect.
• It's Raining Men: New Chaos has a launcher for its Space Marines, clearly a Homage to the Angry Marines.
• Jack of All Stats: The Sons of Toji explicitly describe themselves as drawing a balance between the specialisations of the other Space Marine chapters. Ashley also notes that her Eva lacks any real bells and whistles, leading her to seek assistance from the new!Battlestar Galactica crew.
• Just a Stupid Accent: Rong-Arya and bridge crew adopt a faux-pirate accent when fending off Borg boarders. Then there's Brigadier General Stuart Scott, very Indian but with a thick Scottish accent.
• Knight Templar: Discussed but not yet actually seen. "The greatest evil is not committed by a devil or a demon; it is committed by a saint." Although you might consider that newChaos has the "thinks itself right" part down quite right.
• Littlest Cancer Patient: Mentioned in the interlude.
• Lower-Deck Episode: A few have shown up, such as the chapter focusing on Johan and Kirilae.
• Mama Bear/Papa Wolf: All of New Chaos has the protection of children as part of their philosophy, justified by the New Chaos gods' experiences when they still were human.
• Mexican Standoff: "Do you think you can kill both of us without killing your comrade?" Said by Toji to Nanoha about Vita.
• Mister Seahorse: Deconstructed: Lars was already carrying the concentrated core of emotions that could potentially become a daemon with just a bit more emotion. Skuld just happened to accidentally fertilize it, adding something different to the daemon while doing so. So biologically Lars is the mother and Skuld is the father, insofar as biology can be applied to goddesses and daemons. (Technically, Lars doesn't have a gender. He tends to think of himself as male, but his sex is fully optional rather fun for all concerned.)
• Morality Kitchen Sink: Probably the best way to describe the morality in play here. New Chaos are pretty damn dark grey by any objective standards, yet compared to canon Chaos - or for that matter even the lightest grey of the canon 40k factions - they are practically saints. There are less grey factions around, and with the Lyrical Nanoha gir- people around there are also "white" factions.
  • Then again, 99% of all villains are saints compared to canon Chaos.
  • Ironically, this is what makes New!Chaos so much more reprehensible to many readers than their canon counterparts. Canon!Chaos's excuse for being evil is that they're essentially the God of Evil of the 40,000 'verse; they're expected to be irredeemable, and they fulfill that expectation by Crossing the Line Twice to become the ultimate symbols of violence, hatred and depravity. New!Chaos, on the other hand, doesn't cross that second line and doesn't get the moral immunity that comes with it; they're supposed to be humans, and the readers judge them like humans, and they've crossed so many Moral Event Horizons that many readers call them the true villains of the series regardless of how much more evil the C'tan or Canon!Chaos are supposed to be (and it doesn't help matters at all that they frequently wind up fighting and curb-stomping pure white or light grey factions like the TSAB or The Federation).
  • It does not help that in an early chapter one of the followers of Asukhon defined her side like evil. The WHOLE PLOT of Thousand Shinji was a big scheme to turn Shinji and her three most beloved persons in non-evil, benevolent versions of Canon!Chaos. Then why do they consider themselves evil? Anyway they committed so many questionable deeds before AND after their ascension that it is unbelievable that a benevolent deity granted them godhood.
    • Word of God, is that including the White factions, and having them get messed up, was a mistake.
  • Academia Nut said that it was the same situation than in the original Warhammer 40,000 universe, where the Imperium are the "good guys" compared with everyone else. This reasoning doesn't work for many reasons: In the original 40K universe there is NO good faction, everyone is aware of it, and we constantly see the worst factions. In The Open Door we have the Nanoha or Enterprise factions, that are definitely good, and we never see the worst faction of all (other than a Necrontyr simulation... in chapter 63. So it's too little and too late in that regard). We only are told that there are worst things out there that the main characters are fighting... but we never see them fighting them at all. So that New Chaos is not the "good" side by default, and they not even come across like a tolerable lesser evil.
• More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Part of Lars' arsenal, apparently part of standard daemon "equipment".
• The Multiverse: Universes are sorted according to an "energy gradient", which roughly serves as a Sorting Algorithm of Evil by paralleling each universe's capacity for technology, magic and psychic power. Parts of it have been sealed off and can only be accessed from other parts of the multiverse through "hub universes", with that of Haruhi Suzumiya serving as one of these. Interestingly, it also has Alternate Universes; the second chapter shows that at least one version of Neon Genesis Evangelion different from the native Thousand Shinji one exists, while later chapters also show that canon!40k also exists.
• Mundane Utility: Your super-competent assassin teams not out slaying enemy leaders? Use them as crimefighters and bodyguard detail.
• Mythology Gag: "Had Tzintchi ever sat in his Eva before his ascension crying about how he wanted to run away? Never!"
• Necro Non Sequitur: One of Jose's kills goes off in this way.
  "You mean where he put a round between the eyes of that one guy with poor trigger safety and someone managed to have the bullet spray from the death spasms break the locking mechanism on a crane, thus dropping a cargo container full of volatile drugs on the advancing forces right before we were about to be overrun? Yeah, I'll admit that was art," Vita conceded.
• Nigh-Invulnerable: The Stiletto, at least with regards to nBSG Cylon city-killer nukes, which it tanks even without its shields.
• Nominal Hero or Villain Protagonist?
• Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Constantly invoked. Neo Chaos is a near perfect example of this, and openly states that they largely choose to visit universes where their abilities are to their advantage. In a less deliberate example, Lars is sent to the Ah! My Goddess universe, where his origins give the local deities fits.
• Nuke 'em: Attempted by nBSG Cylons with city-killer nukes against the Stiletto, but the ship tanks all of them without needing its shields.
• Obviously Evil: "At that moment space seemed to unfold and vomit forth a ship, a lurid device of black and white, shaped like an arrow or blade of old and of a distorted, organic Gothic architecture. Statues of dull metal dotted the hull and depicted half molten figures wailing out in agony or various demons and monsters of a more superstitious age doing unspeakable things to each other. The entire thing seemed to be a dedication to all that was loathsome and unclean in the universe." Note again that this is referring to the protagonists' flagship.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Ashley on realising that she and Scipio are about to be tested against a simulation of the Necrontyr.
  • When Q appears in his ready room, at first Captain Picard is annoyed, thinking he's going to be put through another stupid test of humanity's character. Then he sees that Q doesn't have the same joking attitude he usually possesses during their encounters. Then he sees that Q is actually scared, and he realizes that S%!#. Just. Got. Real.
• Omniscient Morality License: The fact that they're fighting Eldritch Abominations is treated by both the author and many of the characters as an excuse for New Chaos to commit whatever unspeakable acts of depravity they want and get away with it.
• Physical God: Skuld.
• Poor Communication Kills: Precia tries to warn Alicia that Nanoha and Vita should be properly explained to, but Ali is not having any of that, which leads into their fight.
• Power Echoes: Available to most daemons; Lars and Skuld briefly compete in "a 'whose voice can get more reverb' pissing contest".
• Powered Armor: Used by Space Marines, of course. Shyft seems to have a Steampunk take on the concept.
• Psychic Powers: Mostly the domain of Tzintchi and his followers, but the other newChaos gods and their followers make use of it too.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: "What. Do. You. Want?"' Adama hissed.
• Purple Prose: Academia Nut's writing style often gets real bad with this. In chapter 73:
  Twisting layers of unreality, fractal patterns of possible creations unfolded and bloomed before spiralling back into tiny vibrating loops the size of atoms. Entire cosmoses stacked like translucent vellum sheets, infinitely large and yet no thicker than a shadow, separated by impossibly vast gulfs transmittable with but a single thought. Impossible things of flavoured sound cavorted with crystalline tiers of niobium light while things not wholly described by any seven senses a person could name played flutes of ultraviolet fire. Creatures with only the vaguest impression of what codified physical laws were and the life that resulted from such conformity of physics pranced about in vile dances, psychic susurrations filling the void with their gibbering, bouncing unnoticed off of the things with stars for hearts and all of the intelligence of amoebas as they plied across eternity.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Rong-Arya and the Stiletto crew want to go on this after the Borg destroy the New Syracuse nursery, but are talked down by Tzintchi himself.
• Rock Beats Laser: Bill Adama and the nBSG crew dance around the antimatter-equipped Praxis despite only having chemically-propelled kinetic energy weapons. Admittedly, they had fire support from the far superior Stiletto, and the Colonials were in some ways more advanced than the Praxis, but still...
  • Also averted in that the odd ideology the Praxis had towards technology means that the Colonials are more advanced in some ways. "Apparently these nutcases used antimatter weapons, a technology the Colonials didn't possess because they had cheaper, more stable fuels that wouldn't destroy the ship on a lucky hit. Who strapped a bomb to their frakking asses like that?"
• Rouge Angles of Satin: Regrettably marring the story every now and then.
• Shiny New Australia: Australia is given to the Colonials after they get to New Chaos's Earth.
• Shotgun Wedding: Lars and Skuld do this.
• Shout-Out:
  • "Always angry, all the time."
  • "Your Wild Mass Guessing amuses me."
  • ""Befriend is the correct term", Hikari confirmed." Especially resonant given the actual existence of MGLN as an universe in this story.
  • Rask going "yes... yes".
  • "Perhaps they ah... think with portals, yes... yes?"
  • "more teeth than the Harpell Family"
  • Lars imitating Darth Vader complete with theme music and asynchronous breathing.
  • "We will not gattai the Evas or their pilo- the Eva and the Bolo, as such thoughts invariably lead to transformation sequences."
  • "Cry some more, bitch!"
• The Siege: Against Nesme by most of the Forgotten Realms gods.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: The "energy gradient" roughly charts the "power level" of universes in technology and magic, but some readers have noted that it is not foolproof.
• Spanner in the Works: Leman Russ, who kills Ahriman, in the grand tradition of his Legion-turned-Chapter.
• The Spartan Way: Divine Assassin training. It starts with a five-kilometre run on hot asphalt immediately followed by a two-kilometre swim across the Aegean sea, with burnt feet still smarting, and the 4-year training includes torture and a week-long Mind Rape session at the hands of an Eldritch Abomination. The end result kills 37 excessively gung-ho trainees out of the 120 volunteers, with the rest washed out to less intense courses. Space Marine trained inherited from canon!40k most likely follows the old vein too.
• Speak of the Devil:
  "Don't mention [the yaoi fangirls]! You might summon them!"
• Spotlight-Stealing Squad:
  • The Lars/Skuld/Forgotten Realms subplot. Many readers were left wondering what happened to the spaceships and Beam Spam and conniving-yet-benevolent Eldritch Abominations that are supposed to be the MAIN characters but are nearly always absent.
    Sitting upon a throne of spotlights, Lars cried out, "I'm not! And do you know how fucking long it took me to steal all of these?"
• Stripped to the Bone: "Then, with a terrible cry, she hurled the energies at the Riders, catching in a swirling holocaust of destructive energies that flayed them and their horses to the bone... but not beyond that."
• Suddenly Significant City: The town of Nesme in Northern Faerun gets conquered by an interloper deity during the Times of Troubles and turned into the industrialized capital of a new country, the Republic of Noctis. Unfortunately, the concept of equal rights for all sentient beings doesn't mesh well in a Medieval fantasy setting, causing most people to view Noctis as a Lawful Evil country for giving citizenship to drow, goblins, and orcs so long as said creatures follow the rules.
• Super Prototype: The Stiletto is the first craft built by New Chaos as a test bed for the combination of the technologies available to them. Although officially rated as a frigate, it can punch far, far above its supposed weight. Eventually, with its long shakedown cruise over, its equipment receives rather drastic tonedown.
• Super-Soldier: The Space Marines, of course. The Divine Assassins too.
• Take That!: Cylon counter-intrusion software is described as practically "Norton"-made.
• Tank Goodness: The Mk XXXIII Bolo named Scipio. An earlier reference was made to a "World Raider" series of tanks.
• Tempting Fate: New!Chaos is conspicuously aware of this, with multiple instances of Lampshade Hanging.
• This Is My Boomstick: People of Nesme, I present to you the Kalashnikov!
• Time Skip: "Had four, bloody, painful, exhausting years truly gone by?" Also, twelve years pass between the time the Stiletto was last contacted by Earth and their return, even though it seemed less than that to them.
• Time Travel: New Chaos can do this. Interesting things happen.
• Took a Level in Badass: Skuld. Also, Toji and the Scoobies after their apparent possession by canon 40k people.
• Translation Convention: All languages are rendered in English.
• Many Lines No Waiting: At the beginning the main plot used to focus on the New Chaos gods (before the author dropped them by the wayside), with another subplot focusing on Lars and Skuld. Then the Lars subplot became THE main plot for a long time with another subplot focused on the Stiletto crew, plus any number of other ones. In the last published chapters the main plot was focusing back on Lars.
• The Unfettered: New Chaos gods may be a good example of why, when trying to be The Unfettered, you either go all the way or do not bother at all. Their laws are anarchic and their combat philosophy is decidedly no-holds barred, with them using their Bigger Stick to unreservedly Curb Stomp "weaker" universes' militaries, making Demonic Possession part of officer training, training their followers to see driving others to the Despair Event Horizon as a valid way to victory, and using brainwashing on their PoWs and telling said PoWs about it. However, because they have standards and lines they will not cross, their considerable strategic and tactical considerations and the relatively non-hardcore standards of their training (compared to many outstanding examples of The Spartan Way at any rate), they fail to achieve the total lack of inhibitions of the truly Unfettered and the moral fluidity that ensues. This results in them appearing quite blackly villainous to many readers.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Demonstrated by Lars, supposedly standard for daemons.
• Wave-Motion Gun: Skuld's little underground nuclear weapons test. Bye, bye, Underdark.
  • What happens to Silverymoon.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • Quite a number of subplots, such as the Stargate SG-1 or Lyrical Nanoha ones, had been left untouched in a while when the fic stopped to update.
  • The four main characters barely show up after a while. In the last twenty-four chapters Misato and Rei are completely missing, Shinji only shows up in two very short scenes and Asuka only makes a very brief appearance. They not even are mentioned in most of chapters, even though this story is supposed to be about them.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Nanoha and Vita don't buy Alicia's defence.
• With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Marella plays this straight, gaining great power, but ends up possessed/controlled by the fragments of souls in the Weave. subverted by the fact that she was clearly insane beforehand.

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