CDT Adventure / Tropes L to Z

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L

• Lame Pun Reaction: When Murquoql figures out the connection between Wain claiming to have experience with curses and the immediate illusion of fire on his pants, she sarcastically quips "Very funny" at the instigators of the illusion.
• Late to the Punchline: It takes Parthenia pretty long time to realize Farrah was making fun of her with her "Nice footwear" comment. To be fair, the Inquisitor couldn't think straight due to her Sleep Deprivation.
• Laughing Mad: In the wake of a tense confrontation with Krakka'a, Rosalind can't control her Tension-Cutting Laughter which is described as sounding slightly unhinged.
• Leave the Two Lovebirds Alone: Varg suggests splitting the group of four, sending Jann and Rosalind to get food at The Purple Fez Tavern while Varg and Ozurr go elsewhere to sell a D'voreem carcass.
• Let Me Get This Straight...: When Shale sets out to interrogate Senior Lieutenant Wilhelmine about Pilot 0037's plight and his terror of his superiors, one of the first things Shale does is make sure she's got the situation summarized.
  Shale: So, let me summarize — your military refused to teach your pilot how to read the manual that would tell him how to fix the computer. They failed to keep him and the computer away from a nesting mother Lanceros wyvern, a creature that they already knew had the capability and motivation to damage the computer. And now that the Lanceros damaged the computer, they want to flog your pilot for not fixing it, even though they're the ones who set him up for failure. Now, do I paint a correct picture, or do I exaggerate?
• Let's Get Out of Here:
  • Rosalind wants to get out of the men's restroom.
    Rosalind: Okay, I'm ready to get outta here, but I don't want nosy nellies and gabby gossips seein' me exit the wrong restroom, so we gotta plan a stealthy exit.
  • Once Syrni Sandra is satisfied that the shrivers are hostile, she thinks "Let's scram" over the comm line.
  • The Panzerfaust was wrecked in wyvern territory, and Moquoql would rather fix it outside of wyvern territory, so once she has a spaceship's drop pod equipped with a tractor beam she says "All aboard! Let's tow this wreck out of here before something else happens to interrupt."
• Let Us Never Speak of This Again: Rosalind does not want to speak of the time she threw up in the men's restroom.
• Light 'em Up:
  • Mequoql's telekinetic specialty is generating light. She prefers to use it inoffensively in entertainment, but when The Gloves Come Off, she can use her power to try thwarting Shadow Walker characters or characters capable of Casting a Shadow. Or she could use her power to imitate at least one Will-o'-the-Wisp, at least one Blinding Camera Flash, or fire.
  • This is Cynthia's aether affinity; as such, she primarily uses a variety of lasers and Hard Light in combat.
• Limp and Livid: When Nyorla stands up to slaughter some moufretas, she doesn't straighten up completely because she's taking out her frustrations at being stuck where she can't help her big sister get out of mind control.
• Literal Split Personality: The Rebecca Jane Walsh seen here is not the original, but instead a fragment of her personality from when she hit something that caused her to split into multiple versions of her personality. Although never explained how in the text, Word of God is that the real Rebecca Jane Walsh will appear and this is not the "real" one.
• Living Crashpad:
  • Inverted with a dead crashpad, Mequoql falls out of a tree and lands on the fresh corpse of a moufreta that just broke its neck falling out of the same tree.
  • Played straight when Nasur falls down a trapdoor and yanks an unconscious Joseph along with him. Joseph lands on top of Nasur.
  • A moufreta bites a horse's hind leg, the horse rears and accidentally falls over backwards onto the moufreta.
• Living MacGuffin: Sa'ad has at least two independent parties wanting to get a hold of him. Or, more precisely, of the information he possesses. His abrasively toxic personality and the nature of his curse makes it hard for anyone to deal with (or even just approach) him willingly.
• Loophole Abuse: The Web of Friendship has a "Thou Shalt Not Kill" policy. The Web members also have a habit of getting a guest to "do the honors" when they feel that someone (e.g. a fiendish vampire) needs to be killed.
• Losing Your Head: The D'voreem that attacked Amaranth is puzzled by why she can't do anything more than move her eyes and panics as she succumbs to oxygen deprivation while her body lies some distance away.
• Loves Me Not: Iolana is introduced this way - sitting on top of a stone pillar, plucking a daisy's petals away. Since she's a spirit of Chaos, the usual binary choice guessing game quickly degrades into something else entirely.
• Low Clearance: A large bell in a Necropolis church's bell tower swings low enough to where it would have hit Syrni Sandra's head if she hadn't ducked.
• Loyal Phlebotinum: Varla's ownership bond with her sword and Chastity Dagger prevents them from accidentally falling out of their sheaths, and reinforces her already strong grip when she unsheaths them.

M

• Madness Mantra:
  • Rosalind has a brief one in the throes of her Heroic BSoD
    Rosalind: I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die, I'm gonna die...
  • A broom-wielding local who saw Arilay shapeshifting mistakes her for a homunculus and starts chasing and pummeling Arilay while screaming,
    Hysterical Local: Homunculus! Homunculus! Homunculus! Homunculus!
  • Bodyguard Ren 4 is shocked by Aynara's sudden but polite interest in the archaeologist he's guarding. When Aynara leaves with a sample of the archaeologist's blood, the bodyguard mutters "Why, why, why, why, why?" This makes more sense once it's revealed that he's actually Sarquoql (Aynara's arch-nemesis) in disguise, and he didn't expect his foes to be here.
• Mage Marksman: Most of the bandits Oseru killed were slain by bullets to the head. And because of this trope, Aseyu (who comes from the same country as Oseru) tries to keep her Anti-Magic hidden; after all, it doesn't make her bulletproof.
• Magical Barefooter: Iolana the shapeshifting High Spirit of Chaos does not wear shoes (or any other kind of footwear) in her default form.
• Magical Eye Streamers: Using her xenophobic captors' spellcasting language temporarily turns Varla's sclerae black with equally black tendrils of fog streaming out at the corners.
• Magical Incantation: To summon spears to stab Shale, Wilhelmine tries to say "Manifest Macht", but Shale interrupts the verbal spell with a fist to Wilhelmine's vocal cords.
• Magic by Any Other Name: The energy that Miss Desperado's characters call "nenro"^note derived from the word "negentropy", the antonym of "entropy" performs the same narrative role as magic in a universe that's primarily a Sci-Fi Kitchen Sink and secondarily a Fantasy Kitchen Sink.
• Magic Knight: Parthenia seems to be quite the powerful lightning mage, and is physically strong enough to drag on a chain a grown, not exactly frail man across the ground with her one arm "without visible effort".
• Magic Staff: Soryn has an ironwood staff topped with an obsidian tetrahedron held in place with a slightly fancy silver mesh. His first spell use in the world is manifesting a spear of Hard Light on the obsidian focus to deal with a moufreta ambush. Since then he's also cast a spell to refrigerate chocolate, healing spells, and a cleaning spell.
• Magnetism Manipulation: Parthenia's primary powers. Electromagnetism, to be precise.
• Major Injury Underreaction: Varla cracks her own arm bones in a Deliberate Injury Gambit and barely acknowledges the pain. She has healing spells, but only takes partial advantage of them despite multiple opportunities to get the healing over with.
• Make Sure He's Dead: When four juvenile moufreta leap off a cliff and splat in front of the herd of mustangs, four mustangs personally ensure the moufretas' deaths by rearing up and slamming their forehooves down on the exposed neck vertebrae.
• Make Them Rot: One of Sindar's abilities, first demonstrated when he makes a piece of paper on the bulletin board shrivel up and disintegrate. He also explains to Layi, Koyel, and Vrask that he helps corpses decompose; perhaps this is how he does it.
• Make Way for the Princess: Equine hierarchy is indicated by who yields ground to whom. The Guardian stallion and Lead Mare can walk through the herd and have everyone else get out of their way.
• Making a Splash: Abyssal Empress Nerea has a plethora of water spells at her disposal, as befitting of a merfolk. This comes in handy when fishing an anthropomorphic otter out of quicksand.
• Mama Bear: Arilay does not take kindly to Wain pointing a gun at her crew member. She isolates him on the teleporter pad with a force field and doesn't let him out until he apologizes.
• Man in the Machine: Arilay is missing her limbs, external flesh, lower jaw, lungs and digestive system. Her remaining internal organs are in a life-support suit, with atomic manipulators replacing her lungs and digestive system.
• Masculine Girl, Feminine Boy:
  • At least when it comes to the way they behave themselves and their personal hygiene. Farrah is the loud, brash, rude and The Pig-Pen to Mark's polite, cultured and well-groomed (as far as his current condition would allow). Being rather heavily armed is what they have in common.
  • Hajnal is a heavily-armored Ascended Demon who Looks Like Orlock, and prefers hearty stews and wines. Gabriel is a Long-Haired Pretty Boy and fashionista who, even though he Never Gets Drunk, enjoys sweet mocktails. Both are devastating fighters in their own ways, however.
• Mass "Oh, Crap!":
  • The Not-Chaos-Hunters panic over news of an approaching giantess. Morpho is not amused.
  • Invoked by Aynara when she starts telepathically drawing sentry bandits' attention to a building on fire as a distraction from Arilay's planned entry to the Ghost Town. The sentries notice the fire and promptly sound the fire alarm.
• Matter Replicator: Arilay's digestive tract was replaced with an atomic manipulator.
• Meaningful Name:
  • Parthenia the Keraunos - roughly translates "The Thunderbolt Virgin" from Greek.
  • Rosalind Lumina Eisenberg: She is named after the Rosalind from As You Like It (both Rosalinds were driven out of their homes); Lumina is Latin for "light," referencing Rosalind being a friendly Daywalking Vampire; and Eisenberg is a German surname translating to "iron mountain," referencing how centuries of surviving Van Helsing Hate Crimes hasn't obliterated her courage and ability to extend trust.
  • Angus McRedshirt. Honestly, was anybody surprised when he didn't survive his introductory post?
  • Nerea: her name is taken from one of the Nereids, sea nymphs of Greek Mythology. Fairly appropriate, considering she's a merfolk with divine heritage, and ruler of the seas around Abyssia.
  • Jobe Pearson the pigplant farmer shares a first name with the Biblical Jobe who suffered misfortune. Jobe Pearson is suffering from the misfortune of two persistent pigplant boars wrecking his livelihood.
• Mechanical Lifeforms: Morpho is a sentient almost-robot whose brain was constructed using Mayatan soul-compatible technology. The process of getting a soul into the mechanism has not been explained in the thread due to irrelevance, but rest assured it's innocuous.
• Menacing Stroll: Snarling, Limp and Livid with a Kubrick Stare, Nyorla moves no faster than a walk as she goes up to each psychic strangled moufreta so she can bleed them out.
• The Men in Black:
  • The Ace of Spades styles himself after this. Simple suit, shows up and vanishes as he pleases, utterly ruthless. The only aesthetic difference from the model is his unusual hairdo, a holdover from his previous lifestyle.
  • This might as well be Parthenia's official title. In a way it is, since she's an Inquisitor, a ruthless government agent whose top priority is to keep her State's secrets safe. She's also clad in black armor.
  • And, ultimately, the Hub Town's Guardian Entity takes form of a one.
• Metaphorically True: Krakka'a tells Akane that a group of humanoids tried to kill him just because he was in their way. What he neglects to mention is that he was only in their way because he put himself there so he could threaten to kill them if they didn't turn around and leave, and that their "attempts to kill him" were intimidation displays intended to convince him to back off, which could have killed him had they followed through.
• Milholland Relationship Moment: Invoked by Jann of Grimmsford. Suspecting that Rosalind is some kind of revenant, he preemptively reassures her that her secret probably isn't as big a cause for concern as she thinks it is, before confronting her with the evidence. When Rosalind confesses that she's a vampire, Jann immediately reminds himself not to panic.
• Mind-Control Eyes: Under Mael's mind-control, Mequoql's eyes turn silver to match his.
• Mind-Control Music: Felicio's specialty. When threatened by some d'voreem, he plays/sings a song that compels them to have a dance party instead.
• Mind over Manners: Murquoql explains why, despite being a telepath, she doesn't know what the missing kid looks like.
  Murquoql: I don't even know if the kid is a 'he' yet, and it would be rude to grab the information from the mother's mind without introducing myself in person first.
• Missing Child: One of the quests that used to be available was searching for a child missing in the jungle. Unfortunately, the author who started the story arc disappeared from the thread before the quest was finished, so without that author's guidance, the story arc had a Diabolus ex Machina ending in the form of a deadly mirage getting the child.
• Missing Man Formation: Three dragonhorses fly single file with the third trailing further behind the first two, to represent that they'd failed to find a missing kid before the missing kid was killed by a deadly mirage.
• Missing Steps Plan: Rook's plan to save Pewter from a D'voreem is as follows:
  • Step 1: Roar a challenge to the D'voreem
  • Step 2: ???^note His plan gets derailed at this point when the D'voreem gets decapitated before Rook can attack.
  • Step 3: Pewter regards Rook as a hero^note Predictably, this step fails because of what happened at step 2.
• Mistaken for Dog: Inverted. Arilay disguises herself as a dog, but a local who saw her shapeshifting mistakes her for a homunculus.
• Mistaken for Pedophile: Downplayed when Soryn sees a green van with a chocolate logo. Instead of immediately jumping to the conclusion that it's a pedophile's tool, he recognizes that the bad first impression is merely an ambiguous possibility.
• The Modest Orgasm: Justified because Syrni Sandra is asleep, thus her movements and vocalizations are shut off — the only audible clue that she's having an Erotic Dream is her erratic breathing patterns.
• Moment Killer:
  • Rosalind and Jann were about to share an innocent cuddle when suddenly two enormous predators big enough to eat Rosalind's missing horses pass by the truck.
  • Later, Varg accidentally sabotages her own attempt to play matchmaker when she Thinks Like a Romance Novel out loud, more specifically referencing penny dreadfuls with demon ladies, with no clue that Rosalind the Religious Vampire would resent being compared, even tangentially, to a succubus.
    Varg [to Jann]: You're not gonna say that she 'looks good for her age' or something? Like in those penny dreadfuls with the demon ladies?
    [Rosalind tries not to burst into tears]
• Mood Whiplash: First a tense stand-off, with Krakka'a and Zarokh on one side and Ozurr, Varg, Jann, and Rosalind on the other, ends with Krakka'a swearing We Will Meet Again. Rosalind doesn't take the threat of revenge seriously, and gets tangled in a Suggestive Collision with Jann while getting back in the truck. The mood set by that collision is, in turn, abruptly replaced with Rosalind feeling guilty for her part in how and when it happened, as well as leaving Ozurr the only one on lookout.
• Morphic Resonance: Iolana has few limitations on her shapeshifting ability, but any form she changes into must contain a small round sapphire.
• Morton's Fork: Aynara and Arnaya whip up an excuse to mess with Wain from afar. He's claimed to have experience breaking curses. If he had been telling the truth, then Aynara and Arnaya would have interpreted that as a challenge. But since he lied, Aynara and Arnaya are engaging in Karmic Trickster behavior to make sure that lie doesn't endanger Murquoql's life.
• A Mother to Her Men: Arilay, leader of the Web of Friendship, has all the protective instincts of a Mama Bear when her crew is threatened.
• Motor Mouth:
  • Nui likes to be very wordy in their speech, so they speak quickly to make up for it.
  • Nyorla rapidly summarizes the hazards of hiking to town from the Sun-Dry Sea.
    Nyorla: Are we two kids just gonna walk all the way through the wyvern-infested desert, across a bridge that might or might not be properly maintained and spans a long drop into a narrow channel of ocean, and then through some sort of wasteland with questionable water and who knows what kind of weird and hostile creatures until we finally find a concrete trench that'll take us close to town but still be tiring to clamber out of?
• Mugging the Monster:
  • Krakka'a stops to harass a truck full of what he thinks are puny mammals. He gets a haugr with a gun, a wizard with lightning bolts, a giant with an axe, and (not readily apparent) a vampire with tactile surface-anchoring powers all aiming at his face and telling him to let them pass in peace.
  • He does it again later when he grabs Akane by the neck and tries to threaten her, not realizing that Akane is a super-strong Oni capable of suplexing a creature five times her size.
• Mundane Solution:
  • Mequoql's Psychic Glimpse of Death is about to drive her into screaming an emotion bomb of mortal terror, which nobody wants to hear. Morpho, a shapeshifting robot, uses Hand Gagging on Mequoql. Too bad Bonnie was thrown right where he stood to do so.
  • A Magical Incantation is vulnerable to interruption via punch to the vocal cords.
• Mushroom Man: Sindar is one - his hair is even described as being the gills of a mushroom cap on his head. Even his clothing is made of mushroom parts.
• Music Soothes the Savage Beast: Defied by the D'voreem who perceive the strange sensations and urges caused by Felicio's Mind-Control Music as a threat and flee rather than risk falling under its power. It at least has the desired result of stopping the attack.
• My Sensors Indicate You Want to Tap That: Rosalind's vampiric perception of bloodflow make her acutely aware of Jann's arousal in the wake of a Suggestive Collision with him.
• My Skull Runneth Over: Murquoql, and Aynara copying Murquoql's weapon analysis power, suffer from the problem of instantly forgetting part or all of the readout of anything that has too much potential use as a weapon and thus produces too much data.
  • Murquoql scans Tecia sa Valdela, but by the time Murquoql learns that Tecia sa Valdela is planning Van Helsing Hate Crimes against Aynara and Arnaya, Murquoql forgot that Tecia sa Valdela can break technology and relearns it the hard way.
  • Aynara wonders why multiple factions are scrambling to claim the HeDGe, which is at the time in the hands of Black Morgan's bandit gang, so she tries scanning it with Murquoql's copied power. Its function of granting godlike powers produced way too much data, Aynara's hair stands on end in alarm, and all that's left once the avalanche of data leaks out as fast as it crashed in is that there must be a good reason why the scan left Aynara's hair still tingling from standing on end.
• Mystical Plague: Zombies in the Web of Friendship's native story are caused by necromancers manipulating enchantments on germs.

N

• Neck Snap:
  • How Krakka'a kills Angus McRedshirt.
  • Soryn seizes a moufreta by its neck with his tail, lifts the moufreta up and whiplashes it.
  • When Mael drugs Lerna with nightmare hallucinogen, Lerna lashes out and bites Varla's arm. In turn, this triggers Varla's anti-vampire reflex. Hopped up on too much adrenaline, Varla aims an overpowered blow at Lerna's neck, breaking Lerna's vertebrae and cracking Varla's arm bones. Varla knows her healing song can reverse it with no lasting physical effects.
  • When four juvenile moufreta leap off a cliff and splat in front of the herd of mustangs, four mustangs personally ensure the moufretas' deaths by rearing up and slamming their forehooves down on the exposed neck vertebrae.
  • Discussed when Varla tells the tale of a vampire whom Sarquoql mind-controlled to rob a bank and break the necks of bank guards.
• Nerves of Steel:
  • Confronted with Chaudhari's group, Parthenia keeps a cool head through the whole encounter ... until the Ace of Spades takes her by surprise and strips her of all advantages, prompting her to visibly shake from the stress ... for about two seconds, after which she quickly regains her composure and continues to taunt her opponents all the way through the conversation.
  • When Pilot 0037 shoots at and misses Nyorla, her reaction is a Nonchalant Dodge and a dissonantly calm, laconic declaration of her intent to heal.
  • Held at Wain's gunpoint, Murquoql scoffs "Point that somewhere else!" and telekinetically shoves down on the gun's muzzle.
• Nested Ownership: Discussed by Valerie.
  Valerie: [Vindex] isn't my familiar, though, Justin is. I guess you could consider Vindex to be my Justin's familiar?
• Never Grew Up: Nyorla has not gone through puberty despite being old enough to do so.
• Never Split the Party:
  • Sticking together in a herd governs the horses' way of life.
  • Subverted when Rosalind thinks about objecting to Varg's suggestion to split the party, but then Rosalind reminds herself she's not among horses anymore and agrees to the idea.
  • The members of the Not-Chaos Hunters do not split away from each other.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: Bonnie has twice assisted in allowing Mael to get away from being apprehended. The first time she mistook the robot Morpho for a potentially dangerous metal slime, the second time was by accident when she landed on Mael and Moquoql.
• The Nicknamer:
  • Farrah rarely addresses the people by their given name. So far, Mark is 'Fingers' and Murquoql is 'Murkle'. She needs to get more creative once she meets the other Mayatan siblings.
  • Carol has shades of this, as she calls Lily 'Lils', and Bonnie 'Bunny'.
• No Dead Body Poops: Averted. The headless body of a D'voreem loses the contents of its bowels as the muscles relax.
• No Man Should Have This Power: Alice's response to the HeDGe, which would theoretically grant omnipotence. Downplayed — it's not a moral objection, she's just confident in her organization's status and considers removing a wildcard that might be a trap safer than trusting it.
• No OSHA Compliance: Discussed by Henry using a metaphor for being overwhelmed by the magical madness he's found himself surrounded by.
  Henry: I feel like a kid lost in a chemical plant, with zero safety regulations. Sure, maybe I can find the right mixture to fix Joe's problem, but more likely we'll just end up with chemical burns, or choking on toxic fumes.
• Nonchalant Dodge: Nyorla casually but quickly twists sideways to present a narrower target when Pilot 0037 tries (and fails) to shoot her.
• Non-Humans Lack Attributes: Downplayed for the nonhumans who can hide their naughty bits in body cavities — the attributes are there, just concealed by default.
  • Mayatans, regardless of whether they have fur or not, can fold their elastic skin over their naughty bits.
  • Soryn has a reptilian genital sheath. He's glad his genetic engineers kept that feature on him, so he doesn't have to worry about getting arrested for flashing after suffering Clothing Damage.
• Nonindicative Name: "Dead Gods" from Oseru and Aseyu's world are neither dead (though they're severely weakened compared to their original capabilities) nor gods (though the difference is academic for most).
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Dominic Chaudhari thinks Parthenia is this:
  Narration: ...Dominic, taking the measure of her, recognized she was no fool. She'd not make the same mistake twice. If anything, she was more likely to escalate the second round in response — even if she went to stun the first time, she'd stop fucking around and try to kill them the second. ... She had no fear of going lethal.
• Non Sequitur, *Thud*: Maequoql (alien) urges a (human) bandit drained by a vampire to go to sleep. The bandit, with not enough blood to sustain his agitation, answers "Yes, mommy," before fainting.
• Non-Verbal Miscommunication: Rabbits, hares and skvaders drum their hind foot on the ground to alert others of their kind to predators. When a skvader hanging out on a domesticated horse's back tries to warn the horse about incoming moufreta, his drumming on the horse's rump is initially mistaken for a signal to move forward.
• Noodle Incident:
  • Arilay's backstory of how she lost body parts and became a cyborg is one big unexplained incident.
  • Gabriel Kardos would prefer not to talk about what happened in Sparta; bringing it up is enough to get him to hurriedly change the subject.
  • The "latest Salsa Incident" is not about the condiment, but about a Screwball Squirrel named Salsa wreaking offscreen havoc that keeps some members of the Web of Friendship offscreen.
  • While trying to explain to Explorer of Unknowns just how busy the Web of Friendship is, Arilay plays a long string of comms-transmitted snippets of dialogue from offscreen Web of Friendship members involved in multiple offscreen incidents. One group of snippets is clearly about trying to shoot down an enemy spaceship. Further snippets hint that a volcano gets crashed into and then used in an Indy Ploy against the enemy spaceship. One snippet claims that "nobody guards the dead" is "an increasingly stupid oversight" but not why. Another snippet, possibly related, identifies a skeleton as not a Camelian skeleton. Another couple of snippets report mapping a black market and an embarrassing exfil, with no details on what made the exfil embarrassing. Some snippets mention bizarre things like a lobster obstacle, "cyberclops" cameras expiring, and a rat named Chlora Phyllis dealing with the aforementioned lobsters. One exclamation is a single-word shout of "Phosphorus!" with no indication of whether it's a warning or an excited discovery or a frantic identification of what's needed or something else. The later snippet saying "two more minutes, and the cave-in is history" might be related — after all, enough phosphorus exploding can make a cave-in — but any connection is not explicit. One snippet mentions a "gauntlet that Salsa wedged in" but cuts off before specifying where, in what or whom, Salsa wedged the gauntlet. One snippet says "let the cleaner nanobots handle that" with no indication of what "that" is other than presumably a mess to be cleaned up. The snippet of "reviewing the traffic jam on the corkboard, no wonder the cops suspected sabotage" leaves the readers wondering why the traffic jam made the cops suspect sabotage and what kind of sabotage would cause a traffic jam.
• No One Could Survive That!: The horses assume that Rosalind got eaten by Sabertooth Lightning once they notice she's missing from the herd. They're Entertainingly Wrong.
• No-Sell:
  • Morpho gets a rock launched at his eye. Not only does the rock shatter against the force-fielded mechanical eyeball, it doesn't even distract him like it was supposed to.
  • Alice tries shielding the devices she carries on her from Sophia's reach using Anti-Magic field when the latter contacted her at the hotel. Considering Technology is Sophia's main domain of power (Iragan even explicitly states that Sophia is Technology), it goes as well as you'd expect.
• Nose Shove: Murquoql shoves pea-sized rocks up some moufretas' noses to drive them off.
• No Social Skills: Tecia sa Valdela is used to dealing with dead souls heading to judgment — who, in her world, are generally in a state closer to a waking dream than the awareness the living take for granted — and the Bureaucracy of the Dead, where rank and knowledge of the Laws are the only thing needed to get ahead. This leaves her blunt and prone to needless Spock Speak.
• No Such Thing as Alien Pop Culture: Aliens from the Jewel Galaxy are hinted to have pop culture, averting this trope.
  • Nyorla sings a Mayatan playground song about tasty recipes for organ meats.
  • Sarquoql lists three alien novelists (Lynn Derra, Zirconi, and Sharnetu) alongside the human novelist Jane Austen when trying to give examples of who understands game theory in the way his archenemies understand it.
• No Sympathy: When Krakka'a tells a sobstory about how a human stole his eggs and his territory, Jen Jara feels skepticism instead of sympathy because she saw a shifty look in Krakka'a's eyes right before he said so.
• No Time to Explain:
  • Morpho has no time to explain himself to Bonnie while (A.) Lily is aiming a gun at him and (B.) Mael is making a getaway with mind-controlled Mequoql. Morpho retreats to the spaceship via teleport to continue the pursuit.
  • When Syrni Sandra is trying to stop Jen Jara from blundering into the same deadly mirage that she'd just blundered into and teleported out of, Syrni Sandra forgoes saying what happened to her in favor of commanding Jen Jara to move away from where it happened. Only once Jen Jara has backed away and returned to Syrni Sandra's side does Syrni Sandra show Jen Jara the wound left by the deadly mirage trying to vivisect her.
• Not in Front of the Kid: Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara try to hide the signs that they are in heat from Cody, who is a child, because they don't want to run afoul of the Stranger Danger taboo that would probably get them in trouble if they tried to explain to Cody what being in heat means and why that would make them act oddly.
• Not in Kansas Anymore: This realization tends to afflict characters who didn't make their way to the Adventure world on purpose.
  • In the aftermath of waking up from a barely-remembered teleport, Rosalind figured out just from the strange landscape and the position of the sun that she was a long way from home. After a few conversations with Varg, Jann and Ozurr about different worlds, she's concluded that she's been teleported out of her version of Earth altogether.
  • When Ozurr sees harpies behaving in ways they don't do in his world, he realizes he's not in Hromstgard anymore.
  • Henry suspects he and Joseph aren't in Washington anymore. He gets a confirmation of that suspicion from an alien who arrived via spaceship.
  • Nui often finds themself reminding themself of this when they encounter physical and cultural differences from their home planet—like the stronger-than-used-to sunlight and (relative) lack of cultural taboos against necromancy.
• Not So Stoic: Nui acts much like The Spock on the outside, exhibiting a logical thought process and not expressing much emotion. However, a session of touch telepathy with Shale reveals some profound panic and fear lurking beneath the surface. It also briefly shows itself when James indirectly mentions Justin's prior outburst; something in what he says prompts Nui to come to Valerie's defense and present an uncharacteristically emotional argument about it.
• Not What It Looks Like: Arnora Bluesword's Dynamic Entry screaming "DIE!" was not directed at the scared Not-Chaos Hunters, she was screaming at the homunculus that tried to Kill and Replace her.
• Not With the Safety On, You Won't: Mayatans can telekinetically invoke this trope, which contributes a lot to their attitude of Guns Are Useless.
• No Warping Zone: Discussed when Gar May says that the orbiting Web of Friendship Scouter Hummingbird spaceship is in the way of a hyper-lane, leading Murquoql and Arilay to wonder what in the name of sanity is a hyper-lane doing so close to orbital traffic. Moquoql further asks "Aren't there minimum safe distances designated in the traffic laws?" before Gar May says that she was mostly joking.
• Now You Tell Me:
  • Varla doesn't mention her healing cantrip until after David's aches and pains complicate an improvised bath.
  • Pilot 0037 and Unit 09 don't mention Unit 09's user manual until after Moquoql the Mayatan engineer is already up to her elbows in trying to fix Unit 09.
  • Rebecca only tells Mequoql that the purported possession preventative was made by a homeopathist, and thus it is useless, after she said the recipe was important and caused Mequoql to yell at her for not fetching the recipe.

O

• Obfuscating Stupidity: Luereyathane pretends not to understand intimidation attempts, because it isn't worried about losing a drone, and it dislikes "exchanges of bravado".
• Oblivious to Hints: Morpho doesn't realize Mequoql is trying to hint that he should shut up until she dope slaps him.
• Odd Name Out: A series of Mayatan siblings are named (from oldest to youngest): Sarquoql, Maequoql, Mequoql, Moquoql, Murquoql... and Nyorla.
• An Odd Place to Sleep: As natives of a volcanic Death World, Viporises have opportunistic sleep patterns. They can sleep standing up with their eyes open almost anywhere.
• Off with His Head!: Amaranth does this to a d'voreem that chases after her and her horse, lopping its head clean off with her scythe.
• Offhand Backhand:
  • Syrni Sandra casually deflects Jen Jara's Dope Slap with a blur of movement, barely even turning to look.
  • When Syrni Sandra teleports really close to Jen Jara to smash a bug, Jen Jara grabs Syrni Sandra by the shirt front without even looking.
• Offscreen Teleportation: The Ace of Spades had a tendency to vanish in between posts and appear with a greeting rather than a narrated entrance.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Mark Tanzer, near the Notice Board, when he and Parthenia recognize each other.
  • Farrah, in the same scene as the above, when she realizes Parthenia is Immune to Bullets.
  • And Farrah again, in the forest, once Parthenia reveals who she is. Meaning that Farrah was shooting at a government agent.
  • Sarquoql thinks his identity is safely hidden in his spacesuit... until John Smith, Security Service calls him by name. Sarquoql is alarmed.
• "Oh, Crap!" Smile: Arilay, a shapeshifting cyborg trying to minimize her Uncanny Valley appearance, swaps one of her normal-looking mechanical eyeballs for one that can echolocate in Mark Tanzer's smoke bomb. When the smoke dissipates, she realizes her eyes are now mismatched and awkwardly covers the new eyeball with one nanobot pseudo-flesh hand, nervously grinning and hoping no one notices her mismatched eyes.
• Oh, My Gods!:
  • Iragan's "Merciful Ether" used as a stand-in for "Merciful God", since the Shattered World he's from doesn't have a concept of Abrahamic God.
  • Bonnie has "For the love of Odessa", Odessa being one of the many deities of Aria.
  • Qorisayane reference the "Dead Gods"; a nickname for Qorisa's native Abusive Precursors. It's not by proper name.
• Oh, No... Not Again!:
  • When a Bolt of Divine Retribution teleports Amaranth, Felicio and Pewter away, the remaining horses run away from Sabertooth Lightning for the second time, thinking "Not again! Not again!"
  • Horny Sailors are closing in on Varla the mermaid in her introductory post, she rolls her eyes and name-drops this trope before reacting explosively.
  • Aynara already telepathically witnessed Haydn set one building on fire in a fight with bandits, so when he gets the idea to explode the Ghost Town's city hall in another fight with bandits, Aynara skedaddles out of city hall, dismayed that Haydn would go for the overkill option again.
• Older Than She Looks: Nyorla has not gone through puberty despite being old enough to do so.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • There are two Sophias: one is part of a group from a future version of Earth, accompanying the Mad Bastards; one is a knowledge incarnate.
  • There are two Henrys: Henry A. Safon II and Henry Bensen.
• Only One Name:
  • Farrah. Just Farrah.
  • Nui's "full name" is Sarenuika... which is still just one name.
  • Non-noble Qorisayane like Aseyu, Koyel, and Layi don't have family names, just a (potentially long) list of titles. Explicitly pointed out by Aseyu, to avoid any misunderstandings with people used to Last-Name Basis.
• Only the Knowledgable May Pass: Varla stops Arnaya the vampire's bloodthirsty attack on David by sticking her sword through Arnaya's lungs, deliberately missing the heart. Most of the witnesses freak out and think Varla is trying to kill Arnaya, thus provoking Varla's contempt, but when Claire recognizes the violence as necessary and the strike as non-lethal to vampires, Varla finds new respect for Claire and quizzes her to see if she can understand to the point of recognizing Varla's violent Talking through Technique. Claire's half-wrong answer reduces Varla's respect for Claire.
  Claire: A wound like that would be child's play to a vampire lord... Sometimes, when dealing with someone's inner demons, ya gotta be a little rough.
  Varla: Claire, you understand the need to get rough. If you can understand the art of it as far as I suspect you can, you should be able to translate for the rest of the group what the placement of my sword is telling Arnaya.
  Claire: I'm going to guess your sword is telling her to calm down and not bite David. Correct me if I'm wrong.
  Varla [disappointed]: You got the 'don't bite David' part right, but that's too obvious to miss. You got the other half of the message completely wrong. If I wanted her to calm down, I would have skewered one or more of her limbs. I want her to hunt, this is me telling her that she went after the wrong target.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: You know the collective exhaustion of the mustang herd is more profound than the previous incidents when Fiddler is too tired to be curious.
• Open Mouth, Insert Foot:
  • Rosalind accidentally calls Jann and his magic scary. She immediately apologizes.
  • Ozurr's first question after Rosalind says she can't fight without loosening control on her vampiric instincts was not phrased as well as he wanted.
    Narration: She didn't seem to be lying...but if his encounters with the Fae had taught him anything, it was that just because someone wasn't lying, that didn't mean what they were saying was true. The trick was to bring it up in a tactful way.
    Ozurr: At the risk of sounding patronizing, have you... tried?
    Narration: Or, he could take his foot and shove it firmly into his mouth.
  • Chitara does this when going on one of her usual rants about the threat witches pose to society during the wagon trip. The catch is that there are two witches standing right next to her. One of them was even one of her customers, which is ironic because her wares were meant to defend against witches.
  • Morpho is vocally incredulous that the Not-Chaos-Hunters would freak out over what they've been through.
  • After Rosalind reveals her age of almost two centuries, Varg Thinks Like a Romance Novel out loud, more specifically referencing penny dreadfuls with demon ladies, with no clue that Rosalind the Religious Vampire would resent being compared, even tangentially, to a succubus.
    Varg [to Jann]: You're not gonna say that she 'looks good for her age' or something? Like in those penny dreadfuls with the demon ladies?
    [Rosalind tries not to burst into tears]
• Operation: [Blank]:
  • During her short-lived communication with Mael, Varla mentally assigns her idea the name Operation Discredit Sarquoql In Case He Shows Up.
  • When outraged by the malicious and/or idiodic setup of how Pilot 0037 was never taught to read and yet his superior officers expected him to read a user manual, Moquoql mentions how she thinks Pilot 0037's Crapsack World is begging for Operation Grey Hanlon.
• Orbital Bombardment: (Discussed?) Maequoql, up in Arilay's spaceship, reasons that as long as nobody drives any wyverns towards town, she won't have to open fire on the wyverns.
• Orphaned Punchline: Though the general context can be inferred, Oseru is seen finishing up an anecdote with her saying that she put a chambered round into somebody's spleen rather than let them finish their sentence. She considers it a droll anecdote.

• Overshadowed by Awesome: Lampshaded by Aseyu. As a Guile Hero from a low-magic world, she's an unremarkable fighter with only enough Anti-Magic to keep telepaths from reading her cards or snapping her neck. She admits that she's "already doomed to be overshadowed" by the other memebers of the boar hunting party when inviting Ethani to join.
• Our Angels Are Different:
  • In her natural form, Tecia sa Valdela is an unnaturally tall, pale, and slender humanoid with wings formed from intermingled light and shadow with a Nightmare Face to boot. Being thoroughly Lawful Neutral, she covers both Dark Is Not Evil and Light Is Not Good.
  • Gabriel's patron and the entity that injured are both Angelic Abominations. His patron is on humanity's side, though it's not a conversationalist; the other is a straight case of Light Is Not Good.
• Our Dragons Are Different: So far, three types of wyvern have shown up in the thread: the raptorial juvenile moufreta, who have a tendency to drop like flies; the unknown stinger-tailed wyvern slain by the Sun Dried Sea trio; and the rather large one-horned lanceros, who ripped a steampunk spider mech a new one. Discussed by Cormack and Lily, with the latter stating that wyverns are very much different from dragons.
• Our Fairies Are Different:
  • This trope comes up during the discussion between Sindar, Layi, Koyel, and Vrask. Layi and Koyel have trouble distinguishing a fairy from a spirit, as where they are from they are more or less the same thing. So they're confused when Sindar, a clearly corporeal being, describes himself as a fairy. Sindar himself explains that fairies in his world represent an aspect of nature with powers to match that aspect.
  • It resurfaces when Sindar converses with Chitara en route to the necropolis. Both agree that fairies are nature spirits, but in Sindar's world, they take on physical characteristics of their "domain", something Chitara has never heard of. Chitara's fairies are also more tricky and malevolent and are perceived as threats.
• Our Liches Are Different: Nyceme seems like a pretty classic example - performed a ritual of some sort to become one, and transferred her soul to her scepter. While her body is more or less intact, it appears to be deteriorating (while not outright rotting, due to measures she takes to prevent that), which Wolfe even mistakes for mere aging.
• Our Nudity Is Different: When Aseyu is asking questions to see what she can get away with, Ethani contrasts the American and Qorisayane standards. The latter are unbothered by women's breasts, but find bared thighs far more risque.
• Our Souls Are Different: Different universes have different rules for the interactions of Anti-Magic and souls — if souls are even known and quantified — that cause some people to react very negatively to the former, fearing, with some justification, being rendered The Soulless by it.
• Our Vampires Are Different:
  • Nearly causes some drama between Rosalind and Ozurr. In Rosalind's universe, vampirism is caused by a virus, which means anyone can become one. In Ozurr's, it's caused by a soul being corrupted, which means only the truly, unrepentantly evil can become one. Fortunately, she's able to explain the difference before he does something stupid.
  • This subject is brought up when Chitara's wagon approaches Rosalind's group. The vampires Sindar and Nyceme are used to don't have souls at all, and so the two are surprised and intrigued by Rosalind having one. As well as not being harmed by sunlight. Nyceme even compares her to the "true vampires" brought up in an earlier discussion with Vindex.
• Our Gods Are Different: Explorer of Unknowns doesn't seem to particularly like other pantheons, even admitting she's the nice one of her people- which include those doing horrific things out of boredom.
• Our Werewolves Are Different: Discussed by Jean when she asks for clarification as to what Ulf meant by "part-time werewolf".
  Jean: A werewolf, eh? What do you mean by that, exactly? There are many that go by that name, you know.
• Out-of-Context Eavesdropping: First Rosalind hears normal chattering inside Chitara's wagon but doesn't hear the words clearly enough to know what they're saying. Then she hears whispering that sounds conspiratorial to her ears, again without hearing the words clearly. Then what she does hear clearly is Nyceme saying, "Then obviousssly thisss isss a job for me," and then the scary-looking snake lady exits the wagon. Given Rosalind's previous experience with surviving Van Helsing Hate Crimes, she concludes it's happening again and panics. But Nyceme just wants to have a friendly chat about undeathly magic.
• Out of the Frying Pan:
  • Sarquoql arrived at this planet in disguise to get away from the swarm of bounty hunters chasing him, only to find out that the Web of Friendship is swarming all over the planet.
  • Discussed when Arnaya infers that there's a greater intelligence controlling the blob. She surmises terminating the blob would honk off that intelligence and calls the hypothetical situation a pan-to-fire jump.
• Outside Ride: Rosalind uses her vampiric anchoring powers to hang on to the roof of the truck for a talk with Ozurr.
• Ow, My Body Part!:
  • With microphone feedback squealing in his ears, Sarquoql complains "ARGH my ears!"
  • When Jobe accidentally kicks Soryn in the kidney and people start asking if he's alright, Soryn says "My poor kidney..."

P

• Pain-Powered Leap: Invoked by Thunder when Stomper and Wheezer didn't jump quite high enough to make it out of The Scar. Thunder nipped Stomper on the rump, causing Stomper to squeal and successfully jump out of The Scar. Meanwhile, Wheezer scrambled up the slope before Thunder got the chance to nip his rump too.
• Painting the Medium:
  • ALL OF OSIRIS' DIALOGUE IS RENDERED LIKE THIS, WITHOUT QUOTATION MARKS.
  • Varla knows Black Speech. When she gets mad enough for its consonant-heavy accent to leak into her voice, the first stage of intensity is represented by the text turning purple, the next stage of intensity bolds the consonants of emphasized words, and the third stage of intensity bolds the consonants of all her words. When she overrides the planet's translator field to speak the language, it's red text on a black highlight.
• Paint It Black: Justin's hair turns black when he fuses with his demon, though there's also bit of a skunk stripe.
• Parenthetical Swearing: Ethani aq'Iqine, like any self-respecting Qorisayane noblewoman, is fond of these. Once when describing Oseru's overly-aggressive time in the Adventure, and later, repeating Aseyu's description of Amaruna as a "photographer" sarcastically.
• Pass the Popcorn:
  • When Red Alert is sounded over Mequoql getting mind-controlled, Explorer of Unknowns appears on the planet's surface with a bucket of popcorn to watch the chaos.
  • Sarquoql, playing the role of bodyguard, acts aggressive towards Mael to add authenticity to his alias. The archaeologist opens up a bag of star-nuts to snack on while watching her bodyguard bristle at her hitchhiking guest.
    Archaeologist: Dude, I'm a le-uuuhhh... I mean, welcome aboard.
    Sarquoql: Hands off, buster.
    Mael: I'm not going to steal her away from you...
    Sarquoql: Good.
    Mael: ...but you may have already lost, my friend.
    Sarquoql: And what is that supposed to mean?
    [Archaeologist snacks on star-nuts]
• Personality Powers: Lightning is deadly most of the time, practically impossible to block or dodge and can deal enormous collateral damage. A fitting weapon for a pragmatic, ruthless government agent with zero concern for human life, such as Parthenia.
• Persona Non Grata: Whatever happened in the weapons shop drove the owner to ban Rosalind from the store.
• Perverted Drooling: Downplayed while Arnaya watched Varla free Nick's mind-controlled uncle. Arnaya drooled only a few drops which the breeze from the sea quickly dried, and lust was one of two reasons she was drooling. The other reason was Arnaya's bloodthirst.
• Perverted Sniffing: The young stallion Rook tries to sniff under the tail of the visiting mare Pewter.
• The Philosopher: Suela and Tovol spend their time arguing about philosophy. Downplayed; they're both relatively young (mid-twenties) and self-taught, and while Suela will become a famous thinker and philosopher eventually, at this point in her life she's only reached the basic implications of her thought experiments.
• Pie in the Face: Discussed when Morpho the Mechanical Lifeform compares the act of electrocuting him to the act of throwing a pie in someone's face. Electricity is robot food, after all...
• Pivotal Wake-up: As the last move after an Unnecessary Combat Roll and other athletics that get her from point A to point B on dry land, Varla the mermaid demonstrates the strength of her core muscles by going from flat on her back to upright without using her arms.
• Plague Zombie: Rosalind's warning indicates the kind of zombies that covered her in gore prior to her arrival.
  Rosalind: I just need some decontamination, this gunk is loaded with zombie germs, dangerous to humans.
• Playground Song: Mayatans have a playground song about creative recipes for various organs. Nyorla sings it while preparing moufreta corpses for lunch, knives dissecting them in time with the beat.
• Playing with Fire: Lieutenant Brandt's magical forte; he is very enthusiastic about lighting things on fire.
• Please Get Off Me: Played straight and then immediately twisted. Varla is on the receiving end of an unexpected hug from Lerna. At first she puts up with it and politely asks Lerna to get off, but the instant Nerea uses the word "molesting" to describe the hug, Varla's Berserk Button is pressed, so she reiterates the request as a roared command while drawing her Chastity Dagger and violently lashing out at Lerna.
• Point That Somewhere Else: When held at gunpoint, Murquoql scoffs and name-drops the trope while telekinetically pushing the gun's muzzle down.
• Poke in the Third Eye:
  • Farrah attempts to do it the most mundane way imaginable: invite Murquoql to read her mind then make fun of her weight mentally. needless to say, the Mayatan is left unimpressed.
  • John Smith (Security Service) tolerates passive Mayatan telepathy that only registers his presence, but if they switch to active probing, he gives them a headache along with the simple words, "I am John Smith, Security Service."
• Popcultural Osmosis Failure: Nora, Leone and James have no idea what a 'smurf' is, so Gwion's joke falls somewhat flat, forcing the latter to explain.
• Pop-Cultured Badass: Wolfe straddles this and Cultured Badass. Teri also qualifies. The Green Eye of the Little Yellow God, Lewis Carroll, Monty Python and much more; neither can seem to resist peppering their dialogue with poems, quotes and cultural references.
• Potty Dance: Arilay fakes a canine potty dance as an excuse to go outside and see what Mequoql (who has just succumbed to mind control) is up to.
• Powder Gag: Invoked and exploited as a firefighting technique — Moquoql summons a drop pod pumping itself full of carbon dioxide and nanobots. When it zooms over to dump its contents onto the Panzerfaust on fire, the nanobots billow like a ludicrous amount of dust until they collide with and reinforce Moquoql's telekinetic fire-smothering barriers.
• Power Copying:
  • Nui does this during the fight between Justin and Miron. When Justin conjures a wall of black fire in front of him, Nui runs to the side of the wall, absorbs some of its power into their shield, and then shoots that energy out of their arm gadget to create a similar wall on Justin's other side.
  • Arnaya was able to copy Mequoql's telekinetic light-generating specialty because Arnaya had previously consumed some of Mequoql's blood in their backstory.
• Power Crystal: What The Not-Chaos-Hunters use for travel and to power up their weapons (specifically Moonstones). It's also what Mael uses to brainwash his victims (specifically Amethyst).
• The Power of Blood: Aynara and Arnaya, tropical Mayatan twins, can copy other Mayatans' telepathic or telekinetic specialties after sampling their blood.
• The Power of the Sun: The Web of Friendship has very carefully developed flashlights that use portals to the sun instead of lightbulbs.
• Pragmatic Villainy: The Inquisitor refuses to start a fight with Dominic's men at the town square on the grounds that bystanders could be hurt. Not because hurting innocent civilians is wrong, but because doing so would result in "Political shitstorm" for the State she represents. Not to mention that Sa'ad, her prisoner, could escape in the ensuing chaos.
• The Pratfall: Morpho's entrance on the planet below has him falling four feet from the air onto his metal posterior before deforming into a comically squashed heap.
  Morpho [deadpan]: Error, category pratfall. How embarrassing.
• Pre Ass Kicking One Liner: Morpho moved to Mael mere minutes after Mael mind-controlled Mequoql, feigning friendliness. Upon seeing Mael's immediate suspicion, Morpho has one last thing to say before dropping the act:
  Morpho [about to tackle Mael]: I am a friend, and I am here to give you a hug.
• Predator Turned Protector: Rosalind, a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire, earned the trust of a herd of mustang horses and integrated herself as their protector. Too bad she got separated from them upon arrival into the Adventure world.
• Prehensile Hair: One of Leone's powers, and the reason her hair's so so ridiculously long to begin with.
• Pressure Point: If you pinch the back of a Mayatan's neck hard enough, the Mayatan will collapse in agony, temporarily unable to move or use psychic powers.
• Pretend to Be Brainwashed: Aynara copies Mequoql's memories and Light 'em Up power, then covers herself in medical tape to Hand Wave her lack of fur, for the purpose of pretending to be Mequoql under Mael's mind-control.
• Pretty Little Headshots: Downplayed when Swanwhite shoots her Breath Weapon firebolts into the heads of a pack of D'voreem — there's no blood splattered because the holes going through their eye sockets and into their brains are cauterized, and cauterization looks a little grosser than unexplained lack of gore.
• Pride: While Parthenia tries to radiate an aura of superiority and some of her remarks hint at her high opinion of herself, her thoughts reveal that she's quite aware of this trait of hers, recognizes it as a flaw and does her best not to let it cloud her judgement. Exemplified by this piece of inner monologue as she goes through the possible scenarios when faced with the option of complying with Chaudhari's demands:
  [My] feelings hurt. Can live with that.
• Primal Stance: While Arnaya the Mayatan vampire twin supervises Varla's attempt to free a guy from mind-control, she perches on top of a boulder in a predator's ready-to-pounce crouch.
• Projectile Kiss: Varla can't seduce Arnaya directly due to Incompatible Orientation on both ends^note Arnaya is straight and Varla is artificially asexual, but Varla can activate Arnaya's memory of Soryn's seduction and make it into a hallucination. Varla aims the spell at Arnaya by blowing a kiss.
• Prompting Nudge: Aynara is impatient to get to Black Morgan. As soon as the bandit patrol delaying her is gone, she bares her claws and pokes her hostages into moving faster.
• Pronouncing My Name for You:
  • Cormack's last name is pronounced tih-NOO-il-uh, not TIN-yoo-wile, as he will have you know.
  • The hotel clerk mishears 'Ó Brádaigh' as 'O'Grady' and assumes Anglicised spelling of the name. Wolfe delights in correcting him. The clerk then lampshades the spelling of Wolfe's name (in which the 'E' is silent).
• Properly Paranoid: When Nerea and Sallara speculate that Sallara's hunters gave up after one skirmish, Varla remembers her own hunters' persistence and disagrees. She discusses the trope by saying "If I was ever foolish enough to assume that enemies give up just like that, I would be either back in captivity or dead."
• Pstandard Psychic Pstance:
  • Maequoql, a Mayatan long-range telepath, is introduced while meditating with her fingertips on her temples.
  • Later her younger sister Mequoql tries to use her Light 'em Up powers to create a massless mirror. Since she hasn't practiced it before, she theatrically places her fingers to her forehead as a convenient social signal that she wouldn't appreciate people disrupting her concentration.
• Psychic Glimpse of Death: Mayatans who witness death can't block out dying thoughts. The experience gives them a headache, which worsens if they themselves were the ones who caused the death. Nyorla temporarily cripples herself with pain by killing four moufretas in a row.
• Psychic Nosebleed: Discussed. Maequoql expects a nosebleed as the least of the possible symptoms she could get from scanning the mind of an Eldritch Abomination. She uses her lack of nosebleed as proof that the grotesque meat-puppet Justin summoned is not an Eldritch Abomination.
• Psychic Radar: All Mayatans have a psychic radar. Maequoql is a long-range specialist Mayatan whose range extends to cover an entire planet from a position in geosynchronous orbit.
• Psychic Strangle:
  • Mayatans use telekinetic nooses with emphasis on squeezing certain anatomy parts depending on what they want to accomplish — one variation squeezes the windpipe, another variation squeezes the carotid artery and jugular vein, and a third variety reserved for threatening sentient beings squeezes muscles uncomfortably close to the windpipe and major blood vessels.
  • Nyorla telekinetically seizes four moufretas by their necks and squeezes their windpipes until they can't vocalize. The strangling isn't what finishes them off, Nyorla uses her claws to puncture major blood vessels in their necks and bleed them out.
  • Aynara uses a downplayed nonlethal telekinetic pressure on a bandit's neck muscles when threatening him into carrying a message to Black Morgan or Mael, whichever one is in charge of the bandits by the time she finds them.
  • Later, to knock out a bunch of mind-controlled bandits shooting Five Rounds Rapid at her, Aynara uses telekinesis to squeeze their carotid arteries, putting a sleeper hold on them. She has to constantly monitor and adjust the pressure she's using to keep them unconscious instead of killing them, so she drinks them into hypovolemic shock one by one to free up her telekinesis.
  • Aynara uses the same telekinetic blood choke when capturing Haydn to stop him from throwing explosions around.
• Psychological Projection: In the aftermath of driving off a homunculus, while Rosalind is still reining in her Horror Hunger, Varg makes a reference to alcoholic drinks and Rosalind scolds herself out of making the mistake of thinking Varg was referring to blood.
  Varg: Pretty decent job by all of you. Drinks are on me tonight. Well, all our supplies are already paid for, but you get the idea...
  Rosalind [aloud]: Aw gee, thanks, I'm glad I could help.
  Rosalind [thinking to herself]: Varg was clearly referring to alcohol drinks, you numbskull!
• Punch-Clock Villain: Ava Sharpe is technically this due to her job as an investigator, although she isn't actually villainous in terms of motivation.
• Punctuated! For! Emphasis!: When Lerna is bitten and drugged by an enemy's mechanical spider, Varla barks an order, "Tourniquet! On her tail! NOW!"
• Punctuated Pounding: When Aynara is drinking out of a bandit's arm and she tries to talk with her mouth full, Shale dope slaps her forehead with the ASL sign for "melon" twice, each contact bearing one word of the reminder "Table! Manners!" via Touch Telepathy
• Punny Name: Amelia Blackwood, the Woman in Room 444, has a mother named Inni who has the power to grant wishes. Inni is also a DJ at a karaoke bar. DJ Inni, in other words.
• Puny Earthlings: Aynara the Mayatan vampire dismissively refers to the bandits in the Ghost Town as squishy humans.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes:
  • Rosalind briefly flashes a puppy-dog pout at Jann in an attempt to encourage his silence just before asking Ozurr and Varg how much they heard of her embarrassing herself.
  • Arilay shamelessly exploits her golden retriever disguise while begging for one of Cynthia and Moobly's biscuits.
• Put Their Heads Together: Soryn interrupts the two moufretas biting his shirt and skin by bashing their heads together.

Q-R

• Quicksand Sucks: A crisis on the Wasteland coastline — a large creature emerges from the sand and leaves a mud pit behind where it was lying. Poor David falls in and sinks all the way up to his snout, so Varla, Lerna and Nerea rush over to get him out, leading to a Rescue Introduction.
• Quizzical Tilt: Maequoql stares befuddled with her head tilted at the unexpected stranger (Explorer of Unknowns) appearing on Arilay's spaceship.
• Rage Breaking Point: After dealing with Vindex, then finding out Not Chaos Hunters's worst enemy had somehow arrived to hunt them down, THEN running into Moufretas, and finally Eris vanishing without a trace within seconds of meeting them, Nick snaps and rants about the whole day. He also decides to rant at Jackson, also being sick of his constant attacks on him for the past three threads.

• Rags to Riches: Alice Winters — Dragon-in-Chief of an N.G.O. Superpower — says that genetically, she's just "standard-issue Midwestern white trash" when explaining that a DNA sample won't reveal anything about her Anti-Magic Enlightenment Superpowers.
• Rapid-Fire Name Guessing: In the Forest, Farrah has trouble remembering Mad Bastards' name. Which she learned mere seconds ago.
• Rapid-Fire "No!": Rosalind, under the mistaken impression that Nyceme exited the wagon to kill her, runs to hide behind Ozurr while screaming "Nonononononono! Don't let her get me!"
• A Rare Sentence: Downplayed in-universe, Murquoql (who has Seen It All) considers the phrase "humanoid lamprey" to be the only rare part of the sentence "Swanwhite was OK, she was playing Roger Dodge-em in the fog while figuring out how to rescue a humanoid lamprey from a human who smelled like drugs and alcohol."
• Raven Hair, Ivory Skin: If dark purple hair counts as close enough for the aesthetic, then Varla the mermaid's ivory skin drawing attention to her Amazonian Beauty muscles complete the qualification.
• Reactive Continuous Scream: Downplayed. When Fiddler first gets her nose zapped by the booby trap on Whisper's saddlebags, she squeals in surprise and pain, startling Whisper who also squeals. Fortunately, Fiddler doesn't start a squealing cycle past that.
• Rearing Horse: Startled and in pain, Angel the gelding reacts to a moufreta biting his hind leg by rearing. Surprisingly Realistic Outcome when he loses his balance and falls over backwards.
• Rebel Relaxation: Murquoql props her back and one foot against the edge of the bulletin board.
• Red Alert: Mequoql's last-ditch distress call before succumbing to mind control triggers a klaxon on the WFS Hummingbird. The Web of Friendship members on board jump to their feet and make themselves useful — Maequoql locks her psychic radar on the perpetrator to track him while Moquoql grabs a bag of tools and runs for the transporter room.
• Red and Black and Evil All Over: Black-haired Parthenia is clad in black leather armor with red hooded coat over it. While it's too early to call her outright Evil yet, she's shown enough of her character not to be unambiguously Good.
• Refuse to Rescue the Disliked: Varla is offended at David flirting at her while she's rescuing him from quicksand, and hints that she could have quit the rescue if it weren't for Nerea and Lerna witnessing and joining in the rescue.
• Religious Vampire:
  • Holy Is Not Safe for the Terror Hero Mayatan vampire twins, but they ignore the aches to pray anyway.
  • Rosalind got her faith from spending her formative years in North America's Bible Belt, she hasn't let go of her faith despite becoming a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire. It shows when she overhears Ozurr and Varg discussing their worlds' deities and her first knee-jerk thought is that she's surrounded by heathens.
• Rescue Introduction: Varla introduces herself to Lerna and Nerea while they team up to free David, who is up to his ears in quicksand. As soon as David is out of the quicksand, the ladies introduce themselves to him.
• Restraining Bolt:
  • Cynthia's eyepatch and gauntlet serve as these, to mask and control her Silver Witch magic.
  • Unit 09 had arctic calibreum components embedded in joints to prevent her from regrowing her limbs and to make her more manageable for the Balamar Empire.

• Ret-Gone: Rebecca Jane Walsh fades out of existence after Michelle decides to use her time manipulation powers to make her disappear, upon realizing it's not the "real" Rebecca.
• Revealing Cover-Up:
  • Rosalind is trying to keep her identity as a vampire a secret. Ozurr is one of her Secret Keepers, but when Finn mistakenly points at Varg (a haugr) when he guesses who's the vampire, Ozurr bursts out laughing and says he can't explain what's so funny. Rosalind realizes she can't shush her Secret Keepers without drawing more attention to the fact that there's a reason for shushing them.
  • Arilay tries to hide her echolocating eyeball behind her hand, but between her conspicuous hand position and nervous grin, it's clear she's hiding her eye.
• Reverse Psychology: After establishing that he hates Krakka'a and has no desire to help him, Osiris tricks him into walking into a trap by telling him to go the other way.
• Riddle for the Ages: The results of the Anti-Magic Alice and the Ace of Spades use is pretty well explained, it's a mobile magical dead zone that is generated by intense mental training. Why it works, and how its interacts with the soul of the user (especially given there's no proof souls exist in their native universe at all beyond being metaphors for consciousness and the self) are questions that will never get answered.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter: Nora attepts this by shapeshifting into a cuttlefish. It works on Cynthia, not so much on Leone.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • Upon hearing that Justin has been Valerie's familiar for ten years, Wolfe concludes she must be older than she looks. Whilst correct, Justin being Valerie's familiar doesn't really guarantee anything.
  • Ozurr thinks Rosalind can't digest raw mutton because it's raw. Really, Rosalind can't digest raw mutton because it's too solid for her vampiric stomach to handle, and cooked mutton would have been worse.
  • During the interrupted game of hide and seek, Syrni Sandra hears Jen Jara's underground sonic boom in the distance and wonders who or what made that sound. When Akane makes a guess and then mentions encountering moving angel statues, Syrni Sandra makes her own guess that Jen Jara made a sonic boom in reaction to also encountering the statues. Syrni Sandra is correct that Jen Jara was the one responsible for the sonic boom, but incorrect about the reason why — Jen Jara was blasting Krakka'a's eardrums.
• Road Apples: When tracking down missing horses, it's reasonable to look for hoofprints and manure. Manure has already been left behind at the beach where the smaller river meets the sea and along the riverbanks leading up to the forest.
• Roaring Rampage of Rescue: The sight of a homunculus trying to drown Jann in a river drives Rosalind into a berserk hissing biting stomping frenzy. Despite her issues with running water, she stays put in the river to try and pull Jann out of the homunculus's grip. Ozurr gets in on the action too, roaring and swinging his axe to chop off the homunculus's grasping tentacle.

• Rule of Three:
  • It took three electric shocks from a Booby Trap for Fiddler to cease her attempts to open the Inquisitor's saddlebags.
  • The skvader explores three different caves for the herd of mustang horses to hide from Krakka'a in before picking the shallowest one with the widest entrance. He goes in and out of that cave three times before the most curious horse, Fiddler, accompanies him inside. Fiddler goes in and out of the cave three times before Lead Mare Flashfoot decides it's safe enough for the entire herd to go inside. In real life, horses shun caves and it takes multiple months of patient training to get a horse willing to enter a cave, but the story of overcoming that reluctance was compressed to move the plot along without tedium.

S

• Sapient Eat Sapient: Discussed when Krakka'a and Jen Jara argue over who's higher than whom on the food chain.
• Scar Survey:
  • Invoked by Jann of Grimmsford, who rolls up his sleeve to show Rosalind where he was cut open to have warding runes carved onto his bones.
  • Farrah provides a self-inflicted Rare Female Example, checking herself out for new scars while soaking in the bathtub.
• Schmuck Bait: Arilay offers Wain three choices to get off her orbiting spaceship: the teleporter pad, the escape pods, and the airlock. Wain wisely does not choose the airlock.
• Screams Like a Little Girl: One of the Horny Sailors is reduced to screaming in soprano after Varla's Groin Attack on him.
• Screw the Rules, They Broke Them First!: Void Maidens are supposed to be the astronauts/ambassadors of the Viporis species. But when Krakka'a aggressively calls Jen Jara an insect, she disregards her diplomatic training and calls him oversized talking prey.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • The herd of horses take off into the distance, spooked by the flash and bang of the teleport, which they call Sabertooth Lightning.
  • When Justin and the demon fuse, the "Not-Chaos-Hunters" promptly decide to get out of dodge.
  • Similarly, Chitara decides to skip town after witnessing the worst that Justin can offer.
  • Iragan's general reaction after witnessing Parthenia's thought patterns.
  • Zarokh is initially willing to stick around and let the Not-Chaos-Hunters lead him to the Coast of Chills. Then, Cormack suddenly vanishes in a bolt of lightning, at which point Zarokh decides vague directions are sufficient and high-tails it out of there.
  • Mark immediately tries to flee when Parthenia recognizes him.
  • After Haydn's Unwanted Rescue, his nuclear spell is the Last Straw sending Aynara fleeing without telling him what's going on.
  • Rebecca Jane Walsh will do this, but it's justified as she has another crisis to solve.
• Second-Face Smoke: In Rosalind's backstory, back when she was still human, a suitor blew a smoke ring at her face. She didn't react well, coughing hard enough to vomit on his shoes. To her everlasting relief, her reaction was correctly interpreted as a rejection.
• Security Cling:
  • Rosalind hides behind Jann and clings to his arm to gather the courage she needs to confess to Varg and Ozurr that she's a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire.
  • Rosalind clings to Jann as a nervous reflex when sizing up Chitara's wagon and concluding the group might turn hostile if they were to find out that she's a vampire.
• Seen It All:
  • A demon picks a fight outside the hotel, and summons pillars of random body parts. A waitress on the other side of town square sighs...
    Waitress: Third time this week. Some people just have no manners.
  • Mayatans come from a galaxy rich in supernatural happenings, so the powers of a self-proclaimed deity are not entirely astonishing to them.
    Moquoql: We come from a galaxy rich in supernatural happenings, you can surprise and impress us, but we usually won't stay flabbergasted for long.
• Selective Gravity: Maequoql turns off the Artificial Gravity in a vast majority of the Web of Friendship spaceship. Niches with potted plants keep pockets of artificial gravity on, as floating clumps of soil everywhere would not be fun.
• Self-Duplication: John Smith, Security Service can appear in multiple places at once.
• Self-Mutilation Demonstration: Arnaya shoots herself in the gliding membrane, both to teach Nasur about friendly fire and to show off her own accelerated healing. But when Amy interrupts with her healing moonstones before Arnaya is done suppressing her own healing, Arnaya resorts to clawing open her own cheek to show off how fast she can heal without the moonstones.
• Self-Surgery: Moquoql sterilizes one of the claws in her fingertips so she can poke a hole through her flesh to the outside surface of her skull, where there's an access wire to her communication microchip that she can plug Novia into. Since it's a relatively small and shallow cut, the trope is downplayed.
• Semantic Superpower: Murquoql's psychic specialty is weapon analysis. With enough creativity, anything can be used as an Improvised Weapon.
• Seriously Scruffy: The more Mequoql's plans to hide her trail from Mael in the forest get interrupted, the more her ponytail frazzles from stress.
• Shadow Walker: Inni warns Murquoql about a vampire lord who can warp from shadow to shadow.
• Shameful Strip: Implied by Parthenia's inner monologue that this happened to Sa'ad once she caught him. Orain offers pragmatic reasons for that. Iragan tells her to keep them for herself.
  Parthenia (thinking): Go on, Sa'ad ... Tell him you're a slave. For me. I know there are no spots on your person that could prove such claim.
• Shameless Fanservice Girl: Aseyu ul'Valmoth's culture has nudity taboos, even if they differ from America's. Aseyu herself does not.
• Shapeshifting Heals Wounds: When Aynara loses an eye, her ears, and lots of skin to a fire that happened while she was fighting to remove an Eldritch Abomination's Teleport Interdiction, she turns into Super Smoke and back to redistribute her mass, reforming her eye, ears and skin at the cost of losing weight from elsewhere in her body.
• Shared Unusual Trait: The Otterbein twins have two for the price of one; they inherited their human mother's heterochromia, and inherited their miri mother's snowflake-shaped iris in one eye.
• Share the Male Pain: Varla just has to lacerate one lewd fisherman's groin to get all the Horny Sailors shielding their own groins.
• Shapeshifting
  • Arilay's external nanobots cover her life-support suit to provide a normal-looking appearance. So far, Arilay has disguised herself as a pile of dirt and a pudgy golden retriever.
  • Nora has this as her ability, which she has demonstrated turning her arm into a tentacle and back again, and fully changing into a cutesy pink cuttlefish.
  • Ava Sharpe can do this, of a sort, via Holographic Disguise means, but hers is limited to a selection of pre-configured disguises.
• Shout-Out:
  • Once Justin, Valerie's "slave", fuses with his demon and starts fighting Miron, Nyceme calls him "one hell of a butler".
  • The Web of Friendship's shadow-avoidance protocols are called Vashta Nerada Protocols.
  • Alice and Wolfe independently think to compare the former's Anti-Magic training to the training of Mentats.
  • After Moquoql passes Maequoql an item via a Hammerspace pocket into Victoria's Secret Compartment, their telepathic conversation is similar to another conversation between Eddie and Roger Rabbit.
    Maequoql: Couldn't you have done that some other way?
    Moquoql: Not while tapping into cartoon physics. Any other way wouldn't have been nearly as funny.
  • Upon realizing it couldn't see, Unit 09 utilized one the Dalek's stock phrases:
    Unit 09: My vision is impaired! I cannot see!
  • The full epithet of Zarokh's patron god, Sobek, contains the phrase "He Who Is In the Water."
  • Explaining what "Abigail protocols" are, a Western Amalgamated agent name-drops "exterminatus".
  • After being startled by a statue of a weeping angel, Krakka'a chides himself for being frightened of statuary, and sarcastically asks himself if he thinks it's going to start moving when he's not looking.
  • Arnaya says that one of the disadvantages of fighting mind-controlled strangers instead of fighting mind-controlled friends and family is that when all is said and done, strangers might try to sue you over rescues they don't like, which is what happened in The Incredibles.
  • Regarding her assumption that Aliens Are Bastards, Oseru says humanity and any alien they encounter will be "two apex predators in a dark forest, doing all we can to survive." (She's never read the Remembrance of Earth's Past herself, but understands game theory well enough, and shares enough of Liu's priors, to come to approximately the same conclusions.)
  • After Krakka'a falls for Osiris' Reverse Psychology and walks off towards a trap, Osiris deadpans Stop. Don't. Come back.
  • Upon seeing Alexa's Game Face, Jen Jara murmurs a couple of lines from The Tyger.
    Jen Jara: What immortal hand or eye could frame thy fearful symmetry?
  • When Jenny the artificial human gorges herself on drugged chocolate, then abruptly drops dead, Soryn twists a line from When Harry Met Sally... and thinks, "I'll not have what she's having."
  • After Fiddler removes a stone stuck in Whisper's horseshoe, she rinses out her mouth in the tiny brook because she does not want to taste everywhere that Whisper has been, just like Remy from Ratatouille doesn't want to taste everywhere his own paws have been.
  • Aseyu's Unusual Euphemism for her Shameless Fanservice Girl tendencies, "sartorial minimalist", is borrowed (though not intentionally by Aseyu, who is speaking Qorisayane) from Eb of Tyranny.
  • When Ellya-Salaenl points out her spaceship to Nora, she adds, "What, did you think I walked here?" paraphrasing a line from Lilo & Stitch when Jumba showed Stitch his spaceship.
  • As someone with a giant serpentine body from the humanoid waist down, Soryn can support the weight of multiple riders. He got the idea to offer by reading the part of Spellsinger where Jon-Tom was trying to summon a ride and wound up with a giant snake.
  • Soryn carries a towel, following the recommendation of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
  • Nyorla's encounter with the extremely fabulous Gabriel Kardos has her, like her fellow Web of Friendship members, thinking of labyrinths.
  • Among the songs Osiris sings to annoy Krakka'a are "The Song That Never Ends" and the Camp Camp Song Song.
  • Sapient demons in Gabriel's world are, loosely, an ecumenical version of their portrayal in The Screwtape Letters. Gabriel explicitly mentions C. S. Lewis as having "them better than anyone else", and Hajnal mentions the wine made from fanatic souls that Screwtape praises as a delicacy.
• Shown Their Work: The 1993 Land Rover Discovery commercial vehicle from the Republic of Ireland refers to an independent conversion developed in 1991 as a means of reduced VAT. Actual picture here.
• Shrug Take: Upon seeing a self-proclaimed deity spontaneously create a feathery cat-like creature, Maequoql and Moquoql blink in astonishment, then glance at each other and shrug.
• Shutting Up Now:
  • Maequoql ends her telepathic conversation with Arilay upon being told that her idea to distract the Ace of Spades with a hallucination sounded like something her evil brother Sarquoql would do.
  • After Mequoql dope slaps Morpho, he finally realizes he's been sticking his foot in his mouth and shuts up. It doesn't last long.
• Sickening "Crunch!":
  • The crunch of a high-speed projectile rock isn't sickening in and of itself, but in the context of smashing into a mechanical eyeball...
  • When Jamie is spooked by Sindar's presence and falls, she sounds one of these when her wing is broken. There are similar crunches when she gets back up.
  • Morpho is oblivious to how creepy he sounds when he's snapping moufreta bones in the process of butchering a corpse.
• Silent Snarker: Maya is deaf and mute and speaks through ASL. She's also the biggest smart ass in the NCH group and almost everything she signs is a snarky comment. If not that, she expresses her dissaproval through her face.
• A Simple Plan: Jann's plan to get Rosalind out of the men's room without anybody seeing her is: he exits first, waits until the coast is clear, then signals her. Simple, right? What Could Possibly Go Wrong? Fate is tempted, but the plan goes smoothly enough.
• Sinister Scraping Sound: Morpho is oblivious to how creepy he sounds when he's using his morphing metal to scrape flesh off a moufreta's bones.
• Sinister Scythe:
  • Amaranth wields one; it goes well with her Grim Reaper disguise when out on the road.
  • Inanna carries a particularly nasty looking one that's bigger than she is.
  • Akane's weapon of choice is the Japanese variant of the sickle, the kama. One that also happens to be a tsukumogami. That can fly.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Almost every other word coming from Sa'ad's mouth is a profanity of some sort. When it isn't, it's a setup for a string of obscenities.
• Skewed Priorities: Discussed In-Universe when Aynara expresses incredulity at Haydn and Wilhelmine launching an extermination mission against bandits when there's a mind-controller and an Eldritch Abomination on the loose.
  Aynara [telepathically]: Bandits? There's a mind-controller and an Eldritch Abomination on the loose here and you're going after those squishy human bandits who rely on their useless guns too much?
• Slasher Smile: After hearing Mael's voice over a confiscated earpiece, Varla gets a nasty grin as she thinks of how to discredit Sarquoql in Mael's eyes.
• The Sleepless: Rosalind hasn't needed any sleep in years. She hasn't elaborated why, but it probably has something to do with her vampirism.
• Sleeps with Both Eyes Open:
  • Mayatans have transparent eyelids to play with this trope — they sleep with their eyes technically closed, but they can still see almost as well as if their eyes were open.
  • As natives of a volcanic Death World, Viporises have opportunistic sleep patterns. Closing their eyes to sleep is beneficial but optional, as they still blink in their sleep.
• Small Name, Big Ego: Wain Fallwen thinks he's an excellent bounty hunter. In reality, he's mediocre at best.
• Smells Sexy: Rosalind is distracted from panicking when she clings to Jann and gets a faceful of his scent at point-blank range.
• Smoke Out:
  • Mark Tanzer exits the thread by deploying a smoke bomb and vanishing.
  • Varla taps into the heat generated by the spaceship's engines and the planet's mantle to vaporize rain into steam long enough to pull her protectees into a cave.
  • Swanwhite mixes steam from her own breath into the mist already in the Rainforest as she backs away from Henry A. Safon II and his gun.
• Smug Snake: Krakka'a. Let's see...openly abusive to his subordinates? Check. Disdain to the point of anger towards those who are weaker than him? Check. Visibly terrified by those who are stronger than him? Check.
• Snake People:
  • Saen is a living lamia, Nyceme is an undead lamia lich, and Soryn is a genetically engineered snake man who can't properly be called a lamia because none of his DNA is from that species — instead he was reverse-engineered to look like one via LEGO Genetics from multiple other species.
  • Zelena is one of these, but takes on human form as A Form You Are Comfortable With.
• Sneeze Cut:
  • Moquoql mentions Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara, who at the time of posting were in a different character development thread, and then they simultaneously sneeze.
    Moquoql (in the Adventure thread): Huh, so that's where Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara chased each other to.
    Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara (in the Space Liner thread): Achoo!
  • Both It Came From The Sea and Unit 09 sneeze (or make strange noises in Unit 09's case) after being mentioned in Bonnie's fate tempting rant of strange things to encounter.
  • Rosalind hopes aloud that either the mustangs were smart enough to repurpose helicopter evasion techniques to evade Krakka'a or Krakka'a didn't bump into them. Miles away, hiding in the Ridge after an encounter with Krakka'a, Lead Mare Flashfoot wakes up with a sneeze from a pre-night-sneaking nap.
  • Moquoql in the Sun-Dry Sea wishes aloud for Seenarnha or Kynn Derra's presence to help her extinguish the flaming wreckage of the Panzerfaust. In the Rainforest, Seenarnha sneezes.
  • When Nora in the hotel complains "Urgh... I'm so hungry, I could eat a horse..." one of the horses in the canyon sneezes twice.
  • Varla rants cynically about authorities who look for any excuse to not lift a finger if someone is in danger, citing John Smith, Security Service not caring about a mind-controller running around on the loose because the mind-controller has left the natives alone. John Smith sneezes twice.
• Sniff Sniff Nom: Mequoql and Nyorla got the idea to sample blood from slaughtered moufretas and guess at whether or not vampires would like that blood.
• So Much for Stealth:
  • Name-dropped by Arilay when the Ace of Spades correctly identifies the sand in her disguise as nanobots.
  • Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara spy on a couple of shrivers. After witnessing their egregious violence against a jellyfish, Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara try to sneak away, only for Syrni Sandra to crunch a patch of gravel under her foot.
    Syrni Sandra: Oops.
    Jen Jara: Busted.
  • Arnaya tries to muffle the noises made by the truck reclamation group, but thanks to Nasur leaving Arnaya's telekinetic bubble, a thief (not the same thief they were after) notices them anyway.
  • A pack of D'voreem sneak up on Zing, but they decide not to ambush him after he notices them and growls at them.
• Something Else Also Rises: In the wake of a Suggestive Collision with Jann landing on top of Rosalind, her fangs involuntarily extend in counterpart to his involuntary reaction.
• Sophisticated as Hell: Parthenia's mental assessment of the situation she found herself in in the Town Square devolves into this.
• Sorry, I'm Gay: The archaeologist doesn't know whether or not Mael was flirting, so just in case, she starts to say "Dude, I'm a lesbian" but she's interrupted before she can finish the last word.
• Source Music: The arrival of a fleet of motorcycles to the sound of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries.
• Southern Belle: Rosalind is a polite Friendly Neighborhood Vampire with a fluctuating Texas drawl. Her thoughts sometimes take note of Miss Manners, Emily Post, or simply that something is or isn't ladylike.
• Space Elves: Nui is a literal Space Elf - has the ears and everything. Or at least looks like one. Their race is quite familiar and adept with magic, and are also a Proud Scholar Race.
• Spaceship Girl: Arilay the cyborg remotely pilotes the WFS Hummingbird and feels it as part of her body.
• Spanner in the Works: Twice, Bonnie ruined the Web of Friendship's plans to capture Mael. First Bonnie mistook Morpho for a slime and cast an adrenaline surge on Mael. Later, Bonnie fell on top of Moquoql, knocking the chloroform rag off of Mael's face.
  Morpho [first incident]: Do you mind? I'm trying to apprehend a mind-controller here! Now look what you've done!
  Moquoql [second incident]: Get off me you spanner he's gonna get away!
• Spare a Messenger: By driving off moufretas instead of killing them, Murquoql recognizes the (slight) possibility that they'll warn other moufretas not to mess with Mayatans.
• The Speechless: Shale has no vocal cords.
• Speed Sex: Justified for Viporises, who on their Death World home moon need to hurry up and conceive before volcanic interruption. Syrni Sandra exploits that feature of her species to sneak in a quick nap and erotic dream while hiding during a game of hide and seek.
• Spell Book:
  • Nyceme has one, with many different kinds of pages haphazardly arranged in what better resembles a binder.
  • Soryn doesn't have every spell that his staff is capable of memorized, he's had to look up a cleaning spell in the staff's user manual.
• Spell My Name with a "The": Parthenia the Keraunos.
• Spider-Sense:Mayatans can tell where somebody is pointing their gun by reading their minds.
  • Nyorla's Psychic Radar lets her know exactly where Pilot 0037 aims his gun, even as his aim is thrown off by slipping in the mud.
  • When Aynara turns into Super Smoke, she can still get her communication microchip out of the way of bandits' Five Rounds Rapid and Haydn's series of explosions.
• Spikes of Doom: When Nyceme tosses her scepter, it lands upright and forms a protective cage made of poisonous, life-draining spikes. It even exudes an aura that makes this doom-inducing property obvious to those who are near it.
• Spit Out a Shoe: A few minutes after eating Angus, Krakka'a coughs up a shoe.
• Squashed Flat:
  • Rosalind worries about accidentally provoking Ozurr the giant into squashing her flat.
  • Defied by Henry A. Safon II, who scrambles out of the way of Ozurr the giant's Dramatic Sit-Down.
  • One of the moufreta corpses ends up being crushed underfoot by the landing albino lanceros.
• Squick: In-Universe, Sarquoql grosses himself out when he imagines a necrophile necromancer turning Nyceme into a lich.
• Sssssnake Talk: Half-woman-half-snake Nyceme speaks this way, complete with forked tongue flicking out. Saen also does it as a parody of this stereotype. It even applies to the latter's writing.
• Stage Whisper: Arilay initially addresses the Ace of Spades in a harsh whisper.
• Standard Female Grab Area: Plasma the dragonhorse grabs the lamprey priestess by the upper arms, but the lamprey priestess keeps fighting.
• Stealth Hi/Bye:
  • The Ace of Spades had a tendency to vanish in between posts and appear with a greeting rather than a narrated entrance.
  • Aynara and Arnaya are capable of sneaking off of Arilay's spaceship even when she's got security cameras all over the interior.
• Stealth Insult: Farrah makes fun of Parthenia upon seeing her combat boots, saying "Nice footwear, there. Pity your kids will get bullied for them" - a reference for the famous "Your mother wears combat boots" insult.
• Stealth Pun: Aynara and Arnaya's retribution for Wain lying is putting an illusion of fire on his pants...
• Steven Ulysses Perhero: The name Sarenuika means "death needle". Not only does Nui have some skill with necromancy, but they spell they almost use fire at UD Justin has an incantation with "needle of death" right in it.
• Stop, or I Shoot Myself!: While under Mael's mind control, Mequoql baits Morpho to stop wrestling Mael and chase her instead by bringing her claws up to her own throat. It works because she doesn't communicate any demands, leading Morpho to assume that she was suiciding with no ifs ands or buts.
• Stranger Danger: Discussed by Syrni Sandra, who remarks that she's still adjusting to other species' cultures being possessive over who is allowed to parent which kids. She still doesn't quite understand that taboo, but she knows just enough to not want to run afoul of it, which is why a) she didn't hug Cody when she wanted to and b) she hid the signs that she was in heat from Cody to avoid giving him The Talk.
• Stress Vomit:
  • Downplayed. Rosalind would have eventually barfed up the mutton that, as a vampire, she can no longer digest, but the stress of almost blurting out her secret is the Last Straw for Rosalind's stomach.
  • Downplayed again when, ill-timed with the nauseating after-effects of using the Not-Chaos-Hunters' Make a Wish gems for the first time, Mequoql hears the bad news that her sister is in the metaphorical crosshairs of a psychopomp. She projectile-vomits raw moufreta liver.
• Stripperific:
  • Akane's outfit. The bulk of her outfit is essentially two three-inch wide strips of leather.
  • Varla the mermaid wears only a sports bra, two metal arm bands, and a sword belt. And she wonders why she gets catcalled.
  • Pointedly averted, in contrast to previous portrayals, by Aseyu. She quite enjoys being naked, but failure to cover up in the jungles of Qorisa can have consequences ranging from embarassing to lethal, so her hunting outfit is Boring, but Practical.

• Stripping Snag: Soryn loses his shirt in a moufreta ambush when they shred and pull it off trying to damage the skin underneath.
• Suddenly Shouting: Rosalind starts her vague summary of the Noodle Incident by briefly yelling at Varg over the noise of the truck.
  Jann: You and Varg seemed in a bit of a hurry when we left...
  Rosalind: Ah, yes, well... [Suddenly Shouting] Varg, I warned ya that weapons and I don't mix!
• Suggestive Collision: When getting into the truck, Rosalind is already seated. Jann tries to scoot by her and trips over her backpack. She tries to catch him as he falls onto her. Their chests touch, their faces are an inch away from an Accidental Kiss, her hands end up on his ribcage, and his hands end up on her shoulders instead of the backrest behind her. And then Rosalind tries and fails to roll Jann off of her, causing one of his hands to slip down from her shoulder...
• Summon to Hand:
  • Moquoql telekinetically summons a grab bag to her hand when Red Alert starts.
  • Murquoql telekinetically summons a fire extinguisher to her hand before realizing the flames on Wain's pants are fake.
• Supernatural Gold Eyes
  • Jann of Grimmsford is a wizard with yellow eyes.
  • As part of her Game Face, Rosalind the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire has the option of turning her brown irises yellow.
• Super-Reflexes: The Viporises Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara have accelerated reflexes.
  • Syrni Sandra reacts Just in Time to teleport out of a deadly mirage that would have otherwise ripped her apart in mid-sentence.
  • Jen Jara attempts to Dope Slap Syrni Sandra at mundane speed, but from their perspective, the slap is a Painfully Slow Projectile, making it easy for Syrni Sandra to deflect.
  • In the time it takes for Akane to prepare to teleport behind Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara, they Flash Step to put their backs against the wall.
• Super Smoke: Nyorla knows Aynara and Arnaya can turn into mist and transport themselves through the spaceship's air vents, but they don't do so then. Later, Aynara turns into mist multiple times to get out of a fire, go down a chimney, and dodge bullets and explosions. Arnaya tries to turn into mist to get out of Arilay grabbing her with a tractor beam, but Arilay calibrated the tractor beam to be able to hold onto air, cutting off Arnaya's escape route that way.
• Suplex Finisher: Akane's opening move when Krakka'a decided to become hostile towards her.
• Sure, Let's Go with That: A bandit patrol encountering Aynara and her three bandit hostages assume the captivity goes the other way around and that Black Morgan will soon have his way with her. Aynara telepathically threatens the hostages to play along with the misunderstanding until the patrol leaves.
• Surrounded by Idiots: Varla gets increasingly exasperated as: the Not-Chaos-Hunters fail to follow through with their idea to distract and incapacitate Arnaya; David and some other witnesses think Arnaya was trying to kill him even though she bit the side of his neck instead of his carotid artery; nobody understood why, out of all the places Varla could have stabbed her sword, she chose to impale the bottom of Arnaya's lungs; and Claire brushes off Varla's warning that demons are professional liars by saying that one demon can't be a professional liar because that demon is a hunter, causing Varla to correct that one can be a hunter and a professional liar simultaneously. Varla's Latin prayer of "Salve me ab fatui nimii!" translates to "Save me from too many idiots!"
• Surprise Jump: When startled by an automatic flushing toilet, Rosalind jumps high enough to cling to the ceiling. Justified as an instinctive use of her vampiric powers.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
  • Mequoql flies an unrealistic bird simulacrum towards a wild raven. They don't become instant friends. The raven is initially spooked by the simulacrum, so the raven flies a short distance away, watches the specter closely, and starts planning potential escape routes.
    Narration: Well, Mequoql had just creeped out the raven. What did she expect would happen, anyway? She wasn't an animal trainer.
  • Soryn's shirt and the skin underneath gets shredded by biting and clawing moufretas, making a realistic consequence to go along with Clothing Damage.
  • A Rearing Horse too panicked to control himself loses his balance and falls.
  • Floors don't have face wells like massage tables do. When Akane offers to massage Syrni Sandra's back, Syrni Sandra can't get comfortable lying face-down on the floor.
• Survival Mantra: Rosalind has to tell herself what not to do in a Suggestive Collision and repeat it a few times to keep herself from doing it.
  Rosalind [thinking]: Don't panic don't bite don't kiss don't panic don't bite don't kiss don't panic don't bite don't kiss...
• Sworn Brothers: Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara are not genetically sisters, but in their childhood backstory, they made a blood pact to consider each other as close as sisters.

T

• Tactical Withdrawal:
  • Moquoql, overwhelmed with a Pressure Point attack, signals the spaceship to teleport her up and out of telekinetic range before her mind-controlled sister can repeat the pinch.
  • Morpho uses the spaceship's teleporter to retreat and keep pursuing Mael, instead of sticking around where Lily might shoot his head.
  • Black Morgan the bandit leader hears a rumor^note started by Aynara who was trying to guess the next move of a mind-controller of someone with silver eyes coming to usurp his position in the gang. Between that, the fatalities of his underlings, and the rampant property damage (at least one building is on fire and City Hall got exploded) beginning in Ghost Town, Black Morgan decides to evacuate his gang out of Ghost Town.
• Tailfin Walking: Averted for Varla the mermaid's "standing" posture. She lays her fins flat on the ground, coils her tail once and puts her weight on the coil.
• Take Me to Your Leader: Said by Parthenia with more professional phrasing than it's usual for this trope to Dominic.
• Taking the Fight Outside: Exaggerated: After Parthenia attacks and knocks out Farrah in the middle of town square, John Smith shakes a disapproving finger at Parthenia and teleports them both out of town.
• The Talk:
  • Played with. Valerie doesn't ask Arilay to explain generally where babies come from, Valerie wants to know how Arilay specifically can make a baby while being part machine. Arilay obligingly explains how she can work around her missing uterus if she wanted to make a baby.
  • Defied by Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara (Void Maiden Viporises), who are acutely aware that they are strangers to Cody (who is a human child) and not on their home world, thus the Stranger Danger taboo is in place, so it wouldn't be appropriate to explain to him about Viporis reproduction and why they're acting odd, so they do their best to hide the signs that they are in heat in order to avoid awkward questions.
• Talk to the Fist: Shale's Mundane Solution for interrupting Wilhelmine's Magical Incantation is to punch her in the vocal cords and make her cough.
• Tap on the Head:
  • Parthenia knocks Farrah out with a punch to the jaw in the fight near the Notice Board. In a touch of realism, she checks if she inflicted any serious damage afterwards.
  • Discussed and defied by the Void Maiden Viporises. Syrni Sandra suggests kicking the shrivers in the head hard enough to knock them out. Jen Jara vetoes it and suggests chloroform instead.
• A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Under mind-control, Mequoql telekinetically pinches the back of her sister's neck. A few minutes after recovering, her sister returns the favor.
• Tastes Like Chicken: Juvenile moufreta tastes like bland, off-texture chicken.
• Taught by Experience: In her backstory, Arilay found out the hard way (in the Fair Folk realms) that just because her digestive tract was replaced with an atomic manipulator does not mean she's immune to cursed food.
• Teasing from Behind the Language Barrier: Aynara deliberately overrides the setting's Translator Microbes to shout a sexual solicitation at Haydn without him understanding right away.
• Technically Naked Shapeshifter: Arilay's clothes are just more of the same nanobots simulating her external flesh.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Farrah and Parthenia are forced to work together to survive in the forest they were expelled to after their fight near the Notice Board.
• Teleportation Rescue: Nyorla and Pilot 0037 hide from the lanceros. When the spaceship's tractor beam fails to scare away the lanceros, the lanceros nearly steps on Nyorla and Pilot 0037. So the spaceship's teleporter pad summons the children and their possessions on board.
• Teleport Spam: Syrni Sandra and Jen Jara rapidly teleport in zig-zags to evade the shrivers' digestive swarms.
• Tempting Fate:
  • Nyceme thinks that Miron is doing this when he dismisses the possibility of there being undead in the necropolis.
    Nyceme: "Famousss lassst wordsss."
  • Ozurr the Frost Giant kept thinking that hoofbeats meant a nuckelavee was nearby. One washed up on the Coast of Chills not long after.
  • Maequoql muses that as long as nobody drives any wyverns towards town, the WFS Hummingbird won't have to unleash an Orbital Bombardment on the wyverns.
  • Ethani is glad there are no red pigs in this land, before musing that a dimensional rift in the Graveyard of the Gods could well send one here. There is, in fact, one that has adopted the pigplants pestering Jobe's farm as a surrogate sounder.
• Tension-Cutting Laughter: In the wake of a tense confrontation with Krakka'a, Rosalind's post-adrenaline crash catches up with her and she starts uncontrollably giggling at Toilet Humor that she otherwise wouldn't have approved of as a Proper Lady.
• Thanks for the Mammary: When Rosalind tries to get out of a Suggestive Collision with Jann, she makes it worse by accidentally causing one of his hands to slip down from her shoulder.
• That's Gotta Hurt:
  • When Rosalind hears a tale of Jann the wizard getting dosed with witchbane, she winces in sympathy as she surmises, "Ooh, if witchbane is anything like what wolfsbane does to werewolves, that can't have been pleasant!"
  • After Wain Fallwen crash-lands his little one-person spaceship next to the hotel, Arilay and Murquoql pipe up with commentary.
    Arilay: Ooh, that left a dent.
    Murquoql: Yowch, that didn't look like fun. Do you need a doctor?
  • Soryn winces in sympathy when witnessing a car crash into an outside wall of the Purple Fez Tavern.
  • When Fiddler finds a stone caught in Whisper's horseshoe, Fiddler infers that his pain is worse than her own experiences stepping on painful stones.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill: There is an artifact in the Ghost Town that Alice would like destroyed. She arranges for an entire artillery battery to do the deed from Mount Bifrons, intending for them to just turn the place into a crater field and sort through the rubble after. The man actually in charge of the battery, Aaruselijair, is fortunately more restrained.
• The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: A more benign example, Valerie's lesbian(?) twin sisters "Maggie" and "Celly" own a magic shop that disappears and reappears randomly- mainly staffed by themselves and their own daughters.
• They Just Dont Get It: Morpho the shapeshifting robot doesn't understand how his actions (e.g. twisting his head too far or dismembering a moufreta corpse in under a minute) can spook witnessing strangers or acquaintances.
• Thinking Out Loud: Arilay wonders out loud how much of The Talk Valerie already understands.
• This Is Gonna Suck:
  • When Rosalind sees Ozurr and Varg staring expectantly at her, she knows she's about to get interrogated about her identity as a vampire. In Rosalind's backstory, previous interrogations on that subject didn't end well for her.
  • The Not-Chaos Hunters realized they fled town without camping gear.
    Amy: This is gonna suck, isn't it?
  • Said by the Nuckelavee when confronted by a group of cats sent by the Fairy Queen.
  • Parthenia's reaction when John Smith teleports her away from the city after her battle with Farrah.
  • Moquoql is telepathically sharing Unit 09's pain as she removes anti-magic plates from Unit 09's shoulders and hips. When Moquoql gets to the hips, she realizes she can't take her weight off of where the shared pain will manifest.
  • Arilay's spaceship sensors are glitching from Mael's spinel-gem-based stealth. Arilay thinks that either Slenderman exists in this reality or someone/something else is tampering with the sensors from afar. Neither scenario is going to be pleasant.
  • When Moquoql explains her way into the realization that the most efficient machine to plug Novia into is the communication microchip under Moquoql's skull, she deadpans, "...oh, this is gonna suck," before resignedly doing the Self-Surgery cut to expose the outside surface of her skull where there's an access wire to the comm-chip.
• This Is No Time to Panic:
  • Arilay's poster warns the populace of bored vampiric Mayatan prankster twins on the loose, but also emphasizes they're generally friendly and the best course of action is to try not to panic.
  • The Not-Chaos Hunters panic when Mequoql reports that a giantess (Arnora Bluesword) is heading towards the campsite. Morpho yells at them to get a grip and name-drops this trope, then he and Mequoql keep calling for calm as Arnora bursts in in an alarming fashion while fighting a homunculus.
• This Is Unforgivable!: The Not-Chaos-Hunters were already having their paitence grow thin with the Web of Friendship's (mostly Arnaya) constant belittling of not only them, but everyone around them. However, they tolerated it (barely) because they needed help stopping their worst enemy, Mael. Arnaya attacking David seemingly unprovoked compeletely shatters what little good will they had left towards the vampire, and while they don't say the trope by name, their behavior and anger towards her is firmly this.
• Thou Shalt Not Kill: Discussed by the Web of Friendship. The organization and their archnemesis Sarquoql adhere to nonlethal tactics, but Morpho points out that they can't assume Mael holds that standard.
• Thought-Controlled Power: The gems the NCH uses to power their weapons and travel. It's also used for healing, start fires, or, to their own surpise, transform people (in Joesph's case, lizard to a human). Unfortunately, first time usage involves sickness, dehydration, and passing out. Only for the first time use.
• Threatening Mediator: When Sallara gets jumpy over Lerna's appearance, Varla levels her sword between them both and demands a full explanation before a fight breaks out, threatening to side against whoever attacks first.
• Threatening Shark: A bunch of sharks show up really fast after Varla spills enough of the homunculus's blood. Fortunately, Varla is able to use the sharks to her advantage by getting them to eat the homunculus first, and then fleeing before they get the chance to eat her.
• Three... Two... One...:
  • Nyorla guesses Aynara and Arnaya's return to the kitchen and tries to count down to it, but that's not what they did.
  • In response to the Panzerfaust being on fire, Moquoql summons an escape pod pumping itself full of carbon dioxide and nanobots. Once she sees it's close enough, she holds her breath and counts down the last three seconds to a Powder Gag.
• Throwing Down the Gauntlet: One half of a Morton's Fork that Aynara and Arnaya use as an excuse to mess with Wain from afar. He's claimed to have experience breaking curses. If he had been telling the truth, then Aynara and Arnaya would have interpreted that as a challenge.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: Discussed while Arnaya and Claire are exchanging painful memories, Arnaya brings up the time she was lurking in Sarquoql's cargo bay only to be jettisoned into outer space in a fit of paranoia.
• Time Travel: Both versions of Michelle have this ability, although whether it is the same sort of ability as Doctor Who is not made clear.
• Tim Taylor Technology: Maequoql's increasing power to the tractor beam is justified as operating within designed parameters. Maequoql's first use of the tractor beam used a fraction of the power it was designed to work with, so when she needed a stronger beam the second time, she used a larger fraction of power.
• Tongue Trauma: When Mequoql gets tired of keeping a D'voreem pack out of the campsite, she telekinetically drags them by their tongues into the campsite.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • Discussed when Varla accuses David of having no sense of self preservation. The accusation was prompted by him flirting at her with the risk of offending her into quitting his rescue from quicksand.
    David: Never in my life have I known the kiss of a guardian angel.
    Varla: Why you—! Have you no sense of self-preservation, saying such brazen things while trapped with no defense against offended slapping? I am far from angelic, and you're lucky there are witnesses. Don't make me regret this [rescue].
  • Four juvenile moufreta leap off a cliff trying to fly and intercept Iolana, forgetting that they're too young to fly. They splat.
• Too Fast to Stop: The drop pod summoned for firefighting arrives too fast to snap into hover position over the Panzerfaust, so it dumps its firefighting contents midflight and lithobrakes once it's past the Panzerfaust.
• Took a Level in Cynic: Rosalind's backstory, which she mentions in a bitter rant, has her undergo this. After altruistically rescuing people from zombies only to be backstabbed when they find out that she is a vampire, Rosalind is understandably wary about letting people know.

• Touch of Death: Sindar has this, which could overlap with Walking Wasteland because it's involuntary. First demonstrated when he becomes frightened of the fiery pillars Justin summons during his duel with Miron and goes to hide in a house plant in the hotel lobby... only to kill it in two seconds. It's also why he refuses to shake hands when introducing himself, but has no problem touching Nyceme, who is undead.
• Touch Telepathy: Shale's telepathic capabilities are strictly limited to skin-to-skin contact. This is a product of Sleutrienn biology and psychology, namely a nervous system which is just a little bit eldritch. Not even Maequoql, whose Psychic Radar covers the entire planet, can read Shale's mind or send Shale telepathic messages.
• Tranquil Fury: Parthenia spends the entirety of her fight with Farrah and Mark (the latter being the first person she met in the thread she actively wants to kill) calmly and efficiently brutalizing her opposition, without raising her voice even once. The only giveaway of the volcanic rage seething underneath her calm exterior is the curt and intense "You..." she gives to Mark Tanzer at the start of the fight.
• Translation Convention: Normally implicit, but the occasional translation note is provided for Oseru, when nuances of something she'd be saying in Qorisayane doesn't quite match up to the English.
• Translation: "Yes": The Viporis interjection "Kat-chi-atz!" translates to "That's Gotta Hurt, that Could Have Been Messy, you're Unluckily Lucky!"
• Trauma Button: When Ozurr mentions betraying his father, Rosalind is reminded of all the times she's been betrayed by those she rescued from zombies. This kicks off Rosalind's bitter rant.
• Trigger-Happy: The first thing Pilot 0037 does upon waking up to see a stranger standing over him is to shoot at the stranger.
• Troubled Fetal Position
  • When Rosalind is sitting on the sand describing how she hates being left with uncertain memories in the wake of fighting berserk, she curls up and clutches her legs to her chest.
  • Pilot 0037 enters one when the WFS Hummingbird's interior reminds him of a restricted area he accidentally wandered into when he became a pilot.
• Turn in Your Badge: Curator Brimoda temporarily relieves Parthenia of her position in order to not overexert her after an exhausting mission. Parthenia does not take it well.
• 20 Minutes into the Past: Last Gabriel Kardos checked in an RP taking place in real-world 2020, the year was 2014.
• Twisted-Knee Collapse: In the throes of her Heroic BSoD, Rosalind's legs give out from under her and collapse into an awkward W shape.
• Twitchy Eye: A side effect of Mael battering down Mequoql's mental shields is Mequoql's eye twitching for the duration of the assault. Her eye twitches again when she remembers her vow.
• Two out of Three Ain't Bad: Varla pessimistically predicts that her reflexive breaking of Lerna's neck will horrify the witnesses. When Sallara is aghast and Nerea isn't, Varla muses that one out of two is better than usual.

U

• Uncanny Valley: Invoked by Rosalind the vampire holding herself more still than any human could achieve.
• Undeathly Pallor:
  • As part of her Game Face, Rosalind the Friendly Neighborhood Vampire has the option of turning the skin between her freckles an off-white shade of gray.
  • Whereas Nyceme the lich always has this, (un)naturally.
  • Subverted by Nui; their skin is described as pale bluish-gray, yet they are alive. Sort of. It's unclear whether this skin tone is normal for a sunestre, or whether it has to do with Nui's soul being loosened from their body and partially tethered to their arm gadget.
• Unfinished, Untested, Used Anyway: Downplayed with a small el-kor field designed to shield a Mayatan's back of the neck from being telekinetically pinched. El-kor fields on that small of a scale have already been lab tested, but under better circumstances, they would have been lab tested some more before their first field test.
• Uninhibited Muscle Power: Rosalind's Super-Strength is only used in an emergency, when she has enough blood to fuel her body regenerating as fast as it tears itself apart under the influence of adrenaline.
• Unnecessary Combat Roll: Varla shows off Awesome, but Impractical somersaults to quickly get from point A to point B on dry land. The somersaults may be quick, but they're impractical as they leave her open to attack.
• Unprovoked Pervert Payback: Varla mistakes Lerna platonically hugging her for a sexual action when Nerea uses the archaic non-sexual definition of "molesting" to refer to Lerna's hug. Varla draws her Chastity Dagger and holds it against Lerna's throat for most of the duration of the ensuing exposition.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: Despite her fearful first impression of Jann the wizard, Rosalind started crushing on him when he lent her his coat to warm her up. She doesn't do anything about this because she's too busy worrying about potential Van Helsing Hate Crimes targeting her. And then Jann disappears via Chuck Cunninham Syndrome right as Rosalind is confessing her crush mid-sentence.

• Unusual Euphemism: When Jobe Pearson the farmer comments on what he thinks is a near-miss Groin Attack, he refers to Soryn's testicles as "clockweights," much to Soryn's amusement.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: Joseph comes off as one to those he meets. The Not Chaos Hunters have met Joseph before, Mayatans have pretty much seen it all, and Lizard Folk are native to Aria.
• Unwanted Rescue: Upon seeing a bandit and his attack dog attacking Aynara, Haydn explodes the dog and threatens the bandit, and things spiral out of control from there. Aynara is aggravated — her plan to deplete the bandit's bullets, capture him and intimidate him into delivering a message to Black Morgan was derailed and now she has to start over with a different Mook.
• Use Your Head: Plasma the dragonhorse rams her forehead into the lamprey priestess's head in an attempt to get the lamprey priestess to stop chewing her leg.
• Uterine Replicator: Arilay mentions an artificial womb as one of two ways she could grow a baby despite missing her biological uterus. The other way is to have a surrogate mother volunteer.

V

• Vague Age: Arilay, a cyborg in a life-support can, has yet to reveal her age. So far the only clues are: Arilay has mentioned her childhood in the past tense. Valerie asked how Arilay could make a baby while being part machine, and Arilay mentioned that she has functioning ovaries while explaining.
• Vain Sorceress: Nyceme is one. As a lich, her body is on the constant verge of rotting, so she's scrambling to find ways to preserve her body better. When she first spots Saen, another lamia (albeit a living one), she is envious of her body.
• Vampire Bites Suck: Aynara biting down on a bandit's already bruised arm is painful enough to make him wail "ARGH WHY?!" at least the first time around.
• Vampires Are Rich: Inverted for Rosalind. Between her nomadic lifestyle, the Zombie Apocalypse back at her home, and the unexpected teleport into a world where she doesn't know the local currency, she has to resort to barter.
• Vampire Vords: Parodied when Arnaya pranks Amy by pretending she's about to exsanguinate her. The witnesses are not amused.
  Arnaya: Ahaha, I vant to suck your blood! Just kidding!
  Marie: It wasn't funny.
• Van Helsing Hate Crimes:
  • Rosalind's bitter rant reveals that in her backstory, she's survived multiple back-stabs both literal and metaphorical, all of which happened soon after each time she revealed herself as a vampire, leaving her paranoid that history is about to repeat itself.
  • Always a threat when Tecia is around; she instinctively loathes the undead, and will seek to send their souls to their rightful place in the Land of the Dead on sight.
• Vein-o-Vision: As a Friendly Neighborhood Vampire, Rosalind is prone to seeing people's blood vessels when she's emotionally compromised.
  • One of the side effects of demonic energy radiating into Rosalind is having a clear view of Jann's blood vessels. It nearly causes her to miss the point of why he was rolling up his sleeve.
  • Later, in the wake of a Suggestive Collision, Rosalind's extended senses kick in again and make her uncomfortably aware of just exactly where Jann's blood is being redistributed...
• Vertebrate with Extra Limbs: Genetically engineered dragonhorses have four legs and two wings.
• Vertical Kidnapping: Defied when Carol dodges Morpho's attempt to yank her up into the tree he was in.
• Victoria's Secret Compartment:
  • Invoked by Moquoql, who passed a fake zipper to her sister Maequoql by folding it into Hammerspace and making the opening for it in between Maequoql's breasts.
  • Later, Murquoql stores rolled-up papers in between her breasts, holding them in place with the skin flap stretched over her chest. She notes the arrangement is slightly uncomfortable.
  • Varla the mermaid has a Chastity Dagger sheathed and hidden in her sports bra.
• Victory Through Intimidation:
  • After Krakka'a aggressively got in the way of a truck, the four riders decide to counter-intimidate: Ozurr reveals his full height and battleaxe; Jann summons a thundercloud and makes lightning zap the ground in front of Krakka'a; Varg draws her gun; and Rosalind reveals her vampiric Game Face and hisses. Krakka'a begrudgingly gets out of their way, but swears vengeance.
  • Parthenia's confrontation with the Western Amalgamated goons is a mutually escalating version of this. It ends in a draw, when both sides' superiors (Sophia the Incarnation of Knowledge and Alice Winters, respectively) come to a consensus.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: Judging from what's been shown, 'Best Buds' may be stretching it, but Mark and Farrah's dynamic is this. The latter's more blunt and the former's more sophisticated in their snarking.
• Voice for the Voiceless:
  • Upon seeing Shale having trouble communicating with a lich, Arilay steps in with a radio keyed to Shale's microchip.
  • Because Maya is deaf AND mute, Amy is pretty much her translator, as she's the only one in the group who can understand ASL.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Iolana is able to change her form at will.
• Vomit Discretion Shot: In-Universe, when Joseph has to puke, he runs away from witnesses and into the bushes.

W-X

• Wake Up Fighting: Exaggerated with Parthenia, if Farrah is to be believed. She kicked, and tried to claw Farrah's thoat out while in deep sleep after spending about a week awake when the latter was trying to put her up on a horse. Farrah's words have some grain of truth to them: when Jean tried to wake the Inquisitor up, the latter reflexively grabbed her by the arm.
• Waking Up Elsewhere: The first thing Farrah sees waking up after the fight at the notice board is the sky partially covered with the tops of the trees. She realizes that's not the place she was knocked out at only after Parthenia points out that to her.
• Walk-In Chime-In: Seenarnha rides a dragonhorse into a forest clearing and seamlessly answers a question asked to Mequoql. Justified because Seenarnha and Mequoql are both telepaths and Seenarnha read Mequoql's mind for an update on what was going on as she approached.
• Walking Armory: In addition to their magic, Moon Hawks like Oseru and Ethani carry a large assault rifle, a sword, three hidden knives, a hold-out pistol, and plenty of ammo for both firearms. Moon Hawks never rely on just one tool.
• "Wanted!" Poster: There's a poster on the bulletin board that reads: WANTED! Dead or Alive! Black Morgan, a bandit, robber and murderer! Armed and dangerous! Last seen near the Ghost Town with his band! Bring him or the proof of his demise to the City Hall for the reward.
• Warm Bloodbags Are Everywhere: Usually, Rosalind has more than enough self-control to ignore her Horror Hunger. But demonic energy radiating from a nearby battle forcibly reminds Rosalind of this and tempts her to unleash her wild side.
• Watch Out for That Tree!: Played with when a wyvern crashes into a tree; instead of being damaged by the tree, he knocks the tree over.
• Watch Where You're Going!: Whisper, the domesticated horse who met a herd of mustangs, misinterprets the skvader's warning drumming foot on his rump as a signal to move forward, and as a result he nearly collides with one of the mustangs in the herd he joined.
• Weakened by the Light:
  • During the briefing, Murquoql learns that the Fiendlord vampire who might be in the rainforest would turn into ashes if exposed to sunlight, but in order to finish him off, the ashes need to be tossed into a river.
  • Due to having rather fair skin, Akane sunburns rather easily.
• Weapon Stomp: While sparring with Carol, Morpho separates her from her halberd and steps on it, not wanting her to use it so soon after she was flung against a tree trunk.
• We ARE Struggling Together: The Web of Friendship, the Not-Chaos-Hunters, David and Joseph were trying to coordinate in their efforts to stop Mael, but quite a few of the Web members keep pushing Nick's Hair-Trigger Temper button, and one Web member engaged in malicious compliance when David said "bite me".
• We Need a Distraction:
  • As part of the rescue plan to free Mequoql from Mael's mind control, Morpho was sent to distract Mael long enough for Moquoql to set up an ambush. Morpho's first attempt at a distraction? The Pratfall entrance.
  • Arilay guesses there's bandits watching all possible entrances into the Ghost Town, so she asks Arnaya, who's already inside, to distract the sentries long enough for Arilay, Shale and company to get inside. Arnaya decides to use her telepathy to nudge the sentries' attention to a burning building that Haydn set on fire earlier.
• We Will Meet Again: After Krakka'a picks the wrong truck to stop, he begrudgingly gets out of the way while swearing vengeance.
  Krakka'a: But this isn't over. You'll find I'm not one to just let insults go unanswered.
• What Does This Button Do?:
  • Defied by Moquoql — she asks Unit 09 what would happen if she uninstalled anti-magic plates and listens to the answer before taking them off of Unit 09.
  • Discussed when Murquoql warns Lerna, Nerea and Leto about strangers in submarines who would, out of sheer curiosity to find out what will happen, meddle with the seals keeping the Abyssal Destroyer in check.
• What Measure Is a Mook?: Bandits in the Ghost Town who encounter the Web of Friendship survive and often get names, thanks to the Web's Thou Shalt Not Kill policy. Those who pose an even potential inconvenience to Oseru and Mael, or Wilhelmine and Haydn, are either butchered or mind controlled.
• What Were You Thinking?: Varla berates Lerna for impulsively swatting a mechanical drugging spider with her bare tail instead of with a rock.
  Varla: Did you not hear me say that the thing that bit you was teleported? Obviously that means somebody with a vendetta sent it to drug one of us, and you swatted it with your bare tail? What in the whole wide realm between geyser and iceberg were you thinking?! Next time, use a rock or something to swat mysteriously teleported creepy crawlies! Understand?
• What You Are in the Dark: Varla implies that she could have aborted David's rescue from quicksand out of offense at his flirting if it weren't for Nerea and Lerna witnessing and joining in the rescue.
  Varla: I am far from angelic, and you're lucky there are witnesses. Don't make me regret this [rescue].
• What's an X Like You Doing in a Y Like This?: When Jen Jara is not satisfied with Krakka'a's rather irrelevant sob-story answer to Alexa's question of "So, what brings a fellow like you to these parts?" Jen Jara takes it upon herself to specify, "What's an oversized prey like you doing in a cramped place like this where you can't fly away from predators like me?"
• Why Did It Have to Be Snakes?:
  • Naiolo does not like crows or ravens at all. In contrast, his travelling companion, Chiatara, loves them.
  • Krakka'a is terrified of humans. Not that he would ever admit it.
• Why Don't You Just Shoot Him?: Aynara is searching for Mael using a bandit's sniper rifle. Why doesn't the Terror Hero just shoot the mind-controlling villain? She can't just shoot him because of three Watsonian reasons: the Web of Friendship's "Thou Shalt Not Kill" policy, the Psychic Glimpse of Death headache she would get from doing so, and the uncertain possibility that deaths in the Ghost Town might alert or fuel some Eldritch Abomination. The Doylist reason is the usual "because then the story would be much shorter".
• Why Isn't It Attacking?: Rosalind is puzzled by Nyceme's lack of hostility.
• Will-o'-the-Wisp: Mequoql was inspired by will-o-wisps when she attempted to lure the Not-Chaos Hunters to Mael using dancing firefly lights. Later, after that tactic fails, Mequoql implicitly blames her lights on will-o-wisps, which is not a plausible thing to insinuate while standing in a town's shopping district.
• Wolf Whistle:
  • Varla the mermaid's presence at the harbor causes a randy group of fishermen to make lewd comments and whistles.
  • Sarquoql's interest in Soryn is more tactical than carnal, but he knows the best way to get Soryn's attention is by flirting, so Sarquoql uses a telepathic hallucination of a flirty whistle on Soryn in an attempt to arrange a meeting. It doesn't work, because Soryn can't tell for certain where that particular whistle is coming from.
• Wooden Stake:
  • The Fiendlord vampire who might be in the rainforest can No-Sell wooden stakes.
  • Rosalind has a pair of scars — one on her chest and one on her back — connected through her body from where a wooden stake narrowly missed her heart.
• Word, Schmord!:
  • Varla scoffs at the threat of a water elemental ("Elemental schmelemental"), convinced that the geological amount of heat she's magically gathered is enough to flash-boil it with the summoners inside.
    Varla: If you dare to send that tidal wave with intent to hurt us, I will return the sentiment and make it boil with deadly heat akin to geysers!
    [the "tidal wave" reveals itself to be a water elemental]
    Sallara: An elemental. T-That's an elemental! A big one.
    Varla: Elemental schmelemental, my warning still applies to it.
  • Aynara considers "bandits schmandits" to be annoying snacks, even though they're numerous and armed with rocket launchers.
• Would Hurt a Child: The too-numerous-to-name Attempted Rape perpetrators in Varla's backstory qualify — Varla started lethally thwarting attempts to rape her simultaneously with her puberty starting.
• Would Not Shoot a Civilian: While she won't actively shoot per se, but Parthenia doesn't mind innocent bystanders being hurt in her potential fight at the Town Square.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit:
  • Sa'ad attempts it after getting a particularly strong electric shock from Parthenia. It doesn't work. The second time, anyway.
  • Pewter employs this during the d'voreem attack. When she and Amaranth break away from the herd, a d'voreem chases after them. Amaranth has Pewter feign exhaustion so that the d'voreem can gain on them and get within striking distance of her scythe.
• Wreathed in Flames: Certain dragonhorses (the ones with scales instead of fur) can set themselves on fire when they're not carrying cargo or passengers.
• Wrong Context Magic: Nui points out that magic in Alice's world may be this, rationalizing that a sentient cosmic force of some sort hijacked magic, appearing to give it a malevolent will of its own. After pointing out that in their world (and implying Cynthia's as well), magic is a neutral force that can be bent to one's will. Alice realizes it too, when she notices that her antimagic field does not quite obliterate magic here as it does back home.
• Wrong for the Right Reasons: In the realm of the unconscious, Aynara manipulates the dreamscape to set her own illusory body on fire. She unexpectedly feels burning pain, and thinks the illusory flames affected more of her senses than she wanted them to. Unfortunately, she blamed the wrong flames. The illusory flames aren't the ones burning her, the flames surrounding her real unconscious body are burning her.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: The Jewel Galactic Alliance is pretty close to The Federation from Star Trek, its vigilante group, the Web of Friendship, is likewise an interspecies cooperation, and the Adventure as a whole is pretty optimistic about the potential for interspecies diplomacy and cooperation, villains included. Oseru, however, has only encountered cyberpunk Transhuman Treachery, murderous AIs, and the mad remnants of Abusive Precursors in her native work, so her operating assumption is that Aliens Are Bastards.
• Wrong Insult Offence: Mequoql cracks a joke using this trope as its base.
  Carol: I'd say cat got your tongue, but you're not exactly a cat...
  Mequoql: [pretending to be snooty] If you're going to be racist, at least do it right and call me a sugar glider. [giggles] Just kidding!
• Wrong Turn at Albuquerque: Soryn bought a bargain-bin map, took a wrong turn, got lost, and somehow wound up in the Adventure world.
• Wronski Feint:
  • Arilay gets rid of the hysterical broom-wielder chasing her by causing the crazy local to smack into the restaurant wall.
  • When a wyvern flies up into the air and dives at Blackthorn, he hovers in front of a tree and then dodges under the wyvern's wing at the last second. The wyvern ploughs into the tree and knocks it over.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: Soryn didn't expect Jenny to get high and laughing off of drugged chocolates, but he quickly figures out how to roll with it in his plan to seduce her. He uses the excuse of steadying her to slip his arm around her waist.
• Xenofiction: Story arcs written from the viewpoint of...
  • a herd of mustangs mysteriously transported into the setting and separated from their humanoid friend and protector,
  • a Terra Novan Common Raven (descended from Terran Common Ravens) that followed a group of humans it associates with easy meals to the location,
  • and a fuckin' Nuckelavee!
  • and now a pack of D'voreem...
  • a murder of crows

Y-Z

• You All Meet in an Inn: Discussed and Deconstructed in Cormack and Nyceme's opening post at the Solstice Cafe:
  "They say that the grandest adventures start with a random group of outcasts forming in a tavern. But who goes to a tavern at 9 in the morning anymore? What is this, some cliched medieval fantasy setting?"
• You and What Army?: When Zarokh demands that everybody get away from Krakka'a, Jen Jara is unimpressed and doesn't think he can stop her, so she rubs it in by teleporting closer to Krakka'a and saying "You and what army?" He shows his teeth as his army.
• You Answered Your Own Question: Henry wonders how to return gems with Make a Wish power. Mequoql points out that Henry could wish the gems back to their owners.
• You Are What You Hate: Alice Winters has had issues with the police in her youth, and reacts negatively to John Smith as a result. The Law Enforcement, Inc. she commands is at least as bad as the worst sort of police force, but they're her people, so she's fine with whatever they do.
• You Can See That, Right?: In response to witnessing two vehicles appear out of nowhere, Carol says to Lily, "Okay... I did not eat the mushrooms. I take it you can see those weird trucks, too, Lils."
• You Can't Go Home Again: Discussed when Varla tells the tale of a vampire whom Sarquoql mind-controlled to rob a bank on an alien planet and break the necks of bank guards. The experience left the vampire suicidal, and because Earth's suicide watch wards are not equipped to handle vampires, the vampire is stuck on the alien planet in one of its suicide watch wards which is equipped to take care of vampires.
• You Do Not Want To Know:
  • Rosalind cautions Ozurr and Varg that they do not want to know what happened after Rosalind ran to the restrooms, especially not at the brunch table.
  • Arilay cautions Valerie, Cynthia and Moobly that they do not want to know what kinds of germs and cleaning residues got all over the biscuits Cynthia dropped on the floor.
  • This is Leone's standard response to anyone inquiring about where her powers came from.
• "You!" Exclamation: Parthenia utters "You..." to Mark Tanzer with barely contained fury when they bump into each other near the Notice Board.
• You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: When Mael needs a freaking drink, Sarquoql (who regards alcohol as a weapon) is verbally incredulous that Mael would drink his own weapon.
• You Just Ruined the Shot: In an attempt to get the Ace of Spades to leave her alone, Arilay bluffs that she's a xenobiologist doing a research film that just got interrupted by the Ace of Spades. Really she's just hiding and spying until she's sure its safe for her crew members to join her on the surface of the planet.
• Your Head Asplode: Downplayed - Thunder's defensive kick cracks the skull of an attacking D'voreem and kills it outright but without excessive gore.
• Your Little Dismissive Diminutive: Sophia's speech patterns is peppered with those.
• Your Magic's No Good Here: Ethani has to deal with a variation. There is very, very little magic to be found in her home universe, so a Background Magic Field makes it harder for her magical senses to work, though it also means she can push her active powers further.
• Your Mom: Layi yells the classic Qorisayane curse, "piss on your mother's grave!", to annoy and distract the wyvern.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Murquoql arranges her dragonhorses Blackthorn, Zip and Zing to stand in Sarquoql and Tecia sa Valdela's way with their wings spread, as she makes it clear she won't let them assassinate her friends Aynara and Arnaya.
• "You!" Squared: Bonnie and Morpho's second encounter consisted of pointing at each other and shouting "You again!"
• You Watch Too Much X: Mael counter-accuses Explorer of Unknowns of watching too many movies after she accuses him of mind-controlling Mequoql for perverted reasons.
• You Won't Like How I Taste: Rosalind takes nonverbal steps to look unappetizing to Krakka'a and Zarokh by using undeathly pale gray skin and showing off her skeleton in the black inverse of a glow as part of her Game Face.
• You Wouldn't Believe Me If I Told You: Murquoql doesn't mention the Fourth Wall or narrators because it would make her sound like a cloudcuckoolander.
• Zombie Apocalypse: Rosalind's homeland has succumbed to a nasty zombie outbreak.