Web Original / Spiral

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Spiral is a hard sci-fi worldbuilding project that focused on humanity's interactions with aliens. It heavily features Speculative Biology as one of its core components. This website is full of information on the project, and this is a fake tvtropes page for it. Consider it as a sort of ARG where we all just pretend that it's a published form of fiction and that the random scenes I'm referring to have actually been drawn or written out. If you are familiar with the proper layout of tvtropes, this may make you want to rip your hair out.

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This mediatype provides examples of:

A-Z

Alien Blood: Hexapods have green blood because its full of biliverdin.
Alien Sky: The sky of hexopolis planet is frequently green. It WOULD be blue if it weren't for constant storms, though.
Artificial Intelligence: There are many forms of advanced AI in this universe, most notably theones inside of spaceships.The status of whether they're sentient or not is hotly debated.
Artificial Meat: Meat is grown from cultures of animal cells. This is mostly used in space, explaining why characters are capable of eating hamburgers despite being 10 light years from the nearest farm.
Benevolent Alien Invasion: The hexapods arrive in the solar system and contact humanity after finding Voyager I, and they have genuinely peaceful intentions
Bio-Augmentation: Most notably the addition of claws, fur, fangs, and tails to spacers, there are also a few other invisible changes done like stronger immune systems, a resistance to radiation, and changes to the inner ear to prevent nausea in zero-g environments.
Boldly Coming: Hehehehehehehehehehehehe
Breathable Liquid: During long periods of space travel, people are asleep in tubes of breathable liquid that cushions them against the g-force of leaving and entering atmospheres. They are not frozen in the tubes and they still age during this process, it's more like a coma than anything else. Waking up is quite unpleasant.
Classical Anti-Hero: Aroo makes positive changes in the world, though they're so plague'd by self-doubt and fear that they don't feel like they help much of anything.
Designer Babies: Spacers were originally created through genetically modifying human eggs and sperm and then growing the fetus in an artificial womb. Though spacers weren't really designer at all, the two most explicit rules in their creation was "Anyone can commission one" and "Things can only be added, never removed." In modern day this is no longer done and older spacers can only create new ones the old fashioned way.
Exotic Equipment: None of the aliens have a typical penis or vagina, though despite the differences some are still more human compatible than others.
Humanoid Aliens: The hexapods are bipedal with two legs, two arms, and one head with most of the sensory organs and the brain inside of it.
Humans Through Alien Eyes: Aroo and the other hexapods point out how weird humans are in comparison to them.
Interspecies Romance: There's a lot of human/alien pairings, but most notably between the main characters Aroo and Damian who end up dating each other after awhile.
Multicultural Alien Planet: The hexapod homeplanet has many different ethnicities, cultures, countries, and religions.
My Sensors Indicate You Want to Tap That: Fang is able to monitor Damian's heartbeat and thus is quickly able to deduce that Damian has a crush on Aroo.

Fang: Your BPM has skyrocketed.
Damian: I was just walking.
Fang: Not long enough for it to be this high. It's been spiking a lot lately, especially when you've been around that hexapod...

Our Wormholes Are Different: Wormholes are used to shorten the absurd length of space travel and are artificially created to allow plausible interaction between different species.
The Voice: Fang has no physical appearance and is only interacted with through voice and text. Unless you count the ship it controls as being its body?
Virtual Sidekick: Fang can hear and speak through Damian's wristwatch and usually only speaks to him. Fang gives many snarky quips and frequently challenges Damian's position on whether AI are sentient or not.