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mm, but the thing about them is not "scary enough" but rate, how much damage can they inflict on your life. And this feels kinda Hitchcock now that I say it

I didn't get why the spirit would look like the owner... one assumes that spirit isn't the original manufacturer model and would look like the possessor

Very much so. "Laurie raised her eyebrows" would be my preferred approach because I'm almost always character-centric looking out.

I just word-searched it and found zero cases of eyebrows moving up (or down) without the POV character's intent. I have one jaw-drop in there. I put that one in deliberately to serve as a dialogue tag / to break up another characters speech flow.

This technique may not work for you, especially in a multi-POV story so YMMV. It can also get wordy. For example, I'll avoid saying "POV character was scared" or "POV character was surprised". Instead I waste time showing the event and hope the reader infers it. Reviewers may hit certain scenes with "how did POV react?" so I know I need to put more words there or trim it all out and have a simple "scared" or "startled"

grumpies makes me think of carebears

I should probably draw myself a map while all these locales are fresh in my head. I miraculously remembered the garden is on deck ten, but I'm reading the previous version and there's an accidental (seemingly) allusion to deck 15. Or had I meant to imply that the fight spilled down from deck ten five levels to arrive there. I can't remember why I did that.

Time to get this show on the road. er-- into space

I had a weirdly fortunate PC crash before saving my latest round of edits. Somehow the version went back from Aug-08 to Jul-31 (evening) so 48 hours of edits. So I got to stitch back the new version with a bit of text-compare on various versions

Oddly, I caught my em-dashes were different between the versions (I found this because the paragraph length would change and I ran my compares). I tend to write without a space–like this. Reviewers suggest adding one – to give a gap and reduce confusion with hyphen.

So I corrected them to add the gap, but as I add new content I tend to flip back to my default. Oops. Maybe I should wait until final draft before tacking punctuation.

Ok, now I'm really under the gun. Some other site has a deadline of Aug17 for posting full story. That's a mere 18 days, so I gotta stop foolin' around

Mirror this outside of TNBW:

Unit is closer to "thing"... fighting unit, computational unit, operational unit, units of measure, scaling unit, and so on. As a word it conveys little other than the concept of modularity. Wheras for the same number of letters, ward conveys health-care

I also found Stargate very clean with its terms.

AIs: the Replicators. [Replicator is easy for the reader to parse - presumably, it replicates lol]
Hybrid: "Human-form Replicator"
Weapon: "Replicator disruptor cannon" and "Anti-replicator gun"
Specific Hybrid: Bob -> Replicator Bob

Compare to Battlestar:
AIs: Cylons
Hybrid: Skinjob or toaster
Weapon: (I checked the wiki and went cross-eyed)
Specific Hybrid: One of (15?) models eg groups of clones

Both are fine. I'm not knocking Battlestar. But Battlestar doesn't also have an Imperium to manage. It can devote all the page space it needs into one milieu.