#rumblespheres

Whoops, ran out of 413 time in this timezone, and I’ve still got plenty of trolls left.

Guess I’ll just cheat my way into the morning!

The “calm your rumble spheres” dialogue obviously intends them to be analogous to breasts, and we’ve all taken that to mean that trolls canonically have them and that we therefore have to either take that into consideration or consciously discard it when designing xeno, but it occurs to me that there is an intuitive leap there that we do not have to make. 

The thing is, the phrase “calm your tits” isn’t literal in the first place. I imagine it’s supposed to mean something like “stop hyperventilating” but we can take it to mean whatever we want with regards to trolls! There are a couple of designs around that are playing with this. I have seen/read about rumble spheres that hiss, rattle, or expand like a frog’s throat. But these are all still predicated on the assumption that rumble spheres are visually analogous to breasts.

But what if we discard that entirely and go from the other direction?

Rumble:

a deep, heavy, somewhat muffled, continuous sound

a rumble seat

a tumbling box, as for the purpose of polishing

a street fight between rival teenage gangs

The first definition has already been explored, the middle two are not particularly interesting, but a fight. Trolls fight. A lot. And calming something that is used to fight fits the quotation to a tee.

So let’s get ready to rumble >:)

Spheres:

rounded

occur in multiples

Plenty of possibilities on an alien body plan, but even assuming trolls looking exactly like humans and discounting any squishy internal bits I can think of at least two strong contenders for things that are roughly spherical and used for fighting: fists, or more generally speaking shoulders.