The Culture/Excession/YMMV


 * Complete Monster: This + Boisterous Bruiser = The Affront's Hat.
 * Crazy Awesome: The Sleeper Service
 * Fridge Logic: The big trick to talking to the Excession is that it only engages in one-on-one private conversations, probably so as not to cause an excession. Which is exactly how any ship in the Culture would act if they were an excession. The Grey Area is the only ship that may have worked this out.
 * Forcing conversation ends badly. The Elench didn't really survive that when they tried. And that drone that carved that message into the side of a ship that was destroying it did not really fare well in the end either.
 * The first Culture ship to report on the Excession mentions attempts to talk with it, which is how it can later be addressed by its callsign, "I". The rest of the Minds involved quickly realize that communication with and studying the thing is less urgent and/or more dangerous than the immediate problem of dealing with how other civilizations will react to finding out about it.