The New Imperial military salute refers to the military salute implemented after the Democratic Revolution in the Ryccian Empire. The gesture involves placing one's arm over their chest and then extending it forward without raising it into the air.

History

Given that the Old Empire's military salute of putting one's hand over their head was seen as humano-supremacist due to the entity's brutal and racist history, a new salute was needed for the armed forces of the Ryccian Empire after the revolution. Empress Alice, the leader of the revolution, opted to initially adopt a salute where one would modify their fingers wherever possible to make a V, as in "victory", but this was soon discarded due to the differences in hand types of the various species of the Empire and the various ways to form a V, thus making this salute inconsistent and at times hard to do for certain species.

The New Imperial salute was then chosen as the new gesture. No one knows where it came from, and thus it is presumed in the present that this was an invention from the Empress herself.

Etiquette

The salute is held in high regard in the Empire due to its function of respect towards those who died in the revolution and due to its military use. As such, a strict etiquette is socially known and enforced, with any significant deviation from the standard viewed as highly disrespectful and offensive towards the values of the revolution and those who died fighting for them. First of all, only military personnel may perform this salute, and civilians are not socially permitted to do it bar on certain occasions such as saluting military personnel, dead or alive. Second, the gesture involves placing one's arm over their chest and then extending it forward without raising it into the air. Generally, an angle below 90 degrees is seen as acceptable. Deviating from the standard by failing to put one's arm in their chest first and/or raising their arm into the air is seen as incredibly insulting and disrespectful. Only children who don't know any better are socially exempt.

Metagaming Facts

The salute was actually chosen from a recorded text found in the Royal Archives that describing an ancient gesture performed by royals and nobles of the Early Old Empire, although no one alive knows this. The text itself was camouflaged with another cover, and thus it rests in the archives as an irrelevant book no one chooses to read to this very day. The reason the Empress Alice opted to encourage such a strict etiquette was due to a warning from this text, saying that any deviation from the standard version of this archaic gesture would be "honouring tyrants and killers from a more unenlightened era who spawned evil so nefarious and toxic, that even the cruel slaver aliens who took us captive as property and whom we have extinguished would be angels when compared to these bloodthirsty devils. They had distorted and warped the truth itself in their time to create a morbose and irrational fiction capable of illogically dividing humanity into categories meant for extinction. To deviate from the standard shall not only curse and taint the sons and daughters of the Ryccian nation for all time, but also spit in the very name of humanity and the victims of these murderers whose massacres without purpose have no equal in all of recorded human history". Due to the text's age and deterioration, the names of these "killers" were not listed when the Empress read it, but the text that has now disappeared due its rot directly mentioned the leaders and systems of the fascist regimes of WW2.