Dabbler’s involvement with Arc-SWAT is curious considering the existence of The Council, but Dabbler didn’t immigrate through normal channels. Actually it’s more of a migration. Well, it depends on how long she’s planning on staying. The sequence of events leading her to join the team would be fun to tell if I was a 5 pages a week kind of guy, but I suppose I’ll show it in chunks as the opportunity arises.

Also it turns out Dabbler was wrong about the alien tourism only being to post-FTL civilizations, as mentioned here, in a page called Don’t forget the alien sex tourism… hmm, kind of went to the well a few times already with that joke. Oh well. But thanks to The Veil, Earth is a very rare case of pre-FTL clandestine alien tourism.

You know, on the topic of doing it with aliens, one thing that rarely comes up in sci-fi shows (probably more so in books) would be smell. Odor to be more accurate. Assuming we’re dealing with basically humanoid aliens where they’re basically just exotic people, aliens would probably smell weird, and we would smell weird to them. Humans smell pretty bad in their natural state, fortunately we’ve invented showers and deodorant and mouthwash etc, and presumably aliens would have as well. Still, ignoring crazy stuff like silicon based life or something that exhales methane, differing biology, environments, and even food supply would affect the odor baseline. It would put a real kibosh on wanting to date the smoking hot green alien chick or the pretty blue alien boy if their breath smelled like the inside of a gym bag, or their sweat smelled like slightly off cheese.

I imagine in a cross species world like Babylon 5 or Deep Space 9, deodorants would focus more on eliminating odors than masking them, since lilacs might smell fine to us, but to an alien species it could trigger some adrenaline fight or flight response, or their most popular scented candle might smell like a summer horse grave to us.

Now that I think of it, a food court on a space station would be nightmarish. You think microwaved fish or kimchi or natto or McDonald’s smells bad? Just wait till you catch a whiff of boiled gork spleen or fizzy flume yolk or smelted Gazorpazorpian flugflaps all mixing together.

Speaking of punch cards.

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon as soon as I get up. $1 and up, but feel free to contribute as much as you like :)

Here’s the link to the new comments highlighter for chrome, and the GitHub link which you can use to install on FireFox via Greasemonkey.