Sydney is stumbling around verbally cause she keeps almost forgetting that not everyone knows that Dabbler isn’t human. To be honest I kind of keep forgetting it too, and it’s probably only a matter of time before I slip up in the comic. Now me personally, if I’m in a room full of superheroes and one of them says “By the way I’m actually an alien adventurer from a race that inspired your current cultural image of demons.” my reaction would probably be “Neat.” But in reality, that is a rather loaded revelation; extraterrestrial life, sapience, civilization, demons are real – sort of. The general populace would have a much harder time absorbing that, not to mention how crazy it would drive a great deal of the religious populace. Sure most people on the more casual side of the spectrum would shrug and think “Hey, cool, God is everywhere, right? Makes sense.” but of course to anyone fervently under the impression that humans are God’s favorite pet project, it could cause some violent cognitive dissonance. That’s why they haven’t revealed her origin to the general populace yet.

In fact Arianna and those in the know have a directive to never actually refer to Dabbler as a human so they can’t be caught in a lie later when she is revealed. It’s not that hard really. Given that we don’t live in a post-warp drive era society rife with aliens, how often do you have to describe someone as human in casual conversation? Though when dealing with Supers, the question of whether or not they are human will occasionally come up. That’s kind of a difficult question to answer, because first you have to define what a species is. Normally a species is defined as the largest group of individuals that can interbreed and produce fertile offspring. (There are some problems with this since some life reproduces asexually but it works pretty well for higher order life) A horse and a donkey can interbreed and produce a mule, but mules are almost always infertile, hence horses and donkeys are different species. (They also have a different number of chromosomes which is pretty telling, but let’s stick with the interbreeding thing.) Supers and humans can easily interbreed and the result will either be a super or a human, (and they have the same number of chromosomes if anyone was wondering) so by that measure they’re the same species. But then things get problematic – Succubi can interbreed with humans and many other species, and the result is always a succubus, but they’re certainly not human. They just have crazy baby factories. (Dabbler will explain this in some detail eventually) Taking that in to account, someone could argue that Supers are a non-human species that happens to be capable of producing fertile offspring with humans. Who knows, maybe every Super has that as a super power?

So… yeah, not everyone knows Dabbler is a space vixen. Kind of digressed there.

For the record I don’t think armored socks of any kind would be remotely practical. Maxima is just saying that they would be physically possible to create, just to mollify Heatwave. Crap I just realized Achilles should be sitting next to her. I guess he dropped his Skittles too.

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.