No Sydney, don’t get distracted by that guys dancing, you’re uncovering a mystery!

The way the orb works is kind of misrepresented on this page, cause it looks like the truesight gives her a myopic little pinhole to see through. If I had twice the space to draw this page I would have done a before and after panel to show the difference between the two. I could have made it a double, but I’d also need more time to draw it as well, so you guys get the “she’s releasing and grabbing the orb and seeing the Star Wars circle wipe of the truseight reasserting itself” effect. Also, unrelated, but that club is pretty bangin’ for a Wednesday night. Maybe a lot of people declared it “Superheroes are a thing” day and are throwing parties all over the place tonight.

I’m not yet ready to reveal what is going on yet obviously, but for the sake of discussion, let’s say you’re an alien and you come to Earth on vacation or for a semester abroad or something, and you have a watch that can disguise you as a human. How do you decide what to look like? Lets assume you’re from a species with binary gender and you can’t change that, but wouldn’t you want to look like the most privileged race in the area you’re visiting? That seems like that would be the default setting, but maybe you like standing out, so you’d disguise yourself as a black guy when visiting Japan. That would make you stand out for sure there. And would an alien know what constitutes an attractive or even a normal looking human? Probably the only way it would work was if there was some tourism bureau who assigned your human form hologram and you couldn’t make any changes while you were there, otherwise they might be tempted to tweak it as they learn what make humans attractive to each other. It also would mean you probably couldn’t get a tattoo while you were there unless your disguise was especially sophisticated. This is assuming that if you can eat the local food then tattoo ink probably isn’t going to dissolve your arm or anything. You’d probably have to get shots before you went so not only would you not have problems with local viruses, but also so you didn’t exhibit allergies to all pollen or so that rotten milk didn’t get you drunk.

Sydney jokes about black people being better dancers, (I’m a terrible dancer so I drag the average down for all white people) but really, beyond some pretty superficial cosmetic differences humans are really quite similar. In fact there is generally agreement among scientists that race is more of a sociological construct than a biological one, but imagine if you were going to a planet in disguise as a native, and among this species, one “race” was better at juggling and another had better memory and another could digest plant matter better. You’d probably have to disguise yourself according to your ability to pass as that subset of the species.

Humans are enormously good at identifying each other from our facial features, so much so that we absolutely take it for granted. I always wonder what would happen if we met an alien race that looked just different from us (or totally different) that we simply couldn’t differentiate them based on facial recognition. If they didn’t have some identifying thing about them that we could use, like one guy has a dimple in face chitin, or another has pale blotches above his eye array, that could make things really awkward. I’d love to see some sci-fi show deal with stuff like that, where there are aliens that are relatable sociologically (not weird cryptic aliens like the Vorlons), but they all have lobster faces and the humans can’t tell them apart and they can’t tell us apart. Heck, we probably couldn’t even differentiate genders, and they’d probably have the same problem unless facial hair was involved.

Crap I forgot Peggy’s tattoos. I’ll get that fixed.

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.