Grrl Power #684 – Cosmic food court
Actually, Sydney’s wrong. The next stall over is an aromatherapy booth that sells scented candles for races with similar miasmic preferences to races like Neo-Otyugh. Scents include “Stinking Cloud,” “Boiled Durain,” “August Whale Corpse,” “Pickled Skunk Anus,” “Twelve Year Old Boy That Hasn’t Figured Out Deodorant is an Absolute Necessity – Times 1,000,” “Corpse in a Dufflebag,” “Fart Salad,” “Surprise Sweaty Testicles,” “Gas Station Egg Salad Sandwich Left on the Dashboard One Afternoon in Phoenix,” “Upsettingly Dark Urine Your Drunk Roommate Accidentally Loosed All Over a Hotplate,” and “Olives.”
If you don’t know what a Neo-Otyugh is, it’s a D&D creature that lives in the sewers and eats… well, its version of mana from the heavens. If you get my meaning. They also lurk in piles of offal to surprise attack prey. So you can imagine they don’t exactly smell pristine. Honestly lighting their farts might improve their smell.
The problem of putting a bunch of aliens or even a variety of fantasy creatures in close proximity to each other, even excluding social and racial incompatibilities, would be things like this. Some races would be incredibly sensitive to even slightly offputting smells, whereas some might communicate through smells like a race of advanced space skunks or something. And then there’s situations like, I don’t know, I don’t imagine orcs or klingons are particularly hygienic. Any number of races would have major issues with the way any other race smells, and that’s before you factor in cuisine, or what they like their detergent or incense to smell like. I really think a stellar melting pot like this station would either need serious odor scrubbers, or everyone would need to have filters installed in their noses.
For those curious, Sydney’s munching on a granola bar or something similar. She carries two with her in her utility belt. Also gum.
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I like that the scanner is even confiured for species with tentacles… love the attention to details in this series!
And check out the size of the hand/tentacle pad that the guy opposite Sydney is using. It is huge!
;-)
Also do you notice that the hand print is the exact size of Sydney’s?
“Small portions” imply beings of a certain size. The booths that sell/serve Sydney-sized (as actually the size of Sydney) portions probably have bigger scanners. And higher/lower counters?
This is a transport hub and Earth is an alien tourist destination. They must know of Earth/humans so even if their systems aren’t configured for humans they will be configured for aliens passing as human. Sydney is assuming she’s in a “fish out of water” situation but I’m betting they have got that covered. Even her money problems might NOT be. An alien banking system serving tourists will need connections to Earth’s banking system so Sydney could access her own account from here. At the very least, aliens heading to Earth will need human currency so there should be a money exchange here.
I’m waiting for Sydney to have that “d’oh!” moment.
He’s peeing on it…
Clearly his species cannot be identified just by handling alone.
Later:
Sydney: ‘Wow! A huge bowl of the hottest noodles I’ve ever eten, and it only cost me two googly eyes and a gold star! Yes!’
Alien: ‘Wow! THREE unique artifacts for a single bowl of thr’iin! Sucker!’
A perfect business transaction. Both parties hugely satisfied.
What are the odds that they’ll simply provide basic nourishment as needed, and the meal will have no cost (to Sydney) associated with it at all?
I can see a few routes for folks deciding that:
1) A sense of charity / community that extends to feeding folks.
2) Recognition that a few things converge:
a) Desperate folks do desperate things
b) Folks who have no idea how they’re going to meet basic survival are desperate indeed
c) Law enforcement gets expensive
… and have the tech such that the reduction in crime from meeting folks’ basic survival needs (as long as they stay civil) is cheaper than the extra law enforcement needed if they don’t.
3) Some form of rights-based structure that includes “basic nutrition” on the list
4) Alien psychology is not necessarily human-predictable.
Seems unlikely from a story telling point of view.
The place isn’t exactly a wretched hive of scum and villainy, but it’s no Appleby’s.
“Hey buddy, how about a glass of water for a spacer who’s down on her luck?”
You’re thinking universal basic income (UBI)? Yeah, I think that’s the direction any advanced civilization needs to go in.
That means Earth isn’t advanced yet: there is still no equivalent on this planet
Not all across the planet, no. But it does exist in places on the planet.
Not specifically, no. Also: It’s pretty far from a forgone conclusion. There’s alternate routes of logic that say it’s a bad idea; as an example:
Anything that gets used – eaten, worn, driven, whatever – somebody had to have made the thing for it to be used.
There’s a number of folks who – if they don’t need to work to live in relative comfort… simply won’t bother.
The more folks you have doing useful work, the more things will be made, and the better things will be for everyone overall.
Thus, as cruel as it may seem to deny someone a bite to eat when they’re hungry and you’ve got lots, it’s better for everyone to force that percentage to get jobs.
I’m not going to say any one specific chain of logic is necessarily true (and there’s quite a few possible routes, all of which come to different and mutually exclusive conclusions) – and of note, any given chain of logic depends on the specific psychology of the group to which it’s being applied, which means with aliens in the mix we can’t even extrapolate based on how humans seem to react (not that the court is really settled, there; humans are a rather diverse lot), but any given author will have an opinion (possibly more than one) on the matter of what an advanced society would look like, and will reflect that in written fiction (to various degrees of “preachiness”), simply because they’re looking at their own chain of logic for what would logically result.
That only works when there are jobs to be had within a reasonable proximity of the people who would need to be doing those jobs. And it excludes people who are simply incapable of doing the job, whether due to a lack of training or a physical or mental issue which prevents them from doing the job. Not every jobless person is jobless by choice.
If you look up the chain, I also gave a chain of logic on why it might be considered a good idea to make basic sustenance free of charge. As I noted: “I’m not going to say any one specific chain of logic is necessarily true (and there’s quite a few possible routes, all of which come to different and mutually exclusive conclusions)” and also noted “any given chain of logic depends on the specific psychology of the group to which it’s being applied, which means with aliens in the mix we can’t even extrapolate based on how humans seem to react”.
You forgot having some alien die on you station can cause trouble in getting rid of the body and hoping its death did not cause disease,parasites, or other weird aversions.
Like a strange creature that admits hundreds of its young on its death that spread over the station causing much trouble.
That and people don’t want to spend money in a business were a dead Voratag is laying. Those things stink when alive and become noxious in death!
and yet public urination doesn’t seem to be an issue, that alien in the bottom left of panel two isn’t even trying to hide off the main walkway.
For all we know, he pisses Lysol Disinfectant, or maybe liquid Quick’n’Brite, or OxyClean.
…What a lot of people forget these days, or never learned, is that urine has been a cleaning agent for humans for millennia. Yes, thousands of years. If you keep it gently warm, the urea in the urine breaks down and becomes ammonia, which is a degreaser & disinfectant.
And, in the absence of kidney or urinary-tract infection, your urine is sterile. (Everything in it has been filtered through your lungs or digestive tract AND through your kidneys.)
That is an urban legend. Take a look using a microscope at all the little buggers swimming around in your ‘sterile’ piss and you’ll disabuse yourself of that misinformation.
and the Roman’s used it as mouth wash; however pulling your genitals out in public and relieving yourself on a wall has rarely (if ever that I am aware of) been socially acceptable in any human society. Even if dumping it into the street is acceptable (emptying chamber pots), it was still taboo to actually GO in public view.
Hey, pal, that comment is a little speciesist. Not ever race has its reproductive organs and its waste management organs in the same place. Heck, most of them don’t even consider reproductive organs to be taboo. ;)
For some reason your comment about reproductive and waste management made me think of the lizards (and therefore dragons) of Pern.
*leg raised against a tree*
Public urination is an … issue?
*puzzled look*
So, Sydney has stopped trying to communicate with aliens, but she has to communicate with the creature selling food and just uses her native language and not all of the others. I also wonder at the missing trilateral appendage. Think how grabby civilization would be if their hands were the claw from the prize machine.
Seems to me more that Sydney has reached DefCon”FEEDME!!!!“, last seen just prior to Sydney’s ‘interview’ at Archon
Naw, she’s nowhere near that seriously hungry right now. Her stomach hasn’t even attempted a whimper, let alone a full-on FUS-RO-DAH, yet.
(Which might be seen as an insult, a greeting, a mating call, or even interpreted as a holy prophecy, spawning a new offshoot in some poor alien’s theology, depending on who hears & misinterprets it.)
Scanner is awfully limited, barely big enough for the cook’s own hand. Very humanoid handprints, no claspers, suckers, double thumbs, left handers?
Maybe it just needs to be big enough to scan a genetic compatibility sample (more big words C:). No need to scan the whole thing if just a Human hand size will do, more compact too…
Genetic compatibility, eh?
So, you could press any part of your body against the plate, then?
Do they at least bleach it between uses, or wipe it down with alien-herpes-be-gone (tm, copyright, patent pending)?
Cause, well, if your manipulating appendage won’t fit on the plate, but some *other* appendage will….
In Europe we have loads of official languages and more than one recognised alphabet, for things like street signs and food details on packaging. But you don’t put them all on every such item. Only the most commonly recognised and the local ones.
So this is a bit of supporting circumstantial evidence that they are on a part of the Dyson sphere which leans towards Earth-like inhabitants. Thus making it a logical stopover for those going to (the previous orb-bearer) and from (Deus and Vale) Earth.
And we have seen a number of suitably digitally equipped individuals to support the fact that the stall owner made a good pick on which symbology to use.
I just started getting into Eclipse Phase, so I’ll assume that payments are reputation based:
Cultural history (like Xuriel is multiple species) as baseline expenses
Known personal history / achievements increase (or decrease) what you can pay for from the baseline
There was a Black Mirror episode that explained it better.
Singing, “Eat the pickle, eat the lettuce. Shut up, lady, you upset us. All we demand is that you let us serve it our way.”
Most depictions of them don’t portray them as hammerheads, but the narrow snout and tiny mouth of the counter alien kinda remind me of the Kif in Cherryh’s Chanur novels. I wonder what his tongue is like?
Long enough to reach places you didn’t know you had inside? o_O
The Kif eat their food so raw, it’s still alive. I would not advise letting them get near any tender bits on your body.
Please don’t be a Tuesday. It’s bad enough the secondary school dropout working the counter at the food court already looks down on her, but it it’s the weekend it’d at least be the go-getter on the team working. On Tuesday you don’t get the employee of the month.
I work Tuesdays and the weekends, your logic is faulty.
I like how white foodservice hats are standard even here in the relay.
How quaint, when the backwater thinks that it is the originator of concepts.
*playing with Alari Ipod*
In panel two, that gray alien with the single antenna seems to be peeing against an odd-looking, white wall. I wonder if that’s what passes for a public toilet in these parts? Because it looks different from the rest of the walls. Maybe some kind of self-cleaning nano-tech? Sydney will probably feel that’s too public a toilet, but it seems reasonable that many aliens don’t share our sense of propriety. To them, perhaps urinating in public is as normal as drinking in public?
This can fall into that awkward territory of taboos that vary by species and cultures within that species. Like an episode of Babylon 5 where they had a snafu with an alien ambassador because his culture viewed eating as an intimate act only done in private; while most species were open about it to the point none had problems with there being food courts.
I can imagine an alien race that would be mortified at humans for farting, as they’d regard it as just another form of passing waste into the immediate area. In fact there could be species that like deer can just leave droppings at random, or like birds which can’t control when they drop so they never thought anything of it until meeting species for whom the act is more “involved” and thus became far more taboo.
Although that seems more the exception going by most species that make it a point to go someplace safe or bury it after words, or regard it as marking their territories.
Maybe it works something like this:
https://youtu.be/8rbNznCBKI8?t=47
Oops. I guess it doesn’t.
I just noticed the alien in the alley taking a leak against the wall.
Nice to know that even out in the deep universe, there are still class acts. :)
If you mean the green guy with the antenna, he’s not using a hand scanner. He’s urinating.
I’ve eaten lutefisk. Can’t say I’ve tasted it though. I have no idea how something that smells so vile can be so completely void of any sort of flavor whatsoever.
That’s how people are able to eat it :P
Either the smell is completely overwhelming your sense of taste, or the chemical processes that produced that smell have eliminated anything that can truly be described as flavor. XD
It could be responding to Sydney itself and is a teaser of the original orb bearer. There’s 3 handprints, 1 Sydney size, 1 Cook size and 1 tentacle like shape. So it could be showing the first 2 because of them there, and the 3rd because the scanner picked up something from the previous owner on the orbs(possibly something like an octopus or squid that could have grabbed all the orbs at once.
Presumably if a larger alien approached it would add a thumbprint. It’s also possible the aliens with the bowl like things on their heads have gotten close enough to the scanner and have tentacles.
Funny outcome: Sydney goes to press the thing, and thinking it may in part be related to paying the unknown orb responds to the feeling *like the air orb did before* and moves into her hand just as pressing….and we discover the power of the unknown orb is….financial management and links to the credits of the previous wielder and a bank account for an ancient and powerful race rarely encountered in this sector of the galaxy or even dimension.
Question how is she going to PAY for her order? I don’t think she has a credit chit or any means of paying the guy for a meal an such.
The commenter’s consensus is that her US paper money is valueless or nearly so and that
the craft items in her utility belt will either get her a value meal or 1st class passage to Earth.
I gotta say, the aromatherapy titles/descriptions had me rolling. “Surprise Sweaty Testicles” in particular.
There’s a reason the military carries canteens, especially in training. Hydrate or die!
I wonder how the vegetarian option is here?
Groot will not approve of Sydney’s barbaric vegetarianism.
“I’ll have a salad, please.”
“A SALAD?”, the waiter said disapprovingly.
“What’s wrong with a salad?”
“I know quite a few vegetables that are very particular on the matter. That’s why we went to the trouble of genetically engineering an animal that WANTS to be eaten, and is capable of saying so clearly and distinctly.”
You know, something comes to mind.
Sydney DID come to this station with something very, very valuable in space. Approximately enough Oxygen/Nitrogen Rich gas to fill her orb. If this station has any form of automated payment (which, if it did, would not ideally work via chip since there are a lot of species from multiple worlds crossing paths here) then it’s not completely ridiculous to think she might have a few znookerzorts in her personal account. Especially if she recycles matter after eating.
But we know nothing about the situation at this station. So who knows?
Not just ‘enough nitrogen/oxygen to fill her shield’, but the means to produce more, apparently indefinitely. That’s the sort of talent that could easily be dangerously lucrative, if the wrong sort of People hear about it.
Just noticed there’s some alien pissing in the alley.
A recruit without a canteen is inconceivable! That’s the one piece of gear I can’t imagine them excluding. The weight and getting accustomed to it is part of the reason, the more important is hydration.
Then again, Sydney isn’t getting the physical training she should be, and sipping from a canteen would just make her leave class to pee more often.