page 1243 – addressing the parts that matter
Oh, hey did we mention that Layla really likes meat? It’s such an obscure detail that gets brought up so rarely that I need to subtly remind everyone that Layla is the most aggressive carnivore on this ship. And this is serious business. Oh, and also Marshall has succeeded in identifying a shared interest with Layla in a way that the other boys haven’t come close to since they arrived. But that’s clearly the less important detail here.
Also, thank GOD this is a futuristic science fiction comic and I could fall back on silly technobabble to hide the fact that I don’t know or care about the specific details that separate good cooking and bad cooking.
EDIT: I feel lame about it, but I’ve finally gotta break the streak of consistent Voting Incentives again. Between finishing up a bunch of stuff I needed to get done before the end of the month and getting a head of start on stuff that needs to be done for NEXT month, I’m really in the weeds right now. The Voting Incentive is basically the one thing I can afford to put on the back burner right now, and by the time all this other stuff is done, I’ll be needing to focus on page 1244, so it’s just not getting done this week. Drat.
Layla is a carnivore and only pays attention to how good the meat is. If the meat is good, everything’s fine, but if the meat is bad then she hates everything. And she can see the difference between good quality meat and bad quality meat from fifty paces while blindfolded based on smell alone.
Every part of this statement is correct.
Now to come up with limitations on Layla’s meat-quality smelling capabilities! She probably wouldn’t be affected by normal surrounding smells, including side dishes such as vegetables, or “meat vehicles” such as burgers & associated toppings. Deep Fried Meat would be an impediment to other’s, but Layla has probably trained her sense of smell beyond that as an instinctive self-defence mechanism.
Do people put Blue Cheese on meat? Google says that Blue Cheese Sauce goes on meat, so they do, as such Layla’s going to have experience with bypassing strong smells. And I obviously don’t have the Google-fu to actually search how to hide the smells of still edible foods, with my results seemingly only coming up with how to hide lingering & built up food smells.
As such, I will conclude that there is no possible way to hide the quality of meat presented to her from Layla’s nose. Not without use of Mad Science, and that’s directly hazardous to her health, for a variety of reasons, with the first typically being that the Mad Science Creations for hiding food scent produce several different mild to moderate health risks, even if none of the materials are outright poisonous.
I know blue cheese is a common dip for chicken wings in certain regions (though I’ve always preferred ranch in that role)
Also, now I find myself wondering what overlap there might be between Layla’s speculative meat-smelling and her canonical Christmas-present-shaking skills. This is a girl who knows how to find what she wants.
vote incentive author comment is for song 20 but pic is still for song 19, so i guess you put the incentive on hold/delay but the author comment updated automatically. yes i checked its not my cache 😉
That’s good thinking on your part, and yeah, the problem was on my end. I guess I didn’t actually remember to post the new image link. It’s up for real now, though. Thanks!
In the interest of nitpicking, to answer the vote incentive’s question: Yes, it is entirely possible for his hair to blow in Outer Space, he only has to be moving sufficiently fast. Space is not a perfect vacuum, there are a few atoms per square meter – the actual specifics depend on which part of space you’re in, density varies, and is much less outside of galaxies. While that may not seem like much, from what I’ve read, the density in the vicinity of the Solar System is such that at about 10% of the speed of light, you get the same problem as experimental hypersonic jets do inside the atmosphere, which is that you have to worry about friction from “wind resistance” melting your ship. You would not need to go nearly that fast for your hair to blow, maybe something like 0.1% of the speed of light. For comparison, the fastest manmade object ever so far went about 0.0002c. Of course, he might be in an area of space with a higher density, so he might not need to go quite as fast. But the point is, it is possible at sci-fi speeds, and probably at speeds we will one day really achieve, for one’s hair to blow in space. Now how he’s breathing, or not boiling or freezing solid, etc. – beats the snot out of me?! Nannites?
See, my answer to the question is just “solar wind”. That’s it! (“Not how it works?” Sorry, I can’t hear you over the howling of the solar wind!)
My answer is more correct, but yours is funnier. Per established FoT rules, rule-of-funny wins. Touché 😉
Part of the sci-fantasy space-weather suite established in the 1950s, along with the ever-popular “meteor storms” and thick as pea soup “nebula” clouds you can see from the inside, often so thick your ship can barely move through them even. That and “asteroid fields” where the asteroids are all only a few hundred feet apart at most. When humans do get out into space they’re really going to be soooo disappointed….
😀