In a comic book, this is one of those pages you register, but basically flip right past. It’s transition, but I didn’t have time to make the previous page and this one a double, so here we are.

You know, Maxima could claim that she can fly at 1,250 light years a second. (I think I said the UCBA was around 5,000 light years from Earth, but I can’t find the comic where I put a number to it.) It wouldn’t be… wrong. Depending on how you actually measure her path. From point A to point B is indeed 5,000 light years and she traveled that distance in 4 seconds. But she didn’t, because the Aetherium Causeway does bridge 4,999.9999999999999999999999999999 of those light years. It’s one of those fun statistics lies. You know, a pregnant woman has a 50% chance of having a boy. She gets pregnant again and has a 50% chance of having a boy, but also a 25% chance of having a second boy. It’s all in the wording. Max wouldn’t be lying if she said she flew 5,000 light years in 4 seconds. If someone wants to use that information to extrapolate her top speed, that’s on them.

Now, the fact that Maxima is wearing a hologram of herself over her bespoke space-latex holo-emitter-embedded catsuit does mean that Cora and crew have a very detailed scan of Maxima in order to project the Max-o-gram. During this scan, Max insisted the holo.hpg image be destroyed after the tournament, not wanting to tempt Cora to disguise herself as Max and, you know, rob a bank or intimidate a corrupt politician or anything of the sort. Of course Cora laughed it off, saying she’d never even consider such a thing. Then Max said, “And naturally you wouldn’t be tempted to cosplay as me during a MMFMM fivesome.”

And there was the tiniest delay before Cora waved her hand and said, “That… of course… never even crossed my mind.”

I’m not sure if Max can narrow her eyes and raise one eyebrow at the same time, that seems like the sort of thing you have to practice a bit so you don’t look like you’re at the start of some kind of weird facial tic, so instead Max just stared until Cora’s hard light elbows started sweating.

Granted, it wasn’t a nude scan, since there’s no chance Max would need a hologram of that. But it’s not like no one has ever holoshopped an .hpg file.

Now assuming access to holodecks is as common as smartphones and also aren’t regulated by a buttoned-up Starfleet, let’s discuss the ethics of holo-disguising yourself as your friends and acquaintances and then having sex with other friends and acquaintances. Obviously if the other party doesn’t know you’re disguised, that’s bad. If the person you’re disguising yourself as doesn’t know and hasn’t given consent, that’s also bad. Maybe a little less bad than the first example, but it’s sort of a lateral difference. But if you’re at an orgy and the holodeck changes everyone’s appearance at random and everyone knows what’s up and consent is in abundance, then… well, congratulations, you probably have a bunch of fairly attractive friends. Huh. I guess that was a pretty straightforward ethics discussion. But then, and ethics conundrum that starts with “everyone is on-board and is okay with it” isn’t the sort of hypothetical that keeps philosophers arguing into the wee hours at their salons.

But that does lead me to the most unrealistic episode across all of Star Trek. The TNG episode where Westley finds out the girl he’s dating is a shapeshifter, and he’s all “Ew, no.” Now, Star Trek isn’t hard Sci-Fi. It’s kind of a medium-soft sci-fi, and in its defense, anything set more than a few hundred years in the future kind of can’t be super hard sci-fi, because we just don’t know where the possibilities of science and technology can really take us. If anything, something set 1,000 years in the future with technology that more or less resembles what we have today is probably less realistic.

But a teenage boy finding out that his girlfriend is a shapeshifter and getting squicked out by it is FUCKING FANTASY. It’d be more like, “Can you turn into Starfire from Teen Titans? Can you turn into Ariel in both her mermaid and landmaid forms? Can you turn into Counselor Troi? Can you turn into…” etc.

Of course, those floodgates probably only opens up after the shapeshifter gets past the conversation that goes, “I appreciate the “you’re all I want,” sentiment, but honestly, it’s okay to ask me to turn into other girls from our class. Or the volleyball coach. Or that one singer we both like.”
“Really?”
“Sure. In fact, as a shapeshifter, it would actually be racist of you to not ask me to turn into other girls while we make out.”

Final version is up, both at TWC and Patreon.

Sexy bodymod news lady Gail has a special one-on-one interview with Tournament Quarter finalist Saraviah Nightwing! And if you subscribe to Gail’s Space Patreon, (which, due to the vagaries of Earth and Gal-Net’s DNS servers, happens to be the same as the Grrl Power Patreon, go figure) you can see that same interview in the nude!

Double res version will be posted over at Patreon. Feel free to contribute as much as you like.