Grrl Power #1473 – Feed the meter
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.
Now I’m wondering what Max can get done in 26 seconds that nobody else in Archon can handle.
Pee.
Something very loud, I’d say.
danoli8162 is correct, then ;P
Maxima takes 4 seconds to move one picometer?
She might genuinely be one of the slowest moving objects in the universe!
Assuming I haven’t made some huge mistake applying the Maxwell-Boltzman distribution, a hydrogen atom of that speed would be a temperature of about 3.76 * 10^-30 K. The lowest temperature we’ve achieved experimentally is 3.8 * 10^-11 K.
Granted, a hydrogen atom at room temperature is quite fast (it’s on the km/s scale). A more apt point of reference would be continental drift (which is 1000 times faster), the growth rate of limestone stalactites (which is 10 times faster) or the erosion rate of bedrock (which is about on par with 0.25 pm/s or about 10 µm/yr). There are some crystals that grow 10 times slower still, then it’s only things like “relative speed of two immobile points in free space 1 m apart due to Hubble expansion” (100 000 times slower, 2.2×10⁻¹⁸ m/s).
Those growth & erosion rates are rate of change rather than speeds (or velocities), I think that’s a different category.
The 4 seconds is from when she left the bounds to when the announcer said she has 26 seconds to return.
Not the 0.94607304725808 picometers she traveled getting there.
Also very impressive that you were able to get that close. Leads me to believe you crunched the numbers, which is a rather impressive mathematical feat. My number was calculating using 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters for a lightyear, and assuming 365.2425 days for a year and the day being an exact 24 hours, which of course makes it all just a little too clean for the real length… but I feel any closer isn’t going to yield significantly different results.
excuse me, I meant 9,460,730,472,580,800 meters for all 5000 light years
Personally I got 0.94607 picometers by just using online conversion. The only math I did was copying the digits Dave put there past the dot ad putting in the calculator 1-0″Ctri+V”. Duck Duck Go did the rest.
Your mathing is impressive but we can sit comfortably on the shoulders of giants nowadays.
I wouldn’t say at all this is a page you flip right past. It may be a transition page but it’s a very impactful transition page. It’s establishing a major time constraint, rough source of the problem, and that Sydney also had to react quickly and is now holding the gate open.
Also it’s cool as hell.
Oh are they actually going to try to have Maxima win a fight in less than 26 seconds? Clock is ticking!
22. She has to go back.
More likely 10 seconds to get there, 10 seconds to get it done, and 10 seconds to get back.
Does it matter WHERE on the playing field she returns to as long as she doesn’t run out the clock?
Far less than that. Starting with 30 seconds for a time-out (assumed), it took 4 seconds from edge or arena to earth, so assume the same time in the other direction. Down to 22 seconds. I don’t recall ever seeing Max’s max speed, other than “classified” and faster than Sydney at Mach 4 (before Syd upgraded her travel ball). Assume a blistering Mach 10 with all “points” allocated to speed.
The speed of sound at 20°C / 68°F is ~0.343 km/s (~0.213 miles/s). Going with 10 seconds to travel to the flight and ignoring acceleration/deceleration time allows travel of up to 34 km (21 miles) from the quarry. This leaves only 2 seconds to assess the situation then blast or fly through something/someone and return. Obviously if she can fly faster than Mach 10 or the conflict is closer to the quarry she’ll have more time to fight.
I believe Archon headquarters is in/near Dallas, TX, USA, and there are a few rock quarries on the outskirts. Probably too far out for to get to headquarters, plus they wouldn’t be willingly fighting Kevin on the outskirts of a major metropolitan area, so probably a quarry much farther away.
So the theory of her boyfriend standing outside Archon headquarters with a bouquet of roses is out. My guess is the quarry is a long way from Archon and somewhat near the Dungeon, probably right next to it. Maybe even the building material source for it.
It’s bad enough to be behind somebody when they instantly accelerate to mach 4 or better, at least the overpressure is limited to 1 atmosphere, due to the vacuum suddenly showing up in front of you.
But pity the poor fool who’s there when she arrives with the air she passed though piled up in front of her because it hasn’t had time to flow around her. Not much better to be anywhere along the path she takes; Multiples of the speed of sound at ground level amounts to a linear explosion.
The takeaway from this is is that unless Max’s classified top speed is MUCH much faster than what is already known, AND since whatever the problem is can’t be dealt with by anyone else, I’m going to suppose it’s a TinkerMagiTech nuke equivalent near the Dungeon that only Max can remove to a safe distance before it goes off.
I’ll guess said ‘safe distance’ is down Eat-Chicken’s gullet.
> I’ll guess said ‘safe distance’ is down Eat-Chicken’s gullet.
Oh, I like how you think!
Keep in mind we’ve seen Max dial it up towards top speed, where she depleted the battery of a stasis field in moments while STILL being able to move – albeit just to turn her head. It’s entirely possible she can move at the speed of light or very close to it.
Even at 75% lightspeed, relativistic mass increase/time dilation is only about 1.5x normal. At the planetary scale, that’s still plenty fast.
Anything even approaching that speed starts overwhelming the nuclear forces of atoms in their path
Relativistic Baseball once again.
If that was the case, counting time in seconds would be meaningless (moving around the Earth twice would take about .1 second). Never assume anything goes at the speed of light in any media, because as soon as you do you can’t rely on things “taking some time” anymore.
There was a bit in *Young Justice* where Miss Martian shapeshifts into Black Canary while making out with Superboy. The real Black Canary was not pleased when she saw a security video of this. The real Black Canary’s boyfriend Green Arrow was also not pleased until he found out what was actually going on, at which point he thought it was hilarious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0QgSXrH_JWE
Exactly what I was thinking.
Last time Syd opened a causeway, the guys at Fracture Station nearly pinpointed her and were about to inform the Xevoarchy. Wonder what will happen if they catch a whiff of caushenanigans near the tournament site.
That causeway was in open space right in front of their sci-fi space cameras.
This one is in Cora’s hold. They don’t know it’s there.
If the guys on Cora’s ship detected a causeway on the other side of a planet, I think there is a good case for saying that the causeway puts off an energy form that is easily detected when active. So if you are not sure what that energy discharge is, then the possibility of Fracture Station detecting the causeway is fairly good, depending on the active and/or passive shielding of Cora’s ship. I would be more concerned that the causeway could cause damage to some of the less common (read as potentially explosive) elements in Cora’s ship, if the energy output of the causeway is something their storage containers are not designed for.
Cora’s ship launched probes to get line-of-sight coverage all around the planet, so they were detecting it through empty space with no obstacle except distance (p675). Also, the current UCBA site, whereever it is, probably doesn’t have the kind of sensor grid you’d expect at a major traffic hub like Fracture Station.
As for the effects of the causeway on ship systems, I’d guess that might have been tested (offscreen, since it’s a not particularly interesting bit of preparation).
In any case, space is vast. The contest may be next door to Fracture Station (esp by Etherium Causeway) or it might be on the other side of the galaxy. Hard to say. And if the station can detect causeways halfway across the galaxy, they might need more staff in traffic control…
No you can’t raise an eyebrow and narrow both eyes at the same time, as both use some of the same muscles.
The best you can do is raise one eyebrow and narrow the other eye.
It’s not really effective as all it generally does is make you look like Sir Patrick Moore.
Not to be that guy, but thats simply not true. I just did it in a mirror.
Narrowing of ones eyes does not require eyebrows to move even a little bit. You can just use whatever those muscles are under your eyes. Hell, I do that part all the time. Then you just have to move one eyebrow up and there you go.
It took a few tries, but it definitely can be done.
At first try, some people are better with certain facial gestures.
I know a lot of people that can’t lift up only one side of the lips, like when a dog growls and lift one side to show the teeth.
Billy Idol (and Elvis… no, the other Elvis) are famous for doing that
Yup. I can do a right-sided snarl, but not a left.
I was able to replicate the action immediately, including narrowing both eyes while raising both eyebrows, but… i also have a lot of practice moving individual muscles.
Any video game that uses her as a character after this is going to have the debuff of randomly leaving that arena for twenty five seconds or so.
is that a pair of citadel’s keepers i spot!
didnt realize this was happening in mass effect universe :)
Those bugs were hard to track down in ME1.
DaveB-“But a teenage boy finding out that his girlfriend is a shapeshifter and getting squicked out by it is FUCKING FANTASY.”
it’s 1987 and most shape-shifters in the movies are ambush predators.
The Howling
American Werewolf in London
John Carpenter’s The Thing
There’s also the possibility that she is a fujoshi and wants to shapeshift into HER fantasy.
Star Trek itself had already depicted that sort of predatory shapeshifter in the form of the Salt Vampire from TOS
Ok, I blew that one, figured she was running from a nuke.
Somebody is going to notice an Aetherium Causeway opening.
Cora’s ship’s forcefields might contain those energies or add noise to make it sound like a warpdrive with a bad muffler.
Doing that AND leaving the doors open might be tricky.
Quarries never get filled in.
Quarries are often used as landfills, for the obvious reason that you have a nice convenient hole to fill with stuff.
many end up as artificial lakes
Those lakes are genuine. They are the result of artificially modified geography, and usually far deeper than lakes that formed naturally, so I do see your point. But now that they exist, they are entirely real.
Most fill with water regardless of any human activity, and they do not require any further input of human time, expense, or labor to remain full. Whether they result from modified geology or not, most of those will still be lakes for a thousand years even if we f*ck off and kill ourselves. They naturally turn themselves to natural purposes like developing a genuine lake ecology without any human help.
A lake is “artificial” if it requires human effort and input to be expended with the purpose of making it continue to exist or if it wouldn’t exist except that it serves some ongoing human purpose.
Somebody has to spend time and effort building and maintaining a structure like a dam to make sure an artificial lake stays wet, or to give it some active structure or to make sure it can be drained and filled on human demand, or can be used to generate power for human use or something. If a lake can go on into the future without any of that, then it’s a real lake.
But I suppose we’re splitting hairs at this point.
> let’s discuss the ethics of holo-disguising yourself as your friends and acquaintances and then having sex with other friends and acquaintances.
Go read #horny_on_main over on Ao3. And canon EGS: “Summer Pranking.”
Have fun ;)
Huh, did not expect to run into an EGS reference here.
I could think that Harem would put on the holo suit, reset the clock, and pop out
I doubt that would work. They’re probably aware that it’s a disguise (but they don’t care, that’s not against the rules), and could tell if it was someone different in that disguise. Along with tracking implements installed as part of the competition for ease of broadcast and monitoring for arena presence.
More specifically, I believe they have difficulty determining much about Izah, due to her force field. They would not have any such issues with Harem, and thus easily spot the imposter.
Also Harem would probably die in that arena before she could pop out, unlike Maxima.
You definitely added a few 9s too many in the description… according to napkin math, she’s traveled fractions of an ångström.
Yeah it’s about 1 picometer.
which is not a small electric rodent with math abilities, no matter what it says
According to a more thorough calculation where the numbers that are “back of a napkin” are just the length of a day and the average length of a Gregorian year, it’s 0.94607304725808 pico meters
Well, whatever has forced her to return to Earth is in for a bad time, as it now has a probably very mad and impatient Max heading right for it.
Good thing for the quarry.
So is that how Chimyriad’s dates in high school went? Assuming she had her shape-changing during that time.
Wesley: “Can you do fur? Asking for a friend.”
I hope this post is the reference point for hologram files to be labeled .hpg in the future.
Ah the The Dauphin episode, 1989. There’s a bit more context there than just “dumb boy can’t get past reactive prejudice.” Considering the guardian of the girl crush, had turned into a big hairy brute and had been trying to pound Wesley flat, there’s just a touch of immediate trauma to deal with.
Beyond ham fisted life lessons on “accepting people as they are,” before it’s too late to ever see them again. Even big hairy aliens that can shapeshift into societally acceptable norms. There’s also some “Death of the Author” and now seeing the kinds of hurtful knee jerk reactions to a crush revealing they’re genderfluid, or intersex, or have been masking some other societal stigma.
I’m going to call it: this is just a test whether she can get back to Earth quickly.
If it’s ‘just a test’, Maxi is gonna be more than a little upset, even if it was Faulke
I agree. Probably set up by Deus. Also confirming that Ixah is in fact Max.
Maxima may be superfast but how did Sydney set up the gateway that fast? Time travel?
They were probably both notified at the same time, but Max didn’t leave the arena until after Sydney had the gateway set up.
Sydney was right there when Harem said “Uh oh”.
Heh, reminds of the girl pretending to be a guy pretending to be a girl (or something like that)
ah, Shakespeare
Dude looks like a Lady?
“Disguising yourself as someone else to have sex with their significant other”? Sounds like the King Arthur movie
Or “Revenge Of The Nerds”.
Or Greek god thing to do.
Didn’t Loki do that several times? Became a father five times and a mother once, as I recall.
Getting pregnant and giving birth, as well as readily impregnating others, really calls the whole idea of gender identity into question. Not just at the level of “what category/ies do I put this entity in” but all the way down to the level of “do any those categories even mean anything at all with respect to this entity.”
Norse myth is all manner of genderqueer
That info is probably one of the Contributing Factors on why Trekkies hate Westly Crusher with a purple passion. He was supposed to be a stand-in for the fanbois, and we would all universally go “WOOT” at having a shapeshifter GF.
I’m old enough to have had more than a few fantasies about Maya from the second season of Space: 1999 back when I was a teenager. Her normal form being played by Catherine Schell made it all the better.
Read the Dungeon Crawler Carl books. One guy gets a gf who is a shapeshifter and he literally describes famous earth women until she gets close enough for him. Book 4 I think.
Louie and his changeling girlfriend Juice Box, yup. That’s on the 5th floor, which is indeed book 4, “The Gate of the Feral Gods (Dungeon Crawler Carl)”. And he mostly has her do anime and cartoon characters instead of actual women — Ursula, Gidget, Jessica Rabbit, etc.
If you are famous and or attractive for whatever reason you could probably license your body scan for use with holo-suits. “Yes! For 100 quatloos you too can be Maxima for 100 minutes!”
There was an episode of DS9 where a skeevy customer wanted a holo-simulation of Major Kira for sexy funtimes. Quark tried some sitcom hijinx to covertly scan her before finally getting a hacked copy of her medical records. Kira and Odo found out what he was up to, and hacked the simulation to have Kira’s body topped off with Quark’s head. Skeevy customer was not satisfied in any sense of the term.
Would have been funner if the skeeve was satisfied, very satisfied ;)
To the point they start following Quark everywhere he goes :)
Tiron the Creepy Alien was, IIRC, played by Jeffrey Combs, giving rise to the possibility that the character was actually a rogue Changeling, fascinated by humanoid societies, spending decades assuming different identities — Ferengi, Vorta, Andorian, random creeps — eventually becoming Weyoun, Brunt, Shran, and every other Jeffrey Combs character.
Someone is going to get the slap of a lifetime.
The last slap they ever got :P
And then Maxi has to wipe what is left off of her hand
I hope not!!!
I hope you are wrong and it’s a designate individual.
bruh, imagine cosplaying as yourself
It could be anything from another fel invasion to a home-grown super being bad. Anything that requires her “special touch” has to be too much for the rest of the Archon to handle quickly. Or some a-hole top-dog wants a report on how it’s going regardless of the fact they are running her out the competition.
That’s a very practical contingency to have when operating off-planet.
I find it difficult to believe Dabbler and the rest can’t put down anyone. Unless Vale is attacking for some reason.
A max costume… Yah know On a related note I’m betting gold skin mods are going to become popular in the next few years.
“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.”
Yeah that is a total trap most guys would fall into, To Quote a friend “DANGER WILL ROBINSON, DANGER!”
Yeah, especially if there was a particular go-to “costume” you requested.
I don’t remember what work it was in, but I’m pretty sure I remember a shapeshifter in something I read being appreciative that their boyfriend never asked them to do specific people. He absolutely made requests for various shapes, but it was never based on names.
While “everyone is on-board and is okay with it” seems like the sort of thing that would shut down ethical debate, that underestimates the ability of philosophers to find things to argue about.
The main question that comes up about such things is “are there things you cannot (reasonably) consent to?”. For example, it’s illegal here in the UK for consenting adults to whip each other (and spanking is in a grey area). Or adult close relatives doing close adult things with each other is illegal on moral grounds in many jurisdictions.
“Or adult close relatives doing close adult things with each other is illegal on moral grounds in many jurisdictions.”
Incest is one of those weird things where it squicks me out and I want it to be illegal, but I can’t come up with a specific reason why it’s bad so long as the people in question aren’t having kids. The BDSM stuff being illegal makes me roll my eyes — puritans gonna puritan, I suppose. (Although perhaps ‘puritan’ is not precisely the right term in the UK.)
Hapsburgs anybody? One point is that pretty much all the laws against incest are rooted in a time when birth control was non-existent, unreliable or strongly frowned upon. You don’t want your field hands to be too inbred to work the fields. That sort of thing is reserved for royalty. People have been doing things for birth control ever since forever but reliable latex condoms only date back to the 1920s. So its only been in the last century that you could have a sustained incestuous relationship with a reasonable expectation of not producing any offspring. Another issue with incest is the question of consent. Sure there are incidents where two competent adults enter into a consensual incestuous relationship but I would argue that there is a rate much higher than in non-incestuous relationships of a skewed power dynamic. That is, one person in the relationship is operating from a position of relative power either from age or intelligence. Lets not forget that if you were molested there is a pretty good chance it was by a relative. Personally I’ve only ever known of one incestuous marriage. But it was kind of messed up. They were first cousins. He was 33 and she was 14. He had a good job and she was one of 10 kids during the height of the depression. Luckily they never had any kids. I would not have wished him on any child. I would argue that as a 14 year old farm girl that she probably could not give informed consent. Professionally I have run across several incidences of incest and most of the time there was a question of consent or competency on the part of one or both parties. So there are lots of good reasons for incest to be squicky. So, if you and your hot cousin who is the same age as you hook up after a family reunion, it shouldn’t be the end of the world. It just that making incest babies is a bad idea and incestuous relationships often involve an aspect of abuse.
It’s possible to have particular incestuous relationships that are “okay” I think, but that proscription exists because that possibility is the exception rather than the rule.
The moral proscription on incest is sustained, I think, on the grounds that many incestuous relationships are desperately unhappy. They tend to come about when one of the parties is unable to meaningfully consent or withhold consent, and develop the way relationships develop when that is true. The local instance of whatever institution administers law and justice see one couple after another with rampant emotional and/or physical abuse, injury, “hysterical” illnesses that we’d recognize as PTSD symptoms, etc… and it doesn’t take too long for them to decide that it’s better not to allow that sort of thing.
Also the (nearly) universal squick about incest is likely tied to a long, long history of people watching incestuous couples produce kids who “come out wrong” or “are cursed.”
The “simple-minded” kid who can barely manage keeping ducks had parents who were closely related. So did those four little sickly kids who all died before they turned six because their bruises never healed. So did that one who never learned to talk, who became bedridden at about the age of puberty and whose mind slowly faded away. And that misshapen guy over there with not enough fingers on his hands and one nose too many oh wait, that second thing isn’t really a nose is it. And any number of stories about people “cursed” or “possessed by demons” – because their brains were literally malformed in development due to doubled recessives, but people didn’t know that.
It doesn’t take too many such stories and experiences for people – medieval villagers, tribal people, religious officials, shamans, whatever – to develop the idea that couples are being punished by divine or unseen powers for incest, or that incest releases evil things into the world.
And then you get a moral proscription, and usually a legal one as well. Nearly universal across all human societies.
What about all those kids who ‘came out wrong’ from parents from different regions and are not related in any way?
It’s a bit like lightning. Anybody COULD get hit by lightning. Anybody COULD avoid it. But there are guys who climb to the top of a tree and wave a sword around in the air while loudly cussing at God. And it doesn’t take too many generations for folks to notice that their odds are different.
“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.”
Technically their original looks don’t matter for it. Since you are all disguised.
““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.””
Young Justice adressed that. Apparently it isn’t a big thing in martian culture, because they are all also telepaths. So a disguise isn’t fooling anyone.
But Megan turning in Black Cannary caused some friction with Black Cannary.
Hard to tell with how zoomed out it is but Sydney looks like she’s not wearing her disguise in that pic… Cause if she’s on an alien planet with unknown methods of surveillance she’s probably just made their team.
There’s no reason for her to be disguised; she’s on board the Interdictor (creating the causeway in the cargo hold). Presumably the ship is parked at a spaceport as close to the arena as possible for just such contingencies.
Even if I were interested in dating, I doubt I could date a shapeshifter. I’d be lucky to manage even a cordial acquaintanceship with someone I was that profoundly jealous of.