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I remember that. That was from when I was on assignment with V in England several years ago. My hair was shorter then. We had to infiltrate a nightclub with a rather…specific dress code.

Those fucking boots were the worst part of the outfit—not that any of it was really tactically useful. The target ran and I had to peel them off and leave them in an alleyway so I wouldn’t lose him on foot. Thankfully I had backup.

Then again, if I ended up lost on an alien world I’d probably panic and try to hide too.

I’m…not allowed to talk about the number of unregistered entities on earth right now but I can tell you it’s a small number, and they’re mostly harmless.

Mostly.

We just took one in, as a matter of fact. S’why we’ve been gone for a while. It wasn’t…hiding or running so much as it was living in an isolated monastery in the Himalayas. There are still some guys talking with the monks there about it, and we think it had been living there for over six hundred years.

Six hundred years! Crazy shit. That’s probably a new record.

If you want, you could talk to it in a couple weeks, but it got injured on the way over and needs some peace and quiet while it’s being treated. Adrian’s flipping out because he thinks it’s a white emperor. Whatever that is.

I’m just glad we don’t need more than one translator to talk to it, because it can speak Nepali, Hindi, and Urdu…along with a bunch of endangered and apparently dead languages and dialects. Pretty fuckin’ cool if you ask me. I hope the Communications guys don’t bother it too much though.

Oh. And…don’t be scared to let us know if anything weird happens to you. Chances are we’ll probably already be there, but you can never be too careful.

Oh! The answer to this is pretty simple. I mean, not entirely. It’s kind of complicated too.

I would say it’s really entirely dependent upon a region’s culture! Say, for example, in the United States alone, wild squirrels are by and large considered something of a pest. This being said, it’s unusual, but not unheard of for someone to keep one as a pet or domesticate them. And in some areas of the southern and southwestern US squirrels are hunted and used for food.

Another example: guinea pigs. In some South American countries they’re a common food animal. But in North America they’re almost exclusively considered pets. You would be very hard pressed to find a restaurant that serves guinea pig in the US or Canada.

I mean if you’re really worried about offending someone just don’t kill or eat anything unless it’s offered to you or someone tells you it’s okay to do that. Actually, in a lot of  human cultures, just straight up eating a live animal without any sort of preparation is pretty taboo. Not to mention it can be unsanitary if you don’t have a highly adaptive or resilient digestive system. In rural areas insects are usually fair game though.

Don’t be afraid to ask your human peers, though! I’ve found most humans are much more forgiving of nonhuman curiosity than you might expect.

If you mean the Men in Black, they’re our diversion guys. Recon too, when the job calls for it. 

And the best damn ones we could ask for, if i do say so myself.They’ve saved our collective asses more trouble than I often care to think about. Unless there’s some other group out there that goes by the same acronym that I’m currently not aware of.

And since it’s my job to be aware of a lot of things, so if you know something that contradicts this information you should probably tell me right now.

This is Carson, isn’t it.

High and mighty M12 fuckers leaving the new ones hanging…

-sigh-

Okay, you’re not a dumbass. I’m presuming you’ve filed all the appropriate forms already. If for some reason you haven’t, do that. Now. Then go talk to some of the engineers in AA.

…That’s Acclimatization Assistance. They should be able to rig up a temperature-controllable containment/environment suit for it in half an hour or less, some sort of communications device up in a day, maybe sooner. I’ve dealt with gaseous entities before, ask for something with an air-compressable trigger. After you’ve got some sort of method of speaking with it established take it with you to Arjang or Sue in Communications.They’ll help with the language stuff. Any weird biological shit goes down, call Ishida…assuming he isn’t busy.

Temporal should be able to help you out with the weird time shit, they’re  in sublevel 7 of the Hawking building. That’s the one below the green hangar.

…Actually, considering the weird time shit, you may want to go there first and not to AA.

Christ I hate time shit so much.

Well this is a first.

I’m not entirely sure how to respond to being called sexy. Since. You know. I don’t have a sex drive. It’s flattering, though, coming from a human. So…thanks?

Wait.

What.

Why would you even ask that.

…it doesn’t bother me, though it’s a bit surreal to see yourself become the equivalent of a massive pre-internet meme. It was the result of an information leak that happened a long time ago, and the damage control division took care of it the best way that they could without killing people.

What’s interesting to me is that had I crashed on another planet, with very different lifeforms, I probably wouldn’t look like this. All the information our biologists and geneticists have gathered from the remains of the ship I was on, and from tissue samples and medical scans that I’ve volunteered, says that I’m a sort of biological homunculus. That I would imprint on the species that I lived with, and physically grow to resemble them. It’s why I’m bilaterally symmetrical. Two eyes, four limbs, one mouth, one spine, etc.

They know more about me than the species that actually built the ship.

heat and cold do not affect me as strongly as they do humans

and i often find the feel of human clothing…

restrictive

but scarves are nice

i own a few

See, I was pretty much born in the United States. You know how Rob said actual crashes of alien spacecraft are rare? Well, that’s how I got here. I was in some kind of incubator on the ship, and that’s how I survived. The folks here raised me. I’ve got official papers, IDs…not that I use them very often. I’ve actually voted a couple times.

But yeah, Adrian got stuck here during the early seventies in an accident with some white emperor tech, and a bunch of field agents found Ovide trapped in a giant bell jar in some dead guy’s basement in the late eighties. You can ask them about the details. Though Ovide doesn’t like talking about it much.