Challenge #02299-F109: I Smell Your Stink

Hey mom, hey dad.

Glad to hear everything's going well back at home. Hope lil sis is still practising for her band tour. Everything here's good, except for one thing. My roommate is kind if the equivalent of a sentient space skunk. I mean, I don't blame them, but you know how strong my nose is! I bet it's not even that bad! So yeah, everything else is fine.

Love you guys,

Katie -- Anon Guest

Humans tend to boldly go where they really shouldn't belong. On a colony world called Gloom, eyesight became secondary to smell, and dark-adapted humans could -eventually- sniff out their fellow beings by scent trails alone. Call it obstinacy. Call it impracticality. Call it being stubborn. The Gloomies simply found it easier to live with their under-lit world rather than bringing the light with them.

Now they brought an intensely perceptive sense of smell with them as well. Not such good news for Katie, who was rooming with a species who had... shall we say... very detectable musk glands. Katie knew it was rude to comment on Thaak's distinctive odour, but...

There was just something about hir that make Katie's eyes water. For the first two weeks at the Academy, she dreaded going back to her dorm. She could sleep there with the benefit of discrete nose filters, but... being awake with that smell everywhere was not her ideal situation. Then, without warning, the strongest notes of the odour stopped cold. Thaak's scent became... way less offensive.

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