Empyrean Iris Story Collection

Olfaction

Intergalactic Journal of Behavior And Biology

All the species that we know of have a generally similar set of senses including, some form of sight, and some form of hearing..... Though these depend heavily on the species and cover a wide range of abilities, for the purpose of this paper. Despite these differences in this area, all species are known to have a general sensory distinction to, touch including pressure and pain, as well as vestibular and proprioceptive senses, though those vary widely and by degrees from species to species. As far as we understand, humans tend to have the most developed set of senses, and maintain the highest number and the most sensitive set of senses, of which we know. They do, however, lack the ability to see into specie of light ranges, and cannot detect radio frequencies. However, even after this consideration, we find that what they lack in these areas is made up for in other sensory areas.

For instance, there is a sense that humans are known to have, that cannot be found in any other species. Of course we understand that any species, consumer in nature, that requires the intake of food into their body to survive, as having a sense of taste however rudimentary it may be. In fact humans themselves can only taste about five tastes including sour, bitter, sweet, salty and umami however, the human sense of taste is closely intertwined with their olfactory sense which is estimated to be able to detect at least 1 trillion different scents .

For those of you who are unaware of this sense, humans have receptors inside their nose that allows them to detect chemical particles in the air and identify it. This allows them a multitude of advantages including, the detection of dangerous gasses, locating food, and even smelling out the potential health of a mate. Aside from the humans, only one other sentient species is known to possess a sense of smell half as advanced, and that is the Drev.

For many of the reasons mentioned in the previous excerpt, the Galactic Assembly couldn't have known what was going to happen during the first interspecies PR conference held at GA headquarters on the Rundi homeworld.

i t was late in the evening when the delegations started to arrive. The Rundi delegation, of course, had been the first to arrive as they were cursed with the inability to be anything other than excessively early. The Vrul delegation and the Tesraki delegation arrived exactly on time one for the reason of logic, if they were supposed to be there at such a time than they would be, and the other for knowing that time was money, and it paid to show up at the correct time and to leave at the correct time.

The Drev The Gibb delegation arrived a single minute late flustered to the point that Vrul medical officers were put on standby to watch the nervous creatures. Of course no one particularly cared that they were a minute late, but with the Gibb's nervous disposition leaned them towards hysterics.

Slowly, the rest of the delegations began to drift in.

The Drev came in their own time. The Drev had never seen the importance of showing up on time, or even developed a proper way to measure time on their home planet. Of course they knew how long it generally took to go somewhere, but in their culture things began when they began and ended when they ended, you couldn't exactly schedule a battle.

THe newest delegation, members of the Iota sector, arrived shortly after having been delayed by an issue on one of their ships that needed to be taken care of during landing.

Members of the Iota cluster came form a grouping of three planets around one star. All of them were rather snakelike in shape but with thick stumpy legs towards the back which allowed them to scoot across the floor. Their anatomy tended towards heavy, and so they did not move very fast. Their heads were almost catlike in structure, though they had no fur, and their skin was covered in a layer of viscous slime