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Originally Posted by Mgellis
What other ruses might they use? What would be the advantages and disadvantages of any particular kind of cover?
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Surely this is very sensitive to what the line you are observing is like, and what you think you need to observe. Merchant ventures are useful on most timelines if you expect to need to move a number of strangers and a lot of money around. The other classic one in the literature is a religion - this works better for a low TL line where you can produce convincing "miracles" with imported technology. On a lot of timelines there really aren't very many other excuses for people to move around long distances after all.
But I expect the standard observation mission is a lot less involved. Something more like send one agent to a provincial town to get a bland job, rent an apartment, get a newspaper subscription and a library card, and bring in a "spouse" or "sibling" who spends a lot of time reading.
Other good covers for small operations would be open up in a major city with a job that is essentially freelance. This pretty well prevents anybody from actually checking to see how many clients you actually have, and hence getting a handle on whether you are spending more money than the time you are working accounts for. Artists, musicians and entertainers work this way all the time, and nobody gets suspicious if they up and move to another town for a few months either, though they usually don't make enough to cover large expenditures. Private investigators have an excuse to ask questions, but it isn't a career likely to exist on many timelines, especially in an unregulated form. Law would be a good one, except that you really do need to actually know a lot about the local law to pull it off convincingly. Small architectural design or engineering consulting firms would probably work quite well for Infinity, given that they have a valid excuse to take new "contracts" all over at any time, and usually have enough technical edge (and the ability to hire somebody on Homeline to do the actual design work) to make it fairly easy to build a good reputation.