The Animalia Halloween Exposition & Carnival was a lot of fun, but like all great things, it must come to an end. The first half of the AHE&C ended with a special showing of The Night on Bald Mountain. But in truth, the performance was actually synchronized to represent the transition from Halloween to All Saints Day, so that the church bells in The Night on Bald Mountain was set to begin at midnight, signaling the transition from ‘profane’ to ‘sacred’.
All Saints Day and All Souls Day, as it was last year, a good opportunity to learn about ancient and modern religions from around the world. Partly it was to show many of the differences between paganism and Judeo-Christianity, partly it was to show how mythology helped explain how the world worked before science, and partly it was to explain why certain uplifted Animalians had certain names.
—
While there had been a scare during the events, with Jeremy getting captured by semi-feral rat Animalians, Jeremy was able to be retrieved with little trouble. What was really surprising was the discovery that the patriarch of “Queen Mary Piper’s Court” was in fact the first specimin that had been experimented on with the prototype of the Animalia Virus. While ‘Subject Zero’, as he was recorded in official Horizon records, was indeed recorded as euthanized, here he was clearly still alive. While the other semi-feral rat Animalians were assigned for mandatory double dosing to help with physical and mental defects, “Queen Mary” and Subject Zero were having their double dosing delayed until they had blood samples taken to figure out how Subject Zero was effectively resurrected by the prototype virus, and how it was different from the current virus. “Queen Mary”, as she was now known to the scientists, and her patriarch were currently in separate comfortable-yet-padded rooms to keep them from hurting themselves or others.