While the festivities in 2021 wouldn't be similar to "February Festival Week", with three major holidays happening in the same week, it was still going to be busy. As such there was a lot of preparation going on, mainly for the Lunar New Year celebrations. What was probably the most anticipated event in the celebration was the Year of the Ox competition, since there were quite a few competitors that were either underdogs or favorites to win.
While everyone was a little confused when birds of prey were being selected as referees for the events, but this was easily explained as birds of prey having the best eyesight and thereby being the best way to catch cheaters. This comment on the Animalia website seemingly kickstarted both proverbs about cheating and famous moments where athletes were caught cheating.
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That wasn't the only thing going on, mainly because of what was going on in the other colonies. Dino City, for example, had gotten a few new members who were members of the upper classes that were, according to the PR-MD, demanding housing that were more "fitting" for them. While William Tarr didn't appreciate the demands, as well as the way they treated him during their meeting, he did allow some local architects to work with them to design/redesign manor houses for Dino City, since they had to match the overall "Stone Age" theme of the colony. While they did cause a bit of a rezoning problem, it wasn't too much of a problem since William had expected it when the "hippies" started "moving in".
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Another new thing that was going on was all the "hippies" that were moving into Mieni Atoll. While this was expected, since it had happened in both Lyre/Animalia and Dino City, there were still some unusual things that this was causing. For example, Henry and Beatrice were spending the winter at Mieni Atoll, and those "hippies" were attacking Henry, verbally, accusing him for all kinds of things that Beatrice didn't know about. Fortunately, Harold was able to explain enough to Beatrice that she was no longer worried about it, and she and Henry were able to resume enjoying their winter vacation.
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Heiya Island, while celebrating Lunar New Year in their own way, was dealing with the aftermath of breaking up a smaller, yet similar, human trafficking ring that was using guys instead of girls. While they still had a greater male-to-female ratio, Heiya Island was no longer a "girl's dormitory", but a side effect was that there were now internet rumors about orgies among the rescued men and women. These kinds of rumors were mainly perpetuated by idiots who were mentioning the Kama Sutra, either forgetting or ignoring that the Kama Sutra actually originated in India, not China or Japan. Fortunately, there were plenty of internet detectives who were able to call them out for being snide morons, with some of them getting sponsored by the Chinese government for helping separate the truth from fiction.
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But what most Animalians were looking forward to was the "carob" chocolate that would be getting distributed for Valentines day. Though this was a little unusual thing to look forward to, it would become clear when carob was revealed to have no theobromine in it, which regular chocolate did.
While the "Big Squeeze" on GameStop had held most of the attention on the news, carob was another that had skyrocketed simply because Animalians could eat it safely, and thereby was being bought up by the bushel by food industries. Unlike the Big Squeeze, carob was actually turning out to be a sound investment because of its relative stability in comparison to GameStop.