While Miles was a little upset that he didn't win in the Year of the Rabbit competition, Honorable Mention was nothing to be disappointed about. In fact, it enabled him to draw some more attention to his interview of the new boys who were now part of Miss Juliet's school. While there were indeed one bull and one horse, the other boys had actually chosen other species for their conversion, helping the reputation of the school as a whole. Eloise's performance, which had actually gotten her third place overall, was helping the French Colony (name still up for debate) grow.
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The Shikamatsu family had also won a free trip to Heiya Island as part of the prizes they won. But Heiya Island was a little more crowded than usual, due to the trend of overweight people arriving for conversion. What made the trip a little more tolerable was various people reacting in hilarious ways to the fact that Mister and Miss Year of the Zodiac were father and daughter.
Yumigami, who had overseen the Lunar New Year celebrations, was also helping out with overseeing the overweight people while Ami and Tsukuyomi looked over the new island that was planned to be the next Asian Animalian Colony. She'd help confirm that, while those who had verifiable cases of obesity were both men and women, only two or three of the women had deliberately overfed themselves.
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Another new thing actually came from Ursula's mansion, where the bimbos who wanted to be Dinotopians were staying. Ursula's initial report helped debunk the claim that they were just lazy people who wanted to use their beauty/looks to coast easily through life, but actually victims of their circumstances, one of which was "Texan Conservativism". While they hadn't officially undergone conversion, because not all of them had decided what they were going to be quite yet, a preorder had been put in for triceratops, diplodocus, stegosaurus, and parasaurolophus conversions.
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Finally, there was news from California, where a lot of buildings that had been "diagnosed" with asbestos had been torn down to make room for Animalian-sized buildings before a bomb cyclone, and subsequent atmospheric currents, dumped massive amounts of rain on California. While this had caused a few people serious enough harm to come to Lyre/Animalia to seek conversion, whether from natural disasters or not, it did have a comforting side effect of building up snowpack and filling up reservoirs. Also, this had done relatively little damage to the worksites since the buildings had already been torn down to the foundations, but there were some kids who wanted to swim in the resulting "swimming pools", but they were quite young and shouldn't be blamed for being stupid.