With Summer reaching its peak, so to speak, the temperature was steadily rising. Of course, there were those who were quick to blame climate change/global warming for the rising temperatures, there were other, more metaphorical reasons for the rising temperatures.
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What was clearly the hottest night, metaphorically speaking, was the Opening night at Club Claw at the Mesozoic Enclave, and not just for the female Dinotopians. In fact, there had been a good percentage of male Dinotopians, many of them having converted as part of Pride Month. While the night was considered a smashing success, it also seemed to show that women could just be as "lusty" as men, and sometimes even more so.
As part of Pride Month, which was in its last week, there were also Dinotopian herms at Club Claw, which often ended up causing some hilarious scenes.
"Damn, girl, your feathers are looking really cute." said one guy as he recorded his visit for his Instagram and came across a Velociraptor herm sitting at a table. "What's your name?"
"My name was Felix, but..." shi said, but the guy interrupted.
"Oh, * bleep *!" he said as he realized his error and began laughing it of in 'instant regret', "Ha ha ha! Oh, man! I'm killing myself! I can't!"
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The second hottest event was the first IAC Human vs. Animalian Comparison, even though it was swimming. Not only was there an official swimming competition between Animalians, but there were also Olympic athletes for comparison. While almost all the Olympic Athletes had lost out to the Amateur Animalian Athletes, there were a few times where it was really close.
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Another 'hot' competition was the IAC Bodybuilding Competition. Despite hir size/build, Nio was being labeled as the "underdog", or in this case "under-panther", of the competition. With the preliminaries over, Nio clearly had suffered some confidence loss in hir abilities, though this was generally understood as a lack of experience. Fortunately, shi was receiving a lot of encouragement on hir section of the website, mostly from family and friends, but there were a few that shi didn't know or recognize, but any encouragement was better than no encouragement at all.
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One really unexpected thing actually happened to "Sergei", who was moving into the BARA House. When he arrived, there was apparently a welcoming party for the ROSE House members. During the party, nobody seemed to care that he was already past his 50s, if the compliments on his physique (and the occasional friendly chest rub) were anything to go by. He even got to take part in a coed game of beer pong with the ROSE house members (BARA on one side, ROSE on the other). However, what was really unexpected wasn't the supposed combination of "college fraternity life" (minus the hazing) with apartment complex life; it was the fact that everyone there were already treating him as an equal.
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Another thing that was "heating up" was the War Against Sauron in When Worlds Collide.... When Sauron's initial attempt to invade Japan was foiled by Kazegami and Nuregami (a reference to the destruction of the Mongol fleet by a hurricane, and the original inspiration for the term kamikaze), he responded with an even more audacious action: his Uruks had begun building a causeway from southern China to southern Japan.
They had done so by moving quickly and quietly from Northern Vietnam to a small Chinese port city, close to southern Japan, and quickly overwhelmed it. From there, the Machine tribe of Uruks (this was accompanied by the Machine tribe trailer from the game Middle-Earth: Shadow of War) had begun building a massive causeway/mole, which they were using to bring their siege machines right to Japan.
China immediately responded by sending their army to recapture the port city but were immediately held at a stalemate. This came to be known as one of the first great battles of the War against Sauron: The Battle of the Landbridge.