With the first week of October, things began cooling down in many ways, mainly in ways related to fall. However, other things not related to fall were actually heating up due to one reason or another.
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In some places, October was actually "INK-tober", which was designed to encourage people to create artwork. For all of the "open" branches of WSA, especially in Lyre and Heiya Island, the art departments/classes were encouraging their students to create new art in various ways. Of course, there were clearly a few who would do artistic nudes, but these had to be arranged in advance and both the model and the artist had to sign a permission slip. Of course, there were a few dads whose terrible sense of humor would result in some epic stories and pictures.
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Speaking of new things starting up, Dario was getting some really unusual help for his paranoia. According to the wildlife services who donated her, "Arlette" was a female golden eagle who had suffered a severe injury that permanently dislocated one of her wings, rendering her unable to fly. However, later scans showed that she was suffering from moderate brain damage as well. The combination of both the crippled wing and the brain damage would lead her to an early grave, by starvation if not from wild animal attacks.
The Horizon Scientists were interested in this mainly because of the overall success of using an MRI to study the development of hermaphroditic characteristics in Bix and Inex during Pride Month. This time they wanted to learn more about Animalian brains, specifically how "feral" brains become more humanoid during the uplifting process. The fact that "Arlette" had brain damage would also be a good chance on how to see how the Animalia virus affects damaged brain tissues.
While Dario didn't understand most of these things, he did agree to spend time with "Arlette" after her uplifting. Once the two of them started "dating", it was clear that "Arlette" and her "innocence" was helping out surprisingly well with Dario's paranoia, though it was too early to find out why that was.
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Of course, the biggest focus on October for everyone was, of course, Halloween and Spookyville. As a new "addition", Joanne was having a "classier" Halloween party so Miles could interview the COOs, CEOs, etc., who were coming to Animalia. As usual, the internet weirdoes and paranoiacs were blowing things way out of proportion, saying things like "Animalia is a plot by the Illuminati", etc., etc., etc. Of course, there were plenty of people waiting to call them out, and back up their facts with documented sources, so nobody was really listening to them anymore.
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Finally, October marked the closing of summer camps in Animalia and its colonies. While some were confused as to why some of them remained open, the explanation made more sense afterward. These camps were closed to children to spend time in during the summer, but during the autumn season, they were repurposed as a place for predator Animalians to pick up tags for hunting prey "legally". As usual, the vegans made noise about this, but nobody listened to the noise anymore, especially since an increasing number of "vegans" were either ending up dead due to their poor choices or exposed eating fish. What was drawing more attention away from them were herbivore Animalians such as Hector, who was not only drawing attention due to his "harem", but also from his champion bodybuilder bod, which was drawing sponsor attention to him and other bodybuilder Animalians.