While the summer solstice is considered the longest day of the year, it's actually not the hottest day of the year. For some people, July is the hottest month, while others say that August is the hottest month. But for Animalia and its colonies, June, July, and August were the hottest months, and it wasn't just temperature-wise, especially as June transitioned into July.
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Ms. Qing was supposed to be meeting the first new students to her etiquette school. To be honest, she was more than a little nervous since she was told that these double-dosed ladies were the infamous "Chinese Aunties", who's rude, entitled behavior made the news sometimes. Sighing, she opened the door to the room where the "aunties" had gotten their conversions. What she found was surprising, but not entirely unexpected.
Inside was a group of 20-something, muscular, female Animalians posing and preening (including some light lesbianism between all of them) in the full-length mirror like peafowl (peacocks are the males, peahens are the females), though not one of them were peafowl. There was a horse, a green tree viper, a panda, a fox, and a rabbit, all of them annoyingly stereotypic. Sighing with resignation, Miss Qing accepted that she might have to use hard knocks to drive some common sense into them (probably even quite literally, with a stiff oaken rod).
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The other thing that was heating up was the IAC Competitions, not just on Ao Guang Island. The Quasi-Raccoon Cuties did special coverage of the Phoenix Queen's Palace on the new island in the south, known as the Island Nest of the Zhuque (or Zhūquè dǎo cháo in traditional Chinese). While the palace in and of itself wasn't finished (partly due to avoiding what has been termed online as "Chinese tofu-dreg construction"), that was also due to the fact that the Island featured an active volcano. While this did mean that there were the dangers of lava flows causing damage, it was also an opportunity to make a geothermal-powered colony similar to Lyre, though that might be more than a little overly ambitious due to China's current financial issues.