Earth Civ 121: The ani-verse

Earth Civ 121 was discovered almost entirely by accident when an experiment with extra-dimensional intransigence was enacted by the company Prometheus in what was then Millennium City circa 1993. This experiment opened gateways across the multiverse although most of them opened only onto dead worlds, small asteroids, or most often dead and lifeless moons and planets. But Civ 121 was not only promising, it was astonishing.

At first the physicists of Prometheus were confused and thought they had a targeting malfunction, for they were looking at what was undoubtedly Union Square in New York City. But the equations were checked and rechecked and the scientists finally did agree that what they were seeing was Union Square. Only upon much closer examination did they become aware of the differences of the Union Square they were seeing, which caused great fuss and excitement around the world as the discovery was shared between all members of the scientific community.

The differences were all in the citizenry. The citizens of this other Union Square was that those citizens, all of them, were anthropomorphic animals. Prometheus had found the Ani-verse.

## Characteristics

To all intents and purposes, the Paradigm City of the Ani-verse is identical to the Paradigm City of the Ani-verse. Paradigmians live, work, play, suffer, joy, and love in a city that any human would recognize if that human had been born and raised in Paradigm. Only just that for some reason or other, the human species not only ever rose to prominence but there is concrete evidence and proof that human beings never rose at all. Instead, animals took their proper places along the food chain, growing in height and intelligence as millions of years passed until they arrived at their Paradigm City of today.

As one stands on a street corner and takes a look about those changes become readily apparent. Here the owner of a Muslim grocery store, a silver-back gorilla, sweeps the sidewalk clean. A taxi cab sputters and cranks past, driven by a bored looking stork as the passenger in the rear, a suit-wearing and Xanax-popping Appaloosa looks with horror at his watch and realizes he's going to be late for his meeting. A trio of bulldogs in hard-hats sit on a construction girder thirty-five feet whistling in canine desire as a very attractive white rabbit doe jogs past under them. Perhaps most astonishing of all is just there at the city skyline, where a well-muscled house-cat wearing yellow spandex with red boots, gloves, and a cape ''flies'' past on patrol for crimes to prevent.

## Relations with Earth-One

Extremely poor. The scientists that initiated contact with their scientific counterparts in Paradigm City of the Ani-Verse and the ambassadors from Earth-One governments that followed found it exceedingly difficult to take the animals and society seriously at all. As a result the humans slung around a great deal of arrogance and haughty mannerisms that quickly soured the natives to the very concept of human beings. When it was learned by the anthropomorphic that on Earth-One anthropomorphic animals were treated mostly as pets and slave labor the damage was irreversible. The anthropomorphic government of Paradigm City expelled humans with a dire warning never to return and broke the connections between the two universes. Whether or not this rift can ever be mended remains to be seen.

## Trivia

The anthropomorphic terrorist group identifying itself as the Animal Liberation Punishing Human Arrogance (ALPHA) was founded and is controlled by anthropomorphic animals originally from the Ani-Verse.