>>79057
What I'm trying to imply is that it's an awkward conversation between a human guy who was visiting an anthro-populated world to do technical work. He sneaked away from the barracks set up at the project site, attempting not altogether successfully to disguise himself as one of the locals, got a motel room in town, and looked through the local version of a dead-tree "Yellow Pages" phone book fur "adult entertainers." He has done this several times, always with the same fox woman, with whom he is becoming infatuated. The local equivalent of the FBI decided to kick down the door to have an earnest and furthright conversation with one of the crazy aliens who showed up last year.
Other things: the world in which it's set is a sort of cultural echo of the mid 20th Century. They're speaking English, despite being mostly anthro versions of various mammal species, with just a handful of birbs and reptiles. If you got into a time machine and went to 1953, and not exactly 1953 but it's close enough that it'd look and feel right, at least if your exposure to that time and place was old TV shows and movies, except fur the locals not being human. There's even a President Eisenhower and a Vice President Nixon, though there are lots of little differences. There was a Second World War, and Japan there is occupied by US furces, but the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers supervising the occupation there is a Marine general named Geiger. If you ask about Douglas MacArthur you get blank looks, because in this timeline he was killed by a German artillery shell in September of 1918 and never became the celebrity he was in ourtimeline. Humans from an early 20th Century Earth showed up about two years ago. They were Americans and they showed up in North America, and within a week there were meetings between representatives of the human US State Department and an astounded President Eisenhower, who is, in this world, an anthro horse.
There is a lot of other stuff upon which this excerpt does not touch, like:
Human representatives give, among other things, printouts of the Wikipedia article about Kim Philby and the Cambridge Five to the President and the Joint Chiefs. They pass on infurmation to the British embassy, describing it as "from a trustworthy source," and from there it makes its way to the British government. But in this timeline, Kim Philby was never born, and MI5 and MI6 are very confused. MI5 and MI6 are still riddled from top to bottom with Soviet agents in this era, but they aren't the same ones in our historical record.
There are little anomalies here and there, like armored warfare having been invented during the Civil War, and both sides using steam-powered tanks at the Battle of Shiloh. Automobiles manufactured in the US got tailfins about five years early, but most of them are still painted in black lacquer like the Model T Furd.
The existence of humans is publicly known in the anthro world, and the human character who has one half of the lines in that conversation is an engineer working on a nuclear power plant in a town just outside of Chicago. No one knows what the hell to think of humans. The human character just really likes fox women, but a few minutes into the conversation they're going to bring in a chubby middle-aged anthro bear and introduce him as Director Hoover. Director Hoover has been kept out of the loop. Eisenhower doesn't trust him. After some equivocation, and repeatedly asking him whether he really wants to know, the human drops some things on the Director that have not been revealed to the public, which he would probably have been better off not knowing. Like, how the portals were created, and where humans from a world that is basically ours in Current Year learned about parallel timelines and how to create portals to them.