[ WP ] Tell me the middle of a sci-fi epic . No beginning or introduction to the setting or characters , nor any context to what 's going on , and no resolution of any kind .

It was one of those three octopus rooms. You get three octopi up in the bar and you figure you have the whole thing figured out. Drinks coming from 24 arms and everyone gets served on time. But that's never the case, these octopuses possess a rare sense of absolutely no habit for being out of water. The drinks come out like mixed bags of chemicals and you get a room full of patrons puking all over themselves to get to the bathroom. I've seen it so many times before. And, as the octopus is native to Earth, these folks should have seen it too. 
 
 I'm no stranger to Tripoli, been here numerous times, they say it was once a desert, and I believe it: the places is deserted of any common sense whatsoever. For instance, you hail a cab and ask for a trip to Seattle, they'll typically take off and drop you in Vegas and charge you the thirty minutes it would take to get to Washington territory. 
 
 Not that anyone would want to go there. Now there's a desert. The Americas. People travel there for history, but I do n't see none. Just another desert full of Starbucks artifacts. If I walk into another home with a shrine to McDonalds or Starbucks I'm just giving up on religion forever. 
 
 Sentient octopuses... damn, this was a fine planet once before they started mucking around with things. You see, you get an engagement with an alien culture and your own culture just goes to shit. People forget who they are. Happens all the time. Why, you can look into pre-ancient cultures like those first in the Americas and see the same thing. Take to drinking and gambling and putting brains in fishes or mollusks or whatever. Then you get your animals wanting equal rights and pretty soon the family dog is fucking your wife and taking your job. 
 
 But they call me a conservative and I'm stuck in my ways. And I probably am. But when you wake up at four in the morning and the neighbors are taking you by the boots because your 108 years old and under legal mandate to be composted, you get a shaky feeling about the culture. Had to move. Had to get out of Britain. Ended up in Tripoli. Hunting bears. 
 
 Whatever they did with the bear it took and the fucking things are the most dangerous animal in the entire galaxy. I've seen a few scary monsters out in the beyond, but the intelligent bear takes the cake. Once they let that animal loose they did more in ten years than humanity has in a century. Now you got your bear territories and your non-bear territories and most sources say that Earth will just be one bear planet by the end of 3045. Hell, I do n't know. But my job is to take care of the problem on the human territory end. Trouble is, the fuckers burrow deep into the Earth and at 108 you get a shitty feeling about jumping down caves in search of modern day monsters. 
 
 Anyway, let me buy you a drink while you're listening. I tend to continue long into the night and you being a bear deserve an explanation.
