Lavo Standard (10) (8-2-09)

Meanwhile, Keyron was pursuing his dream, to entertain people and be popular as a comedian. As the summer was approaching gradually, the sun seemed to have intensified its brightness just a bit more than yesterday.

Keyron had yet styled himself with a suit. It was the first performance out of a few chances in a day. Standing before him was a lady with shoulder-length slightly wavy hair, clad in a sailor-esque white short-sleeve shirt and a navy-blue short skirt. Her faint however reassuring smile often turned him shy, yet she kept her eyes on his comedy performance. To the eye of anyone else around, only she appeared happy with Keyron. She didn’t show any signs of leaving soon.

For his life Keyron had never been recognized by a young lady up to this point, with considerable attention. And Keyron had never expected the situation since his stand-up tended to comprise contents for adult males, like politics. Even for them, his performance, whether it included any messages, was something difficult to comprehend. Yet Jade’s attitude which embodied her loyalty to Keyron served him confidence.

He, however, might have looked more like a comedian outside the stage.

“I ate something wrong, didn’t I?”

During about an hour of his performance, he felt something wrong with his stomach.

“It’s havoc!”

Leaving “Excuse me!,” Keyron rushed into a convenience store to dominate its restroom. Minutes later, when he came back with a nervous grin, Jade remained at the place. This incidental intervention let Keyron feel familiar with Jade, though she had always been with him.

“I’m really sorry. I have stomach pain and a headache. I have to go,” he made an apologetic remark.

How could stomach pain coincide with a headache? And what does “I have to go” exactly mean? thinking this way Jade was hardly suppressing laughter. So did Libro inside.

Keyron packed up his bulky vinyl bag with props as wigs and others, and began dragging his feet off the place.

“Libro, we should follow him.”

His “I have to go” might have been carrying a sense of urgency. Since getting back home hours ago, Keyron kept lying down on the futon inside the tent, except when nature called him. His face was flooded with sweat. Taking the situation seriously, Jade as a human bothered to look after him. She every so often wiped sweat from his face with a towel. Keyron just passively accepted her kindness while being puzzled as to why this young lady was devoting herself.

“Libro, I think he should take medicine. Let’s go back to the station and see their prices,” determined, Jade snatched his wallet from a pocket on his pants.

“You are such a thief,” wheezed Keyron.

“Please don’t take me wrong, Keyron. I love you. I’m just leaving to pick up some medicine and I’ll come back soon,” Jade kissed him on his cheek.

“I have to go.”

There were some over-the-counter drug stores around the Ichikawa station. Sales staff offered roughly the same prices: approximately ￥1,500 at a minimum, for a small jar of tablets against a cold. Yet Jade found the wallet had only coins worth only about ￥1,000. There was not a single banknote in the wallet of note.

“Jeez, I’ve gotta get extra somehow,” perplexed Jade.

At the place where Keyron regularly performed comedies, Jade was ready.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” the volume of her voice was large enough to halt the progress of each passer-by.

“Thank you for giving me part of your precious time! I’d like to refund it by presenting some happy comedy show!”

“The first comedy is..., ‘Hungry Keyron!’”

“It’s havoc! Do you know how many people in the world can’t have food and suffer from hunger!? It’s havoc! But you know, all of a sudden good news jumped in! There was a mid-aged guy named Keyron, who was enduring virtually homeless status, had no promised food and seemed to die down the road! Today again, he didn’t have anything to fill his stomach and serve his lovely cat! The lovely cat! In distress all he could do was just to repeat ‘It’s havoc!’ while foraging around! All at once, by a stroke of luck Keyron bumped into the ex-president of ‘a’ GM company! Keyron initiated stand-up, ah...some kind and the ex-president understood it! They hit it off with each other and became friends! Amused, the ex-president told Keyron ‘you can grow a GM crop by this seed!’ It’s havoc that ‘GM’ stood for Genetically Modified! Keyron put the seed into the ground and poured water over it! Very soon the seed sprouted up and leaves began to grow larger and larger, and finally it became a tree! The tree had a sizable piece of fruit hanging on a branch, and hungry Keyron immediately picked it off and sliced it in half with a cooking knife! He found something unusual inside the piece! What was it!? It was a Gold Medal! Wow, was that man the ex-president of a mint? To test if the gold was genuine or not, Keyron bit it! As he opened the wrapper, the content was chocolate! A piece of wonder chocolate! But Keyron, feeling grateful, shared it with his lovely cat! The lovely cat! Ah, I wish a mint could do anything for his sweet tooth! It’s havoc! A crop? It was the wrong choice of a word!”

“(Hahaha, I like this!),” Libro was laughing out loud inside Jade’s body while the audience made suppressed laughs during the performance.

Opinions began boiling out of momentary silence.

“Wow, it was actually fun. The plot was not bad (who wrote this?), and her husky, yet crystal-clear voice, both facial and physical expressions were fascinating to have livened it up,” said a man out of the audience.

“Yeah, I think her voice has something special and made the story work (who wrote this?),” piped in another.

Certainly those voices were acclaim for Jade, and she responded to them with a winning smile. And she swiftly shifted to the next story.

“The next one is... ‘The art of mustache!’”

Thanks to her past history with Keyron, Jade had memorized all the scripts and even could afford to make ad libs. Caprice of cats might have enabled her. Overall she carried out nine plots for about an hour as Keyron normally did. However, the audience must have also been enthralled by the lass’s charm and acting skills in addition to the altered plots, whose prototypes the playwright aged over 50 acted on suitably. A small box which was placed between Jade and the audience gathered notes and coins, much more than the worth Keyron did and she needed at the moment.

Retaining the sense of triumph, Jade ran to a drug store, bought a jar of tablets and went back home to attend to Keyron. As Jade opened the entrance of the tent, Keyron was fast asleep.