Lavo Standard (5) (6-29-09)

Doubtless, the slime was an imaginary creature. Like the case with this, people were sometimes creative in designing a new character for entertainment purposes. That was the species whose depictions varied. Someone must have personified real simplest creatures to look even sensational.

Meanwhile, “marimokkori” was presently on the list of most popular mascots in Japan.

Marimokkori was a man-shaped character whose green face took after a marimo, a green alga, indigenous to Hokkaido, looking similar to a slime. The comical face made its début in 2005. For this mascot, a noun “mokkori” described the swollen male genital organ indeed; he appealed the “manliness” which could be taken as sexually-harassing by women. Notwithstanding the anticipation, many Japanese led by school girls gravitated to marimokkori to have it release its animated film on DVD. The reason behind the success was likely that people took marimokkori as a piece of pop art, a product of imagination.

Meanwhile, uncertain beings like extraterrestrials accompanied probabilities in the real world, to be different from definitely imaginary characters. Even in today’s society, although there was no decisive evidence to prove the existence of space aliens, some people believed, or hoped, that there were life forms which traveled from different planets to the Earth, whose intelligence excelled humans’.

Every piece of information about space aliens, including one about spacecraft, might have been created by people, but the ambiguity all the more induced people’s concerns and interest at the same time, to occasionally make the subject exploited by authors and tabloids. Indeed, some readers liked articles of the kind. Take that perhaps most popular “gray” with its slim gray sleek naked body, relatively large head and large eyes, for instance. The existence looked real and succeeded in shaking people’s realistic thoughts.

Today, technological advancement turned the world into a composite of vivid pictures and might have made people believe as if they were becoming omniscient beings--though of course they were not--despite privacy concerns. In such a somewhat hermetic society, the sort of free-wheeling topics might have allowed vents and free imagination.

[Inhale!]

(In public places, on a tangent, installing more surveillance cameras would raise the security level against crimes like robberies and assaults. In the meantime, vigilance with even more ample data capacities and more speedy calculation of computers could lead to better disaster prevention. For example, predicting weather conditions must lead to quick counter actions. If there were such a system capable of detecting incipient signs to alert residents, the death tolls of the last tsunami waves and hurricanes in Southeast Asia would have been lowered. Or, what if space aliens looking like marimokkori manipulated nature?)

[Exhale!]

Meanwhile, it would remain to be seen what reactions the public would make, seeing that a human-designed creature actually existed in the real world.

So far Libro showed no particular specifications to humans, but a cute appearance. At present he must have been seen as a pet like a dog or cat, or an entertaining animal like a panda in a zoo.

In general, animals’ intelligence was lower than humans’, but the former could earn the affection of the latter by performing something done by them.

For example, a red panda of Chiba Zoological Park became popular in 2005 because it could stand with its hindquarters for about 30 seconds. And currently, a bear of Hiroshima City Asa Zoological Park was popular because it played with a wooden stick, twirling it around its body as deftly as a human would do.

But, Libro had done nothing for people to date.

In the Friday morning, around 15 reporters of the media companies and broadcasters were having a wait in the front yard of Suzan’s house; They, outfitted with cameras and camcorders, had interest in the slime, after she had taken a short movie of him and forwarded it with a summarized explanation to those companies. All Juno, Katz and Mathew were out, but these crews were noisy enough to fill the reticence.

While Libro was an opportune material for the writer’s status of Suzan, she believed that this strange creature would draw attention of the media and followingly the public, to conduce to spreading the disappearance of Daryl nationwide.

As the entrance door opened, Suzan came out with a portable dog case. Absence of a podium or any preparations meant that the occasion was not major nor official, though the respect to the news would be elevated soon, either positively or negatively.

Yet the size of the article was not so important for Suzan, since the chief purpose was to publicize the incident about Daryl. Off the doorway, Suzan stopped her walk before the deployment of the crews.

“Good morning. I’m so glad given this occasion. Let me make some short presentation of a strange, however lovely creature. Just please don’t fail to attach Daryl’s issue to the main article,” Suzan said and opened the dog case.

As soon as Libro jumped out of it, he got annoyed by booms and cameras held against him.

“(Please stop it! Juno, help me!)”

“Libro, come on!,” all of a sudden, Akichalo cut into the commotion, snatched Libro and ran out of the front yard through the gate.

“Are you ok? But you must find…” while Akichalo was running with Libro on his back, he flashed and began melding into Akichalo’s body in phase with his breathing. Accordingly, Akichalo’s body grew up larger and larger, and became a human.