Lavo Standard (9) (7-27-09)

Suzan identified her willpower as her leading strength, while its lining was her stubbornness. With this ability, she had built her status quo. She, having studied hard, graduated from one of the most competitive universities and began working in a major publisher. She gave birth three times.

Juno took after some of Suzan’s personality traits.

It was not the first argument between Suzan and Juno, and again Juno had temper tantrums and taciturnity. In the unsettling situation, Suzan only wished that Juno would even thank her leniency that allowed some days with Libro, though she had yet acknowledged how persistent Juno would be after making a decision. To meet this sort of wish might have been too early for a fourth grader.

Meanwhile, Mathew, an employee at a major pharmaceutical company, was reserved and reticent, with his low-pitch voice. His characteristics became more evident when contrasted to Suzan’s proactive attitude and high-pitch voice.

He first met Suzan at a match-making occasion when he was already in the company. And they began hitting it off to develop a relationship into marriage.

At younger ages, Suzan was more temperamental, even sometimes troublesome, though. She got upset at Mathew more often, but he could search for and analyze what wrought the problem, and solve it. Mathew was the one Suzan could pour her heart to. To find Daryl, Mathew agreed with Suzan’s idea to tap into the media.

Katz seemed to have inherited both Suzan’s high leadership and Mathew’s therapeutic nature.

As Mathew did to Suzan, Katz played the role of a mediator whenever Juno had a problem with her family. Last evening, he thankfully knocked on the door of her room. He said through the door that Suzan hadn’t intended to do anything wrong. And led by him, Suzan, Mathew, Lois and Mel attempted to calm her down. Many times in the past, Katz had helped Suzan reconcile with Juno, although her sadness seemed entrenched this time.

Even though Suzan in part regretted her own action, expectations were high after the TV news spread. It must have just been too early for helpful information to come: She checked whether there were responses on her blog last night and earlier this morning, but none of them would lead to Daryl. Instead, there were irksome messages forwarded last night: Besides opinions and questions about Libro, she received some indirect quibbles from the mothers of Juno’s classmates. Those mothers were concerned about potential health hazards to their children, after Juno took Libro to the classroom. Suzan was sorry for Perry, guessing that they must have pelted complaints at him too.

Whatever the situation was, Juno went to the school in the morning, Saturday. Although Mathew was on holiday, he attended her and Katz.

After doing the dishes after breakfast, Suzan was allowed a break in the living room. As soon as she rested herself on the floor, fatigue was soporific and let her consciousness fall.

At dusk, Suzan was standing in the middle of a shopping street, on which the hubbub and footsteps of pedestrians traveled back and forth. In contrast to these noises, they, both men and women, looked as apathetic as humanoids while hastily and uniformly walking down the street in either direction, passing by Suzan. Her eye-level was distinctively lower than theirs because she was a cat somehow. She met the gaze of another cat sitting over there amongst pedestrians.

“Daryl!”

Suzan intuited that the cat was Daryl and made a step toward him, but he turned around and began running away.

“Daryl, please wait!”

Suzan’s pursuit started.

Leaving the shopping street, the view turned into an expansion of a residential area filled with detached houses, each of which was surrounded by stone-made fences. Most of those houses had two stories.

Daryl jumped on the top of a fence, and resumed scurrying. And Suzan followed suit.

Both Daryl and Suzan were scurrying on the fences. After him she went straight, turned right at the corner, went straight, turned left at the corner, jumped off the fence onto the street, crossed the street, jumped on the fence, began scurrying straight...

Furthermost in the residential area, prior to Suzan Daryl hit an infinite grass field and stopped his feet for a second. Far ahead of him she identified a tall tower standing on a horizontal line. The tower appeared to be a blank in the orange light from the sun.

Daryl conducted a jump off the fence and began scurrying toward the tower.

“Daryl!”

Daryl would not turn around even though his mother was chasing him.

Suzan was having a dream. When she came around, she was lying on the tatami floor. Her head was resting on her arms that were functioning as a pillow. A blanket on her body was the kindness of someone. The lights and the television were off and no person was around. “How long did I sleep?,” she sighed in the quiet, dim living room. The clock indicated that it was past eleven and urged her to get lunch.

“You woke up,” Mathew was wearing an apron.

“Don’t worry about lunch, I’m doing it with a deal of Mel’s help. You should have a break when possible.”

Feeling relieved, Suzan turned on the TV with a remote control. On the screen, the scene was of a school classroom with Perry; in another scene Juno and her classmates were interviewed by a reporter. To make the issue more serious than Suzan had anticipated, Perry who responsibly let Libro in was investigated by the reporter and insisting that Libro was by no means a swine flu virus and harmful. Seeing how Perry was annoyed, Suzan took herself to task for her conduct.

According to the following report, a separate red slime was found in Saitama prefecture. Yet to cross Libro’s personality, the red variety was aggressive and offensive: It snarled with fangs and jumped at a local resident. It was shot to death by a hunter, to only expose its blood which was colored as deep as red wine.