With most, if not all school finals finished, almost everyone was getting ready for Animalia's biggest event, the 2021 International Animalia Convention. This year would be even bigger than usual, mainly because of the 2020 Olympics being delayed due to the pandemic, but this was considered, in hindsight, a good thing because it would be a chance to compare amateur Animalian Athletes with fully trained Olympic Athletes, but it was decided that they should only do the comparison after the event in the Olympics. But since the Olympics weren't really starting until late July, so there was plenty of time to sign up and begin practicing, as well as get some more organization done.
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Polly was called to the main office on her last week, but she wasn't in trouble or anything like that.
"So I hear you're planning on visiting Jeremy down in Dino City this summer?" asked the vice-principal of WSA Elementary.
"Yes." answered Polly.
"You'll be surprised to learn that Jeremy has been taken up by Dino City's new rock band, the Punk-A-Sauruses." said the vice-principal.
"What? Why?" asked Polly, surprised.
"It's apparently part of his 'less work more play' therapy," answered the vice-principal, "also, he's apparently really good at being the new keyboard player."
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Meanwhile, over at Heiya Island, they were working on both the planned "samurai prep school" for the girls and guys that had been rescued from human trafficking rings as well as their own events for the 2021 IAC. While the plan to do a stopover on Heiya Island hadn't been abandoned, the delay had caused some to reconsider the finer details of the "lighting ceremony".
The overall idea of a "samurai prep school" was generating a lot of comments on the website, mainly about what such a school would entail. While there were some that had some genuine ideas, others were more focused on things found in prep schools from tv, movies, and/or graphic novels. Fortunately one clever comment made any further comments more humorous and less snide:
Mr._Men_Man: I think being in such a school would do you good. At the very least it would get your head out of that gutter you seem to be perpetually stuck in.
While another comment from Tsukuyomi severely burned (metaphorically speaking) someone who had some prejudice against prep schools.
Witty_One_Liner: We don't need another fancy prep school where they teach chess, debate, and fencing.
Lunar_Wolf: Don't worry, we won't have any of that. It'll be more like Shogi, Sadane, and Kendo.
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In Lyre/Animalia, there were some who were focusing more on their training for the games, while still focusing on their projects. Miss Fabina, for example, had gotten in contact with the APD to keep an eye on Tani, Date, and Naya while she was working on cleaning the rust off her tennis skills.
Juliet, however, was working at balancing planning the colony on her land, since the other members of the European Union had caught wind of it and wanted a piece of the action (so to speak), and doing some skyping with the "breaking bed kingpin", as he was known on the internet, that was now part of Mercy's "Criminal Trash Recycling" Program. After federal agents had done some background checking, it turned out that the only reason why he had turned to drug trafficking was because of the accumulating medical bills that were resulting of his weight/obesity problems. After an initial meeting, which was expectedly rocky, it was discovered that he was indeed "kind and smart", "educated and an educator", but she had to wait until his conversion into a fellow "silver fox" since it was being delayed a little bit until after he had reached that point in the program.