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Pet Name: Leoflare and Jisonshin
Owner: hoshi_princess
Breed: Lupe

Leoflare and Jisonshin contrast greatly, like dark and light, fire and water, earth and sky, snarls and smiles. And yet these two hold so special a place in my heart that to speak of one and not of the other would be unthinkable…

Leoflare was my first Lupe, as far back as I can remember. No one would believe he was the tiny puppy I found wandering the crowded streets downtown, his ebony fur torn and tattered, brown eyes clouded…almost a skeleton, aimlessly walking about with no point in life.

“How’re you, puppy?” I had held my hand out to him and waited for a reply, but got none as the black and orange creature stumbled past me and fell, meters away, shivering from cold. I had taken him and wrapped him in my coat, brought him home, and there waited for weeks before he found his voice and state of mind and looked at me and asked.

“Where am I?”

I had told him where he was, and how I had found him on the brink of death. Then I had asked him where his family was, what he was doing out here at his young age, and he had not replied, merely looked out of the open window with faraway eyes. For a while there was silence. Then he said, “I don’t…remember.”

He never remembered. He stayed with me. There never was a more silent Lupe than Leoflare, as I had called him, for he had the ferocity of a lion and his temper had a fire’s flare. His was the wisdom that came through indomitable thinking in isolation. “I don’t need to remember my past,” he once told me gruffly. “I have enough to worry about the future already.”

Then came Shin. I found him through a friend, whose Lupe family had a litter of four, and Shin was one of them. The puppy had sharpened little white teeth and the chewing instincts of a rodent. Combined together came torn bed sheets, three new couches, and Leoflare locking himself up in his room to avoid him. And he had the hyper-ness of one who eats sweets and coffee for breakfast, dinner, and lunch…and I don’t even allow him to touch sugar!

Leoflare’s patience exceeds it limits every time he is with Shin, but it was through him the black and white pup grew into the Lupe he is now (though he is still puppyish, just ask anyone who knows him). With a flaring temper and twisted snout he had more than once called, “NO! Adding five and zero does not make fifty! You are a Lupe with the brain of a nut, Jisonshin!”

Life is grey without Shin. His smiles never seem to leave him. “If there are stars in the night sky there will always be hope.” Leoflare had once remarked, to me when he was in one of his better moods, that Shin had light-headed wisdom. “If you don’t stop sulking I’m gonna bite y’er tail and that’s gonna hurt!”

That was long, but these two Lupes deserved it. In fact, I have better go and stop right now, since Shin is begging for his lunch and Leoflare is begging him to stop shrieking, ‘fore they go out for their hike in the woods. Two Lupes whose spirits are as great as their hearts…

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