Chapter 148: Book 3 Chapter 5: Butterflies in the Sky

“Glad to see that everything’s in order, Excy.”

Harley watched Lee carefully as Noel Burrows spoke, but she didn’t even twitch. She just continued sipping at her tea, raising and lowering her cup with the same clockwork motions as always.

Lee’s father had dropped by for what he had horrifyingly promised would be the first of many visits. Now that Lee was in her last year at the Einstein-Odinson College, his overbearing urge to exploit her had redoubled. He had just finished inspecting her dorm room, even though it was the exact same room he’d forced her to live in for the past three years. Harley and Vell had tagged along to ease Lee’s emotional burdens, but they could only do so much.

“Now, do you remember everything you need to get done this year?”

“First priority, negotiate with Vell Harlan for a Roentgen research contract,” Lee said.

“Again flattered, but no thank you,” Vell said. He might’ve considered taking a job with Roentgen, provided he was allowed to work with Lee, but the more time he spent with Noel Burrows, the less and less he could tolerate the idea. Noel wanted the rune on his back, and Vell didn’t trust him to use the power of Quenay responsibly. Vell barely trusted him to use a pen responsibly.

“Secondly, build a functioning oceanic ley harvester,” Lee said. Noel casually glossed past Vell’s polite refusal, and over the fact people had been trying to build an oceanic ley harvester for decades and never succeeded—technically. Siphoning mana from the oceans was easy, doing it without also siphoning mana from the living microorganisms inside the ocean was the hard part. Noel Burrows was no stranger to siphoning mana from living things, as Joan’s family could very angrily attest, but doing so with ocean life would cause a catastrophic chain reaction eventually leading into a mass extinction event that would fully sterilize the planet. Even Noel wasn’t stupid enough to do that. Barely.

“And thirdly, find a well connected husband,” Lee said. It was a testament to her herculean self-control that she maintained perfect poise while saying that. Not only was Lee entirely uninterested in marrying for the sake of her father’s company, she was entirely uninterested in men as a gender.

“Got the old Burrows memory, I see,” Noel said. “Like a steel trap.”

Noel Burrows had repeated the three points exactly four minutes ago. Harley hadn’t forgotten them yet, and she was actively trying to.

“Now, time for me to leave, I have to go make some recruitment calls with the other seniors,” Noel said. “Get cracking, XL-X8! Only a year to go!”

Noel turned on his heel and left without so much as a wave goodbye. Lee held her teacup in her hands for a minute after he had left, and then hurled it into the nearest wall as hard as she could. Vell fetched a broom and dust pan to sweep up the vaporized teacup while Lee grabbed a pillow and screamed into it.

“I will never understand how you can keep a straight face around that dude,” Harley said.

“A lifetime of practice,” Lee said. “And a goal to look forward to.”

One day Lee would inherit her father’s company, and all the years of bullshit would finally pay off as she burned it to the ground. The dream of that day helped keep her sane while she pretended to tolerate her father’s narcissistic stupidity.

“Still. His insistence that I get married off is becoming more and more grating.”

“Oh yeah. Just spitballing something here, what if you pretended to marry Vell? It’d get him off both your backs, for sure, and keeps Vell on hand to keep you sane.”

“No offense to you, Vell dear, but I’d rather not.”

“None taken. I’m not, uh, violently opposed to the idea, so if it’s get married or get you disowned...maybe,” Vell said. “But I’d also like to have a dating life.”

“Not even in an emergency,” Lee said. “Again, nothing to do with Vell, but with marriage then comes the pressure to produce an ‘heir’. Ugh.”

Lee shuddered at the very thought of it.

“If I have to sit through a conversation about sex with my father I’ll rip my own ears off. And possibly beat him to death with them afterwards.”

“Lee. Impulse control.”

“Right. I’ll stop at ripping my own ears off.”

“Better.”

As part of preparing for her inevitable departure from the college, Lee was trying to get a little better at controlling some of her violent fantasies about her parents. Soon she would be in less like-minded company, and openly fantasizing about committing patricide would get her much more than some worried looks from friends.

“At any rate, I should have no need of pointless distractions for my father,” Lee said. “I’ll produce something of substance for him.”

“I’m not signing any contracts either,” Vell said.

“Not that one!”

“Oh, the ley harvester then? You think you can pull that off?”

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“I have a good concept for it already,” Lee said. “It might take some doing, but I’ll have a good start this year.”

“Well you just say the word if you need a hand, boss,” Harley said, and Vell echoed the sentiment.

“Thank you both. As ever. I’ll try not to let it take up too much time,” Lee said. “We do have quite a bit of work to do in other areas.”

“Don’t remind me,” Vell mumbled.

“Speaking of, is Quenay hanging out over your shoulder right now?”

“Nope,” Vell said. Even though others could not see or hear the conversations Quenay had with him, Vell tried to make his friends aware when the mysterious Goddess of Life was hanging around. He’d been a little worried that her stealthy appearances would make him sound insane, but Lee and Harley had never doubted him for a second.

“Are you comfortable with her following you around like that?”

“She has been surprisingly chill about it so far,” Vell said. Even amusing, at times. “And I’m kind of hoping if she hangs around enough, I’ll learn something about this game of hers.”

“You think the meaning of life is hiding in a knock knock joke she likes?”

“Can’t hurt,” Vell said. “Best way to learn about the meaning of life is to live it, I guess.”

That, and Vell had absolutely no better plans. Traditional scientific methods weren’t much good when scouting Gods and other unseen forces. Sitting back and hoping Quenay’s strange appearances gave him another clue seemed like the best option.

“That reminds me,” Vell said. “She’s already given one thing away.”

“Right. Butterfly Guy.”

Harley glanced out the window at two hourglass-shaped purple butterflies resting on the windowsill. One of the butterflies had been shadowing Vell for years, though up until his first year of classes he’d never regarded them as anything but ordinary butterflies. That assumption, like most assumptions in Vell’s life, had proven to be wildly inaccurate. Not only was the butterfly a portentious omen of historical significance, it was also locked in time, perfectly identical and unchanging no matter where or when it appeared—or how many of it appeared at once. There had been three of the butterflies earlier, and more and more seemed to be showing up every day.

“Anything new on that front?”

“Well, no,” Vell said. They’d done some cursory research on ‘Butterfly Guy’ and found nothing but a few very enthusiastic lepidopterists. Vell had gotten some very lovely photos of Blue Morpho’s out of that search, but not much else. “I just wanted to bring it up again. See if you guys had anything.”

“I got nothing,” Harley admitted.

“Nor I.”

“Alrighty then, as usual we’re working with nothing,” Vell said.

“We’ve done more with less,” Harley said.

“Less than nothing?”

“You know what I mean,” she snapped. “Let’s do some fucking science about it!”

“I’m on board,” Lee said. “We’ll entrust the Quenay dilemma to you, Vell, while we work on the issue of the butterflies together.”

“Okay, sounds like a plan,” Vell said. Last year he had learned the hard way he was too passive in his personal journey, and aimed to correct that. “What do we do first?”

“I just had an idea, actually,” Harley said. “What if we just tried to catch one?”

“Catch one?”

“Yeah. Like in a net. They’re butterflies, you can catch them in a net.”

All three looked at the butterflies resting on the windowsill, and then at each other, then back at the butterflies.

“The entomology department might have some nets we can borrow,” Lee said. “I’ll talk to Dr. Boniventure.”

----------------------------------------

“Having fun?”

Luke had been walking across the campus with his boyfriend when Lee had come sprinting around the corner, net in hand, and almost immediately tripped over her own feet. A purple butterfly fluttered away while Lee picked herself up out of the dirt.

“Not entirely, dear,” she admitted. “This is in the interests of science.”

Vell was next to come sprinting around the corner, followed shortly thereafter by Harley, both hot on the heels of another butterfly.

“Certainly looks scientific,” Luke said.

Heedless of his casual criticism, Vell and Harley sprinted on.

“Stop running so fast, you’re scaring it!”

“Dr. Bon wants these nets back, and I don’t want to have to borrow them again,” Vell said. He took a swing at the floating butterfly and missed. “I can’t handle more ‘browsing the net’ jokes!”

Vell had a low tolerance for bad jokes, and Dr. Boniventure’s were among the worst. He took another swing at the fleeing butterfly and only narrowly missed it.

“Almost got it,” Vell said. “Almost got it!”

Summoning his last reserves of stamina, Vell made a mad dash towards the butterfly and swung his net down hard. The net swung down over the butterfly and then hit the ground with a muted thump far too anticlimactic for the circumstances. Vell held the net in place and beamed in triumph.

“Got it!”

“Good going, bud!”

Vell shot a quick thumbs up back at Harley and then kept his eyes on the butterfly net.

“Uh. Now what?”

“Now we put in a jar, or something,” Harley said. “Maybe we should’ve thought of step two first.”

“I wasn’t even sure we’d get this far, frankly,” Vell said.

“Are you saying this was a bad idea?”

“No, obviously, I just, uh…”

While Vell struggled to explain himself. Luke took a quick look at the butterfly net. The thin structure of the netting had almost entirely collapsed in on itself—and the structure of the net’s handle was also starting to bend inward slightly.

“Uh, Vell,” Luke said. The net warped even more as Luke spoke. “Maybe take a step back.”

“Why, what’s up with the-”

Vell turned around and looked back at the net just in time to watch it explode., then implode, then explode again. For a moment, there was nothing but a small black orb, then the orb turned itself inside out and became a hole in reality, through which Vell caught the faintest glimpse of three shining blue lights. The image lasted only a moment before the orb collapsed in on itself again, and vanished entirely. Where there had once been a net, and a butterfly, there was now just a patch of brown dirt and a handle with nothing attached to it.

“Vell. Why did your butterfly net make a localized wormhole?”

“Is that what that was?”

Luke nodded. As the gang’s resident physicist, he knew a wormhole when he saw one. Even when he saw one that had apparently been created by a butterfly.

“Uh...I think our Butterfly Guy doesn’t like having his pets captured.”

“Butterfly Guy?”

“Long story, we’ll get you up to speed later if you want,” Lee said. “Luke, if we could recreate that wormhole phenomenon, could we hypothetically travel through it, to whatever’s on the other side?”

“At that size, for that long?” Luke said. “Not a chance in hell. We could maybe send some kind of signal probe, though, and then track that, find out where exactly the other end is.”

“Hah! Science,” Harley said. “Can we get started right away?”

“Well, we need to wait a little while,” Vell said.

“Why?”

Vell produced the stumpy handle of his former net.

“If we’re going to be destroying these things with wormholes, we’re buying our own nets,” Vell said. “These are school property.”

The march of science waited for no man, but it did wait for ethically acquired butterfly nets.