Chương 129: Book 2 Chapter 37: Butterfly Connect

"I've scanned pretty much every bit of Mesopotamian artwork I can find, but there's no indication of Quenay," Adele signed. She didn't have the scientific acumen of some of Vell's friends, but she was still doing her part to pursue the mystery goddess.

"I even tried color restoration and analysis to look for any mismatched eyes in old sculptures and frescoes. No dice."

"Well, thank you for trying, darling," Lee said, before giving Adele a quick kiss on the cheek.

"All efforts are appreciated."

"Ruling stuff out is just as important to science as getting things right," Vell said.

"We'll get there." Having brought in a handful of the most brilliant minds known to science to study Quenay, the gang had managed to pool their resources and discover absolutely fuck-all. Everywhere they looked they found dead-ends, pointless rumors, and false leads. Cane had gone in pursuit of secret deities a bit more aggressively, and had only three close calls with joining cults to show for it.

"Maybe not this year, but eventually," Lee said. Time was winding down in the school year, and finals prep was starting to eat up spare time they might have used for experimentation. Any loose ends to be tied up would have to be done swiftly and dramatically, and Lee kind of hoped that wouldn't happen. After last year's kidnapping incident, she was hoping for a drama-free final day of school. Hoping, but not expecting, of course.

Adele began to pack up her research, and tucked all her gathered notes back into her bag. Vell did the same, figuring he'd leave and let Lee and Adele have a romantic chat while they still had time. In spite of his polite attempt to excuse himself, Adele ended up snatching Vell by the wrist and holding him in place.

"Don't move."

"Butterfly again?"

"Yep." Once again, an enigmatic purple butterfly had alighted on a bush near Vell. Adele had been the first one to make Vell aware there might be something out of the ordinary about the butterfly, and still insisted it might be very important. Lee had poked at the butterfly situation and figured that it (probably) wasn't connected to Quenay, since her trademark was mismatched colors, and the butterfly's wings were both the same color.

After that, she'd mostly lost interest in studying the mysterious butterfly, in favor of focusing on larger problems. Adele hadn't given up on the lead, though. She withdrew a complicated, almost camera-like mechanism, and aimed it at the butterfly. After pressing a few buttons, the device made seven clicking noises, flashed once, and then beeped loudly. The final beep scared off the butterfly and set it fluttering into the breeze.

"Got to the beep that time," Vell said. Adele had used the device several times before, but the butterfly usually got scared off much earlier.

"That mean whatever you're doing worked?"

"It's always worked," Adele signed.

"It just worked better this time. It's a multi-spectrum scanner. Like a camera that captures things other than light. Radiation, mana, soundwaves, all sorts of stuff."

"And what exactly do you plan to do with all this butterfly data?"

"Plug it into a multi-spectrum analyzer, if I can find one," Adele signed. For some reason, multi-spectrum scanners were much easier to find than their analyzer counterparts. Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.

"Oh, Freddy's got one of those in his lab," Vell said.

"Are you sure?"

"Yeah. Me and the guys got drunk once and multi-spectrum scanned Cane's butt."

"Hmm. Boys will be boys," Lee said.

"Perhaps we should make a more professional use of the equipment."

"I don't know, I wouldn't mind having a butt scan," Adele said.

"Butterflies before butts, I think," Lee said.

"No butts," Freddy said.

'This is school equipment, you know. I got in trouble for that scan."

"Damn it," Adele signed.

"The butterfly scans should be fine, though," Freddy said.

"We're due to recalibrate it soon anyway. I'll say your butterfly scans are the calibration sample." Adele handed over her scanner, and Freddy plugged a multitude of wires into it. Both the handheld device and its much larger counterpart started to hum as a massive amount of data was transferred and analyzed. Lee took a seat and examined some (well-shielded) mendelevium samples while Freddy got to work.

"So, before I take a seat," Adele signed.

"Is this one of those scans that takes hours?"

"No, it usually takes about-" The machine dinged like a microwave mid-sentence.

"-that long," Freddy said. He pressed some buttons on his monitor and took a look.

"Oh. Hmm."

"What's going on?"

"Hold on a bit and let me actually recalibrate the thing," Freddy said, as he started typing.

"Don't want to introduce an investigation thread that turns out to be a computer error."

"Wouldn't be our first false lead," Lee sighed.

"I know. I've got red hair, doesn't mean I want to be a red herring," Freddy said, chuckling to himself. The machine dinged once again.

"Alright, let me compare that, and... huh."

"Ready to tell us what it is, Fred?"

"Let me show you," Freddy said. He turned his monitor around to display it to the group.

"We'll take a look at Lee as our control group, since she's in the background of most of these shots and doesn't have a magical anomaly on her back like Vell does."

"Sounds scientific. What are we looking at, though?" Adele signed. Freddy was showing off several scans of Lee, but aside from minute, regular variations, there was nothing notable about them.

"Well, this is just what's normal," Freddy said.

"Look at the variations. Minor changes, for things like cellular growth and decay, differing energy levels depending on how recently she's slept or eaten, minor things. Fluctuations that all happen normally through the passage of time."

"As compared to our butterfly, which…"

"Which... doesn't," Freddy said. He moved to the next tab and displayed dozens of scans of the butterfly, all of them exactly identical in every way.

"There's no growth, no energy change, no variation... no sign that time's passing at all."

"So the butterfly is, what, locked in time?" Vell asked.

"That's one possible description of what's happening," Freddy said.

"I'm going to be honest, guys, as I understand it, there's no precedent in the conventional laws of physics for this to be possible."

"Well that's about par for the course at this point, honestly," Vell sighed.

"Yeah. If I didn't know about Quenay and Vell's rune and all that I'd chalk this up to a computer error," Freddy said.

"But as it stands, looks like we've got a butterfly-shaped time anomaly on our hands."

"Well that's fantastic, I'll add this to our ever-expanding list of problems," Lee said.

"Is there anything else you can glean from this data, Freddy?"

"Nothing much. The absence of variation makes it hard to do any more work," Freddy said.

"Then I thank you wholeheartedly for your help, and I think we will get out of your prodigiously fluffy hair for now," Lee said.

"Sorry for introducing another existential anomaly into your life, bud," Vell said.

"It happens," Freddy said.

"I got your back, Vell, no matter how many of these things stack up."

"Ready to go, Adele?" She did not respond. Lee went to check on her girlfriend and found her staring at the window. Lee followed her eyes and then, with a heavy sigh, pointed out the window. Vell took a look as well.

"Oh, of course," Vell said, to no one in particular.

"Couldn't even wait five minutes before you escalated, could you?" On the windowsill, an impossible purple butterfly fanned its wings in the sunlight -as a second, identical butterfly flitted in the air behind it.