Sue
Legacy Name: Sue

Sometimes her prey would land on those flowers decorating her body. She made it a point to wear only the freshest flowers, those with a little nectar in their hearts that had not yet dried up. She would not try to net a butterfly until she was sure of the catch. Like every collector, she'd had her near misses that were still painful to think about. Impatient collectors often went home with nothing but bits of turf caught in the net in a moment of miscalculation.

Each board of captures she carded was unique in its arrangement. One series was organized by color, another by size and a third by the pattern on the wings of its occupants. She never wasted a capture, even when butterflies turned out to already be in her collection. Every room in her house contained at least one butterfly display and even the towels hanging in her kitchen had a butterfly wing pattern stitched into the cloth.

To say she had a butterfly obsession would be an understatement. Even as a child, Sue had insisted her mother glue butterfly wings to her back when she went around trick-or-treating on Morostide.

On this particular day, she had her eye on a marvelous Delphi Aqua Lacewing with ivory-tipped wings that fluttered slightly in the breeze as the butterfly landed on a conical red flower. Sue's net descended with all the skill of a champion of Net Gain, her captive fluttering frantically as she plucked it from the delicate netting and stuck it in a jar. The beautiful wings soon fell still as the chemicals purchased in Darkside did their deadly work.

She kept her finds bunched together in a red wagon that could hold up to thirty jars. She was approaching her limit for the day and was thinking about heading home for tea when the one she would always think of as Giantess appeared over the brim of a bluff.

The butterfly was ten times the size of the largest she'd ever collected with glorious purple and teal wings streaked with silver and dotted with sparkling scales that almost looked like little diamonds. For five whole minutes, Sue simply stood there with her mouth open. What a find! The entomologists down at Subeta University were never going to believe this unless she could bring the specimen in as proof.

Only an enthusiast with her degree of knowledge in the habits of butterflies could time the swing so perfectly, drooping her net right over the insect's massive silver antennae.

Unfortunately, the butterfly's strength was in proportion to its size. Sue gulped as her feet left the ground. Her capture - or was it her captor - took her above the level of the clouds until she could no longer see anything but an endless field of white fluff.

She didn't know how long they glided. The misty mountains looked sort of like a postcard she'd once seen of Shengui Guo but she couldn't be sure of her location, not with all her equipment resting in the front of her wagon.

Their destination was a bizarre hill that looked something like a cross between a beehive and a termite mound. She got a glimpse of walls glistening with moisture before the massive butterfly gave its antennae a hard flick and sent her flying across the room. She landed in something soft and very sticky. When she tried to pull herself free, she found she was stuck like a fly on flypaper.

"It's no use, you know. I don't know what mixture they use, but the butterflies see to it that nobody leaves the rainbow chamber without their permission. There used to be a telenine here as well, until he repented."

Sue raised an eyebrow at the kanis' choice of words. "Repented?"

"The Butterfly Princess wants all collectors to put down their nets and take up building butterfly houses. She believes that if we truly want to enjoy the beauty of her smaller cousins, we should do so while they're living and not kill them for our own pleasure."

Sue did her best to edge away from the crazy kanis but could not even twitch a hoof. "Are you trying to tell me the butterflies...talked to you?"

"Of course not. I read it in their writings on the far wall. It's difficult to make out so close to sunset, but they've written a code based on what their ruler tells them. I believe they communicate mind to mind. There isn't much else to do when you're hanging from the chamber of the greatest gathering of butterflies in history so I taught myself to read their writing. They'll care for us until we sincerely promise to snap our nets and go home peacefully. I don't know how, but they can tell when you're not being sincere. I've petitioned for my freedom three times but they can always tell how badly I wanted to pin their princess with a grand bolt. I'm weakening now. One gets tired of living on the edible flowers and rain water they provide and what they're saying makes sense, when you think about it long enough."

It was awkward falling asleep in such a position but when she woke, the kanis was gone. She could not resist casting a lustful eye on even the sunny little butterflies that fluttered past her nose on their way to seek nectar.

Sue had a feeling she was going to stay where she was for a very long time.