Internet-Degenerate

Fun fact: The reason this chapter took so long to release was because of the title.

Also, if things turn out well, I should be putting out chapters everyday (or every other day, more likely) around this time next week.

In the early morning hours of May 5th, Vincennes student Katherine Klein was sitting in her dimly lit room at her desk, talking to a Marbled White butterfly sitting in her tiny hand. On this day last month, the little butterfly Katherine had named John Silver had crash-landed into her room with a broken wing. As a lover of nature, Katherine made it her mission to nurse the tiny insect back to health. Her voluntary landscaping and garden care of Vincennes would have to be put on hold for the meantime. It's not as if something disastrous would happen to everything if I stopped gardening for a month or two. I'll just have to work extra hard when I get back to it, Katherine reasoned.

She had started to dedicate all the time she could spare to looking after John. During breaks between classes, she went to her room to nurse. During the weekends, she left her room only to eat. She would count down the minutes until the end of class, and when she was supposed to be studying, she tended to her patient. She had even skipped out on the Soirée Dansante to look after the butterfly.

"Come on, John," Katherine sweetly urged the butterfly, holding a pipette filled with watered-down honey close to his face. John unfurled his proboscis and began to drink from the artificial nectar. Roughly a week after John came into Katherine's life, she made him a prosthetic wing by pinning his little butterfly body using the wire of a binder clip and essentially gluing a black feather over the broken wing. She tried her best to find one that was roughly the same size as his wing and cut it down to shape. Over the past month of Katherine's nursing, the prosthetic wing has been working wonders. At first, John wasn't able to fly even a meter before falling. But each day that passed, John was flying further and further than he could previously.

Katherine had recently set John Silver onto the flower bed just outside her window. She felt that he needed to feel like the other butterflies, so she sat and watched John as he hovered from small yellow flower to small yellow flower. Today, however, was different. After Katherine had finished feeding him, she opened her window and set John on a flower, just as usual. John sat there for a few minutes. One could only guess what was going through his mind at this time, but all of a sudden, without warning, he flew up. Katherine was shocked by the sudden take-off and lost sight of him. He was gone.

"But..." Katherine whimpered, "I wasn't ready to see you leave..." She helplessly looked towards the horizon with melancholy in her heart. A faint smile came across her face as a tear trickled down her cheek. "Goodbye," she muttered and closed her window with a heavy yet full heart. Tucking herself back into bed, she decided to get ready to take on the rest of the day when she woke up. When she woke up, however wouldn't even be an hour later when there was a polite knock at her door.

"J-Just a minute," she called out. She hurriedly sat up, tidied her bed a bit, ran her hands through her fluffy light brown hair and patted down her pyjamas, trying to make herself look a little presentable before she answered her door. "Ah, N-Nina! Salutations!"

"Salutations," Nina greeted back, looking a little worried. "I didn't wake you, did I?"

"N-No, n-not at all," Katherine lied. "I w-was just... u-um..." she looked over her shoulder into her room. Her eyes landed on her messy bed, and she knew there was no hiding it. "Sleeping... Y-Y-Yeah, y-you did wake me - but i-it's fine! It's fine. I-I'm supposed to be awake. To what do I owe the pleasure?"

"Well," Nina scratched the back of her head, deliberating something. "You're the one who usually takes care of the gardens, aren't you?"

I don't know where exactly I went wrong in life to end up here, but here I am. Wait, that's a lie. I know exactly where I went wrong. It was last night when I cursed at the top of my lungs. It turns out people can hear you scream. Nina and Adelaide came running to me, worried out of their minds when they heard. It was very awkward when I had to explain what I was so upset about. Anyway, it's about six-thirty in the morning, and I've been chopping off infected branches and dumping them in a pile for the past seven hours or so. I only recently started going around spraying fungicide on everything. What am I complaining about again? Oh yeah.

Adelaide is sitting on my shoulders and squishing my head between her thin but oddly toned thighs. She was wearing the sports uniform of a white t-shirt and blue short shorts, so her bare skin was touching me. I don't know how I should feel about this.

"Seraph, hold this," she tells me, handing me the plastic spray bottle she was using. "I need to reach higher." I brace myself as Adelaide grabs onto a sturdy looking tree limb. She hoists herself up off of my shoulders and pulls her knees up to her chest while hanging from the limb. Then, slowly, she placed her feet on my shoulders one at a time without letting go of the branch. "Okay," she breathes, holding a hand down to me. I return the plastic spray bottle she gave me and keep a tight grip on her ankles, and she gets back to spraying the top leaves of the tree as I had instructed her to.

"Adelaide. Seraph. I'm back." After a bit, I heard Nina's voice call out from behind. I can feel Adelaide twist her upper body around to face her, so I do a little U-turn on the spot. As I do, I hear the leaves in the tree rustle about, and Adelaide trill her lips and cough.

"Puh! Pah!" Adelaide spits leaves out of her mouth. Ew, one landed on my shoe. "Where did you go," she asked.

"I told you," Nina said exasperatedly. "I went to get Katherine."

"Okay... Where is she?"At Adelaide's question, I see Katherine warily poke her head out from behind Nina and look up at Adelaide. Her messy bobbed hair seemed even messier than usual, and she was wearing the same clothes that Nina and Adelaide were wearing. She even brought a step ladder and her own spray bottle. "Oh! Salutations! Are you helping?"

"Y-Yes... S-Salutations," Katherine stuttered with a nod. She looks down at me, so it's only polite that I nod back. What wasn't polite was how she immediately hid behind Nina when I did. I guess I better not greet her then. Wouldn't want to give her a heart attack.

"Awesome!" Adelaide exclaimed. "You have to get a plastic bottle and fill it with that poison in the container and spray it over the leaves."

"It is fungicide," I correct.

Katherine set down her step ladder against a tree and made her way to the fifty-two-litre storage container I had filled with fungicide. Most of it's been used already, so the container's now light enough to easily pick up and carry around. I set it down in the middle of the empty path for convenience. Katherine looked at it, confused. It's clear by the look on her face that she's perplexed by its existence. Nina grabbed the bottle she had set next to the container, and Katherine grabbed her by the arm. She beckoned Nina closer and spoke into her ear.

After a whisper, Nina looked at me. "Katherine wants to know how you made this," she tells me. "Wait, did you make you this?"

"Yeah," I tell them. "It's just some water, veggie oil, dish soap and bicarb soda."

"I-I-It was eco-friendly s-s-soap, r-right?" Katherine asked. Although she was stuttering, her tone of voice was very aggressive. I couldn't see her eyes from behind her low-hanging bangs, but I could tell she was glaring at me.

"Yes, ma'am," I answer, taken aback by her unexpected attitude. "I made certain it said 'organic' on the bottle when I used it in the kitchen."

Katherine nodded her head in acceptance of my answer. She looked down at the container, then back at me. "W-Where did y-you find this?"

"The container? Just in the shed," I say. She looked back at me quizzically. "The shipping container shed," I elaborate.

"...Which one?"

"The... the one in front of the tree line... way behind the dorms."

"...Y-You mean the r-rusted one c-c-covered in c-cobwebs th-that's c-clearly b-been abandoned?"

"...Yeah," I utter after being stunned silent. "That one." Honestly, that explains why it was such a pain to open. And also the dead snake. Why would Chelsea tell me about the shitty one? That damn troll. "I-I at least made sure to properly wash and disinfect the tub before using it."

"G-Good." Katherine lifted the lid to the fungicide tub and filled her plastic bottle. Nina, who had been darting her eyes between Katherine and me while I was being interrogated, refilled her bottle and placed the lid back. At some point, Adelaide had gotten reabsorbed into her duties and probably even forgot she was standing on my shoulders. All I could do at the moment was watch Nina and Katherine get to work as I wait for Adelaide to tell me to move to where she needed to reach. I see Katherine climb her step ladder to reach a branch. I also see her attention get drawn to a branch I had pruned and see her look of shock. I made sure to cut at a forty-five-degree angle... what's wrong with it?

She jumped off the step ladder and ran towards me, stopping about two meters away. "Th-the dead branches," she exclaimed. "W-What did you do with them?"

"I put them all into a pile behind the abandoned shed. I was going to burn them in a fire pit after spreading the fungicide."

Katherine nodded again. "There's um... Th-there's actually a-an i-incinerator near the g-garden shed," she tells me. "I-I'll go get it r-ready for burning."

"Oh, thanks," I mutter as she starts to jog off past me. "Wait," I call out to her retreating figure as a thought occurs to me. "If you're going to move the pile, I left the wheelbarrow at the old shed! There should still be a pair of loppers and secateurs in there, as well!"

Without stopping, Katherine spun around, nodded at me once again, completed her spin, and ran off in a slightly different direction.