The life of a butterfly

[temnix]

Once there lived and flew a butterfly. It had brown wings with black stripes and eye-like roundlets on the wings. It was probably not very long ago. At some later point someone killed the butterfly and pinned it to a display, on which 43 other kinds were sat. Together they were called "44 species of butterflies of North America." For how long that sheet of cardboard stood there, in the unknown place, instructively, no one can say, but eventually somebody scanned it or took a few snapshots of it with a digitial camera, moving the wings of all of the specimens, and compiled an animated gif. This gif went online - maybe sooner, maybe after a while, maybe accidentally. There it stayed. Eventually I came along, browsing Internet images for materials for a new spell for these games. I wanted to summon gloomwings, the enormous moths from the Demiplane of Shadow, or rather, from the Monstrous Manual. I had started out hoping I could edit and redraw one visual effect with which the game came supplied, rarely seen, and did, but I thought I ought to look for real butterflies for comparison. "44 species of butterflies of North America" came up in the search. I downloaded the image, then took it to ezgif.com for splitting into separate frames and put them side by side in the same folder. There were so many rows of these varicolored insects there, with so many patterns, all in different motions and phases. Gloomwings are supposed to have some special pattern on their wings, and I looked for something unusual. Many of the butterflies were captured in insufficient phases, just opening their wings or completely closed. One was a solid moth, but its wings barely moved at all. This brown one with black stripes and eye-like roundlets on the wings seemed almost striking enough, its wings had been captured in a full range of positions. I cut out the pieces of the large file with this butterfly, discarded the rest and compared the movement of these wings with my original file. Now I became convinced I could not use the old one - its wing-like folds moved in a wrong dimension. It was to be this Lepidoptera. I first recolored the find to gray-blue and then inverted the colors, ending up with something like a ghost. Blending had to be added through visual effects. The butterfly had no legs to drag its prey anywhere, like a real gloomwing, so I drew those. After the frames were tilted a little to represent strained effort and the frame cycles were set up to run very quickly, the gloomwing was ready to appear in the screen world - pale, gray, changed almost completely.

And that is the story of what became of that butterfly. There may be some conjectures and suppositions here, a little creative license. It is possible that the display was a virtual creation to begin with, and the butterflies drawn all of them rather than photographed, although in that case it isn't clear why all of the species could not receive full wing spreads. But every one of them had to be taken from nature at some point, either then or before, copied over, from ones that had flown and fluttered and sparkled with all those colors, including brown with black stripes and eye-like roundlets on the wings.