Whatever Happened... to Robot Jones? Continued

Part 3: Ghost Writer - Prologue: Indestructible Girls/Chapter 28: Stick-E

Part 3: Ghost Writer

Prologue: Indestructible Girls

Donna Crowe was just seven years old the first time she saw a glass-winged butterfly in person.

Before that, there were few things she remembered quite so vividly. Her first bike ride all by herself. The day her father yelled and stomped in a fit so loud he shook the house and make a clock fall off its flimsy little nail and shatter on the floor. The day her mother was wheeled away on a gurney, through the double doors of the remote island hospital, never to stand back up again.

Her father had taken her on many trips in her childhood. Later in life, Crowe would report that he had the habit of putting aside a savings from the modest profits of his business to put forth in his family's interest, including the broadening of his only daughter's education and experiences. In reality, the "modest" Crowe named textiles business was far more well off than was reported for tax purposes, having a number of smaller but loyal business partners they dealt with under the table. So luxuries such as vacations were easily arranged.

Donna, who's mother had been a teacher and who herself had excelled at public school, had a fascination with the many basic types of animals in the world. Cats and dogs, monkey and elephants, and even more complicated animals, like platypuses and the extinct woolly mammoths. And all in all, Donna herself had a general neutrality towards animals. Even the yearly school trip to the zoo were bores.

But Donna had never heard of a glass butterfly until she saw one for herself.
The year after Amelia Crowe was declared dead, and Donna had lost her arm, Earl Crowe took his daughter to Mexico during her break from school. She was walking alone through a green field, up close to a brush of flowers, when her eyes caught what looked like tiny brown hairs that quivered ever so slightly in the breeze. Donna's head swiveled and she realized that she was looking at the veins of a butterfly, and that between the brown borders of its wings were cells that were completely absent of color. It sat there calmly as she studied it from her position only a foot away. After an breathless full minute, the insect must have decided it didn't like that it was being stared at, and took off. And she watched it go far into the distance until it disappeared behind more leaves. She wasn't just interested in the creature, but amazed. It wasn't camouflaging itself against its background like a chameleon, but practically see-through at any state.

Being the little bookworm that she was, Donna carried her fascination with the butterfly into research as soon as she returned home to the states. What she found the most intriguing about this particular species, called the 'greta oto', was that despite it looking even more delicate than other butterflies, was that it had the strength to carry 40 times its own weight. How nature had managed a feat of beauty and strength like that was amazing. She had a rough understanding of a human body's durability and sometimes what it could handle being a miracle of science. But for Donna, she was obsessed with a creature that looked like glass, but was stronger than its counterparts.

For the next few years, she spent a lot of time looking at zoology books alongside studying mechanics and computers-an interest instilled in her by her father, and the desire to understand how her own metal arm worked. Before she was out of high school, she'd built herself an even better prosthetic arm than the one she'd carried through her formative years. This one more android like. With her knowledge of business and technological engineering, she was able to start up her own company at the age of twenty three. Because her father had already named his own textiles company Crowe, she respected its integrety by naming the new company Lightoller, after a little known surviving officer on the Titanic.