Mr. Sunshine is happily humming a tune. He smiles as he sings the last line.
‘Don’t you take my sunshine away…’
Sunshine looks down. Nox’s research notes sit open before him, but it’s not the notes he’s looking at. A bright yellow butterfly is crawling across the papers.
“Beautiful, isn’t it, my little Sunbeams?”
The butterfly flies up onto his finger, perching itself for inspection.
“Even in the darkest corners of Arcadia, there is Sunshine to see. Beauty. We see it in the simple butterfly. Its beauty, its grace. Such a special little friend… Doesn’t watching it make you happy, Sunbeams?”
“Doesn’t it make you want to rip it to pieces to find out just what makes the humble little butterfly so special?”
Sunshine smiles sweetly as he pulls at one of the butterfly’s wings.
“Perhaps it is in the design of the wing that we may figure out the secret of the butterfly.”
He pulls some more, pulling the wing off the butterfly. It flaps about feebly as he holds the removed wing up to his face.
The smile never leaves his face.
“That’s what friends like Nox do. They call it scientific analysis. That’s a tricky word that means trying to explain something they cannot understand.”
“Trying to figure out what makes a butterfly so beautiful… Or why Mister Sunshine always has a smile on his dial. It’s no difference really. Some friends just need to analyze the world around them.”
“They’ll destroy the beauty of Arcadia if it will just lead them to a conclusion.”
He watches the butterfly struggling and failing to fly away. He pokes at the butterfly gently.
“But however will our friend fly if one pulls its wings off?”
“How will Arcadia smile if your gas makes it feel blue, friend? That’s not very nice, is it?”
Sunshine still smiles as he watches the butterfly slowly dying before him.
“Friends don’t let friends be unkind.”
He picks up the research notes, flicking through them.
“I helped you test your gas, Nox. But that wasn’t enough. You needed a bigger sample size, just to test your scientific curiosity. Pages of notes here, all because you just don’t understand what it feels like to be happy… And sad people just want to make everybody else sad too.”
“I bet there’s no smiling face behind that mask. That you’re no stranger to the blues yourself. But when your investigatingness brings your blues down on my friends in Arcadia, you aren’t being a very good friend any more.”
He closes the file, slamming it down on the body of the butterfly, smile still plastered on his face.
“All you’ve done is pull wings off butterflies to try and find out how they fly.”
“I am like this butterfly, Nox. But unlike this butterfly, I don’t take kindly to having my wings pulled.”
“You tried to take my sunshine away, but friends don’t let friends hurt people Nox. I’ll make sure your dark clouds cannot block anybody else’s sunshine again.”
“Only then can you see the sun shining through the clouds of your own creation.”