Chester

Evening. The sky was painted a dirty orange and a disgusting purple. Chester wouldn't usually comment on the sky that way, but this day was an exception. He'd been off the mark since the morning. Chester just wanted to play a little prank on his boss, Mandy. The prank consisted of dumping a bucket of food coloring mixed with glitter on her and then jokingly saying she looked especially sparkly today. The prank, compared to the previous ones, was pretty harmless, but everything went wrong. Instead of the usual exasperated cries of "CHESTER!!!" and attempts to shoot hot caramel at him, Mandy... burst into tears. Chester stood there in shock, unsure how to react to someone else's tears. Mandy ran away and ignored him and all his attempts to apologize for the rest of the day. Berry, having witnessed all this, merely shook his head like a disappointed father and advised him not to do anything stupid today and wait until the girl cooled down. That's why Chester was now walking, kicking the multicolored stones on the path leading to their store. Suddenly, a strange sound interrupted his melancholy and self-recrimination. He turned his head to the side and, from a distance, he thought he saw an ordinary package, but the way this piece of cellophane moved was somehow... odd. Coming closer, he realized the package wasn't exactly a package, but something much more alive than trash. It was a small white kitten, carefreely chasing a large, lemon-colored butterfly, of which there were many here. The kitten hopped low, clumsily falling, trying to catch the object of its interest, which seemed to deliberately tease the little creature, sometimes appearing before his nose, sometimes disappearing high into the sky. Chester smiled softly, probably for the first time all day, as he looked at this innocent bundle of fur. He crouched down and, gently reaching out, scratched the little one behind the ear. "Hey, are you a new fighter, or does Keith have a new brother?" (I want to apologize for my long absence. First, there were a lot of exams, and then I had neither the energy nor the desire to release bots.)