"Why do you keep calling me that?"
"'Red'?"
"Yeah, what's up with that?"
"You know, like the purposeless guy that gets eatten by a monster. Always wearing red."
"What does that even mean, Jarvis?"
PFC Jarvis Kang was both a marine and a timer. As such, his low level of free-range intellect, both innate 
and systematically nurtured by the 'Corps, was in fierce competition with his anacronistic delusions over which 
would make him less coherent. Well, maybe delusions was an unfair judgement. There were still those who 
maintained timers were legit (above and beyond the subjects themselves); that the government's initially trumpeted, 
eventually quashed and quieted experiments in temporal "fatigue" really had thrown an indeterminate number of 
folks around before the plug was hastily pulled and everything denied. Regardless of fact or fiction it 
certainly had given rise to a small but sociologically fascinating segment of the population with 
antique proclivities consistent with the story (and inconsistent with everyone else). Like others of his 
ilk, Jarvis had no records predating the experiments, but while this could, indeed, validate conspiracy and 
recommend Jarv as a hapless victim snatched from his own time and deposited in ours, Occam's Razor suggested a 
lonely orphan with an affinity for historical fantasy and the need and requisite dispossession to join this 
anomalous subculture. Either way, the man, claiming origins in the Reagan-era United States of America, was a 
caffeine-swilling, pizza-pounding, eternal fourteen-year-old, a peurile enigma of out-moded terminology and reference to 
culture popular to an assembly of one. He was also very much in love with his job, which made sense 
because (again whether fortified or not by reality) Jarvis believed he'd been delivered, essentially, into a 
Christian calendar 1980s video game, and by dint of well-honed ignorance refused to absorb nuance and complexities 
to the contrary. To him, life was a comfortably simple-minded quest for a higher score, and to his professional 
credit, the mentality left him in possession of a pretty big one. 28 men killed on the clock (so to speak) and 
who knows how many Monsters.
"'Star Trek', dude."
"I don't know what that is, man."
"Anyway, Jarvis, he's not useless, he's documenting -- and if he -does- get eatten by anything while he's 
doing that, it's your fault. What do you think you're here for, anyway; shy of wasting my tax money?"
"Yeah, that's right, jefe," Jarvis glowed, briefly fondling a thin-jacket nuclear shell capable of blowing a hole 
in the side of a klandit you could roll a tire through before shoving it into the breach of his broad-barrelled 
rifle to pump it to place. "No monsters getting past this marine."
"I don't know if your relationship with that thing should make me uncomfortable or outright nervous."
"I don't tell you how to do your job."
"So you admit that I have one now."
"I'm with Vann on that front, actually. Given there isn't enough biology down here to cover the bottom of a pretty 
small bucket, any damage to life or limb would owe something to friendly fire. As far as that goes, maybe you 
and Dott should be wearing red shirts, Jarv, since she'll only need to patch someone up you put a hole through."
"Holes I make don't patch well, egghead. Medics need a dustpan for my handiwork, not band-aids."
"What the fuck is a "Band-Aid", jar-head?"
"You guys wanna shut up for a second, and let me work over here?"
...