>“Rhed?”
Aaron stalked his way through the doorway, entering Rhed’s office. His face wore a nervous expression. In contrast, Rhed’s feet found themselves on her desk, as her chair strained due to the unnatural position it took as Rhed leaned back. Her lap bore a laptop, as it’s screen displayed a video game Rhed played periodically. She was unconcerned with Aaron’s trials.
“Uh, Rhed, this is important.” Aaron pleaded, knowing that Rhed would rarely pause her adventures in cyberspace.
“Well, it better not be ‘portant’, then.” Rhed jested, slightly frustrated because Aaron had just been in her office literally 6 minutes ago because the coffee machine “broke” (in reality, someone unplugged it to charge their phone. It still took Rhed a solid 3 minutes to discover the problem, while the phone stood triumphantly upon the coffee maker.)
“The tensions with the Creationist Fundies are, uh-”
“Tense-ey-ing-er?” Rhed interrupted comically. “When are they not?”
“Well, uh, a lot of them have been showing up with guns? And, uh, it’s freaking me out?” Aaron expressed.
“And that, my friend, is the point.” Rhed stated in a fearless manner, but it was obvious that she too was frightened. “They want to scare us. I don’t know how they expect us to give in, but they’re pretty damn ambitious because apparently the Christian God hates us, even though biblical scripture didn’t even mention evolution, much less fluffy Velociraptor. At least the sane majority of Christians know that.” she continued.
“Why do, uh, these 'extremists’ hate us so much?” Aaron asked.
By the delighted look on her face, it was obvious that Rhed had thought of this question frequently, and she was anxiously awaiting awaiting this moment. “Because, when a majority has an extreme ideology, when they become the minority, those ideas become actions.” she said. “Liberal christians now vastly outnumber the fundamentalists. Anyways, I doubt the Fundies would actually pull a People’s Crusade on us. It would damage their rep’ far more than it already is, which is saying a lot. I don’t think they would be that stupid.” she stated, and then pondered upon how stupid her last 3 sentences would sound if they were foreshadowing events in a piece of literature.
Aaron, realizing he had nothing else to day, stood still for a solid 5 seconds.
“Uh, well, I have to go. See you later.” Aaron said, already walking out into the hallway.
“Oh, be sure to tell Phil to increase the perimeter security!” Rhed yelled.
>Rhed was a moderately tall woman. She, contrary to her name, had nothing to do with the color red. Her hair was a sleek black, her skin was incredibly pale (in every sense of the word “incredibly”), and her favorite color was definitely blue.
A favorite memory of hers was on the first day of her sophomore year. On the desk in front of her was a paper filled with lazily-crafted geometric shapes that seemed to interrogate her, as if she just murdered Ms. Dodecahedron. When they were asked to present, most of the classroom got on perfectly fine. However, when Rhed came to the question “What is your favorite color?”, her teacher sarcastically remarked that “this should be obvious”, to which Rhed replied “I’m actually colorblind, the color 'red’ looks like the shade of yellow you’d expect in a public bathroom.” (This teacher would later become her favorite).
As an ornithologist, colorblindness is not handy. A lot of birds are excruciatingly colorful, and that vibrance is wasted upon Rhed’s eyes. However, she made it work, and now is the head researcher at 66 Mya.
66 Mya is an entertainment and research foundation that reverse-engineers bird genetics to stem birds that lived before 66 million years ago, as the name suggests. The research done by them gives even more credit to evolution than it needs, and although that’s not their primary purpose, that angers a lot of fundamentalists.
