It wasn't red paint.

Everyone knew. How could they not? You could hear the screaming across town... and there weren't many places it could be coming from in the middle of the desert.

It wasn't red paint. Red paint doesn't turn the colour of copper after a few hours time.

Oh yes, everyone heard, but did anyone care?

Everything was always so... surreal. Maybe they were used to it. Maybe they decided to turn a blind eye. After all, what made the cries stand out in a town founded on the very idea of insanity and conspiracy? What ever constitutes as truly, genuinely strange in a place called Strangetown?

It wasn't red paint, splattered across the damp cellar walls, trickling onto the cold cement floor and oozing into the creaking mattress beneath the man who truly deserved his name. Red paint doesn't cause pain. Red paint doesn't flow through your veins. Red paint doesn't seep from an open wound after years of torture and experimentation.

Would he even be able to get up tomorrow? He had no choice. Would he even be alive after tomorrow? Just another mystery to tack on to the town's list of them. Heaven knows the Beakers would try their damnedest to ensure he wouldn't.

The concept of good and evil is such a strange thing. Was he good? He wasn't sure. He never got the chance to try to be. Were the Beakers evil? They're all he ever knew. At least they finally gave him a bed and something to eat.

It wasn't red paint. There's a difference in cost. It wasn't red paint. Paint's easier to clean. It wasn't red paint. Surely somebody else knew. But no one ever tries to stop it, which leaves him quite the Nervous Subject indeed.