December 13th, 2015

A little snippet from the second short story in the novel, The Scarlet Bastards - A Company Soldier. This is from The Terrible Slice of Cong Fu Chu. A brief description of the recruiter for KlondikeCorp's Off-World Legion.
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Pasty and round, his thinning hair combed over and held in place by a liberal measure of scented hair gel, his dull puffy eyes had appeared somewhat exaggerated behind his heavy glasses, and I had wondered fleetingly why he had not opted in his youth to correct them. I concluded, by his eastern European accent, that perhaps he was a recent immigrant from a country where such medical luxuries were nonexistent. He had sat me in a creaking chair before his magnificent pre-fabricated oak veneer desk while he tapped a compu-pad near a framed snapshot of himself in fresh scarlet shalwar pajamas and blue sharwani tunic of the Off World Legion with a Martian Starbucks in the background intruding like a zipper in a Bigfoot photograph. It appeared that he had once himself performed Company service on Mars, likely in the Argyre District, and was probably far prouder of it than he should have been.