As the man approaches you at a run, he shouts, "You have got to get under cover, Miss! It's an air raid!"
You sit up a little bit, and you look at him with a little bit of annoyance. "Air raid?" you say incredulously. "No," you say firmly. "I don't think you understand..."
At that instant, a bomb drops through the portal he came through just as it closes, and it explodes in a cloud of shrapnel nearby. Anticipating the blast, the man throws himself over your body, and he takes the shrapnel and the heat of the blast in his back. He slumps over you, critically wounded, and he cries out in pain. "It hurts! It hurts!" he howls in tones of disbelief. "I can't believe how much it hurts." His face scrunches as he starts to sob.
The man is bleeding profusely, and you're not sure what do as you cup his cheek in your hand. You are panicking, though. You don't want this tranquil, beautiful place to be sullied all of a sudden by such a senseless death, at least not on your watch. There doesn't seem to be anything you can do to stop it, though.
The man's sobbing subsides as suddenly as it began, though, and with a pant, he starts to give you instructions. "Miss," he rasps. "Look, I am sorry you're being dragged into this, but if you can, would you try to find where my tags went?"
You shake your head more in confusion than in negation, your face scrunched in anguish. "How is that even important?" you whine. "Where do you hurt? What can I do?" This is so overwhelming.
"No, look. It doesn't matter at this point, but for the mission to succeed, someone that comes along needs to be able to identify my body to verify that I am out-of-action, so they can stop waiting for me to come back and send out another guy. Otherwise, they could keep waiting until it's too late."
"None of that matters!" you cry desperately. "It matters that you live!"
"And then live how?" he yelps, almost laughing incredulously. "As a pampered invalid in a wheelchair? As a coward who risked the mission to save his own skin? I would rather be dead for something than alive for nothing. Even something stupid...but this mission isn't stupid. The other boys...they could..." he starts coughing and spluttering, and he doesn't manage to talk again.
A cause. You used to think in terms of causes. However, you recall the thoughts in the way that you might recount a movie that you watched long ago and no longer identify with. Somehow, the idea is endearing, in a way. It occurs to you that this is a little bit like an interaction you once had with a child that still believed in Santa Clause. The idea of embracing that sort of belief yourself made you feel silly and sort of wrong, but hearing the child's faith shining so brightly made you feel he was a wonderful, really cool, little person, like he was someone you wanted to know forever. This man's Quixotic nobility is like that, and a sort of tenderness starts to open up in you toward him, even though you don't even know what his mission was about or which side he was on.
However, the man's breathing is growing ragged and rough, and he has begun to pass out. You start to panic, and you don't know what to do. What do you do? You cudgel your brain violently, and you start feeling like you are going to scream. And as your stress from the situation spirals out-of-control, you involuntarily release a cloud of skunk-spray...somehow right in the man's eye.
Oh, fiddle! Fiddle-de-dee!