Jim

**“***Just some damn kids and their god damn pranks.***”**
— **Jim on the indiscernable message**

**Jim** is a playable character and the main protagonist of *Night* *Watch*.

## Description

### Appearance

Jim is an adult Caucasian man with short, dark brown hair and is of unspecified age, height, and weight. He wears a standard park ranger uniform, consisting of a long-sleeved, grey dress shirt, adorned with a name tag and his NPS badge, a black necktie, dark green pants, black shoes, and a buff brown campaign hat. During the rainstorm, he wears a black plastic poncho.

### History

Little is known about Jim's background, except that he has a wife named Nicole and at least two children. In 1978, he worked as a night-time forest ranger in a state park located in the Pocono mountain range.

## *Night Watch*

On the night of June 18th, Jim starts his first weeklong shift assigned to the watchtower in the middle of the park. A note left by his coworker TJ lists off his tasks: checking for fires every half hour and answering distress calls over the ham radio made potentially by hikers who are in trouble or lost.

From the observation deck, Jim makes out a smoke pillar from a nearby campsite. Shortly after, he receives a signal over the emergency ranger channel, but answering the transmission, he hears only heavy breathing. He chastises the person on the other end for misusing the emergency line, who responds with a gutteral scream. Dismissing this as an ill-natured joke, Jim's station loses power, forcing him to go and examine the generator below. Discovering the tank to be empty, he gets a can of gas from the adjacent storage shed, coming across a mysterious floppy called "Maze of the Minotaur" on a shelf nearby.

After refilling the generator and returning to his post, Jim pops the disk into his terminal, which is revealed to be a horror text adventure. He controls a player character trapped in a labyrinth and must attempt to navigate his way out. When a chase sequence begins within the game, Jim's immersion is broken by knocking from the deck entrance, causing him to leave the side of his computer and check the door, finding no one present.

He loads the game back up and seems to have somehow progressed to a new area, which the player explores until the exit is shown by a little girl after handing her a doll, but the game soft locks the character right before they can reach the end. Another interruption follows this time by Jim's satellite phone ringing. He picks it up and talks to Nicole, who asks him to bring some souvenirs for the kids and worries about the long hours and remote location of his new workplace, but is cut off when the signal dies. This time, the game has been corrupted to the point where the text is completely garbled, with only some words occasionally pointing towards the movement within the setting. As Jim struggles to get further ahead in his game, he notices far too late that he has been neglecting his main duty, with the tower itself having somehow caught fire. Jim can choose to stay behind, inevitably falling victim to the flames, screaming in agony as he burns alive, or break a window with the butt of his rifle and jump through to instead plummet to the ground from the great height.

Jim then suddenly jolts from his bed in the station, realizing he had dreamt the entire thing after falling asleep sometime during the night. Several items are now missing, including the cabinet, his standard-issue rifle, and his phone. His monitor no longer holds the floppy disk, instead beeping, with a flood warning having been issued due to an intense rainstorm hitting the area. He receives an incoming signal, this time from one of the overnight campers, who wants him to check out the "pig noises" they've been hearing, fearing that someone might be watching them. Jim makes his way over, stopping by a ruined cabin that has been vandalized with graffiti, including a Baphomet-themed pentagram. He arrives at the campsite but finds it abandoned with signs of foul play before being alerted by a girl's cries for help deeper in the woods. Going closer to the sounds, he is ambushed and knocked unconscious by the Driller Killer.

Jim wakes up again, naked and bound at the wrists and trapped in a cage inside the killer's lair. His kidnapper walks around the room he is kept in, sometimes stopping in the doorframe and producing bizarre grunting sounds. Eventually, the Driller Killer rushes the cage, power drill-first, gruesomely killing Jim. During his drawn-out death, a bible verse is displayed on-screen:

**“***AND GOD SHALL WIPE ALL TEARS FROM THEIR EYES AND THERE SHALL BE NO MORE DEATH, NEITHER SORROW, NOR CRYING, NEITHER SHALL THERE BE ANY MORE PAIN: FOR THE FORMER THINGS ARE PASSED AWAY.***”**
— **REVELATION 21:04**

## Trivia

* Jim is exclusively referred to as "Park Ranger Jim" by Puppet Combo.
* If Jim heads back down to the generator shack after hearing the door knocks, he will be attacked by the Fireman, the main antagonist inthe now-cancelled *Burnt Alive*, and wake up as if he had died in the tower fire.

## References

1. ↑ https://twitter.com/PuppetCombo/status/1235922933803094017
2. ↑ https://twitter.com/PuppetCombo/status/1240625374742134784
3. ↑ https://twitter.com/PuppetCombo/status/1282691245471563778