A gray room, its walls void of any decor. Three desks, stationed in three corners. In the fourth corner was a locked door.

At the first desk, there was a man of about twenty years old, diligently scratching words on page after page of questions to answer, decisions to make ...and the reasons why. Only briefly would his dark green eyes leave the page and wander towards the door, but then the golden brown shock of hair on his head would drop down again, back to his work.

 
Barlow trudged into Morris as dusk fell, hungry and cold for yet another evening, just as he had been for countless evenings for countless days previously.
“After this job, I’m retiring,” he muttered to himself, stepping around a pile of horse manure and wading through the crowds. He felt like a fish swimming upstream, as most of the merchants and farmers were heading out of the city.

'Twas a dark gray night on the old North Shore
- And the wind and the waves were wild -
That the black-caped traveler came to her door
And begged to rest a while.

An hour's rest from the savage wind
She dared deny no man,
So graciously she asked him in
To sit and warm his hands.

She stirred the fire and bade him sit
Before the merry blaze.
Sit he did, and stared at it
With a lost and distant gaze.