A sock had fallen on the pavement. It had been burnt, and it is missing the other pair. The soot that stains the yellow fabric gradates into a slight ombre effect against the asphalt it had been placed on. It isn't too long ago since the rain had stopped, as the road is still damp. He stares on and the world remains unmoving, the only color resembling vitality slowly fading as the wetness of the soil filters through the piece of sock, consequently beginning to darken it. Hang on—no, he soon recognizes. It isn't a sock lying neatly on the ground. It is a dead body. He keeps adjusting his vision to the gray-blueness of the downcast weather. He doesn't see anything else for a while.

"No!" he hears a man scream, but it hardly registers to him as a faint buzzing in the background. A murder of crows flies by, their caws echoing, resembling laughter that derides him. A face appears, coming from up ahead. He is so close to the ground, barely managing to move, obscuring what little he can make out of his surroundings, that the figure doesn't even come to view until it's only several steps away. The thick black hair and the rounded brown eyes are supposed to be from the same person's features, but his spinning head proceeds to separate them from each other, making them appear as two unrelated things. And then there is the voice again, "No," it says, coming from a frowny mouth that had to belong to the same man, but again, keeps getting disembodied from him. The figure breaks into a run and falls to his knees on the ground next to the dead body.

Then the clicking sound returns. It's only one click, but it feels like lightning had struck him. A gun emerges from behind, and the mysterious brown eyes look up at it. The person behind the dead body had cocked the weapon—click; he's ready to pull the trigger. The dead body stays fixated facing towards the right, away from the hand holding up the firearm.

"Wake up, man," the man before him pleads, putting a hand on his arm as he tries to shake him awake. "Wake up! Howie! Come on, wake up!"

"Howie!" Santi, whose voice is raised significantly in concern, calls out to him. He feels his pale coworker's hand on his left arm as the other had been nervously tapping on it. He wakes instantaneously as he snaps back into reality, his senses quickly adapting back to their natural state after having been fully engulfed in a weird dream. His consciousness settles in as he begins to relax again, only just noticing his labored breathing. What's happening? —his mind asks; Oh, . It was a dream—his mind fills him in; What is it about again? Why do I feel so frightened just now? Why did I feel like I couldn't move? Why did I feel like my body was hurting? —a series of questions fire in rapid succession; he feels reassured despite his racing thoughts, finding comfort in his being awake. He is safe; he'd come out of the dream unscathed. He doesn't need to get worked up about it anymore.

"Huh," he mutters to Santi in a daze. His body is slow to catch up to the cognizance, narrowly falling behind, confusing him. After another second he manages to pull himself altogether. He sees the pale man standing by the side of his bed, face stricken with anxiety, looming over him.

"You were having a nightmare," his coworker claims. "I thought I heard something weird, so I looked and then saw you groaning in your sleep. You didn't stop so I worried you're having trouble waking up."

"Really?" he mumbles, and then to himself, "God, what was that?" and then to Santi again, "I'm up. I'm okay now."

"You sure?"

"Yeah, yeah. Thanks."

Santi retreats and climbs back to his top bunk afterwards and leaves him to himself. He lays on his back and looks at the bed on top of him. It stopped moving once Santi had gone to sleep once again. He stares for a little while longer, reliving the sensations he had endured in that dream. He recalls everything as vividly as they had happened to him in his mind's eye. But the details slip from his grasps. His brain shows him a picture with all the general parts free for him to look at and study, a plethora of many individual things assembled together to form an entirely different gestalt, and whatever that thing is evades him completely.

He couldn't bring himself back to sleep, and after trying for what had seemed like another half an hour, he decided to just get up, get ready, and start his routine. He wonders how long he had taken to put himself together but had no means to a clock. There is none in their living quarters, or at least not in the room he shares with Santi, so he quickly runs up to the first floor to check on the huge wall clock by the bar counter. He doesn't expect that aside from the time, he will also discover the bar owner already there. In his mind, he's running through his to-do list for the day, getting ready to do his assigned chores on The Roundtable, so he knows that Mr. Jeon isn't supposed to be there until another hour later. The bar owner had arrived earlier than usual. Typically, the rest of the crew would have already set things up before their boss' car had even parked in front of the building. "Mr. Jeon," he greets. "The others are probably awake and will be here in a bit."

"No, no. It's fine," Mr. Jeon dismisses. "Actually, today's one of the days we close the bar for a day off."

"We do?" he raises in confusion.

"Yes, but sometimes we do it twice a week, sometimes every other week, usually at the end of the month," the bar owner explains. "Those boys don't usually take days off that much anyway. Still baffles me, to be frank. But I digress."

Howie can attest to that. He has never seen the other employees go anywhere or do anything else thus far. He knows some of their hobbies—Santi with his music, the two boys in the next room with their video games that he can hear them get boisterous about from time to time, and the four of them entertaining themselves with the TV watching a couple of streaming shows on some occasions. "So...no work today, sir?"

"Of course. You can spend the rest of the day however you want." The bar owner paces to the bar counter and picks up a cardboard box from there. "And you can have this, as a plus," Mr. Jeon hands it to the bartender. He takes it, opens it, and sees a second, much smaller box, this time a smartphone package, with the picture of the phone model printed on it, alongside a white envelope. "That's your pay. I thought I'd give it to you early. I can't do bank or wire transfers, yeah? So I had to cash it out and give it to you. I bought you the phone, so I don't have to do this in this way the next time, but then I realized you didn't have the info to make an account. So just use it for yourself."

Howie instantly feels like he has become a billionaire overnight. Money? And a smartphone? After being dirt poor with not a single penny to his name for weeks, he is now able to get himself things he is naturally entitled to as part of his civil and human rights. If you had told him in that moment that Mr. Jeon could perform Bible-level miracles, he would have believed you.

"Good morning, boss," hails a voice coming from the back. It's G, with Wolfgang following right behind. They are both dressed casually, for the first time appearing to Howie a lot more like the young adult men in their prime that he had almost forgotten that they are. The newbie had to quickly remind himself that the people he is living with right now are, in fact, people.

"You boys heading out?" the bar owner inquires. The two men walk past their new coworker and approach their boss.

"Yessir," says G. "Wolfie's buying a new game that came out this week."

"And G's going on a date," Wolfgang retorts teasingly, answering on G's behalf like his friend had for him.

"No, Wolfie," G says lovingly, in an almost patronizing way, like you would when you correct a toddler's mistake, "Try again. You can do better than that," he challenges, signifying to Howie, who had almost believed what Wolfgang had just said, that they are messing around.

The other three men laugh amongst each other, leaving the new employee whose body language clearly expresses his awkwardness to stick out of place.

"Say, why don't you boys bring Howie with you? It'll be perfect for him to have a stroll around," the owner suggests randomly, causing a bit of a shock on the employee's end.

"Yeah, come with us," Wolfgang, delightful as always, enthusiastically agrees. G smiles cordially, encouraging a positive response out of the newbie, who is feeling backed into a corner. "Don't worry, we don't bite," the bartender with the high nose assures him.

"Yeah, you don't. But what if he does?" the bouncer quips, implicating Howie.

"Here we go again. GGG," the bartender reacts while holding out a thumb down and shaking his head comically slow, expressing his disapproval of the bouncer's joke, before turning to the newbie and telling him, "So? You wanna come with us?"

Howie gets reminded of what had happened earlier with Santi, when he had tried to initiate a conversation with his roommate to advertently, hopefully, make friends with him, and feels the chill ride down his spine right away as he recollects how that had turned out. Now he's being handed a chance for a do-over, this time with his other two coworkers, and he is embarrassed and daunted, but not because he is afraid of what their opinions are going to be of him if he does mess up again, but because the uninvited realization that he is as small as a speck of dust the same way the Earth is against the rest of the solar system compels him to epiphanize just how insignificant he is. He fears that if he fails to build a connection outside of himself, if he cannot interact with the world around him and everything in it, he will forever be trapped within himself, a prisoner of his own existence, a solitary being in a desolate place, with no one to turn to and with nothing to tether him down. He will be irrelevant, a blip in the universe, a glitch in the grand scheme of things, unable to leave an irrefutable proof that he had ever been alive. He may as well just die now, since there is no reason for him to waste his time living a pathetic life.

He nods at Wolfgang in agreement. "Sure," he smiles.

Howie hadn't had the chance to change out of his work clothes. He simply doesn't have the luxury to just throw them back into the washer again, so he just removes his apron and neatly places it on the counter, before heading out with G and Wolfgang. Mr. Jeon had left before them with his car. He couldn't offer them a ride because he had an appointment elsewhere, the opposite direction from the local mall by the district proper where they were going. So they take the bus on the way, sharing a relatively quiet but genial ride together. After more than twenty minutes, the bus arrives at a stop, and all three had stepped off to ascend the footbridge connected to the mall on the other side of the four-lane road.

"What does GGG mean?" Howie asks Wolfgang. They walk in a line with the bartender in the middle of the newbie and the bouncer. His sharp eyes peer over Wolfgang to see G waiting for his friend's answer along with him, clearly listening in to their conversation. They are pleasant to be around and like to joke a lot. G keeps referring to Wolfgang as Wolfie, which Howie assumes is his personal term of endearment for the bartender, and enjoys teasing his friend a lot, because Wolfgang never reacts in an unpleasant manner, which says to him that the man is not quick to temper. The bartender just laughs along, and he laughs a lot, but goofs around just as much as the bouncer, and whenever he hears a corny remark from the latter, he would say, 'GGG,' so it had piqued the newbie's intrigue.

"It means 'Good game, G'. Erm, how do I explain this," the senior bartender thinks briefly. "In gaming terms, it generally just means that the match was good and enjoyable. But when it's trash-talking, you're basically telling your opponent they at playing, because the game is already a 'good game' way before it even ends officially. Does that make sense?"

"Yes?" he replies. He does get what Wolfgang means, but what does G have to do with it?

"So he's Good game, G because he's always spoiling things with his unfunny jokes. GGG is basically a curtain call for him to shut the up," bein