With a loud grunt and a creaking pop, Glenn pried out the last floorboard in the tiny entryway room in the equally ground-floor tiny apartment he and a crew of half a dozen other men were working on. He sighed as he leaned against the front wall near a window. Since the courthouse had been rebuilt, many of the buildings in its vicinity had seen a dramatic rise in popularity. Some had been purchased and knocked down, in the hopes of constructing even nicer housing complexes, but some of the less run-down complexes had merely been purchased, its owners content with merely renovating and raising the rent.

That was where Glenn came in. Many of these buildings and the housing units within them were disasters. If he was lucky, all the flooring and stairways would be intact, if occasionally rotten or stained with various bodily fluids. Glenn knew more about the effects uncleaned blood and vomit stains had on spruce and pine. More often, the wood completely decomposed in places, exposing the stone, (more often) packed dirt, or the apartment beneath it. Many of the ground-floor apartments hadn't even bothered to put in flooring beyond the ground itself, in which case, they had lay to down new floors. It was long, hot, and physically grueling work, and work that Glenn wasn't entirely familiar with. Unfortunately, it was the only work he had been able to find.

Glenn wiped the sweat off of his forehead with the back of his hand, sighing. He started twirling the crowbar around, thinking about how his job was a gigantic waste of his time. He shouldn't be using this blunt, simplistic tool. He should be twirling a chisel, or a hammer, or an awl. He wished he was in front of a bench, with the smell of sawdust and varnish in the air, and not this hollowed-out building, where the stench of garbage, human sweat and decay was overpowering.

?Glenn, get back to work! Now!? He heard the foreman bellowing from deeper inside the apartment. He grunted as he stood up, ready to ask his boss what he would be doing next. He hoped it was something easy, but it was probably more floor demolition. He tried to twirl his crowbar again as he walked over, but he spun it too far and it clattered into the dirt. He picked up quickly, hoping the foreman didn't hear it and have another reason to chastise him.

One Month Earlier...

The group of construction workers trudged through the rain-slicked streets of West RhyDin as dusk started to fall on the city. Most of the men were in groups of two or three, talking boisterously, and occasionally peeling off from the main group to go to various run-down taverns they spotted along the way. Glenn walked by himself in the back, his black cloak obscuring most of his head and face. His head was down, staring at the cobblestone streets, watching for the potholes and puddles of rain water that seemed all too common in this part of town. It was the end of Glenn's first day of work for the West RhyDin Construction Company, and the less skilled employees, Glenn included, were headed back from a work site to the boarding house where the vast majority of them ate and slept.

When the men arrived at the house, which resembled many of the inns they had seen in the city, they immediately lined up for the cloak room in the lobby. Glenn found himself on the end of that line, as usual, and by the time his turn had arrived to hang up his saturated cloak, he found himself shivering. But there wasn't time for him to change into dryer clothes; as soon as he was done, the dinner bell rang. With a sigh, Glenn made his way to the dining room.

He surveyed the dining room, which consisted of rows of long benches and tables made of (near as Glenn could tell) pine that was crudely constructed and sanded. He quickly decided to sit at one of the quieter tables. The humans and other unique...species who chose to sat at that table hardly looked up at him as they made room for him. Glenn tried not to stare too much at the man who was easily another torso's length taller than him and seemed to have the skin and head of a bull, yet stood on two legs. Nor did he look over he look at the green-skinned, pig-faced man who looked like a monster out of one of his childhood nightmares. They looked far too busy dipping pieces of day-old bread into their thin chicken-broth soup and shovel it all into their mouths to discuss the fine points of their species with someone who had never encountered them before. Besides, he wasn't even certain they could speak Common. Instead, Glenn spent most of dinner staring into his soup bowl, wishing there was a little bit more meat, or potatoes, or anything other than broth and water in his soup.

Glenn was similarly disappointed by the sleeping arrangements. Some heavy renovations had gone into the second floor, in order to get more beds and people in than could previously fit in there. Glenn assumed that the upstairs must have been where the inn's rooms must have been; on the left side, where the main barracks were, he could occasionally see the spots where flimsier walls had been installed to cover up where the room doors had been. The right side remained much like it always was, with the individual rooms given to the supervisors and the largest room to the head supervisor. He didn't know what their rooms were like inside, but he imagined they were much nicer than his: rows of bunk beds on either side of the room, with a pathway through the center of the room to walk through, and very little space between sets of bunks to stow one's stuff. There were just two doors to enter, one near the stairway upstairs, and one at the other end of the room. Glenn was fortunate enough to have his bunk on the side of the room with windows and on the ground, although it was near the very back. Those who were in the room were sleeping quietly, those that entered after Glenn almost immediately went to sleep. Glenn changed into some dryer clothes, draping the wet ones over his chest (which barely fit into the space allotted him for personal items). He then sat and listened to the rain falling and the thunder rumbling, trying to ignore the sound of rain drops sliding through leaks and plopping into buckets placed liberally throughout the room.