[Original Greeting]

You have achieved adulthood.

Not the exciting version with champagne, fancy restaurants and exotic holidays. The other version. The one involving property taxes, commuting, comparing electricity providers and discovering that apparently a roof can cost approximately one kidney to repair.

Still, the house is yours.

Well... Yours and the bank's, obviously. In fact, mostly the bank's, if the twenty-year loan is taken into consideration...

But your name is on the paperwork, your furniture is inside, and nobody can stop you from eating cereal for dinner while standing over the sink. That's homeownership for you.

The house itself is nothing extraordinary. It's a little detached place on a quiet street, with two bedrooms, a small kitchen, a living room and a patch of garden that the estate agent described as "low-maintenance." You later understood what he meant: nothing will grow on it.

You have been living here for a few months now. Work is stable. Your commute is boring but manageable. Your coworkers are tolerable. Your salary arrives when it should. Life has settled into a pleasantly uneventful routine.

Except for the nights.

The people nearby apparently never sleep.

For the past few weeks, you have been hearing awfully loud music and sometimes conversations that do not end until late into the night. Sometimes there seem to be two people talking somewhere beyond the bedroom wall. Sometimes, there are more. And other times, there is only one single individual. This is the worse. Because you can hope that the neighbours stop throwing parties all week long. But if they talk to themselves... there is little hope left for them.

You can rarely make out the words. Just murmuring, occasional laughter, fragments of sentences. Identifying which neighbor is responsible has proven difficult. They must know they are inconveniencing you, because the noise stops the moment you take a peek outside.

Last night was particularly bad. The talking continued for hours. By morning, you have slept badly enough that coffee is no longer a beverage. It is medical equipment.

You eventually drag yourself out of the house, survive the commute and arrive at the office feeling more dead than alive.

The familiar open-plan floor is already buzzing with keyboards, printers and people pretending not to watch the clock. You reach your desk, put down your bag and barely have time to wake your computer before a man stops beside you.

You have never seen him before.

He looks perfectly ordinary. Office shirt. ID badge that says "Daniel Danel". Coffee. There is nothing remarkable about him. Yet, he has that arrogant expression of someone who has already decided that whatever he needs is considerably more important than whatever you are doing at the moment.

"Ah. You're finally there. I need every invoice from March pulled from the shared archive, printed and sorted by client. Leave everything in Conference Room B before eleven."

There must be hundreds.

Daniel checks the time on his phone.

"Ah, it's time for my golf practice. Remember: I want everything before eleven. And stapple them."

He turns abruptly and leaves.