The man in an underground in france

He is going somewhere- maybe to work, in a tiny green cubicle.

Maybe he's the guy in the office everyone loves,
they always pull him into their lunch groups for a good gossip
and greet him as he strides past on errands "Hey Carl!"
He's never going to get promoted, but that's ok
he likes his little desk and computer and chair and the privacy of his tiny cubicle
cause when no one is watching ;
he whips out the spectacles no one knows he needs
and from his desk drawer, he reverently extracts -a comic prototype.
6 months of his time have been poured into this baby;

A re-telling of Romeo and Juliet with a steampunk twist, where the lovers meet at A Burning Man convention and later, rendezvous in Romeo's hot-air balloon. The pair gleam out from the cover, his arms thrown about her corseted waist. Every detail painstakingly drawn, from the tiniest cog in the air-balloon to the monocle-chain dangling from Romeo's chest pocket. It took him two days alone just to get Juliet's curls looking just right, like they'd been blown free of a tiresome hat.

And it's almost complete. Just two more pages, and he'll be ready to go to print. The day job is simply for money. It's the fuel that allows his hands to keep on drawing, to keep alive a name, and reputation, he assumes only in that other world where people have seen what his hands can really do besides type 300 words a minute.

and so, our man gets to work, editing, culling, sketching

then,
footsteps approach
the tools of the trade disappear, and by the time Bob the Computer repair guy rounds the corner-
"hey Bob"
"hey Carl"
"hey"
and no one's any the wiser.



Or maybe he's just kinda, going to work doing insurance or something where he'll answer angry calls from people with burnt houses all day.