"Haa… Haa… How do you run so fast?" Priya let out as she stopped behind Wren with both palms on her lap trying to catch her breath.
Saying that she was outclassed wasn't enough to contain it… he had been jogging while she had tried to catch up.
'It's probably because of those long muscular legs.'
Compared to him she was barely muscular but that was her goal.
She didn't want to be a body builder but she wanted to burn a lot of unnecessary fat and leave her body perfectly proportional.
"You just have to put your energy in your legs… Haa…" He exhaled as well. Running like that had gotten him tired but Nyx wasn't wrong, he needed to build more endurance.
[I'm glad you think so as well, Host.]
He was standing in front of Langford Lodge and the building stood above them looking old.
Most of the town had renovated so much that he barely recognized the place anymore but that wasn't the same for the Lodge.
It was a three storey building that stood out from everything around it even though the body of the building looked old and dusty, like it had been left behind while Harlow moved forward without it.
Priya saw the way Wren was looking at it. She could tell he was thinking about those times… it was on his face and she could read it clearly even if he tried to hide it.
"Do you want to go in with me?" He suddenly asked her. "It's been a while so I won't remember everything though I guess that's a dumb thing to say since you won't remember everything either—"
"Of course I'd go with you." Priya blurted out, interrupting him. "I still remember the layout well so I can guide you. That's if you want it."
She didn't want to sound so excited though she was. Wren smiled at her and Priya felt her heart skip a beat as a small blush made its way onto her face.
'Wren has such a sweet smile…' She thought. It reminded her of when he smiled as a kid. She wanted to protect that smile, she wanted to be the reason he kept smiling like that whenever he looked at her.
'What am I thinking about? Calm down Priya…'
This was called disloyalty. Thinking about doing such things was being disloyal to the man who loved her. She needed to be a strong woman and get over this… it was just a phase, seeing your first crush again after so long. He'd leave eventually and leave her all alone aga—
Wren took her hand and her heart skipped again making her gasp.
"So are you going to lead the way or should I do the honors?" Wren asked, then turned toward the gate. "Is there a gate key? The gate seems locked."
Priya stepped forward to the closed gate pulling Wren along.
There wasn't actually anything holding the gates together, they just looked locked. The steel had lost its sheen completely and gone a deep rust color all the way through.
She let go of Wren's hand and felt a small emptiness doing it.
Priya pushed the gate from the center and the two sides swung open with a loud creak, each door hitting the walls on either side and sending a small cloud of rust and dust into the air.
"Oh so it was open?" Wren stepped inside and so did she.
The front of Langford Lodge spread out before them.
A clear pavement ran from the gate straight to the front door but on both sides of it, weeds had grown in so thick that they were beginning to creep across the path itself. Everything that used to be a maintained garden was now completely overtaken.
"It looks really abandoned." Wren said.
Which was expected. It had been quite some years since anyone had properly stepped foot here.
Wren still wondered how his father expected him to revive this whole place especially without sending any funds.
[Host, your father did send credits to your account. A hundred thousand credits as start-up capital.]
'What the hell am I supposed to do with 100k?' He thought. He had never had that kind of money in his account before… well he had seen Joel throw that number around casually, but that was Joel but for Wren it was a first.
'If this was a third-rate country then sure, 100k credits would go far. But isn't he aware of how expensive buildings are in Unitas?'
It didn't matter if you were in a town or a city, construction costs hit the same regardless. There had been a time his old landlady in Bostara had shown him the original receipt for building the apartment complex he'd lived in.
He had nearly fallen out of his chair… Five million credits and that was before he was born. What would that same build cost now at twenty four?
[I'm sure your father expected you to do nothing with it or spend it on yourself. Don't worry, Host. We'll prove him wrong. After all, you have me.]
Wren trusted her… it, he wasn't going around doing all of this for nothing.
"Uh, Wren… you've been standing there for a while." Priya said and he blinked back to the present.
As she'd thought, he had been somewhere else in his head. "Do you not want to go in? If you want to go back we ca—"
He reached out for her hand again and her face flushed immediately.
"I'll be ready as long as you're with me." He said with a smile and Priya's face went red as a tomato. She looked at the ground, composed herself and then looked back up with a fake glare.
"The hell… stop saying cringe things like that, we're fully grown adults." She said and before Wren could respond, she dragged him along the pavement toward the front door.
Above the door was a faded sign. The paint had gone almost completely but they could make out the shape of a W at the beginning and an E at the end.
"Let's go in." Wren said, reaching out to grab the dusty door handle.
Priya slapped his hand away.
"Ow."
"Don't touch things that are this old without protection." She said, pulling a handkerchief from the pocket of her joggers and placing it over the handle. "We don't know what kind of germs exist in here."
She pushed the door open carefully.
It swung wide with a creak and a puff of dust that hit both of them in the face, and she pushed it all the way until it hit the inner wall before they stepped through.
The reception area opened up in front of them.
"This is where your mom used to sit." Priya said with a warm smile nodding at the desk then her eyes went wide and she turned to Wren. "I didn't—"
"It's fine, Priya. You're right. That's where Mom used to sit." Wren said and took a step forward toward the reception desk.
It was a long front desk made of dark wood.
There were cracks running through the surface and the wood had warped badly from years of moisture and neglect, though it wasn't rotting.
On the top of the desk sat an old bell, dusty but still intact. He was about to ring it the way his mom used to but Priya got there first, tapping it three times through her handkerchief.
DING-DING-DING!
It rang out clearly across the empty reception and Wren smiled.
"Mrs Langford usually did that when she wanted to drive us out after we disturbed the customers." Priya said, smiling too.
He remembered. Being a kid was something else… with no pressure, no money problems and no failed confessions in front of apartment buildings. It was just a carefree stretch of time ahead of you that felt like it would never end.
They both looked at the pigeonhole shelves behind the desk where the room keys still hung in their slots. Most of them were there, completely rusted and the tags on them faded beyond reading.
"I remember when we used to give the leaving customers back their keys." Priya muttered, more to herself than to him.
She and Wren used to climb up onto the counter, against his mom's specific instructions and reach across to get the right keys for the customers checking out.
Back then there had been real foot traffic here. It was nothing like the big resorts in the major cities but enough to make Harlow feel like somewhere people came to on purpose.
Wren walked slowly further in with Priya beside him.
The floor was dark hardwood, warped near the windows where water had gotten in over the years.
Cobwebs covered the ceiling corners and had grown across the light fittings until the bulbs were barely visible underneath them.
"I really can't recognize much of this place." Wren said.
To the left, the dining area with eight tables still arranged exactly as they had been left, chairs pushed in, and old menu holders still standing on each table surface.
Everything had the same thick grey coat of dust on it and the floor in the dining section was worse than reception with grime built up in the corners and along the baseboards.
… And he had to clean all this for the mission.
He was really beginning to think Nyx was just enjoying watching him suffer with this ground floor cleaning mission.
Something moved on one of the dining tables and Priya pressed herself against Wren's side immediately, her grip on his arm tightening.
"Spider!" She let out.
"You're this old and still afraid of spiders?" Wren asked. Now if it was a cockroach he would completely understand… those things were his lifelong enemies and he had no shame about it but a small spider?
"Stop saying it like I'm old… I'm still a very young woman who hasn't gotten married yet." She said, clinging to his arm and pointing at the table with her free hand. "K-kill it!"
"You said I shouldn't touch anything though…" He said.
Priya grunted.
"T-then at least lead me away from here." She said. "Let's go check out the kitchen instead and make sure the spider doesn't follow me. I won't let go of you until you do."
Even as a kid she had been terrified of spiders and even now he found it genuinely cute. It was just a small one… if it had been something large and poisonous he would have been moving too but he wasn't going to say that out loud.
Regardless, Wren pulled her away toward the kitchen area. It might have been slightly unnecessary but he wanted to see how much of Langford Lodge he could still recognize.