Case - 1 : Assistant.

My AeroStrider's headlights flashed, drawing my eyes away from my AR interface and to the road in front of me.

A HoverSteed had stopped in front of me with Larkin sitting comfortably on its head in the opposite direction, facing me, as my AeroStrider automatically slowed down while approaching him.

'Hmm…'

"Yealo Sarg." Larkin spoke with slight admiration along with a soft head nod, inviting me to stop in the same driveway he was waiting in, in my own personal landing deck, a hundred stories high.

"What're you doing here?" I asked, having understood he'd definitely broken speeding limits around the area by using his police emergency siren.

"I thought you could use some help, Sarg!" He exclaimed, standing up quickly, with his facade of acting cool breaking apart the closer I got to him. 'Seriously. Is he interested in me?'

"I'm no longer your Sarg."

"Are you? I don't know what you're talking about. I haven't gotten any mail informing me of the situation. Perhaps you have?" He asked me in a pretend confused tone.

'Clever brat.'

"Why're you following me around?"

"Like I said! I thought you might need som-"

"I won't let you if you don't tell me." I exposition'ed in a serious tone staring into his rose brown eyes that were jutting about, wondering how to talk ahead, so I helped him, by shoving his chest and walking towards the door of the landing deck to get into my house while my AeroStrider parked itself.

Seeing me leave seemed to have let him give into his FOMO as he blurted out in a hurry, something that I had not expected, which was a given since I half expected to have to reject him after he proposed to me given how nervous he looked.

"I know you don't know me, but I am a fan!"

"A fan?" I asked, turning around to look at him. 'A simple fan wouldn't go so far…' I thought.

"I mean, yes! But I became a fan when you once arrived at our orphanage to solve the murder mystery of our Mataron!"

"....huh?" 'I didn't remember seeing a kid like him. Neither do I remember his name. Larkin? Do I know anyone with that name? And what was his family name again? Does he even have one? Did he get adopted?'

"Well, I know you don't recognize me but, perhaps this might help." He said, combing his long silky black hair that had been parted cleanly from the center earlier, to look like a proper newbie recruit, downwards as they covered his eyes fully along with the upper half of his face.

A spark of recognition ran through my mind as the picture of a little boy came up rushing with my memories surrounding the case of the Matron, one of the first cases that I'd become famous for solving.

"You- you're that kid that-"

"Yes! I was the one that discovered the body and called the police!" Larkin nodded with excitement at my recognition as he pulled his hair up to look at me with his shiny little eyes.

"You, you've changed quite a bit from how you used to be." I spoke, comparing between the stark contrasting appearance of the worn out destitute boy that had stayed in my memory and the smart and handsome, well-built young man in front of me now.

"Thank you. I guess." Larkin mumbled out in a shy manner while combing back his hair to how it used to be parted, right down the center.

"Well, you may join me, make sure to connect to my house network. The password is Riyane3029Persephone." I replied in a relaxed manner, 'Not like there was going to be much inside the place anymore to begin with.'

Larkin skipped across to my side and asked in a confused tone, "Persephone? Isn't that the woman who was kidnapped into the underworld? Why her?"

"Oh." My voice must've sounded a little off along with my expression since I saw Larkin's face look like he had asked something that had upset me.

"You don't need to answer that Sarg! In fact I have plenty of other questi-"

"My Ex-Wife chose it." I interrupted, partially because I wanted to answer and mostly because I didn't want to know what other questions he had that he wanted me to answer.

Larking became surprised and almost stumbled but then right himself and continued walking beside me until we reached the door in silence.

I stood in front of the door and waited for it to open, but it wouldn't budge.

"Erm….did your *cough* ex-wife *cough* also change your house password." Larkin asked.

"*sigh* no probably not." I said with a sigh, tapping on the door's electronic panel to open the retinal scanner.

A slot at my eye level opened up on the door as I placed my eye over the hole that had a camera and a few low power lasers in place which shot into my eye and scanned them for a few seconds.

The door unlocked with a satisfying *click* as the generic female AI assistant voice sounded throughout the house at once, "Change in Wavelength ID detected. The subject needs to be rescanned for all the features to be restarted."

"Uff. That's got to be annoying Sarg. I usually set up my house so that I don't need to constantly perform rescans, it automatically figures them out and does it for me. I could help you out with it if you wanted me to?"

".....I did this on my own." I replied as my mind walked into a web of thoughts with a mental *sigh*, 'What a way to return 'home'. Getting called fat by your own home automation system.'

I looked down at my stomach that looked like it had gotten a little flabby with the small slaps I patted it down with making them jiggle unintentionally.

'I did get fat.'

'Looks like it's time to go back on the treadmill.'

Larkin, standing by my side, looked stunned that I was this cautious, I guess what they say is true, 'Never meet your heroes. They are often disappointing.'

Looking around the house as its lights flickered on, I watched the few curtains flutter as the windows behind them slid open causing dust to rise up into the air that started flowing toward the ceiling when a low ignorable *buzz* emitted from them signaling the purifier that had been installed in them began to work.

Larkin beside me, looked at the destruction and damage all around the house in awe as nearly everything looked like it had been overturned and thrashed with mud from potted plants in the balcony spilling into the living room with their pots shattered, the porcelain cutlery smashed in the kitchen sink, forks and spoons tossed around and the electronics that were at the ground level all ripped apart as if they had been thrashed with a baseball bat.

'Oh! Look. The baseball bat.'

I looked at the bat that was embedded in the foam wall of the sofa that lined the living room looking towards the balcony window, giving a peerless view of the horizon outside the room and separated it from the dining room where unrecognizable food that had nearly turned to dust lay on plates, having become a living fossil that could perhaps be used as a demonstration for what food might look like if it was left to decompose for two years.

"Where did you go those few times you left the office in the nights, Sarg?" Larkin, who was standing beside me, asked.

'Does this kid have no tact? Where did he learn this from?'

"You know. Here and there."

"Oh…"

'Who asked him to get disappointed over a question he asked me himself?'

'Damn young people. Always expecting you to look like a media influencer. Does he also expect me to start talking in slang?'

'I take back my earlier words. Humanity is definitely dead in the world if this is the next generation.'

Walking carefully, trying to avoid the seemingly unavoidable *crunches* that came from crushing unrecognizable trash under my boots, I moved towards the override panel on the walls of the home that was inside the master bedroom.

Larkin stayed behind, seemingly not wanting to intrude, but I could see he feared for my life too as I walked deeper into the heavy pit of rotting smell that emitted from the decomposing garbage all around.

'Poor guy, wants to get out as soon as possible.'

'Perhaps these old bones can show the young ones some magic after all.'

I stepped into the master bedroom and touched the part of the wall that sat flushed into it but retreated under my careful and gentle push.

With a satisfying *click* the panel sunk into the wall as it slid down into a rack, revealing an array of words and lights which I promptly attacked to initiate the ability to issue voice commands.

Turning to look upwards arbitrarily, I spoke towards the ceiling, "Vanessa, could you please clean up the trash for me?"

"Voice command issued; Command not recognized; Auto correcting using Natural Language models; Initiating procedure to clean the floors." The generic AI voice replied as I began walking towards the door in a quick manner, hoping to make it before the cleaning system activated.

"Woah!" Larkin exclaimed looking, presumably, at the floor panels behind me that had all started to split and form artificial sinks all around, tossing away any trash into the compartment below for them to be sorted and sent into the building's garbage collection and recycling stream.

After many more *crunches* and even a few throbs of muscles that indicated my age catching up to them and their fatigue, I reached Larkin's side and pulled him by the scruff of his neck along with myself out the door as the two of us watched along the fascinating way the house floor kept splitting up into tiles and letting the trash on them slide down into a lower container where, through the occasional gaps that were visible during other tiles splitting around we saw running water push them around and sort them into the end of the waste disposal tunnels.

"How did you manage to make them handle the furniture like that?" Larkin asked, pointing at the tiles that had things on them, like furniture and carpets, as they tilted and formed procedural ramps in a coordinated manner with the surrounding tiles to slide the trash onto them without letting the furniture itself fall over.

"The house is mapped out using a three-dimensional array, and all the things recognized as trash using Vanessa are tossed out into the garbage collector. The rest is made to stay by calculating their approximate weight and friction, which gives an approximate angle for the trash to slide but not the furniture itself."

"Cooool~" Larkin spoke in an awed voice. "Vanessa too. That's a nice retro name."

'I guess the old can still surprise the young, I guess.'

We waited for a few minutes in silence while a soft continuous cool breeze blew past us both on the outside with the trash being cleaned on the inside.

Just as Larkin began to step into the house when most of the tiles were done with dusting away their trash to give the situation a closer look, I stopped him by holding his shoulder.

"Huh?" Larkin gave me a confused look, but I just squeezed his shoulder as I pointed at the floor tiles that had all angled themselves to create permeable gaps in between them.

Larkin along with me paid close attention as water began to flow out of those permeable cracks as the entire area without carpets was flooded with water before being rinsed clean of dirt and dust with them flowing back under the tiles as the water levels dropped and the tiles right themselves to form a perfect continuous patterned geometric floor.

"Wow….that was pretty impressive. I'm amazed other people don't have this already. Where di you get it from Sarg?"

"...I made it myself."

"Oh!?"

I began to avoid looking at Larkin's eyes since they looked like they were emitting light with the amount of adoration they held in them so, I simply walked into the house once again and left my shoes at the sunken shoe area that automatically cleaned them for later use and stepped into the house that was now smelling better.

'I'm home.'

'....or at least, I'm the only one home.'

I looked at the electronics that had been broken and were still on the walls and the several decomposing foods that remained on the countertop of the kitchen and ignored them for now as I sat down on the chair in the living room that I generally used, feeling a sense of comfort that I hadn't felt in a while, a sense of home that wrapped around me but still felt empty with missing parts in it.

Turning on my AR glasses, I began to surf the network once again for any clues that I had missed or connections that I could form with all the information I already had.

'A woman with a dead son, a woman with a dead neighbor, and a woman who has a friend that has a dead wife.'

'The woman has too many dead people around her to not be suspicious in some way statistically. But she seemed sweet. Perhaps she is covering up for someone else?'

'The young man who has a dead wife?'

'Hmm, what was his name again?'

'....Revanche?'