My Netori Life With System: Stealing Milfs And Virgins

Chapter 302: 302. The Depot Has Three Versions. So, Apparently, Does Everything Ellie Says

Haruka shifted her gaze toward Mike, her eyes searching his for a silent consensus.

"Now?" she asked, her voice barely a murmur, as if the suggestion of leaving the warmth of the table were a delicate proposition.

"Stanley and Ren are going to be here long after we get back," Ellie reassured them, gesturing vaguely toward the far end of the table where the intellectual friction was generating its own heat. "They’ve found a common frequency."

"They won’t even notice the air has shifted."

As if on command, the universe provided the proof.

"...but the issue remains that ’designed spontaneity’ is still, at its core, a design!" Ren’s voice cut through the air, sharp and insistent. "Can you actually engineer a moment of chance, or are you just building a stage for it?"

"Yes, but!" Stanley’s voice surged in to overlap, his tone rising in a defensive yet excited cadence. "The design intention and the lived experience can diverge so violently that the original plan becomes irrelevant!"

"The user dictates the space, not the architect!"

Ellie caught Haruka’s eye and gave a small, triumphant tilt of her head. "See?"

Haruka turned her head to look at the two men. Her expression moved through a complex sequence: a flicker of amusement, a moment of analytical observation, and finally, a quiet acceptance of the inevitable.

She turned back to Mike. He was watching her with that singular, impenetrable expression he wore when he wasn’t providing information but was instead absorbing the entire world around him, processing every microexpression and shift in the room’s gravity.

"Sure," Haruka said, the decision made.

Ellie moved toward the back of the room, her footsteps soft on the floor. She reached for a cardigan hanging from a hook near the rear door, shrugging it on against the encroaching chill, and pushed open the door to the garden.

Mike stood, his movements fluid and purposeful.

Haruka stood with him.

Behind them, at the far end of the table, Stanley and Ren remained utterly oblivious. They were deep in the trenches of a debate regarding designed community spaces and the role of pedestrian infrastructure in fostering incidental social contact, a conversation they had apparently both been nurturing in the private corners of their minds for years, now finally being hammered out with efficient, mutual intensity.

...

The garden was a small, contained sanctuary, managed with the precise, orderly aesthetic of the District 5 terrace houses. It was enclosed by a sturdy wooden fence, the narrow stone path illuminated only by the pale, amber spill of light from the rear windows.

At the far end of the garden, beyond a raised planting bed that held the skeletal, dormant remnants of the season’s last growth, sat a low outbuilding. It was an old structure, original to the property, its weathered brick suggesting decades of history, but it had been reclaimed; a new window caught the moonlight, and the door had been freshly painted, a bright mark of modern intent against the old stone.

As they stepped outside, the temperature dropped sharply. Haruka’s breath bloomed in small, ghostly clouds in the biting air. She glanced up at the sky, a heavy, oppressive expanse of dark, overcast clouds that offered nothing but the characteristic gloom of a late November night in Erosyne.

Then, her eyes settled on the outbuilding.

"Is this where you do all your work?" she asked, her voice sounding crisp in the stillness.

"Most of it," Ellie replied, leading the way. "The dining table inside is Stanley’s sanctuary for studying in the evenings, and the living room is our shared space, and the bedroom is... well, for sleeping."

"So this is mine. My headspace." She pulled a key from her pocket and slid it into the lock. "The very first thing we did when we bought this house was clear this place out and install a radiator. It was freezing."

"How long did that take?" Haruka asked, watching the precision of Ellie’s movements.

"Three days of pure, unadulterated labor," Ellie said, a tired but proud smile touching her lips. "Stanley handled the heavy lifting, the brute force of it, and then he stepped back and let me arrange everything exactly the way I wanted it."

"Which is the only correct way to handle someone else’s workspace." She pushed the door open, the hinges giving a soft, welcoming creak. "He never moves a single thing in here."

"He knows better."

"Calibrated restraint," Haruka remarked, her voice tinged with a newfound respect.

"His best quality," Ellie said, and there was no irony in her voice, only a deep, quiet sincerity.

Ellie stepped inside, her silhouette momentarily framed by the doorway before she moved to flick on the light. The soft, warm hum of the electric radiator greeted them, casting a gentle glow that chased away the damp chill of the garden.

Mike followed her in, his footsteps heavy and deliberate on the floorboards.

Haruka, however, lingered. She stood at the edge of the garden for a long moment, a solitary figure against the dark, overcast sky.

Her gaze drifted back toward the house, peering through the large rear window. Inside, the dining room was a golden sanctuary of warmth.

Through the glass, she could see the two figures at the far end of the table, Stanley and Ren, still locked in their intellectual dance. They were a blur of motion and gesture, two souls who had finally found a shared frequency, a resonance so deep they seemed entirely insulated from the rest of the world.

With a quiet exhale that vanished into the night air, Haruka turned away from the warmth of the house and stepped into the outbuilding, following the others into the quiet.

The space was exactly as Ellie had described: a sanctum of creation. It was a working studio, raw and unapologetic. Along the far wall, a large drafting table sat laden with the tools of her trade.

Nearby, shelves groaned under the weight of architectural models: fragile, intricate cities built of cardboard, balsa wood, and the occasional piece of hardened resin. Some were nearly complete, standing as miniature monuments to vision; others were skeletal and unfinished, frozen in a state of perpetual becoming.

The walls were a living archive of Ellie’s mind. Sketches were pinned everywhere; some were frantic, gestural scribbles that captured the raw soul of a structure before the details could stifle it, while others were painstaking, technical renderings that deconstructed a shape until its very purpose was laid bare.

The air inside was thick and comforting, significantly warmer than the biting November air outside. It carried a distinct, evocative scent: the dry, woody aroma of paper; the sharp, sweet tang of model maker’s adhesive; and the deeper, more intimate musk of a lived-in space.

It was the smell of a room that had absorbed the essence of its inhabitant, a place that felt less like a shed and more like an extension of Ellie herself.

Mike moved deeper into the room, his eyes scanning the chaotic beauty of the walls. He stopped in front of a particular cluster of drawings, his gaze narrowing as he began to decode the lines.

"This is the depot," he said, his voice low, recognizing the structural vocabulary she had used earlier.

He could see it in the linework: the heavy, rhythmic repetition of the iron columns, the soaring ambition of the mezzanine, and the calculated, sweeping sight lines that dictated how a person would move through the space.

Ellie stepped up beside him, her presence a warm weight in the small room. She pointed to the three distinct studies.

"The one on the left," she said, her finger tracing the jagged, skeletal outlines, "that’s the bones."

"The raw, unyielding truth of the structure."

She moved her hand to the center drawing, which was far more complex, layered with light and shadow. "The one in the middle... that’s the dream."

"That’s what you could achieve if you actually respected the bones if you worked with the history instead of trying to bury it."

Her finger drifted to the final sketch on the right, a drawing that looked far more conventional, far more ’safe.’ Her voice took on a hint of a dry, architectural melancholy. "And the one on the right... that is what usually gets proposed."

"The compromise. The version that’s designed to please everyone and move no one."