Today, on my way back home from my chemistry exam, I took a different route down a few alleys between buildings just to see some new parts of campus. As usual, I was looking down incase anything fun or shiny caught my eye, and I just so happened to find this key in the mulch of a flower bed. It looked like it had been there for a while, so I don't think anyone is really missing it at the moment, and I'll probably find somewhere to turn it in tomorrow morning. But until then, my desk is its new home.
Since I just posted about all the little things I have found on the ground yesterday and this key would have qualified for that list, I decided to make this post into a real, normal length post, I would write a story about this key.
"Martin, someone finally found it!" Kathy at the front desk of Coin Hall said, a little too cheerfully, over her telephone intercom. "You can come on back," she said to me with an excited smile. God, I thought to myself, this better just be quick thank you for finding his key, I have class in 20 minutes.
Kathy led me back behind the desk and through a frosted glass door that had "MARTIN BUILDING MANAGER" on it in black lettering.
"Hello son! You must be the gentleman who found my key. It has been missing for quite some time, I was beginning to think it would never find its way home." The tall, black haired man with deeply tanned skin said as he stepped from behind his desk to shake my hand. "Pardon me, I got a little ahead of myself. I am Martin, the man in charge of this little operation here. And you are?"
I told him my name and shook his hand. His grip was firm but his hand was surprisingly soft. "Here you go." I said and reached out my hand with the key in it to hand it to him.
"Not so fast! We have to make sure it still works first! Nature sure can take a toll on things! Follow me." he said, pushing my hand away.
"Look I have a class I gotta get to...." I said as Kathy and Martin quickly walked out of the room. "Right, I guess I'll follow along." I said to myself.
"Ah, here we are." Martin said, pulling a small wooden box out of the bottom drawer of a desk. We were in some sort of storage room in the basement of the building where they kept the unused office desks and chairs. Martin had gone to a seemingly random desk in the middle of the room and opened the bottom drawer. The box he produced was nothing special: just a perfectly square wooden box that ran about a foot in each dimension. The only noticeable thing about the box was the large metal keyhole on its face.
"Here, just insert the key for us and you can be on your way." Martin instructed me. His voice was very proper, I thought to myself.
"This isn't some kind of trick is it? I'm not gonna get shocked or poisoned or something am I?" I asked. I'd been asked to do strange things for people before, but never on a Wednesday afternoon, and never anything quite so.... mundane....
"Certainly not!" Martin exclaimed. "The rules state that you, the finder of the key, must unlock the box. If you do not do so, then please go return the key to where you found it and forget this ever happened."
"Well, I do love unlocking a good box now and then." I said. I put the key in the lock and twisted it. Before I could lift the lid to see what was inside, Martin grabbed the box from in front of me and turned it to face him. He opened it quickly and looked inside with Kathy. Both seemed to be pleased with what they saw inside, and looked at the contents of the box and then back at me before placing the box back on the table in front of me.
"They're all yours." Kathy said to me, the same odd cheerfulness in her voice.
I leaned over the box and looked inside. I was dumbfounded. Inside the box was 6 small gold bars.
"You're kidding." I said, looking back and forth between Kathy and Martin. They both had the same strangely cheerful yet serious expression.
"Nope! They're all yours! You found the key, so you get the reward! You wouldn't believe how long we've been waiting for that key to turn up. We put it in that flowerbed more than two years ago! We dropped it right on top so you would think someone would have seen it, but no! Here we've been, pretending to work here for two years!" Kathy said to me. I guess it was a little odd that no other lecture halls had a front desk.
"So you're telling me you knew where this key that unlocked a box full of gold was, and you just sat here every day for two years pretending to work, when you could have just took the gold and sold it for yourselves?" I asked. I had a lot more questions, but this seemed like the most logical thing to ask.
"The rules are you find the key, you win the reward. If we hid the key, then us going to get it wouldn't really be finding it would it? It'd just be us going to pick up the key we dropped." Martin told me. This wasn't exactly the most sound reasoning to me, but I wasn't really in a position to argue with two people telling me to take thousands of dollars of gold for free.
'Well alrighty then." I said, setting down my book bag to load it with my prize. The bars were much heavier than anticipated, but at this point I think my back could afford the extra weight.
Martin and Kathy didn't say another word to me as I slung my bag back on my back. I looked at them to say thank you before I left, but they both just nodded at me and turned around and walked back they way they had came. I followed after but didn't catch sight of them again.
Should I have questioned things a little more? Yeah, probably. But you tell me that in the face of thousands of dollars worth of gold you wouldn't just take the money.
I went to the rest of my classes that day like normal. My back ached a little bit as I walked up the stairs to my dorm room, but nothing I was too upset about. I swung the door to my room open and walked in. My roommate was on his computer with headphones in and didn't seem to notice me when I walked in. My bag hit the floor with a very loud metallic thud. He looked up from his computer and took out one headphone.
"What was that?" he asked me, a confused look on his face.
"You won't believe what I found today." I replied.
Thanks for reading. Please let me know if you liked it. This story was pretty much a daydream I had walking back after finding this key, with some tweaks here and there. Let me know if you liked it, or if you didn't like it. I really appreciate any feedback you have. I don't really consider myself a writer and I really just brain vomited out this story, so don't be too harsh please (or do, I can't tell you what to do).
