I stared at the guns and ammunition, so many racks of guns and ammunition. The simple beauty of this place brought a tear to my eye, it was like looking at my account all over again and finding it filled to the brim with credits. I could do so much with all of these guns. It took a cut out of the fear of the monstrous thing beyond the walls of the room as I took in the room and appreciated it how it was. Like a piece of artwork the likes of which I could see and admire, not hidden behind a box. Boxes beyond ammunition lined shelves that went up 20 feet or so to the ceiling behind the ground-level racks of guns in the room.

I even spotted blades amongst the racks of guns, though I was less interested in them, they stuck up in the otherwise heavenly sight of the room. I had only one sword I wanted, and it wasn’t here, it was out there in the beyond.

It was a beautiful little thing, this little room, a piece of pure, wondrous beauty. If I had the time, I would have loved to take them apart and spend my time dissecting each and every weapon to find the way they worked, the idea sung to me, though distanced, like the part of me that had been filled with understanding and my knack for tools had a sheet over it to keep the dust of unused off of it like old furniture.

I checked the amount on my person and was honestly a little sad to find that there was little room to fill with the amount on my person already, I could not simply pocket the room and make off with it like the Bandit I felt like.

And not able to do that, I settled on the second-best thing, something I could do, I got grumbly about not being able to do what I wanted.

“Aw man, by bags already full. This is… This is so sad. Beautiful, but sad. All these guns and boxes of ammunition, and no one to fire them, no one to give them purpose, I don’t get it, Lilly, why direct me here? To torture me? Have I been so bad that I required this as punishment? It is too cruel.”

“No, I didn’t. What are you… Oh, you're messing with me, ha ah haha,” She said in a tone that told me it was not funny, “very funny, no I brought you here because there is useful technology purported to be housed in this room, as well as valuable files on the server at the back. There should be a red box here.”

“A red box?”

“Yes, this facility had a prototype red box from the red box industry, the box can be entangled with other red boxes, so you can put something in it and take it out somewhere else.”

“That… is so useful! What the hell? I want one!”

“Indeed, unfortunately, you can't have one; it’s not part of your government-granted kit, and the design and construction, and distribution are the sole right of red box incorporated, you can put your stuff in the box, but even if you can lift it, you can’t take it with you,” she told me, in a way that told me it wasn’t the end of her train of thought.

I didn’t like being egged on like that, but I wanted to know her answer, I wanted one of those boxes, it would be so useful.

“Come on, out with it, I don’t have all day; finish the thought so we can get out of here.”

“I’m glad you asked. There are blueprint on the server in this room that’s shielded against resonance-based intrusion, so I couldn’t access it from outside. Unfortunately, it is also Illegal to copy the blueprint, Alas, whatever shall we do? It’s like a piece of art in a museum, I can only touch it, but not copy it.”

She said a tint of melancholy in her voice, but then she did something that I didn’t expect from my otherwise kind little oracle.

“Fascinating, this bit is a 1. And this one is a 0, so fascinating… oh my, and this is another 0. This is so fascinating that I will hold it in my short-term memory where it's not illegal to hold any information forever, and never forget any of the data.”

I started to cackle, and like a kid in a candy store, I started stalking down the aisle, looking for the best, choicest of sweets.

As it turned out, the red box was pushed behind a rack of guns on the floor. I had to put down two pistols, four rifles, and something called a true shot shotgun down on the floor and drag the rack back and away from the red box. It was wheeless, so it made a bit of a ruckus as the noodly arms of my peacekeeper form held true as I put my weight into it and pulled it away from the shelves.

My peacekeeper form, I was finding, was even weaker than my normal form. Maybe the workouts had given me a bit more strength for a similar build, or maybe humans were just weak, but whatever it was, it was noticeable, and my arms and legs were a bit achier than they should have been too.

It was not the type of body I wanted to stay in for a long time. I might be able to get a date if they were into humans, but even so, I honestly couldn’t wait to get out of it. The skin was wrong, the height was slightly wrong, and the proportions of my body were wrong. A million parts I never would have thought of felt wrong and made me feel wrong by proxy.

It felt like I had crawled into someone else’s skin, and it bugged me in a very visceral way that I hadn’t expected. At least I could change back, it wasn’t like getting a prosthetic, at least.

Now that I thought about it, even if I lost a limb, would I need to get a prosthetic?

Such were my thoughts as I pulled the rack, but once I let go of it, my mind turned towards the box, and I started towards it, getting down on one knee, I went and opened it up. It looked like one of those bioplastic cold boxes that medical used to haul around stuff, only all red with a slick design emblazoned on the top and sides in solid black.

You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

It was an image of an open box sucking stuff in with the creative and highly original name of the red box incorporated under it a few times.

I opened it, and despite the branding, it did not suck anything in. The inside also looked like the inside of the cold boxes, just without red stains. It was remarkably clean, but that was the extent of the anomaly.

“So, uh, Lilly. Do I just… put stuff in here? Is there anything weird I need to do? Do I need to say some magic words? Anything like that?”

“Noooo, nothing like that. Just put them in the box, then close it. I’m checking everything out about this model, but it seems to work like most models I’m aware of, I’m checking its signature, so I’ll be able to get your stuff out when I… when we come across another box. Baaased on its ledger, it was being tested for certification on data fidelity, not on normal transport, testing was inconclusive. I would recommend leaving smart weapons out of the box or anything with a complicated set of electronics. I would also recommend not putting yourself in there, but I don’t think you would fit, it would also be a very stupid way to die, too stupid for you by at least 30%.”

“30%? I’m only 30% away from being dumb enough to crawl into the fancy teleporting cooler box? Owch.”

“Human intelligence is highly normative, especially for female codded brains; 30 or so percentile is the difference between a normal person and someone who would be considered an idiot. Or in your case, 30% is the difference between sub-standard and a Darwin award recipient.”

“Heyy. Don’t insult me with something I don’t understand, that’s just plain mean, what happened to you being nice huh? I miss the old you already.”

“Please,” she scoffed, “we both know that there's a time and place to be nice and that you're more calmed by a bit of banter and a light insult vs a nice comment.”

“Are you in my head? You seem to know a lot about me for someone that I just met,” I asked her, filling the box with my ill-gotten goods in a weight-efficient way.

It was a bit harder than expected, some of the guns were too long and had to be discarded, but extra ammunition, guns, and one sword that looked cool, but I otherwise didn’t care for it all went in the box until it was chock-full. Ammo was relatively heavy compared to its use; you only needed so much, and the load got lighter over time. A gun was heavier, but if you didn’t use it up, its weight remained the same. My carry weight needed a balance, and the carbine and its ammo were the most costly compared to its use.

Then, I kept the special rounds and decided to box the excess ammo for my handguns.

I managed to get two slightly longer guns in, but they were a close fit and took up a lot of comparative space. I put the ammo they were kept within, along with most of the ammo on the guns I didn’t intend to use to travel lighter.

I kept two longer light guns sans ammo, a shotgun that looked cool and some ammo, and my handguns. The bullets didn’t even fill up my ammo pouch. I filled my other pockets with nicknacks.

All in all, I was maybe a bit lighter, though not by much.

The whole time, she was silent, but not the creepy silent, but the thinking silent, thinking about what she would say. Her answer was brief.

“I am, in a very literal way, in fact, in your head. Where did you think I was?”

“Creepy,” I told her, closing the lid, “So was that all? Just the red box? Nothing else? How is that going to help me get back to my ship.”

“Well, if you had thought about it, you could have lowered your weight entirely instead of trying to make off with every item in the room like a Bandit, but I suppose it's on brand for you to be so greedy. I suppose there is a featherweight bag, and for speed, there are some displacer boots. You are allowed some bags, and footwear is supposed to be provided, though those were supposed to be more along the line of a backpack with a standard kit and some boots. They also require energy to function and rely on resonance technology, though I can handle that. Try… one row over, right side for the bag, left side and further down for boots. You can put the featherweight bag to good use, stick your heaviest stuff in it, and put it on the boots... Well, I suppose you should get accustomed to them.”

“Yes, Ma’am, of course, ma’am, anything you say, ma’am,” I told her, scooping up the shotgun and the weird ammunition I was fairly certain belonged to it. It was weird, pre-packed ammunition, instead of the looser stuff I had, cased in some solid light casing, though I didn’t know if it was plastic or metal or what.

“Cut it out, you smart-aleck.”

“I thought you said I was dumb, ma’am?”

She started groaning, and I knew I had won. So I calmly strode over to the shelf while fiddling with the ammunition and loaded the alien gun until I found a bag by ‘Bag of Holding Incorporated,’ stitched into one corner with a feather motif, which I grabbed and wound to the right side of, the aisle, and found a pair of weird shoes and without any other shoes I picked them up.

There was a pattern with them; they all had very intrusive branding, and they hurt my eyes with their bright colours. It was kind of heinous.

“What’s with this stuff, all this branding? It's intrusive and a massive eyesore, no?”

“It is, it was an obnoxious trend, from what I gather. Remember, this will put back your transformation because it will take up all your energy generation.”

“Yeh, yeh, it's worth it for all that cool stuff, we’ll have plenty long to charge up in orbit where I won't need the bag or these shoes, not like I can use them. Now, let's get our bearings,” I told myself, standing with the shoes.

They were a bit big and a little bouncy, but that was it. It wasn’t particularly notable for things that screamed artifact to my well-honed artifact-hunting senses.

I packed up the bag with as much as I could, even going as far as to leave the bag open with some bigger stuff, I also put my boots in there and put on the obnoxious shoes, with their multiple clashing colours, but ran into my first problem: I didn’t know how to charge them.

“How do I?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll help. Your not versed in how to utilize resonance yet? You’ll feel a tingle, that’s normal, please don’t fight it.”

“Fight what now-” I started to asked before it became obvious what I wasn’t supposed to fight.

There was a tingle, which was a weak way to put it, but it was at least a way of describing it. A jolting shock of electricity jerked from my gut, zipping around my body without leaving my body twitching. It lingered for a moment before slipping out and into my skin, where it tracked up to my fingers, arced out, into the bag, down to my shoes, and blocked by my socks.

“Please take your socks off, the shoes are made to be worn without them…”

“Lilly, the socks stay on during tingle time.”

There was a grossness in her voice, grossness and disappointment.

“Please don’t go there, it's beneath you… Which is saying a lot, considering you’re even shorter now than before.”

Damn... Lilly was growing some teeth, and I kind of liked it.