The Key

Tawell and her research team had recently been busy tackling a problem: the relationship between Milia and the boxes. Even the flames of war burning throughout the universe could not divert their attention from it. It felt rather awkward, after all, since the places that handled both people and boxes every day were basically crematoriums...

That was unlucky to say, but Milia really was a girl with an inseparable bond with boxes. I felt that deeply, especially after Tawell demonstrated a very interesting experiment for us:

First, she had Milia climb into one of the containers. This was not particularly difficult for the latter. Although she had only been a baby when she first emerged from the stasis pod and had now grown into a graceful young lady, she was rather slim, and she seemed to have stopped growing after turning fourteen. When she curled up, Milia could fit perfectly into the container. From that, it seemed those two boxes had been made as a matching set with her—though it was hard to say which had been made to fit which.

I thought of Suigintou. That girl had also come with a box... All right, we were getting off topic.

Back to the point: during Tawell's demonstration, she had Milia climb into one of the containers, leaving a small Universal Probe inside with her. The probe had a camera. Milia held it in front of herself and kept making funny faces, then the researchers closed the container from outside. This was one of the recent breakthroughs: we had found a simple way to control the two containers.

When the lid of the box closed, guess what happened?

Just as many people had guessed, Milia vanished.

When that happened, Older Sister and I both gasped softly. On the image transmitted by