Tim’s apartment is exactly what the lobby promised: soft, recessed lighting, tasteful art that exists purely to prove someone has taste, and a throw blanket draped over the sofa that probably costs more than my last paycheck.
Tim shrugs off the oversized jacket like it’s the heaviest thing in the world and tosses it toward the couch. It misses, but she doesn’t notice or care. She stretches her arms overhead, arching her back, eyes fluttering closed.
A long, contented sigh escapes her lips.
“Even with all of this,” she murmurs, swaying faintly on her feet, “it feels really, really good to be home.”
I stand near the door with my hands in my pockets like a man waiting for a bus that may never come. The oversized button-down shirt hangs loosely so I can clearly see her collarbone and the edge of her shoulder. She hasn’t fixed it. I need to stop noticing that.
She is a guy, I remind myself. You drove a guy here. That is a guy.
My internal monologue sounds increasingly unconvincing.
She pivots toward me. Fast, for someone who is definitely still drunk. Her eyes lock onto me with an intensity that doesn’t quite match the way she’s listing two degrees to the left.
“Okay.” She points at my pocket. “Fix me. With the box thingy.”
I produce the silver slab. “I’ll try. But I should be upfront, I have no idea how this works.”
“What do you mean you don’t know how it works?” She blinks at me, offended, as though I’ve admitted I don’t know how forks work. “You used it before.”
“It just… happened. You got in my car and started complaining about women. The box heated up. You changed.” I hold it out, flat on my palm. It sits there. Cold. Inert. Deeply unhelpful. “It’s not reacting at all right now. Maybe you need to, I don’t know, complain about men?”
She stares at me. I stare back.
“Like… as a girl?”
“It’s my best theory.”
She considers this with the gravity of someone doing long division in their head. Then she clears her throat, stands a little straighter, and says with the energy of a college improv performer:
“Boys are so stupid.” Her ditzy girl persona is surprisingly convincing. “They, like, never listen. They’re always trying to, you know-” she waves a hand in a vague, sweeping motion, “-get into my pants.”
She looks at the box. “Nothing?” she asks.
“Nothing,” I confirm.
She deflates and collapses backward onto the couch in a single boneless movement, sinking into the cushions like they’re holding her captive. She fishes her phone out of the oversized jacket pocket. The same jacket she tossed on the floor, where she has to lean forward to reach. I force my eyes to look at the ceiling. Yes, I did not look down her shirt, even a little.
Oblivious to my turmoil, she lounges on the couch with her phone. “Okay. You do your box thing. I’ll just…” She waves vaguely at her phone. “Be here.” She holds the phone to view her face. “Stupid face unlock doesn’t work.” She taps her finger on it. “My fingerprint doesn’t either? Piece of junk,” she pouts. “What was my pin again?”
I forcefully turn away from her and exhale. I have a problem to solve. I turn the slab over in my hands.
It’s still seamless. Still smooth. Still offering absolutely zero instruction manual. I run my thumb along the face of it, the same way I did in the alley, and… there. That pull. That low, resonant connection, like a string being plucked somewhere behind my sternum.
Was that why Tim couldn’t touch it? Because I’d already, what, bonded with it? Been chosen by it? I mentally file that thought under problems for future Quinn and focus.
I lean into the sensation. Press against it.
Something shifts. A soft internal click, like a latch giving way.
The metal began to warm.
I grin. I did it! I activated a magical object. Excited, I turn toward the couch.
“Hey, Tim,” I say. “I found some…” I stop.
She’s holding her phone at arm’s length, chin tilted down, lips slightly parted, the oversized shirt doing absolutely nothing to hide her modesty. The camera clicks.
She notices me and lowers the phone with the sheepish grin of someone caught doing exactly what they intended to do. “You’d do the same thing in my position.”
I open my mouth. Close it. She’s not entirely wrong, and I refuse to confirm that. Instead, I completely ignore it. “I found a trigger. It’s heating up. Like before.”
She sits up straighter. “Oh. That’s… good? It’s good, right?”
I shrug. “I have no idea.”
“Well, I’m not turning back into a guy any sooner. Let’s test it out. What do I do?”
“Think about being a guy? Complain about men? It seemed to respond to emotional context before.”
What followed was a spirited, increasingly creative monologue. She praised men. She criticized men. She did a brief, impassioned tribute to the shape of my jawline that was genuinely moving. The box remained warm, though unreactive.
I shake my head slowly. “It’s not activating. Maybe I need to touch you with it.”
She freezes. “Isn’t it going to shock me again?”
“Maybe?”
She stares at me. “That’s not reassuring.” She sighs. “…It didn’t hurt that much,” she concedes, and extends her arm with the resigned dignity of someone submitting to a flu shot.
Try to think about going back to being a guy,” I say. “I’ll do the same.”
She nods. Her jaw sets.
I press the box to her forearm.
The box reacts immediately. The connection I feel to it blazes sharply. It feels… happy to be used.
Tim’s breath catches: sharp and involuntary. “Okay, I feel that…”
A shiver tears through her, starting at the point of contact and radiating outward like a stone dropped in still water. She doesn’t pull away. Her spine straightens on its own, posture correcting with an almost dignified authority, shoulders rolling back as her chest rises with a deep, ragged inhale.
Then the exhale comes slowly. Too slow.
Beneath the white cotton shirt, something shifts. The fabric draws taut; not violently, but with a kind of quiet insistence. Fuller. Rounder. The collar dips as the shirt redistributes itself around a silhouette that is, undeniably, going in the wrong direction.
Her face shifts. The angles soften further: cheekbones rising, jaw tapering, lips gaining a fullness that is frankly unfair. Her eyes, already striking, deepen. Men have written masterpiece poems about lesser eyes.
“I… I don’t think it’s-“
The sound she makes isn’t pain. It’s something else entirely. Startled. Deep. Like every nerve ending had just been tuned to a frequency slightly beyond her previous range. Her thighs press together as her hips groan wider. Her free hand grips the back of the sofa as if to stabilize herself.
The box spikes, one brutal flash of heat, before it goes ice cold.
Silence. Just the hum of the air conditioning and the creaking of wood under our feet.
Breathing heavily, she looks down at herself. Her hands hover. Not touching. Just hovering over her increased assets.
“…I think you made it worse,” she whispers. Her voice had changed again. Now a soothing sound that makes her seem soft and vulnerable.
I look at her. I look at the box. I look at the ceiling, which offers no guidance whatsoever.
“Worse is very subjective,” I say carefully. “Objectively speaking, I’m sure many women would-“
The look she gives me could strip paint.
“-consider themselves fortunate,” I finish, with the energy of a boy caught with his hand in a cookie jar.
She turns away from me and walks, carefully, recalibrating with every step, toward the full-length mirror on the far wall.
A long silence stretches between us.
She stands in front of the mirror and just… looks. Not with vanity. With the careful, bewildered attention of someone trying to identify a stranger in a lineup.
“I can’t believe this is me,” she says finally. Her voice had gone somewhere quieter. Contemplative. “More than that… I feel normal. Like it’s always been this way.” A pause. “Is it messing with my mind?”
I look down at the silver box. As always, the piece of metal offers nothing.
“Well,” I say, casting around for a silver lining the way you cast around for your keys when you’re already late. “On the bright side, we confirmed the box is definitely the culprit. And you’re… I mean, objectively, a lot of doors are open to you. You’re very pretty. Even if we can’t reverse it.”
She turns from the mirror.
Her expression is unreadable in the specific way that means it is, in fact, very readable, and what it says is not complimentary.
“Quinn.”
“Yeah?”
“Go jump in a lake.”
She turns back to her reflection.
I wait what I felt was a respectful amount of time before I speak again. I ask, “So. What do you want to do?”
Our eyes meet in the mirror. Hers. Mine. It’s hard to draw my eyes away from her deep pool of wonderful…
“I mean,” I continue, gesturing vaguely with the box before I get distracted again, “I’d rather not use this on you again…”
“Please don’t.”
“…or anyone else, before I understand what it actually does. But it’s the only lead we have.” I turn it over in my hand. “I have to use it on something.”
“Use it on yourself,” Tim says. Her tone was flat. Tired. The bitterness in it was quiet, not sharp, the kind that comes from somewhere real.
I laugh awkwardly. “Even if I wanted to, I don’t think it works that way. Every time I use it, I feel a connection? Like there’s a flow of something. When I pressed it to your arm, something moved between you and the box. Like it took something and gave you something in return.”
She turns slightly. “I have no idea what that means.”
“Honestly, neither do I.” I tuck the box into my pocket, carefully, like a feral sleeping mouse that will wake at the slightest touch. “But if I can figure out what the direction means, I might be able to reverse it. Pull back whatever it took from you.”
Tim exhales. Long and slow. Her gaze drifts back to her reflection, and something in her face softens into a kind of tired resignation.
“I was really hoping this was going to be a simple fix,” she murmurs.
“Same,” I say. “How are you on time? Anyone expecting you? Family, friends, work?”
She scratches her cheek. A small, absent gesture. “No. Nobody immediately.” Her eyes stay on the mirror. “I could text anyone who matters and buy myself at least a month before anyone notices.”
She says it flippantly, like the way people say things lightly when it is actually a huge deal. I’m not touching that landmine with a ten-foot pole. The situation is already complicated enough.
“Must be nice being rich,” I say. “However, that is one less thing to worry about.”
Tim turns away from the mirror. “So, what’s next? Do we tell someone? Police? Scientists?”
“Absolutely not.” I shake my head with the conviction of someone who has watched too many government conspiracy documentaries, and not enough of them were fictional. “Best case, we both get monitored for the rest of our lives. More likely, if I’m the only one who can use the box, I get quietly detained and spend the next decade as a human lab exhibit.”
Tim huffs out a breath and runs her hands through her hair. Her fingers snag immediately. She works through the tangle with a small, annoyed frown, completely unprepared for the sheer volume of it.
“You’re the paranoid type,” she mutters.
“I prefer strategically cautious.”
“Same thing.” She wrestles her hand free and sighs. “But you’re probably right. So, what do we do? Just figure it out ourselves?”
“I can think of two things.” I hold up two fingers. “First, we go back to the alley where I found it. Maybe there’s something else there. A clue. Context. Anything.”
Tim nods slowly. Then glances at the clock on the wall. Her expression curdles. It was closing in on two in the morning.
“…Not tonight,” she says.
“Not tonight,” I agree. “Better to have daylight. Also, two people crouched behind a dumpster at 2 AM tends to generate the kind of attention we’re specifically trying to avoid.”
“What’s the second thing?”
“I try the box out.” I touch the box in my pocket. “We know it can change a person. But is that all it does? I want to see what happens if I use it on something that isn’t, you know…” I wave vaguely at her.
Tim takes a reflexive step backward.
“I said, not on you,” I say.
She stops retreating, but keeps her distance. Reasonable.
“I’ve used it twice now,” I continue. “The first time it activated on its own and changed you. It worked even though the box was in my pocket. The second time, it only triggered after I touched you with it and made you more-” I searched for the word.
“Feminine?” she offers, with the dry exhaustion of someone filing a complaint they know will go nowhere. “In both body and mind?”
“We’ll go with that. I want to see if I can direct it. Point it at something else and get a different result.”
She considers this. “What do you need?”
“Something you wouldn’t mind losing. Clothes, maybe?”
“Clothes?” She blinks. “You think it’ll work on clothes?”
“No idea,” I say honestly. “That’s what makes it an experiment.”
She looks at me for a long moment, then disappears down the hall with the loose, slightly-overcorrecting gait of someone still negotiating with a new center of gravity. She returns holding a large, shapeless hoodie at arm’s length, the way you’d carry evidence.
“Had this forever,” she announces, dropping it on the couch. “Was going to throw it out anyway.”
“Stand back.”
She steps away urgently. I pull out the box.
The connection comes faster this time, easier than before, like a path I’ve already gone down. It warms in my hand almost eagerly.
I touch it to the hoodie.
And feel… hesitation? Not mine. The box’s.
A kind of uncertain pause, like it had reached for something and found something unpleasant. Then, what I can only describe as mild disappointment, the specific low-grade letdown of someone handed a task beneath their skill set. The box seems to exhale, a faint, resigned warmth, and then went cool.
I reach for the flow of energy the way I had before. Caught only a flicker. A trace. It works differently on objects. Filed that away.
I look at the hoodie.
It had changed. Subtly, but undeniably. Smaller; not like it had shrunk, but like it had been altered. The shoulders were narrower. The waist tapers inward with a quiet, deliberate curve. The hem had evened itself out.
It is, without question, a woman’s hoodie.
Tim stares at it. “Huh,” she says.
“Huh,” I agree.
Tim steps forward, eyeing the hoodie like it might bite. “Is it safe to touch?”
“Should be,” I say, poking the hoodie myself.
She picks it up, turns it over once, and pulls it over her head.
What followed was a brief, undignified battle.
Her hair catches immediately, tangled in the collar, then the sleeve, then somehow the collar again. The oversized button-down shirt bunches and clumps underneath in a way that defied the basic geometry of clothing. She emerges from the other side looking like she’d lost an argument with a laundry machine.
“Stupid hair,” she grumbles, attacking the tangles with both hands.
I hold back a smile. I hold it back with significant effort.
She straightens the collar. Smooths the front. Shakes her hair back from her face with the practiced flick of someone who had absolutely not been doing that for years. Then she planted both hands on her hips and looked down at herself.
A small, satisfied smile settled on her face. Genuine. Unguarded. The first one I’d seen that wasn’t attached to either panic or sarcasm.
“It fits perfectly,” she says with her hands on her hips. “It’s… wait.” She stretched the sleeve, rubbed the fabric between her fingers. “It feels brand new. Did it actually make it brand new?”
“Appears so.” I gave her two enthusiastic thumbs up. “Lookin’ good.”
She turns the smile off like a switch and directs a flat look at me instead. “Why, thank you, Quinn.”
Then she yawns. Long, helpless, jaw-cracking. Even her yawn is adorable.
However, her yawn makes me yawn. Immediately and without dignity.
We stood there, both blinking at each other through watering eyes.
“The adrenaline wore off,” I observe.
“Evidently.” She presses the back of her hand to her mouth through a second yawn. “Are you… do you need to go?”
“I was going to ask if I could crash on the couch, actually. It’s almost three. I’ll drive home on no sleep and end up in a ditch.”
She waves at the couch with the generous vagueness of someone already half asleep. “Sure. Whatever. We leave first thing.”
“One more thing first.”
Her eyes, which had been drifting toward closed, flicks open again. She looks at me the way you look at someone who keeps adding items to a list that was supposed to be finished.
“What?“
“Pajamas,” I say. “What do you normally sleep in?”
“…Shorts and a t-shirt.”
“Perfect. Can you grab those?”
The suspicious squint deepens. “Why?”
“Experiment.”
“You said one more thing. This better actually be the last thing.”
“Last thing,” I confirm. “I want to go to sleep too.”
She holds the look for another three seconds, decides she is too tired to argue, and shuffles toward the bedroom. “If this takes more than five minutes,” she calls back, “I’m leaving you in the hallway.”
Tim reappears from the bedroom holding a white t-shirt and black basketball shorts. She dropped them on the couch.
“You’re going to change these, too?”
“Yep. One second.”
The connection came faster again, almost impatient, like the box had been waiting. But when I touch it to the clothes, I feel something new beneath the warmth. Like before, a low, unmistakable irritation. The specific energy of someone being asked to do arithmetic when they know they’re capable of calculus.
It activated anyway. Cooled in my palm.
The t-shirt narrowed into a fitted tank top. The basketball shorts cinched and shortened into something that could, generously, still be called shorts.
Tim looks at the result with her arms crossed. “Okay. You proved you can do it twice. So what?”
“One more time.”
She opens her mouth to argue, but thinks better of it. I activate the box again.
The connection comes, but thinner. Tired. The box’s annoyance softens into something closer to resignation, the low-grade exhaustion of a professional being asked to stay late. It has one more in it. Barely.
I touch the outfit.
The tank top and shorts shift, blur at the edges, and merge. When they settle, the result is a short, low-cut nightgown in ivory silk. Delicate. Impractical. Incredibly sexy.
Tim stares at it.
“Really.“
“I didn’t choose it,” I say. “That was the box.”
“The box is a perv then.”
“Careful, the box might be listening. It might not want to change you back if you mock it.”
She gives me a look that could have curdled milk. Then, because I have never known when to stop, I say, “You could try it on. You know. Just to make sure it fits.”
“Quinn. I’m a guy.”
“I know. But, and hear me out, you’re currently a girl, and this is arguably the one window in your life where you can wear something like that without any social consequences whatsoever.”
The withering look intensifies. Then a yawn ambushes her completely, jaw-cracking and unstoppable, and the withering look dissolved into watering eyes and a slightly tragic expression.
“If I do this,” she says, “will you actually let me go to sleep?”
“Immediately.”
She snatches the nightgown off the couch without another word and disappears into her bedroom.
I sit on the arm of the couch and wait. The apartment hums quietly around me. Outside, the city carries on, indifferent to the fact that I was currently sitting in a stranger’s living room holding a supernatural artifact at 3 AM, waiting for a boy-turned-girl to try on a nightgown. My life is weird now.
The bedroom door opens.
“Well,” Tim’s voice comes first. “It fits.”
She steps out.
I make a focused, deliberate effort to keep my expression neutral. I fail immediately. The nightgown falls across her frame with an elegant economy, not revealing so much as suggesting, which is somehow considerably worse. The kind of outfit that understands exactly what it’s doing and has no regrets about it.
Tim leans against the hallway wall in a pose of studied casualness. She twirled a strand of hair around one finger and looked at me with a small, knowing smirk.
“Yeah,” she says. “I recognize that expression.” A beat. “It’s strange, being on this side of it.” She tilts her head, considering. “It’s almost… fun isn’t the right word. Empowering, maybe.” She waved a hand. “Doesn’t matter.”
Another yawn overtakes her, and just like that, the smirk softens back into exhaustion. She pushes off the wall and pads back to her room, and I become very interested in a point on the far wall that happens to be in the same direction as her swaying hips.
At the door, she glances back over her shoulder.
“You stay on the couch.” A pause, for emphasis. “Do not come into my room.”
The door clicks shut.
My legs, apparently done with the day, deposit me onto the couch without much input from the rest of me.
I sit there for a moment in the quiet. The lamp on the side table casts a low, warm glow across the ceiling. Outside, the city murmurs. The silver box sits in my pocket, cold and still and deeply, profoundly unhelpful. It feels distant; it probably wouldn’t work even if I tried again.
Today was unbelievably weird.
The couch, it turns out, was significantly more comfortable than my bed at home, which felt like the most normal thing that had happened in the last four hours.
My mind is still racing when I lie down, so I think it’d take a long time to actually fall asleep, but the moment my eyes close, I’m out like a light.
TheXtra Path 
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