The box had come from his aunt, or more accurately his late aunt. She had been a loveable but peculiar old bird, never marrying, spending all of her spare time and income traveling wherever her fancy took her. Over the years she had filled every corner of her little bungalow with an incredible collection of what he always though of, fondly, as junk. It was mostly trinkets and exotic objects that caught her eye during her travels. She had never written much of a will, so after her death the family gathered and sifted through her collection, each taking anything that interested them or that held special meaning, and giving away the rest to charity or the land fill, whichever was appropriate.

Jack was still surprised that this particular family meeting had happened with no bloodshed, much less any major arguments, over who got what. Ultimately he had come away with only a few items. Most of them were simple things that held some personal sentiment connected with his aunt.

The box, though, was an exception. It was about six inches wide by two inches tall by three inches deep. It was covered by an incredibly detailed inlay of different types and shades of wood. He had picked it based solely on its beauty, and hadn't noticed until he got it home that the lid was locked. In searching for a latch or keyhole he discovered that the inlay pieces moved. They seemed to actually be some sort of puzzle, kind of like the tile puzzles he had as a kid where you s.h.i.+fted around the tiles to order them in a number sequence or to form a picture. This puzzle was much more complicated, though. Each piece was about half an inch square, making for 48 pieces to arrange on the lid.

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That might not have been so bad, but it wasn't long before he discovered that the pieces could be s.h.i.+fted from one side of the box to another and over the seam between the lid and the body of the box. He had yet to figure out how that worked, but basically it left him with a 6-sided puzzle of some 287 pieces that could only be s.h.i.+fted one at a time, and no idea of what the finished puzzle should look like. So, after a couple of weeks playing with the box his wonder at its workings and hopes of solving its puzzle and actually opening it had mostly faded.