"Remember, everyone but usthinks that this is the way I've always been." Amazing," Bryan mused, "Simply amazing. Something that can alter thevery fabr...c of reality has to be unimaginably powerful." More powerful than the one ring?" Dave asked with a grin"I wouldn't go that far," Ali laughed."Do you guys want to try it out?" Charlene asked, holding the ring outfor any of her friends to take. All of them stared at it but none ofthem made a move to reach for it. "I can't believe you're all. Well, except for Holly and Becky, who seemed to be lost in a world of their own.Laura started to go over to them, but I pointed her to go back to her place.In two strides I was right next to them. I bent over and got a grip on a handful of Holly’s hair and used it to get her up to her knees, while at the same time reaching down and doing the same with Becky’s hair with my other hand, which she had never seen coming as her eyes were tightly shut while still riding out the latest peak that she. And we didn't have to have the aliens drive us around, either, as long as we used the shuttles.The correct answer, of course, was something halfway between the two. What we really needed was something that had a hyperdrive but was much smaller than the freighters, maybe something that held a hundred passengers, and had the acceleration of the shuttles. That would drop the whole trip to a half hour to leave Earth's HEZ, plus a few seconds in hyperspace, plus a couple of hours to get through. After my father parked the van in the driveway, I prepared to unload my belongings. It would take multiple trips because of some poor planning. I ended up stashing my clean laundry in one bag, the dirty stuff in another, and we also brought a cooler with leftover fish from the trip to surprise my mother with. It reminded me that I wasn’t nearly as strong as my father. The bags that he easily carried into the van earlier that day, were so heavy that I could barely even lift them. It hadn’t even.