Now, I'll fast-forward through several years. I kept palling around with Emily, Kendra, and Millie. I kept going to church, doing well in school, and racking up badges in Girl Scouts. Whenever meetings or badge requirements called for skits, short stories, or poems to be written, I was the go-to girl. I began to put my Girl Scout work onto the Internet, along with stories of Ul disguised as reminiscences of Afghanistan or fiction on the Fall of Atlantis.
I kept bugging the Colonel and Dr. Ventnor about where you others were and when I could see you. You know the drill.
One change to my life was that the Colonel began to train me to use my gifts. He tested me to learn how much I could lift, how high I could jump, how well I could climb and swim, and how fast I could run. At my full speed, running shoes came apart around my ankles; then I had to stop because my soles tore up. They healed quickly, but they hurt.
He also tested how far and how accurately I could throw. The answer to those questions was, embarrassingly for me, "Far, but not accurately." When I first tried to throw a softball at a target on a side of the barn, the ball vanished from sight over the barn's roof. I learned from the Colonel's reaction to my toss that ROFL can describe real behavior. It felt good to me to make the Colonel laugh, even if he was laughing at me.
He also taught me skills from his special-forces manuals. I could sneak through woods, pick locks, rappel down walls, and cut phone lines with the best of them. Trusting soul that I was, I failed to wonder why a good Southern Baptist Girl Scout needed such skills.
Using them, I began to sneak out of the house at night and run throughout the Jackson Purchase. I ran barefoot to cut down on expenditures for shoes. As I got older, my feet hardened till I could run from Paducah to Mayfield and back, a distance of over forty miles, in ten minutes. Two hundred and forty miles an hour is a snail's pace by today's standards, but I was proud of it then.
Life went on. I almost forgot that I was a girl from another world, till the day when the crystals awoke.