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“Well you just touch the ring with both hands, and let your thoughts direct the flow of time as far back as you want to go. Then you’ll disappear from here and be wherever you were in the past.”

 “Thank you for letting me do this, and for saving me from Colleen’s tummy,” said Kenneth.

 “We were happy to do so,” said the princess, “She has eaten most of our people, all of them gone just like that, while she enjoyed them as a series of meals without feeling the slightest sense of discomfort herself. You may use the Ring as you see best now. Once you have vanished from this timeline, we shall use it ourselves.”

Kenneth held the ring with both of his hands and concentrated all of his will on having his timeline reversed back much further than the last two years, all the way back to a point when he was a junior high school year 8 student, the year that he estimated that Colleen would have been just starting her double degree at the university. This time he would meet her before he even left school, and he would tell her he loved her. It would be easy, knowing that she had let him kiss her in their reunion part of the original timeline. He would have years with her, before she perfected her reducing device and became a danger to him. After that, if he hadn’t found a way to sabotage her progress in designing and making the reducing machine, he would suddenly emigrate without a word and without a trace. She would never find him. He might even get a shot at removing her machine, if she didn’t know that he was aware of her intentions by having lived a previous timeline and read her manuscript.

The leprechauns watched Kenneth fade from sight, and then set about turning their timeline back two years only. They found themselves reappearing in their kingdom, with the cavern’s soil roof intact, the palace still there, and nobody from above aware of them. Colleen herself might well have been picnicing in the meadow, but had no idea that the objects of her mouth’s desire were living right under her.

The leprechauns who had used the ring retained their memory of the previous timeline, but were glad to see the prince and all the others still there, uneaten, and unaware.

The princess went to the prince and explained everything that had happened in the previous timeline, and the way that they had used the Ring of Reversal.

“If things go on the way they did before, then all we’ve done is buy ourselves back those two years,” said the princess, “Then she’ll find this place and eat most of us again, or even all of us this time.”

“We need to warn the people we know she shrank last time and will again this time, and we need to make sure we don’t make the same mistakes that confirmed our existence to her and led her to find and dig up our kingdom,” said the prince, “The first one we can help is Stanley, when she first meets him in the meadow.”

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