Keely Teslow walking down Decatur Street for the Diffy House was a bit of a hazard for the denizens of Pickford. She was a young beautiful teenager, but maybe a bit more attractive than she was aware of. Her long blonde hair bounced over the shoulders of her dark sweater and her feet danced with a regal air as men both young and old noticed her. Young boys of five and eight wanted to marry her while older men beyond her years wished they were young again but for the luxury of going to school with her. As parents feared what sort of beauty she was blossoming into, Keely's male peers looked with bitter jealous realizing she only had eyes for young and dashing Phil Diffy, another handsome young adult from H.G. Wells High School. As Keely advanced on the Diffy House, the twelve-year old paperboy mooned over her and slammed through a high hedge. Mr. Simms delivering merchandise to his retail store drive over an open manhole and smashed through the bus bench on the curb. Mrs. Anton began clobbering her husband for watching Keely vanish into the Diffy House. A fellow student named Perry Willows smashed his new car into Mr. Simms' truck while wondering why only good-looking people dated each other even as he considered himself a decent guy.

"Hi, Mr. Diffy." Keely entered the front hall of the Diffy House before Phil's father. "Is Phil ready for school?"

"Yeah," Lloyd was sipping a cup of Wizard-generated Martian coffee and gasping pleasingly from its taste. "He's still up in his room."

"Oh," Keely barely stepped forward then looked back. "Uh, you guys aren't upset that I stowed away in the time machine and ruined your chances of returning to your own time?"

"What? No…" Lloyd wanted to remove that thought from her mind. "I… I mean - we love it here. Barbara and I have never felt closer; Phil really loves being with you, and Pim… Well, Pim… You know, Pim, she really…" Lloyd started lightly breathing through his teeth. "I'd steer clear of her room if I was you."

"Check!" Keely mused and postured a bit with that suggestion. On the surface, the Diffys were the typical American family, but under it, there was a grand secret that only she was privy to under their roof. At first, it seemed impossible and incredibly unlikely that they were time-travelers stranded here from the future, but then she saw their gadgets from their time - wonderful gadgets yet to be invented for making life in the future more tolerable. The Wizard seemed to be some sort of data retrieving matter-manipulating creation that Phil often used as a phone or as a source for holograms. He had goggles that induced virtual-reality surroundings and an object called the transmorph for shapeshifting into other ages or different people, and then there was the hover-pod, an anti-gravity sled that could circumvent the planet. Keely wasn't sure how she avoided burning up in the friction at high speed, but Phil understood it. All the Diffys were blessed intellectually, but they were a bit ignorant with her turn-of-the-Twenty-first-century customs and traits. When Keely had first met Phil, he was stuck in clothes from the 1970s, but after soon after some initial reluctance and half-interested prodding, she had learned the truth. It was both fascinating and sometimes exciting even if she often forget how far ahead in time they had come from. While she often watched the Diffys muse confusingly over the barbecue and dishwasher, she realized what it might have been like if she was suddenly stranded in the Fifteenth or Seventeenth Centuries.

"Hey…" She looked up to Phil tying up his sneakers. "Got the cigarette box out. More money to get those tickets."

"Aly and AJ here we come." Phil grinned excited and reached under his mattress for the money they had been saving for the concert tickets. A few dollars here, a bill here, it was now adding up to get the tickets to see the teen singing stars. Aly and AJ were very big stars to them and something as iconic in Phil's memory of Twentieth Century celebrities. He'd never seen the series that Aly had done nor had he seen any of the eleven movies they were going to do, but through Keely, he had become quite a fan of their work.

"Now up to about three hundred and fifty," Phil added to their stash. "A bit more and I can score us backstage passes."

"Oh god, oh god!!!" Keely was getting excited at just the idea of meeting the sisters. "I can't wait. I've got so many questions for them! This is going to be so great!"

"Yeah!"

"You know, Phil," Keely lightly bit her lip and beamed a bit inflated with her own ego. "Some people have said I even look a bit like Alyson Michalka." Hearing that, Phil slowly lifted his head up to her disbelievingly.

"What?"

"No, I'm not kidding!" This was a big thing for Keely to be compared to a big time former Disney actress and now popular singing star. "I was over in Hansentown shopping and some kids my age came up to me and wanted my autograph! It was so cool!!!" She was grinning and cheering for herself with wide-open hand gestures. "I mean, look at me with my head up, don't you think I look exactly like her! Just picture me with my hair as long as her!"

"Maybe you have a…" Phil just didn't see it, but he couldn't break her heart. "Passing similarity."

"Phil…" Keely was feeling her emotional bubble busted. "Come on, okay, let me borrow that transmorph thing of yours to increase the length of my hair. I swear, you'll think I was her."

"You know, Keely," Phil lifted his pack up to the corner of his desk and began zipping it up. "Sometimes I think you only like me for my future gadgets."

"Phil, that's so totally not true!" Keely tried to keep her patience with him and tried appealing to his ego. "Why I bet with you by my side, someone might think you're that Nicky Ruleman."

"His name is Ricky Ullman." It scared Phil a bit that he even knew that. "Keely, the transmorph isn't meant to be a toy."

"You've used it for far less." Keely pointed out.

"Yeah," Phil reared up his pack to his shoulder. "But we got to get to school. It'd take me too much time to show you how to work it." He advanced on her thinking she was right behind him, but Keely instead had other ideas. She'd used his other gadgets before under times of duress. How hard could it be?

"I swear," She picked the transmorph up out of a bedside drawer. "Sometimes, he just frustrates me…" She glanced over the settings, twisted a dial a second and looked for Phil to keep from being surprised. He was already down the hall and heading down the stairs. As Phil's feet pounded the wood steps, his mother looked up from the kitchen to wish him luck in school. Lloyd was earning extra cash by doing repair work on a neighbor's toaster at the table.

"I'm gone with Keely." Phil waved back to his parents and then noticed he was Keely-less. Looking back for her behind him, his ears instead heard the sound of cracking and crunching. In the ceiling of the living room, several cracks streaked outward from the center dropping dust and pieces of drywall. A later ceiling chunk hit the coffee table and the overhead support beams groaned over their heads as a terrific weight filled the upstairs.

"Oh no," Barbara Diffy fretted over her clean house. "Lloyd, get Curtis. Those time machine parts stored in Phil's room exploded again!"

"They couldn't have!!" Lloyd responded slowly perplexed. "I stored them in the attic!"

Dropping his pack, Phil was rushing to see the damage to his room. He was hoping his drum set had escaped damage and prayed it would not be a repeat of him living with their pet caveman in the garage. Bounding up the front stairs, he rounded around the top banister and slid to a stop. The entire second floor had warped under the stress impact occurring in his room. He came to a stop and stood in his doorway and looked up and then up again. His face was oddly complacent to what he was looking at. He should have been upset, but it actually more of his typical response to the sort of things he experienced living in this century.

Keely's head turned distractedly realizing she was being watched and what had happened. The room hadn't shrunk around her; she had been increased in size. Instead of giving herself longer flowing locks, she had increased all of herself to somewhere around eighteen to twenty feet tall. Confined in Phil's room, she was sitting on the far side of the room with her back bent down and her head down between her knees. Her pole-sized left arm was pinned under her legs as her right hand felt around for the transmorph knocked from her hands to the floor. Her perfect features scowled embarrassingly and grunted as her head rubbed against the light fixture in her hair. Phil just looked up at her trying not to be an "I-told-you-so" but he had told her not to try using the transmorph.

"You do remind me of someone." He finally cracked half-serious. "Alice in Wonderland - Through the Looking Glass." He referred to the scene in the Lewis Carroll novella where Alice had grown from the magic cookies.

"Step over here and say that…." Keely mumbled rolling her eyes.