Alanna's Powers, Chapter One

A remarkably strong young woman
Update: 21/09/1997 to misc2

	Within the animal kingdom are breeds of cats which can run at speeds close to 100 miles 
per hour or crush the skull of another animal in their powerful jaws. Certain primates can hang 
from trees with two fingers and pull themselves from branch to branch with one arm while carrying 
one or two of their youngsters. Bears can lift large cars loaded with people. Some have speculated 
that it is possible for humans to be created with some of these same genetic gifts. I have never 
speculated; I know from my own experience that this type of genetic variation is possible. My 
younger sister, Alanna, had two strange phenomena about her. The first is that she was born with a 
strength that can only be described as prodigious. I am aware of very few men and no women who 
can brag of accomplishing the feats she has accomplished, but which are a well kept secret due to 
our upbringing in an old fashioned family whose old time values she has carried with her to this 
day.
	My father was a religious military man with definite values about a woman's role in the 
world. Don't get me wrong. He was not really a male chauvinist pig, but he wanted his daughter 
wearing dresses, having a family in a nice house, and following in the feminine traditions of 
America's past. Despite his seeming backwardness, he was a loving dad who doted on his beautiful 
daughter. Alanna was devoted to her father and followed his wishes as well as she could to the 
extent that she was naive about a great many things and unaware of her strength until relatively late 
in her life. By that time her own values were formed in such a way that, although she was not 
ashamed of her power, she did not want to showcase it. For the most part she has spent her life 
avoiding situations in which she would dominate or embarrass the men she has known or come in 
contact with, but there have been times when this has been unavoidable.
	Her brother Jeff and I were oblivious of her strength, though looking back on it, we 
should have noticed that she was different than the other girls. Indeed, she was different, even at a 
young age, than most people. She was not able to leap tall buildings or lift huge weights as an 
infant. That is cartoon stuff. Even a young cheetah can not run as fast as its parents. However, its 
parents are as fast as cheetahs, and Alanna's parents, brothers, classmates, and acquaintances were 
humans. 	
	I don't mean to suggest that Alanna wasn't human. She had all the characteristics of a 
young girl. In her youngest years she was a very pretty little girl who wore pink dresses and bows 
in her hair. In her teen years she was a heartbreaker, incredibly sexy looking but unaware of her 
effect upon boys, and she grew into an incredibly beautiful woman with thick shoulder length 
brown hair, dark eyebrows, and exquisitely attractive eyes. 
	Her physique did little to suggest that she was the possessor of anything beyond ordinary 
physical capabilities.She looked like an unusually attractive suburban woman. Although she had 
quite a bit more muscle than most women, she looked more like a tall gymnast or an enthusiastic 
tennis player who goes to the health club twice a week than she looked like a bodybuilder. That is, 
she looked ordinary until a few minutes after she would begin to lift or to strain herself physically. 
	I qualify this because the other strange phenomenon about her was the extraordinary 
amount her muscles would expand after strenuous exertion. People who work out frequently 
experience a "pump" in which their muscles fill with blood and appear to expand. However, in all 
my experience I never saw anything quite like Alanna's pump. Perhaps it was this capacity for 
muscle expansion which allowed for her enormous strength. If more oxygen could be brought to 
the muscle fibres, that might allow them to be stronger. It is impossible to know for sure, but I have 
digressed.
	As I started to say, my brother and I ought to have noticed her strength earlier than we 
did, but we weren't always as observant as we might have been. Moreover, our father kept her, as 
much as possible, away from our wrestling and football matches. That was boy stuff. The first sign 
that Alanna was unusually strong came when she was about eight or nine. 
	My mother had a tradition at holiday time of putting walnuts, pistachio nuts, and peanuts 
out in bowls for us to munch on as we watched the Christmas specials and the football games that 
were always on the TV. I loved walnuts as did Jeff, and one night the conversation turned to their 
relative merits in comparison with other nuts. 
	Alanna difinitively announced, "I don't like walnuts."
	"What!" I exclaimed.
	"I don't like walnuts. I like peanuts."
	"I like peanuts too, but walnuts are better."
	"No they're not. They hurt my hands."
	"Oh!" I said, thinking this was the dumbest thing I had ever heard. 	"Why, do the 
splinters get under your nails when you pick at the peices after cracking them?"
	"No, it hurts my hands to crack them."
	I just figured she had wimpy hands and that the nutcracker hurt her hands. The truth was 
obvious, but I did not see it. It wasn't until later that I realized she was cracking them in her hands. 
You see her hands were strong enough to crack the nuts, but her flesh was still the soft flesh of an 
young child. A year or two later I figured it out when I saw her grab a hand full of walnuts. She 
held the bowl of walnuts in her left hand, and one at a time took them in her right hand and cracked 
them between her thumb and the two strongest fingers of her hand the way an experienced short 
order cook cracks eggs. 
	Later, when everyone else had gone to bed, I tried it myself. I figured that it must not be 
that hard, but I did not want to risk embarrassment in case it was. I took one nut and could not 
break it. Figuring that I had a faulty nut I put it back and tried another one. Still no luck. I tried a 
few more. Then I tried squeezing them between two hands, then smashing them on the counter 
with one hand. I got some major bruises on the heels of both hands, but nary a scratch on any of 
the walnuts. Finally, I resorted to the nutcracker, but I was a shaken young man. But perhaps it was 
all an illusion; perhaps she had put fake walnuts into the bowl. 
	Just then she bounded down the stairs to get a late night glass of milk. I was standing next 
to the walnuts, looking at them stupidly.
	"Hey, Alanna, do you want a walnut," I asked, tossing her one.
	"Sure," she said. "They go really well with milk, and you were right. They are better than 
peanuts. The best thing is they don't hurt my hands any more."
	"No!?"
	"Nope!" she exclaimed, and then cracked it snappily between her figers as I had seen her 
do before.
	"Do you always crack them with your fingers?" I asked.
	"Yup,"
	"You never use a nutcracker?"
	"Nope, well, only when Mum and Dad are around. It's the polite thing to do, but it seems 
like a waste of time. It's so much easier to do it with my fingers, especially since it doesn't hurt 
them any more."
	Now I was really shaken. I knew there was something unusual about my then eleven year 
old sister, and the amazing thing was that she didn't even know. I also knew her hands were a 
whole lot stronger than mine.  What else could she do with those hands I wondered? What if the 
rest of her was as strong as her hands were? Suddenly I remembered a few other strange things 
which had occurred over the previous years and that had remained unexplained, but that is for a 
different story.