"Maybe we should wait to test this ring," Max said as he put the ring down on Luke's bed. He quickly scribbled "LIFE AFTER PEOPLE" on a note and left it next to the ring. He then went back to the box and took the third ring from the third column. It was a simple ring, with a ruby and a sapphire set into it side by side. The shape of their setting resembled the infinity symbol.
"What do you think this one will do?" Max asked.
"Just put it on and we'll see," Mark replied.
Max put the ring on his finger, then waited for something to happen. It was a while, and it soon began to get to Max. He did not want to waste his turn to test a ring if the ring did nothing.
"Is it a dud?" Mark asked with a bit of a mocking tone.
"Well," Max said in a slightly-irritated tone, "maybe you could wear it and--"
But before Max could finish, Luke and Zack dropped their jaws and widened their eyes. As Max looked at his brother and friend, he thought that it looked as though his vision was changing--as though his head was getting lower. At first, he thought the ring's effect was to shrink the wearer, but that was before his red shirt covered his eyes. Max wasn't getting shorter; his head was sinking into his body! But he realized that he couldn't feel anything below his neck. It was as though he was nothing but a head, passing through a tube of..blue fabric? Max's shirt was red, not blue. But now, his head was rising through a tube of blue fabric. He had stopped noticing his surroundings as he realized that he felt like nothing but a head, but had his shirt somehow changed color? No, there must be something else going on. Then, light flooded his eyes--his head was coming out of the shirt! Max took a breath and looked to see--Luke's room, but something was different. When his head sank, he was standing opposite the bed, with Luke, Mark, and Zack in front of him from his left to his right. Now, he was standing in front of the bed, looking towards the mirror, and Zack and Luke were facing away from Max and had switched positions. But it didn't look like they had even moved. Mark was still in the middle of Max's view, but he looked as though he had just gone through something himself, because he kept feeling his--red shirt?
"Max, are you okay?" Zack asked Mark.
"Why are you asking him?" Max asked.
Luke turned around and said to Max, "What do mean, Mark?"
Confused, Max answered, "Luke, you know that I'm Max."
"What?" Luke asked.
Before Luke could answer, Mark shouted, "Of course he's Max! I'm Mark!"
After a while, the four managed to get the story straight. Apparently, the ring switches the head of its wearer with that of another. The reason it switched Max's head with Mark's was because Max had [sarcastically] wished in his head that Mark could be in his shoes. Since the ring was now on Mark's hand since Mark's head was now on Max's original body, Mark was the one who took the ring off. When he did, the twins' head sank back into their shirts and rose up again on their own bodies. Once again, Max was the one with the ring.
"Well, THAT is interesting," Luke said.
"Hey, something just occurred to me," Zack said. "When Luke was wearing the hydra ring, he had three heads. We don't know how or even if the wearer can get more heads, but what would happen if someone went through a head-swap with a hydra? Would all the hydra heads swap out to end up as one head on the other body, and the other head sprout up as many on the hydra body? Or would it involve just one hydra head? Or...?"
"We could test that later," Mark interrupted.
"Maybe you could do it on one of your turns later," Max said to Zack. "We should figure out what the rest of these rings do first."
"Yeah," Luke agreed. "Counting that "life after people" ring that Max didn't actually try on, there are still twenty-nine rings to go!"
"Well, it is my turn now," Zack said. As Max left his ring and a "HEAD SWAP" note on the bed, Zack went to the desk to look in the box for a ring to choose.