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This story was from https://thechangingmirror.com/phpbb/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=2553

And it was Rewritten by me. Although it was bad grammar and misspelling from the start as I managed to fix it, I hope you guys are okay with it. Plus, feel free to add and comment.

Might be the best. Definitely the dumbest. I'm here for every synthesized beat

Zelo, thanks for the comment. Anyway, Athena's involvement was set up by the previous writer, who left off over a decade ago. To those following this branch from the beginning, it's sort of a 'Reverse Whodunnit' where the audience already knows 'whodunnit' and the suspense revolves around when others in the cast will figure out who did what to who. To those picking up from where Athena becomes the protagonist, it's more of a regular whodunnit. But in both cases, there's still some mystery: We don't yet know who the various Stone Switchers are - we just know there are at least six of them in this branch, and each has their own yet to be revealed motive for seeking the Original Stone. And we also don't know some of the other consequences of the wishes yet.

I'll admit I messed up a bit with the one wish for Laura Mathis to be returned. That implies that the owner of the Omission Stone found the original stone, when in this branch it was the owner of the Charity Stone who found Jon and switched the stones. But that's easy enough to explain: Jon's not the only one who got the stones switched on them. Shortly after the Charity Stone holding Stone Swticher took the Original Stone from Jon, the Omission Stone owner found the former Charity Stone holding Stone Switcher and stole the Original Stone from them, leaving them with the Omission Stone. This will probably come up in the story if it becomes important.

Anyway, I have some ideas for some further revelations and twists involving what's going on in Lake Point. But anyway, glad you're enjoying it.

I started reading this branch around when Athena became the main character, so I'm actually at the same page as her, discovering stuff at the same time as she does. Gotta say, it's pretty interesting.

A fitting end, but the wishes totally contradict, especially when the victim is specified by name, but then again maybe Sarah was just renamed to have many names and the subject of all the wishes made in 2nd person, I guess that’s maybe plausible. But I like the end with the lab where they are studying her as an alien specimen.

So weak. A bad dream? This is the appropriate time to literally send Sarah to hell for all eternity.

Originally, both this and the previous episode were going to be the same episode, but it was getting a bit long and I thought it would be better if the reading of the list happened in another episode.

Those who've read the very first episode of YAWYW carefully know that Jon made a few wishes prior to showing Karyn the stone and turning the branch blue. It was implied those wishes were minor, nothing major, so in my speculation of those wishes, I made them similar to the wishes about the branch.

Anyway, I had fun writing all those wishes for the list. I figured there'd be plenty of wishes made, and not all of the other stones' wishes would be about finding the original stone.

Well that was a crummy ending! And I guess after this much time, probably neither wokka nor hyral will come back to finish it. Either one of them I could accept as a canonical authority.

lifesmainantagonist - Well, it may comfort you to know that there are some branches where the antagonists end up facing consequences while some protagonists begin work on cleaning up the messes. Of course, anyone can have the tables be turned on the antagonist. But of course it's more satisfying if there's a build-up leading to it, instead of it coming so sudden that it's like 'And then the antagonist crossed the street and was hit by a truck'.

This is quite possible the best and stupidest thing I've ever written. Here's a link to Aha - Take On Me

The problem is that all the ‘writers’ don’t have any ambition to actually have the story reach a resolution, they just have whatever conflict is in progress continue for another chapter and have Sarah torturing everyone and then they leave and someone else comes along and does the same thing and it drags on and on and on. This thing needs an ending and honestly I think the best way for it to end is for someone to take her by surprise, like someone who survived their ordeal and knows she’s a monster but has freedom of action, maybe one of the students from the first class after giving the teacher-turned dog a command, leaves school and returns with a gun and then shoots her in the head from behind. And then, after she’s dead, then everyone has to make sense of things and pick up the pieces and to figure out the situation they eventually go to her home and find Jon and Karyn, Jon being mentally incapacitated, but Karyn shrunken but able to tell them what is going on, and then they can finally resolve things with the stone taken off of Sarah’s corpse, the end. The story needs an ending and it needs someone with the ambition to actually do it. I’m tired of almost all of them ending like this, just this indefinite status quo of Sarah torturing everyone or some other horrible situation of some sort that never ends because new people just come along and all they do is just continue what’s already happening with more of the same.

@lifesmainantagonist the stone is gone. Karyn asked Jon's family if they had seen it.

Thanks for adding. You're #1

Well, I left the comment partly to reassure you that yes, it DID get noticed. You've got some interesting starting posts here, and I don't want them overlooked, so I'm doing what I can to help.

Thank you. With all the posts I didn't think it would get noticed :)

Funnily enough in the German game The Dark Eye, there is a thing called Egg-born, I believe it is from maybe Slavic or Germanic folklore? Anyway, it refers to a type of Witch that is born from an Egg, they are unusually beautiful and charismatic and age much slower than normal humans, I chose this option for my Raven Witch character because I thought it sounded fun, now I am wondering if this is the basis for this world's egg laying humans, in this alternative reality, has the mythical egg born become a fact of life for many women? Probably not but it is fun to speculate on this , for me :D

12 views since Feb 2001, wow in the low traffic region of this website now

Bored aliens messing with humans? This has some potential.

Special thanks to Mattisguy for helping to inspire parts of this episode, particularly the discussion of Scarlett's last name.

Anyway, Scarlett's been turning up in various branches here and there, and I thought I'd elaborate on her status as a mentor for Athena. This seemed like a good branch to do it, as Athena needed someone to talk to who might help her to at the very least find out what happened.

Loved how I was able to post an episode set mostly in the Occult Store on the day before Halloween. I'll probably have more in this branch some time after Halloween, but for now, the 'Eureka' moment is a good place to leave off until next time.

That's a very petty suggestion. Very small-minded premise. Gender role reversal, please. That's extremely specific and it's your interest personally, obviously. The reason the "you are what you wish" story is an intriguing starting point (and better than your plan) is because it could be anything, do anything. It has unlimited potential, not constrained to be one thing. Now it's not the only possible thing that could be like that. The beginning of Futurama also comes to mind. Guy gets frozen, wakes up in the distant future and things are very different. Again, unlimited potential, with no specific plot hook required. I don't know, maybe someone should put that in the drafting board? Call it "Butcherama" or something in deference as a head nod to the fact that it's not a new idea but goes in a completely different direction? But that's the direction that any such template seed story should take. It should allow for the part 2 to be anything. I mean there's also vast displacement in space premise, not just time. So the "Farscape" template in addition to the Futurama one, not that it's actually fundamentally different. And the Japanese "isekai" premise, but they make it horrible by always making it exactly the same thing, namely always a swords and sorcery universe which behaves exactly like a video game (though there's no reason it needs to be that, just a completely other reality with no constraints like that). But almost anything else, would be so provincial, so specific and inevitably would be too constraining people lacking that particular interest/fetish to write about something they don't want to write about.

This is absolutely amazing. I can't wait to see this be built into more of a world.

Welp, there it is. I didn't pick up any of the hints about what it would be, but it was pretty clear that Jon was missing something about what Nadine was saying, that there was something different about Nadine that Jon wouldn't think was normal.

Eggcellent chapter

Someone had to :)

I think it's weird that he did just one. Even if someone had stopped me playing with it, I think I would have either made the other one match or put the one back before continuing.

Thank you! And sorry...
I had intended this story to be just another horny and silly trait swapping/acquiring adventure, but it just kind of snowballed into something else. Hopefully once I get a couple more chapters posted you can hop back into the story and enjoy Jo's journey. After all, she still has to get her stone back from Sarah.

Yes, we've been laying hints throughout the narrative here ;)

"Madison!! Did you lay this egg?!"😝

Jojokes aside, this was NOT what I expected. I thought Joni really would be "an entirely normal girl". That sure is "something interesting", alright.

Oh wow, I just realised: this explains why Zoe was so pissed off earlier. She wasn't on a particularly bad period. She was laying an egg (or three)! And those remarks about Nadine... calling her a "hen", her calling herself "special"... it all makes sense now! I wonder what else I missed while skimming through previous chapters? There seemed to be some focus on the food Joni was eating, but I'm not sure if that's related to eggs. And, of course, not to mention the stuff from this chapter before The Reveal™.

Thanks :) "Twistedly wholesome" was my entire desideratum for this one - and really pretty much for my writing in general. It all comes from growing up with "The Far Side," I s'pect...

It's actually tremendously impressive to me how you can make an utterly mundane slice of life story and this ultra bizarre concepts like egg laying work so seamlessly well together so often.

Also has Jon been walking around naked in the bottom half of his body all this time? And he’s just ok with that? It kind of didn’t mention that little detail but it seems kind of important now.

I'll have you know that I actually stopped reading this branch because it was making me feel too "weird" and sad (to the point that even just reading the titles triggered these feelings). Which... I suppose means you did a great job at making an engaging story with a likable character.

So yeah, keep it going👍

I copied and pasted the last paragraph from the previous episode, to give this continuation a bit of context. Since this cliffhanger had been there for over a decade teasing how Athena might be the key to making things better for those affected by the horrific outcome of the Charity Stone's wishes, I thought it okay to write my take on where the story might go from there.

I couldn't resist including references to McMillan Tech Industries characters I introduced in my Transformation Guns stories (just about everyone except Richard McMillan and Samantha Duncan made their first Fiction Branches appearances there. Lake Point High School's drama club student and critic Starla Stanfield also debuted there, and has gone on to play a significant role in my Wishing Coins episodes). And it made sense to me that Samantha Duncan and her friends from Research and Development would be among those trying to stop the disaster before it happened.

I also managed to work in a way for both the Gibson and Madison surnames for Jon and Zoe's family to co-exist.

Anyway, I'll probably get back to this soon, as I already have an idea as to who Athena could contact to find out more about how the current situation came to be. That person is another already existing quasi-canon character who we don't see very often.

There are 3 things here now that I think about it that may be seen as errors. Jon should get two changes if he makes the wish and he is one of the objects of the wish. The bicycle was just a bicycle and though it was theoretically for him he was just creating a bicycle and it wasn’t affecting his person. The second thing is, what “stone” is “from the time we both saw the stone” referring to? The animal stone? If so, Karyn shouldn’t remember him not having a pouch because that was before she first saw it. He didn’t say “the first stone”, he just said “the stone” and the animal stone should have taken it to be referring to itself, but it had apparently interpreted it to mean the first stone for some reason. Of course Jon didn’t know there were 2 stones at the time but if making a wish about “the stone” without being specific the current stone should assume it’s referring to itself. And the third thing is that he wished for a brand new bicycle. So it shouldn’t have retconned the bicycle into his life 3 months earlier. It may have been new 3 months ago but if he wishes for a new bicycle it should be a new bicycle when he wishes for it. I guess these may seem like nitpicky things but if I see something well written otherwise but missing on such details I just wanted to leave a note for the writer should he by any chance ever see it.

A recipe for disaster? I think so, too. After reading a lot of the branches involving the Obvious Stone and the Proximity Stone and seeing the trouble THOSE stones cause, I was wondering what would happen if you had a combination of those stones. This episode is the starting point for many possibilities as to what could happen as a result of someone using the Obvious Proximity Stone.

A recipe for disaster for sure.

What, no one got the idea of him making a wish, it going wrong and him wishing that he knew what was happening and then forgetting all about the stone. Or at least that’s what happened in a similar situation here: https://www.deviantart.com/samusemblem/art/The-Opposite-Day-Genie-183720189

How do shoes make him shorter?

Why would changing someone's shoe size do anything to their height?

I guess it made her more evil and less intelligent since the most likely explanation (even if it’s incorrect) is that he had her in his room to fix her problems as a pleasant surprise when she woke up.

all 3 of them are the same thing and this one has turned into pure cancer

@lifesmainantagonist Indeed, this is one of the darker scenarios within Fiction Branches. As far as the Charity Stone goes, its function is to give a free wish to whoever was a target of a wish someone made while holding the Charity Stone (free wish meaning they don't have to be holding the Charity Stone, or know it exists, or be anywhere in its immediate vicinity, for their wish to be granted). So even though the name of this particular imitation of the wishing stone might SOUND nice, wishes made from it don't necessarily have to have nice outcomes. Like the regular wishing stone, poorly thought out wishes can lead to dangerous consequences.

Let's hope so... Jo seems like a good person, with a surprisingly horrible curse.
Btw when I started writing this in 2022, I had no idea that things would work out this way. But the more I write and think about Jo's situation the more this turns into a Monkey's Paw story.

very brutal continual rewriting of history; the charity stone wasn’t very charitable

Will she ever find happiness? 😭

@lifesmainantagonist I suppose, since he specifically used the word "wish", the stone could've interpreted it as "wishing with the stone" - normally you can't make contradictory wishes, but this would allow you to bypass thar limitation. At least that's the only explainaition I could think of that would prevent what you said from happening.

On a semi-related note, I'm surprised how well-written and entertaining this is, considering the strange, (most likely) fetish-fueled concept. I guess it's the execution that counts, not the idea.