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With the holiday season and all its madness finally behind me I can finally get back to writing semi-regularly again. Not gonna lie, though, I wasn't really as excited for this episode, at least not as much as for those that ought to follow after.

This is amazing, I know very well that Inspiration can leave, and a story can die for that reason, so I hope that your Muse returns and brings more of this beautiful story

I like where this is going. Thanks for writing

Yeah it was. How could I not use it?

Wasn't that the name of the doctor in Dark City?

I don’t know why almost everyone else thought it was essentially omniscient and willing to provide any information desired. The evidence is strongly to the contrary. Read the original letter from grandfather and see what it says. “There is no limit to the number of times you can do this, as far as I can divine”, “How it works, or where it came from beyond that, I have no idea. All I can tell you is how it works and trust you to use it wisely.”, “This range I estimate at several miles, but I fear I have not been able to determine an exact figure.” - Does it make any sense grandpa would have said any of these things in his letter, if he could have wished for information? Really I think everyone else has been screwing up, both being lazy with the deus ex machina, and negligent in maintaining consistency, by having information being anything anyone can ask for at all. Now I have put asking for information into some story segments I have written myself but I think I have only done it at depths where someone else had already written that into the story already so I might as well not have a reason to refrain from it then.

I only said "fix" because JonKaryn still seemed very angry about what Karyn did, so I assumed they'd want to separate. A "subjective fix", let's call it. Sorry for not making it clear at all.

And The Lost Room is from 2006 and yet it’s still one of the best things I’ve ever seen. You shouldn’t limit yourself to the “new releases”, either here or otherwise.

As for the change in narration, even before the parts I wrote, it started in 1st person told by Jon, and then because of sloppiness was suddenly changed to third person, so I thought it would be interesting if that was because the narrator changed to JonSarah and so it became first person again once she became the active character, but then with that precedent perhaps it should go back to third person when they separate and back to first person for JonKaryn to be the narrator. It’s partially created out of a desire to make that first change of narration not just seem negligent but I think it worked out nicely.

“fix” is a strange relative subjective condition. Was it not in need of “fixing” before this chapter but now it needs to be fixed? Why is that, because it’s ok to turn the males into females but not vice versa because girls are good and boys are bad? Who needs to be fixed specifically and in what way? If the outcome was Jon and Karyn separate leaving them identical triplets except with Karyn having blonde hair and breasts and then got a surgical mastectomy and then Jon broke his friendship with Karyn and created a new one with his new bro Sarah would that not be a fix? Jon and Sarah could even recombine if they wanted because that was not wished for in the past tense. They could even set up a thing where they can merge and separate at will whenever they want just for fun. The only ones who definitely would be different than how they started would be Sarah and Karyn and they would just be reaping the consequences of their actions while Jon is the only one who never did anything bad to anyone and he would be back to normal. If you see this as being a big hole and much worse in a way other than Karyn ruining her relationship with Jon, isn’t that opinion just created out of an anti-male bias? Because that’s the only permanent change, Sarah and Karyn have had their genders changed, which is especially inconvenient for Karyn considering her first wish.

I find the narration PoV changes intersting. It's almost like the combined willpower of two people is strong enough to overpower the 3rd person narrator.

Anyway, I wonder where this one will go? How will they fix this? Can they even fix this?

I really miss this story. I hope one day you go back to it. Marry Christmas.

This sure has a lot to unpack doesn’t it.

Sarah dunking Karyn in a trash can is a reference to Shorts, in which Sarah’s counterpart Helvetica Black was always doing that to the main characters. Last name Black, hmmm, is that a coincidence or were they actually influenced by this website when they made that movie?

Why not just make him female?

How about a mom to some screaming toddlers and a breastfeeding infant?

Too bad his girl job didn't come with a female body so he could do a natural childbirth.

Aw, too bad Jon's job didn't start at the beginning of the pregnancy, so he could experience the entire thing.

You volunteering to write it @lifesmainantagonist? Open to PRs https://github.com/fictionbranches/fb

Apologies for the short chapter but I didn't want to define Mikey's actions in the previous chapter. I wanted people to be able to branch from there easily. <3

after use of web.archive.org and fixing the link to what it was at the time I was able to figure out the link you reference is now this: https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/15738 Maybe someone should have a bot look through all the links in the website and make them dynamically link to what the current address is?

Curious, most curious...

...oh wait, this was made a year ago. :/

oh it’s like the occupant from The Lost Room

Oh, the pain of not being willing to confess something to your parent(s)... 😕

@Great Sage: heh, no, I hadn't heard of that before, but it's interesting to read about - looks like it has roots in an old Estonian folktale: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Child_who_came_from_an_Egg

What if there’s a child of that branch which itself gets deleted and then there’s nothing? And does the existence of comments also prevent its deletion?

I second missing your contributions. Hope life allows.

I am floating around, been having some troubles lately, and been sucked in by another project. Will be returning to this soon.

I'd love to see Jon and Laura's story to continue

I didn't originally write this, just transferred it from the old version of the site. In some Zulo stories the medallion infers the purpose of a clothing item if it hasn't been worn before. In this case, really high heels might indicate they were designed for someone shorter than Sally's body.

I thought for sure some other woman was going to enter the house while he was upstairs, such as Karyn or his family members, and they would be caught in the crossfire and changed that way and stuck like that. A total missed opportunity there.

You left in a paragraph from the first one where he tricks Sarah which does not belong here, the paragraph starting with “In an instant, Jon's hand completely changed”. Jon’s hand isn’t changing here, he’s only changing Sarah.

48 hours? They had sex for 48 hours straight. In her own home with her parents home. Not as a result of a wish, that’s just their typical behavior. Because that’s just a believable thing that happens, sex for 48 hours. Did the writer just step off the spaceship from his own planet before writing this? The death by Snu Snu planet.

Of all the Switched Stones, the Donut Stone is probably the easiest to spot right away, given how different it looks from the normal stone. One would have to be in a dark room and making wishes in the dark to mistake it for the original stone.

I can see where you might feel the desire to do a branch with a 'nerfed' version of the original stone, given all it's capable of in other branches. Even with the range limitation and the 'wishes can't contradict previous wishes' restriction, the stone COULD be way too easy a solution to many of the problems the protagonists face. To the point where writers often have to found ways of keeping the stone out of the way until the magic chaos spreads to outside the stone's range. Or maybe an antagonist gets the stone and makes so many crazy wishes that by the time the protagonists get the stone back, there's such a big mess to clean up that they don't know where to start.

I'll be the first to admit that wishing for information can be a bit of a writing shortcut, but sometimes we end up resorting to it if it helps move things along faster. Of course the initial premise raises a lot of questions as to why Jon's grandfather didn't know the range of the stone and trusted Jon with it in the first place (and since a lot of branches involve Jon messing up with the stone and accidentally creating a big mess, people start wondering even more). But of course we do sometimes come up with some explanations for these.

Put another way, whereas the switched stone branch seems to be about the side effects taking the victims by surprise and them trying to deal with them if they figure out what happened and creating the additional quest of recovering the “true” stone, this is just about nerfing the original stone.

I have a clear idea for the motivation for the shadowy figure but I’m not sure if I should say it because it might function as a spoiler if anyone later uses it, and if anyone puts it in later please remove this comment admin, but the idea is, he’s been changed by the animal stone himself, and one can’t undo it with the primary stone unless one tricks two other people into ruining their lives or fully changing by the animal stone, sort of like the worst kind of chain letter.

I’m not sure if your comment is for me or for others but I literally just wrote a chapter in the switched stone section. https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/5192122

The motivation here is just that the stone is too powerful. It’s like in dbz where death itself carries no consequences because you can just wish everyone back. Also whoever has the stone is far too OP. Where some psychopath character whether it be Sarah McMillan or someone else is just unstoppable and there’s no real challenge or plausible way for them to fail in their evil ambitions. Well now they’re in for a surprise if they think they’re invincible with the stone. And the original letter from the grandfather does seem sloppy in its consideration, like he thought it could do anything and yet he didn’t know exactly what its range was, well why didn’t he wish for that information? Maybe the answer is one can’t wish for information, and he actually didn’t test it very well with high ambitions because he didn’t actually try to do anything outlandish with it and drastically overstated its capabilities.

This appears to be my branch, https://www.cyoc.net/interactives/chapter_212264.html, from another site. Is there a particular reason you are reposting it without attribution? Would you mind removing it and not copying my content in future?

The traditional root for branches like that, where someone gets the idea that few new rules or constraints on the wishing could lead to some extra fun, is the old classic Switched Stone episode, found here: ( https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/22496 ). But no offense, this episode kinda doesn't feel like that? It strikes me more as one of the handful where The Stone itself takes center stage, where the fun to be had is in daydreaming where it came from, how the magic works, what it's place in the cosmos is, etc. I've written a few episodes like that myself, in fact. In my experience, they don't tend to get as much traction, though. Readers and Writers seem to be more attracted to stories where Jon and co. come first and the Stone comes second, not the other way around.

It’s not a “theory” about the stone in general, it’s not a “phase”, it’s a branch with this additional set of constraints. That’s it. If you want to write from here, you play by these rules.

Looks like another author going through their "But how does the Stone ACTUALLY work!?" Phase. Maybe I/Someone should consolidate competing alternative theories in a single academic tome or something? Although I'm not sure how many people would care.

It starts with a fight, but I intend for some character growth and empathy along the way.. :)

Yes there should be a build-up... of the right length and quality. And the resolution shouldn't be too simple as well. Though you're one to talk Christine L: https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/46462 followed by https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/46463 followed by https://fictionbranches.net/fb/story/46466 I think I'd have preferred a swift resolution with truck-san to that. Anyway this current chapter is too far. I think a few chapters earlier would be the best place to continue from, but it just would seem so, non-canonical.