"Hey, what the heck is this?" Jon examined the change the shop owner had given him in his hand.
"Er, a coin?" Karyn asked sarcastically.
"Har har," Jon sneered. "It's not an American coin though. In fact I've never seen anything like it."
"Let me see that," Karyn grabbed the mysterious coin from her friend.
The coin was very worn and lacked any kind of denomination on either side. One side - the face side, Karyn assumed - simply had an intricate but eroded engraving of a woman's face, staring straight out from the face of the metal. What remained of her features were very beautiful, and she had a discrete smile. Engraved on the other side of the coin - the tail side, by default - was a simple geometric spiral that coiled out to fill the entire face.
After a minute of inspection, Jon enquired, "So?"
"It's new to me," Karyn relented.
Jon took the coin back and stared at it in thought for a moment.
"Maybe," he spoke at last, "you could... guess?"
"What do you mean? What good would that do?"
"Guess what this coin is, you never know-"
"-I might be right?" Karyn smiled and tapped her Pendant of Fortuity knowingly.
"Exactly."
"Okay then," Karyn geared herself up, "I guess it's a... a magical coin? That grants wishes, maybe?"
"You think?"
"How should I know??" Karyn replied incredulously. "Give it a try!"
"I dunno, I think maybe you've had wishes on the brain since the business with that rock-"
"Just wish for something, Jon! Let's find out!"
"Okay, here goes," Jon looked around, then looked down at himself, then decided what to wish for. "I wish that my shirt was blue."
They waited a moment, but nothing at all happened to Jon's red t-shirt.
"Well, I guess I was wrong," Karyn said, finally.
"Yeah, guess so," Jon replied, putting the coin in his pocket. "I'll take a look at it at home. I've got a book on rare coins, I can try and find it in there."
"Sure, why not?" Kayrn sighed. "That was a nice idea though, using this necklace. So what shall we do now?"
"Well," Jon grinned. "I know something we could do..."
They quickly walked off in the direction of the amusement arcades.
The shopkeeper, who had been watching those two teenagers in his close-circuit crystal ball, smiled smugly to himself.
He talked, to no one in particular, "What those two don't realise is that thanks to the Pendant of Fortuity she had guessed correctly the coin's function! It is indeed a wishing coin!"
As Jon and Karyn left the scrying ball's limited range, the owner re-covered it with a cloth and hummed a little tune that he'd heard somewhere before, but could not for the life of him remember where.
"Yes, what they didn't know is how to ask for the wishes correctly," the aged and quite, quite mad shopkeeper replied to himself.
"Indeed," he said. "I know precisely how Naryanne's Coin works..."
