"Yes he is," replied Jonni. "He didn't explain everything to me, but this girl named Nora tried to steal the stone and ended up swapping minds with him."
"I... see." replied Gary. "I'd make some comment but I don't want to seem ungrateful. You know what Linda thinks of him; you just heard it." He had a guilty look on his face, as if he had said something rude.
"I'm Liam," said Liam. "Until something is done. This isn't over, I know that."
"Wait a minute!" exclaimed Jonni. "You're thinking that Grandpa is a bad guy, but I don't know about that. Just a minute ago he decided he could fix you, Dad, but he couldn't fix you, Mom, and do you know why? He wouldn't do it because it wasn't right. And I agree, now that he explained it. It wouldn't be right. If he doesn't care about other people, why would he say that?"
"Because..." said Liam. "Because... there are different kinds of 'bad guys'. Different degrees. He's not comic book evil. But he's done some things that people shouldn't do. And he could fix me, anyway."
Jonni looked at her grandfather's face. The man-- woman, currently, but she still imagined her grandfather's old face there-- seemed honestly puzzled. "How?" asked Jonni.
"I'd like to know too," said Jack/Nora. "We're in the middle of things. Who knows what could happen at any moment? We have to fix all the wishes as soon as possible."
"Don't make it a mind transfer machine," said Liam. "Make it a body morphing machine. You wish I'm a boy because I went into a body morphing machine, just like Gary went into a mind transfer machine. You can use the machine to change me back, just like you did to him. Or make it a transform ray instead."
"I don't know," said Jack/Nora. "Suppose that did work. Wouldn't it be too easy? You could fix anything at all that way. If I wish you're younger, like Jon's friend, could I fix it by wishing it was caused by an age-changing ray and use that a second time? If I wish you became the President, could I say I made a machine or a ray which 'changes whether someone is President' and use it again to make you normal? There has to be some limit."
"Nobody's ever heard of a ray that changes whether someone is President," said Liam. "That's silly."
"Nobody's ever heard of a mind transfer machine, either," said Jack/Nora. "It's silly too, except in movies. And I don't think the stone decides whether it can do something depending on whether someone made a movie about it. I can only think of two possibilities, so far. The first is that the stone can only do things that are possible normally. You can turn someone's hair blonde and wish up a bucket of hair dye to reverse it, but not a hair-changing spell. Hair dye is an ordinary substance and if you use it you're just changing the hair back by yourself, you're not reversing it with magic, even though you made it with magic. If this possibility is true, then it must be that mind transfer machines can be made using only science. Presdential-transformation machines can't. Morphing rays... maybe they can, maybe they can't. Who knows?"
"And the other possibility?" asked Jonni.
"The other possibility is that Liam is onto something and the idea works. You can reverse any wish that way. Though even then it wouldn't work if the wish had a clause that says that they can't change back."
"I'm going to try a wish now," said Jonni.
"Don't be too hasty," said Jack/Nora. "We need to discuss any wish you make."
"Grandpa," said Jonni, "if you haven't noticed, you can't use the stone. I can use the stone. We can discuss it, but I'm going to be making the decision. And there's something else I can do. I can ask the stone for what I really want to know."
"You want to ask the stone if you can wish that your Mom was transformed by a transform ray?"
"Yeah, I do. But there's something else I want to ask it about. I want to ask it about you. I don't know if it can tell me everything since the stone's range isn't going to cover all the places you've been, but..." Jonni gripped the stone tightly and began to say...
