"Use the stone," said the Asian girl dressed in black, "to give me whatever I want."
"Can you be more specific?" asked Jon.
"Sure," replied Zoe. "Just do it when I ask. In other words, I want us to be partners. When you make plans with the stone, I want you to include me. When I ask for something, you wish it up."
"What if you go insane and ask me to turn Mom and Dad into toads?" asked Jon.
"Stop being so literal, Jon. I don't mean you give me everything I ask for, I just want you to be as willing to use the stone for me as for Karyn. Do we have a deal?"
"You're awfully confident you have what I need," said Jon.
"Will you agree?" asked Zoe.
"I, um..." Jon looked at Karyn, but finally realized that since the stone was his responsibility, he had to decide. "Sure, Zoe. Oh, and I wish Zoe knew if I'm sincere about this."
Yup, thought Zoe. He was. "Okay, Jon. First of all, paint the wall black. And make it a wish you can reverse."
"I wish Zoe's wall would become black, but can turn whatever color she wants."
"And you see those CDs? I'd like a bigger collection. Now, fill that container of nail polish..."
A number of wishes later it was over. Zoe walked directly to her bookcase, pulled a book off the shelf, opened it up without any searching, and showed Jon a page. "I've had this for a while," she explained. "It tells you how to make the stone have unlimited range." On the page was a complicated paragraph, full of technical words laced with references from anything to Einstein's theory of relativity to Crowley. It started with the words "I wish..."
And it was also in a very familiar handwriting.
"That's Grandpa's handwriting!" said Jon.
"Yes it is!" said Zoe. "He put it there when he came to visit last month. I didn't understand it then, but now I think he wanted us both to use the stone. So he arranged it so you get the stone, but you can't fully use it without my help. And I bet you wouldn't have been able to just walk in and take that page."
Jon read over the page silently, then started again. "I wish...." He didn't understand everything he was saying, but the stone seemed to. Suddenly he got dizzy--as if he had to look away, but couldn't look away from the whole world at once.
"Did it work?" asked Zoe.
"I don't know," replied Jon. "Let me try." He looked out the window for the moon--luckily it was visible at the time. "I wish that the moon would have an extra crater on the upper left."
The usual wish-making sensation came and when the three looked back at the moon, the crater was there, just as Jon had wished.
"Could you accidentally destroy the world with that?" asked Karyn. "It could be very dangerous. If you turned the sun into rock or something..."
"Sure," said Jon. "but even without doing that, we could still destroy the city by accident... the world might be okay, but us--we'd be just as dead. And this way, we can make all kinds of wishes that we couldn't before. Make you really Korean until the morning, without things like web pages and relatives upstate still thinking you're white. Change Sarah into a frog without every police officer from outside the wish radius coming to search for the missing person. Travel to other countries--you know I was last in Korea when I was six. Rule the world!"
"Uh, Jon..." said Karyn.
"Don't worry, I'm not really going to rule the world. I'll be careful. Why don't you guys tell me what I should do now that there's no range limit on the stone?"
