Some people said it was magic. Some people held out for a more rational explanation. Nobody, however, knew what had really happened that changed Jon's city of Appleton forever. It was the topic of talk shows, news magazines, and science journals around the globe; that is, until people got bored of it. A few years of not being able to understand something gets tiring, and since the problem wasn't spreading, it didn't seem very urgent.
Sure, there was still a team of researchers that had an office downtown monitoring anything new that might occurr, but for the most part they were just a formaility. If you asked Jerry Chan, the senior scientist, what was the cause of the daily switch, he would just shrug and smile. Nobody knew.
It wasn't just the fact that each and every day in the city that Jon lived, and a few miles around it, everyone would wake up in a new body, switched with someone else in town. That would normally be enough to make your head spin. But the fact that all the clothes of the new body would go with it, creating a convenient situation where whatever body you were in, you had something to wear. Figure that one out! Nothing else, just the clothes. Well, clothes and the body.
There was no radioactive comet, no secret gamma explosion, nothing that anyone could figure was the cause of the 'Morning Swap' (as it was now known as). After a while the people of Appleton became resolved to the fact that this was the way it was. People started wearing nametags in order to show who they were. The swap caused a miriad of problems, productivity slowed down, unwanted pregnancies were on the rise, but the Appletonians bonded together in a sense of solidarity. If they had to live in such a strange manner, at least they weren't alone.
All this was lost on Karyn and Jon. All they knew was that they had rolled the dice and caused a random switch. Jon, now checking out his new body (formerly his sister Zoe's), was glad that the wish would only last a day. Little did he know that the stone had interpretted the wish differently than he wanted. His wish:
I wish that for one day everyone in town would become the characteristic of the die or dice rolled and I wish that the ones rolling and the ones near the ones rolling will remember how things were before the rolling of the die or dice
Was heard to mean that for a twenty-four hour period all the residents of Appleton would become a random person, but then after that the process would repeat itself. But they wouldn't know that until the next day.
For now, Jon was having a great time, grabbing Zoe's boobs, checking himself out in the mirror, looking briefly at the nametag pinned on his chest. He looked up at Karyn and laughed, since the body she was wearing recently belonged to...
