Jon met Karyn on their way to the bus stop the next morning. Karyn was sniffling and sneezing up a storm. "I must've picked up a cold," she muttered. "Man, I wish that there wasn't such a thing as a cold."
Jon let go of the rock, which he'd grabbed by reflex when Karyn said the words "I wish." "Well..." he muttered.
"Hey!" Karyn brightened. "Give me the stone for a minute!" Jon handed it to her. "Be careful..." he said, a little nervously. Karyn nodded and stopped to think for a moment. "I wish," she said, "that the common cold was replaced by something equally harmless, but without all the sniffling, sneezing, and mucus." She handed the rock back to Jon just as the bus pulled up, and they got on.
They arrived at school as usual and strolled down the hall. Suddenly, Karyn felt a little dizzy. "Hang on a sec," she said, and headed into the girl's bathroom.
While she looked into the mirror, trying to figure out what was wrong, she felt a tingling in her ears. As she watched, they expanded into a triangular shape and became covered in brown fur, relocating to the top of her head. Her hair changed to the same shade of brown as well. She felt a tingling in the rest of her body, and her torso and chest shrank down to about what they had originally been. The tingling moved to her fingertips, and she saw that her fingernails had been replaced by retractable claws. Finally, she felt the tingling in her tailbone, and it soon grew out into a long, furry tail.
Karyn's jaw dropped. "Damn." She ducked into a stall, ripped a hole in the seat of her pants and underwear, and threaded her new appendage through. She exited the stall but yelped in surprise when another girl entered the bathroom, and tried to hide.
"Oh, come on," the girl said. "It happens to a lot of people, and you didn't get it that bad. Heck, you shoulda seen Angela McPherson. Last semester she turned into a guy."
Karyn's jaw dropped again, but she realized that the stone had changed things so that everyone else saw this bizarre new substitute for the cold as normal. She headed back out into the hall.
Jon's jaw was the next to drop, but Karyn quickly explained what had happened. A quick wish for detailed information revealed that for anyone that contracted a case of the disease there would be about a twenty percent chance of changing into a random new form.
"Well that's just great," Jon muttered. "And I probably caught it, too."
"Hey, relax," Karyn replied, tail twitching and ears back. "At least you didn't actually transform. I'm gonna have to rip holes into every pair of pants I own now. Anyway, it's only a twenty percent chance. You're four times as likely to not change as you are to change."
"Yeah," Jon muttered. "I guess you're right."
The rest of the day passed without incident, but when Jon was sleeping that night...
