After a while of inspection, Ms. Tennenbaum handed Jon back her blouse and smiled. "Thank you, Jon," she said. "I think I have a good idea of how you're put together. You can go hang out in the library if you like, until your next class."
Jon forced a smile as she got dressed. "Thanks."
She nodded. "And remember: if you ever need to talk about it, I'd be happy to help."
This time Jon's smile was genuine, and she waved as she flitted out the locker-room door, heading down the hall towards the library. Unfortunately, the only micro-sized books available were a set of encyclopedias, and none of the computers were small enough for her. Shrugging, she grabbed an encyclopedia and opened it, trying to find out what the deal was with this condition the stone had created.
As it turned out, the common cold as Jon and Karyn knew it actually had existed for most of history. It was only in the mid-1960s that this new condition had sprung up, eradicating the common cold as it went, for some unknown reason. In fact, there were a lot of unknowns about the disease, such as how it operated, how reproductive compatibility was maintained between transformee species, and where it originated (Jon nearly burst out laughing when she read one theory, that it had been brought back from Venus by a space probe, the return of which slightly predated the earliest outbreaks.) All that was really known for sure was that it was contagious, remaining so for about three days after infection, it was spread by respiration, it had about a twenty percent chance of changing someone who contracted it, it was normally temporary but sometimes permanent, it could only be contracted once, and the change could occur at any time during the three-day contagious period (while she was reading, Jon overheard two of the students in the library whispering about a video they'd found online of a man and woman switching sexes during intercourse.)
Jon continued to read until the bell rang, fascinated by the list of known types of changes and the accounts of how transformees were employed in the Cold War. She looked forward to getting today over with and fixing this, but it was pretty fascinating how much things could be changed by one simple wish.
Mikey, Jon's little brother, was sitting at home, playing video games. The elementary school in the area had a very lax administration that had a lot of days off and half-days, and today was one. Growing bored with the PS2, he headed up to Jon's room to play Jon's SNES. It had been a little weird this morning, finding out that Jon had become a little fairy-girl in the middle of the night, but Mikey had mostly gotten over it; he knew that as long as he didn't hang out on Jon's bed, he should be okay. The SNES was all set up, but he couldn't find Chrono Trigger in the stack of cartridges.
Looking around, he spotted it on the nightstand. Picking it up, he noticed a small rock underneath it. Mikey wondered why Jon would have a rock on his - er, her - nightstand, and picked it up, looking for anything interesting about it. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary; he wasn't a geologist, but he could tell it obviously wasn't any kind of gemstone, or even something common but pretty like quartz. But then, Jon had been acting a little weird ever since Grandpa died, even before her sudden change. Mikey hoped that he wouldn't catch it from Jon; he'd never caught it before, so he shared the slight nervousness most kids his age did about it. He could handle a change like getting cat ears or something, but something major like turning into a girl or being six inches tall - that would be pretty terrible. Why couldn't he just catch it, not change, and get it over with? "Man," he said to himself, "I wish I'd just catch it already."
Suddenly, he felt strange. What was going on? Had he actually caught it? Was he changing? No, that was not what he had wanted! Strands of long red hair suddenly fell over his face, and as he reached up to brush them away, he could feel that his face had become softer and finer-featured. He yelped in surpried, only to notice that his voice, though it hadn't cracked yet, did seem a little higher than before. His body shape changed, all the straight lines softening out, becoming almost like the beginnings of a girl's figure, his arms and legs becoming slender and delicate. Suddenly, Mikey could feel a strange sensation in his privates, and he realized that he had just become a girl!
But the changes weren't over; the skin on her arms began to expand, growing outward and eventually joining to the sides of her body, leaving her with rudimentary wings. They weren't rudimentary for long, though; the pinkie fingers suddenly extended, becoming wingtips, as the parts of her wings that weren't her arms became covered in soft brown feathers. Her legs began to change, too; they became thicker and slightly more bowed outwards, shaped a little more like birds' legs, with scrawny, orange-skinned claws for feet. Tailfeathers grew out of the skin around her tailbone as her entire lower body became feathered, with a soft patch of down covering the crotch area and hiding her newly female genitals.
Mikey stared down at her new body, then at her reflection in the mirror on Jon's dresser. From the waist up, except for her wing-arms, she looked much like any other girl her age, like a female version of the old Mikey. But her lower body looked basically like a bird's; she recognized the results of the change from health class at school as the "harpy" archetype. But how? How was it that he - she - changed right when she wished she'd come down with the infection? That couldn't be coincidence, could it? She stared at the stone in her hand. Had this...was this thing magic or something? It was a wild leap of reasoning, but Mikey wasn't feeling especially rational at the moment. "Oh God," she shrieked, "I wish I'd never found this stupid thing!"
And all of a sudden it was gone. It had been magic after all! She looked frantically around for the stone, hoping to use it to change back, but it was nowhere in sight. For, you see, she hadn't found it in the first place; she'd contracted the disease from Jon when they had been getting ready for bed last night, and had only changed now. The stone, late the previous night, had been knocked off the nightstand as Jon turned over in his sleep, shortly before undergoing his transformation, and had fallen into the nearby wastebasket, which had been dumped into one of the garbage bags Jon's dad used to take out the trash. From there, it had been collected off the curb and hauled out to the county landfill.
At school, in math class, Jon felt a shiver run up her spine, like she was having some kind of premonition. She shrugged it off as another of the many unusual sensations she was experiencing from her transformation, figuring it would go away when she used the stone to change back that afternoon. She and Karyn would have to be careful, though; they'd both seen how careless wishes could have unintended consequences.
