Jon lay there sleeping in the pool for quite some time. She was so completely drained from crying that it was nearly eleven by the time she woke up. Realizing that it hadn't been a dream after all and she was in fact stuck as a mermaid, but too tired to break into a fresh bout of hysterics, she simply lay there, floating between the top and bottom of the pool, staring at the sky beyond the water's surface. She grew bored of this after about half an hour, so bored that her boredom won out over her desire to experience as little of this body as possible. She gave a few experimental thrashes with her tail, then began trying to figure out how to swim. She discovered that thrashing like she was still trying to kick her legs did technically work, but was highly inefficient, and tended to produce a lot of undesired side-to-side motion, since the muscles on either side of her tail corresponded, in her brain, to the legs she no longer had. After some thought and a little experimentation, she settled on a smooth up-and-down motion like cetaceans used; it made sense, since her flukes were also horizontally oriented. She also found that since she was neutrally buoyant, she could swim just as easily on her back as she could on her stomach. With nothing else to do, she lay on her back, gently undulating her tail, swimming in circles around the perimeter of the pool.
She spent another half an hour circling the pool, and would have kept on doing so for even longer if she hadn't noticed a tiny shape hovering above the surface of the pool. She came up for a better look, brushing her dripping hair out of her eyes. Hovering in the air a few feet away was a tiny human figure: a girl, no more than three inches tall, who looked to be about eight years old. She was naked, and Jon assumed the blur on her back was the wings that were keeping her aloft. After waking up as a mermaid, Jon wasn't especially shocked by this, but something about her face seemed familiar; hadn't Mom mentioned something about pixies...? Suddenly it clicked. "Mikey?" she gasped, incredulous. "Is that you!?"
The pixie-girl nodded sadly. "It happened last night," she said, tears welling up in her eyes. "Oh, it was so awful! I woke up and all I could see were my pajamas, and then I got out and saw what happened to me, and then Mom came in and found me, and she dressed me up in doll clothes, and I had to go to school in a skirt and the teacher told everyone who I was and they made me pick a girl's name and we got to lunch and all the other guys were teasing me and making kissing noises and calling me Tinkerbell and making fun of me for wearing a skirt and I took my clothes off because I'd rather be naked than wear that girly junk and then the cafeteria monitor came along and tried to make me go to the principal's office and I got away and flew home and...and...and..."
She burst into tears, barely keeping aloft as great spasming sobs wracked her tiny frame. Jon caught her as she fell, and held the little pixie in her cupped hands. "I know how you feel," she said. "This is pretty awful for me, too."
Mikey continued to sob, curling up in her new sister's comparatively gigantic hands. "What am I gonna do?" she wailed. "I can't spend the rest of my life as a girl!"
Jon cradled her tiny brother-turned-sister close to her chest, wondering what to say and trying ignore the unfamiliar sensations she was experiencing from her arms brushing against her breasts. "We may not have to," she said.
Mikey kept crying. "What do you mean?" she sobbed. "Changes are p-p-permanent, you know that!"
Jon sighed. Maybe she shouldn't be instilling unlikely hopes in Mikey, but at the moment it seemed that what she needed was any kind of hope at all. "We can change back with magic," she said. "This whole changing thing is the result of a careless wish by Karyn and I. Grandpa left me a magic wishing stone when he died, and we tried to turn colds into something 'harmless' but got this instead."
Mikey brightened a bit. "Where is it?" she asked, jumping up and launching her wings into motion. "I'll go get it and you can change us back!"
Jon shook her head. "Mom threw it out this morning by mistake," she said. "It's already buried in the landfill by now. But the way I see it, if I had a real magic wishing stone, then magic actually exists, and there must be more than one magic item out there."
"Do you really think there's something out there that can make us boys again?" Mikey asked. Jon nodded. "Doing all this was nothing for the stone," she said. "So even a less powerful magic artifact should be able to get us back to normal. It might take us a while, but it'll be a lot better than being stuck this way for life."
