Wait, Jon thought as Karyn spoke her wish, a month? Hadn't Karyn said a week? It had sounded like a fun idea to try out for a short time, but he wasn't sure he wanted to commit to a new life, much less a completely random one, for a MONTH! But it was too late... Jon's world was already dissolving around him. Nothing to do now but sit back and let the stone's magic take effect.
It wasn't any particular sensation that let Jon know he'd landed in a new life, but the sudden lack of sensation. Transferring to a new body had made for one dizzying ride, and he was glad to find himself settled back down into reality, and into darkness.
Darkness. It was all around him as he slowly opened his new eyes. Shadows everyhere. It was night. But it wasn't the darkness that caught his attention... it was the arms wrapped around his waist, the hot breath against the back of his neck. He was in bed--in someone else's bed, in someone else's body--and he wasn't there alone.
He felt a sort of tingling at the back of his thoughts. Half a thought, a quarter of a memory, a shade of meaning just out of reach. It was someone else's memories filling his brain, he knew, but they weren't fully-formed yet. He tried to remember, tried to think of his new name, tried to recover some information about his new life, but he couldn't hold onto anything solid. Not yet. Maybe it was going to take a few minutes. No, if he wanted to know who he was, he was either going to have to wait or investigate himself. He wasn't feeling particularly patient right then, so he decided to get up and look around, at least get a glimpse of his reflection.
He reached up and slid the blankets off him. Now, how to get the woman spooning him off his waist? Wait... WAS it a woman? He certainly hoped so, but he suddenly realized that, since he'd been dropped completely at random into someone else's body, he had about a fifty/fifty shot of being a woman wrapped in the arms of a man instead. Suddenly the push to figure out who he was seemed all the more pressing.
Slowly, carefully--because he didn't want to wake his bedfellow--he tried to slide the foreign arm off his foreign body. His bedmate's arm seemed slender enough; hopefully that was a good sign.
He was just about to slide the arm off him when he heard a voice mutter directly behind his ear. A MAN'S voice, he noted with disappointment. Jon paused for a moment, breathless, in hopes that the man would return to sleep. The man's breath, which had stilled for a moment, returned to its slow steady pace. Jon held back a sigh and kept trying to extricate himself from the man's arms.
A moment later, though, the breath caught again, and the man muttered a few words: "Ehn? Que fais-tu?"
Jon was baffled for half a second at the strange syllables the man was muttering, but then, suddenly, he understood. "What are you doing?" Jon had never spoken a word of French in his life, but he guessed his new body's memories were kicking in. Jon thought for a moment and suddenly realized he could speak and understand French just as effortlessly as English. So he composed a quick response:
"Je vais--" he said, but suddenly he cut himself off, startled by the light lilt of his voice, the high flutey pitch, the hollow sound, the lack of a masculine buzz. It was a woman's voice, coming from his own mouth just as effortlessly as his old male voice had come from a different body. Bizarre. He guessed that removed any doubt about who he was. He coughed a fake cough, recomposed himself, and started again: "Je vais au WC," he said. "I'm going to the bathroom." Seemed natural enough an excuse. But the man didn't respond; he was already asleep again.
Jon slid out from under the man's arm and off the bed, his bare feet hitting the carpet. Now, standing, he could feel certain details of his body and his wardrobe: a slight bounce of a pair of breasts as he stood,a tickle of hair against the back of his neck, an airy coolness against his legs and upper chest, and cold silk rubbing against his torso and against a bare crotch. It was strange, but it was not an altogether unpleasant mix of emotions.
Somehow, despite the darkness and being in a strange room, he found the door effortlessly, and then padded down the hall to the bathroom just as easily. He suspected his new memories were continuing to kick in, and he was grateful. Acting on this strange sort of instinct, his hand reached for the bathroom light, and--
He squinted and averted his eyes, pained by the sudden brightness of the light. Through his clenched eyelids he could see bare, hairless legs and bright pink silk and what seemed to him to be very ample cleavage. His new body, he realized. As his eyes adjusted to the light, his gaze crept up to the mirror before him, and he looked at the face reflected back.
He was not surprised by what he saw. In fact, there was a strong familiarity in the woman staring back at him, a sort of déja vu, a doubling. It wasn't quite the same as seeing his own reflection, though increasingly it felt like seeing someone he recognized. It was more like a faint, haunting memory growing stronger with each second he looked at himself in the mirror.
The woman who looked back was pretty. Not breathtakingly beautiful, but pretty. Jon suspected she would look authentically beautiful under better circumstances, but for now her brown eyes were bleary and her face was blotchy from sleep, and her brown hair, dark and curly and frizzy and long, was tousled and wild. Her figure, clad in an uncomfortably short negligee made of pink silk, was not as impressive as it had seemed to Jon a moment earlier, looking down from the inside, but it was pleasant. Short and slender, but with a noticeable curviness. This woman would never be a model, but she would catch her fair share of attention from the men and perhaps a bit of jealousy from some of her fellow women. She was older than Jon, but not by much.
Nineteen. She was nineteen, Jon realized as the pace of his new memories sped up, or perhaps as the relevant background information settled alongside his language skills and his spatial sense. She was nineteen and working as a waitress in a café here in Paris. Not well-paying work, but it was the best job she had been able to get with her particular education and skill set. She got by well enough, and she wasn't particularly ambitious about trying to find another job. She and... Guillaume, her boyfriend and the man in the bed... she and Guillaume were happy enough. And her name... her name was... Natasha? Nikki? No, Nicole. Nicole Dufour.
"Nicole," Jon said in his lilting voice, which sounded more familiar to him now. There was something very final about knowing his new name, as though it somehow made this all real. "Nicole Dufour. Mademoiselle Nicole Dufour. Hello, Nicole Dufour; it's nice to meet you." He realized he had said it in French. He marvelled over how easy it had been to speak French, how effortless the vocabulary and the grammatical patterns came to him, how perfect the inflections were. He sought his new memory, now complete, for something to recite in his new voice and native language. The first thing that came to mind was a song by Annette Cadet, a French pop singer he had never heard before but whose every album he now had logged into his brain. He sang a chorus of the song, noting as he did so that Nicole didn't seem to be any better a singer than him.
This was strange. It was kind of neat, he had to admit. Seeing a strange body mimic him in the mirror, speaking a foreign language in an equally foreign voice, having all these new memories mingling with his own, and--he had to admit--feeling what it felt like to be in a woman's body. He wasn't sure he wanted this to last a month, though. He wasn't sure he would like it after the novelty wore off. And he wasn't sure he was going to be comfortable pretending to be a woman. Sure, he knew HOW to be a woman, and he had ample memories of BEING a woman--of being a little girl, of passing through a much different puberty of his own, of reaching his adulthood and moving out on his own and feeling for the first time like an independent woman, of living a life fraught with all the hassles and all the joys of womanhood--but he WASN'T a woman. At heart he was still Jon, very much a guy, and while, thanks to Karyn's wish, he didnt feel any particular compulsion to ACT like a guy, he wasn't sure he was comfortable acting like a woman, either. No number of new memories and no wish-inspired compulsions, he realized, would make this natural and comfortable. He was a guy, and he was wired up to feel like one, to want to be one. He wasn't going to be any more comfortable wearing a dress and looking like a woman as Nicole than he would have been as Jon. He wasn't sure he liked the idea of the rock's magic coercing him into a femininity he wasn't happy with, but he knew he was going to act like Nicole for the rest of the month anyway, like it or not.
Suddenly he wanted very much to talk this over with Karyn. He was certain it would at least be of a little help to have an ally and a familiar spirit in all of this. But a realization slowly crept into his thoughts: Karyn had made no provision in the wish that they land in bodies in close proximity to each other. Yes, there was a chance that Karyn had become Nicole's mom, her best friend, maybe even Guillaume back in the bedroom of Nicole's apartment. But it was far more likely that Karyn was in some very different body on a completely different side of the globe. With several billion people to choose from, who knew
