Karyn was nearly crying with shock. Suddenly finding yourself with no hands, but hooves in their place, was bad enough. Not knowing why was worse. "Jon. Do something. Wish my hands back! I can't live like this!" She struggled to her feet, pushing with her forehooves on the soft ground beside her and leaving perfect hoofprints. Reaching for the stone, she only managed to knock it out of Jon's hand with one hoof, making him wince in pain.
"Karyn. Calm down. We've got to think this through carefully. Look what's happened already! I said we should leave well enough alone, and now look, we're both worse off than we were before." She was shaking slightly, tears in the corners of her eyes, and he reached out and tried to hold her hands. When he felt the cool hard surface of her hooves in his hands he flinched slightly, then gripped harder and looked her in the eyes. "We'll work it out. Don't worry, but we've got to be slow and careful about it."
She gazed back at him, and slowly nodded. Pulling her hooves out of his hands, she wiped her eyes with the fur just above one of them, then put her arms down at her sides so she couldn't see what they looked like. The odd weight of her new hooves pulled at her arms though, as a constant reminder. "OK", she replied after a moment. "What next?"
Jon bent over and picked up the stone, his tail stretching out behind him automatically as he did so. Placing it back in the box he dropped the box into his pouch for safekeeping and resumed pacing back and forth, his long thick tail trailing on the ground behind him as he walked. "I'm not sure. What have we got? Every time I make a wish I also get a strange animal change. It seems to be concentrating on kangaroos in my case, and is slowly changing me into one. When I made a wish that affected us both, we BOTH got animal changes. Your change is different to mine, though. Why? The stone certainly wasn't doing this yesterday."
After some more thought, he stopped. "We could wish to know what was going on, but if what I think is happening is actually happening, we'll end up with more animal parts. Also, I'm guessing that if we wish away these changes, like I did with my ears this morning, the current animal parts will go but we'll get others instead. I just don't know why!"
Karyn crossed her arms and looked at him. "OK, it sounds like you've thought it through, and I agree. But I can't go through life like this!" She held up her right hoof and shook it at him. "I guess you were right, I could have gotten used to the breasts and hair, but I can't go through life with hooves and no hands! I'm going to HAVE to wish my hands back! And even though you said you could live with a pouch, can you live with a tail?" Jon stopped, and looked over his shoulder at the mentioned appendage. It was fur covered and heavy, very muscular and strong. Experimenting, he found he could brace the end on the ground and lean back supported by it, like a built-in chair.
"It could be useful", he grinned. "But yes, you're right, most of the time it would get in the way, even if no-one else thought it was strange." They pondered the problem for a while.
Eventually Karyn said resignedly, "Jon, give me the stone. I'm going to wish I had my hands back. Then we can think what to do next, but I've GOT to have hands. Being like this scares me more than you can imagine." He looked sympathetically at her and slowly nodded.
"OK, but word your wish very carefully, all right? We don't want anything else odd happening. I guess it will be a good experiment to see what happens." She glared at him, and he looked apologetic, and after a moment she shrugged.
"Fair enough, I suppose, but I don't like being an experiment. Now, how am I going to..." She trailed off, looking speculatively at her hooves. She certainly couldn't hold the stone at the moment, and contact with flesh was required. Did hooves count? After a moment's thought, she kicked off one shoe and held out her foot. "Pull off this sock, will you?" Jon raised an eyebrow, then got it. He squatted down with his tail sticking out behind him, and pulled off her sock, then removed the box from his pouch and the stone from the box, and put it on the ground next to her foot.
Karyn went over the wording of the wish in her head for a few seconds, glanced at her watch, then placed her toes on the stone and said firmly "I wish that my hands and arms were back in the condition they were in 20 minutes ago." The normal visual effect made them both glance away briefly, and when she could look at her hands again she was ecstatic to see they WERE hands again. "Thank god", she muttered, feeling one with the other. Looking up at Jon she smiled, then frowned. He was staring at her with raised eyebrows. "What?" she enquired curiously.
He shook his head with an odd expression, then rummaged through his pockets until he found his phone. Quickly snapping a picture of her head, he wordlessly showed it to her. She stared in amazement. The blonde hair framing it was familiar, but the leopard's muzzle protruding from the lower part of her face definitely was not.
She immediately put both hands on her face and felt it. "Oh for God's sake, this is ridiculous", she shouted in anger. She could feel that just below the eyes, her face pushed out into the muzzle of a leopard, nose and mouth completely changed. It was odd that she hadn't noticed immediately, and even more odd that she could still talk completely normally. Fur covered her face from just under her eyes down to under her chin, and around the sides of her head to her ears. Opening her mouth and feeling inside with one finger, she ran it over huge canines and lots of smaller, very sharp teeth. Her tongue felt rough, like a cat's. Her wide flat nose was damp and dark pink, and she licked the end of it.
"I wish we knew what the hell was going on!" she shouted, forgetting that she was still standing on the stone with a bare foot. Jon realised as soon as the words "I wish" left her mouth, but was too late to do anything. Suddenly, he fell over as his legs cramped up briefly, and Karyn put her hand over her mouth in dismay as knowledge flooded into both of them and she stared at Jon in embarassment and surprise.
He lay on his side for a moment, mind reeling with the influx of new information, before looking down at himself and sighing. Then he looked at Karyn and sighed again, before slowly pushing himself up to stand on his new kangaroo legs.
Karyn very carefully and deliberately stepped sideways off the stone, then picked it up and put it back into it's box that he had dropped when his legs transformed. Handing it back to him, she watched as he put it back into his pouch, then she walked around collecting the scraps of his pants, underwear, socks, and shoes, all of which had practically exploded off him when his legs changed.
They both then inspected the damage the wish had caused. Karyn now had a tail as well, one that apparently came from a horse. It had ripped through her pants and hung to her ankles, blonde like her hair. It was slowly swishing back and forth, reflexively.
Jon was by now pretty much half kangaroo. His legs, feet, and hips had all changed into those of a kangaroo, and the fur of his pouch had joined up with his legs and tail to completely cover him from the upper abdomen down. When he tried experimentally taking a step forward, he abruptly hopped a couple of feet with both legs, then went flat on his face. "Fuck" he mumbled through a mouthful of grass, then pushed himself to his feet again.
Further experimentation show that he couldn't move his legs separately, but was only able to hop. After a few minutes practice he managed to do it without falling over every time, and hopped back to rest on his tail beside Karyn, who was watching him from a seated position near the wall.
"Now what?" she asked.
"We need to find the original stone, somehow" he replied, feeling the fur of one leg with curiosity. The accidental wish had told them that the stone was in fact the animal stone, not Jon's original one. It worked in much the same way, but any wish granted by it also made a partial animal transformation happen, to everyone affected by the wish, including the wisher. The changes were random, although for some reason it seemed stuck on kangaroo in Jon's case. The animal changes thus caused could be undone by the stone, but it would simply cause new ones. As a result, you were always stuck with at least one animal transformation. The only way to get rid of them all would seem to be with the original stone.
Unfortunately the knowledge they had gained from the stone explained why they kept changing, but hadn't included the identity or whereabouts, or indeed motives, of whoever had made the exchange. Presumably that would require another wish, and another change.
"But how can we, without using the stone? If we do that, we'll change again, and even though we can wish away the changes we'll still get more. What if the change is really bad?" Karyn asked in frustration. "Like, if it had given me gills from a fish rather than hooves from a zebra, I could be dead by now! Or what if it had given me the brain of an animal? It's incredibly dangerous!"
Jon nodded. "I know. But we don't have a lot of choice." They fell silent for a while. Karyn reached back and felt her tail, pulling it around to the side and running the long coarse hairs through her fingers.
"We can't afford to make any more wishes until we have a chance to work out exactly what we need to ask for and how to deal with it", she said firmly. "We need to figure out exactly how to get the stone back with the minimum number of wishes, to minimise the damage." Jon nodded slowly, looking down at his kangaroo lower half. He had discovered that he was still male, despite the female pouch, which made him feel slightly happier.
"I know, and I agree, but I'm not sure I can stay like this until we fix it. I mean, the pouch was one thing, and pretty minor really, but look at me now! I can't even walk, I have to hop everywhere." She turned and looked at him sympathetically.
Reaching out and putting an arm around him, she leaned over and tried to kiss him on the cheek, forgetting her changed mouth. The sensation of a huge cat's nose pressed against his face made them both jump, and laugh. "Please, Jon, don't make any more wishes until we can figure out the best way to proceed", she pleaded. "I know it'll be difficult, but I really think it's too dangerous. We've been lucky until now. No-one will think anything is odd, and we'll both just have to put up with these changes until we can fix it."
After a moment he nodded reluctantly. "OK. I promise. I'll lock the stone up in my document safe under my bed with my passport, and we'll sit down and think this through. I really would have liked to do that earlier, when I only had a pouch, you know." He looked sternly at her, and she had the grace to look embarrassed.
"I know. Sorry. You were right." He smiled, and stood. Hopping slowly around the end of the wall, he stopped and stared at his new bike. Karyn stood beside him and followed his gaze. "I don't think you're going to be able to use that now", she said with a small laugh. He gazed down at lower body and agreed with her.
"You take it. You can get some use out of it until I'm able to get on a bike again." She nodded, and grabbed the bike. "Don't get your tail caught in the chain!" he advised with a grin. She looked startled, then reached around and grabbed her tail, tucking the end of it into her belt.
Getting on the bike, she waved and said "I'll see you tomorrow. Let's think very carefully about what to do next, OK?" She pedalled off homewards, leaving Jon standing on bare furry feet next to the wall, propped up on his thick tail.
After reflecting on the odd events of the last hour or so, he retrieved his backpack from the ground, put it on, and began hopping home, wondering how long he'd be like this. He discovered that he was rapidly getting better at hopping and was soon able to move confidently and remarkably quickly, leaning over quite a long way with his tail stretched out behind him and balancing him. He remembered that kangaroos are very efficient when hopping, using very little energy. This seemed to apply to him as well, since he felt like he could keep this up all day.
Arriving home after a surprisingly short time, he realised this new method of travelling was as fast as the bike had been. There were some benefits to this form after all. He cleared the steps to the porch in one bound, then went inside, wondering with some trepidation whether anyone would notice he was half kangaroo. As it happened, he was greeted perfectly normally by his family and it was obvious that they didn't see anything different about him. When he looked at a family photo on the mantlepiece he was somewhat surprised to see that in it he was also part kangaroo. Apparently the stone had made the partial animal transformations retroactive. That at least made some things easier, as there wouldn't be any awkward explanations to deal with.
Going up to his room, he pulled the small suitcase-sized fire safe from under the bed and opened it, then pulled the stone in it's box from his pouch and dropped it in on top of his various important documents. Relocking the safe, he shoved it back under the bed, not without briefly wondering whether he should make a quick wish and undo the kangaroo transformations. After a moment, he realised that Karyn was right and it was too dangerous. Being like this was inconvenient, but he was perfectly functional and mentally intact. There was no guarantee that further changes would be as livable with.
