"I wish I was Karyn's new best friend, Joe, but Karyn remembers both the old and new realities."
The number on the stone blurred, and changed to a zero... and then Jon felt himself transform. His body remolded itself, and he felt unfamiliar desires float through his head. Because he heard the wish, he did remember the old reality, but when he transformed into his new self, he no longer felt like the old reality was a state he had to get back to.
Josephine, or Jo for short, shook her head to clear it, then brushed her long black hair away from her eyes. "Wow," she said. "I'm a girl now." As Jo looked at the stone, she saw that it had changed back to a 3.
"Is that you?" asked Karyn when the two met before school. "What happened, Jon... Jo?"
"The stone," she explained. "Someone replaced it. And there are only three wishes per person! I was going to let you use a set... but I realized that if I was a different person, I could use a second set myself. We've got six wishes between us and we need to leave another one to transform again to get more, so we really only have five... Do you think we can find the real stone using only five wishes?"
"Are you sure you're okay, Jo?" asked Karyn.
"Of course I'm okay. Like I was saying, we can't just wish for the real stone back... but maybe there's some indirect way to do it."
"I'm not talking about that! You're a girl! Does it, uh, bother you?"
"Maybe it would have bothered me as Jon but it doesn't bother me now. I can't wait to...."
