Karyn began to walk off. "Where are you going?" Jaya queried.
"To confront Zoe," Karyn replied. Jaya shook her head. "No need," she said. "We have the stone."
Karyn sighed. "I tried that, way back at the beginning of this mess. It's not powerful enough to overcome Zoe."
"Well, we can't take her on like this," Jaya said. "We could very well get converted too." She thought for a minute, then brightened. "I wish," she said, clutching the stone, "that Karyn could use her power to charge this stone, strengthening its abilities."
Karyn stared at her. "This way," Jaya explained, "we can overpower her without having to get close to her. I specified you because you have the most followers, intentional or otherwise."
Karyn nodded. "I'll be drained entirely from this. Who knows how long it'll take me to recharge. You'll have to do everything from there. Keep the wish simple; just get the Deity Stone out of Zoe's body. From there, you should be rested enough to deal with the rest of them in your own...inimitable fashion."
Jaya brightened. "So I get to make them my children?"
Karyn shrugged. "I won't be around to stop you, but for the moment, yeah. We need to have a long talk about the ethics of this afterwards, though."
Jaya nodded. "You're right. So..."
Karyn took the stone from her. She focused everything, her entire power, the power of all the happy, normal people in the world, normal people who certainly wouldn't want to become Goths and serve some Dark Goddess, into the tiny object in her hand. That done, she dropped to the ground.
Jaya caught her on her way down and laid her out gently, then picked up the stone. "I wish," she said, "that the Deity Stone was no longer part of Zoe and was destroyed."
Zoe had noticed the moment the force-field went offline, and had run back to deal with the freed goddesses, followed at a shortdistance by her army. Unfortunately, they had been quite a distance away by that time, still making their way on foot. Zoe skidded around a corner to find Jaya just finishing her wish. Suddenly, it was all gone. The power, the link with her followers, everything. She was plain old Zoe again, except that she'd lost none of her megalomania. "You...you BITCH!" she screamed.
Jaya turned and noticed her. "Oh, hello," she smiled. "Sorry we have to do this, but you can't just go taking everybody else's world like that. Come here, Zoe. Come to me, my child."
There must have been some residual magic in Zoe, because the changes weren't instantaneous like they usually were. Zoe began to shrink. "NO!" she screamed. "No! You can't do this!" As she continued to shrink, her clothes disapeared. "I won't let you take this away from me!" she yelled, still shrinking, as her hair returned to its natural golden-brown color. "You can't-you can't-AUGH!" She let out a final, hateful shriek, spasmed, and fell unconscious. As she finished shrinking to her new height of four inches, four beautiful dragonfly wings grew out of her shoulderblades.
Jaya picked up the tiny, naked pixie girl, her new child. As she watched, Zoe began to wake. Sitting up, she looked herself over before looking at Jaya with an expression Jaya had sorely missed from her: happiness. This was the Zoe Jaya had grown up with, happy, outgoing, and a little mischievous; totally antithetical to the surly teenager-turned-Goth-turned-Dark-Goddess Jaya's family had been putting up with for a little over two years. "Thank you, Jaya," she smiled. Jaya smiled back. None of her subjects called her "my Goddess;" she was "Mother," or simply "Jaya" to those of her children who were on good terms with their real mothers, as was the restored Zoe.
It was at this time that Zoe's army arrived. With their Goddess no longer fortifying them, the battle was over before it had even begun, with a loud shout of "Come to me, my children!" from Jaya. Some of the stronger ones lasted long enough to emit a single gasp before losing to the change, but in two seconds they were all children of Jaya. Now all that remained was to hunt down and stop those empowered soldiers Zoe had sent to change other towns.
One of Jaya's new children, a graceful, naked dryad turned to her. "Is...is it over?" she asked. Jaya smiled. "For you," she said, "it's over."
"And for you, Mother?"
Jaya thought for a moment about her future as Goddess of Myth with her friend Karyn, Goddess of Normality. "For me," she laughed, "I have a couple things left to do, and then it can truly begin."
