Meanwhile, Zoe was puzzled. "Who's that?" she wondered. "I didn't know Mom and Dad knew anyone like that." Of course, Zoe and Zelda did not know that their wish to be a pretty and popular highschool girl had been granted to Mikey.
"A burglar?" wondered Athena.
"Two burglars?" replied Zoe. "They didn't act like burglars. They acted like they belonged here. Something is very wrong. I wish I had the answer."
"Oh... my... god..." said Zelda. "You guys, you have to stop this. I have the answer. I know the answer. The whole answer. That stone is serious bad mojo. We might be able to use it but..." Zoe was about to say something and Zelda yelled "No! No wishes yet! Well, just one. Wish that I have it on DVD and make sure you name me by name."
"Uh, whatever you say," said Zoe. "A moment ago you didn't believe any of this.... I wish that Zelda Whitefield has that information on DVD."
The wish, of course, was granted to a random person. A person walking along the street was granted a wish that Zelda has the DVD, which is to say, the wish still did exactly what they had meant it to do. The disk appeared in Zelda's hands and she went over to the DVD player to play it.
Shown there was a picture of a normal family: Zoe's mother and father, a strange young boy captioned as "Mikey", Zoe at normal weight, and another strange teenage boy who was captioned as "Jon".
Jon had received a wishing stone, but someone had replaced it with the Omission Stone. Mikey had disappeared. Then after another relatively minor wish, Jon had disappeared and only Karyn remembered him.
But Jon disappearing rewrote reality. Now that Jon had never existed, he had never gotten the stone. Zoe got the stone instead and it had never been replaced, at least not in the same way. Since Jon had never existed and there was no Omission Stone anyway, Jon had never used the Omission Stone, which meant that he had never been wiped out of existence, which meant that he did get the stone and did get wiped out... It all became a paradox: wiping him out prevented him from being wiped out, and preventing him from being wiped out wiped him out. Reality kept flip-flopping between the two versions.
In the half reality where Jon didn't exist, Zoe got the stone and had it replaced with the Random Stone. Zoe and Athena then became fat.
But since each reality only half-existed, it was possible for wishes to affect either one. Zoe's wish changed the other reality such that Mikey became Michelle, and Biff was Jon's boyfriend.
Finally, Zoe had wished to know the answer and the wish had randomly gone to Zelda.
"What do we do?" wondered Zoe. "I barely understand all of that. Wishes that cancel themselves out?"
"We just need to stop this," said Zelda. "I wish that this reality flip-flopping would stop and anyone who exists in either reality would exist."
A few seconds later she motioned at Zoe. "Go ahead. Say it. If your wish doesn't contain words like 'my' and 'your' and 'this' that change depending on the person, it doesn't matter who randomly gets it."
"Okay." Zoe repeated the wish and nothing much seemed to happen.
"Congratulations. You now have a brother Jon and a sister Michelle. Now we need to become thinner."
"But I'm so hungry!" said Zoe. "How come we're hungry even though we remember the previous reality? We weren't hungry then!" She popped a Tootsie roll out of the wrapper and stuffed it in her mouth.
"Because," explained Zelda, "people who hear the wish remember the previous reality. But they can still be affected by the wish. Hunger is something you feel, it's not something you remember--you still feel hungry now even though you remember that you weren't always like that."
"What? So for instance... Jon remembers the reality before Biff became his boyfriend, but he still feels that Biff is his boyfriend?"
Meanwhile, from Jon's perspective... Jon didn't realize that he was continuously popping into and out of existence. Neither did anyone else, since their memories kept popping in and out as well, but Jon especially so since he only existed in one. "I think that worked," he told Karyn. "Let me go home and check." He took the stone from Karyn and headed for his room.
Then, in his reality, he passed his sister Michelle's room.
One reality over, Zoe began to wish quickly, no longer thinking things through before spitting the idea out. "This stupid, fucking thing! I wish I knew what was wrong with it."
The wish was made on the Random Stone, so it didn't affect either Zoe or Zelda. Instead it affected Jon, and as a side affect of the wish Jon was able to always remember the original reality.
After learning about the stone granting wishes to random targets, Jon tried to rush to Zoe's room to explain it to her before she caused any more damage.
Zoe and Zelda sat there annoyed by the stone not working so she tried making another wish "I wish Biff was my boyfriend".
The doorbell rang; as Jon was right at the door, he answered it.
Biff instantly grabbed Jon by the waist and kissed him on the lips. Jon was shocked and disgusted by this and started to push Biff away when Biff broke the kiss and said, "I noticed your parents weren't home," and kissed him again.
Jon didn't know how to react. Biff then picked Jon up and ran him to Jon's room placing him on the bed, looking at him with lust while unzipping his pants.
"What are you doing?" said Jon.
At this point Zoe made it so that Michelle and Jon definitely existed and things stopped flip-flopping. Of course nobody noticed.
"What?" I'm your boyfriend! Don't you love me?"
"I..." All Jon's memories told him he should react in a disgusted manner. Yet somehow he felt as though Biff really had become his boyfriend, that they really should belong together and they really were having sex. He knew that it was a wish, but it didn't matter.
[Note: At this point, I believe both the Random Stone (Zoe's) and Omission Stone (Jon's) should exist. The Random Stone is as good as the real one if Zoe remembers that all wishes about people must use names. Of course, she might forget to do that sometimes. Exactly how much Jon remembers is unclear--does he know only about reality changes made after he got the ability to remember, or does he know about previous ones, such as Mikey's sex and Zoe and Zelda's weight as well?]
