As the morning light streamed in between the curtains and across the bed, Jon stretched and opened his eyes. Looking at the ceiling for a moment, he blinked as he remembered the day before.
Turning his head he glanced at the box on the bedside table that contained that incredible stone. Reaching out for it, he picked it up and sat up in bed, opening the box to look at the stone. He stared at it for a moment, marvelling at the fact that something so small could be so powerful. Suddenly, he frowned and inspected the thing closely. It seemed different, somehow, but he couldn't put his finger on precisely how.
Eventually he shook his head and dismissed it. There was no reason for it to be different, he must be imagining it. Putting the box down he got out of bed and got dressed, then wandered off to the bathroom. Returning twenty minutes later he packed everything he'd need for school, then looked at the box. Should he take it?
If he was sensible, he should lock the thing safely away so he couldn't lose it, or have it stolen. He shuddered to think of the damage it could cause if it got into the hands of some of his acquaintances at school. Sarah McMillan, for instance. She was not a good person, in his view. Remembering his conversation with Karen the day before he wondered if he should just lock it away, but after all they had agreed to try it for a week.
He thought for a while. Ideally, he needed to come up with some way to prevent any loss or theft of the stone, so he could keep it with him. Yet it seemed possibly premature to wish some sort of lock on the use of the stone, as the wish couldn't be reversed. After a while, he had an idea. He picked the stone out of it's box and said, "I wish that I had a storage container that only I could access. This container can be accessed from anywhere and at any time, and will disappear when not needed. Anything placed in it will be protected from anything." It was a bit of a mouthful but he managed to get it out in one breath. The familiar optical twitch occurred, and he looked around expectantly.
Jon wasn't sure quite what to expect. Absolutely nothing, however, wasn't really it. There was no sign of any mystical storage jar, though. After a moment he realised that the way the wish was worded, he would probably have to summon the storage container to him, as it was presumably in it's 'disappeared' state. Wondering how he went about this, he dropped the stone back in it's box and stood in the middle of the room.
Feeling a little foolish, he said out loud, "OK, I need my storage container", while wondering if anything would happen. There was a faint sound from behind him, and he turned and stared in amazement.
He had been thinking along the lines of some sort of small strongbox that would hide in some other reality when not required. What he was looking at, though, was a large metal door that had suddenly appeared in a formerly blank wall. "Well, fuck me!" he mumbled, very surprised.
After a moment, he wondered if he could make it go away. As he thought this, the door simply faded from view, the wall appearing as if nothing had ever been there.
Some experimentation proved that he could make the door appear and disappear at will, and with a little more effort could make it appear on and wall in the room, even on the ceiling. Eventually he decided that while this was pretty cool, he should perhaps actually OPEN the door and see what the container looked like inside.
Summoning the door again he walked over to it and grabbed the handle, pulling on it hard. He nearly fell on his ass as the door opened much more easily than he had expected. Pulling it open all the way, he stepped up to the threshold and looked inside, his mouth slowly dropping open.
"Holy crap..." he said slowly.
The other side of the doorway didn't open into a closet, as he had been rather expecting. In fact, he was a little hard pressed to think just what it DID open into, other than a room one would store spare planets in.
It was big. Very big. In fact, he would go so far as to say, Very Very Big Indeed. Stepping inside, he looked around, then up. Turning around after a couple of seconds, he went back into his bedroom and shut the door behind him, leaning heavily against it and sweating a little.
It was rather clear evidence of just how powerful that damn stone was. The room behind him seemed to go on forever, lit well and evenly from no particular direction. It was a little like that virtual supply room from the Matrix film, only nothing like as cramped. Shaking his head, he dismissed the door for the moment and went downstairs for breakfast. His family were surprised by how quiet he was, but didn't push.
After breakfast he went back to his room to get his pack with his school things in, and after a moment's hesitation summoned the door again. He opened it and stepped inside once more, looking around. The sheer immensity of the space around him was somewhat overwhelming. He had a sudden thought, and turned around to inspect the door he had just come through.
It presented a rather odd sight. There was a doorframe with an open door, though which he could see his room, simply standing unsupported on a featureless white plain. It wasn't, as he had expected, in a wall of some sort. Walking slowly around it he was surprised to see that when he got around to the other side of the doorway it presented the same view of his bedroom as the other side did.
He stepped through again, retrieved the box containing the stone, and re-entered the apparently infinite space he now seemed to possess. Opening the box he looked once more at the stone. It still seemed to him to be somehow different than it had been the day before, and once more he couldn't quite work out why. Shrugging, he closed the box and put it on what in the absence of a better word could be called the floor, and went back into his room, closing the door behind him.
Disappearing the door, he sat on the edge of the bed and stared blankly at the wall where the it had been. This was a rather overwhelming thing to start the day with. He rubbed his left shoulder absently, it was aching a little. It had been slightly uncomfortable for the last ten minutes or so, and he idly thought he must have slept on it wrong.
Suddenly looking at his clock, he noticed the time. 'Damn it, I'm going to be late!' he thought to himself. He only had five minutes to get to school, and it was a good fifteen minute walk. He'd missed the bus as well.
Struck by a sudden thought, he looked enquiringly at the blank wall, then tried something. He summoned the door again, looked at it musingly for a moment, then dismissed it. Summoning it once more, he this time thought about it appearing in the wall of the downstairs hallway. Nothing apparently happened, so he went out of the room and looked over the side of the stairs. Sure enough, the door was there, sandwiched oddly between the closet and the doorway into the living room. He made it vanish once more and reappear in his bedroom, then opened it and stepped inside.
He mused that 'inside' wasn't really the right word when the space he found himself in looked like you could lose Mount Everest in it without too much effort. Shrugging this off for the moment he reached out and pulled the door closed, then stared at it with some worry. He wasn't sure that what he was about to do was a good idea, but thought that at least he had the stone in case things didn't work out.
Rubbing at his shoulder again, which was feeling a little stiff, he tried dismissing the door. Not sure what to expect, he was a little surprised when apparently nothing did. After a moment, he reached for the handle and experimentally pushed. He might as well have tried to push his way through the side of a mountain. The door was absolutely immovable. Pulling met with the same effect.
'OK, so presumably the door has vanished from the wall in my room', he mused. 'So, will this work...'
With some slight trepidation, he tried summoning the door again, but imagining it in the side of the school gymnasium, around the back where no one normally went. Once more there was no apparent change, but this time when he pushed it opened easily. He was looking at the scrubland at the back of the school.
"Cool", he exclaimed, and stepped through. It looked like his 'storage container' doubled as an instant transport system. Dismissing the door, which looked really out of place in the concrete wall, he walked around the side of the building with a smile, heading for the front door of the school. His shoulder picked that moment to ache severely. "Ow!" he exclaimed, stopping in his tracks and grabbing it with his right hand. Squeezing it he was surprised to find that it felt really stiff and hard, like the muscles were spasming.
The pain peaked, and subsided. Jon leaned against the wall for a moment, recovering. As he was about to begin walking again, his left arm all by itself began to slowly move out from his side. He looked at it in amazement, wondering what was going on. Trying to stop the slow movement didn't achieve much.
He reached over with his right hand again and grabbed his upper left arm, attempting to stop the movement. He was shocked to feel that his upper arm was hard and felt rough under the sleeve of his shirt. His arm continued to move, slowly rising until it was held up and away from his torso at about a 60 degree angle. He could still move his hand, but everything from the shoulder to the wrist was frozen in place.
Staring at the wayward limb in disbelief, he was distracted by a stressed noise coming from his shirt. As he watched something began to push against the inside of his shirt around his shoulder, apparently growing larger by the second. After a moment it tore through and he looked at it, unable to believe his eyes. It was a twig!
He reached over and felt it. It was real. It really was a twig, and as he touched it several others were also beginning to push out in different places along his arm.
Everything happened quite fast after that. Within five minutes he found that instead of a normal arm, he now effectively had a branch sprouting out of his shoulder. There were quite a few twigs and side shoots coming from it, some up to a foot or so long, and as a final change dozens and dozens of leaves sprouted, covering his new branch in greenery.
By this point he was leaning heavily against the wall, almost ready to faint. He became aware that he could feel everything, even the sensation of the breeze moving his new leaves. What the hell had happened? Why did he have a branch rather than an arm?
His hand was still normal, at the end of a three foot tree branch, but it didn't do much good as it was stuck in that position. Jon stared at his new appendage in disbelief, wondering what had happened and what he was going to do about it.
And to top it off, he was still late for school...
