As the light faded, Jon was plunged into darkness. He panicked, unsure what sort of situation he had jumped into this time... until, flailing about to get into a defensive stance, he opened his eyes and realized, with relief and a little embarassment, that they had nearly been closed.
Jon was greeted with the sight of a brightly-lit bedroom. He was alone, lying in bed, a tousled sheet covering his body. Throwing off the sheet and getting to his feet, he saw he was dressed in a grey silk nightgown that fell in gentle folds to his knees. He was female again, though at this point he wasn't sure that even mattered; he had enough other things on his mind to fret over his gender.
Jon sat down at the white wooden chair next to the large vanity table and though back over the flurry of scenes he had just witnessed. It was difficult to take them all in. Traffic accidents, a prison riot, a crowded hospital and a wounded Sarah McMillan, people gathered by the dozens on the steps of the police station, religious extremists moving out to enact God-knows-what kind of violence on anyone they deemed "sinners". Scenes of chaos on the television screen. Paranoia, fear, anger, confusion, and countless people swapped from their bodies and their quiet lives into new and strange lives that, in most cases, seemed to suit them very poorly. Most dire of all perhaps, was the airplane flying over the city without a pilot in its cockpit. The city was a mess, and things seemed to be getting steadily worse; inch by inch the town was turning into a war zone. And on top of all of that, Jon had the police and the federal government hunting him.
Jon looked glumly into the mirror, and glumly a woman in her late twenties, dressed in a revealing nightgown and with an explosion of curly brown hair about her head, looked back at him. Here, at least, things seemed to be peaceful enough. Jon wondered if this woman even knew what was happening, or if she had slept right through the disasters that had befallen the city. If so, she was going to be waking up to quite a shock.
This was Jon's fault. It was all his fault. Had he not made his careless, thoughtless wish, none of this would have been happening. He had to do something about it, something to make everything right again, or at least to contain or cleam up as much of the damage as he could. It was his responsibility, his grave duty. But what could he do? The stone was gone, and he hadn't the slightest clue where to find it. Without the stone, he was as powerless to halt these switches as everyone else in town.
Perhaps he could still be of help, though. His frenetic switching had given him, and would probably continue to give him, something of a bird's eye view of town. He was, moreover, both calmer and more knowledgeable about the nature of these switches than most people. His perspective could give him a unique opportunity to be of help to people. He couldn't control where or when he jumped, but he could certainly help people as the opportunity to do so presented itself, like a sort of guardian angel to the town.... and that would be better, at least, than letting himself be held captive by his switches. Hopefully in time he could find his stone and stop the switches. Until then, he would do his best to make things better.
There was still much he didn't understand about all f this... chief among them, perhaps, why he, and apparently he alone, was suddenly jumping from body to body in sequence while everyone else's swaps seemed to have stopped after their first. There was not much he could do right now to find out the answers to his questions, though, and he wasn't even sure having those answers would help. So for now, rather than question the why of his circumstancs, he would simply focus on making the best of them.
He just wished he didn't have to do this alone. He had finally found Karyn, finally found someone to help him figure things out. And now, he reflected, as the light took him once more, he was alone...
