"We're already here, Mom," Zoe said. On any other day, his voice would've dripped with sarcasm, but everybody was in too serious a mood for that. Tina did a double-take, then half-smiled at her own inattention. "Ah, right," she said. "Well, you two don't look any different than you did before Mikey went out. Do you feel any different?"
Jon shook her head. "Nope," she said. "But would we notice if we did?"
Mikey shrugged her shoulders. "I don't think anything happened to them," she said. "I wasn't made 17 by the first note, I had my age swapped with Jon's. So maybe the one that made me a 15-year-old girl avoided contradiction by making Jon originally 15, I dunno. These things don't seem to change reality, anyway. And that's the only one that should've affected them indirectly, and none of the others were supposed to directly affect them."
Tina nodded. "I guess that was fortunate," she said. "We're going to have enough trouble getting things straightened out with just these changes. Now, I guess the next thing we need to do is find out who else found one of the notes."
"Right," Ken said. "Mikey, how many do you think there are?"
The snake-tailed girl shrugged. "Not sure," she said. "I don't think there were more than five notes already taken, plus the one Mom found."
"Hmm," Tina mused. "Not as bad as I was afraid of. So...that stone can help us get this worked out, right?"
"Right," Jon said. "We already found out that it can't undo what's been done to us, but we can use it to change things so that living with this is easier, I guess. But we have to be really careful, okay? Wishes made with the stone can't directly undo other wishes, and everybody but the people who hear a wish being made will think things have always been however it makes them."
"Well," Ken mused, "I guess the obvious solution would be to make things so that everybody affected by the notes has always been whatever they are now, but I don't really like the idea of changing people's lives without their permission. Since there's only a few other people affected, do you think maybe we could ask them how they'd like things worked out?"
Tina looked thoughtful. "I suppose that would be a more ethical way of doing it," she said. "But what if they try to take the stone from us? That kind of power can be awfully tempting."
"Well," Zoe offered, "maybe you could wish they couldn't take the stone away? Heck, you could even make them forget all about it after they'd been taken care of."
