(This branch is a bit of a reboot or remaster of the original A Royal Mistake path; I wanted to incorporate a few world building ideas I had and refine Juniper a bit.)
Light exploded out of the stone, a thousandfold greater than with Jon and Karyn's earlier, simpler wishes. It spread like a nova, before it engulfed the entirety of the globe, beginning to reshape everything from the architecture to the people of every nation on earth. Jon, standing at the epicenter, was no exception as he felt his entire body rearranging molecule by molecule while his surroundings similarly shifted, like soft clay being rapidly re-sculpted.
Little did Jon know, but his offhand quip was about to tilt the entire world on its axis. Simply because, turning the otherwise unremarkable suburban American teenager into royalty was no simple matter. Sure, the stone could exchange Jon's mind with a princess of one of the handful of surviving monarchies in the modern world, but that wouldn't answer the heart of his wish. Even if he wasn't putting much thought into it, when he said princess, he meant a princess in the classical sense. Royalty, directly in line to wield the reins of power, not a figurehead fit for tabloid fodder. No, for the stone to properly grant this wish, it needed to make a some big changes.
Truly, the wish would have sent the stone into deep thought, if indeed the stone had been capable of that. The stone didn't think in the traditional sense, acting instead like a sorting algorithm of sorts, albeit an intensely complex one. It would, if possible within the parameters within the wish, seek to make changes it deemed to be the most logical. To that end it began rearranging history in a methodical manner to achieve the stated command of turning Jon into a princess. Rather than creating for Jon a singular kingdom, suddenly existing in the midst of the United States, it changed the base parameters of civilization to make monarchies the dominant political form throughout the world. First order of business, all these democracies and corporate oligarchies would have to go, to be replaced by good old fashioned feudalism. Of course, more egalitarian distributions of power hadn't arisen arbitrarily, so the stone set about changing conditions to allow the aristocracy to firmly hold on to power.
That was simply done by a few minor alterations to the human genome, and a little flex of magical power. In this new world, the nobility would be the natural wielders of magic, giving them a mystical edge over their subjects. It was difficult to organize a popular revolution when your local lord could hurl fireballs at you after all. With that done it was a trivial matter to gently guide the course of human history to create a kingdom for Jon's family to rule.
There was of course the other specification that Jon be a princess, rather than a prince, but again the stone easily remedied this as Jon's body shifted and reformed to fit the new history of the world. Truly, if the stone had been capable of pride, which of course it was not, it would say it had done a bang up job as the new princess stumbled back onto her heels as reality began to settle into it's new configuration. See, all it took was rewriting most of human history, ruthlessly preventing a few revolutions, creating a whole class of spell casters, redrawing the borders of every country on earth, and completely transforming Jon, and before you knew it people would happily be treating her like a princess. Wish granted.
