"Jon, come in here!" his mom cried. "It's happening to me!"
Jon bounded over and smacked into the closed door.
"Awww, mom!"
"Are you all right honey?" her mom said.
"You usually keep the door almost closed, and so I just pushed on it... no, I wish the reason was because I just pushed on it, I didn't just push on it, I tried to turn the doorknob, but you know, I have paws now."
The doorknob rattled for a moment and then it swung open, and there stood Jon, standing on all fours like a cat. She peered into her mom's bedroom, and there sat her mom, looking quite human, but also noticably younger. She was holding something in her hands that was also pooling in her lap. She held it up and forward. It was a long, sleek, furry black tail. She was crying.
"Don't be so sad, mom, you look years younger."
"That's not why I'm sad, son!" she was mostly calling Jon 'son' as of late, as if to emphasize that Jon would always be her son. "I'm afraid that I'm going to lose my family!"
"Pfff, if they try to fire you because of discrimination, they're going to have a fight on their..."
"I already was fired. Months ago. And it wasn't because of any kind of discrimination, it was because I, I just couldn't compete. There were new young go-getters looking to advance their careers, and new ones applying for entry level positions, and who are they going to keep? The woman whose biggest contribution was making the coffee in the morning? My sales record was pretty bad. I didn't have the edge. And we're... we're 70 thousand dollars in debt." Jon's mom had been in the exciting field of corporate marketing, representing, or deliberately misrepresenting as the case may be, what one company could do for another if they just hired their services.
"Seventy thousand," Jon said. She had no idea. Well, the stone would take care of something like that in a jiffy. They could be living in the biggest mansion in mansionland. I guess the earlier wish for her to get a promotion at work wouldn't apply, since she didn't have a job at all, Jon thought, and wondered what would happen if you wished for something like that, that had preconditions that weren't satisfied. For instance what would happen if you asked for your car's color to change from red to blue, if you didn't have a car. Would it also be the same as 'I wish for a red car, and for it to change color to blue'? Apparently, if their situation was any indicator, the answer was no, invalid wishes that had prerequisites that weren't true, were simply ignored. Alternatively, all her coworkers would indeed be 'smitten' by her new appearance, since the total number of coworkers was zero, so all of them were smitten.
"What have you been doing all this time instead of going to work?" Jon asked.
"At first... at first I was applying to jobs. Listings in the classifieds, help wanted signs in store windows. I even applied for jobs at fast food places. Did you know they have such a thing as tenure at taco bell? Taco bell! They wouldn't hire me because they had a waiting list, and their current employees had tenure! In a tv show, when they want to show someone has reached rock bottom, there's a character saying something like 'I'll show you! In two months, I'll own this town!', and then there's a cutscene and then they're suddenly in a derpy uniform and unenthusiastically saying 'hello, can I take your order?' but reality is even harsher than that, you can't just get a job, not even a Mcjob. Eventually, I just gave up. Most of the time you kids would be at school, so you wouldn't know if I was home."
The two of them looked over. Jon's sisters Zoe and Elizabeth were standing in the doorway. They had been avoiding Jon, not because they weren't normally on friendly terms with their 'brother', but just because it was understood that they would try to avoid being infected.
"Stay back, kids," their mom said. "You don't want to wait what are you doing...!"
To their surprise, Elizabeth was kissing her mom and Zoe was kissing Jon, right on the mouth.
"...why?!" she cried.
"Because we're a family, and we don't want to be left out of this, we stand together or we fall together," Lizzy said.
"I just wanted to be a catgirl," Zoe said.
Jon wondered if it was too late to elaborate on Karyn's reckless and irresponsible wish, to at least let both his sisters keep their hands. Presumably Lizzy would get mom's strain, but because Zoe kissed me, she's going to end up with paws like me, she thought. Jesus, why did Karyn have to be so irresponsible at times, especially when it mattered. Well, Jon was one to talk, this was all his - her - fault, in the first place, because of the stupid wording of the original wish. But Karyn had did her part deliberately, with no regard for the consequences. Why did she do that? Just a momentary impulse because she thought it would be cool?
Jon excused herself for now. She had some serious wishmaking to do.
She wasn't going to screw around on this matter. She could wish for a winning lottery ticket, but with that, came publicity, usually it becoming national news, at least if it was the jackpot and not a lesser amount. "I wish for ten, count them, ten, one thousand ounce bars of gold. That should fix our money problems." And there they were, stacked nearly on Jon's floor, deeply pressing down into the carpet fibers under their weight. How much was ten thousand ounces of gold worth? Certainly a lot more than 70 thousand dollars. Maybe Jon should come clean about the stone to her family? Ugh. That would be a difficult explanation. It would cause everyone less anxiety if they didn't know, she decided. They would know to be less worried about the future, but they would probably resent Jon for the rest of their lives. It was selfish of Jon, she knew, as most of the benefit of not telling them was for herself, but she thought they would be happier not knowing as well.
"I wish that my strain, as well as Karyn's and Sarah's strains of the cat flu, would preserve their human victims' biped stature, and also not turn their hands into cat paws. And for good measure, I also wish that all four strains would cause their victims to biologically become 18 years old, in human years, not cat years, unless they were younger than that, in which case it doesn't affect their age, and they will age until they're 18, and then stop aging at age 18 and become biologically immortal. There. Now even the ones who don't want it will at least get some benefit out of it, it will at worst be a mixed blessing."
Jon thought for a moment.
"I wish I knew if what I just wished for worked."
Speaking of mixed blessings. Only the last part worked. Jon's, Karyn's and Sarah's strains already had the trait that they gave you paws and made you a quadruped, those were the traits of those strains, and they could not be undone. Blast it. Well, Zoe said she wanted to be a catgirl, and since their mom had only started the transformation, as far as she knew, she was going to get paws and had gone for it anyway, so she was going to be getting the full catgirl treatment.
Jon was thinking about maybe wishing for her mom's strain to take priority if someone was infected with both, which would surely save Zoe from the full treatment and just let her keep the best parts, but suddenly there was a quiet knock on the door to her room, and it started to swing open. In a panic, Jon stashed the stone in its box and quietly slid it under the bed. The door fully open, there stood Zoe.
"Jon, did you think I was going to let you get away? I have been holding back from quality cuddle time with a certain kitty cat, but now that I'm infected, there's no reason not to, and I know you're lonely too, so it's a win-win situ... HOLY SHIT! Are those real?!" Zoe said, pointing at the stack of gold bullion on the floor. She walked over and picked one up. It took both hands. Jon was half surprised she was strong enough, 1000 troy ounces is like 70 pounds. "Oh my god, this tiny thing is so heavy! It's real, isn't it! How did you get them!? Did you rob Scrooge McDuck or something?!"
"I, uh, found them buried in the woods, with my metal detector." The real treasure hunt, 6 months earlier, had gone a little less spectacularly well. He kept finding beer cans, and one time, had dug down to find a sewage main. Fortunately he hadn't broken through it.
"Jon, do you have any idea how much that's worth?" Zoe said in disbelief of the situation.
She did. But maybe it was better if she played dumb. "Probably hundreds of dollars."
"Jon! Gold is worth hundreds of dollars per ounce! You know, an ounce? The weight where you need to use more postage on a letter? That weight of gold, hundreds of dollars! These thousand ounce bars, they're like a million dollars each! Let's go get mom, ok? She has to know about this!"
"Ok," Jon said demurely.
After much exhilaration and celebration, her mom having minor flu symptoms but now with cat ears and 4 distinct bulges visible through her shirt under her two usual ones, Jon and Zoe were once again alone in Jon's room. Zoe didn't give Jon a moment to make that last wish, but after seeing just how enthusiastic Zoe was, decided she would probably rather have paws anyway. To be fair, it was pretty fun having them, Jon decided.
Jon and Zoe fell asleep on Jon's bed in each others' arms, Jon purring quieter and quieter until she drifted off.
