The familiar patterns of light streamed around Grig, and soon he arrived in a barren snowy wilderness.
Grig switched on his translator, another magitechnology device that was a mainstay of Carmal. It wouldn't do to subjugate the galaxy and have any difficulties in communicating with their subjects, after all.
"Rargha rawr!" he said to the life form that was standing there, which roughly translated to "look at me, stupid!" And then mumbled to himself something about how it seemed to be different somehow, from the pictures he had seen of the creatures that lived here earlier. But this could not be translated, as it involved abstract ideas that were beyond the comprehension of the life form he stood before. The life form aggressively took a swipe at Grig, with claws blazing.
"Blast it anyway," Grig said, swallowing the polar bear whole, absorbing it, and assuming its shape.
Grig looked at his homing device. It was useless at the moment. He could only home in on the reality altering artifact if it was active, if it was being used at the time and releasing its particular sort of influence on the rest of the universe, and for the moment, it wasn't.
Grig pressed a button on his transportation pad, which caused it to fold up and compress itself into a case, that in human terms, looked somewhat like a typical suitcase. And along ambled a polar bear holding some strange piece of technology in one hand, a suitcase in the other, as it headed toward a nice cave of sorts, a few hundred paces away, where he would await the signal that would allow him to zoom in on that which he seeks. It had already been used recently, and that was how he had found it. Surely it was just a short matter of time before it was used again. He had landed in Greenland, far away from any humans, but that was best for Grig's purposes anyway, he didn't need to be bothered with locals until it was necessary to confront them.
Jon was wondering what he should use the stone for. There really should be something he could do with it. Should he wish for his homework to be done? No, that was cheap. If he was going to use it to cheat, he might as well ask for all the knowledge he would learn in school to be implanted into his brain directly or something. But even that didn't seem to have a lot of point to it. The whole point of education would be to be trained to eventually get a job in industry and become a productive member of society, and it seemed like Jon could do better than just living a boring typical life. But how big was too big? The stone's capabilities were too tempting, but it was also hard to exactly decide on what to do.
"Dinner is ready!" his mom yelled from downstairs. Jon thought about his mom. She worked a job and also filled the role of mother. She was a hard-working single mother. Most single mothers were terrible parents, but his was so diligent, and she deserved better, Jon figured. And he had the means to provide that relief. But for now, dinner was already prepared, and he wasn't going to waste the meal prepared with love by his mother.
Jon wished, holding the stone, "I wish my mother would get a raise at work," and then put the stone away and went downstairs.
Grig sat in his cave, looking at his instrument, which served multiple purposes. It was a death ray, a homing device for reality altering artifacts, and a general planetwide information gathering device. He had connected wirelessly via sattellite to this planets' "internet" as its locals called it, and was playing some sort of digital board game called "checkers" against a human, to pass the time until he got a signal that would tell him where on this stupid planet to go. While playing, this human opponent wanted to "chat" with Grig.
"ASL" the human chatted. The translator struggled for a moment with the specialized terminology and indicated that it stood for "age sex location".
Grig wasn't sure how the translation would handle that. In his species, there were 2 sexes needed to produce an egg, and one more needed to hatch it, but as they were shapeshifters, there was no need to be permanently as one or another of the sexes as apparently the life forms of this planet did it. But he would just wing it with some partial truths.
"2848 Earth years, male, Earth", he typed. Male was the sex of the polar bear whose form he had assumed, at least. Carmalians, being of a superior species, could handle things like arithmetic computations and conversions of units at speeds that could put the average autistic savant to shame, and so also easily knew his age in Earth years without effort.
"Ha ha, very funny," the human he was playing chatted.
"Oh well," Grig said to himself, "it's just as well that he wouldn't believe me."
"Damn but you're good though," the human chatted. "How long have you been playing checkers?"
"6 minutes," Grig answered.
"No, I mean in general, not just today."
"6 minutes."
"Bullshit. This is not the 1st time you ever played checkers your too good."
"You're," Grig corrected. Don't these stupid humans know their own language?
"Grrrr! Damn you!" the human chatted. "Who are you, anyway!"
"Nobody in particular," Grig answered.
Suddenly Grig got a signal.
"I have to go now," Grig chatted and resigned the game, leaving the man he was playing feeling humiliated, since he was clearly going to lose that game, and he didn't want a pity resignation from a better player.
Grig unfolded his transportation pad, and uploaded the coordinates for transportation merely across continents on a planet. It wasn't an exact fix, but it was precise enough to get him within the same human town.
After teleporting to the town, he stood in front of a teenaged girl. One Sarah McMillan. No one else was around.
"Ahhh! Oh my god! A polar bear!?"
"Arrrraa!" bellowed the polar bear, which in polar bear speak, roughly meant, "I'm going to eat you now. Taa taa." Sarah was paralyzed in fear at this.
The polar bear flung out a paw, which crushingly gripped around her neck, and chucked her down his throat. Sarah's last thoughts as she disappeared down the polar bear's throat were that she had wasted her life trying to be popular with people that she had no respect for.
"Yuck," Grig said, in her new feminine voice, at the revulsion of not just swallowing but becoming something so utterly repulsive.
Looking at her ubiquitous alien device, Grig, looking like the late Sarah McMillan, but naked, said, "I still don't know exactly where, but at least I have it pinned down to the right area now. One of the humans who lives in this settlement must own it. One more use of the artifact, and I should have it." Grig coughed up the clothes Sarah was wearing, and realizing that it was often customary in some alien civilizations to wear these things, put them on. In one of the pockets, she found an ID card of some sort, a 'driver license", which had her name and address on it. It would serve as a base of operations until Grig had this all resolved, which hopefully wouldn't take very long. She didn't want to waste too long on this development-forsaken rock.
