Grig was losing patience. Her cover was on the fence of being blown, and on something that probably wasn't a valid lead. All she needed was one more use of the artifact. She was almost to the house of the former Sarah when her device chirped. Her eyes went wide. This was it! She almost didn't even feed the coordinates into the transportation pad, because it was only 2 thons, that is, about 800 meters, but 1 minute could potentially make quite a bit of difference, plus it could teleport her inside of buildings, to within one hundredth of a thon, and that could avoid some nuisance with locked doors. She activated the teleportation process, and stood right outside the door to Jon's room, inside his house.
Jon went straight for the stone when he got home. He got it out from inside its box, held it, and said "I wish I knew what was going on with Sarah McMillan."
And in that moment, he knew. He knew that she was dead.
"But I just saw her a few minutes ago! She just died?! Was she hit by a car right now?"
Jon was about to wish for information on the circumstances of her death, when the door to his room flew off its hinges and exploded inward into the room, missing him by less than a foot.
"Jon Madison," Grig said. "So, it was you, after all."
"Sarah? Wait a minute. You're not Sarah."
"No. I just took her form. Give me the reality altering artifact." Grig pointed a device at Jon, which looked suspiciously like a futuristic weapon.
"You know about it? Who are you?"
"I'm not really interested in shallow banter, but I'll tell you that I'm an alien, from outer space. Give me what I want, and I'll go away. Don't give me what I want, and I'll still get it, when I take it from your cold, dead hands. Though not really, more accurately you won't even have cold, dead hands, since you'll just be a cloud of particles, but when I learned your language, the database included a bunch of cute idioms, movie quotes and other cultural references, and I have been having fun with them."
"Like the Planet of the Apes thing earlier."
"Oh, you got that," she said.
"Don't you want to know how to use it?"
Grig cutely squinted at Jon for a moment, and then conceded that. "All right. Tell me about it." But she waved the weapon dangerously at his head.
Jon figured he really couldn't bullshit his way out of this, so he picked up the stone. But he had the element of surprise. If he was willing to risk it. This Sarah pretender probably didn't know it was voice activated, by the words 'I wish'. That was the gamble, at least.
"I wish you didn't have that device," Jon said.
"A pity for you that I doooo.... wha?" Grig's tool had just vanished.
"I wish..." Jon started to say, before finding a fist jammed in his mouth and his jaws pried open painfully, unable to say anything more. The trouble with trying to trick an alien with an exceedingly high intelligence was that they tended to learn very fast, and won't let you suckerpunch them the same way twice.
"Very funny," Grig said, forcing the stone from Jon's grasp with her free hand, with unimaginable strength that went well beyond the plausible parameters of that body. "I take it that this grants wishes then. That's interesting."
Grig yanked her fist out of Jon's mouth, taking most of Jon's teeth with it, and breaking his jaw in a compound fracture that left him in agony and his face a bloody mess.
"You look even worse than your species looks normally. I guess I'll test it out. I wish the damage I just did to you would be healed."
Jon's face regenerated, his teeth growing back. He gasped in relief of the pain suddenly being gone.
"Well what do you know, it works. It looks like my mission here is done."
"Wait!" Jon cried. "Don't you want to know how the rules at least? The limitations of what it can do?"
"I'm a great scientist where I come from. I'm sure I'll figure it out."
"Ok, Sarah, or whatever your name is. Try this experiment then. Ask for your device to be back."
Grig shrugged her shoulders and said "I wish I had my device back." And nothing happened. Jon knew this was because the device had been wished away, and that earlier wish could not be undone by wishing it back.
"All right, human. You have my attention," Grig admitted. It was actually a pressing matter since she was going to need that device to get home, as it was what interfaced with the transportation pad in order to set its coordinates. "I might as well hear what you have to say."
"Promise to let me use it one last time," Jon said.
"Fat chance, bozo. Did you think I was an easy to fool fairy tale villain like the evil genie that lets the man trick him into locking him in his bottle, or the ogre from Puss and Boots, who will arbitrarily give you the advantage and turn into a mouse and dutifully be gobbled up? I am as far above you as you are above that mouse."
"I'm not trying to trick you. What if I ask you to wish for a few things, and you do them if you agree and find them reasonable?"
"Maybe. It depends on what you want. But start talking. Whether I do it or not will depend on how forthcoming you are."
"Ok, first of all, you can't undo earier wishes."
"Ahh," Grig said. "I wish for a different device, which is functionally identical to the one Jon Madison wished away." And there it was. "Well that solves that dilemma. I'm not sure that little bit should earn you a whole lot of bargaining power though."
"It also has a range limit of its influence, of a few miles."
"Hmm. Ok. Actually, I'm more interested in learning how it was made."
"How it was made?" Jon asked.
"Yes. You see, my kind has been collecting these devices, these artifacts, reality altering artifacts, for quite some time. 'Magic', everyone calls it. This is not the first such artifact. We have a lot of them. But we always get there long after they were made, usually long after the civilization that created them has turned into dust, by the time we detect the characteristic signal they generate. And this is probably no exception. I take it you didn't make this thing, and have no idea how it was made."
"No..." Jon admitted.
"A pity. It would be nice to have a recipe for making more."
"You could wish for more."
This surprised Grig. "Is it that powerful?" she asked.
"It's frighteningly powerful," Jon said. "I'm not sure there is anything it can't do."
"All right, let's see about that. I wish... hey, make your request. What would you like me to wish for?"
"How about you wish for the real Sarah to be resurrected?" Jon suggested.
"Holy poop on a stick, are you saying it can even do that?"
"I don't know, but it's my last opportunity to try it."
Grig aimed her device at the stone, pressed a few buttons on it, and said "I wish for Sarah McMillan to be resurrected into a new body just like her old one, right here in this room, right now."
As the stone activated, Grig looked at the device, as lights lit up on it, in a circle. "Level 4, level 7, level fourteen, level twenty seven !?"
A naked Sarah appeared in front of them.
"Welcome back to the land of the living," said Jon.
Grig slumped to her knees, looking at the device, and the stone, in shock. "39. It reached level 39."
"Yeah, I have no idea what that means," Jon said.
"There's another me!" the real Sarah said. "I'm alive! Ah! Don't look!" she squealed at Jon.
Jon looked away and said, "could you wish for some clothes for her?"
Grig was still busy being flabbergasted. But not so much as to be witless. "I wish for some clothes for Sarah, just like the ones I'm wearing, which are actually her clothes anyway," she mumbled.
Sarah picked up the clothes and put them on as quickly as she could, while saying "who is that, why does she look like me?"
"I'm the polar bear," Grig said.
Sarah's jaw dropped. "The... the polar bear?"
"Yes, the one who ate you," Grig said. "No hard feelings. My name is Grig, by the way."
Sarah backed away, stumbling against the corner of Jon's bed and falling on her firm low-fat buttocks.
"Settle down, I'm not going to do it again."
"What is going on!" Sarah cried.
"What is going on here, is that you have what is at least a level 39 reality altering artifact here. And the scale isn't even supposed to go over 10. 10 is god tier. 10 means it can destroy the universe. The entire universe. Or something equivalently amazing, like creating a universe. I can't even imagine what 39 means, and it may be even more than that, whatever that would mean, that was just the highest reading I got. The next most powerful reality altering artifact in existence is level 4.7. This is on a log-log scale by the way, meaning that its actual strength on a linear scale is like e to the power of e to the power of its level, so 39 is vastly more than 4.7. 39 is ludicrous. It's absolutely batshit insane. It's like this thing can do literally anything. It might even be able to change the digits of pi, or make 0 equal to 1. Or... of course! I wish I wouldn't be destined to die in 12 years!"
Far away, on a distant planet, a certain artifact, the one that had prophesized Grig's death, shattered into a million pieces.
"I wish... for the knowledge, the secret, the recipe, for making reality altering artifacts, the knowledge of what they are and how they work," Grig said. And so Grig knew. "Of course! That's how. So that's how it's done. That's how it works."
Jon was just about to ask Grig what she was going to do next, and if he could have an opportunity to use the stone, when Grig surprised him by saying "Here, have this back. I don't need it. Use it wisely. Be excellent to each other. And party on, dudes." Grig tossed the stone to Jon, who fumbled it for a moment and then caught it.
Grig entered some numbers into the strange alien device she was holding, and plugged it into the transportation pad which was still in the hallway. Then she held up her hand in the Vulcan v-shape salute and said "or was that live long and prosper and peace and long life," before hitting the activation button and disappearing into the cosmos.
Jon and Sarah were in silent reverence for a moment, before Sarah said "can we have sex now?"
"What? What?" Jon replied.
"Don't you think the situation calls for it? It would do us both good, for stress relief. And correct me if I'm wrong, but with the help of your magic rock, we can erase any consequences, so we don't need a condom, we can do it all naturally, which is best."
"I... I... don't even..." Jon started, but found the sentence difficult to complete with someone else's tongue jammed in his mouth. "Damn," he thought, "Sarah really is a slut. But I don't think she's really a bad girl. Eh, why not, it beats being friendzoned by Karyn."
Epilogue:
The Carmalian empire experienced a revolution of knowledge and quality of life. A renaissance. And it had a new galactic emperor. Emperor Grig, in a physical form that most of the Carmalian subjects found distasteful at first, but it eventually grew on them, and soon, became popular enough to have several million imitators. And so there were several million Sarah McMillan twins out there in space. But Grig introduced a cornucopia of new reality altering artifacts that entered the peoples' lives and improved every aspect of them, and rewrote the science books, enriching the understanding of everything, bringing with her the complete theory of reality altering artifacts and algorithms, bringing it all into public knowledge and shedding light to the science behind that which had been called magic, and changed the reputation of the empire from an oppressive totalitarian dictatorship to, well, a friendly totalitarian dictatorship. While Zarg learned the hard way that his phrocks didn't love him personally as much as he thought they did. Or should I say, they loved him a great deal. Carmalians were their natural prey, after all. There was no food they loved more.
While on Earth, Jon and Sarah started going out. Much to the chagrin of the popular crowd at school. And also Karyn, at first. Sarah was surprised by how happy and fulfilled she felt with Jon. When Karyn realized how jealous she was, and the mistake she had made, she confronted Jon and Sarah, and after what almost turned into a catfight, the three of them became the best of friends. With benefits. With the power of the stone smoothing things over and making it possible to try some crazy sexual experiments (primarily temporary gender changes, but also more exotic things like two of them or all three occupying the same body and more adventurous body modifications and transfers of consciousness) that made any issues they might have had seem petty, it was not hard for them to get over their hangups about each other and come to simply adore each other. Sarah helped Jon and Karyn socialize with others more and in return received more genuine love that she didn't even know she was missing, Jon got to have a loving relationship not just with the one he had so long adored but another, to feel completely fulfilled in a way that really contrasted with how miserable he didn't even realize he was before, and Karyn learned the reason why she was always preoccupied with Sarah was that she was actually bisexual and frustrated and in denial over her feelings for both of these people who she actually had a crush on for a long time, but now she got to have them both and totally fall for them both head over heels.
