"I think I sort of messed up," said Jon.
"What do you mean? You didn't even use it yet! You wanted to use it, right?"
"Yeah. But most things aren't interesting in ways which would make any sense. I mean, suppose I used, let's say, a spoon. If you just get a human, that's boring. It's only interesting when the human has something about them which is like the spoon. Now, how many ways can a person be like a spoon, if it's not a cartoon like that Ranma story where the guy has a spatula for a head?"
"There's plenty of ways" said Karyn. "There's... Uhh...."
"See! There isn't anything. I mean maybe they can wear clothes with pictures of spoons on them, or be the same color as the spoon, but you don't need a magic device to do that. If they're not looking like a real life cartoon character, you can't really make their face shaped like a spoon or have their fingers be spoons, and I don't want to do that anyway because I've seen Edward Scissorhands. Maybe a little more oval, that's all."
"They could act like a spoon. They have normal fingers but they feed you things. Maybe if you turn a blender into a person they could blend food just by sticking their finger into it. There has to be something."
"What if I humanized the stone?"
"Jon, you don't want to lose the ability to get wishes."
"I could make a wish first that the humanized stone keeps working magically. Or here's an idea. If it has a gender you get that gender but if it doesn't you get a woman. What if half of it has a gender? Like a photograph of the top half of a person, or that broken GI Joe action figure I still have somewhere. Does the rest of it become female? Hmm... Photos could be interesting by themselves. Do you get a person like in the photo with their memories or a new person? What if you use an edited photo? If you use it on a statue of Napoleon, does he know what Napoleon knew? It is sort of like a photo after all. If I fire it at a book, do I get a person who knows the words in the book, or a person who thinks they're a character in the book, or does it just use the picture on the cover, since the picture has a gender, and make a person like that? Or about gender, what if I use a flower? Some flowers are both male and female. Or an earthworm. And what about small things? If I fire it anywhere I'd hit some bacteria, and some dust particles, and some air."
"Looks like you do have some ideas. So what is it?"
"Well...."
