Jon couldn't understand the voice below them, but heard fear and pain in it. He hurried away from it, to the surface, changed to something more human, and said, "I wish I could understand that language!" Nothing happened.
"The stone!" said Karyn. She'd shifted too, not into a humanoid otter like himself but fully into a young woman with the morning sunlight in her hair. "I'll get it." Jon had only a second to see her before she ducked just below the surface and swam towards their boat as an otter again. Jon nodded, though it was too late for her to see, and dove towards the cry for help.
A pit had gashed the underwater road, and Jon saw nothing alive in the water directly above it. The fish kept away. Still Jon descended until he saw the bottom, where someone hid behind a statue. No -- most of her body had turned to marble! The head and one arm still unchanged waved frantically to him, and she called out in an unknown tongue.
Jon hovered near her and tried to make reassuring gestures with his paws and tail, but without a human voice or the wishing stone there was nothing to do. In a minute his throat tickled, and he heard Karyn coming with the stone.
"Hello?" he tried saying underwater, exhaling bubbles. He didn't need to breathe. Since he was already a were-otter, it felt like cheating.
The marble woman's gibberish changed. "--So long, it's been so long I can't believe by the Tree you've finally come and --"
"Calm down. We're here to help. What happened?" Meanwhile, Karyn approached and gasped as she saw the marble woman.
The woman said, "I... I... thought everyone in Vinland was dead. You must have been changed by the stone's power too."
Karyn said, "I wish this person were back to herself."
The white marble flowed and melted away, leaving behind the sleek silver metal and plastic of which the Vinland woman was made. She tested her legs and treaded water before sitting down on the seabed, arms wrapped around her knees and rocking. "I'm Glora. Please, you must use the stone to undo what Sleituson did. Isn't that it there? Why haven't you changed yourselves back yet?" Long, metallic golden hair floated around her head.
Jon and Karyn exchanged a look. "Uh, Miss Glora? -- I don't think we're from the same place as you."
It took some explaining, back on the deck of Jon's boat. Glora came from another world, where someone named Sleituson found the stone and destroyed a flourishing Viking civilization after wishing himself power and cursing all who opposed him. Glora had always been an android, an equal citizen with the humans of Vinland, but --
Karyn said, "Did you know this Sleituson?"
Glora tore into a raw fish Jon had caught, apparently enjoying the taste. "We found the stone together. But he did something to me, and I can't remember." She shivered. "I was in the water so long, trapped with no one to hear me. That city underwater, was it your world?"
"No," said Jon. He'd been thinking about Atlantis; didn't the legend say it had been destroyed for wickedness? Maybe the sunken city belonged here in the Land of Things That Disappear. Maybe it even was Atlantis.
Glora punched one palm with her fist. "Then Sleituson is still out there, smashing worlds! You two have seen what the stone can do. Won't you help stop him?"
Jon said, "But we've got the stone now. Here: I wish Sleituson was dead."
"Jon!" said Karyn. "That's murder!"
Glora said, "It won't work anyway. He's not stupid. He must have wished to protect himself."
Jon set the stone down on a wooden table between them, and slapped his hand onto the table to stop the hand from shaking. It was so easy to kill someone with the stone, so easy to twist anything to your liking. "Then it's too late to undo what he did," he said. "We should make a wish or two to keep him from jumping worlds, then focus on doing something non-destructive with the stone -- here, or back in my world."
Karyn sat with her chin propped on her hand, looking at him with an expression Jon couldn't read. Glora looked back and forth between them, then stood up from the table and said...
