"Well, Karyn, what do you think of wishing that I'd be about to give birth, then changing Jon back to an adult after he's born?"
"Hmm," said Karyn. "That could work... Or you could just wish that Jon was in front of you at the same age he was before he went inside you."
"But wishes can't be reversed!"
"Are you sure that's a reversal?" said Karyn. "You didn't wish for Jon to be inside you, you wished for him to come inside you. One is changing what something is, the other is making something happen. If you wish him out, you've reversed what is, but you haven't reversed what happened. It still happened."
"Let me guess" said Sarah, "you want to be a lawyer when you grow up?"
"No I don't. Do you want me to try it? I want Jon back...."
"Fine. Do it."
"I wish," said Karyn, "for Jon to be sitting with us, at the same age he was before he went inside Sarah."
Sarah clutched her stomach. Jon appeared. Totally naked. Several teens let out screams. "Streaker! Pervert!"
"I wish," said Karyn, "that Jon would be clothed right now and nobody except us at this table would remember him being naked here."
"So that's what happened," said Jon. He looked over to Karyn. "Karyn, I didn't mean to... I mean you and I..."
"Aren't like that. I know" said Karyn.
Jon had been friends with Karyn for a long time, and he was sure he still would be, but he felt that sex with Sarah had closed off some of the possibilites he anb Karyn might have had. He tried not to dwell on it, tried to think of other things....
Only to realize there was one other thing bad enough that it wasn't just a distraction, it was a real problem. "Sarah" asked Jon, "you say that you lived as an adult as a month? And then you wished yourself back to one day after you changed?"
"Yeah" said Sarah. "Where is this going, Jon?"
"And when you wished yourself back to one day after you changed, you did it in such a way that the whole city was like that, so you were only gone a day?"
"I didn't say it exactly that way, but that's what happened. I know the stone doesn't always do what you mean, but this time, I think it did."
"Sarah, the stone has a range limit."
"What?"
"The stone has a range limit. You can take the city back a month, but you can't take the world back a month. So the city's now a month behind the rest of the world. Any day the city's going to be full of reporters talking about the mysterious city that lost a month of time...."
