Jon wasn't fully awake when he stepped out into the vacuum of space that morning. He had literally just rolled out of bed, threw on a shirt and some pants as he usually did, grabbed his school bag, and trudged out his bedroom door with every intention of consuming whatever was in the fridge.
It didn't click that something was wrong until the bedroom door fucking vanished the moment he closed it behind him.
Jon instinctively wanted to cry out "WHAT!?" or something but found that he could not. There's no sound in Space, after all. He opened his mouth and air just came rushing out, literally sucked from his lungs by its own pressure, and his attempt to inhale got him a lungful of nothing. Literally nothing. He was suffocating, and his whole body felt swollen and puffy like a roasting marshmallow just before it catches fire.
Finally alert, he actually took in his surroundings. Pearly white dust against a black sky filled with stars. The Sun blazed down harshly against his skin without an atmosphere to protect him from it, and hanging up in the sky, half-shadowed where it turned away from the sun, was the Earth, portrayed in more fantastical detail than any globe Jon had ever seen.
The Moon. Jon was on the moon. And he was gonna die if he didn't think of something fast.
HOW THE HELL AM I ON THE MOON!? was his increasingly panicked thought, before he remembered the Stone and realized it was probably to blame.
THE STONE! THE STONE, THAT'S THE ANSWER! Jon had maybe a minute to live out there, naked in space, and he spent the first few seconds of that minute desperately taking off his backpack and chucking it to the ground in front of him. It took longer to fall than he expected and landed all wonky, but he didn't care; it was poised enough for him to unzip and dig out the box. Precious few seconds were spent fumbling in the low gravity, but soon he had it out and the box open and the Stone in hand.
He then realized he couldn't speak. He then wasted seconds panicking. He then tried to make a wish anyway.
I WISH I HAD A SPACESUIT! He thought with all his will, clasping the Stone like a catholic rosary, except with white knuckles.
And thank god, it worked. The Stone flashed, Jon's body de-puffed, and he gasped in a lungful of sweet, sweet air. He breathed very hard for several seconds, letting the lightheaded feeling wash away and panic give way to clarity.
His body still felt like it was on fire, though. His lungs, especially; after a long moment of gasping he was coughing up blood. The vacuum of space really did a number on him, it seemed. "I wish that I was fully healed!" he said when it felt like he had breath to speak again.
The stone flashed, and it was so. All the pain and everything vanished instantly, and the only sign left that anything amiss had just happened was the adrenaline rush he was just coming down from.
And come down he did. Jon felt he had to sit, and plopped down onto the sharp dusty rocks. He would've lay down, too, but he had an oxygen tank or something strapped to his back. Yeah, he was in a Spacesuit now, and now that he wasn't immediately dying he had the brainspace to fully comprehend that. It wasn't one those bulky kinds he saw in pictures; this seemed to be mostly made of some very tight stretchy material, form-fitting except around a few key areas, with a robust cloth outer layer in the pristine white he did usually imagine on spacesuits. There seemed to be layers of fabric and tubes and stuff in whatever space material this was, and honestly he didn't want to think too hard about it, and just trust it was keeping him alive. Same went for all the little dials and things on the suit and helmet. Apparently the Stone had also taken the liberty of transforming his school bag, because in addition to whatever it was on his back, his bag had become a second cache of things an astronaut might need: there were tanks of what was obviously extra pressurized air for instance.
Jon glowered. "What the FUCK, Stone!?" he hollered at his pet rock. "I wish I was back in my bedroom!"
Nothing.
Disturbingly nothing.
"I wish I knew why that didn't work?" Jon asked.
Grandpa's letter materialized from nothing again. It was a bit odd handling it in low gravity with no atmosphere, but still, Jon picked it up and gave it another look. This time, the highlighted section had changed; instead of emphasizing irreversibility, the section about the Stone's range limit had been pointed out.
"So I can't wish I were in Lake Point because Lake Point is too far away?" Jon thought about it. "That doesn't make any sense! I wish this paper would explain why I can't get to Lake Point, and also explain why the Stone could transport me to the Moon!"
The letter underwent a physical transformation that other particularly kinky pieces of paper would have found very erotic, and ended up as a multi-page research paper by a team of very accomplished theoretical physicists that made his eyes water just to look at. As in, there was some supposedly enlightening mathematical equation that looked like a vomit of symbols Jon had never seen before, including a host of greek letters, subscripts, superscripts, funny-font letters with funny hats, AℕΔ not a single actual number in the whole mess. Come think of it, there was no equals sign either; was he even actually looking at a proper equation? Jon was uninterested already.
"So it's some technobabble about the stars aligning or some shit. Got it." Jon crumpled up the paper and engaged in the first ever act of littering on the moon.
After a moment, Jon got up and looked around. Part of him expected to see aliens or astronauts or rovers or, anything the geeky side of him found interesting, really, but no. He was truly alone out here. There wasn't a single living besides him around for thousands of miles, probably. Apart from his own breathing and movement, there was nothing to hear, and apart from the sky and moon rocks, there was nothing to see.
Jon thought a moment. "I wish I had somewhere to sit down."
The stone flashed, and there was a vehicle. Some kind of space buggy custom made for traversing the lunar terrain, with big ol' wheels and a beefy suspension, and only one seat. His seat. The driver's seat. The Captain's seat.
Jon climbed in. There was a manual in the vehicle, apparently meant to teach him to drive and care for the thing, but Jon wasn't interested; he only wanted somewhere to sit, after all, and the driver's seat was plush and cozy. Besides, where would he even go?
...Where, indeed? "I wish there were a marker where the door transported me here." It was the only point of interest he could think of on this big ol' rock, anyway.
A simple stake with an inscription appeared where he'd just been sitting. Jon nodded and got back to thinking.
Apparently the Stone's range limit was not as straightforward as he'd imagined. He'd always imagined a sort of magic bubble, centered on the Stone, within which the Stone had absolute power over everything, but of course that wasn't really how it worked. How it really worked was some mathematical mess he'd die inside if he tried to read. Still, he knew the Stone had power. That hadn't changed on the Moon. It could still conjure up buggies and letters and spacesuits from nothing, and presumably still retroactively affected reality too. Within the confines of that magic bubble the world was still his plaything.
A smile kinda crept onto his face as he considered his pet rock, and the blank slate that was the moon. On a whim, he said "I wish the marker also had another inscription on it, declaring this place, 'JON'S WORLD'."
