The giant door clicked open.
Impressing Applejack with her very large vocabulary of swears, Athena grabbed him by the arms and dove for the nearest cover—the cranny by the farthest-most desk leg, only slightly fouled by dust and cobwebs.
The door opened in earnest, forcing out a powerful gust of wind that would’ve sent both toppling had they not found a hiding spot. With it entered Jon—good—and a pair of guards—less good. The guards didn’t wear the heavy armor you’d expect with a fantasy world. Appropriate to the weather, they had bright, easy-to-wear uniforms instead.
“Are you sure, Your Highness?" spoke the taller of the two, rigid in both tone and posture. “The reports spoke of a green fairy flying into your window. A green fairy.”
“And a purple one in the area!” said the second, shorter and squatter. “ ‘Almost as bad as the greens, they are.”
“I’ll be fine, both of you,” Jon smiled warmly, voice slow and measured, posture neat and serene. And—holy cow—even Athena couldn’t help but swoon along with the bumbling guards. How on earth was Jon so good at this? “I am one of the more powerful mages in this kingdom, am I not?”
Both guards nodded vigorously. Great way to check for facts, Jon.
“Yes—”
“—Uh-huh—”
“—indeed, dearest princess—”
“—one of the most powerful!”
“Unmatched!”
“Prodigious!”
“Indeed!” Jon said, signaling both to shut up. He clapped his hands. “So I’ll humbly request your departure. I’ve… Princessly duties to fulfill?"
Both guards took this wholly in stride and marched out. Jon sighed in relief, loosened to a more moderate posture, and spun around.
“Athena?” he said, pretty voice no longer all high and majestic. “Please tell me you’re around here somewhere. I’ve had a day.”
“Begone foul giantess! I’ve sworn to defend Lady Plumdrop till my dying breath!”
Oh. My. Goodness.
“Athena, you didn’t tell me you found a boyfriend!”
“Shut up.”
“He’s waving a needle at me! Like a rapier!”
“Shut up!”
“He’s not even turning me into a giant peppermint statue! What a gentleman!”
“Jon, I will strangle you.”
Applejack had immediately endeared himself to Jon. Unlike all the other horrible fairies wrecking the palace and ruining lives, the little green man flit around uselessly and shouted something about “paying back Plumdrop for letting him win yesterday.”
Athena hadn’t expected Jon to come back in such a nice mood. And to her growing bafflement, she hasn’t expected him to literally squee at something. She’d expect this more from his princess identity than his real one, to be honest.
“Applejack, leave the princess alone. She’s a friend,” said Athena. Applejack immediately obeyed and fell to her side, grinning like an over-eager golden retriever. Athena ignored him. “Jon. Please tell me you're all giddy for an actual reason and not, like, because all the princess roleplay finally got to you.”
Jon grimaced at that. “No, no, we have good news for once.”
He pulled out a reddish, metallic stone and said nothing more. Athena kept quiet for several moments, not quite following—Oh shit.
“Seriously?” she said. “Just like that?”
Jon nodded. “It was a fluke. Mom made a wish and accidentally teleported without it.”
They argued for at least an hour. Athena did have the initial impulse to make a selfish wish and run away with the damn thing (Jon deserved it for everything he put her through, after all), but after seeing all the consequences of misusing it, she was more than happy to just fix everything and never see it again. Applejack, meanwhile, just sorta existed. Athena couldn't really get him to leave, but eventually gave up and decided he was too dumb to cause problems like the other fairies.
“We need to treat this like a contract,” Jon had said. “Something that accounts for every wish my mom and I’ve made already, and somehow without contradicting them. We’ll have to be careful with the wording, too—”
Athena saw less need to hem and haw about all that. Eventually, in frustration she just planted her hand on the comparatively boulder-sized object and said “Dude. Jesus Christ. I wish for a second magic stone that can counteract the first.”
Flash
So. Jon registered three immediate things about Athena’s wish.
One Mississippi.
The wishing stone liked to match the mental state of its wisher. Be calm and methodical? You get a calm, methodical wish. Easy. But, say, what if you’re fast and frantic?
…You’ve seen what Linda managed. Be fast and frantic, and you get big, explosive wishes. The kind that turns cities into tropical islands.
Athena’s wish was also fast and frantic.
Jon tripped forward, not sure what was about to happen but mind already tornadoing with several counter-wishes to fix the fallout as fast as possible.
Two Mississippi. The flash of light filled the room.
Athena messed up the language. She wanted a second wishing stone—but did not ask for a second wishing stone. She asked for a second magic stone.
Meaning, whatever happened next was unlikely to grant wishes.
Jon was jumping along his desk now, arm outstretched, knocking all his curated books to the wayside in loud thumps. Applejack squeaked and fluttered back. Athena demanded to know what the hell Jon was doing.
Three Mississippi. A second stone was coalescing next to the first, metallic-blue in color.
Wishing stone or not, there’s never been two magic stones before (matter-of-fact, Jon’s first ever wish was to confirm this. There was truly supposed to be nothing else like the rock in the world). Meaning, simply, Jon had no idea what happened when you got two of these things.
Did the stone split in half, leaving two that were only half as powerful? Would they "counteract" each other by going inert when close together? Hell, I don’t know, what if they just smashed into each other?
None, as it turns out—
—Jon slammed swung his hand forward, desperate to grab the wishing stone before something went catastrophically wrong—
—wish granted, the red stone’s light faded—
—the force of Jon’s landing knocked him sideways in a way he didn’t expect. That is to say, he slammed his tits into the table and startled, grabbing the wrong stone as a result. The new, blue one—
—and, as it turns out, Jon was wrong on all counts of how the two interacted together.
They were simply, viciously, magnetically repulsed.
Jon held the blue stone tight, coldly aware of his error. The red stone flew to and through the window.
SMASH.
And fell into the kingdom outside.
