...There must have been some preexisting wish!
The stone belonged to my grandfather, and probably to many other people before him! Any of those people could have made wishes to change its nature. In fact, it seem likely that the irreversablity of wishes was a result of some primordial wish...
Karyn shook her head slowly. "That kind of thing could be dangerous... If we're dealing with so many unknown wishes, we won't have any way of knowing how it's going to react to ours..." She thought for a moment, then held out her hand. "Give me the stone. I have an idea."
I gave it to her. It wasn't as though she could do much worse then she'd already done. Holding it up, she said: "I wish I knew all the wishes that had been made with this thing..." Abruptly, her eyes glazed over. I waited, shifting my new body uncomfortably. After a while, I started to worry. What if someone had made a wish to trap anyone who tried that? What if Karyn couldn't...
Her eyes suddenly cleared again, and she shook her head slowly. "Wow."
"Wow what? What'd you learn?"
She was blinking and moving her limbs around, as though they'd gone to sleep while she was in her trance. "I... I couldn't possibly list them all. This stone is very, very old, and many of the people who owned it weren't very nice..." She shivered. "But I think I know what's been causing our problems. You were right about the irreversability wish - someone back in the seventeenth century did that. He was one of the worst of the lot. But from what I can tell, he also meant to be able to go around his own wishes somehow... I think the stone can sometimes force its own way through a loophole in an earlier wish. And after he lost it, someone else almost immediately wished that the stone would never be able to completely override human will again. I think he'd killed its previous owner and wanted to keep anyone from abusing it again."
I thought about this for a moment. "Then how come you were able to control what I wanted to be?"
She shook her head again. "I'm not sure how far that ancient wish goes. I think it only works in certain situations."
I picked the stone back up and looked it over slowly. "I wish..." I said slowly. "...I wish that everything done with this stone from the time I first recieved it, and everything that is done with it in the future, will have the potental to be undone - except this wish, of course."
Karyn frowned. "Are you sure that'll work? I mean, the wish said no wish could undo another..."
I shrugged. "I think it'll work. It's probably still impossible for one wish to undo another, but we already know that some loopholes exist... This is just building a doorway out of them. So to speak."
I fell silent for a moment, running my eyes over my graceful curves, and suddenly realized that I wanted to be a boy again. I glanced up at Karyn, and she shrugged. "Easiest way to test it out. Don't think I'm letting you off the hook - I still want to make you spend some time like that - but I didn't really want it to last forever."
I grinned. Now that I really wanted turn back, I realized how I could, and how I'd been able to change before, too. "When you made that wish before - you wished for me to stay like this forever, right?" When she nodded, I continued, "But that could mean a lot of things. For example, you could have meant- No, I wish you meant that I'd just stay capable of becoming whatever I wanted." As soon as the wish was complete, I felt something shift. I took a deep breath, and...
