Jon glanced back towards school. "We should try the library. What should we start with -- Hamlet, or a Star Trek book?"
Karyn said, "Hamlet? Jon, everyone dies in that."
"So? It's not like we would. Aah, you're no fun."
Karyn was busy with her notepad again. "What we need is a test world." She wrote:
Karyn and Jon stood in a forest.
She tapped at the text with her pen and said, "Now all we have to do is say 'Yawa' and --" She was gone! A thunderclap sounded where air rushed in to fill the empty space, and the notebook fell. Jon caught it by reflex.
"So it works," he said. Before he could say the word himself, Karyn reappeared right next to him, knocking him aside onto the pavement.
Karyn reached down to help him. "Experiment One is a success... but it's boring. It's a generic forest. Let me see..." She clicked her pen again, crossed out the old words, and wrote:
Jon and Karyn stood in a forest of gigantic redwoods, in a thunderstorm, with three red moons shining down through the clouds.
"Now, let's both go," she said.
Jon scratched the back of his head, still not sure what the point of her "experiments" was. With her he touched the page and said, "Yawa."
Rain slashed down at him through a howling wind. He raised an arm to shield his eyes, and saw something strange about it -- and then he saw Jon.
Or rather, someone who had to be Karyn was there, but she looked like him. And that meant... Jon looked down and realized that he'd entered the story thinking of Karyn, and taken her role in it. His voice was changed as he said, "We swapped!" He could hardly hear himself over the wind.
The real Karyn gasped, then laughed. "Oops." They were both soaked from the rain already. She looked up and Jon saw the maze of branches between them and the red three-mooned sky. He leaned back against a tree and a branch snapped off. "Emoh."
He reappeared in the real world, as his normal self again, holding the notebook. He felt a strange pressure building up in the air and dodged away, holding the notebook at arm's length just as Karyn appeared beside it.
Jon grinned nervously. "I didn't mean to be you."
She shrugged. "It's more information for us to go on. At least it didn't mix up our personalities." Jon felt vaguely insulted.
As Karyn wrote again, Jon realized that he was still soaked. Shouldn't they have dried off when they left? Oh, well -- Karyn didn't look half bad that way. He stared at her, forgetting the original idea.
"So, what next?" he asked after a minute.
Karyn said, "It's strange. I didn't write this." She held up the notepad, on which was the description of the forest and the sky. But it continued in her handwriting, mentioning footsteps in the dirt, a broken branch, and their brief conversation. "Do you know what this means?" she said.
"We could write a world full of gold, and carry it back out with the 'ytoob' password?"
"No, no. Think bigger. I want to build something. Here." She seized the notepad and sat on the curb, writing furiously. She tore out the first page and handed it to Jon, then started on another.
She's really intent on these tests, thought Jon. What about having a little fun, if they had access to so much power?
He found a pencil and quietly added some lines to the back of the page labeled "Experiment #3." Just a little extra description of the Jon and Karyn characters, and some neat props. And a supporting character. Did it matter how well a thing was described? Heh, this would surprise Karyn!
He stashed the pencil away as Karyn finished her second page and looked up. "Okay! Are you ready?"
"Sure," he said, suppressing a grin. They put the two pages together. He thought of the character named Jon and said, "Yawa."
