pakkwiman's profile

As I wrote this, it occurred to me that no one accounted for what happened to Sarah McMillan and Stephanie Wright on Tuesday before they became Sarah Barry and Stephanie Sanders on Wednesday. It would be neat if an explanation could be integrated into some future plot development.

Maybe Sarah Barry and Sarah Kim have inherited some trait from Sarah X on Tuesday. Similarly, Stephanie Sanders and Stephanie Nguyen might have something in common with Stephanie Y on Tuesday.

Or not - and even if not, if the dormant/resurfacing hypothesis above turns out to be correct, Tuesday traits lost on Wednesday and Thursday might reappear on some later day.

Maybe if a person born into family 1 has traits A, B, and C, the stone tries to make as many of those traits surface if that person is reborn in family 2. Maybe the nature/nurture of family 2 enables A and B to be expressed but not C. A later swap could put that "girl" (however defined) into family 3 where trait C could be expressed but not A and B (which have been replaced by traits acquired from family 2!).

I'm not happy with the way I covered Dan Madison's backstory three times in the first part. That was unintentional - and the sort of thing that would be fixed in a rewrite. I was going with the flow of the words as they came out, and that flow circled back twice. When I speak, I often cycle back to reinforce earlier points. I've done that here, but it doesn't look as good in writing. I hope it's not painful to read.

I got the name "Daniel" for Jon's grandfather from Anonymous51.

I've revived some old names from the past:

Katie Shepard, last seen here
the original Christina Pasternak
? Hale; I've named this girl Brooke; she was replaced by Tina on Tuesday and Jennifer (no last name given; a brunette cheerleader on Wednesday who used to be Jennifer Taylor on Tuesday)
Amber Wellington

Dan Madison's academic career was loosely inspired by Keith Taylor's.

I was curious to see how your continuation would differ from mine. This was worth the wait! You took bits of mine and built upon them.

"One of the workmen headed toward the sign on the mailbox, adding the name Meshida to it, weathering it so it did not look new."

Looks like there might not be any McMillans in the new reality.

"And...I didn't try to convince Sarah she wasn't my sister...to see if I could reach the old Sarah."

Not sure if Jon is implying whether he wants to recruit his sister Sarah or not. In 2009 you wrote a branch where Sarah is in Jon's family and has no memory of her old self but decides to help Mikey who remembers the old reality. Jon doesn't necessarily need Sarah to be her old self or want herself to be a McMillan again to recruit her for the team. Brown-haired Sarah might be motivated by a sense of justice toward others. She might think what the workmen are doing is wrong and might want to stop them - even if such efforts might erase the only self she knows now.

Bardinga,

I second Samantha on the character sheet. Maybe it can be in the Forum and you can edit it as the universe grows.

Impressive debut from you. I need to reread this branch and get to know the characters better before I dare to write about them. You seem to have deeply thought this through, and I'm reluctant to mess up whatever plans you may have.

I was stuck trying to figure out why Susan didn't get to play and was hoping The Guest or you would come up with something - and you did! Much better than the vague notions I had in mind which didn't involve the coach or Sarah - just another player (Rachel's granddaugther Brianna rather than Makayla Brusnikov), much less lead to a great scene in which Jon gets serious and Sarah loves it!

When I started this branch in 2008 I never imagined it'd lead to some soul-searching stuff like this. Thank you.

"Honestly, that boy used to be so reliable"

Maybe the previous babysitter whom Jon replaced was!

"who was only on his second wife of the week" - LOL

"despite the fact she'd been young people the only a few hours beforehand" - my other favorite line

"She was fairly experienced as a waitress in her mind, but earlier that day, she hadn't even known how to drive, or that showing off her chest got better tips."

Wondering how the waitress got swapped since I'm assuming an "experienced" waitress wouldn't be a high school student working part-time. Ah, I've got an idea ... hope it doesn't ruin your plans.

I wish I could continue this, but I don't know enough about soccer or eight-year-old girls to formulate a plausible answer from Susan.

BTW, Seo-jun (neat "Susan" sorta-soundalike!) is normally a male name in Korean. It was the #1 male name in South Korea in 2019. But I have known a Korean woman whose name sounded like a man's name in Korean, so why not? The only trouble I have is coming up with a Korean name component pronounced "jun" that could be interpreted as masculine. ("Seo" can be a female Korean name component.) Maybe in the current reality, Susan's mother wanted a son and stuck with the name she would have given a son!

I was a bit surprised to see the name "Yeong-ja" for a young girl because "-ja" is an old-fashioned suffix, a remnant of the Japanese colonial period - a Korean translation of "-ko" in Japanese girls' names. ("-ko" is now similarly out of style in Japan.) I once ran into a group of elderly Korean women born during Japanese colonial rule, and their names ended in "-ja."

I liked the use of "Umma"! Although it's unrelated to English, it sounds just enough like English mommy-words to be understood in context.

I had to heavily revise this episode to make it conform with what Nobody14 established in "Where were you?".

At the moment, the beginning of this episode doesn't conform exactly with the ending of "Was There Anything Good about Jon's New Life?", but I hope the moderators will approve my revised ending to smoothen out the continuity.

Note to moderators: I'd like to change "When Jon went to his room to grab his backpack" to "When Jon bent down to grab his backpack" as in "Jon's New Sisters" because Jon didn't go to his new room (and doesn't even know where it is!).

Thanks for picking up where I left off with the phone! I may have considered having the phone being taken by someone else, but I definitely did not explore that possibility in depth.
You make me wonder if Athena's new criminal tendencies were inherited from the girl she replaced - or if they're a carryover from Betty Lou Drucker who might have been a petty thief in her teens.

I've had my phone stolen, and you've given some idea of what might have happened to it! Shudder!

The Guest, I forgot that I had somehow (accidentally?) pinned my home as a location in my iPhone's map app. I suppose that if I could forget that, a flustered Jon could forget that too.

Imagine if Jon Nguyen hadn't pinned his home unlike Jon Madison. Jon would have opened his map app and looked for a pin that didn't exist.

I should have had Jon try to use his phone to go home, but I'll let the episode stand as is, since I hadn't made a continuity-violating error requiring correction.

Linda is a single mother in some branches and married in others...hard to keep track.

No problem. When I finally started writing here again for the first time in over a year, I got off to a bad start by contradicting what Nobody14 wrote about Sophie Burger ("a little shorter than other girls her age") and making her replacement Keun-hye, an adult Korean woman, taller. I fixed that right away.

Lately I've used the "View story so far" function multiple times so I can have all the episodes from start to finish open in multiple adjacent tabs for reference. I try to check things as I write. This branch dates back fourteen years, so it's unlikely anyone has all the details in active memory. Recently I rediscovered that I had given Zoe's first swapped form a last name (Monaghan) two years ago.

As for asking...many people also have their address in their phone or the house phone.

I considered having Jon find his address on his phone, but I myself don't have mine on my phone, so I had him wander town instead to give him something to do while pondering what was happening. In real life I find long walks useful when I'm overwhelmed.

Why didn’t I make Jon simply ask Tiffany where his house was? Maybe I should have. But I’m thinking that Jon is uncomfortable with the new Tiffany and is reluctant to speak to her again. Also, he’s freaked out by the fact that she now lives in what used to be his house. I imagine her house being subtly different from his: same physical structure but different car, stuff in the yard, etc. That almost-but-not-quiteness has shaken up Jon and left him unable to think clearly.

A note about Jon's father: Back in 2008 when I started this branch in "Random family swaps", I made a brief reference to him:

He [Jon] heard footsteps in the hallway outside his bedroom. They were too light to be his father's, but too loud to be his little brother Mikey's.

However, Jon's father was never mentioned again in the branch, and in "Another Mystery", The Guest established that Julie Madison was a "single mother."

I'm assuming that Linda Madison was also a single mother, or else Jon would have said something about losing her father when Julie became his mother.

To reconcile those 2008 and 2022 episodes, I propose that Jon's father is still alive and that in the initial reality, he still visited his ex-wife's household on occasion, so Jon would know what his heavy footsteps would sound like.

Question: Is Jon's original father a Madison, or did Linda Madison keep her last name and give that name to her children?

Great before/after contrasts!

A future episode might reveal some degree of continuity between old and new beyond the retention of first names. The previous Manning and Donovan might’ve been slightly different from this duo, and not just because their first names were different.

Neat to see the Carly McGill/Samantha Sanders scene again but from another perspective!

I’m sorry if I sound too critical. I love this episode, and I upvoted it. I want to continue the story from here but am not certain about some of the details.

“Of course, she'd only been a freshman for a day. Before that, she had been a sophomore, and the day before, a Junior. Unlike some, her changes had been minor, as she'd gone up or down one year...but not anymore.”

I’m confused by “up … one year”.

It seems that until the wish took effect on Tuesday at 3:47 PM, Rachel was a junior. Then she became a sophomore.

And on Wednesday she became a freshman.

And now on Thursday she joins the class of ’54 (?).

Until that sudden age boost, it looks like she was just going down a year at a time.

Nobody14 established in “On the Bench” that one of the soccer players was eight. So I made Ji-woo eight too.

If Rachel is now eighty-six, she would’ve been born around 1936, assuming this story is set in 2022. So when she was eight, Roosevelt was in office - Ike wouldn’t be in until she was about seventeen.

Possibilities:

she’s old and getting her presidents confused

she was thinking of FDR and not Ike

she’s seventy-six which would make her eight when Ike was in office in 1954

I’m guessing “Wacjowski” is a typo for “Wachowski” since I think “cj” is unusual in Polish. http://www.herby.com.pl/indexslo.html , a database of Polish surnames, doesn’t contain “Wacjowski”.

“Palimpsest” is a nice metaphor for swaps and could be a title for this branch if it were published as a standalone novel.

Thanks for immediately picking up where my episode left off!

I was hoping this episode might reveal who the female director was and had once been, but perhaps that can come up later.

I hadn’t thought of diversity as a factor in the director’s mind. That, um, could set the stage for what happens next.

The director being irritated by the song “Tomorrow” cracked me up.

Three great things about Rachel:

a reminder that theater requires more than actors
first character mentioned who’s gone up and down a year

(probably a very common effect of the wish, but this episode is the first time that such little shifts have been explicitly pointed out)

first elderly character

I fixed a continuity error of mine: I originally made Connie tall, but neither Keun-hye nor Sophie were tall, so that made no sense, and I decided to have Keun-hye and Sophie have the same height and build.

A note on Keun-hye’s last name: Korean women keep their surnames after marriage. So she remains a Lee even after marrying Mr. Kim. However, her two daughters take their father’s surname.

I was considering writing an episode in which Jon said no, but this is even better!

Happy to see this branch resurrected after 16 months!

Having Tiffany belong to an unfamiliar family rather than having her join the family of an established character is a nice touch.

(continued from above)

Nothing says the stone can't work on a case by case basis either

I was thinking that there could be six different interpretations of Jon's words for the first six days, and then on the last day, any of those interpretations could apply on a case by case basis to various "girls" (however defined) on campus, making poor Jon unable to predict how to cope with his fluid reality. But a case by case interpretation of the Thursday transformation works for me too.

Back in 2009, The Guest wrote,

One could also theorize that the families themselves would change and the girls would remain exactly as they were.

and for 11 years I was assuming a scenario like the novel The Great Mom Swap in which the girls are temporarily adopted by different families who aren't genetically changed. But Jon turning black to match Aisha has made me see other possibilities in familial transformation.

Again, thanks to you both for exploring what could be done with my idea! I'm half-hesitant to add any more episodes to this thread because it's so much fun to sit back and read whatever you come up with!

Just expressing my preferences here ... my big hangup is universe-internal consistency. I've seen stories/episodes with the transformation equivalent of a time travel paradox. A character is left untransformed even though their whole world has changed and their parents don't exist anymore or never got together in the new history. So that character shouldn't be able to exist.

(There are stories, of course, in which such characters are fish-out-of-water heroes, remnants of a continuity that no longer exists, but the rules as established in this branch are that the altered universe is internally wholly consistent except for Jon's memories. [No one else was with Jon when he made the family swap wish, so no one's else's memories remain intact.])

Hence my logic - if (1) Aisha is still black and (2) Jon is now her brother, her new family - Jon's family - has to be biologically related to her. The stone has lopped off all the lower branches of her nuclear family tree except for her and has grafted on the Madisons who are now (whatever Aisha's last name is). Julie is the new daughter of Aisha's maternal grandparents and whoever Jon's father was is now the new son of Aisha's paternal grandparents. Meanwhile Aisha's parents and siblings (if any) are now grafted onto some other family tree, most likely white due to the town's demographics.

Susan Madison's family swaps with Linda McMillan's. Susan has a mother, maybe Father, and two siblings. Linda has no siblings. Is Susan Madison suddenly an only child and her parents are Richard and whoever replaced her as Mom?

Yes, that's what I was thinking (which doesn't have to be the only way things work): Richard-Mrs. McMillan-(daughter slot) are one unit and (Jon's father)-Julie-Jon-(daughter slot)-Mikey are another. The daughters change slots, and the rest of the units alter to fit the daughters. So Richard McMillan morphs into Susan Madison's father Richard Madison, and (first name) McMillan morphs into Susan Madison's mother (first name) Madison.

But ...

Do the extra kids swap with the help?

That would be fun. The number and type of slots in Linda's family remaining fixed and the Madisons being forced to fit. The parents would remain parents, and one daughter slot would be fixed, but one could have fun with the rest:

Mr. Madison > Mr. McMillan (genetic changes)
Julie Madison > Julie McMillan (genetic changes: e.g., red hair to blonde, less prone to fat)
Linda McMillan > Linda McMillan (no genetic changes)
Jon Madison > the McMillan housekeeper Jon (genetic changes; new last name); the stone regarded the housekeeper as being "like part of the family"
Mikey Madison > Mikey Orr (genetic changes; replacing Fred Orr, Sarah/Linda's cousin since there were no spaces left in the immediate family)

Conversely:

Richard McMillan > Richard Madison (genetic changes)
(first name) McMillan > (first name) Madison (genetic changes)
Susan Madison > Susan Madison (no genetic changes)
McMillan housekeeper > (first name) Madison (genetic changes)
Fred Orr > Fred Madison (genetic changes now Susan's brother instead of her cousin)

What if the family you swap for yours has kids of different ages? What if Jon is suddenly the younger sibling...etc etc etc.

That would be the age-constant model (Jon being forced to fit into a preexisting younger sibling slot in another family) which also works for me.

Jon and Aisha seem to have been the same age before. Are they fraternal twins now? Or Jon could be Aisha's younger brother. I like how The Guest didn't make Aisha specify whether he was older or younger: "my brother."

The key point is that the girls in the school are remaining the same for the most part.

I agree that is key. Something has to remain basically the same, for Jon's sanity as well as the reader's sake. The fun will be seeing how families adapt to fit their new daughters. If, for instance, Linda McMillan is now Julie's daughter, Julie could be a lot like the old Susan McMillan, both physically and mentally. Maybe with a shorter haircut. We've already seen a glimpse of how Jon has adapted to fit his new sister Aisha.

On the other hand it would be interesting if the new families in turn influence the girls in some nongenetic way. Maybe Julie McMillan is kinder than Susan McMillan or whoever Linda McMillan's mother was, and Linda is less nasty.

require a ton of reference to know who has been what if we warp people around too much

Maybe the temptation to introduce more characters should be kept in check (as much as I'd love to see them) and the focus should be on a small core: Jon's new black family and his familes from before and after the swap (Linda McMillan and Susan Madison).

Spelling out my assumptions about the Thursday wish: the girls keep their genetics and names, but their new families are altered to be the biological relatives of the girls and have
new last names.

Note that “genetics” doesn’t necessary equal being physically unaltered, as the girls could have nongenetic traits altered because they grew up in different families. And their personalities and life histories could be different too.

One possibility that just occurred to me is that some of the girls may end up being adopted daughters of new families. In that case the parents and other children wouldn’t be altered physically or in name, but the girls might have new last names, though their genetics would stay the same. That does raise the question of who their biological parents are in the new reality.

Example: On Wednesday X is the biological daughter of A and B. On Thursday X becomes the adopted daughter of C and D, but is still the biological daughter of A and B (who gave her up for adoption at birth). A and B in turn become the adoptive parents of Y, the biological daughter of E and F, and so on.

My assumption was that if Jon is black, he’s (whatever Aisha’s current surname is) now, and Julie and Mikey are Aisha’s mother and brother, while Aisha’s original family now has some other last name and is the same race as their new daughter (who is likely to be white).

BTW, back in my original episode in 2012, I mentioned Jon’s father, but everyone ever since, myself included, forgot about him. Could he make an appearance as Aisha’s new father?

It seems that Aisha Johnson lucked out and was swapped into another black family (albeit fatter than the Johnsons) on Wednesday. (Odds are she was white on Tuesday with a different first name like Alicia.)

Pre-wish black Aisha Johnson > Tuesday: white Alicia X > Wednesday: black Aisha Y > Thursday: Black Aisha Y with Jon’s family as black Ys

X might equal Brewer, and if so, Aisha on Wednesday might have carried over her weight as a white girl into her new identity as a black girl. Julie’s weight already happens to nicely match that of her new daughter Aisha. Mikey could be chubby now. I’m assuming Jon didn’t gain much if any weight as he would have noticed even without a mirror. (Did Tiffany have one in the office because she was so vain?)