I wasn't used to the stone at all, or I would have known what to do. Instead I fled. I could hear someone moving. I walked towards the living room to see who it was, only to have a man grab me from behind and push a rag into my mouth. I inhaled once and fell unconscious.
I woke up some time later--but not quite an hour. My watch showed that it was just a little bit short of an hour, and I was still a woman, and I knew that Karyn had limited that wish to an hour.
Karyn was still unconscious beside me. Her eyes were nearly blank, her breathing shallow. I wondered if she had a concussion. Knocking someone out isn't as safe as they show you on TV. Concussions can cause serious brain damage or kill.
But then I remembered the stone. Karyn's fingers were tightly gripped around it and I had to pry her fingers apart to take it. Obviously my captors didn't know the stone was anything special. "I wish," I whispered, "that Karyn would recover completely right now and it would seem normal to whoever's holding me."
Karyn woke up--suddenly, not slowly. "Jon," she said, "someone hit me..." She looked around. "We're in a cell! What's going on?"
"I don't know," I told her. "Maybe I should use a wish to...."
Only at that point, the wish wore off. I was a guy again, as I expected. I was in normal clothes. I was also at home with Karyn, who was halfway to the door. She suddenly tripped. "What?"
"I don't get it!" I said. "One moment we were in a cell and the next we were at my place. It happened when I turned back, and...."
"Wait!" yelled Karyn as she got up. "I think I can guess. You turned into a woman. That changes reality so everyone thinks you were always one. There must be someone who'd kidnap us when you're a woman, who won't do it when you're a guy. So they kidnapped us. But when you changed back, reality changed back. Every single part of reality related to you being a woman changed back. You had never been kidnapped, because they never even had a reason to come into the house."
"If that's true, what do we do?" I wondered. "Change me into a woman again to find out what's happening? No, better yet, I could just zap them period. I wish the guys who kidnapped me as a woman were here and helpless."
It was a good idea, but it didn't work. Nobody appeared, and I had a hunch why.
"I wish I knew whether the guys who kidnapped me are in the wish range."
Needless to say, the answer was "no". I had to do it the hard way.
"I wish I was May again for the next two hours."
And things changed around me and I was female and in the prison cell again with Karyn. I briefly wondered how I could do this and stay in the stone's range, but of course the stone had moved with me and was inside its own range.
Still, I was now in the lair of whoever it was who kidnapped me, and there were a lot of things I could do to them. "I wish...."
