“Joey,” Karyn finally said a few minutes later. “We may have a problem.”
“What?” I asked.
“There’s still so much we don’t know about this world,” she explained. “We could sit in front of your
computer all day asking questions and we still won’t know everything.”
I looked at the ring on my finger. “We could always wish to know everything,” I said.
“No,” she shook her head. “I don’t want to just know everything. I want to experience it. Those times you
wished us to know who Christina was and what my sister’s names are, I felt this…jolt. It only lasted for a
second but it felt really weird.”
“Yea, that happened to me too,” I said.
“That’s just it,” she said. “If we wished to know everything, what could that do?”
I realized her point. Might we risk damaging our own minds? “I see what you mean,” I said. “And I think
you’re absolutely right. Let’s just find out as we go. If we need to make little wishes for knowledge,
that’s it. Sound OK?” She nodded. “Problem solved.”
“No, problem not solved,” she said.
“Huh?” I asked.
“Don’t you remember when you showed me all those die at your house?” she asked. I nodded. “Don’t you
remember what you said about time limits?”
I had to think for a minute. Then I remembered. I said that there would be a time limit for only a day.
“Just for a day,” I said with a sigh.
“Joey,” she pleaded. “I don’t want that. I want to stay like this. I want to experience this apparently
wondrous world we’ve created.”
“Let’s fix that,” I said. I looked at the ring and said, “I wish that this world would remain for as long as
we want and that we could not change back to our previous world unless both Karyn and I wish that to happen.”
Nothing seemed to happen. Neither of us felt any disorientation nor were there any other signs of alteration.
“So…we won’t know for sure until tomorrow?” she asked.
“I…guess. At least for certain,” I answered. “But considering how this thing has worked so far I’m not going
to doubt it.”
“There’s one other little problem then,” she said. “We’re the strangers in a strange land. We both have the
same lack of knowledge. To me that means we need to stay together.”
“Sure,” I said. “So how is that a problem?”
“Silly,” she said. “What two people are always with each other every single minute of every day?”
“Well…no one, I guess,” I answered.
“Right,” she said. “Because we don’t know everything, if one of us is alone and something happens we don’t
know about, that could be awkward.”
“Now I get it,” I said. “And it would be worse for you because you wouldn’t have the ring to help you.”
“Right,” she said.
“Alright, let’s try this,” I said. “I wish that Karyn and I would be able to remain together at all times and
that no one would find it unusual.”
“Good think we don’t have jobs right now,” Karyn giggled.
I chuckled. “Like I couldn’t have done something about that,” I said.
“You know,” she said. “There is something I’d like to do right now.”
I asked, “What’s that?”
She answered, “Play a joke slash teach a lesson to my sisters.” She had a mischievous look spread across her
face.
“Go on,” I said.