John

Jane arched an eyebrow incredulously. "This all sounds perfectly insane. Why don't you take the shifter thing?" she suggested to her brother. "You'd probably have more fun with it than I would."

"Are you sure?" asked John. Jane nodded.

"All right," said Dick. "One shifter for the male of the species. I just have to ask one more time -- are you sure you want this? Once you have the shifter, it's yours to keep forever."

John shrugged. "Yeah, I'll take it."

"You got it," said Dick. With the glowing object in one hand, he lunged toward John. The next thing John felt was the slightly sickening sensation of the device traveling through his chest and then somehow evaporating inside him.

"Enjoy," said Suzy with a smile. "And we'll be back in 30 days with another shifter." With that, the two visitors disappeared into thin air.

John looked at Jane. Jane looked back at John. John said, "Wow, I'm suddenly really tired." He managed to fall head-first onto his bed before he passed out completely.

He awoke to the sound of rain on the roof and gray light filtering in around the window shade. "Ugh," thought John. "Why can't this house be somewhere warm and sunny?" He waved his hand dismissively, and quickly felt a brief throbbing sensation in his chest, followed by the feeling of the world being twisted around, and then the sound of wind rushing through his ears.

When the wind went away, so did the sound of the rain. The light in the room changed, too -- it seemed strangely brighter. John cautiously stood up and tiptoed over to the window, then lifted a corner of the shade.

Instead of the view he'd been expecting, what he saw was a blue morning sky, mountains in the distance, an unrecognizable neighborhood of homes with palm trees in their front yards. Stunned, he dropped the shade and turned around.

The bedroom looked exactly the same. "Jane," he said, and then, a little louder, "Jane," again.

He walked over to the lump of covers on her bed, reached for where he thought she'd be, and shook. "Jane, wake up," he said.

"What?" came the groggy response.

"It's sunny outside."

"You woke me up for that? Of course it's sunny outside." Jane pulled the covers away from herself to look at her brother and say, "This is L.A."

"L.A. -- Los Angeles?" John was taken aback. Even in the low light, with Jane lying there in her nightgown, John could tell that his sister's skin was a couple of shades darker, and her hair was a couple of shades closer to blonde, almost as if she'd been spending time sunbathing.

"Yeah, Los Angeles, where it's only" -- she turned a bit to look at the clock on her bedside -- "7:15 on a Saturday morning. So what's your problem?"

John's mind was racing. He tried to think of another quick test. All that came to him was Suzy's bizarre suggestion, and so he thought about changing his name to John Doe. Throb, twist, wind, and then he asked his sister, "Okay, what's my name?"

She rolled her eyes. "John Doe. And I'm Jane Doe. Did you seriously wake me up just to ask me stupid questions? Try again around noon, okay?" She rolled over and pulled the covers back up atop her head, leaving John standing there.

It became clear to John that the problem was that even though Jane had been in the room when the reality-altering power was given to him last night, she wasn't immune to the power. He mulled over whether he should keep her unaware, or make her remember old realities after he changed them.