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Yo this is a great thread, love to see more.
It probably won’t be as bad as Rick fears. Yes, the girls will know she’s in control of their hive mind... but they’ll also know they can call on her to get great marks on any test and fantastic consequence-free lesbian sex; given that they’re horny teenagers, that’ll probably call on her for that a lot, even if they were originally straight.
As for possible side effects... Maybe the originals periodically give birth to more sexy soulless duplicates who immediately become part of Jim’s hive mind? Or they periodically switch bodies (which would be easy to compensate for using the hive mind, but might still be disconcerting.) Or maybe the girl in charge of Rick’s hive mind could periodically change such that she’s only in control about 50% of the time?
Come to think of it, we don’t actually know whether the wand can do a large-scale retroactive change. All we’ve seen it do in this branch is minor physical transformations, some mental effects, and the don’t-notice-us thing. Maybe Jim’ll have to settle for making everyone think the transformation was caused by mad science, without actually changing history?