Welcome to the world of Edison City, where the never-ending battle against the forces of evil includes everything from the Owl Bandit taking over the subway line downtown to the Antichrist trying to rewrite history aboard the HMS Titanic. Anything and everything is a possibility here, including flying sharks. Especially the sharks.
If you’re new here, catch up with the Edison City Index:
Previously, an apparent civilian named Wyatt Roberts, with the guidance of a Helpful Onboarding and Processing for Employment (H.O.P.E.) had just accidentally shot down the superhero Captain Midnight and then escaped in a stolen car. Meanwhile, Captain Midnight unfortunately found himself in the afterlife and in the Bad Place no less. We would return to Wyatt, we really would, but there’s someone else we should follow up on first….
Technological magic, one of the little-known branches of the magical fields of study, is usually employed for rare and important purposes: foretelling the future, aiding in great causes, and so on. It is not, repeat not meant for trifles like summoning a genie. This is especially true if you are, for instance, two unknowing Earth teenagers who have stumbled upon a techno-magical book left in a human library by mistake after someone misplaced a grimdecimal.
Of course, Davy Morris didn’t know what a grimdecimal was; he didn’t even know what techno-magic was. What he knew was that, for the first time in his lamentably uneventful academic career, a Girl from his own grade was interested in him. Or at least, she indicated that she might possibly be. (Heather wasn’t really; she’d heard rumors that he was good with computers and she’d seen movies that teens like that could hack grades, and she hoped he might do the same for her abysmal grade in History; she had a perfectly fine boyfriend named Blake, but he doesn’t enter into the story).
Davy was, at that moment, attempting to impress Heather by doing something no one should ever do in a library: reading strange words out of a dusty old book. “Do you even understand that?” she asked quizzically.
“Shyeah,” he said. “It’s Latin. It’s from the Magna Carta. All about property and kings and stuff like that. See, look: evocus genium!” Davy said this with as much resonance as he could muster while still keeping his voice down; he was, after all, in a library. He also tried to sketch the signs the book said with one hand while still holding the book in the other; this turned out to be more complicated than he realized, and in the confusion he didn’t notice that something was materializing until he heard Heather gasp in shock.
Davy looked up. There stood Candystriper, hospital gown, robot arm, and all, and she wasn’t in the least happy about it. “Okay, pal,” she said, “You asked for it!” She took aim and prepared to fire, but to her dismay golden letters flashed across her robot arm. “What do you mean three wishes?” she hissed in reply to a voice Davy couldn’t hear.
“Three what?” Davy said.
“I think she’s a genie,” Heather said, catching on more quickly than the astonished Davy had.
“No,” Candystriper said, “No, no, no, no no no that is IT! I have been teleported, blasted, blessed out by an angel, and now you yeeted me all the way to wherever the heck we are and you tell me I’m a genie now? No way! I’m a supervillain henchwoman, okay, I work for the Malevolent Med-Student, or Super Surgeon, or whatever he is now, anyway, it’s complicated, we might be doing a redemption narrative thing, I don’t know, but we are not doing this, okay? I’ve got a robot arm, and I know how to use it!” She flung her arm up in the air in high fury. “Fire!”
Nothing happened.
“FIRE!” she yelled.
Heather snickered.
Candystriper took a few very deep breaths, and counted to twenty. Then she turned. “Fine,” she said, “Fine. You want wishes, pal? FINE. You get three? Whaddya want?”
Davy should, perhaps, have released her right then and there, and nothing else would’ve happened. Unfortunately he’d grown up watching Disney’s Aladdin, and the lesson he’d taken wasn’t to be honest with one’s girlfriend (if one had one) but to avoid wishing oneself into a genie. Short of that….
“What I want,” he said, “what I…what’s most important…is to be the most powerful sorcerer IN THE WORLD!”
He didn’t even care that he was in a library anymore. He didn’t care that Heather was backing away from him, her eyes wide in horror. He was about to become a super-powerful sorcerer, and oh boy wouldn’t that be fun.
Candystriper, naturally, had a different opinion. “That’s your first wish, huh?” she said. “Sure you don’t want a gerbil or something? I’d love a gerbil, myself.”
“No!” Davy snapped. “Most powerful sorcerer! In the world! That’s it! That’s what I want! That’s all I want, okay?”
“Sure thing, pal,” Candystriper said, and snapped the fingers of her robot arm. Davy disappeared.
Some three billion miles away, he reappeared, landing hard on a cold (very cold) rocky surface. Davy leapt to his feet, magical phrases springing to his mind. Warm air swirled around him, just in time to keep him from freezing into solid ice. “What the-” he said, his teeth chattering even with the magically conjured heat.
The sky was inky black above him, with only a hint of deep blue near the horizon. A pale white star shone faintly; it didn’t even cross Davy’s mind to consider that it might be the Sun. If it had, and if he’d done some further thinking, he might have realized then where he’d been sent off to.
“Yeah, he’s not coming back,” Candystriper said to the astonished Heather. “Bad phrasing, you know?”
“What?” said Heather.
Candystriper rolled her eyes. “He said most powerful in “the” world. Didn’t say which world. So I sent him to Pluto, gave him a basic set of survival spells. Life, heat, etc. No transport, natch. He’s the most powerful out there, that’s for sure, and he can have it. Anyway, he said that’s all he wanted, so there’s his three, so I’m out of the genie business. See ya!”
This time, when she fired up her robot arm thrusters, they worked, and she blasted off out of the library and away into the night. As the library staff rushed up to Heather in alarm, demanding to know what was going on and who’d just smashed a new hole in the nice new library roof, Heather wondered exactly how she was going to explain all this. And, even worse, what about her grades?
What everyone, from Davy to Heather to the bewildered library staff had forgotten was that there was now in existence, thanks to Davy’s inadvertent techno-magic, a genie where there hadn’t been before. And where there is a genie…
Read the Next Episode.
He should have opted for the gerbil...
Where there is a genie...there must be a lamp? No? I can't think of a good way for that to end. 😬