Felicia Hardy

Stakeouts always tended to be tedious and boring, especially when you were operating on the right side of the law, so to speak. There were no guard rotations to study for an opening, no open windows to look for as an easy entry. You just sat on your ass waiting for something to happen.

So that was exactly what Felicia found herself doing at the moment, perched outside some shitty warehouse at the docks. Peter had gotten a tip that the Maggia were smuggling in stolen historical artifacts they planned to flip to AIM in exchange for weapons and tech. He had asked her for help, and she’d jumped at the chance. Peter had helped her so much over the years that this was the least she could do in return.

She really wouldn’t mind helping him in a bigger way, but, you know… he was a happily married man.

Peter, however, was ten minutes late, so she was freezing her ass off alone. She knew the man well enough to figure he probably had a good reason, but that didn’t help much against the early winter chill in NYC.

She was just about to call him when she noticed something. A black cat strutted into the warehouse through an open window. Felicia decided to turn on her heat-vision goggles for the heck of it and follow the feline.

To her amazement, when the cat passed a guard, the guard simply dropped to the floor.

She couldn’t quite make out whether the guards were dead or just passed out, she wasn’t Daredevil, after all, but it definitely warranted further investigation. Shooting Spider a quick text to let him know something was off, she made her move.

Entering the warehouse proved to be easy, especially for someone with her skill set. Surveying the building from the rafters allowed her to see that all the guards were incapacitated, and the black cat was nowhere to be seen.

She slowly descended from the roof, it never hurt to be careful, and checked on the goon closest to her. Luckily he was still breathing, which meant she wasn’t dealing with a mass-murdering feline. Maybe it was a rival thief who had taken the term cat burglar a little too far. Now wouldn’t that be a story.

After making sure that everybody was out cold she decided what was up. It looked like the Maggia had been in the process of checking the goods; several crates were open. She recognized ancient Egyptian, Greek, and Persian artifacts, along with what she believed to be Chinese pieces. All of them were worth a fortune and could fund the criminal organization for quite a while.

As she was about to call Peter, she finally spotted the cat. It was standing on the upper platform, carrying what looked like a vase, or maybe a lamp, in its mouth. Whatever had happened here, this was apparently what the feline had been after all along, and she, Felicia had just decided it was a she because male cats were far too lazy to act as burglars, was about to make her escape.

Throwing caution to the wind, Felicia leapt toward the cat while covering her mouth and nose. In a somewhat anticlimactic ending, the feline was startled, dropped the item, sprinted toward the open window, and jumped out.

With the immediate danger seemingly averted, Felicia turned her attention to the artifact. She wasn’t a historian, but she had enough knowledge to identify precious objects with some accuracy. This one, however, was off. It looked old, but the design and markings didn’t belong to any single civilization. The inscriptions had one thing in common, though: they all represented love, sex, and fertility.

Felicia felt a pull toward the object. She couldn’t quite place it, but in the end it overrode her cautionary instincts as she bent down to pick it up. Now she could see what it was: it resembled an old oil lamp, like the one from Aladdin.

While admiring the lamp in her hands, she realized too late that the mental pull she’d felt earlier had become a physical one. The lamp tried to suck her in. Panic set in as she dropped it and tried to run; however, she couldn’t escape it.

Letting herself fall to the ground, she flexed her claws and buried them in the concrete as an anchor. It bought her enough time to grab the spider-tracer from her belt, the one Peter had given her to let him know she was in trouble, and pressed down on the center.

-

Feeling somewhat drowsy, Felicia opened her eyes, trying to regain her bearings. Everything around her was dark. She really needed to see what was going on, and as soon as the thought formed in her mind, the darkness receded and she found herself standing in a white void.

Blinking away her confusion, Felicia decided to try something. She really wanted to sit down.

A chair appeared before her.

She stared at it for a moment before cautiously lowering herself into it. The chair felt perfectly solid beneath her. Testing the strange new reality, she imagined a glass of wine.

It appeared on a small table next to her.

Felicia blinked.

“Okay,” she muttered to herself. “That’s… new.”

She figured she was trapped in the lamp and that at least her basic necessities were provided for, but she really needed to understand what was going on and how to escape. The pieces began falling into place almost immediately. The lamp. The void. The way reality bent itself around her thoughts.

The revelation hit her like a brick.

She was a genie.

The knowledge didn’t feel learned so much as remembered. Rules and instincts pressed themselves into her mind as if they had always been there. She had been changed on a metaphysical level, bound to the lamp and gifted with wish-granting powers that far exceeded anything she had ever possessed before.

And from what she could tell, there was no escape.

There was no loophole.

This was her life now.

Letting out a slow breath, Felicia decided to fill the white void with a copy of her apartment so she could think about what had just happened. The change happened instantly, walls rose from nothing, furniture appearing piece by piece until she was standing in a perfect replica of her living room.

Another realization surfaced along with the first.

She wasn’t just any genie.

The wishes she could grant would have to revolve around intimacy and desire. There was no three-wish limit either; as long as a request was sexual in some way, she could keep granting them.

Felicia didn’t really know how to feel about that.

On the one hand, she knew she was practically sex personified. She loved sex in all its forms. Seduction had been part of her life for years.

But being with Peter in the past had made her want to be better.

So she could only hope that whoever picked up the lamp and became her master wouldn’t make her cross any boundaries she wouldn’t have crossed back when she was just a regular cat burglar.