Negotiating With A Genie

20260322

Prompt from DailyPrompt.com

“Alright. What’s your first wish?”
“I wish I could fly!”
“Hm.” A pair of glasses appeared on the genie’s nose, and a stack of books poofed into existence around him. “What kind of flight did you have in mind?”
“Huh?”
“Well, the simplest method would be turning you into a bird, but I suspect that isn’t-”
“No no no!” I desperately shook my head and waved my hands.
“Right. So, assuming you want to keep all your current physical abilities…?”
I nod. Baffled by this turn of events.
“Then the second easiest would be giving you magical wings.” He flips through one of the books. A notebook materialises, pencil already scribbling. “Let’s see… if you’re happy with the wings being only useful for flight, I could give you dismissible ones. The downside is that you’ll have to learn to fly, and if you lose consciousness, the wings will vanish. But honestly, if you pass out in the air you’re in trouble anyway, so…”
“Can’t you… make it so I magically know how to fly?”
“Ahh, thing is, if we’re going with a magical addon to your body rather than modifying your body, changing up your brain like that would count as a separate wish.”
“I don’t want you to change my brain!!”
The genie looks forbearingly at me over his glasses. “How do you suggest I change the information stored in your brain without changing your brain? That’s like asking me to change the colour of your eyes without changing the pigments in them.”
“I… uhh… oh.”
“So. If you want automatic flying abilities rolled into the wish we need to go with body modification. Then changing your brain can just be a, if you will, sub-wish. That would mean permanently having wings.”
“Mmmm…” I peer at my back. “That’d make buying shirts and stuff really hard… how big would they need to be?”
“Good question. Hm…” Books leaf through themselves. The notebook is scribbling a bunch of formulae I can’t begin to understand. “I think we could get away with a wingspan of approximately four metres. That’d look something like…”
Ghostly wings appear, dwarfing me.
“Those are huge! You really can’t make them smaller?”
“Not if you want to fly with them.” The genie looks somewhat offended. “That’s assuming you only want to do short-range flights, mind. It’ll be exhausting trying to stay in the air for long stretches.”
“Ugh…”
Even when the wings fold up they feel massive. It’d be like wearing a backpack all the time.
“Well, we can reduce the wing size if we do further body modifications.” The genie riffles through one of the books. “For example, making your bones hollow, rejigging your lung structure to be more suited for high oxygen uptake, or-”
“Stop, stop, stop!” I plant my fists on my hips and huff. “What about… being able to psychically levitate myself?”
“Oh, yes, that’s doable. And since that involves rewiring your brain we can also adapt you to having the necessary focus to maintain levitation for a reasonable period.”
I sigh with relief. Finally!
“Now, do you have a preference for what shape your head ends up? For reference, we’ll need to enlarge your brain volume by almost an order of magnitude.”
An orb appears next to him, then a much larger orb.
“You can’t be serious!” I splutter. Beyond tired with this lousy joke. “I thought you genies were all-powerful!”
He gives me a Look which prompts chilling flashbacks to every tetchy teacher I’ve ever had. I can feel my back break out in sweat. “Listen, kid. Part of what got us locked up was everyone else agreeing that there needed to be rules governing reality warping. The most prominent ones you should know as ‘the laws of physics’. If you want this wish to work you’re going to need to compromise somewhere!”
I look down at the floor. Dispirited and lost.
“…Alright, while you’re thinking about that, do you have a second wish?”
“Can you make me super-strong?”
“Oh, for - you want massively increased muscle mass and being able to fly??”

Prompt was “Your protagonist is offered something they have wanted for a long time, but there are more strings attached than they thought.”