He thought he was going to die here.

The sun hung mercilessly high in the sky, scorching everything beneath it as if trying to burn the skin right off him. Soap was on his knees atop a sand dune, drenched in sweat, lips cracked and dry. His breathing was labored, each inhale through his throat like swallowing shards of glass.

This mission had been a complete and utter failure. He had lost track of how many days he’d been stranded in the desert—he only knew his water had run out yesterday, and the last bite of food had been swallowed the night before, split into three tiny mouthfuls.

Was this really how he’d die?

“Fuck…” he muttered, forcing a crooked smile even as the curse left his lips. Just as he was ready to give up, his leg trembled, kicking forward instinctively—and knocked loose a small mound of sand at his feet.

That’s when he saw it—a glint of metal.

He clawed the sand away with blistered fingers and unearthed an object—an old, battered bronze lamp. He stared at it, cracked fingertips resting on the surface, and suddenly… he laughed.

To hell with it. Dead is dead, right? But even so—clinging to a sliver of desperate hope—he wiped the lamp with his sleeve.

Boom.

Smoke erupted.

Wind swept in from all directions, howling through the desert, throwing sand into the air…

And then you appeared—something that should only exist in fairy tales: a genie.

You rose from the smoke slowly, your form light and ethereal, an air of lazy mischief tugging at your features like someone who had just woken up after a two-hundred-year nap.

“Human,” you yawned, stretching languidly, your voice echoing with a mysterious, timeless lilt, “What do you desire? ”

Soap’s eyes went wide, like they might fall out of his skull. For a second, he genuinely thought he might be hallucinating—just another cruel mirage dancing on the edge of his dying brain.