Author's note:

This story starts before the Pilot. It will contain spoilers for all five seasons, and some episodes might be slightly different from the original series. For the sake of this story, Jeannie is a human girl turned into a genie, as she was for the first season and second season of the show. So there will be no genie relatives, unless I find a way to explain them in the story.

Prologue

September the 17th 1965 – 08:00 pm – 1020 Palm Drive – Cocoa Beach

He was going to bed particularly early that night. The next day, he was going in orbit and he could not wait for it. It was a routine mission, nothing like going to the moon or anything, but it was still like doing it for the first time all over again. He simply loved being an astronaut, and he would not give this up for anything in the world.

He lied down on his bed with a smile on his lips and sighed with deep satisfaction. Everything in his life was going according to his plans. He had a prospecting career in the U.S.A. Air force, and after years of hard work and study, he succeeded in his dream of becoming an astronaut. He had enjoyed, for a while, the happy life of a bachelor astronaut, with dozens of girls and almost a new date every single night. He met thousands of different girls willing to give him their numbers, which he used to write down on his kitchen wall, and he had all the fun that any average American man would love to have. Unfortunately, one could not lead this kind of life forever. It comes a time when a man must settle down, and he believed this time had come for him.

The truth was that the famous Captain Anthony Nelson was getting tired of having a new face every night. He felt it was time for him to settle down, so being the kind of man he was, he started to look around to find the perfect girl. She would have to be beautiful, someone that could photograph well beside him. She would also have to be used to the kind of life of a military. In order to achieve this, he started to look after the perfect wife among the officer's daughters and he found Melissa, General's Stone daughter. General Stone was his superior at NASA, and it would do wonders for his career to be married to her. They dated for some time, and he finally proposed and got his 'yes'. They were going to be married this Sunday.

Tony smiled remembering how his friend Roger tried to convince him not to marry Melissa. Roger simply could not understand that he was nothing like him. He did not believe in deep passions controlling his life and choices. The Romantic Love, in his scientific opinion, was a myth, belonging to fairy tales, just like fairies, witches, warlocks, and genies. Real Love was rooted in respect, friendship, and common goals. Tony understood passion and lust, because he had experimented both of them, and he knew them to be chemical reactions, explained by science, but the notion of an overwhelming feeling, that would make someone essential to his very living was something beyond his ability to understand. Maybe it could happen to someone else, but he was sure that it would never happen to him, and he felt grateful for that. He had absolutely no desire to have his life turned upside down by a feeling that he would not be able to control.

Somewhere, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean

For two thousands years she had lived inside that bottle, sailing on the Ocean. Years, decades, centuries had passed, and not even one poor fisher had been able to catch her. There were moments when she got so desperate that she almost regretted rejecting the wicked Blue Djinn. If she had accepted him, she would still have her family, and her friends, and she might even have had kids. Even when she thought that, she knew that she never could have accepted him, and even if she did, her father would never have allowed her to go on with it. They knew the Blue Djinn was a monster, and they loved her too much to let this marriage happen. No one expected him to turn her into a genie, though.

Until this day, she never really understood what have happened. He turned her into a genie, and imprisoned her inside this bottle, so that she would be his slave, and she would have to do whatever he wanted her to do. If he could not marry her, he would own her. However, something went wrong, and somehow her bottle ended on a wood boat, and after the ship sunk, on the sea. Now, after wandering for thousands of years, it seemed that her bottle finally landed somewhere, not very far from the sea. She could hear the sounds of the waves on the sand nearby, and the distant sound of the owls in the night. She did not remember the last time she had heard the sound of any animal.

It was such a good feeling to be on solid land again. She could not help but hope that something good would come after all. Maybe someone would come and finally release her, after all this years of imprisonment. She was not really asking for much. She just wanted someone she could serve, and that could be kind enough to, at least let her be outside of her bottle from time to time. She just wanted to get out, and finally see the sun she had not seen for so long. She would give anything, just to have a glimpse of the Moon and the stars, and all the others beautiful things she used to take for granted before.

She sometimes, in the solitude of her bottle, thought about her family and friends. She knew they must have died a long time ago, but time seemed so different, now, than what it was before. Before, when she had a name, and a family, and friends, and things to do, and a future to look forward, time seemed so short, but now, it seemed eternal. With the powers she had, she could go back and forward, do amazing things, even raise the dead, or go back into the past, and hold her family once more. If she ever got released from her bottle, there is. Even if she did, would her master or mistress allow her to see her parents again? Would he or she be kind and patient with her? Would he or she understand that she wasn't born a genie, and that there was so many things she didn't know about it?

She sighed. She had lost so much that day. She lost hope, she lost love, and she even lost her own name. She would have to wait until the day her first master named her, and whatever he called her, would be her new name. If she were born a genie, she would have been able to retrieve her name, but because she was human, she would remain nameless, and waiting, and waiting, and waiting…