Chapter Text
Early Season One
The book took her nearly two days to crack. It was small and unobtrusive, but she could feel the power of it when she held it in her hand, layer upon layer of whispers and blood packed between its covers.
She was almost disappointed when she called in a favor with the Applied Sciences development team and got a good look at the seemingly blank pages. Just a list. Not a grimoire of forbidden spells, not a map of dark laylines, not a transcription of untranslated runes. Only page after page of ordinary human names.
She took her coffeebreak then and there, and sulked her way through the whole fifteen minutes of awful breakroom coffee and annoyingly upbeat music from the radio that someone had spelled to only pick up some bland pop station out of Mississippi. (Truthfully, only about four minutes of annoying music passed before she hexed the machine into silence, but it was the principle of the matter.) After her allotted time, she considered herself ready to take on the book's next challenge.
Sure, lists in and of themselves weren't terribly interesting. But lists were composed of data, fuel for the curious mind. This was a very specific list of very specific people. Googling was faster than scrying, and when Felicity picked a random page and typed in some names, that now-familiar thrill of excitement and fear returned. Her first impression had been right; the book was full of dark power. The men and women in its pages were strong, magical and mundane alike. And they were bad, the worst kind of bad – seedy, underhanded, greedy people who used every means necessary to get what they wanted and escape the consequences.
But if you knew the name of a thing, you had a handle on it. Everyone got the shivers thinking about how crossroads demons wanted their contracts penned in blood, but the signature itself was just as important. In Felicity's particular brand of magic, and her personal philosophy on life, truth was knowledge and knowledge was the greatest form of power. In the right hands, the book of dark power could be turned on itself and pulled into the light. By the looks of what had happened to some of the people on that list, someone already had.