segmentation fault

fireland:

I’m chained up in the dungeon of Emperor Xing. Yes, again.

Last time I managed to escape by hanging here for six months and losing enough weight to slip through the manacles. Time before that I excreted the lockpicks I’d eaten and grabbed them with my toes. Time before that I seduced Nathan, one of Xing’s elite guards, telling him that I couldn’t, you know, I couldn’t seal the deal with my hands cuffed. Point being I’m really hoping to come up with an escape plan that doesn’t involve me seeing a therapist and a proctologist afterward OK maybe for once?

Just as I’m about to imagine my daughter getting molested by a black man in an attempt to give myself a burst of manacle-snapping adrenaline, the emperor himself strolls in. Long fake fingernails, glittery eyeshadow, uncomfortably short kimono, golden stilettos, the usual.

“Bob Danger!” he says. “Accept my challenge and I will grant your freedom!”

I sigh and say: “I have wrestled your giant mutant panther. I have disarmed your army of a thousand robot scorpions. I have bested your genius baby at Go and Pachisi. I have survived the twenty erotic torments of Madame Lei. I have even freed myself from your devious finger trap. I mean seriously.”

“Come on, last time, I swear,” Emperor Xing says. “I am thinking of a number between zero and infinity! Tell me the number, Bob Danger!”

“Five,” I say.

“What the hell,” Emperor Xing says.

“Am I right?”

“Yeah.”

“Ha ha!”

“How’d you know?”

“Five’s your favorite number, man. Remember when I was here back in like ‘97? We got to drinking that rum you got from a merman and really opened up?”

“I—no, not really.”

“I told you about how I cry after sex but it’s a good kind of crying? Like, cleansing?”

“Not ringing any bells.”