This is the tragic story of Flylighter the Coward, who dared to dream a dream of cowardly escape, and was denied entry into Valhalla at the last. Flylighter awakened in a daze, on the rough stone floor in the middle of a room he'd never seen before. Ahead of him he saw a closed off, barred stairway to the outside. To his right, a locked wooden double-door was being scraped and pounded on by a snarling, unseen beast. Flylighter's first instinct was to pee himself right there on the floor, which he promptly did. His second was to bound to his feet and sprint to the barred stairway. "HELP ME!" he screamed. "Something's in the room next to me, I can hear it growling! It sounds hungry, I just know it's going to eat me help me help me Help Me LET ME OUT!!!!!" No answer from the outside. Flylighter screamed with all the pitch and voracity of a young maiden at a Juustin Biebrehaus concerto, until his voice was hoarse and all but a whisper. He pulled and kicked the bars, and kicked and kicked again, to no avail. He was stuck, with naught but the wooden doors protecting him from his unknown foe. For seventeen days and nights Flylighter tried to escape his prison, the monster behind the doors all the while. For seventeen days and nights he lived off food and drink he appropriated by shaking nearby vending machines. And, for seventeen days and nights, the bars guarding freedom refused to budge. On the eighteenth day, the vending machines ran out of food and drink. Our cowardly antihero realized that he would die of cowardly hunger and cowardly thirst, and decided that he must somehow escape past the beast beyond the doors. Never did it occur to Flylighter that he should try to actually slay the monster; no indeed, he placed no trust in the shanty workmanship of the wooden sword he found in his prison, and even then, he had no notion of how to use it properly. Instead, he devised a simple plan of stealth and deceit. Flylighter timed the slams on the wooden double-doors. The growling beast rammed the door roughly every ten seconds. Flylighter walked quietly up to the door and waited for the next slam to come, sparing enough time for one last horrified self-urination. SLAM went the door, and Flylighter unfastened the lock and then pressed himself against the wall next to it. He waited... and waited... BAM! The door flew open, sandwiching Flylighter against the stone wall. In barreled a two-foot tall, cute penguin-like bird with a pointy, ribbed beak. MAN ALIVE WHAT IS THAT FOUL ABOMINATION, Flylighter thought to himself in the voice of a projectile-vomiting kitten. He would have screamed like a dying baby, had his voice not long since gone raw yelling to the outside, and had the wind not been knocked out of him by the door. Nevertheless, he knew it was time to act, and when the creature ran further into the room, Flylighter snuck out from behind the door and ran for his life out into the hallway. Ran, ran, ran our Flylighter did, into large open rooms, cramped little compartments, hallways skinny and wide. Hid, hid, hid our Flylighter did, behind crates or doors or statues, whenever he caught even a glimpse of another demonic creature. Twice was he almost caught, first when he peed himself in fear yet again and monsters found his puddly trail, and next when he soiled himself in terror and they followed his stench. In the second incident, Flylighter ditched his pants, left on a statue as a ruse to distract his pursuers. Flylighter ducked into a room, his heart pounding and his lungs aching for lack of oxygen. He must have been on the run for what felt like at least 1.24 minutes now, and his legs were quaking under the effort. He looked around, and realized he was in an archery range. In the middle of the floor, he saw what looked to be a projectile strapped to a miniature nuke: a bolt of mass destruction! Flylighter snickered in glee, snatching up the death stick and grabbing a small crossbow off the wall. Another idea was hatching in the coward's pea-sized brain. Slowly and patiently, he crept his way back toward his prison. Hiding behind statues and in alcoves, darting from hiding spot to hiding spot, almost slipping in his earlier puddle of pee, Flylighter managed to elude his fearsome enemies once again, and found himself back in that fateful room in which he awoke eighteen days ago. Somehow, the penguin creature had managed to lodge its head snugly between the bars around the stairway, with no hope of getting out. "Oh, don't you worry, foul beast, I'll get you free," Flylighter rasped aloud, "just... not in the way you'd hoped." He walked to the center of the room, just behind his first fear-induced puddle, and loaded his mini-nuke into the crossbow. He raised his weapon, and aimed directly at the beast's posterior. "Let's see you sons of liches stop me now," he spat, aaaand... The blast threw the coward all the way across the room and against the back wall, and he bounced flat onto his stomach. His ears rang, his nose bled, the room spun, and had Flylighter had any pee left to pee, rest assured that he would have peed it. Dazed, he realized the room had begun to darken. The dust began to settle, and as it did, he looked up to see that among the rubble and monster guts, the bars and stairway stood perfectly intact, unscratched and unscathed. "In... con... ceivable," Flylighter whispered, and blacked out. Unconscious our pantsless coward lay, unaware of his surroundings. Thus he remained, until a sickly diggle happened upon the wrecked room, saw him on the ground, and slowly stabbed him to death with a sewing needle. (Moral: if you were clever enough to wonder if you could blow your way to freedom way back in the first room, or at least into a secret room, don't bother. It won't work )
