For a normal man.
I crouched down, felt that elastic stretch in my calves, the burn in my thighs, and the atomic critical mass in my glutes, and I sprang into the air…
A Short Break
Can we just stop for a moment and truly appreciate just how many inches are in thirty-seven inches?
That’s not one inch. That’s not two inches. That’s not three inches. That’s not four inches. That’s not five inches…
Well, you get the idea.
But in case you don’t, that’s also not six inches. It’s not seven inches. It’s not eight inches. It’s not nine inches. It’s not ten inches. It’s not eleven inches. It’s not twelve inches. It’s not thirteen inches. It’s not fourteen inches. It’s not fifteen inches. It’s not sixteen inches. It’s not seventeen inches. It’s not eighteen inches. Did I mention it’s not eighteen inches? Well, it’s worth repeating, because eighteen inches is still definitely not the same as thirty-seven inches.
It’s also not nineteen inches. It’s not twenty inches. It’s not twenty-one inches. It’s not twenty-two inches. It’s not twenty-three inches. It’s not twenty-four inches. It’s not twenty-five inches. It’s not twenty-six inches. It’s not twenty-seven inches. It’s not twenty-eight inches. It’s not twenty-nine inches. It’s not thirty inches. It’s not thirty-one inches. It’s not thirty-two inches. It’s not thirty-three inches. It’s not thirty-three inches. (You still there? WAKE THE FUCK UP!) It’s not thirty-four inches. It’s not thirty-five inches. It’s not thirty-six inches. It’s not—whoops, almost screwed that up.
Because it’s true: thirty-seven inches is, in fact, thirty-seven inches.
And that’s how high I was about to jump. From a standing start. Not from a run, not from a trampoline, not from a basket toss. Just a straight-up vertical leap of thirty-seven mother-effing inches.
At least, according to my estimate.
We’re Back, Baby!
Dude, I nailed it.
Grabbed the edge of the balcony, pulled myself up in the middle of that electric inferno, ran over to Hannn’s shadowy throne, and finally saw what deep down I’d known all along—Lord Hannn was nothing but an advanced prototype AI Sony Intel-Inside™ Hyper-Core i27-530000K 40-thread 11.9 GHz quantum-processor robot.
That’s right. He was a fucking computer.
A really cool one, but still. A computer.
I reached back into the shadows with my mighty hands, grabbed all Hannn’s computerized guts, and yanked them out of the wall. It was pretty fucking awesome too, because it wasn’t just wires and shit—this was like advanced stuff, like Bishop-from-Aliens stuff, so there was all this green goo spitting out from all these tubes, and all these weird humanoid groaning sounds, and I could hear Hannn going, like, “Help me! I’m melllllting! Gurgle gurgle.”
Yeah, honestly, if you ever get the chance to destroy a super-high-tech AI quasi-android, I totally recommend it.
So then of course—OF COURSE—the last thing I did was grab Hannn’s stupid robotic Xbox-controller hand and tear it off of his robotic right-arm stump. I held it over my head like the greatest, most badass trophy I’d ever won—except for, obviously, my Blockbuster trophies—and I turned to face the massive crowd of Brotherhood hoodlums packing the arena. I screamed at the top of my lungs:
“LISTEN UP, BROTHERHOOD! I HEREBY LIBERATE YOU FROM YOUR EVIL ROBOT OVERLORD! YOU’RE FUCKING WELCOME!”
And I threw all that funky robotic shit, with all its clouds of smoke and weird green and pink goo and blood-red flames and smoke and MORE SMOKE, down into the deep, dark pit of the arena.
Then I paused, looked around, and realized I was completely surrounded on all sides by armed-to-the-teeth evil illegal gang members. I mean, these guys had guns, they had knives, they had swords, they had chainsaws, they had flamethrowers, they had surface-to-air missiles—kinda unsafe indoors, you guys—they had everything.
And leading them all was Carl the Hunchback.
“No!” I said. “You? Carl the Hunchback?? You’re the real…”
A Short Break
Yeah, so I know this is, like, a pivotal moment and all, but have you gotten over just how impressive that thirty-seven-inch vertical leap was?
Wait—you have?
Well, whatever, man. I’m still super blown away by it. I mean, just—wow.
We’re Back, Baby!
“…leader of the Brotherhood??”
He smiled. “Didn’t see that one coming, did you?”
“Well,” I said, “I kinda did. There’s always gotta be a twist, right? So, let’s see. I’m guessing that you always knew I’d be the biggest threat to your global criminal organization, so you were like, ‘Man, scoping out the Two-Time is a mission I can trust to no one else. I better go undercover myself, so I can, like, get close and betray him when he least expects it!’ ”
“NO!” Carl the Hunchback shouted. “That was not my reasoning. I just wanted a—a change of pace!”
“Uh-huh, right,” I said. “And then I’m guessing that you hid the secret door in my room in the most obvious place possible, because you were like, ‘Let’s show Doc the truth about our evil diabolical plans to mass-produce a superhero action figure of him while calling it a doll—A DOLL!—so we can piss him off, and in his rage he will win the tournament, and then we can sell the action figure to children everywhere and make billions without giving him one thin dime.’ ”
“Um,” Carl the Hunchback said, “you lost me there.”
“You know what?” I said, really on a roll now. “I would bet my whole treasure chest of earnings—like seriously, no take-backs—that you’re not even a real hunchback. You were just trying to throw me off the scent! Now you’ll probably stand up straight and be like six foot two.”
Carl the Hunchback looked at me.
“Right?” I said, kinda laughing. Dude kept staring, didn’t say a word. Super awkward, which backfired and made me go all in.
“Come on,” I said. “Like, no one’s really a hunchback anymore, right? Modern medicine—it’s the twenty-first century here. See a chiropractor, am I right or am I right?”
I looked at all the heavily armed criminals around him, hoping someone would throw me a bone. But they were all doing
