A Lifetime Sentence… Briefly

The Abyssal Bastille wasn’t just a prison.
It was a fortress buried ten miles beneath the ocean, surrounded by trenches no man dared explore, built to house the world’s most uncontainable minds.

No light touched its walls.

No sound escaped its corridors.

And no one had ever broken out of it…

...except for Professor Deathjoke—nineteen times.

Now came the twentieth.

A week had passed since his wild defeat at the hands of Hybrid. He'd spent most of it strapped to a shock-proof gurney, surrounded by neuro-dampening fields and chemical suppressants designed to keep anyone from laughing, thinking, or even twitching without permission.

A guard passed his containment cell.

“How’s the jester today?”

“Still smiling,” said another, staring at the screen. “Doesn’t blink. Doesn’t sleep. Just stares at the ceiling... like he’s waiting.”

Indeed, in Cell 13-B, Professor Deathjoke lay perfectly still.

Swollen eye. Crooked grin.
A single word carved into the ceiling in his own fingernail scratches:

“SHOWTIME.”

The Show Must Go On

Exactly seven days after his capture, the prison alarms blared with an emergency code unheard in Abyssal Bastille history:

“BREACH IN SECTOR ZERO.”

Not Sector One.
Not Two.
Zero.

A hidden service shaft opened in the lowest, most secure section of the prison.

A single man stood there—dressed in black overalls, a utility harness packed with surgical tools and gadgets, and a plain, unreadable expression.

His badge read:

SIMON CALEB.
Status: Deceased.
Clearance: Revoked.

But his grin said otherwise.

“Hey, boss,” he whispered into the chamber, “Time to leave.”

Professor Deathjoke’s eyes snapped open.

Twenty

The escape was ballet.

Security doors reversed. Inhibitor gas was vented. Internal comms were scrambled into 24/7 laugh tracks. Guard weapons jammed or exploded in clouds of glitter. Surveillance screens showed nothing but reruns of Clown Wars X.

All while Smiley, once known as Simon Caleb, moved like a ghost through the facility, untying a single man.

Deathjoke rose from his chair like Lazarus rising from a bouncy castle.

“Oh, Smiley,” he said, voice gravelly from sedatives. “How long’s it been?”

“Six days, seventeen hours, twenty-two minutes. But the warden counts it as seven, so technically—”

“—let’s make it twenty, shall we?”

They shared a twisted chuckle as alarms howled like mechanical banshees.

Security drones deployed.

Smiley tossed a handheld EMP that pulsed a smiling face as it detonated, frying the room.

Deathjoke staggered through the final corridor, bruised and wild-eyed but grinning like a devil who'd just been let off probation.

“And people say romance is dead,” he wheezed.

Meanwhile…

Hybrid sat on top of a skyscraper, sipping electrolyte water and trying not to punch a steel beam in half.

Her communicator chirped.

[ALERT: PROFESSOR DEATHJOKE MISSING. ESCAPE #20 CONFIRMED.]

She crushed the communicator in her hand.

“Are. You. FUCKING KIDDING ME.”

Back at HQ, analysts scrambled, video feeds looped, and generals screamed at one another.

“We had ocean pressure sensors! Psycho-resistant cells! Molecular ID locks!”

“He’s not even a teleporter!”

“HOW?!”

Only Hybrid had the answer.

And it was just one name.

“Smiley.”

The Message

That night, she returned to her apartment, only to find a small box on her windowsill.

She didn’t touch it.
She just stared.

A clown-faced jack-in-the-box.
Painted with glittering gold.
Inside, a note:

“20’s a nice round number, don’t you think?
Miss you already. Yours in Chaos – D.J.”

Hybrid inhaled deeply… and exploded.

“I WILL RIP YOUR SPINE OUT AND SHOVE IT BACKWARDS THROUGH YOUR LIVER YOU DERANGED TOYMAKING MANCHILD!”

Across the city, Deathjoke sneezed while sipping hot chocolate in a stolen bathrobe.

“Someone’s thinking of me.”

Back in the Lair

Their new hideout was smaller, beneath a disused aquarium. Fish skeletons drifted in display tanks. A broken animatronic dolphin sang quietly in the background.

Smiley sat cross-legged, repairing a broken bomb disguised as a rubber duck.

Deathjoke lounged on a couch made of discarded funhouse mirrors.

“You think she’ll come?”

“She always does,” Smiley said without looking up.

“I do admire her consistency,” Deathjoke mused. “And the punching. She’s very gifted in the punching department.”

Smiley tightened a bolt with a small smile. His hands never trembled anymore.

“She’s the only one who catches you.”

“She’s the only one who understands the game,” Deathjoke whispered. “You build a trap. She breaks it. I laugh. She hits me. We go again.”

Smiley looked up.

“What happens when she stops playing?”

Deathjoke stared at the ceiling, grin faltering for just a moment.

“Then the world will finally be quiet…”

The silence hung.

Then Deathjoke clapped his hands.

“But until then! We’ve got work to do! A city to prank! Explosives to sneak into elementary schools—for educational purposes, of course!”

Smiley chuckled darkly.

“Let’s make 21 the funniest one yet.”