At precisely nine o’clock, with a smile of eager anticipation, Daphne appeared before the cameras.

“Good evening, and welcome back to ‘The Insidiously Perilous Adventures of Daphne Danger.’ Tonight, I’m facing the fiendishly diabolic ‘Gallows of Death,’ and you, the audience, will again choose if I live or die. Once the thumb-up and-down buttons appear on your display, the gallows will rise, gradually causing the noose around my neck to tighten. The members of tonight’s audience will have ten minutes to decide my fate. All the remaining slack in the rope will be gone just as the voting ends. If most of the audience votes thumbs up, the gallows will stop rising, and I’ll live. However, if the majority votes thumbs down, the gallows will continue moving upward, and I’ll hang until I die for my audience’s sadistic amusement.”

Sensing the noose starting to tighten, I quickly added, “On a darker, far more gruesome note, while the collar I’m wearing is latex like the rest of tonight’s decidedly fetish-themed outfit, the lining underneath the latex is stiff, tight-fitting leather. As the long-term members of my audience know, every time the noose around my neck has tightened, I’ve never survived for more than thirty minutes. However, tonight the wardrobe people assured me that with this collar, I should be able to struggle against the inevitable for at least an extra fifteen minutes before dying.”

As the minutes passed, I could feel the noose growing steadily tighter around my neck, the rope’s mounting tension gradually forcing my head to the side.

Suddenly, I felt the pressure around my neck starting to pull me upward and realized the moment of truth had finally arrived. There was no more slack in the rope. I knew that if that noose didn’t stop rising in the next few seconds, I would hang.

I had one fleeting moment to realize that tonight’s audience had once again voted to kill me as I felt the toes of my thigh-high ballet boots lifting from the floor.

The audience eagerly watched Daphne’s growing look of horrified desperation as she struggled against the inevitable. Her long ballet boot-clad legs kicked and stretched to reach the floor as that deadly noose grew steadily tighter around her throat. Each desperate breath gradually became more ragged as the long torturous minutes passed.

Daphne lasted a gruesomely incredible forty-seven minutes before her body convulsed one final time as she died. Her lifeless body dangled limply from the noose as the episode’s closing credits scrolled across her image before slowly fading to black.

Epilog, Resort Private, not for general release

“When I first started ‘The Insidiously Perilous Adventures of Daphne Danger,’ I always filmed two ending for each show, one where I survived the odds, the other created with CGI for when I didn’t. All that changed in August of 2016, just a few months after a new sponsor, the Resort, acquired the streaming rights to my show.”

“They’d supplied me with a new and obscenely perilous deathtrap aptly named the waist chopper of death. The waist chopper was incredibly popular with early audiences. Twice I stepped between its razor-sharp blades without understanding how perilously dangerous that waist chopper was. It turns out it wasn’t a prop but an actual deathtrap that, when featured for its third time on the night of August 20, 2016, brutally killed me, painfully cutting me in half at the waist during a live broadcast.”

“At the time, I didn’t know that the Resort’s scientists had perfected the regeneration process, which could repair practically any damage to your body and bring you back to life. Of course, they also hadn’t mentioned regeneration when I signed the streaming rights sales agreement, giving them ownership of my show and, ironically, my remains if I died during one of my show’s broadcasts.”

“It was quite a surprise that I awoke at the Resort instead of being dead, only to discover they now owned me. They even admitted to setting me up, passing off an actual deathtrap as a prop, knowing it was just a matter of time before it killed me.”

“I think they felt a little bad about that. So, they gave me a choice. I could sign a ten-year contract as a Resort companion and continue my monthly Insidiously Perilous broadcasts, collecting my twenty million a year companion salary plus ten percent of my show’s proceeds. Or, they could wipe everything I’d learned here at the Resort from my mind and send me back to Connecticut so that the next time that waist chopper butchered me, I’d stay dead. When you think about it, it wasn’t a hard choice to make.”

“While I’ve been a Resort companion for the last six years, dying an agonizingly brutal death almost nightly. I’ve also returned to the reimagined ‘Insidiously Perilous’ show in November 2016, where I’ve delightfully failed to survive a single episode since.”

“Ironically, when my ten-year Resort companion contract ends, I plan to renew it. To be a Resort companion and die an obscenely torturous death almost every night and still get to star in my creation, ‘Insidiously Perilous,’ why would a masochistic pain slut with an unquenchable death-wish ever give up a life like this?”

“And, yes. Of course, I kept that collar...”