How about if your a Samuri committing Seppuku as an act of honor, and your best friend agrees to cut your head off to end your suffering?
Really compelling, Dave. Here's another compelling argument:
You're a Ninja from the Iga Province in 1575, scaling a wall with your ninja claws, in order to breach the wall and take out the samurai warlord and his minions. Your foot gets caught in a crack in the stone wall, ripping your two-toed ninja tabi off your feet, so you have to continue your scale and mission wearing only one shoe. No big deal for a ninja who has trained his whole life to disregard such trivial discomforts.
Reaching the top of the wall, your bare foot scrapes across a shard of rusty iron, overlooked from the previous century's fortress renovations. Again, a trivial discomfort that the ninja barely notices.
You take out the samurai warlord and his minions, take flight from the castle, swimming the infested waters of the protective moat, fleeing to the woods and to your mountain ninja home.
A month passes.
You've been trained too well. Having learned to ignore pain, you've failed to notice that the simple scratch on your foot had been infected, not only from the bacteria on the rusty nail. But the waters of the moat also served as the castle sewerage. Your foot is swollen to the size of geisha's fake hairdo.
It is gangrenous.
And it is slowly killing you.
In 1575 Japan, there is no hope for a cure. Sure, you could draw your ninja sword and chop off your leg, something that any other good ninja would do. But the gangrene has spread not only up your leg, but into your brain. You cannot survive.
A week passes.
You lie on your thatch floorpad, practically drowning in an icy cold pool of your own sweat. Bile seeps from your pores. Both legs have rotted off and the rest of your body is scaled, putrid, and falling apart.
Torture.
When will it end?
"Somebody kill me...please."
Your ninja wife holds your rotting hand, dagger in her other hand, contemplating through tears of anguish what is surely the last request you will ever make.
What's a good ninja wife to do?
Thanks for the helpful comment, Dave. :cheers:
