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“Yes, I am.”

“I'm your father and I forbid you to go.”

“You're an old man of 46, and you'll drop dead of exertion if you run after
me. Goodbye!” she shouted with a giggle, and ran off.

Well, she was wrong about her father's physical prowess, which he had
very much kept up over the years by all the lifting he did of heavy gold chains
and gold furniture, so Aurelius was still very much an athlete. Citia had also
not factored in that he was twice her height, and his strides were twice as long
as hers. So that just as she had taken about eighteen strides, he had taken
exactly nine, caught up to her, scooped her up and ran her immediately into
her bedroom, locking the door with a “You see how much I love you, my little
nugget, locking you up to keep you near me always and always.”

Now, Emperor Aurumius had seen the cleverness of his youngest child,
and knew her entirely capable of hatching some fiendish escape from inside a
locked room, so he took the precaution of removing all her clothes, including
her shoes, leaving her only a single green scarf to help her cover her
indecencies if she wished. He went to bed, flushed with pride at how much
proof of love he had demonstrated to her.

Citia was indeed a clever girl, but she didn't really need cleverness to
devise a way of escape. (The screen scarf, the window...you had it figured out
long before Citia, hadn't you?) Citia also wasn't terribly in need of clothes or
shoes. The palace was in the middle of a desert, so she hardly needed clothes
for either modesty or warmth; and as for shoes, the palace was in the middle of
a desert, and the gold sand actually felt nice between her toes. Poor Emperor
Aurumius; not the deepest thinker in the history books.

And so it was that very soon after, Citia made her way to the palace. Did
she knock at the gates and demand to be let in? Not she. Instead, she looked

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