So I'm dead.

Bugger.

I've seen a lot of things in my day. Done a lot more. Still, you'd think an atheist bloke like me would end up killed in some war. Not stabbed by some madam of the night and thrown out a window getting skewered on some statue. And now I've got to wait for an audience for the almighty.

If the almighty in here is God, then I'm a bit shafted.

I've not seen Glas here. Or the darling Hana. Plenty of other people though. People I've killed mostly. Even though we're dead they're still avoiding me. I don't know if my pistols work down here. I've not had to try them yet.

Then it happens one day. This big almighty bugger turns up and gives me one of those Chinese prayer talismans you see in those old kung-fu films. Next thing I know I'm led to someone even bigger than the other guy. He looks me up, he looks me down. Then his voice fills my head.

"You should not be here."

Time probably means nothing when you're dead. But then I find myself back in good old New Oz. I'm in an upstate apartment. The money me and the others were owed had been paid into a nice little bank account all in my name. High interest rate with it as well. Plenty of beer in the fridge. Expensive, home-brewed stuff. Not that foreign rubbish. And there is a rather attractive girl nearly naked and asleep in my bed.

So you're asking me what happened? Buggered if I know. Maybe I just overslept. Or I'm in some medical hospital and I hit my head really bloody badly. But maybe this has something to do with Rain.

Oh, she wasn't in our last little adventure with the young Wee Ming lass. But she was with us when we got called up in that little job involving EINDS. That little bugger. The one that her, mother, if that is what you can call her brewed up. That one that was killing me slowly and surely. Well, her delightful sister cured me. That cure killed her gigantic blob of a father. So you can call that cure a prototype. I don't remember exactly how it got made. What I could tell you would take far too long. But I would figure it was not the most natural of cures. I got the original cure. The one that would kill a god.

So if a god is divine, wouldn't something that could kill a god be divine as well?

It's just a theory mind you. But as I was cured just a few days before.

And I had a divine cure, that could kill a god.

And Mr I'm So-High-And-Mighty-Here didn't exactly say why I shouldn't be in his little private hell. Come to think of it, I thought he looked a bit scared. I saw plenty of fighting down there. Weird things bleeding something what couldn't be blood. Nothing coming after me. Those buggers getting scared in case my blood went all over their pretty corpses and burn them alive or melt them or whatever?

And I got my meeting with the boss-man after a few days or even hours. Not years like the others there are meant to have waited. Maybe his secretary pushed me into the people he really, really wanted to meet today.

That, with this money and a very nice pent-house. No need to have to work. Nice little incentive not to get myself killed. And that girl does look like she wants me very, very badly.

Maybe I'll see if Hana or Glas are fine and dandy. Tomorrow.

But if they want a reunion, they're coming here. Go back to China?

Not bloody likely.