I was told this a story once, quite a long time ago, back in the days when blood ran in the rivers and the last that anyone had seen of sense was on the chopping block. Each for their own back then. Survival of the strongest and all that. That sort of existence is hard to imagine now, I know, but it was real. All of us were composed of soft and vulnerable flesh, a shivering shell around what, now we know to be, is all important. Our consciousness. To think we were once confined to slow bipedal ambulation, at risk to shifting ground or tree roots. Now we float. I know you find it hard to believe but it is true. I was there. Anyway, I lose my point in setting the scene. It was one or two centuries after the collapse of civilization as it was then know. Having rebuilt itself after the Third Onslaught, mankind thought that we had learnt our lesson, much as I believe was foolishly thought before. We hadn't. We recovered, regrouped and rearmed for what was to be the final go at it.

At what, you say?

At our extinction.

A lot of us were for it, working under the premiss that if we couldn't help ourselves then best get it over with as soon as humanly possible and let some other species have a crack at this earth, while there was still some of it to be had. I had my money on the cockroaches, but that is neither here nor there.

It would have happened if it were not for the timely arrival of a certain someone. Aszzh was his name and he came from the past and the future, arriving at that very point as he had recognised it as a pivotal one. He came with unknown technology from the future and forgotten wisdom from the past, with a streak of grey down the left side of his black haired head and with only his right hand and by the gods, did he kick arse.

What? O, you've heard this one before? Bugger. What about the one with the robotic frog? RoboRibbit? You have? Bollocks.

Ummm...

Well, what about the one with wizened old storyteller who used to disappear in a cloud of *poof*..............



Where the fuck has he gone?

He just disappeared!

Yeah, in a cloud of pink smelly stuff. It smells like...

....a mixed-fruit urinal biscuit.

Yeah!
Yeah!

Too bad, I was starting to like him.