Prologue – Episode 2 She reaches the sixth door and checks the time on her phone. 11:57 pm. She reads the message again.

69th floor. Turn left out of the elevator. 6th door.

She pulls her compact out of her handbag and checks her makeup. Perfect. Probably more than this job deserves. Everything about this job is unusual. The client refused to give her a room number, preferring instead to give her detailed instructions of how to find it. Then came the instruction that she was to arrive at exactly midnight. Not one minute earlier, and not one minute later. And then there’s the hotel itself. Hotel Butterfly, on the corner of Swanston and Eclaire Streets in the heart of the CBD. The thing is…she can’t recall there ever having been a hotel on the corner of Swanston and Eclaire Streets. And Hotel Butterfly was nowhere to be found on the Internet or in the phone books. Despite being an enormous 90-storey glass-framed monolith with green lighting reaching high up into the Melbourne sky, she could swear she had never seen it before. Hell, even the reception staff were unusual; two young, insanely sexy young women with long tanned legs in inconceivably revealing uniforms. She checks her phone again. Midnight. She reaches to knock on the door, and pauses as she notices the room number. It’s the 6th room on the 69th floor, but the middle digit has come unscrewed and is hanging upside-down by its one remaining screw.

666

Figures, she thinks. This job couldn’t possibly get any weirder. She knocks on the door. And is greeted by a large bald man in a suit of polished chain mail armour. Credits: Esme by Stormi Dresscoat Italia from DAZ3D Hotel corridor photography by Renaud Camus (used under Creative Commons) Rendered in DAZ Studio 4 Pro Composited in Photoshop CS5 Extended