Four years had passed since that deplorable day when Sergeant Drake had refused to kill off Inspector Shine in a fit of human decency. In the mean time, all the heroes and all the villains had tried to pick up the pieces of their lives, which they had stupidly screwed up during that awful year 1889.

Inspector Reed was depressed. His wife was still in the loony bin, his daughter was still missing and probably drowned, and Captain Jackson was still crashing on the sofa. Jackson's wife, Long Susan, was pissed at him for doing idiotic things that made her have to sleep with a gross guy. It was a very good reason to be mad, though. Now she was busy setting up a name for herself as Victorian London's first and best female super-villain. She had determined that she would rule the criminal underworld, and Jackson would be sorry he's made her dump him.

Jackson was depressed because he loved no other woman like he loved Susan. And he couldn't sleep with Rose just like that anymore, because it would break Sergeant Drakes heart, and make him break Jackson's nose. So Jackson comforted himself with booze and cigarettes and cutting up the dead corpses that had been killed by London's many murderers.

Rose was also depressed, although she was usually too busy to notice. She was a successful singer now, and drew full houses every night. She still loved Sergeant Drake, but he refused to believe she loved him, so nothing could happen between them. The last couple of years, Rose had been touring a lot, and she had her own band and back-up singers now. She was out of London most of the time, and had hoards of fanboys writing her romantic letters and sending her their long-johns, but after that time she met a pony-tailed kidnapper in the ads she was more suspicious of their behaviour.

Emily was also very depressed in the loony bin.

But nobody was more depressed than Sergeant Drake, who had a huge hole were his heart used to be. To give a little re-cap of what happened to him four years earlier: His friend tricked him into doing a gold heist, and then killed himself, giving Drake PTSD. Rose refused to marry him because he would be an obstacle to her career. His other friend turned out to be bent and heavily involved in the drug trade, and got murdered by Inspector Shine. He had married Bella, but she turned out to already have a husband who was a scary sect leader. The sect tried to kill Drake and Rose, and when that failed, Bella stabbed herself to death in front of him because she realized he couldn't love her the same way after that. After several weeks in the blackest depression since that time with a completely different Bella and ten blank pages, Drake found it in his heart that he couldn't beat the snot out of suspects anymore. They got a lot less confessions nowadays, and that was the beginning of frustrating modern policing where criminals have all sorts of rights over honest people. But at least he hadn't sunken to the depths of killing a fellow policeman, eh?

The not-killed policeman in question, Inspector Jedediah Shine, was not depressed. He was pissed. Four years earlier, he'd had a thriving mafia going, but the pesky humanitarians over in H-Division had put a stop to most of it. His drug-trade was busted, and his accomplices were either in prison or he'd had to murder them. He hated it when he had to bump off perfectly useful commodities like that. Some bastards had killed his unofficial employer, and there was now a lot less demand for his strangling skills, because not a lot of people could be trusted to know he had them, dammit. Not being able to strangle people made him almost as twitchy as not getting laid. Out of all the rotten things Edmund Reed had done, throwing his girlfriend in the slammer was the most grating. Not to mention that he was no longer the ultimate fighter. Sergeant Drake had knocked him unconscious, and he'd spent three months on a steam-operated life-support system. That was humiliating. But at least he had a plan, an evil plan. Edmund Reed would not know what had hit him… Muahahaha!