[pshrynk]

leTerrible lurched to his feet and staggered in the general direction of the street. He wasn't sure what is goal was, but he knew that he had to find someone. "Being dead is not so good for your thought patterns," he mumbled. He could tell that his functions were coming back, since he was able to find the street without using his face, now.

Emerging from the alleyway behind the Casino, he heard the sound of a mezzosoprano singing some that sounded bawdy. In German. A few brain cells snapped to attention and he pointed his feet in that direction, hoping that they would get the hint. Several passersby in the street crossed themselves and quickly left the area rapidly.

"I'm not a zombie, you pastiches!" he swore in French. He thought about pastiches and decided he would have to submit that to the Bureau of Incomprehendable Swear Words when he got back home to Montreal.

He was about half way across the street when he found himself surrounded by four young Cubans, wielding knives.

"Good evening, senor!" the obvious leader said, "Do you happen to have on your person a gun?"

leTerrible could only stare in confusion and shake his head no.

"Good! Then consider this a robbery! If you would not mind, please give us your valuable possessions or we shall have to resort to violence of a most undesirable nature!"

leTerrible scratched his head and wondered who had given this street gan a lesson in manners. Suddenly, the weight of the day's events came crashing down on his mind, crushing the last of his patience with it.

"You want my valuable? THIS is my valuable right hand! It can make wood sing! And THIS is my valuable left hand! It can only make wood give a poetic recitation, since I cut part of the finger off!" leTerrible swung wildly at the street punks, landing squarely with the first. He looked down at his fists in curiosity after the punk sailed thirty feet through the air and crashed through the brick wall of the cantina.

"Strange. They never did that before."

The other three punks quickly grabbed their unconscious leader and sauntered off in a synchronized fashion, deciding once and for all that going for Olympic Glory was much preferable to trying to make a hard scrabble living in the streets of Havana.