Leon’s awareness stirred, and he slowly became aware of a faint point of light in the center of his vision. He couldn’t feel his body, as if he was floating in a total void. As he focused his attention more and more on the pinprick, it started to expand, gradually dragging him along what felt like an endless tunnel of nothingness.

The faint sound of slow jazz music was the first thing that Leon heard as he felt consciousness creep back into his mind. As his eyes opened, he found himself lying flat on his back, beneath a dark wood paneled ceiling. His body felt strangely numb and weightless, as if his mind were present but his physical self was not.

He slowly raised himself up to a sitting position, and realized that he had been reclining on a chaise lounge. The room was covered with rich red wallpaper, with dark wood paneling along the baseboards. Bookshelves were evenly spaced around the walls, heavily laden with ancient looking tomes.

A fireplace rumbled along the back wall, the mantelpiece adorned with hunting trophies of animals that Leon couldn’t quite make sense of. In front of this display, a large wing-backed armchair was seated behind a heavy wooden desk. A man wearing a white suit smiled down at Leon from atop the chair.

“I’ve been waiting for you, Mr. Sterling... though I was not expecting you so soon...” the man said to him in a deep, smooth voice. His handsome, angular features were framed by shoulder-length white hair and decorated with a well-maintained close-trimmed beard. Something about this man in the white suit was off-putting to Leon, the very tone of his voice seeming somewhat predatory.

“You... do I know you from somewhere? Who are you? I swear, just give me some more time and I can pay back the money I owe you!!” Leon pleaded out of instinct. The man in white grinned, letting loose a short chastising chuckle which sent chills down Leon’s spine.

“I’m afraid it’s too late for that sort of thing, Mr. Sterling... you already have racked up quite a great debt - a cosmic one, at that,” the man in white rumbled. Leon’s face was overcome with a look of confusion. A ‘cosmic debt’?! What the hell did that even mean?

It seemed the man in the white suit had picked up on Leon’s confusion, as he continued on.

“Your gambling, lying, and addiction to vices has left your soul overburdened by your bad karma, you see. Your soul is impure - too filthy even to be recycled and born again as even a blade of grass. I’m afraid you’re going to have to spend some time in Hell, Mr. Sterling,” the man in white elaborated, leaning forward to rest his elbows atop the desk and steeple his long, well manicured fingers.

Leon’s face blanched. Hell?! He was an atheist - what gives?! Every intelligent person he’d ever spoken to had assured him that the entire idea of an afterlife was a fairy tale, so he’d never paid it much heed. He made a mental note not to trust intellectual types again - if they were wrong about Hell being real, what else must they have screwed up?

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“P-please!! I’m sure this is all some kind of mistake... I’m not even Christian so, like, isn’t there supposed to be some leniency for people that don’t, like, know the rules?!” he stammered, instinctively trying to bargain and wriggle his way out. The man in white simply returned an unflinching gaze.

“I’m afraid there is no such exception - we don’t make the rules, the Universe does. I’m simply the messenger here. How about I let you pick which hell you’d like to go to? Would you rather suffer a blizzard so cold that your skin freezes off for thousands of years? Or perhaps you might like to get hacked to pieces in molten iron for the duration of your stay?” the man in white asked, in the tone of a hotel receptionist who was offering him a choice of room. Leon’s entire body shuddered just at the images that entered his head. Were he still alive, sweat surely would have been pouring from his forehead by now.

“W-w-wait!! If I owe all of this... this... “karma” then maybe I can do something to work it off another way? I’m sure that if you give me time... no, I’d BET that I can win my soul back!!” he exclaimed, perhaps with a conviction which was surprising to the man in white - the man’s expression certainly suggested that he was not used to spirits with their wills so intact.

“Hmm... well, you ARE a bit of an early arrival - you weren’t meant to die having your organs harvested, you were meant to die ten years from now over unpaid gambling debts... perhaps I can delay your sentence for a bit. It doesn’t change the fact that you are burdened by this bad karma. I don’t think it would be fair to just send you back, either...” he trailed off for a moment, as if searching his memories. He produced a book from one of the shelves, leafing through it as if he were a lawyer consulting a legal text.

“Aha! Here we are! Random reincarnation - a random creature on a random plane of existence... that ought to do it! A fitting sentence for someone in your circumstance, I would say... Are you prepared to wager your very soul and spin the great cosmic wheel, Mr. Sterling? No take-backs if you are reborn as an amoeba or something...” he said, his voice taking on a bit of a playful tone. Leon gulped, and nodded. It seemed this was his out, and he was going to take it. Something in his gut told him that luck might be flowing in his favor tonight.

“I’ll take it. Where’s this wheel, then? Is it like roulette or something?” he asked, rising shakily to an upright position - he didn’t quite have feet in this state, and sort of hovered above the ground. The man in white chuckled, and snapped his fingers. Suddenly, the room fell away and was replaced by a void studded with glittering stars. Below them, a wheel of an incomprehensible scale was stretched out below them.

“This is the Great Wheel. You’d probably be better off praying for this one, Mr. Sterling - the odds are very much against you here...” he said, gesturing to a large lever hovering in space. “Go ahead and give it a whirl.”

Leon approached with hesitation, before grasping the great lever in both hands. It took all of his strength to heave it to the ground, but the wheel began to spin. He could almost feel his entire being spinning with it, and with it, his vision began to fade once again.

“I’ll speak to you when you are on the other side, Mr. Sterling, to better explain the specifics of our little wager... I have a lot of paperwork to do, and this wheel takes a long time to slow down.”

That was the last thing he heard before the world disappeared once again.