"The torturers. Did she not mention those? She must have at least heard of them, because she's where all the special powers come from..."

"She did not mention them. Or judges, either, but that term is less immediately alarming."

"Honestly, of the two, the judges piss me off more. I have friends who are torturers."

More's the pity for her choice of friends, but: "Right, what exactly is the story here?"

"How much do you already know?"

"Nothing about either of the listed job descriptions. This is an afterlife, she runs its underlying structure, my world doesn't need it because fairies are immortal, we're attached to a known mortal world though and she wants to check to see if she already gets its dead mortals."

"Okay. Well, it goes like this: somebody dies, and they get stored unconscious in the middle of a room until a judge decides to come look at them and wake them up. The judge reviews the entire history of their life, and if they were practically perfect they get to go Upside, and if they weren't they go Downside, and if the judge doesn't like them they go Downside and get assigned a sentence of some number of hours of torture, the record is twelve. And torturers can't easily quit - judges virtually never bother assigning sentences to anybody who's already sorted, because they'd have to notice and care that you were doing something, but if a torturer stops doing their job the judges will keep sentencing them until they reconsider. There is a loophole to make this whole system less completely shitty: a sentence has to be served by somebody, but it doesn't have to be by the person it was originally for; anyone else can decide to take it for them, and it counts as long as the substitute sincerely means to be a substitute. I'm one of the people who does that. We're called contractors."

Shrug. "Yeah."

"What other things here are astonishingly horrible?"

"Eh, plenty, but most of the rest is just what happens when you have an enormous population of people who can't die and whose single unifying characteristic is that they weren't nice enough to get put in with the nice people, all thrown together with no oversight at all. People who want to be shitty to each other are going to find ways. And there's the special powers I mentioned - judges can read your entire life history at a glance; torturers can establish a connection with one person at a time that lets them move that person around like a puppet - but getting rid of those kind of comes with getting rid of the relevant professions."

"Are you liable to be forgetting anything or should I fly up to the tower and complain about that right now?"

"I've hit all the structural problems. Like I said, people being assholes is a separate issue."

"Yeah. We have assholes in Fairyland too. And for that matter a control mechanism, but it's different and I don't think she can get rid of it. Though I may as well ask."

"Assholes are a universal constant."

"Will I find you here again if I come back?"

"Maybe. If you don't, you can go to this transit address," she pulls a small white card out of her pocket, "and ask to talk to Eights." The card has a number on it: 9246938^0. "Somebody'll find me."

"I mean, define 'real'," she says. "It's what people call me these days. If 'real' means 'live' you won't find many people here who even remember theirs."

"Oh good. 'Real' means 'first'."

"Yeah, then almost everybody you meet will be going by something else unless you hang around the base of the tower waiting for newbies."

"Okay, good. Thank you very much." Promise goes out of the library and flies to the top of the tower. The bit with the windows.

Once she gets about halfway from the top of the cliffs to the top of the tower, she is inside the bit with the windows again.

"Hello," says Promise. "Some of the details you didn't mention are very objectionable. Basically everything about the judges and the torturers should go."