Office.

"Hi."  Demon.  Vivid orange-red skin, spiraly black ramhorns, the whole bit.

"Hi."

"You okay?"

She looks at her hands.  They're trembling.  But - she doesn't feel like she was just hit by a truck.

Physically she feels all right, actually.

"I - think so."

"So, you're dead."

" - like - "

" - this is - heaven?"

"Inasmuch as it's a thing-that-happens-to-you-after-you-die, yeah.  It's not heaven heaven but it's not-the-realm-of-the-living-anymore."

Actually on reflection she feels a bit silly asking what is clearly a demon if she's in heaven.  But, like -

" - I never really - believed - in anything.  Like that."

She doesn't know why she's saying it but it seems important to say.

The demon peers at its desk, slides papers around or lifts them to look underneath.  " - ah, yeah, you're from what's called a mundane exit-only universe.  No native magic and no way for anything non-native to get in.  But in your verse's case we can pull people at the moment of death."

"And that's what you did to me."

"Yeah.  We try to get as many people as we can."

She nods.

The thought comes to her that she does seem to be - not going completely to pieces, upon being presented with this enormous new stressor, better than she would've done at fifteen, so she's been making progress along axes she cares about.  So that's good.  Inasmuch as it matters at all, now that she's dead.

"What - happens now?"

"We can give you two options - you can either go to Idyll or you can be contracted out."

"What - are those."

"Idyll is - you know how it feels when you're exhausted after a long day, but it's a good day and it's a good exhausted, and you've just collapsed into the coziest bed you've ever been in in your life, and pulled the comforter over you, and it's just cold enough outside the blankets for you to be perfectly comfortable under them?  And your eyes are closed and you're smiling a little bit and you're like, two seconds from falling asleep and having the best night of sleep of your life."

"Idyll is that feeling, forever."

" - okay.  What is being contracted out."

"You'd be put into a new universe that needs you to do something for it.  It's not reincarnation, it's you as you are now except with probably some new magical resources, just sort of - dropped in."

"Needs me to do something for it like... what."

The demon pinches the bridge of its nose.  " - so the thing is I can't tell you?  Which, ugh, it's stupid, like okay whatever constraints we're operating under don't make any sense, I've tried to get my middle management people who I report to to explain them to me but I kind of get the impression they don't know either, which like, solidarity!, but I also get the impression that they mostly think I can go fuck myself about it - sorry I should not be making this your problem right now - "

" - okay here's what I can tell you.  There's lots of different universes and most of them aren't like yours.  Most of them have magic.  Some of them have like - magic that works in such a way that someone who's been pulled out of a world, for some reason, can sort of slot into them.  Like "person from outside the universe with unique magic powers appears from nowhere" is just A Thing That Happens Sometimes, in them."

"There's also lots of different - organizations or entities or processes or phenomena or optimizers - that take people from worlds like yours, or sometimes just random other worlds, and drop them into new worlds, either in a reincarnation-y way or in a drop-in sort of way like we do.  And like, contracting out is somehow a thing, like it's not something we made up to work exactly how it does.  And it's like............ it's based somehow on what you would probably do in a world, given the resources that you are in fact given in the terms of the contract.  So the contract itself doesn't technically place any obligations on you.  But like - there is a contract open on a world, a world that's fucked up in some way and whose ontology or metaphysics or whatever admits of this fucked upedness being solved or ameliorated by the world putting out a contract on itself, and then that contract......... is, somehow, metaphysically offerable.......... to people who would feel compelled or obligated or inclined to try to fix that fucked upedness.'

"But also the contract doesn't guarantee that you'll be - definitely able to pull it off?  People have ever been contracted out and failed their contracts.  And people have also ever been contracted out and found it, like, completely horrible, even if they do consider themselves to have succeeded.  So you being offerable a contract means that you're the sort of person who'd try to fulfill it, but it's not a guarantee of success, and it's not - being dropped in a world with a bespoke personally-fulfilling quest or anything like that.  There's places that can do that I think but we're not one of them, we're contract-brokers."

"And okay here's the part where the constraints we're working under don't make any sense - at some level of the hierarchy people know exactly what the contracts on offer are for, how exactly the worlds putting them out want themselves to get fixed up, but for some bugshit nonsense reason most of that information isn't allowed to filter down to me and the rest of it isn't allowed to filter down to you.  Like I can tell you about the world, and about the magic you'll get - probably you'll have choices about your exact magic, depending on the world and how you're gonna slot into it - and I can even tell you about what ways in which the world is fucked up, but only in the capacity of like generally educating you about where you're going.  I can't give you a mission briefing, like, this contract is for you to solve this social ill in this way.  The fact that the contract is on offer to you is supposed to itself imply that you're a sort of person who will try to solve whatever problem the contract is about."

(A few moments into this speech she starts taking notes, frowning, with her tongue between her teeth.  She doesn't realize until about halfway through that she didn't have anything to take notes on or with until she started wanting to do so.)

"Okay, I - think I'm just gonna assume you're being honest about all this, because if you're lying and you can fake this I don't think there's anything I can do anyway - "

"Can I like - hear out a bunch of contracts and get into the details of them before I decide what I do?"

"Yeah totally," demon says.  "You can change your mind right up until the last second, we're not looking to trick you into anything.  - but uh I can't keep you around too long.  Maybe an hour or so."

"Okay," she says.  "...okay."

"...I think I need - a few minutes to process.  Is there an empty room or somewhere I could go - just for five or ten minutes, knock on the door if I'm in there a while?"

"Right through there."  Demon points to a door to her right that may or may not have been there before.