"Thanks."

She stands, and heads through, into a cozy room with a comfy armchair and a soft incandescent lamp.

She sits.

She puts her head in her hands.

Takes a very deep, shaky breath.

Lets it out in a sigh - almost, but not quite, a gasp.

Rubs her eyes, briefly.

Okay.

She's on a time limit.

This is exactly the sort of situation where her thoughts would want to chase themselves in circles, and she'd want to talk to one of her friends in order to sort them out.

If - if Lianne or Nausicaa or somebody were here, what would she say...?

"That I'm sad and scared and - don't know what to do."

"That I'm not gonna see either of them again, or my mom or my dad, or anyone I met at college - that I'm never gonna be a doctor - "

Another deep, steadying breath.

"That I don't think I want to go to Idyll but - but I don't know if I want to go somewhere completely new - "

And Idyll's forever, and what if if she goes somewhere else and dies again she dies for real, she doesn't want to give herself finite time if Idyll can be forever - but is Idyll even better than dying, she'll just feel good forever but not do anything ever again - but she imagines oblivion, imagines stopping, and that has to be worse, it has to be worse to know you're about to be nothing -

Another breath.  Her thoughts are going too fast for her.

"My thoughts are going too fast for me.  Idyll - is scary because I'll never do anything again except rest and feel better.  Contracting is scary because I might die forever."

She gets out her notebook and writes - prospects of coming back here if I die on contract?

She can feel her brain trying to conjure a million more things to be scared about, about Idyll, about contracting - and she writes each one down.

Idyll - what if I miss out on someone else from my world?  Can they find people I knew and put me in touch, if I don't go to Idyll?

Contract - it'll be SO HARD acclimating to a completely new society

Idyll - I always felt like the world needed me to save it, and I don't want to turn my back on it

Contract - dropped into a new world, who would I talk to, how would I make friends?  Could I function on my own?

Idyll - wireheading is a scary idea for reasons I was never able to articulate, and I'm scared I'll talk myself out of excuses to be scared of it and talk myself into doing it without really getting at the reason it's scary or existentially horrifying, because I can't articulate it to myself given only an hour to think

(Lots of this is in shorthand, or abbreviation, or single meaningful words; but even that much helps her think and reason around her fear, divide it into pieces and see what it's trying to tell her.)

She does, kind of, want to cry.

But she's on a time limit.

She emerges.

Sits, opposite the demon.

"I'm leaning towards contracting out," she says, "but I think I'd like a lot more info beforehand."

Demon nods.  "Do you have questions?  There's a standard spiel I can give you about worlds you're likely to get contracted to, or I can just look at what's available and go from... there..."

It frowns at its papers and shuffles through them again.

"...fucking... okay I have one contract for you available.  I'm sorry, I thought there'd be more.  I can just tell you about this one, or you can ask."

Breath.  In, out.  "So it's Idyll or I drop into this one world?"

"Yeah."

"All right.  I have no - even slight frame of reference for what an other universe will look like."

"Humans get contracted out to worlds with humans or creatures with human-like psychology almost exclusively," the demon says.  "This one we have contemptibly bad information on, but we know it has some species that you'll recognize from your popular fiction, dwarves and goblins, as well as humans, and - okay rubber forehead aliens is a term of art here, I don't know if you have it - "

"Like, human-looking and -acting but a bit different?  Along both axes?"

"Yeah," it says.  "And then more exotic stuff with an essentially human bauplan but some wacky extraneous shit, tentacles or whatever.  I'm sorry we don't have anything more specific, it looks like there are a lot of city-states and a lot of them are - species-nationalist, I guess - and a lot of them we only heard about second-hand or got brief glimpses of.  Okay though we do have pretty good intel on your magic, at least, and I can give you more details about the area you're gonna be dropping into."

"Okay," she says.  "I - want to know about the magic, and I want to know about the part of the world I'll be dropping into, I think in that order - but I also had some questions about inter-world travel and phenomena like this place.  Do we have time to get into all of it?"

It checks its watch.  "Yeah I think so.  A bit briefly, maybe."

"Okay.  I am increasingly uncomfortable with the prospect of going to Idyll and I doubt I'll be able to resolve my discomfort about it in the time you say I have, but - I need to know a couple things.  If I die in my contract-world, can I come back here; and can you catch people from my world and put them in touch with me?"

"...Technically in principle the answer to both of those could be yes but - our org is operating under lots of constraints that I can't really explain and mostly don't understand, and we catch as many people as we can but that's not very many.  We're focused on worlds like yours, exit-only ones, because they're least likely to have their own afterlives and so most likely to be throwing people to - our competitors, who aren't great.  So we'd be more likely to catch your friends in your world than to catch you if you die again."

"What happens if you die in your contract world - dovetails with our future discussion about its magic, so I'll defer that for a minute.  If you tell us who to watch out for we can keep an eye out for them, and tell them some about your contract world, or that you went to Idyll if you decide to - but we can't really put you in touch, I think that kind of arbitrary world-transit is above our pay grade.  I'm sorry."

"Okay.  Thank you anyway.  Can I give you some names?  I can't - draw them or anything, I'm not an artist - "

"You can give me their names, and I can tell people that if they catch people by those names to ask if they knew someone named Kaylee Whitlock, and to bring them up to speed.  But - no promises.  We don't catch a lot of people."

"I understand."

She writes down her parents' names, and her little cousins' names, and Lianne and Nausicaa's names, and some of her college friends and a professor she was particularly close with, and hands the demon the list.

"I'll keep this safe," he says.  "Our people are good about this sort of thing, they know what's up."

"If there's time I might want to write them letters," she says.  "But if not - tell my family I love them and that - I'm gonna do my best to do good.  Tell Lianne and Nausicaa I love them and I'm a better person for meeting them, both of them - "

And she has messages for the rest of her friends, too, and for her favorite professor.

The demon dutifully records all of it.

"Okay also, real quick I should also clarify about Idyll - in principle people can be taken out of it.  It's not really exactly a place but there are some sort-of-places, like how this is sort-of-a-place, that have access to it?  There's people in them a bit like me but with wings instead of horns.  If you went to somewhere that had access to Idyll you could talk to those people and get them to wake someone up.  We don't wake them up because like, they all chose to be there, and we don't have anywhere good to put them.  But in principle if somebody could do interworld travel better than us it'd be within the realm of possibility and maybe decency to rouse everyone in Idyll and say, hey, you now have another choice, you can go live here if you want.  I'm telling you this because the contract you're being offered suggests that if you got good interworld travel you'd probably do good things with this information, but I really wouldn't get your hopes up about good interworld travel.  Like I said the constraints we're working under - don't make sense, or don't seem to to me, and if they don't make sense to me that means I can't guess based on them what kind of constraints you'd wind up being under if you got good interworld travel, except that they might prevent you from doing very much more good with it.  But I think interworld travel in principle is possible in the magic of the world you're going to.  So.  Just in case, some day."