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.

"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."

"Okay.  I'll remember."