The space he wakes up in is bright purple and stretches on for what seems like forever. The only other thing in it that can be perceived is a rounded woman with a bright face and glowing feathery wings. 

"Congratulations! You have been selected by the ineffable Will of the Multiverse to reincarnate as the villainess of a specific kind of romance story. Kind of weird, but it's become a huge thing over ten or so of your years in at least a dozen universal branes adjacent to yours. I think one of the Will's avatars read something somewhere and got a little too invested, honestly. Now, you won't be reincarnating into an actual otome that exists," the angel says. 

She taps her chin. "I don't get it, but according to my guidelines it's actually more in genre for us to create a custom otome-style world for you? It seems weird to me, but the universe molding crews love it, so we get lots of brownie points at inter-department parties. In any case, you'll be reincarnating into the soon-to-be-created Kingdom of Villarosa, setting of the counterfactual smash hit story Roses of Villarosa, told in a variety of mediums with details varying to fit." 

"You'll be becoming the much-hated villainess of the story, fated to be sentenced to a horrible bad ending for the crime of being the gorgeous and charismatic heroine's rival in love and for generally being an awful person. I'm sure you can picture how the story goes already," she adds. "--And I'm sorry, but you're definitely going to be a woman in your next life, and you'll also be attracted to men, though you may choose whether you want to be attracted to women also in your new life or be strictly into the cute boys."

"If you object, all I can say is that management apologizes for the inconvenience, but the Will's... well, will is final. On the upside, though, the reincarnation process will ensure you don't suffer any severe body or gender dysphoria, as well as preventing too much homesickness for your old life. Those safeties are there to prevent any depressing suicides. I'm sure you'll be relieved to know that you won't have to relive being a baby or toddler, you'll recover your old identity and memories when you're a teenager, a few days or weeks before the start of 'canon.' Another benefit is that because we haven't actually sent the specification for Villarosa to the universe molders, we have a chance to tweak things to make sure that your otome villainess reincarnation is to your taste. Just pick what you like best, and when we're done the molders get to work, I download a batch of fresh fake meta-knowledge about Roses of Villarosa to your soul, and you get reincarnated."

"So let's get started, okay?"

"What the fuck."

"I get that a lot, but people want a wide variety of different answers."

"I think I just died for no apparent reason. Maybe I'm having hallucinations...that would be a plausible side effect of the chaos magic, actually..." 

The angel winces. "Ah. No. Um, according to my records, you pulled off some kind of interdimensional teleport, and landed in a universe that...well, there's all kinds of hazard warnings on it. It pretty much took one look at you and squished you on sight." 

Baruti puts his head in his hands and sits like that for a minute. 

Finally he sighs and straightens up. "Alright. At least for the moment, I might as well assume this is real. A female villain. In a fake story. Is there a reason why?"

"Because I work for gods who are capricious assholes."

"Can you quit?"

"Firstly, no, secondly, if I did, they would just make another being like me to replace me and she wouldn't be as good at helping people get through this insane process with as much of what they want as possible."

"Fair enough. What exactly are the choices I have available to me?"

"You can choose your new world's tech level and magic level, your hairstyle and hair color--those are more important than they sound--your species, various aspects of the structure of the story, and some perks and flaws. On a mechanical level. You can more-or-less fill in the details however you want as long as they don't conflict with your mechanical choices or require mechanical choices you didn't make." 

"Alright. Thank you. How free-form are the mechanical choices?"

"It...varies, but overall most of the free-form-ness is in the non-mechanical details. Just about everything can be customized in some way but, likewise, just about everything has discrete choices that must be selected between."

"Alright. What can you tell me about the tech level and magic level?"

"The tech level options are 'Aesthetically Archaic,' which takes place in a romanticized version of the past where things are much nicer than they were at actual comparable points in time, and optionally has magic; 'Actually Archaic,' where things are as bad as they actually were in the past, and you have to choose a magic level of low or none. It gives you a free perk, but there are better ways of earning perks; I don't recommend it. 'Contemporary,' where things are approximately at the tech level and social level they have in your world at the point at which you died; 'Realistic Futurism,' which encompasses a technological level a ways past yours and common to many universes geographically similar to your own, 'Marvelous,' a term which is used to encompass an aesthetic based on literature foreign to your world; your world of origin doesn't really have anything I can use to gesture to it. But it has technology beyond that of 'Realistic Futurism.' 'Steampunk,' which takes some of the themes of Marvelous and runs with them down the tech tree, envisioning a world of steam and gears and brass. Cyberpunk, which for some reason they insist on leaving in despite it making no sense to people below a certain tech level--no offense, but your world doesn't qualify--Cyberpunk is a genre full of machines that think, merchant organizations that have become bloated beyond the point of anyone's heath with money and power, and a lot of gratuitous glowing lines on things. And Space Opera, which means a tech level significantly higher than Cyberpunk and convenient interstellar travel."
 

"Interstellar."

"Yes."

"What scale of interstellar are we talking about...?"

"Arbitrarily high. It's the top of the tech scale for a reason, and that reason is that it's actually quite wide in terms of possible actual level."

"Alright. Let me think for a minute. --I haven't forgotten about Magic Level, I assure you, but I do need to think for a minute first." 

He closes his eyes and thinks for a minute. 

"You know what tech level my world is at, and what literary tropes it doesn't contain," he says, opening his eyes. "What else do you know about it?"

"A lot. And I can get you stuff from it, too--not anyone's diary, both in terms of knowing and getting, but aside from private stuff like that. If I don't know it off the top of my head, I can probably find out." 

"Can you tell me which of the Great Mages have been successfully killed, and who has been killing them? --Aside from 'other Great Mages,' I know that that's going on but I don't have everyone neatly sorted into conspirators and non-conspirators."

"Hm...I think so...let's see..." she blinks. "--Huh. Um."

"Um?"

"It looks like your little mishap didn't just chuck you into a profoundly hostile universe, it forked you," she says. "When I search for living in-universe mages over a relevant power threshold, your name comes up." 

"I'm alive? I mean--one of me is--you're saying my plans have not all been ruined, I'm just not personally in this experiential thread going to be the one to carry them out?"

"That's what it seems like to me!" 

Tension he didn't actively realize he was carrying drains out of him. He all but collapses to the ground, taking some time to just be without worrying about the next step in an ambiguously long game of high-stakes Xanatos Speed Chess in...longer than he would like to think about. Since the first murder, to be sure. He would be worrying about the long-term effects of stress on his body if he couldn't just fix them with magic and if he hadn't just been emphatically murdered by a rogue universe. The psychological effects are less irrelevant but there's not a lot he can do about them just now, aside from exactly what he is doing. 

The angel was created to be literally superhumanly patient. She waits while he decompresses. 

It's a good thing that the angel is literally superhumanly patient because he is just going to fail to function for a while. He has no real basis for a solid idea of how long it's been, when he finally shoves himself up into a sitting position, since there's no timepiece and he doesn't have any bodily needs to attend to, but he wouldn't be surprised to learn it had been multiple hours. 

"Alright. That changes the calculus significantly. This isn't a setback, it's an opportunity. And I suppose I have less reason to be annoyed about the gender change, since there's already a me going around being the me that I already am. Change isn't such a bad thing, as long as it's not along axes that will just go on forever." Pause. "As long as the gender change is comprehensive, and I'm not just going to be stuck in a woman's body acting out a woman's role for however long with my own male gender identity intact."

"That's the idea. Some people have very stubborn gender identities, so it doesn't always work out in practice."

"I have a gender identity, but I don't think I would characterize it as particularly stubborn," he says. "Alright, what were you going to say about magic level?"

"There are three magic levels--well, technically four. Low, Medium, and High. And None. You get an extra perk if you pick None, and I suppose it would be less of a bad idea for you since you could do your current kind of magic anyway, but in general it's just a really bad idea. You can get new magic if you pick literally any other magic level!"

"Do people do that a lot? Choose None?"

"Not a lot, but a surprisingly large number of people think that the options have to be balanced in some way such that None is just as good actually. Those people are wrong."

"Are there other options where one is just actually worse?"

"Actually Archaic in the tech level is. Aside from that--there are options that are taken less often than others, and for what I would consider good reason, but I would consider those niche rather than bad. I suppose Blonde in the hair color options could be considered worse than the other options, but even then I've seen people pick it for reasons I could respect."

"Which are?"

"All the other hair color options had effects they couldn't put up with." 

"Alright." He thinks for a moment. "Obviously my world had a tech level of Contemporary, but what would you say its magic level was?"

"Medium. I would say high-medium now and low-medium in the not-too-distant future if the usurpers have their way." 

He makes an annoyed face. "I can only hope that my living fork manages to throw a wrench in their plans...but I'm not optimistic. I'll be satisfied if he survives to deal with them another day. Alright. Does a higher tech level necessarily result in higher quality of life?"

"Not necessarily, you can get some nasty dystopias at high tech levels for example, and of course happiness set points are psychologically complicated, but in general higher tech levels are better for people."

"Alright. Space Opera and High Magic then...I must confess, I don't have any idea how to model what a tech level that high would look like..."

"Don't worry too much about it, I can get this shunted off to a cooperative subcommittee of the worldbuilding team with a note that we want a maximally ethical setup, it won't be perfect but don't beat yourself up about it. There are constraints set up by my ASSHOLE BOSSES," she yells out into the void, "that mean perfect isn't remotely allowed even if it were a coherent thing in the first place. So don't beat yourself up about not knowing how to micromanage things a little bit closer."

He startles when she yells, then laughs softly. "Alright. I'll do my best." 

"Good! Self-recriminations never got anyone anywhere."

"No, I suppose they wouldn't, at that. ...Can you get me examples of relevant works of literature, that my own universe doesn't have?" 

"Oh, sure! --None of them will be written for your particular cultural background and set of starting assumptions, though. I can get you more books to help fill in the gaps but historically the results of attempting to do that have...varied." 

"Varied by...?" 

She spreads her hands apologetically. "The creativity of my client, I'm afraid. I haven't done this enough, yet, to be able to skillfully guide the process." 

He purses his lips. "And I suppose it's something that your bosses didn't design you for." 

"It's not something they tend to object to, but no."