"But I really don't know."

"That's just not really what I was picturing.  And I would have acted differently if I'd known that."

"The novice office probably knows more. It's probably a frequently asked question if a lot of people worry about it."

"Thank you for taking me there."

Eft nods. "Almost there, you see the pink-and-yellow building there?"

"I see it.  ...Everyone here has been really nice."

"Oh, thank you, I hope your luck continues."

"Do you think it's luck?"  ...Or, that's not quite the right question.  Everyone who has chosen to interact with her has been very nice, and you need a baseline number of helpful people for that to happen, but choosing to interact with her is a filter, isn't it.

"...I guess?"

Aaa she fumbled this interaction.  "Thank you for your hope."

He laughs a little like she made a joke and leaves her at the threshold of the pink and yellow building. It looks like the inside of a shell with how smooth they've made the surface. But there is a sign with a lot of languages on it. The English says "New Angel Orientation Services".

Well, she goes in.

The angel sitting at the desk is a round-faced pink-haired woman who is extremely specifically inspired by runway looks in Paris in 2089's moment of retro wheelchair-as-fashion-accessory, but nobody ever recognizes this, so she mostly just looks like she'd have to take off half her clothes to stand up and has fingerless gloves on. (Her chair has wheels but only caster wheels.) "Hi, can you speak?" she asks in an exaggeratedly cheerful voice.

"I speak English."

"Great." She stops exaggerating. "Do you have any urgent questions or should I just give you my standard speech?"

"...Is there any truth to the demons-stealing-souls thing?"

"We don’t have a good way to be sure. Our contact with Limbo is such that if demons were leaning on them to muddy the question of whether any given person were there or not, it'd be impossible to verify independently. Demons themselves give mixed answers. I can tell you that Limboites report they don’t and fairies mostly agree, and living humans think they do, and if there is someone specific you are concerned about there are good odds we get you in touch with them even if their soul was reported stolen."

"That's good.  Um, are there laws here?"

"Yes, there are city and regional laws and I can print you the latest written version in English, but they will be interpreted and enforced in Lihi, so you shouldn't count on anything relying on exact words in English."

"Is there anything it's illegal to have done as a human, as opposed to being illegal to do going forward?"

"No, but some cryptographically protected statuses may require verifying things about your past conduct including as a human and fraud is illegal."

"...What?"

"If you claim to any kind of person or organization that your conduct in life was a certain way, and it wasn't, and they are relying on that information as anything more than casual conversation, it might count as fraud. The main way this comes up is something called cryptographically protected status, where you can join a sort of club or group and be given a way to prove that you are a member of that group and don't just look like one, cryptographically."

"Okay.  Thank you.  I, um - uh, I - I can probably receive the standard speech now."

"Okay! Welcome to Heaven. You're an angel now. That means you can change things within a range of a few hundred feet. It's much easier to destroy things than to fix them; you need to know how you want something to be to make it be that way, and so you can undo something that you don't understand and not be able to restore it. That means you shouldn't change things that belong to anyone else. Heaven's fluff is pretty easy to work with because it's solid, pleasant to handle, about as dense as water, and all the same. Instead of taking apart things that might matter to someone else, you can peel a little fluff off the nearest surface that has some and turn it into whatever you want. It's best practice to grow the fluff back how you found it so no one trips or anything, and to take only as much as you can hold in your arms at one time since in many places it is holding things together or holding them up, but since it's so workable that replacement should be very easy even while you're learning, and you can practice here if you would like.

"Being an angel also means you are indestructible. So is everyone else, so if you try to change them, you might be able to annoy them, but you won't be able to seriously harm anyone. You can still be startled, slightly and briefly hurt, scared, and made emotionally uncomfortable, though. So can everyone else. We all have to live with everyone else forever, so don't make a terrible nuisance of yourself. Some new angels like to practice to get used to being indestructible by doing things like jumping from heights or playing with fire, and that's fine as long as the place you choose for it isn't going to be wrecked in a way that you don't know how to solve. You should take a moment to be clear with yourself that you don't want to have problems that indestructibility should be able to fix, if you don't; sometimes new angels wind up with some kind of disability sticking for a while if they strongly identified with being disabled and their indestructibility takes that as its template.

"You I see already have wings, but if you don't like them just as they are right now, we have people who volunteer here and can reshape or remake them for you, and there's also classes on anatomy so you can learn to do it yourself. It's a lot easier to get around a lot of places by flying.

"If you pay attention you'll be able to feel summonses. If you can't, I can tap out the rhythm of them for a few seconds and you can try to correlate the feeling with the taps, and that usually lets you pick it out. Those summonses are for random angels. Taking them is risky because while many humans are very nice, not all of them are, and being summoned is a vulnerable position. We don't recommend you take any for the first three and a half years - that's a translation from an old time unit - but if you think you want to, we have a handout on that. If you are interested in summonses in the long term there are classes you can take on skills that will let you get better summon jobs, and we can also tell you what kinds of payment will be most valuable here at home.

"As part of being indestructible, you don't need to sleep, but you might get slightly tired. You can counteract that with caffeine and if you have had it before it should not be very hard to make your own; I can make you a caffeine drink if you need something to try before you can manage it. If you do want to sleep, within this cavern all the designated places to sleep are private residences reserved for people with certain cryptographically protected statuses, or charge rent. There's more general housing available for free in the cavern just below this one and the English speaking neighborhood is Psara. You also don't need to eat or drink, but can, and should be able to make your own food. You do not need to go to the bathroom and are not allowed to try to do it anyway within city limits. You don't need to breathe, but low or high air pressure can create problems for other people, so you should not change it too much.

"Here is a printed map of this region of Heaven. It's simplified - it leaves out a lot of small caverns and tunnels, it's not to scale, and it's divided into levels in the drawing by what's connected to what and not by absolute altitude. It should still make it easier to get to anywhere you're trying to go by name. We're here in Jiohui.

"You can take classes in Lihi and in eight other languages popular in this general area here. Here is a schedule. It's sevenday threequarter right now and the chart on the first page shows approximately how that corresponds with human time.

"The New Angel Department takes donations and volunteers but you do not owe us anything for our services, it's a charitable operation."