He switches to American English. "In a dog-earring them and refusing to put them down for dinner way or in a reverent and careful way?"

"Depends on the book. I'm not going to dog-ear your books."

Sigh. "I suppose that's adequate. You should have received an ID number when your application was approved and I'll need that so I can confirm that you're not likely to do anything worse than exist while thinking it's sometimes okay to mistreat some books."

Seems like probably not the time to get into a spirited argument about the sacredness of $1 SF paperbacks. She reads off her number.

He confirms he has it right and types something and waits a moment and then confirms which reception area she's in and tells her to meet him at the east gate of it in half an hour.

She will be there.

And he can take her to his place, about half of which is a library, and give her a tour and time to set down any luggage she may have magically acquired in the last few minutes. Her interview will be a few blocks thataway.

Thataway she goes when the time comes, having spent the intervening moments looking at the titles of his books.

The interviewer has a neat minimalist office and looks like an unmodified human. She greets Bella warmly and invites her to have a seat.

Bella sits down. "Hello, pleased to meet you."

"Are you really?"

"It could stand to be under better circumstances, I'm not exactly delighted to be dead, but I'm glad that your organization exists and that it was relatively easy to find."

She smiles. "I see."

"Do you ask questions or do I just start talking about my relevant ambitions?"

"You start talking and I'll ask questions if I have them."

"Okay. So I haven't had long time to get oriented, since I died quite recently, but I did some reading - I was curious about demon psychology but didn't have any really brilliant ideas about it in the course of reading what demons have written or transcripts of negotiation with the dragon or anything, unfortunately, but in the medium term at least I want to be learning magic, which in addition to being tremendously appealing on a personal level also seems like it's pretty flexible in its application. I have in the last day or so gotten more acclimated to the idea that it might be incumbent on the dead to cause an apocalypse but tend to be of the opinion that if you have arrived at the conclusion 'we should kill everyone alive' you have probably made some kind of error and should start over again at least five or six times." Any reaction or should she keep going?

She’s doing a hell of a poker face but she has a question. "What were you hoping for when you started reading about demons?"

"I was hoping for some way to meet them in the middle, like if they'd be fine if they were able to import puppies instead, or fine with having kinky sex with people who are into that or writing tragedies or if we were really lucky maybe they'd actually really like to be annihilated if only that seemed possible or they'd enjoy instead setting art on fire or something, but I found nothing like that, not even much evidence that they vary. I object to this way for reality to be since I was raised on, like, utopian sci-fi and American anti-racism, but reality didn't ask me so here we are. I want to support revamping more afterlives into tolerable places to live. Some ideas which I haven't already confirmed that somebody else already had, though I doubt I've got anything fully original, include moving currently living people into afterlives and seeing if that improves their outcomes once they do die; doing really elaborate demographics analysis of some kind to see if there's any traits, especially ones that we could influence, that define where people go; attempting to replicate Jesus by capturing demonic gametes... that's about it."

"There are people working on some of that; I can put you in touch with the stats people. Have you ever actually done anything?"

"I'm seventeen. I was still in high school. And my mom doesn't believe in obsessively padding one's resume for college so I read improving books instead of doing volunteer work or whatever."

"Do you have any concrete plans or just dreams?"

"Learning magic is reasonably concrete, as is 'read more', but neither has had much time to get specific as yet."

"I wouldn’t say so."

"Yeah. If I had a resume I'd presumably be able to interact with some more conventionally transactional sector of the economy; I'm here on the hope that you guys frontload investment on potential."

"I think the Society for the Advancement of Human Potential will like you, they go for just promising personalities more than we can afford to. How about - " She takes a pen out of her pocket and starts writing on the pad of paper on her desk. " - I send you to them and the stats people and maybe someone who can help you find work."