Random stories

Look, I've got a *big* afterlife to run, here.

People are coming and people are going, my budget is stretched thin, the boss man is always breathing down my neck, and the line of people complaining that I've been unfair to them is *literally* infinitely long.

I'm just this guy, y'know?

So I've gotta be economical. That's actually how reincarnation got started in the first place. Is your case going to take longer to judge than I can spend per person? Bam, sendja back down. Live another life, see if you can *commit* to something this time.

Of course, it didn't stop there.

The proper heaven is upstairs- they don't let me in there. I think maybe *I'm* being processed for whatever I did in my mortal life, though I can't remember one.

Do gods die? Pretty sure I'm a god.

Eh. No time for pondering. Only time for processing.

So. It gets busy up here, as I'm sure you can imagine. Think of all the stuff you have to deal with when someone dies- the estate, getting someone to take the body away, the mourning, the family fights over money and silverware and trying to figure out who's going to take care of the dog...

All of that. Trust me when I say it's worse up here. And there's a *lot* of dead schmucks who walk through my doors.

So, given that I've got loads of resource constraints, I do my best to be economical. The purgatory system is honestly pretty simple- you take people with similar levels and types of shittiness, stick 'em all in a mini-planet together, and let them sort it out. Sometimes they improve and get bumped up somewhere nicer, sometimes they double down and have to be moved into a crappier world...whatever. I've got half a dozen interns whose only job it is to sort through those schmucks, and then sort through them *again* once they've gone through them all.

We don't really go through the purgatory worlds as often as we should, to keep people moving. But you do what you can do.

And it takes a mightier god than I, to imagine what my interns might have done in a previous incarnation to get stuck as afterlife-managing interns. I wouldn't inflict that on any but the worst human sinners, I'll tell you that much.

Hell, at least, is pretty straightforward. You chuck 'em down into the eternal furnaces. Their bodies are eternal, so they can't *die*, but it *really* sucks. And we need the furnaces to run a bunch of machinery *anyway*, so it's easy on the budget. Don't need interns to check on 'em, either- if you're *that* shitty, you can just wait until the line dies down.

But, even with the existing, expansive system, there's some cases that just...don't quite fit.

Take this asshole.

I mean, he made me hate him within six seconds. I'm supposed to be incapable of hate, but this guy blew past that like it was *nothing*. He was grating as all hell to be around.

But- and this is an important point- his actions on Earth weren't particularly shitty. I mean, he was still a dick a lot of the time, but he wasn't exceptional. He wasn't bound for hell. If it weren't for his preternatural ability to piss people off, he'd probably be headed for a pretty middle-of-the-pack purgatory world.

Normally what I do with cases like this- cases that are going to take more than a minute to process- is chuck 'em back down to Earth. But whatever this guy had going on wasn't going to get fixed by that. You can just *tell*.

And *that* meant that he'd show back up here, and I'd need to deal with him again, and again, and *again*.

No.

*Hell* no.

One, because I've already interacted with this asshole more than I want to. And, two, it wastes precious time. Putting problems off is how you turn problems from difficult to impossible. My budget issues were bad enough. Having cases that I had to process dozens of times would make everything *much* worse.

I had to grit my teeth, be a big boy god, and find something that at least resembled a solution.

Fortunately, it wasn't *that* hard.

The whole idea of the purgatory worlds is that people have to live with others like themselves. If everyone else is your type of shitty, you have a hard time not confronting that part of yourself, and understanding what it's like for others to deal with you. In effect, they're torturing themselves. Which is fine and dandy, because we do *not* have the budget for dedicated torturers.

So I decided to do something similar, before chucking this asshole back down to earth.

Soul splitters are nifty tech that I don't get to use often. I invented 'em back in the old days, when I had enough budget and, on occasion, time to kill.

I miss those days.

Anyway. Just run the asshole though one of those, stick a note of binding on the resulting soul chunks, and toss 'em down to Earth. This was also easy on the budget- the Fate department has to deal with keeping the two together so they can torment each other. The department head might chew me out if I abuse it, but what the hell else am I gonna do?

With any luck, the asshole will have sorted some of his issues out by the time he gets back.

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Submitted by Xavier_Elrose on Sat, May 27, 2023 to /r/WritingPrompts/

The prompt

You and your worst enemy spent a lifetime making each other miserable. After death, your consciousness and memories merged. It turns out you are the same person, and in a previous life you were such a bastard that you were reincarnated into two so you could experience yourself first-hand.