It's a routine recruitment day in F.I.X.F.I.C, the multiversal exception handling agency. Today, a particular woman will receive her recruitment letter, and the world will see what may come of her as an agent of Good...
From far away, the trained scriers and omen-recorders determine that she is currently unoccupied, and dispatch a messenger.
Andrea is, as usual, reading fic. She managed a million words read this week due to binging something long, it’s the current hyperfocus. Unfortunately this does mean she has forgotten to take her meds, or eat, or get out of bed at all. Having been entranced in her binge reading all day.
There is a rather loud knock on her window. If and when she looks over, there's a little dragonfly-winged fairy floating outside, with a wax-sealed letter in her hands.
“What the actual fuck?” She bites her lip rather hard to test if she is dreaming. Nope, the pain was real, she was awake. Does she have brain damage? Did she have a stroke? Andrea feels otherwise fine… but this was crazy. Is she hallucinating it whole cloth or layering a delusion over a real real thing like a bird or something?
…She might as well open the window and find out. “Hello?”
"Hi! Letter." chirps the pixie, in a voice so high it's barely on the edge of hearing.
She flits in and deposits the wax-sealed envelope in Andrea's hands, then flits back out the window and disappears with a little wave.
Well… it wasn’t an owl, so this isn’t a hogwarts letter delusion. Though JK being such a massive cunt really did retroactively poison those dreams for Andrea.
The letter seems real enough? It has weight? Brain damage probably doesn’t feel so real… Let’s not have a existential crisis about real pixies and the nature of reality and open this letter instead. Ew ew ew tearing paper.
Dear Andrea Valentini,
I hope this letter finds you well. We at the F.I.X.F.I.C. Agency have a job opportunity for you that we believe that you may be interested in. Contrary to what you might have expected, the multiverse is both quite real and quite accessible, with the right technology or 'magic'. Naturally, this both means that there are all the more problems to solve, and all the more options for how to solve them.
The F.I.X.F.I.C. Agency are but one amongst many groups that has access to multiversal travel and the fruits thereof. Our mission is to ensure the thriving of sapient life, with an especial focus on inserting our empowered agents into worlds undergoing great peril to 'fix' the arc of their world into something brighter and better. You in particular have been identified as likely to be especially compatible with both our empowerment methodologies and our mission.
The job is far from an easy one, but we have millennia of experience shepherding and supporting would-be heroes, and a broad selection of benefits available for those willing to undertake the task.
If you wish to speak with us in more detail about joining us, please tear the enclosed talisman, which will transport you to one of our bases, where you will be fully briefed and offered a selection of abilities and missions to undertake. Unfortunately, due to security considerations, a further explanation of those details cannot be included here, but rest assured that even if you decline, the worst that could happen would simply be that you return to your life as it was before.
If you wish to decline, simply discard or destroy this letter, and we shall trouble you no more.
Agent Asteris
F.I.X.F.I.C. Office f235bf
All preceding content is hereby certified to be true and accurate to the best of the knowledge of the F.I.X.F.I.C. organization, to be designed for honest and open communication, and to contain no geas, pact, glamour, enchantment or similar working, nor any supertechnological or esoteric enhancements to alter effective persuasiveness or the circumstances of reception, beyond your identification as an adequate potential and a discernment of minimum availability to read the contents of the letter. If you have any complaints about the manner or contents of this communication, please either discard this letter or report your concerns to Sapient Resources at your earliest convenience.
This would obviously be a fake letter except it was delivered by a pixie… But the name of the organisation… it was so dumb. Fixfic. Literally fixfic. Like something out of a lazy wish fulfilment story or crackfic. Even them picking someone like her seemed like a lazy wish fulfilment trope. Andrea was a agoraphobic fuckup with no real skills who survived on disability benefits.
The disclaimer about geas and altering effective persuasion were worrying. But if someone magic wanted to mind control her they wouldn’t need to warn her about it. If they are lying shes fucked anyway, if they are telling the truth then she can just come back if it doesn’t work out.
Fuck it.
She tears the talisman.
There's a feeling of space wooshing past, a flickering stutter of darkness, and then she appears in a dark-carpeted office. An expertly trimmed bonsai tree, which looks to be some form of teak, sits on the desk, along with a red-tinted pair of monitors. Black leather chairs sit behind and before the desk. There is no apparent entrance or exit from the room, though she can see through the windows on the north side of it a large hedge maze, over which two suns hang.
A red-haired woman of remarkable beauty sits behind the desk, wearing a well-fitted business suit and tie. A silver pen juts from her pocket, and her lips seem dyed a deeper red than should be natural, though they lack the sheen of lipstick.
"Welcome to Fix-Fic Headquarters, Andrea. I'm Agent Grey and I'll be handling your interview today."
She raises an eyebrow. "I'm certain you must have questions. I will provide what answers I can within the limits of operational security." The words have an air of roteness to them, as if she says them all day long day after day.
Oh fuck. Pretty lady. And here she is still in pajamas… she just got teleported and here she is worried about being in her pajamas in front of someone hot. Have some priorities, Andrea.
She takes a while to find her voice, and her thoughts. “I uhhh…. How did the teleport work? Because If there’s a transporter problem I might need to have a cry about my original being dead.”
"You were physically moved, not destroyed and reconstructed. Also, the soul is real, so it doesn't actually matter what happens to your body."
Agent Grey takes the pen from her pocket and makes a small note on a pad of paper where Andrea can't see what she's writing.
Souls… that… could be very bad? “So uhhh…. Does… the soul do anything? Do I have to worry about hell again?”
She literally JUST started getting over all the religious fears she’d been raised with, despite having decided ages ago they weren’t true. Just because you knew something wasn’t true doesn’t mean you didn’t still feel it. Fears were hard to get rid of like that. Andrea had just barley gotten over her fear of hell and feeling shame from worrying Jesus was watching her in bed, and now she finds out souls are real after all.
"The soul does in fact do things, but there's no-one standing in judgment over your world deciding whether people go to hell or not. That is in fact the case on some worlds, but we - that is, F.I.X.F.I.C. - are trying to eradicate the practice because no-one deserves hell. Let me pull up the afterlife situation on file for your world..."
She taps away at her keyboard for a few seconds, and then turns her attention back to Andrea. "Your world is currently hooked up to a Class C reincarnation system. In other words, people who die there reincarnate on other worlds in a way determined by magical physics and not by any actual agency. The spectrum of worlds looks like... six nines percent chance of a side-grade, with about a one-in-a-million chance of better or worse, and memory is not preserved through the transfer except six-nines exceptional cases. Of all people in your world's history, estimations show that around one hundred seventeen thousand humans have ever retained their memory through reincarnation, and of those individuals..." She taps a few keys more. "Over three-quarters of them were recognized by multiversal agencies looking for agents, either good or bad, and the remainder were reincarnated more or less randomly due to fluctuations in the currents of multiverse space. There is approximately a one-in-ten chance that even a single individual might have been reincarnated with their present memories in a significantly worse universe; all others effectively stopped existing, having no memory of their past lives, were adopted as agents by deities or multiversal organizations, or reincarnated to worlds at least as good or better than their current one."
She folds her hands together on the desk. "It can be possible to recover parts of past lives in some cases, which this model does not account for, but generally this is not a full retrieval but instead a much hazier transfer which is significantly lossy. Does this suffice to answer your question?"
“Uhhh yeah. If it doesn’t keep memories does it do anything actually important? If you mostly stop existing when you die anyway.” That kind of reincarnation really wasn’t better than just how Andrea thought normal death worked before. Dead is dead even if someone later recycles a soul you temporarily took care of for a while. At least it’s not heaven and hell. Learning some place have hells was alarming though! “Are… is…eradicating the practice of having hells going well?” The power scale of this organization if they are fixing hells must be wild. If there were any god types that had set up those hells they probably wouldn't be happy someone else was fixing them.
If she gets teamed up with a spiky haired teenage boy and told they have to go grind levels to eventually fight a god like in some ps2 JRPG she will lose it.
"At the present date, there are roughly three orders of magnitude more Grade A utopias in the universe than there are Grade A hellscapes, and the proportions are similar for the less bad and less good universes. So yes, we're winning. But worlds are built and worlds decay, it's a constant battle against entropy to keep conditions relatively good across the majority of the universe. Many merely averagely-bad worlds are overlooked due to us having much more urgent triage priorities. The ones that need real help are where we dispatch our agents to repair the state of the world."