What Kaori wanted in an afterlife wasn’t perfectly clear. She was having almost as much trouble envisioning the afterlife as she had with the world around her. She had thought that just having an idea for the world would be good enough. She was expecting to buy a premade afterlife package and just implement it like a new piece of software.
It didn’t go according to plan. There were no premade afterlife packages. When you bought an afterlife there were a few varieties to choose from. One was the infinite expanse of one type or another. This type baffled her for a bit until Einoro said “You could just buy two and have a heaven and hell setup like earth had.” Suddenly it made a lot more sense. That wasn’t how she wanted to do things though.
She wondered how that would be possible. How could you put an infinite plane in place next to a world. More than that, it would be directly tied to that world. Einoro came to her rescue again by asking how you could store ten million books on a laptop computer. Thinking in those terms, a soul would be something like a set of virtual data and the place that it went wouldn’t have to be physically massive to be infinite to the souls that resided there.
Kaori still had no idea what she wanted to do so she decided to look at all the options. Another one was oblivion. No, just no! that was the cheapest but that would suck for those that were living to know this really was all you got. She remembered the atheists back home and wondered how people like them ever got up the motivation to do anything except be hedonists.
Then there was the promotion system. This one let you turn a soul into a higher form of soul by burning its experiences to give it the capacity to be reborn as something better than it was before. She was honestly interested in that idea and set it aside as an option. The problem with this one was that it assumes you will have spirits, demons, angels, gods, and other incorporeal creatures roaming the surface of the planet. Interesting but not quite the one she wanted but she wouldn’t count it out completely just because it wasn’t exactly like her old world.
It was about this time when a couple of the demons and an angel came back with a batch of applications. Kaori took a break from the afterlife quest to peruse the applications. What she read shocked her for a few moments, the sheer cruelty of the way so many of them died and the callous indifference of their deities was sickening.
She reminded herself that she was about to set up a world where all the inhabitants would fight each other and the world around them as a way to get ahead. She began questioning herself but then remembered that a world without conflict wouldn’t advance. She would have to leave the being to do as they pleased and even then they might still end up fighting. Even the elves might have fought each other. The universe wasn’t a nice place but she would at least be able to make it rewarding.
Kevall, the demon of lust, leaned over her shoulder and asked what she was doing now. “I’m trying to figure out what I want to do about the afterlife here. I think I have part of it but I’m not sure about the rest of it.”
The reincarnation system was the one she wanted. The inhabitants thought they were being reincarnated already but the truth wasn’t the same thing. Kaori discovered that the people of the forest were actually all still stuck in their bodies in a sort of suspended animation or something. When she thought about their souls, she was able to actually see thousands of them just laying flat in the soil. At first, she wanted to be mad at Yaju but then she remembered that he didn’t really know what he was doing and hadn’t even been able to summon his book until it was too late.
Kevall looked at Einoro and then at Rocell before looking back at Kaori. “Boss lady, why don’t you just use the heaven and hell system? You already have residents from both sides to give you pointers on how it works right? That’s the simple solution then right?”
Kaori grimaced at him and then almost burst out laughing as he literally flinched back. “Relax, I’m not going to punish you for giving me an opinion or idea. You’d have to really do something wrong before I would take action against you. But I don’t like your idea. I don’t want to just copy something else that already exists. If I’m going to have to create it then it’s going to be MY creation not some knockoff copy. I also don’t like the way the systems from earth didn’t give any incentives to the living besides what just being nice does. I want to have something tangible come from this too.”
Saying that much set a plan in motion. She purchased the reincarnation system right away but then discovered that it was a straight one to one transfer system. She then realized that she could still purchase the promotion system, she would just have to modify them both a bit to work with each other. But she now had her plan pretty well settled. It would, once more, be game influenced.
This time, she thought of it like a mini-game in a regular computer game. Not quite the same but that helped her figure it out and that was what she needed the most was inspiration. “Hey Rocell, do you remember the premise of that MMORPG about the crystal glade? The one with all the killer graphics that bogged the game down so much it crashed constantly? *At a nod of confirmation, she continued* think you can write a quick synopsis of the gameplay for me? If I set you up on laptop how long do you think it would take?”
Rocell considered for a moment while absently flapping her wings. “I dunno, maybe like, 30 minutes. I could probably give you a full rundown of the game in an hour. It would take a little longer to retype the code for the entire game but if you give me two hours, I could probably do that. You were right though; the code was a mess and I doubt that it’ll be as useful.”
Kaori just shook her head and handed her the laptop from nowhere. “I’ll take the full run-through but skip the code. I want to use elements of that in the afterlife here.”
Kaori comes up with a system where the inhabitants can be reincarnated. They go to the afterlife which is a game set up as an MMORPG with multiple story lines that a soul can follow. The soul plays as their self from their previous life. The script forces them to be railroaded a little bit but every decision has multiple paths for them to follow. She then thinks thing through and decides to make it an open world style instead.
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It means more work but the extra possibilities should make things run a bit smoother. The question is how long to let them have in the afterlife? She finally settles on making the duration one year at most. Then she remembers that she doesn’t know even how long the year is here or if it has one at all! How utterly frustrating!
Kaori then set the game-like realm of the afterlife to have various trials and rewards such as bosses and puzzles, just like any normal RPG might have. The major difference was that she didn’t limit her options in any way. For all her talk of not wanting to rip off an existing system, she blatantly refurbished any old game knowledge she could dredge up. It didn’t matter to her if it came from a sci-fi, fantasy, shonen, or horror game. She purposely put in elements of some of the otome games she played in college and even parts of a few FPS games.
The world was looking like a real creation of Dr. Frankenstein by the time she was finished putting all her ideas into it. That’s when the rest of the demons and the last angel showed up and everyone was intent upon seeing what the goddess was making. It had been nagging at Gelor for a bit now and he couldn’t help falling into his old job. “Pardon Boss lady but, don’t you think it’s a bit weird to have all those different things mashed together? I mean, this game thing has robots and dragons, kings and space empires. I don’t know, isn’t it kind of, you know, messy?”
Kaori considered his words for a few seconds before turning to him slowly. Everyone was expecting her to be mad or something but she had on a different kind of scary face. This was the kind of face you never want to see on an otaku or a hardcore gamer, the face that says, are you interested in hearing about it? “I thought about that for a bit but then I remembered that this is a setup for an afterlife. This one will be set to only last around a year at the longest.”
“Since the souls in the game won’t have any perspective on what’s going on, I plan to make it more like their subconscious is in charge. They will feel like it’s all a dream and anything goes in dreams. I plan to have everything be hazy and overly bright to encourage them to miss the details. They will still have full control of their minds but will be forced to simply accept everything they see as normal.”
“I’ll have them run through the game world leveling up as a soul. They’ll each face various quests and trials and by completing them they will gain abilities. The different types of trials may be anything from farming to fighting monsters. Every soul will remember their previous life and think of themselves as that person. I want to make it so that as the souls go through the afterlife, they can gain certain abilities from completing trials that they will be able to keep in the next life.”
“I was also thinking that if the soul gets enough of some kind of points or tokens then they get to keep some of their memories of their past life in the next. One thing I want to add as a given is that if I can make that last part work, then souls will never be reincarnated as the same kind they were and they will get to keep the language of their last life as a bonus.”
“ooh ooh, and I just had another great idea! Maybe we could make it so the soul gained experience points and leveled up to say… hmm, Maybe level 100. If they do some kind of quest after that, they begin earning experience towards deity levels. Once reaching the low deity level in points, a soul can always come back with their deity levels intact. The deity levels will allow them to build towards becoming a god or goddess.”
“First, they would have to become an angel or a demon. Oh, I forgot, I want to set it up so that evil people get to keep their evil intent if they chase after it in the afterlife. They will be able to remember some of their past life as the new person. If they gain deity levels, they will basically be the same person in a new body. If they just have some memories, they can learn what to do or not to do based off of them. If they become a good person, it may be because they didn’t like the memories or their evil past life.”
“Once a soul gains enough experience to become an angel or demon they won’t be reincarnated as anything else and won’t be able to be killed by anything but another angel, demon, or a deity. At that point they will join us as helpers to run the world. If they continue to do a good job then they will be promoted to being gods or goddesses and I will need just as many evil deities as I do good ones. I really did like the look of a lot of those applicants but I promise, you all are first in line for your godhood.”
This earned her a round of cheering and she had to wait for it to die down before continuing. “I think that I will be promoting all of you right after we pause the world but I’ll need to figure out for sure when the timing is right. I need all of you to keep working on this for a bit longer though. We’re not there yet. There are still a bunch of things I haven’t figured out how to do and when the new people arrive, I’m going to be doing a lot of work with all of you on the world. Let’s make this world a blast!”
“Oh yeah! I was wondering, do any of you demons want to become good gods instead of bad ones? Oh, and do any of you angels want to be evil gods instead? I know it’s a weird topic but I just figured that…” Kaori was interrupted by a chorus of requests to change alignments and it wasn’t just the demons surprisingly.
“Okay, Okay, I get it! I’ll let each of you choose which side you want to work on. I’ll have the new angels and demons work with the inhabitants or against them just like you did on earth. I want to focus their efforts on keeping steady growth. But I will need good gods to rule over the inhabitants, almost like players, and I will need evil gods to run the monsters and keep them in fighting shape. I also need them for the dungeons. So I suppose I might need more evil gods than good ones to begin with. No, I’m planning to make a lot of different species so I suppose that each of them will need a couple gods.”
“Oh yes, I also need gods to take care of the animals. I’ll be making the animals where they can take advantage of the afterlife enhancement system as well. I’ll even give a minor soul to colonies of bacteria and viruses so that they can evolve into more complex creatures, maybe like slimes or some other fantasy mini-monster. Any ideas?”
They worked on the afterlife for hours and eventually got it a lot more fleshed out. They had to set up something akin to NPCs for the souls to interact with but that wasn’t too hard for them. Then they set loose the thousands of elf souls to begin wandering in the new afterlife. They used them to gauge a general response to everything. They had to modify a lot of things but it was all fairly easy since the whole thing had a feeling like a dream. The souls would just watch as the angels and demons would come up and modify things right in front of them and then go right back to what they were doing when told they could.
After a few days of working through the afterlife and making all of the various things work, they were finally able to just let it run. They all kept an eye on it just in case any of the inhabitants found any more glitches or snags. They decided to take Kaori’s advice and just keep notes on what needed changing and doo it in patch updates like a real game. The next thing was to turn their attention to the veritable mountain of god applicant that they had brought back. It seemed that the chances of dying while committing an unforgivable blasphemy were fairly high and that left a lot of applicants to screen. Finally, Kaori felt like she was doing her job the right way!