What followed was not at all what Kaori had envisioned in her mind happening now. Each of the prospects for a new deity had an application and at the bottom of each application was one of those magic circles almost like the ones in the ordering manual. She picked up the application on the top of the stack and looked at the name. Varla.
Kaori considered the application for a couple of of moments. She read through the two pages of text so tiny that it would have required a magnifying glass in her previous life, at a rate that would have made a computer envious. Contained in those two pages was the very sad life story of a woman who had devoted her life to defending her sister. She had cross-dressed as a man and become a warrior only to have a sleazeball trick her sister and steal her money. In the end, the sister had died and the god of war cast her aside for being a woman!?
Kaori looked at Pross who had made the report and demanded. “Are you messing with me? You’re telling me that this person was rejected from her afterlife over being a woman?”
Pross just shrugged in his now human form until Kaori pointed a finger at him. He yelped in a strangely high voice and all of the sudden his Business suit clad figure became that of a voluptuous oriental woman with similar features to the original deity but of a decidedly feminine framing. Pross looked at her wide eyed before looking down and began to pat his body through the suit in alarm.
Kaori shook her head in resignation and a grunt of disgust escaped her lips. She pointed again and in moments, pross was returned to his original form and he sported a look of profound relief. “If I can do that to a deity under me then why would it not work on a regular soul? Am I missing something here? Have I just overlooked something simple?”
Rocell leaned over Kaori’s seated form and rubbed her shoulder in sympathy. “No, you really aren’t missing anything here. If the soul didn’t belong to the deity in question but another, then the deity wouldn’t be able to change it without permission from the one who did. Since the young lady in question had pledged herself to that idiot Chern, he could have just as easily turned her into a man. It was a petty and cruel slight to her is all.”
Kaori looked at the pages again and then at the bottom where three magic seals were present. Above each seal was the name of one of the three sisters. “It’s still hard to believe that there are so many souls floating in this… *checking the page again to make sure she got the name correct* Naught, you say, and it’s full of souls? If they aren’t claimed by a deity but weren’t rejected by one can we really have them?”
As kaori looked around she was astounded to find every head nodding emphatically. She then looked at the huge stacks of papers on her desk. “And you said that you only talked to a handful of the souls in the place? And we could make a contract with every one of them? Like these two other sisters, they hadn’t pledged themselves to a god, so they just ended up floating in this oblivion of nothingness?”
When Kaori got back nothing but affirmative nods she began to chuckle to herself but not in amusement. If this was the kind of gross incompetence that was happening throughout the universe, then it was no wonder Descartes was so desperate for competent help! This was just blatantly wasteful from a purely managerial point of view. If she were to view them as nothing but resources, this would be far too much but if you took into account that each of these were people then this became madness.
Kaori reached out her hand and grabbed her book from midair and perused the section it opened to. Sure enough, it just said a contract of deityship. Kaori’s face took on a huge calculating grin. “Sorry to put you all up for this task so soon but I’m going to send you all back to these places to get one of these forms for every one of them. I’m going to sign up every single one of them to become deities. I’m just going to leave a clause in it that it may not happen immediately and will require certain efforts to be fulfilled on their part.”
Seeing a look of confusion on a couple of their faces, Kaori continued. “You know, what’s a few hundred lifetimes getting it right and rising in soul rank to become an angel or demon. They’ll still be awaiting the day that some deity or another needs them to fill in a role under them. It may take hundreds of thousands of years but they are surely all going to end up as deities eventually, right?”
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Kaori could tell from the smirks around her that every last one of them understood her plan now. They would sign every one of the souls floating in some nether realm of limbo up to become gods. The vast majority of the souls would then simply go into the afterlife system to be reincarnated as new people. Since every soul in the reincarnation cycle that Kaori had devised was technically able to eventually become a god or goddess, it was a huge legal loophole that would allow them to siphon all of the souls from these other worlds in one fell step. Every god there was looking at Kaori with a profound sense of respect.
Kaori picked up a few more of the contracts and scanned through them. She sat each of them aside almost as quickly. There was a growing pinched look of concern on her face. “I hate to ask this of you but are any of you inclined to become councilors?”
All of them looked a little lost and confused for a moment. Realization struck them all pretty quickly. A lot of these people were going to be broken. They had spent entire lifetimes serving a deity and then got denied in the end. After that, they each spent some amount of time ruminating on their own failure to impress their god or goddess.
Gelor, the formerly small and dodgy eyed demon of doubt raised his now elven hand. “I might be able to ease a number of them through their problems. Having worked to instill doubt in people for centuries, I think I know a thing or two about how it roots itself to the soul. I can probably get maybe a dozen people through but I’m not even confident of that. Sorry Boss la…, ahem, Fujiwara-sama.”
Everyone started to hear what amounted to muffled screaming but nobody was quite sure where it was coming from. Kaori realized a moment later that it was coming from her book and opened it to the page that was yelling. There in the midst of the pages, she found half a dozen pictures of various deities and what looked to be page after page of angels looking at her pleadingly. It took her a moment to register that the heading above the section was "Mental and Spiritual Help Section".
Kaori perused the section a bit, reading the bios of the various deities offering their services for the position of counseling and teaching counseling to deities and the listing for the angels had them as mortal counselors. Kaori had to look through the section several more times in disbelief. Finally, she spoke to the animated two-way mass conference call on the page. “Can any of you tell me why every listing here is so incredibly cheap? I’ve seen the listings for others in the help section and most of them are charging around ten times what you are, let alone what you angels are asking. What’s your reasoning?”
There was a sudden clamor of noise as everyone started to respond but then most of them quieted down and finally everyone deferred to the most senior goddess on the page. “Ma’am, the reason that we are willing to work so cheaply is because it’s our calling. None of us are interested in fulfilling roles other than this but the problem is than most supreme deities see no value in our services whatsoever.”
“That’s why a lot of us have been awaiting the call of a deity willing to use our services for a while. I myself have been waiting seven celestial cycles. I’m sure that some of us here have been waiting a lot longer than that. Still, when we heard through your invocation of need and you still didn’t open the book, we were all very dismayed. I think I speak for everyone here when I say I was terrified to hear someone say they needed me but didn’t even know I was here.”
“I see that you are a new goddess. I can’t in this speak for anyone else, but I am willing to defer any and all payment until such time as you have enough worship flowing in to cover my pay safely.” A few of the faces on the page looked pensive or even dejected but the vast majority began nodding their heads in agreement. Apparently, those with a strong sense of empathy were willing to go above and beyond in any world.
Kaori thought it over for a moment, weighing her options. She scanned the two pages of faces in this subsection while considering her options. She flipped the page and found that there was a different subsection on the next page and flipped back. Each of the portraits was rather small on these two pages. The six deities had larger portraits than the angels did but they were still packed onto the pages, especially with a short bio under each.
Finally coming to a decision, Kaori looked back at the goddess who spoke to her. “I have a counter offer. How about if I pay each of you a sum listed to you but only the upfront for one local year’s worth. Each of you, also leave your posting up in the catalog so other deities can still hire you away if you get a good offer in the interim. Finally, I will hire every one of you on those terms with the understanding that I will have to do a lot of work to get things working just right and you may leave after the one year of employment if you don’t feel this is a good fit for you.”
There was a moment of silence, then a cacophony of noise erupted from the pages. Almost every portrait contained a deity or angel nodding their head furiously while trying to be heard pledging their agreement. It was chaos but of a good kind. Some of those in the portraits were even seen to be crying with joy! Was it really that big of a deal?