Kaori began pressing the buttons on the counseling help pages of her book one after another. As each one popped up in the glamorous and apparently mysterious heavenly realm she had created, they were handed a contract to imprint. Right after the imprinting of the contract was done, almost every one of the deities or angels began gawking at the wholly unexpected sight of the room around them.
After a moment of chatter between the new arrivals and her bevy of deities, several of the angels and a couple of the deities bolted over to her and began chattering all at once. Again they all looked embarrassed and deferred to the same elder goddess who happened to be among those that came to her. “Fugiwara Kaori-sama, *The green skinned woman stumbled over the unfamiliar name* we were just informed that some of your senior gods were once demons. Is that true?”
Kaori was puzzled for a moment and it must have shown on her face. Just as one of them was about to clarify, realization struck Kaori. “Yes, that’s true. Truth be told, only four of them were not demons until only a short while before you arrived. I harbor them no grudge for doing the job that was assigned to them.”
They all got very excited but also rather nervous. After another tense second the woman, which Kaori had tentatively determined was a dryad, spoke up again. “Do you suppose it might be possible to extend the same offer to a few demons that you offered to us? We all know of a small group of about five demons who sorely hate their roles and would likely jump at the chance to switch professions. Demons almost never apply for the role of counselors because they have such a reputation that nobody is willing to hire them. Please ma’am, I know it would mean a great deal to them!?”
Kaori chuckled a bit at their earnest faces. “Yes, fine. Why don’t you three angels go speak to them but do it quietly. I don’t want a bunch of other gods getting jumpy that I’m poaching their workers. As for you six deities and you too Gelor, I am about to begin pulling in the ones I want to directly offer deity positions to right now.”
“Gelor, I’m putting you in charge of the counseling project unless you would prefer to abdicate the position in favor of *pulling the name from her memory of the bio* Tozenna. I will be summoning six to start with whom I want to each receive personal, one on one counseling.” She then looked at Gelor for his reply.
The former demon come elf looked away sheepishly before speaking in a small voice. “If it’s all the same to you, Fujiwara-sama, I would rather defer the job of overseeing this to my more experienced elder goddess. I really only volunteered because there was nobody else to help with that. I feel that she would likely be the better fit for that role and I very much want Fujiwara-sama to have the best people in every position.”
Kaori couldn’t help but feel a momentary sense of warmth towards her subordinate. She decided that she would break her usual dry business practice for once and got out of her desk chair. She walked over to the surprised Gelor and gave him a quick bow. “I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, much.”
He looked at her bowing to him with wide eyes and then caught the mischievous grin on her face as she said the last word. He visibly relaxed and she straightened. “don’t want to make us uncomfortable, hah!” But his smile betrayed his true feelings on her little jest.
Returning to her seat and crossing her legs, Kaori addressed everyone in her clear, no-nonsense, managerial voice. “Okay, Tozenna, You will be in overall command of the deific counselors and will help them get all of my chosen deities over their first hurdles. I’ll then begin calling in a steady stream of future candidates. Those of you angels that are still here will be sent a stream of souls that have suffered grievous mental scarring. But before all that, gather around, all of you newest members so that I can explain how things are going to work here and what we have yet ahead of us.”
Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.
The next couple hours were spent giving a crash course in the way that Kaori ran things as a manager. The way she planned to run things as the goddess were only slightly different. The part she had the hardest part explaining was the 4X game concept but when she told them that she would be the only one who needed to really worry about that part there were a chorus of sighs all around. She explained about the way she wanted to restructure the planet and the system. It was a lot for them to take in but all of them seemed to be catching on pretty quickly.
She was only a few minutes into her talk about how to manage your juniors when the angels arrived back with a group of eleven demons. All of them looked meek and terrified, a still very odd look for demons in Kaori’s opinion but they organized themselves quickly and came forward to kneel and bow to her. The one leading them was a huge roiling black collection of smoke and ash with glimpses of fire in his depths.
Apparently, he was an archdemon named Nazmur’vaz, who was in charge of a branch of the underworld military in his original domain but he had always secretly hated his job. He had at some point spoken to an angel who counseled him through his feelings and he discovered that he was actually good aligned. Unfortunately, there was no place for him to exercise his true alignment in the underworld but he began testing to see what others around him were like.
Eventually, he discovered that there were a bunch of demons who were neutral and didn’t care one way or the other but there were also a few like himself who loathed their station. He got them in touch with the angel and she got them in touch with others like herself, including the deities of counseling. But, being demons, they had no hope of getting jobs as counselors. The deities and angels weren’t really getting hired very often for that. Then, out of nowhere, a sudden ray of hope appeared to them. The angels arrived and began telling them that they could get jobs as counselors or something else good aligned! Every one of them dropped their old positions flat. Even being paid much of nothing was preferable to working eons in a job you hate. And so, he quickly went around and gathered any that wanted to change alignment and here they were.
After the briefest of pauses to compose herself, Kaori smiled and extended them all contracts with clauses about their alignment going forward and all terms of employment clearly spelled out. The interruption was over pretty quickly and Kaori repeated her explanation of managing juniors up to that point for the benefit of the new demons and the angels who had gone to fetch them. Her explanation and plans were apparently very unorthodox but were received with much aplomb. She heard several of them extoling her virtues and several others grousing about her not having been around to teach all the other gods how to correctly manage a world.
With the explanation out of the way, it was time to introduce a whole bunch of new deities and future deities into her world. She first plucked a couple of promising souls out of her afterlife. These two had been practically plowing through the afterlife and had already accumulated a good portion of the virtues and assets to get them on the fast track to godhood.
The first was an elven ghost by the name of Eremileane and she was a former priestess of her tribe. She had taken to the afterlife with a gusto that showed she was intent on making as much of herself as possible. When she discovered that she could improve herself in the next life by completing quests in the afterlife, she began rushing about finding every quest she could lay her ephemeral hands on. It didn’t take long for Kaori to get a notification about her.
The next was a guy named Somolos. He was a hunter in his last life and found that through his prowess in hunting that he could gain more than food. He did do a few errant side quests that helped some of the NPCs out in the afterlife but he mostly hunted ever greater game. Kaori had a huge role for someone like him.
With the two elves looking around bemusedly, she tasked Yaju with catching them up to date on what was going on, would be going on, and where they were. Before that though, she told them both that she was going to make them lesser gods. If they could have died of heart attacks, they probably would have. Then when they realized who they were talking to after that, they were again completely mind-boggled. Einoro went along with them to help Yaju fill in the blanks and the sight of a female who looked like Yaju may have thrown them off more than anything before that.
It was finally time for Kaori to begin pulling souls out of the other domains. She would start with the top six candidates and then work her way through them all from there.