My first thought is that the afterlife looks surprisingly like a normal, if oddly furnished, office building. The floor is dressed stone or tile covered with a patchwork of durable industrial rugs, the walls and ceiling are painted white, and the room is filled with rows of heavy wood desks. Huge windows on one wall flood the room with natural light, letting me see that the desks are covered in scattered papers and reference books. I’m facing a set of double doors, and I glance over my shoulder to see some hallways leading deeper into the building.

That’s as far as I get before someone starts hammering on the door in front of me and shouting orders.

“Isekai Affairs! Search warrant! Isekai Affairs! Search warrant!”

My second thought is that the afterlife sounds like it’s about to be the site of a SWAT raid.

“You’ll never take me alive, coppers!” Someone screeches his defiance from deeper in the building and then slams a door closed.

My third thought is that I need to amend my second thought - the afterlife sounds like it’s about to be the site of a gunfight.

My fourth thought is that I want no part in whatever’s about to go down. I hit the deck, squeeze my eyes shut, protect the back of my neck with my hands, roll under the nearest desk, and resign myself to a life of gunfire-induced tinnitus.

The building’s front door disintegrates with a BANG and I hear wood fragments pattering off my shelter before something goes past me so fast I can feel it pushing the air around. Then every muscle in my body just… stops working. I go completely limp, eyes falling open and head rolling over, before someone grabs my wrists, drags me out into the open, and slaps a pair of handcuffs on me. I have a tiny moment to wonder how they paralyzed me; gas doesn’t work like that!

All I can see from the ground are shoes, but they only add to this SWAT team’s mounting strangeness. Nobody is wearing the combat boots that I’d expect. The person that handcuffed me is wearing layered, overlapping metal plates, like armor-plated hiking boots. Another person runs past wearing leather moccasins.

And then I can’t focus on anything because there’s a fight happening.

A chorus of wet snapping noises crackles out from the direction of the hallways. It’s joined a second later by some kind of hideous shrieking bass roar, perhaps a rocket launch having its soul sucked out. Another door-exploding noise follows that, then glass shattering, maniacal cackling disappearing into the distance, a complicated metallic noise like someone flattening a car with a tower full of church bells, and finally a settling calm, glass tinkling to the ground and bits of metal rolling across a hard floor.

“Fuck!” A woman shouts angrily, “Ji, did you get him?”

“This one humbly apologizes,” comes the reply, smooth and cultured. “He threw off my Sticky Swamp Mud Technique too easily.”

The woman just starts belting out orders. “Fine. Bob, follow him. Pop spirit stones if you have to. Ji, secure the area.” The woman talks right over Ji’s florid acknowledgment. “Agnes, make sure the zombies stay down.” “As you command.” “Liv, deal with the guy out there.” “Yes ma’am.”

I hear another whooshing sound above me, which I tentatively identify as Ji blasting past on his zombie-slaying assignment. A pair of legs comes and stands next to me, nothing more than acid green blobs to my uncontrolled eyes. Assuming I’ve been Isekai’d into some kind of urban fantasy setting, this is probably a bard or sorcerer? Something charisma-based, you’d have to have some magical personality powers to make that color work.

The maybe-bard crouches down and gently pokes me in the ear, rolling my head up until I see that the rest of the outfit is the same color as the pants and shoes. They lean over to look at me more carefully. Then they sigh. “Agnes,” she shouts, “Did we not agree to leave baseliners uncursed? Free the woman so I may interrogate her.”

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Just like that, all my muscles are back. I focus and see shoulder-length brown hair, green eyes to match the eye-searing green outfit, and something with strings on her back. Definitely a bard, then.

“Hi! Liv Thompson, Bureau of Isekai Affairs Senior Special Agent,” she brightly introduces herself. “Don’t get up yet. Can you tell me who you are, what you were doing here, and any Gift or powers you might have?”

I consider. On the one hand, this lady is probably a cop of some form, and “all cops are bastards” probably applies across realities. I should really just ask for my lawyer. On the other hand, I have no idea if I get a lawyer here, and it’s entirely possible that if I clam up she’ll just use her hypothetical Charisma score to turn my executive function to polenta and then suck everything out anyway.

“Uhh,” I manage to croak out. “Whitney Ismael, Software Engineer. I got hit by a truck and next thing I knew I was standing here and you were about to breach.”

She lifts a skeptical eyebrow at me. “Oh, come on,” she says. “That’s the single most unoriginal, stereotypical lie you could have possibly told. Everyone was ‘hit by a truck and just appeared here thirty seconds ago.’” She even makes the air quotes. “Try again.”

Ji goes flying past again, this time where I can see him, insofar as “see” applies when all I catch is a fluttering grey blur in the corner of my eye.

“No, really!” I shake my head, as much as that’s possible in my face-down-on-the-floor position. Don’t want to spook the probable federal agent equivalent. “I mean, okay, I know that automobile accidents are the second most common cause of death in my demographic so I was always careful about crosswalks, but that just meant that it jumped the curb, crashed through the front of the restaurant, and pasted me right as I was about to dig into my croque monsieur. I really did get hit by a truck and I really did land here right as you knocked on the door, seriously.” I laugh. “I couldn’t be more of an isekai protagonist if I tried.”

“We’ll see about that ‘protagonist’ bit,” she says, with a kind of absentminded menace. “Any powers, notable capabilities, or gifts to report? Did you see, hear, or otherwise interact with any visions, deities, strange messages, voices, ethereal whispers, blue boxes, dinging noises, prompts, important questions, shadowy entities, formless darknesses, oracles, prophets, or any other supernatural forces in between your death and instantiation here?” She rolls out the entire list without even hesitating. Memory superpowers, performance superpowers, or she’s just given this schpiel a thousand times?

“No, no world-shaking prophecies or meetings with deities,” I say. “Straight from ‘hit by truck’ to ‘Isekai Affairs, we have a warrant’. No, uh, gifts, no supernatural powers, I haven’t gotten access to any system you might have around here. I’ve apparently gotten the most boring Isekai ever. As for notable capabilities I carried over: I can probably still write ‘hello world’ in every programming language on Wikipedia except Malebolge? Does that count?” I grin hopefully. “Oh! And when I’m sufficiently depressed I can read three hundred thousand words of bad fanfiction a day.”

Agent Thompson gives me a look. “I’ll just put you down as ‘baseline software engineer’, then,” she says. “Though you’ll have to tell us what that is later.” She detaches the handcuffs and hooks them on the back of her belt. “Aaaand that means you can get up now, just don’t go anywhere or do anything or get in the way until we’ve figured out what we’re doing next.”

I roll over and sit up, preparing to look around to figure out more about my new life, and am immediately interrupted.

“Hold up,” the leader of the SWAT team calls out. “Did you say you wrote programming?”

Agent Thompson backs up to give us some space.

“Um. Whitney Ismael, software engineer,” I offer, “So, yes, I do more architecture than hacking, but I can write code. Program. Why?” The leader comes around a desk to reach us, blue eyes focused on me. Her clothing is a stereotypical fantasy ranger getup, light leather armor and a hooded cloak in various shades of forest green, a bow slung over her shoulder, and a pair of long straight knives strapped to her forearms. She has dark skin and short, frizzy hair. I scramble to my feet to greet her.

“Supervisory Special Agent Heather Townsend, Ranger Captain, Bureau of Isekai Affairs.” She holds out a hand and I mindlessly shake it. “We need to counter this nutjob’s magic but HQ refuses to assign us a hard wizard or an appropriate classer. We can’t even get a skilled baseline Visitor.” She scans my five-and-a-half feet of out-of-shape nerdery. “Reports say that Visitors that were engineers or that know ‘programming’ handle Hard Magical Gifts well.” She considers me carefully. “Impressive reaction, if you did Visit right then. You got out of our way and made sure we knew you weren’t a threat. You seem friendly and sane.” She switches her attention to something over my shoulder, reads for a few seconds, and flicks her hand at it before returning her gaze to me. A LitRPG setting, then?

“Right,” she says decisively, “You’re conscripted. Welcome to the Bureau of Isekai Affairs.”