Debt of Nature

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Running simultaneously on Eagle Time and MSPAFA. Unfamiliar commands presumably come from the other.

Such a fleeting thing is life. Beautiful, from a certain point of view. Tragic, from another. Pointless, from yet another. All things experience life, be it for seconds or for millennia. No matter the experience, though, life holds one thing constant: it ends.



It takes very little. An errant step atop a precipice. A misjudgment of which mushrooms to eat. Perhaps merely a fire, if one has the misfortune to not be fireproof. Life can end suddenly, or have a drawn-out conclusion, but a vast minority of mortal beings can circumvent their own deaths.



But death is hardly the end. If it were... well, we wouldn't be here right now. But I have something far more important to tell than a metaphor about death and burning plantlife. A story quite familiar to me, and assuredly quite unfamiliar to you.



This is a story of death.



More specifically, a story of Death. One Death of many. There exists in this multiverse a corporation, one assuredly greater than any you have seen. This corporation deals not in simple products and monetary profits, but in something far grander. This corporation deals in souls.

DEATHCO, it is called. A soul's first stop after leaving the body. Some are cleaned up and sent into new bodies. Some are simply judged and sent to the proper afterlife. But a few - some might call them lucky, others might prefer "unfortunate" - end up staying here, in the employ of DEATHCO itself.

This story is about one of these souls.



A recent recruit of DEATHCO, barely even settled into their office space. Their job, simple: to retrieve souls from the myriad universes and return them for sorting and judging. As you see them now, they appear as the "Grim Reaper" - a familiar sight to a race called humans. But you'd know all about that, wouldn't you?



Nonetheless, the Reaper isn't the "true" nature of this soul - they've lost nothing of their former self after all. Behind this facade, they...

Um.

Oh dear.



This isn't good at all. One second, please.

...

...



FSSSSSSSHHHHHH

- One brief clean-up later -

I must apologize. I may have underestimated how flammable this tome is. ...Quite a bit of it has burnt away. No matter, I know this story by heart. Now, where was I?

Ah, yes. The soul who appears before you is...

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...up to you! You, collectively, as readers, that is. Who, and, perhaps just as importantly, what is the soul currently appearing as the Reaper? Give as much or as little description as you want; all is welcome, and, just this once, nothing is set in stone.

His name was Yon Yonson. He lived in Wisconsin. He worked at the lumbermill there.


He took his own life following an identity crisis, in which people he was sure he knew would ask him who he was regularly.

He actually worked on the filing system upstairs before taking an unfortunate fall out of the window and being reassigned to a new job within the company

A juvenile, ripped from her future by injustice.

That's Jeffry Herschel, road crew worker and blues musician. He was killed trying to save his guitar from a rampaging asphalt golem.

THE PRESIDENT

A serial killer. He's having trouble adjusting to the fact that he's not supposed to do the actual killing.

>A small duckbilled platypus
>A Normal Human Man
>A solar powered robot with a buggy AI
>A vampiric watermelon
>A doppleganger. He looks like whoever he's interacting with, within certain constraints.

ONE OF THOSE, OR ALL OF THEM

>Mark Roberts.

A time traveler who has grown old and wise while touring the universe, before one day hitting the wrong button in his time machine and colliding with his past self at the moment of his initial journey through time. Not only is he dead, but most of what makes him who he is was wiped out in that time paradox.
Also, his lower body is that of a snake, and he has two heads.

Anubis
Blood Elemental
Soul Of A Dead Human Private Investigator
Unicorn
Crazy Cat Lady
A Hive Mind of Birds

That's Jeffry Herschel, road crew worker and blues musician. He was killed trying to save his guitar from a rampaging asphalt golem.

I like this one.

He was a necrophiliac.

he was a bomber pilot. Probably could be accounted for hundred of deaths all considered

He was a grim reaper.

He was a male stripper and his name was Hugh Jass.

Harry Potter

>The chief marketing officer of a massive telecoms company, a husband and father, who secretly spends all of his free time writing My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic fanfiction.

*snicker* Almost exactly my dad

She was Shea Roberts, and she sold ice cream to children. Unfortunately, she was killed by a crazed shooter out of the blue. Insulted by this random death, she now seeks vengeance for all those who treat life in such a careless way, and asylum for victims of those random killings.