ISEKAI INDUCTION - PART III

“Yeah… so, like… I don’t know what to do about all this.” 

Pony-tailed, en-sandled, and sitting at his desk with a potted lotus and ill fitting linens, is Chris. Head of Human Resources. His cupboard of an office stinking of patchouli.

“You’re the right guy, but uh…” he spins on his chair, taps on the draws of his filing cabinet, inclining his ear to listen for the right one, then yanks the middle open, pulls a single manila folder from its engorged guts, rotates back to the desk, and places it unfolded on the exact page he needs, “…looks like we got the wrong timeline.” 

He taps his finger on a long sequence of letters, characters, and numbers. The most heinous password you’ve ever seen. 

“Always gotta double check your code, man!” he licks a fingertip like my Grandpa with a newspaper, spins the wheel of his rolodex, flicks out a card, and slides it alongside my dossier.

Janus and I peer over the two documents. Scrutinizing the hundred character strong mess. 

“Oh, I see it! You must have forgot to press Shift.” I point at the same spot on the two codes, “Sticky keys and unresponsive switches are the bane of admin for typos.”

Probably hasn’t ever given his keyboard a wipe down, let alone popping the caps off to give it a full valet.

Chris nods approvingly while Janus, almost imperceptibly, begins to vibrate. Seething in his own special way. 

“But, well, we know what the problem is…” the Head of HR flicks on a CRT monitor and heaves the screen round to us, a slightly pixelated livestream plays of me back in Generic Co. chatting away with the tomboy from Accounting, “…we just can’t do anything about it.”

What am I... What is he wearing? Is that some clone they replaced me with? No, that’s the me they were meant to take from another dimension. And he’s scoring a date with Kia while I’m stuck in this bureaucratic nightmare!

“He really looks the hero sort, doesn’t he? I think it’s the cloak that does it. Well, damn…” Chris leans back in his chair and bounces on its back legs. “…guess we missed our chance, or just mustn’t have been fated after all.” 

Janus, having not spoken for some time, mumbles to himself, “The Returns Agency does not make mistakes.” as if by repeating the mantra he can will it to be true. 

What do you call this then you mahogany two-piece goon? Me, I am the mistake! That you made!

I keep my thoughts to myself and sit there with a resigned expression, my eyes transfixed on the me inside the screen.

How did he become a hero? Other than dressing the part, how is he any different from me?

“Just gotta live up to your potential…” my thoughts must have crept into my features, or Chris has telepathy - which wouldn’t be a bad trick for the Head of HR in a multiverse spanning organisation - as he answers my questions with a whistle, “…the power of The Daemahken~” 

I cringe at the sound of it, the name my parents cursed me with, “How am I meant to live up to the main character of a video-game that I was only named after to win a bunch of merch?” thirty pieces of silver in exchange for a lifetime of embarrassment. 

“Oh, I meant ‘then it won’t be a mistake’, but that sounds… yeah, hmm…” even Chris gets it now.

We’re all screwed. 

Janus, having finally snapped, snaps his own neck, and his lifeless body slumps to the floor. Chris looks down at him, sniffs, and goes back to scratching his scruffy stubbled chin.

“Why’d he do that? What the hell do we do with a corpse? Are we gonna get arrested by, I don’t know, inter-dimensional police or something?” 

With the Head of Recruitment dead about my feet and the Head of Human Resources about as useful as a corpse himself, I start freaking out wholesale. While I grip my head in panic, blinkered to the world around me, a murmur slowly reaches my ears. 

eeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrr~

I turn my head to Janus’ cadaver, assuming this must be his death rattle, and am horrified to see it begin to twitch. The moan increasing as he re-inflates like a twisted balloon animal.

“EeEeEeEeEeEeEeEeRrRrRrRrRrRrRrRr...”

By the time he is sat up again - suit as dishevelled as Chris’, hair a wild mess covering his eyes, five o’clock shadow in full bloom - the groan has grown to a full on wail. 

“AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!!!”

My hands shift to cover my ears and I stare at the still nonplussed Department Head to do something. He shrugs for answer then throws a paper-clip at his colleague. “Calm down, dude. Don’t be so dramatic.” 

The cry stops dead.

Janus flings himself over the back of his chair despondently. The Head of Recruitment reduced to the moodiest of teenagers. “The Returns Agency made a mistake…” He whimpers pathetically to himself. 

“Is he going to be OK?” I look between the fetal position beside me and the Head of Human Resources, who merely nods. 

“Yeah, err… just give him a minute. He’s like that.” Chris waves his hand while scanning over the documents spread out on his desk, “Chipper as they come 99% of the time, but boy does he, well… this!” 

After mouthing the word 'stress-head', he flips my folder over and points to the end of a paragraph. My eyes trace over the fine print. A mix of relief followed by further dismay flood over me. 

“Yeah… the Agency kinda works that way, I’m afraid, but…” he switches to his beige brick of a computer again, crackling over the keys while Janus continues to blubber beside me, “OK! So, if you can just live up to your hero title, like the you we were meant to recruit from the other timeline, then errr… that’ll fulfil your contract with us and you can either choose to renew it, or go back home.”

Looking far too pleased with himself for working out a loophole in their T&Cs, he sits back in his chair, and returns to bouncing on its rear legs. 

“Or you could just send me back and go pick up the guy you were meant to in the first place?” I smile sheepishly, hoping to avoid the same back and forth as with his co-worker earlier. 

“Can’t.” 

We’re not doing this again!

Chris smiles, knowing I would have lost it had he continued, “So, how it works is something like… we picked you up from the exact moment it would not cause an issue for your timeline. Just so happens it would have been the same for that hero you too.” 

“Huh…” I hadn’t expected actual answers to the questions I’d been left with by the sobbing lump in the chair to my side. 

“Yeah, so like, if we put you back, that’ll cause problems with your timeline now.” the Head of HR pulls a slinky out of his desk drawer to fidget with while rocking himself ever further backward, “Big end of the world kinda issues we’re meant to resolve not cause.” 

I can tell he hasn’t had to think about any of this in a long time, really dredging up early training modules no one ever thought would be necessary, but for insurance purposes everyone has to be taught at least once.

“To answer your question…” I pick up what Chris is putting down. 

“…if you put me back, and pick up the right hero, that causes problems for both our worlds.” I sigh and lean back in my own chair. 

“-s not the worst part…” Janus finally strings a comprehensible sentence together for the first time in all his babbling “…The Returners would be sent to investigate, they’d find out that… that… we made a mistake… and… and-“

“Hey, now. Buddy! Don’t worry. That’s not gonna happen, OK? Big deep breaths. In and out, yeah...” The Head of HR comes round his desk to comfort the Head of Recruitment. The two heads of the two Heads pressed together.

My curiosity piqued, I cannot help but ask, “What would happen?” 

Chris has to hush the eruption of emotion from Janus and shoots me a ‘SERIOUSLY?!.’ kind of look. “We’d get audited.” Another hiccup and round of bawling from Recruitment as Human Resources pats his back.

An audit? That’s it? How bad could that be-

I realise my own foolishness. Eyes widening in cosmic horror at the implications of what a mistake would mean for all of us. 

An eternal Agency, dealing with the infinite worlds of infinite dimensions, throughout all of time and space. A full audit of every action every hero has ever taken, would literally take forever. Double shift overtime until the heat death of the universe... of all universes! Then everyone would still be expected to keep going over the innumerable files of unlimited timelines throughout an unending afterlife. Which is, I guess, what this kinda already is. Paperwork Purgatory!

I mouth an expletive and Chris nods at my existential understanding. 

“The Returns Agency does not make mistakes.” He coos the mantra back to Janus in hopes of it catching. 

I pick up the chorus and join the group hug, in desperate need of some comfort myself. “The Returns Agency does not make mistakes.” 

We stay huddled together for a while, not quite an eternity, until the Head of Recruitment can contain his sniffling. 

“Phew… well then, crisis averted.” Chris, a little tactlessly, separates himself and stretches. 

“What about…” Janus wriggles into me alone, cuddling up like a lanky child, filling my arms while I figure out my position, “…well, me?” 

The Head of HR finishes his little yoga routine and blinks at me “What about you?” 

“Yeah?” I blink back, matching his confusion. 

“Oh, so, well, you’ll have to pretend to be a hero…” 

'Pretend to be a hero!' Are you kidding me?

I must have flushed with anger, forcing the words back behind my teeth to not upset my big baby Janus again, because Chris backs up for a moment and sets about thinking. 

“…we’re not going to send you out there to just die, but to get out of your contract you have to fulfil it.” He bounces the slinky in his palm.

“And to fulfil it I need to live up to my heroic potential…” I can feel the despondency return as if leeching it from the Department Head in my lap, the calmer he gets the more depressed I become. 

“Easy, right? It might take a while, but time is on your side here. You’ll learn ‘how to hero’ from shadowing your colleagues, they’ll be none the wiser about your origins, and, err... no one gets an eternity of paperwork with Quality Assurance and Management over their shoulder,” He cracks a grin and I can envision the bulging brain muscles he must feel like he has right now, “Win-Win!”

It’s not a bad plan. Bit duplicitous, but workable… hang on!

“How do I live up to my title? The Daemahken means ‘Demon Kin’! Are you telling me there are Demons out there I’ll have to fight?!.” A little terror on top of all the panic and despair fills my veins with adrenaline and my forehead with sweat.

“Yeah. Plenty. Well, sort of...” The Head of HR, in his infinite wisdom, drops a final bombshell, “What I mean is, probably. You’ll eventually come across one, infinite timelines and all that. There are gods working for the Agency already, take Janus for example.” As if it were the most casual thing in the world, Chris name drops his colleague with more emphasis.

The Roman God of beginnings, endings, and transitions, Head of Recruitment for the Returns Agency, and literally two faced with separate built-in peppy and depressy personalities… the Janus himself.

Kill me now.