Death's Rulebook

2. The Basics Of Reaper-Hood

Part 1: Your mission, what it is and how it works (Should you choose to accept it, of course. Just kidding, you either do this, or you die. Again.)

Now that we've gotten you used to the idea of being Death's wacky janitor—or not. Probably not. And I still don't care--it's time to move on to the next and most important part of your new job.

The Death Ledger.

Or, known by its less ominous and cool-sounding name: that notebook you woke up next to when you died. Yeah, yeah, exactly, that creepy little notebook you're staring at right now because it's giving you the heebie-jeebies?

I want you to pick it up, nice and easy. I know it's freaking you out and making you feel like a schizo on meth, but do it. C'mon, don't be shy.

Done?

Good.

You are now looking at your Bible.

No, I'm not being melodramatic. Your holy book. Your daily bread. The one thing—besides Death—that's going to rule the rest of your undead life.

Other than the creepy, Horcrux-like feeling that it's giving you right now, you might be wondering what's so special about a book?

This little baby, tells you who is going to die.

Nobody really knows how or why, but it all boils down to this. It's magic. Shit explanation, but suck it up, we don't have anything better at the moment.

Ledgers are given to us when we become Reapers, and they are intricately tied to us. Each Reaper has his/her/their own Ledger, and each book is tailored to us, our individual divisions and personalities. They are the source of our powers and the very thing that keeps us, well, undead.

In a way, they are our Precious—cue the creepy Gollum voice—and your new and most valuable body part.

Yes, you now have an emotional and spiritual bond with a nice, little—possibly freaky and sentient magical being/object worthy of a Stephen King novel—notebook.

Oh quit panicking, the thing won't eat you (I think). It's actually quite the opposite. The notebook is your shield, and lifeblood, the thing that makes you the indestructible badass that you are.

So it's a nice Precious. I think...

Nice or not, the notebook enables you to do the most important thing: your job. Which, truth be told, isn't quite as scary as you think it is.

Actually, most of it is already done for you. Names will pop in your notebook at random, a couple of days, weeks, sometimes even months before the intended person is going to die along with their basic information. This includes their age, exact location and precise TOD, a.k.a time of death.

All this stuff is meant to help you identify your client more easily, and with absolute certainty, before getting down to business.

Apart from all the aforementioned info, the Ledger itself provides, there will be three empty slots which will read as follows.

-Manner of death.

-Cause of death.

And last but most important:

-Serial number.

Now it will be your job to fill in these last three, post-mortem, but we still have one itty bitty thing to cover before that.

The actual dying.

Remember what I told you about being Death's janitor? Your job isn't causing the actual death. It's locating the mess and cleaning it up, no questions asked. Like those professional murder clean up crews—except you work for someone who would make even Marlon Brandon's Godfather choke on his cotton balls.