Reaper world building

The job of the reaper is simple. You get a few year's worth of assignments in advance and must help these people pass on by cutting the dead's ties to their old life. There are two reasons why people choose to become reapers. This is either a) because working as a reaper guarantees heaven. b) because the previous reaper failed to cut their ties to life. When people choose to become a reaper they must promise to many things and abide by many rules placed down by god himself. They must change their name, always hide their face, never interact with anyone from their past life, and generally stay completely anonymous. breaking a single one of these rules, intentionally or not, will cost their very existence and the souls of their subordinates. being a Reaper is a job. They are paid depending on the number of assignments they do, and the assignments they are given are based on skill, age, and a number of subordinates. many reapers make a living wage but, due to anonymity rules, never tend to buy a house.

Subordinates or weapons are a very interesting aspect to Reaper lore. (see Soul Eater or Noragami for the inspiration.) Reapers are physically unable to harm a human being and souls are physically unable to be harmed, except for one tool. Reapers have a special knife with them always which is able to damage a soul just like a human being, to the extent of not being able to die again. This tool helps in a ritual where a name is carved into the skin of a newly dead soul, the soul's face is covered and the name carved into them becomes their new name. This is the ritual in which reapers gain a new subordinate and does not require consent from the soul. The reason why subordinates are also called weapons is that they can turn their entire body or part of their body into a weapon. this weapon is unique in that its only purpose is to destroy the ties a soul may have to their old life. Without a subordinate, A reaper may get 10% of the jobs that a reaper with only one weapon may get. this because the reaper must take months in advance to try to convince the person who is soon to die to actually pass on, Fewer jobs mean that a reaper may only make a few hundred dollars a year. So it is very rare for a reaper to not eventually break down and force a soul to work for them. The whole concept of subordination is very immoral for many reasons. It is essentially slavery as a person is forced to spend hundreds or thousands of years separated from anyone they knew in servitude, the process is painful, and many reapers tend to be very corrupt as they are guaranteed heaven no matter what sort of extra sins they decide to commit, this includes abusing their subordinates in any matter of the way.

When a reaper fails to help a soul pass on, the soul stays on earth, wandering and slowly becoming more corrupted. Usually, a more experienced reaper will be called in to clean up the mess, but this isn't always the case as it can easily pass under the radar. A corrupted soul can leech into the human world little by little the more corrupted it becomes and this is the results in hauntings. as more of the soul becomes corrupted, it loses itself and begins to become the corruption. Left for too long, there will be no soul left to save. Extreme care and extremely talented reapers are needed to correctly purify the soul Usually the soul will always have some sort of connection to earth regardless of how well they are saved and effects of corruption are left (aesthetic stuff like horns or claws or other little traits). Many of these souls choose to become reapers or subordinates since at that point they have lost so much of their soul they have lost many connections except for the one to earth (such as no longer wanting to see their family or even knowing their past)

Reaper Abilities-
-Create subordinates
-go between the physical realm, the spiritual realm, and to the heavens itself
-create portals that allow them to go almost anywhere
-Functionally immortal and relatively un-aging. They can still be hurt by injuries as they are corporeal but injures heal in less than a few minutes.
 -they pretty much have had smartphones from the beginning of time which allows them to take out currency and track jobs.
-to see the exact time of a person's death

Subordinate abilities-
-fighting skills that they did not have in life.
-the ability to turn parts of their own body into a weapon
-just looking cool and being sad
-the whole immortality thing too

Too tired to write rules. Essentially remain anonymous and do your job

while immortal and not aging in the regular mortal way, time still does have an effect on them. By being corporeal they still live in a body, a body that has no heartbeat or system of living. in general, they pretty much live in an immortal corpse. as time goes on they lose weight until the point of looking skeletal, their eyes grow vacant, and hazy until completely clouded, and their skin loses any sort of color to it, becoming grey until eventually slightly blue and purple. They also begin to smell of death more strongly the longer they exist. This can be stopped or slowed to a near halt by taking care of the body in, not only the normal human way, but also in ways that corpses need to be taken care of to keep from rotting. this is also expensive so only richer reapers can afford to do this.

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