Beyond Post operates under jurisdiction of the Records Bureau, processing correspondence the living world declined to deliver. Membership is by application.
Apply for ServiceThe DLO is a working postal bureau, staffed and operational. Subscription begins the moment your application clears Form 12-A — filings received by the 25th are dispatched on the 5th of the month following.
On the third day of his probationary employment, junior clerk Fujimoto Kenji was assigned the filing of forty-seven Form 49-D submissions into the Eternal Archive. The task was, by all standards, uncomplicated.
He misfiled one. Not into the wrong drawer — into the wrong dimension. The displaced form nudged Form 0, the original document anchoring the boundary between the living and the dead. It moved by approximately three millimeters.
The boundary now hiccups. Letters arrive from people who are not yet deceased. Souls receive return-to-sender notices. A very cheerful woman named Ogawa Hana appears at the front desk every Tuesday, inquiring after a letter she sent her daughter in 1987. She does not appear to be dead. She does not appear to mind.
You are receiving this correspondence because your name has been forwarded for observational purposes. Subscription is voluntary. Departure is theoretical.
The bureau operates on consistent internal logic. New employees and recipients are advised to internalize the following ordinances before opening their first letter.
Time moves differently within the office. A courier may age in the field at a rate uncoupled from her colleagues at the desk. Do not synchronize watches.
Letters carry weight. A letter containing bad news is, by measurable standards, heavier than one containing good. Couriers are advised to prepare their backs.
Nothing is ever lost. Items are misfiled. This is both a comfort and a horror, and the bureau does not formally distinguish between them.
The building rearranges itself between visits. Records Keeper Tsukimori has mapped the premises fourteen times. Each map is correct. None of them agree.
Souls passing through leave traces. A faint warmth on a chair. Handwriting on steamed glass. Do not wipe the windows in the morning.
Mail addressed to the dead may not be opened by the living. The reverse is permitted, though seldom advisable.
Five clerks staff the office across the boundary's working hours. Each maintains their own correspondence style, their own ink, and their own opinion on whether the recent boundary instability is, or is not, anyone's fault.
Two classes of correspondence are currently authorized. Founding rates are locked perpetually. The DLO does not raise pricing on existing parties — to do so would require a new form, and we do not have one.
Quota: 50 · Closes when filed
No quota · Open enrollment
Every cycle, the bureau dispatches the same four classes of correspondence — though the contents of each rotate, accumulate, and occasionally vanish from the record. What you receive depends on when you filed.