MANUMISSION AND LIFE AS AN IMAGO

In order to forgive afterlife debt payments, people pay an enormous deposit to live a second life as domesticated animals, beasts of burden. This is called manumission. These people become trees, birds, pigs, horses, fish, sheep, etc. They form an entire ecosystem that makes life on Pandaemonium possible. Sometimes the change doesn't happen all the way, or fails to complete, and the person is crippled and rendered helpless. They're supported by family, pushing them around in wheelchairs and swearing at them for getting into debt.

The services that facilitate manumission are commercial, and vary in quality. Good manumission that is safe is more expensive. Cheap manumission can result in these botched or fatal transformations. If manumission doesn't take, the debt is not forgiven, and the person must live out their few remaining months or years maimed and sick and upon death head to the Cauldron anyway.

It functions like a mortgage, and you make regular payments on it. Like the property a mortgage buys, it can vary in quality. Big money buys a more pleasant situation. Poor money buys a poor, short existence.