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The premise is that there's a guild of couriers that use a dangerous parallel spirit world for shortcuts through mortal space to deliver packages at great speed.

Despite the advantage of speed, why would customers choose them over classical shipment? Given the dangers the couriers put themselves in, plus dedicating a single individual to at most a few packages at once, the service would be quite pricey.

While their service would be faster, what could be a reason they are hired when a supernatural being needing a quick delivery could simply opt for, say, shipping via overnight UPS?

Some added detail:

Dangerous as in "unless you're trained to do this job, you will probably die."

Fast as in within hours, maybe even under an hour. A courier might make multiple hops between the real and parallel world to plot the most efficient path, and this could lead to very quick routes.

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    $\begingroup$ Besides the obvious "They stay in business by having more profits than losses" I'm unsure what you're looking for from us. If you're asking for us to tell you how much demand there would be for such a service, you're asking to build your world for you. Similarly if you're asking for a business plan we'd be building you world there as well. We're not a brainstorming site. Asking us to build worlds for you is not permitted. Try making an edit to ask a more specific question. $\endgroup$
    – sphennings
    Commented Sep 13, 2022 at 5:06
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    $\begingroup$ Customers pay a premium for speed, just like in the real world. The high cost of delivery is passed onto the customer plus a hefty markup. Customers who have otherwise-impossible shipping needs have no choice: pay the crazy price or have the package arrive late. Customers who need the package to arrive on the other side of the planet in an hour can't choose normal overnight delivery. Whether your fictional business can turn a profit given their costs + demand at their price point is an economic question that depends on countless factors that we cannot tell you. $\endgroup$
    – Tom
    Commented Sep 13, 2022 at 5:45
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    $\begingroup$ @sphennings "we're not a brainstorming site" then what exactly is the point of this Stack Exchange? Most of the top questions right now involve brainstorming answers to worldbuilding problems, I am looking at "How can a mute cast spells . . ." as an example. Why is it okay there but not here? By "stay in business" I mean "why would they get customers over standard means" which I guess I'll edit to be more explicit to that point. $\endgroup$
    – Tim Morris
    Commented Sep 13, 2022 at 16:23
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    $\begingroup$ @sphennings You went and flagged the question I referenced? Dude... I could have picked any number of recent top questions, and in fact multiple questions that question links to do the same thing as it and mine. That seems a bit spiteful on your part, if I am to be honest. If the community overwhelmingly uses this SE for one purpose, maybe it's the rule that should be changed. $\endgroup$
    – Tim Morris
    Commented Sep 13, 2022 at 18:09
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    $\begingroup$ @sphennings One of the literal mods of this site has some brainstorming-like questions $\endgroup$
    – Tim Morris
    Commented Sep 13, 2022 at 18:20

6 Answers 6

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Impossible to intercept

When someone enters the parallel spirit world, the time and location they reach is unpredictable. The rules of navigating this plane are fundamentally different from the mundane, and really not entirely understood. Some suggest that each gate from our world spawns its own self-contained instance of the spirit world - an infinite multiverses type of scenario. Others say that the spirit world is one, but each trespasser experiences it alone, unable to interact or even perceive others from their own world.

In practice, this means that nobody can intercept your courier once they are in the spirit world, except the denizens of the spirit world themselves. And they can't get out. The route is not safe - but it is incredibly secure.

Your clients are secretive corporations, warlocks entangled in ancient rivalries, whistleblowers, spies, paranoids, the corrupt ultra-wealthy. They pay a hefty premium to have their couriers transport their packages through this route, because they don't necessarily mind the package being lost (and the courier, of course), but they absolutely don't want it falling into their enemy's hands.

Edit to add: to insure themselves against betrayal by the couriers themselves, the clients must provide an exit beacon that points across the planes to the real-world location that they want their delivery taken to. Without such a beacon, there is nothing in the spirit world that would allow you to navigate back to reality. A courier lost in the spirit world, or attempting to flee with their package, would be wandering for a very, very long time.

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    $\begingroup$ "Not safe, but secure" nice! I'll likely mark this one as the answer even though I like several of the answers. $\endgroup$
    – Tim Morris
    Commented Sep 13, 2022 at 16:36
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    $\begingroup$ The edit doesn't pan out: the courier could always have -- and should, really -- a spare exit beacon provided by the guild. What prevents betrayal is reputation, any rogue courier is hunted down by the guild itself, and brutally executed. $\endgroup$
    – Matthieu M.
    Commented Sep 14, 2022 at 8:36
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    $\begingroup$ @MatthieuM. there can be no hunting down (otherwise the premise fails). And there can be no spare beacon: something wrong happens if you go in with two beacons. The couriers do come back, but... incomplete. Packages are altered and made unusable in the process. It's one way to interfere with your enemy's courier runs (the other being, obviously, to just destroy the beacon reality-side) $\endgroup$
    – Ottie
    Commented Sep 14, 2022 at 9:10
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    $\begingroup$ As for hunting down, I was thinking real-world hunting down; the courier lives in the real world, most of the time, and thus a rogue courier will be hunted down in the real world -- and once outside the guild may not have means to use the spirit world to escape. $\endgroup$
    – Matthieu M.
    Commented Sep 14, 2022 at 9:35
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    $\begingroup$ @MatthieuM. I think at this point it comes down to aesthetic preference; I just find that a reputation/honour based motivation eventually just boils down to "how can this person be bribed/blackmailed/coerced", which I personally don't care much for. Also I suspect I am just spending too much time doing security audit of internal networks, and this is really just "magic TLS for real packets". $\endgroup$
    – Ottie
    Commented Sep 14, 2022 at 12:02
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Say, the "parallel spirit world" is the wild west, there are no laws, there are no borders.

Your "couriers" are highly trained navigators of the spirit world turned criminals. Similar to Frank Martin (played by Jason Statham) in The Transporter; a super-competent special forces military guy turned criminal; that is a No questions asked courier: He will move anything (or anyone) without question, across borders, past checkpoints, whatever. For a price.

Your couriers are like that; just highly trained and super adept in the spirit world. It is extremely dangerous -- For people that don't know what they are doing.

But in your story, you focus on a best-of-the-best character. Others may be caught and killed (to prove the danger), but your hero always narrowly escapes by their wits.

They can move drugs, obviously, but perhaps also take prisoners out of jail, move weapons, deliver intelligence, rescue people, be recruited by the government to perform a rescue, and so on.

You don't have to emulate the movie, of course; your couriers can work for the government, as spies, or criminals, as smugglers. Or have couriers on both sides of the law, that occasionally must do battle in the spirit world.

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  • $\begingroup$ The Transporter seems interesting. Haven't heard of that before. $\endgroup$
    – Tim Morris
    Commented Sep 13, 2022 at 16:40
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    $\begingroup$ @TimMorris There are sequels to the first one, but I liked it the best. Basically his rules and contract are he does not interact with the package; he doesn't open it, he doesn't know what is in it. He is just delivery. But this time, the package is placed in the trunk of his car, and halfway through the trip, it starts making noise. It is a girl, and the drugs keeping her unconscious have worn off. He feels compelled to break his own rules and let the girl pee; but naturally, things kind of go south from there; he knows what the package is, the mob boss client tries to kill him, etc. $\endgroup$
    – Amadeus
    Commented Sep 13, 2022 at 18:46
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Very discreet delivery

Besides advantages of speed, magical couriers could easily bypass customs and surveillance, delivering very delicate, illegal or secret content anywhere without discovery. They could even deliver stuff to or from the inside of houses kept under constant outside surveillance. There could be moral quandaries if a courier is tasked to deliver (or get rid of) e.g. a murder weapon, a corpse or a child for sexual abuse.

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Spells can't be sent over the internet.

This is the main thing that would make them super rich. There's no way to communicate magic quickly across the mortal plane. As such, anyone who can communicate quickly has a massive advantage.

Suppose a group of dragons finds a lost treasure trove with massive amounts of gold. One of them wants to crack it. They could wait for a cracker to arrive in the next few days, or they could send a sample through magical space, get a spell to crack it back, and get millions in gold ahead of other dragons.

Suppose a key potion manufacturer has their cauldrons breaking. The spell needed to fix the unusual damage from a rare component could take days to arrive from the unusual specialist, or they could order it over the spirit planes.

There's a decisive magical profit to be made with quick travel, one that can't be replaced with semaphore or radio or wires.

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    $\begingroup$ Magic spells not being simple data that can be transmitted over the wire is clever. I like that. $\endgroup$
    – Tim Morris
    Commented Sep 13, 2022 at 16:32
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As a magical, slower version of the Internet

I can see parallels between this and early telephone line systems and telegrams. Those were used alongside letters because they fulfilled special niches. Letters were used for style, sentimentality and bulk transport, while telephones and telegrams were used to just transfer information from one side to the other.

Even now, there are programs like Cuba's El Paquete, which has the Internet delivered in the form of USB dongles to Cuba's residents once a week, or France's Minitel, which was a telephone line system that resembled the Internet.

Your usage of the word, 'guild', might imply that your Fantasy world is set in the Medieval, Renaissance, or Wild West period, which could mean that the Internet hasn't been invented yet, so the magical couriers could fulfill the same 'delivery at all costs' or the 'extremely fast' niche, transferring information within hours to residents.

As an aside, the early Internet used to have transfer and download speeds of over hours, so this could actually be a plausible way.

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There is no faster way for ...

"short-lived" goods

You can have goods with extremely short life-span (food, flowers, ingredients of any kind, maybe donor organs or magically created items) that need to be collected and then "consumed" within such a short timespan that any conventional means of transport cannot keep up, so these couriers are the only way (the risk matters little, if the chance is 0% otherwise).

"fresh" luxury items

This is a more decadent variant of short-lived: There is some exotic fruit (aka far away from your customers) that turns bad minutes after harvesting and no amount of cooling can (fully) preserve its fresh taste. Wealthy people pay generous amounts for in-time delivery to their parties.

low-stockpile rental goods with volatile demand

There exist some device / tool with only a small amount in existence at any given time, that is vital to / eases up a highly specialized task (e.g. only done once per day in any given city, but one cannot predict when exactly).

If needed, people want it fast for a short time, then will return it. Producing too many of those goods and renting them out only for short bursts is not profitable, but having a small supply and handing them out (almost) instantly when needed is good enough to make it proftiable (even with the occasional loss of courier and item).

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