What do you headcanon hinoby does when a tech either loses a limb or dies?
For both serious injury and death, i think Hinobi is has some insane insurance type thing going on for its employees. Basically if a tech (or most other employees to be honest) get severely injured, Hinobi pays for a large amount, if not most or even all of the cost. At least if they get treated in a civilian hospital and not an HQ’s medical wing. No need to pay for anything in the HQ, and with their plixel based tech they’re very efficient and good at treating injuries. The fact that Plixels are basically a few steps back from being straight up nanobots helps.
Same for death. If an employee dies, their family usually gets a hefty chunk of cash. Some people have questioned why paid-for injury and life insurance is included with the job instead of something more normal for a business like free dental or something, especially for pretty entry-level and/or presumably very safe jobs, but their questions are usually answered by Hinobi claiming it’s something they’ve done pretty much since they started out as a company (which isn’t exactly a lie) and it’s just a thing they do, a part of the company experience that they’re simply never had a reason to replace. Any more prodding questions and that’s when the resets come out. Hell, I’m willing to bet that “Hinobi gives its employees life insurance instead of any normal business insurance” is one of those facts that would appear in an in-universe “believe it or not” book. Just a weird quirk that’s been going on so long that it’s basically normal for the company.
Plenty of people say that it’s Hinobi’s way of getting OUT of giving proper benefits to its employees, since they can still say “we give our employees these expensive benefits” while not disclosing that the benefits they give are basically useless to an employee because why would a random teenage store worker need life insurance? A massive company known for being somewhat shady in its finer details like Hinobi would definitely pull something like that.
In reality the heath/life insurance thing is for a couple of reasons, a couple big chunks of which Hinobi can’t say to the public. Yes, it is technically a way to avoid legal trouble and avoid damaging their reputation, but it’s also a lot more useful than the public knows. Everyone questions why Hinobi gives all employees life insurance until they discover that part of the job involves fighting dangerous monsters on the regular. Unbelievably dangerous stuff in the case of older corporate techs like Tech Specialists, many of whom probably wouldn’t be as willing to work if they didn’t have these benefits.
If a tech, tech specialist or most other paid employees die, and Hinobi will often do whatever it takes to prevent that in the first place, Hinobi COULD technically make them disappear, literally erase them from all public records and erase the minds of their friends and family, but they usually DONT. For the same reasons why I say most HQ defences are meant to be non-lethal. While it is POSSIBLE to cover up all traces of someone’s existence, Governments have done it before and they don’t even have mind-wiping technology, it’s an extremely difficult process and messing any part of it up will land you in significantly more hot water. It’s much easier and cheaper to simply cover up the death and make it seem like more natural causes. A car accident or accidental drowning or simply going missing. Anything to make it seem like Hinobi and especially glitches had nothing to do with the death.
That paid-for life insurance thing also comes into play again because having a financial incentive to keep their employees alive and being forced to pay families significant amounts whenever there is a death, regardless of the circumstances of death, helps Hinobi seem a bit less at fault. Some conspiracy theorists may claim that Hinobi is paying off families to not speak about something, but Hinobi can easily point to it being something they do for every employee that they’re pretty upfront with.
That rumour about Hinobi using life insurance to avoid giving proper benefits also comes back into play because on the surprisingly rare occasion a younger employee dies and Hinobi has to pay their family, it looks a lot like Hinobi just got bit in the ass by their shady attempt to scam their employees. They offer a very good looking and fully paid for life insurance plan as part of the job so they can claim they give their employees expensive benefits, not mentioning that it’s almost useless to the teenage employees they have working in their stores, only to be forced to actually follow through on that offer when one of those employees dies in a sudden car accident. Everyone point and laugh at the giant megacompany trying to do shady stuff and failing and pay less attention to the actual circumstances of that death.
For missing limbs, there is a (almost) canon answer in the form of Phil! Early versions of the show (to the point where the rough draft of the show’s main title animation had this detail) had Phil be missing an arm, with him using a plixel prosthetic. So Hinobi does accommodate for this sort of thing.
Again Hinobi will do whatever it takes to make it look like natural causes, like that employee lost an arm or a leg through some event that had nothing to do with Hinobi like a car crash or an injury that got severely infected and had to be amputated, anything but a glitch or workplace accident, but at the same time they’ll make a big show out of paying for their employee’s prosthetics and aiding with medical bills. Mostly to keep up appearances but they do also care for the safety of employees all things considered. If they didn’t care about the physical wellbeing of their techs, they’d be struggling a lot more against glitches and have to cover up a lot more injuries and deaths that they ideally want to avoid having to cover up.
Also worth noting, Hinobi isn’t just a video game company. They’re a more general tech company that just happens to have Video Games and Computers as their big focus and thing that they’re most well known for, so there’s a solid chance they have at least a few models of prosthetic limb that they’ll willing to include in their employee package alongside stuff like that free Hinobi Smart-Bracelet all employees get as a hiring bonus (that also happens to be a disguised tech gauntlet if you’re hired as a glitch tech or other glitch-combat based job). Probably won’t be plixel based like what Phil almost had, but Hinobi will provide it. That being said, they do have plixel based prosthetics given exclusively to employees.
Hinobi’s Plixel prosthetics specifically are primarily a work benefit though. Only usable if you’re on the clock doing something that the public wouldn’t normally see, like being a tech fighting glitches or working down in the HQ. In public it’s a lot more like how they treat something like a Tech Gauntlet, Tech Armour or something like BITT, too close to risking Hinobi’s secrecy for their comfort and something that should be used at least somewhat out of view of civilians. That being said, Hinobi Prosthetics do have skins available that can help disguise them as either ordinary prosthetics or flesh and bone limbs if the employee wants, and Hinobi is a lot more comfortable with someone wearing that in public in comparison to the semi-transparent-blue-plixels default appearance they come with.
You don’t get to keep them if you quit, retire or otherwise get removed from the company, but you do get to keep the regular prosthetics or any of Hinobi non-plixel-based prosthetic tech that they gave you. It’s just Hinobi’s plixel stuff that they get to keep. Plus removal from Hinobi also means removal of your memories and that half-plixel-half-electronic-component prosthetic arm is the exact kind of advanced tech that Hinobi is trying to remove your memories of.
