Chapter 12: Rowan PoV (Right before and into System initiation)

  It had been a late night for Rowan the day prior and now she was paying for it by cutting it real close for work. Sure she was co-owner of the law firm but it set a bad precedent for a boss to be showing up late simply because they could. Ever since she found out from her mother that she technically had a younger brother she’d been using her free time to hopefully find her estranged father and evidently younger brother. Growing up there had been quite a bit of resentment there towards her father. She had been convinced growing up that he abandoned their family and wanted nothing to do with them. This was only partially true; he wanted nothing to do with her mother specifically. A somewhat understandable sentiment considering the fact that mom had apparently cheated on him with his coworker while he was freshly dealing with the death of her grandmother. Not to mention the part of the matter concerning that they were engaged and supposed to be married just weeks from when the whole affair came to light. At the time Rowan was just a toddler and her younger brother was less than a year old. She didn’t really remember any of the circumstances, and it took a lot of arguments with her mother to get the whole story. Her excuse was post-partum hormones or something, but regardless of the reason the affair ruined any future of a unified family Rowan could’ve gotten to grow up with. Back then as a toddler she’d supposedly chosen to stay with her mom and her father fought to have custody of her younger brother. Then it seemed her mom fled the social consequences of the affair by moving back to Ireland with her in tow.

  Rowan had been up late because of her attempts to find her father and brother. Sadly it would seem like there would be no heartfelt reunions or reconciliation, at least not with her father. Her investigation had yielded results, unfortunately those results were her father’s obituary with the time of death dating to just a few months before she was able to get the information she needed to go look for him from mom. However she was at least able to find her brother’s information. Thankfully he was still around; it would have been quite the tragedy if he weren’t considering he was only a few years younger than Rowan. His name was Samson, and once she was able to reach out to him they had a lifetime of catching up to do if he wanted to do anything with her.

  The grief regarding the knowledge of her father’s death was an incredibly conflicting thing to parse through for her. She had grown up both resenting the man, knowing almost nothing about him, and wanting his approval and by the time she had the answers she needed he was no longer around for her to confront. Sure she could understand the pain of what mom put him through but to never reach out after all these years felt like he was punishing Rowan for something she had no control over. Then again, there was also the chance that mom was still hiding things from her and could have deliberately stopped him from being able to find them. Regardless, she did want to meet her little brother. Growing up she always wished she could be an older sister and lo and behold, she apparently had been the entire time. She didn’t want the drama of their parents’ circumstances to prevent her from having a relationship with her little brother. They may not have grown up together but she was hoping they could at least stay in touch going forward.

  While on her way to the firm, her mind was distracted by brainstorming different approaches on reaching out to her brother. The first major issue was that he was in America, so there was an entire ocean between them. It would probably be a bit extreme to just show up in person out of nowhere without reaching out first. So she thought about writing a letter to him. It was ironic, she’d always wanted to be an older sister and now that she knew she was, she couldn’t even think of something to say. She desperately wanted to be able to talk to him, in part because their father had raised him so he was now the only person left alive that she could ask about everything she wanted to know regarding the man. She decided that she would draft a letter introducing herself and explaining the situation from her end of things. There really was no way around it other than just spilling all the beans outright. Hopefully the email she found of his was in active use. From there they could schedule meeting up in person if he was amenable to it, and maybe she’d also be able to visit her father’s grave in the process.

  “Good morning Fiona, do you have the files from discovery for the Peterson case?” She said to her legal assistant after she walked into her office.

  “I’ll get them right to you ma’am. Any luck last night? It’s unusual for you to be late coming in.” Fiona replied.

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  Fiona wasn’t just Rowan’s assistant, she was also her best friend. Some may have found the dynamic weird considering the nature of their working relationship but they made it work. They’d known each other far longer than being coworkers in the firm anyway. Suffice it to say, Fiona knew that Rowan was looking for her father and brother. The two women didn’t really keep any secrets from each other.

  “Yeah, it’s a lot to take in. We’ll talk about it after work.” She said while making her way to the part of her office where she kept a mini-fridge stocked with cold brew. As she was about to grab her coffee, the world went white. Simultaneously Rowan heard an explosion of some kind. There was high pitched ringing in her ears as she attempted to recover from the disorientation. She found herself in an empty white void alongside thousands of other people. Within their midst there was a floating grey sphere about a meter across.

  [Welcome to Phase ONE of System integration]

  The orb spoke to her, well less actually speaking and more like the information it wanted to convey just showed up in her head. “I must be having a psychotic episode because of what I found out about dad either that or I’m in a manhwa now somehow.”

  [Choose a tutorial starter weapon and kit]...

  Instead of fully allowing herself to freakout, Rowan paid attention to the words in her mind from the system. The fact that the choice being given included a weapon meant that whatever followed carried some danger to it. If this was just herself having a mental breakdown then there’s no reason not to play along but if this was real and she didn’t make the proper choices, her life might be on the line. She didn’t want to have to fight up close so she decided against the melee weapons available. There were a few different kinds of bow but she had never used those before so that was a no go. Her eyes hovered over the option to get a casting focus, it was a simple staff adorned by a singular octahedronally shaped crystal on top. Quite obviously she had never cast a spell before but she was drawn to the staff. She tried to ask the words from the system for more information regarding that option.

  [Contains the basic spell Mana-bolt]

  After rationalizing to herself that choosing the staff was basically like choosing a gun, she picked the staff as her starter weapon. She then quickly went over the options for the kit and she ended up going with a survivalist’s kit. The healer’s kit was a tempting option but whatever was coming next this system found it prudent to offer a survivalist kit so she chose that for the adaptability it offered over the healing. Wounds didn’t matter after all if she ended up freezing to death or starving or something along those lines. It seemed to her like the survival kit offered her the greatest chance at surviving what came next; she still had to meet her brother after all. She was really hoping that this wasn’t just some insane hallucination.

  [Transferring to Tutorial Area]...

  Just as suddenly as she found herself in that white void, Rowan now found herself on a verdant plateau. There was a gentle breeze and off to the side she could see a mountain that looked to have terraces along its descent. It was like looking at a giant set of grassy stairs interspersed with the occasional tree. She hadn’t yet had enough time to take in all of her surroundings when the system spoke once more.

  [Life in the Multiverse seldom knows peace]

  [First Tutorial Quest: SURVIVE]

  [59:59 remaining]

  Oh boy, this really wasn’t the day she was expecting to have when she woke up late. “Is this God punishing me for my tardiness?” She laughed to herself as she tensed up in anticipation of the danger.

  A warm glow enveloped the far side of the plateau she and the other people were on. As the glow receded, packs of child sized green humanoids appeared. It was goblins of course, a system favorite of any manhwa she’d ever read that had a system in the first place and quite a few of ones that didn’t even have a system. Those little gremlins always seemed to be feral degenerates in stories and Rowan wasn’t about to test out their inclinations toward diplomacy when the message from the system just told her to survive and not to expect peace. Before they could clear the distance between them she readied her staff and tried to cast the mana-bolt spell. Evidently the equipment came with a certain level of knowledge and intuition about its use, the bare minimum really but that would suffice. The blue projectile of crystalized light went wide, hitting only empty air in the process but now a few of the goblins were looking her way. “Oops.”