Chapter 1
She would show him. Nothing was stopping her from entering those doors. The large glass ones leading up to her brothers place of work and his most treasured office.
Despite being told her entire life that this would be her most important job, the only one that mattered, what she had waited and grown up wanting all of these years… she was still nervous.
She let out a shaky sigh and pushed the big steel frame of the transparent glass door in front of her.
Almost instantaneously she was met with a bustling, noisy, chaotic environment. Phones were ringing off the hook and it seemed that everyone had too much work to be doing.
This is where I'll be working from now on, the girl thought, readjusting her ponytail, tied neatly up with a dark green ribbon.
She walked confidently toward the central reception desk, taking notice of a woman managing two phones at once. The woman behind the desk took notice of her, finished up her current call, and put another two on hold before turning back to her.
"May I help you?"
"Yes, I'm here to see William T. Spears, could you let him know I'm on my way?"
"And who may I ask are you?" the receptionist asked with a hint of annoyance.
"Stephanie O. Spears… his sister."
As Stephanie stood outside her brother's office, she sighed. She and William were surprisingly close siblings, despite the fact that the two had moved out and gone their separate ways after Will had become a shinigami.
It had been Stephanie's dream to follow in her older brother's footsteps, although people doubted her ability to succeed as efficiently as him. In terms of personality, the two were remarkably similar, both were determined and hard-working, never letting anything seem to get in the way of them achieving what they wanted.
Perhaps it was their mutual hatred of failure, and yearning for perfection that drove them to be the best they could in all aspects of life.
William hadn't been so sure that Stephanie was ready to handle being a reaper, yet knew that he would not be able to dissuade his sister if she had already gotten the thought into her mind. They had both grown up average lives, from a long line of shinigami. See, most people on earth were unaware of the shinigami realm, which was actually comprised of quite a bit of people, not just the reapers themselves. There were a variety of jobs dealing with the management of the lives of the still-living, as well as the cleanup after those that had died. It was a reaper's job to make a judgment of whether a soul was fit to continue living, and if not, they would be given the somewhat exhilarating task of taking that life away and sending it to its corresponding fate.
Many other jobs existed on the sidelines though. There were those that oversaw and catalogued death records in the library. Others meticulously copied records and reports of all souls ever collected. Still others were needed to teach and train future shinigami to continue their legacy.
It was rare to see many female shinigami, as the job wasn't suited for the faint of heart. Not to say that women weren't capable of doing just as good of a job as the men, however they typically would get filing or secretarial work.
Not Stephanie.
She was determined to reach for the highest peak, and would settle for nothing less.
So when she turned the knob to her brother's office and met his eyes with a playful smirk, he already knew what she was going to say.
"I'm here for my training. When do I start?"