Fifty Seven

Grinding was always Fyndraxis’ least favorite part of any role playing game. In his youth, he played these games mostly for the stories that they told. The stories in question were usually trite affairs with very little emotional depth. This was perfectly suited for a teenage boy. Uncovering the backstory of a hero with a mysterious past or possibly magical heritage was exciting and engaging. But from a narrative standpoint it was pretty low stakes.
It usually went about like this: Our hero is going about his day as a youth in some sort of medieval village. He was adopted by the village elder because his parents were either dead or off doing magical things somewhere, usually dead though. Either way, he is heir to a mysterious magical lineage of course. He is always managing to get into trouble, and everybody thinks he is sort of a loose cannon. Some sort of bullshit goes down that makes it so he has to leave the village on his own.
Either he finds a magical artifact or he opens a forbidden door. It doesn’t really matter what it is, the point is he has to pack his shit and never look back. After he is out in the world for a while, his mysterious past is revealed to him and it turns out that he is the only one kicking around that can save the world. There are some yadda yaddas that happen and then he gets super tough and beats the ultimate evil that is hell bent on destroying the planet. Roll credits, great job everyone.
The previously mentioned Yaddas were usually a bunch of grinding. If you aren’t familiar with the term, it’s a kind of nerdy shorthand for work. Once you get far enough in a game, you reach a kind of narrative deadzone. You know a lot of your mysterious back story, but you aren’t tough enough to take on the big bad guy yet. What you have to do is run a sort of cost benefit analysis and find a group of enemies who are easy enough to beat but also give you a high enough payout in experience points to make the whole thing worth it.
This is usually achieved by finding a place on the world map that has a higher than average amount of random encounters. For some reason this tends to be in forested areas. Once this area is found through trial and error, you spend the next couple of days of your life walking your character back and forth hoping to run into an enemy party. Through this process, you level up and get tougher. Eventually tough enough to save the world or whatever.
This is exactly what Bird and Fyndraxis chose to do. When Fyndraxis suggested that Bird needed some sword training she agreed with him wholeheartedly. If Fyndraxis were a regular run of the mill sword instead of an apocalyptically sharp nuclear death machine, this would have been an easy task.
They would head out to the woods and do some footwork drills for a couple of years so that for the rest of her life she would move as though she was holding and swinging a sword. After that, a few years could be devoted to actually swinging the sword and cutting things until the sword was a natural part of her body.
If they had adopted this strategy they would not only be wasting a whole lot of precious time, but the area they chose to train in would be a cratered radioactive nuclear wasteland and Bird would be dead. Luckily, Fyndraxis held inside himself a battle simulator. His entire realm was a mashup of every role playing game he had ever played. It was perfectly suited for the task.
He could also manipulate time in this simulation, so the years they needed wouldn’t be a problem. Not that they needed actual years to do this thing. Bird required proficiency with the sword, but she probably wasn’t going to be facing down hordes of expert swashbucklers. She needed to be able to use the sword safely and naturally and not lop off a leg or the top of her head.
Montages have a long and storied history in film and media. They are a narrative device used to skip over the boring parts that turn the main character from a bumbling dirt farmer into a total badass. Fyndraxis had always wondered what it would be like to be inside of a montage. While you were learning Karate or becoming the best dancer in that town from Footloose, would there be indiscernible slow motion music playing in the background? In the process of learning to balance one footed on a log in northern China, would a cameraman drop in every couple of months and shoot some B roll?
This turned out not to be the case. It was just a lot of very hard work. Fyndraxis tried his very best to craft scenarios that Bird would come across out in the real world. Large groups of cannibals, marauding Wendigo, dense forests, steep terrain, deep snow. He dressed her in simulated hunter armor that moved with her body and protected her from large impacts.
This also gave him data that he could use to tweak the armor and work out any bugs that it had. He simulated the weight and balance of the sword that she wielded so that it would act exactly like the sword he inhabited. He did his best to simulate its tendency to undergo spontaneous acts of nuclear fission. He boosted her stats so that she could move like she did when she used the powers that Mycellus granted her.
He was also able to use this opportunity to get to know just what exactly Mycellus had given her. His gift to her as seen from Fyndraxis’ point of view was a very extreme fungal infection. The mycelium that had made itself so pervasive in the crust of the earth had done the same to her body. Every tissue that she was made of was shot through with microscopic white tendrils that not only fed her energy and information, but also reinforced and repaired her body.
If she were to break a bone, the mycelium would pull it back together and mend it. If she were to say, get a huge dose of radiation that shredded her DNA, it would be replaced and repaired at the micro cellular level. She could connect up to the larger mycelial network and talk directly to Mycellus and ask him questions. She could also use the network as a giant sense organ to gain insight as to the world around her. This was not something that Fyndraxis could simulate, but Bird didn’t seem overly concerned with that.
In this process she became extremely proficient in about a month. This was due mostly to her innate athletic talent, but a lot of it was sheer determination. A month seems like a pretty long time, and for Fyndraxis and Bird it was. For the world at large though, it was merely the better part of an afternoon.