Seventy Three

“Fyn,” Bird was trying to get the pitch back on track, “you with me? What’s going on?”
“Oh, sorry Bird. I must have glitched out for a second there,” the sword answered. He had been in the middle of showing the new stove to Solomon and his crew and had stopped talking mid sentence, leaving them all kind of hanging.
“Glitched out? What does that mean?” Bird asked.
“It happens every once in a while. I haven’t told you about it? My metaphor is a mess and it just kind of glitches out sometimes,” the sword explained.
“News to me. Sure you’re alright?” Bird asked, a bit confused.
“Yeah, I just need a minute to listen to some eighties music or something,” the sword continued to explain.
“Do you want me to come in there and check you out?” Bird questioned further, becoming rather concerned.
“No, I’m good. I think I just accidentally deleted some files or something. I really shouldn’t log into myself as root,” the sword said cryptically.
“Ok. let me know when you are ready,” she said.
“Ready for what?” The sword asked in search of clarification.
“Man, you really must have fucked something up. I’m coming in there,” she had moved past concern, and right into actively worried.
“No, it’s seriously a mess in here. Really, I’m fine. Just let me know what we were doing and I’ll catch up,” the sword was doing its best to reassure her.
“You were demoing the magic system for Solomon. You showed him the stove you designed,” Bird explained.
“Oh yeah, that’s right. Sorry. As you can see the on button is right there on the side and you can use that to turn it on and off,” the sword tried.
“We covered that,” Solomon claimed.
“Right. Maybe we should call it a day then. I think I might have really screwed something up in here,” the sword said after a pause of a couple seconds.
“Alright,” Bird said, warily, “looks like Fyn is going to call it a day to work out some Daemon stuff.”
Bird picked up the sword and made her goodbyes to Solomon, Roxy, and Grandad. She headed down the stairs and made for the yurt.
“I’m worried about you, Fyn,” she said as they approached the yurt.
“I just need to do some maintenance. It should only take about twenty four hours,” the sword explained from its place at her hip.
“Twenty four hours? That’s like a year in there. What could possibly take that long?” Bird asked, skeptically.
“I think I need to do a full reboot and check out my log files. Something went very wrong. It might have been my poor attempt at coding this nanomancer thing. I am really not a good programmer. In fact, I think I am so bad at it that I actually broke myself. I am shutting down now. Goodbye,” the sword signed off abruptly.
Bird looked at the sword, puzzled. She went inside the yurt and hung it on the hanger she had fashioned for him. Fyn was acting weird. Weird being a relative term, he was always pretty weird, but he wasn’t acting like himself. She had never known him to glitch, whatever that was, and she certainly never heard him talk about shutting down or rebooting. She summoned a console to make sure that the hunter network was still up. It was. Also, she noticed that his sheath had turned black. This was a signal that they had worked out to let her know that he was away. It was strange. It had turned black back in the throne room just before he glitched out or whatever. This could have been a symptom of whatever was going on with him, or possibly something bad. Either way, her instinctual suspicion was beginning to bubble in the back of her mind. Something was up.
Luckily, Fyn designed the network to work independently of the sword. She was worried about him though. He must have really messed something up if he had to be down for a whole day. This was a really bad time to take a vacation though. The G would be expecting to use the hunters to do things, and she had no idea how to direct them. Maybe she could check in on them and make sure they didn’t get into too much trouble.
That was day one of the new age of magic. A cool new stove and an absent Daemon. Great stuff. Bird headed back to the throne room only to find it empty. After some questing around, she found Solomon and Grandad at the still. They had installed a new stove and were testing it out. The old wood furnace lay on its side outside of the stillhouse, seemingly abandoned for eternity.
“How’s it look?” She asked the pair. They were celebrating their handiwork by passing a bottle of white lightning back and forth, trading sips.
“This is amazing!” Solomon exclaimed, “this is going to save everyone so much time. What else can we make?”
“I’m not really sure. Fyn is still out of commission and I don’t really know how any of this stuff works yet. I wouldn’t say he’s the brains behind the operation, but this stuff is more his area of expertise,” Bird said, covering for the sword.
“Oh well. These stoves are enough to keep us busy for a while I think,” the King observed, going back to some stove related task.
She left them be. She and Solomon were still possibly on bad terms. They hadn’t talked about it, and frankly she didn’t feel like it. The less time she spent around him the better. Though she had made her feelings about them very clear a number times, the message hadn’t completely landed. She had even gone to the trouble of standing downwind from him as much as she possibly could. Her natural body odor caused a reaction in him and she took care not to get within arms reach if she could help it. Standing downwind from him after about noon was a pungent place to be, so she had decided that it was best to see him as little as possible.
She wondered what Roxy was up to, so she wandered over to her outbuilding. She was there also installing a new stove. This one next to her old stove, probably on the off chance that the whole scheme didn’t work out.
“Hey, Rox,” Bird hailed.
“Hey, Liberty. Could that sword always talk?” Bird had been keeping Fyn’s existence as much of a secret as she could, but now Solomon’s inner circle knew about it, and soon everyone would know.
“Yeah, I didn’t want anyone to freak out about it,” Bird admitted.
“Solid plan. This magic is going to change things,” Roxy was making some adjustments to the stove.
“Hopefully for the better,” she said positively.
“Well, they’ll certainly save us a lot of work. Who knows what that kind of free time will do to us. I have two boys that cut wood for me full time. If I don’t find something for them to do, well, you know how boys are,” Roxy was fiddling with the stove trying to turn it on.
“I do. They’ll still have to fetch water,” Bird knelt down to help her.
“That’s nothing compared to the wood,” Roxy managed to get the stove fired up.
“I know. We’ll all be pretty busy learning how to use this stuff for a while. Between that and heading out to the waste to get more Hunters, I’m sure there will be very little downtime,” Bird watched as Roxy got a very large pot of dried animal parts onto the stove to render.
“Heading out into the waste for what?” Roxy asked.
“To get more Hunters. They’re made from the Wendigo,” Bird said nonchalantly.
“Nobody told me that,” she eyed her new piece of technology warily, “Is this safe?”
“From what I can tell, it’s safe. I wouldn’t bring anything dangerous here,” Bird said confidently.
“Like a talking sword?” The only thing that Roxy was better at than making glue, was making people feel stupid. She used her words sparingly so that each one had more weight. It only took those four to make Bird question her entire motivation.
“Yeah, like a talking sword,” that ended the conversation. Most conversations ended like that with Roxy. Around here, if you saw somebody wandering around shaking their head like they just found out they were an idiot, chances are they just talked to Roxy.