Read the Fucking Manual

Summary: When your power makes your life into a videogame, it'd be idiotic not to read the manual. Inspired by, of all things, the tendency of so called 'gamer' fics to 'bank' their points or perks or what have you.

Taylor frowned.

"Help?" she tried.

"Help System activated! What seems to be your bogle, young lady?"

Taylor sighed. "Christ, the game's Canadian," she muttered, then cleared her throat. "I have several questions."

"Ask away, young lady, the Help System shall answer all that it can!"

"Okay, I have a bunch of questions. First, I assume that I'll unlock more perks as I level up. Is this correct?" Taylor asked.

"That is correct," the system said.

"Is there a level cap?" Taylor asked.

"There is no level cap," the system said.

"What does Strength do..."

And so on and so forth.

Fortunately, the stats screen happened to be a pause menu, so despite the fact that Taylor had spent sixteen hours just pouring over every single little detail of the game, as far as she could get the Help System to answer, had not caused her to feel hungry, tired or even bored. Soon enough, she was as informed as she would ever be.

Ready to face the world, she ended the pause and looked around her, the kitchen was just as she remembered it being, and her pasta was still a minute away from finishing.

She smiled.

It was time for some level grinding.

It hadn't taken long for Taylor to develop a strategy.

Her stats all affected her in various ways. The 'Physical' stats were quite obvious, but she had still gotten clarification and even inquired on the aesthetics of her body based on stat distribution. It seemed like so long as she was relatively well balanced between Strength, Endurance and Agility, she'd have a balanced body type, while going too heavily in any one direction would transform her body.

Good to know.

Her mental stats were a bit more complicated. Her perception didn't change how good her eyesight was, for instance - she still needed her glasses to see no matter how much she improved it. Instead, she saw and noticed more things that she wouldn't before, and was better able to make educated guesses as to what something was based on the blurry images that her eyes captured.

Luck apparently affected everything that was not a predetermined outcome, or which had no random factors. Considering everything had a factor of randomness in some way, it was a very potent stat, as it affected everything, skewing probability in her favor.

Charisma was also pretty straightforward, she would just be more convincing and would be able to stumble into the right words to say at the right time more frequently. Good pair with luck, that one.

However, the most important stat, in her opinion?

Intelligence.

Not just because of the name, but simply because Intelligence increased the experience points she earned with any action.

More importantly, every stat had related perks, and Intelligence had perks mostly geared towards further improving the rate at which she levelled up.

You would think, well, if you're only increasing how fast you level up, how are you going to actually do anything with all those levels?

Well, that's where perks that increase the number of skill and stat points that she received came in. And guess what those were related to in the perk tree.

Fortunately, simple and dumb actions would give her experience, small and meager amounts though it might be. It's not as if she needed to fight right now. For the time being, she stuck to cooking, reading books, completing puzzles, 'winning' arguments online (apparently swaying public opinion in her favor counted as a victory, and managing to sway the other person's opinion was a major victory granting enhanced experience) and doing well at school. The latter was giving her progressively more experience as the Bitch Three were putting more and more roadblocks.

In truth, Taylor had even started to like the three bitches. They were the major source of experience she was getting, simply because of how many obstacles they gave her to overcome. From something as simple as fending off Emma's verbal attacks or even weathering the storm, as it were, to dodging Madison's childish pranks to escaping Sophia's violence.

Everything gave her experience.

And as she got more and more experience, her level increased, and with it her intelligence and basic skills, which she then used to obtain experience quicker and more efficiently.

Taylor spent three months doing nothing but grinding her levels and intelligence.

Skills had no set cap, but they did have diminishing returns on points past a certain point. From one to one hundred, the difference would be night and day, but from four hundred to one thousand, the difference would be smaller than that. One of the advantages of high intelligence was the Instant Math perk, Taylor thought to herself. She was getting a surprisingly large amount of mileage out of that one, especially considering she could mathematically calculate trajectories and velocities so that she could more easily evade Sophia.

Three months after she had started, she had determined her points flow to be sufficient to begin improving everything else about herself.

Needless to say, it did not take long for Taylor to quickly find the physical peak of normal human beings and exceed it, to the point that she was fairly certain these days she could throw down with most Brutes without breaking a sweat. Maybe she couldn't arm wrestle Glory Girl... but that was just a matter of time.

The bit that was really legitimately hilarious was that because her level was so high, as she had crossed into the three digits, her HP was insane. Which led to the rather amusing tale of how she had helped Armsmaster capture the Parahuman known as Lung, by simply standing there and letting the Dragon of Kyushu tire himself out against an opponent who could simply tank everything he could throw at her.

Admittedly, she could've done without her clothes being burned off, but hey, at least she had a body she wasn't ashamed off.

That was just the start of an illustrious career, a career which had the high point of her convincing Zion to kill himself.

Charisma, its related skills and its related perks were all fun, Taylor mused. Who'd have thought that she'd save Earth, all Earths really, by telling a creature beyond her comprehension to just go die?

The idea of 'banking' skill and stat points shows up in pretty much every 'Gamer' fic ever.

Don't. Use the points early to make the grind faster and easier. Speed up your farming so you can speed up your farming so that you're getting more points than you know what to do with.