Lus sighed as he entered his quarters. It'd been a painfully boring two weeks since the battle with the Corporates, and he was dreading having to endure even longer without a chance to get off the Argo. Repairs in the fsylan tubes were complete, which meant each day was handling general maintenance tasks and wishing something remotely interesting would happen.
After sliding his boots off, he collapsed onto the couch while Avil eagerly climbed up to curl up next to him. With one hand giving the cat the pets he demanded, Lus used the other to start flipping through system screens.
He had leveled up again already through cooking for the crew, though he no longer made the [Beginner's Luck Soup] perfectly since giving everyone on the ship a giant boost to [Luck] might start drawing attention to a secret he was desperate to keep. Instead, he continued to make variations of the soup or used the pasta recipe to make his own dishes, all of which gained him [XP], just in a lower amount.
All [Level 4] brought, however, was another stat increase, with [Stamina], [Health], and [Strength] all increasing by 1, while [Luck] increased by 2. The home page now read:
[Stamina: 7]
[Intelligence: 8]
[Strength: 5]
[Charm: 6]
[Health: 10]
[Speed: 8]
[Common Sense: 0]
[Luck: 11]
The Beginner's Luck Soup had increased his [Luck] by 10, alongside anyone else who ate it, but no one had seemed to notice that their miraculous escape from the Corporates came back to the dinner he made. Then again, no one but Nippy even had the means to see things like stats anyway. The effects of the dish were temporary and wore off after only a few hours. He hadn't had the chance to make it perfectly again even for himself since they ran out of kechin meat, but he was excited about the possibilities other system recipes could bring.
He tapped away from the homepage to the newest tab on the screen: [Recipe Book].
The screen then presented him with a long list of recipe names, all except a handful behind some kind of lock. [Beginner's Luck Soup] was entirely available while two others were marked as buyable: [Tasty Buns] and [Galloping Scallops]. The problem was that all he could see about them was the price and the name, which meant he would have to buy one to get the chance to see how to actually make it.
Since he started cooking his mish-mash dishes using the single recipe he had, he found that none of them gave him any kind of boost. He figured that the whole point of the system [Recipes], but gauging what kind of power they had was hard based on names alone.
He had [1100 XP] to spend after all his hours cooking, including taking a couple of breakfast shifts since Lbrvr had gotten to go off ship for the resupply missions, but each recipe cost [500 XP] so he'd been wary about spending so much of his [XP].
Most of the other names on the screen looked more helpful than the two options he could buy, but he wasn't sure how to unlock them. It could be leveling up, or it could be that buying one recipe unlocked the next one. He'd tried asking Leviathan, but as usual, the Demon was as unhelpful as he could possibly be.
"Well, here goes nothing," Lus murmured as he selected [Galloping Scallops], the more interesting of the two. He hit the buy option, and the entire recipe opened up before him. He skipped past the history section to check the list of ingredients and groaned. The kitchen definitely didn't have all the spices it called for, and now that he actually thought about it, they didn't have scallops lying around either.
"What a waste." He closed out of the [Recipe] to see that nothing about the recipe book had changed. The two fully available recipes were at the top while just below them waited the single buyable option, and everything else remained unattainable.
"Well I can't make that one, so maybe this one will be a little more manageable," he said to himself and Avil. The cyclops cat paused to stare at Lusac as though he understood what he was saying before returning to his grooming.
Lusac spent another [500 XP] to buy the [Tasty Buns] recipe just for the sake of spending his [XP] which didn't seem to have any other use once he leveled up. It had a much more reasonable ingredient list, but it did seem like it would take a lot more time to make than his usual cooking window, so he'd have to plan ahead when he actually wanted to cook it.
One glaring issue with all the [Recipes] Lus noticed was the lack of description of the power. He disliked that he would have to make the [Recipe] perfectly in order to figure out how it affected his stats, but he supposed that was a relatively minor problem all things considered.
He tapped over to his [Quests] tab, but there was nothing new there either, even with the additional [Recipes]. This system was becoming as mundane as the rest of his life with the lack of missions and getting off the Argo. Lus had always hated the idea of being stuck in a ship, traveling the void for weeks to months at a time. One of the things he liked best about being a Runner is that he got the benefits of seeing the galaxy while getting frequent chances to breathe regular air on planets.
Sighing again, he waved the screen away. It wasn't going to provide anything of further interest. He contemplated turning on an old gladiatus match, but at the idea of sports, he remembered his disappointingly low [Strength]. It had finally increased at his last level up, but that was because he'd spent so much time crawling through the fsylan tubes with a backpack–something he didn't normally take with him. He figured that if the stats were going to be based on how he spent his time between leveling up, he could game the system a bit and skew it towards giving him the stats he wanted. Unfortunately that meant if he wanted an increased [Strength] stat, he was going to have to do something that required [Strength], which meant hitting the gym.
Lusac didn't enjoy using the community workout space. It was always full of other crew members, and everyone who used the weights was already rather buff themselves. That meant when a skinny Human like Lus came along, he spent the entire time trying to ignore the incessant teasing. Of course, since he rarely went, he never gained the muscles to prove his worth against the others, creating an endless cycle.
He'd actually already sucked it up and gone a couple of times to work out over the past couple of weeks, but with all the time he was spending doing very non-[Strength] related things, he was worried he still wouldn't get the boost he wanted. Even if he only got 2 or 3 more points in [Strength], that would be enough for him to stop worrying so much about it.
"I guess I have to go," Lusac told Avil.
The cat meowed, the strange pitchy screech already a normal sound to Lus's ears. Becky had been kind enough to get real pet food and a real litter box for Avil during one of her chances to get off the ship since Lus was required to stay on board full time. The creature had settled into his new home happily, but even having a mutant alien for a pet didn't deter the endless boredom of his past few days.