“You’re doing it all wrong.”

Liam looked up from the bird carcass on his chopping board. “The food?”

The head chef, “Alan” (his actual name was a garble of inhuman sounds, which was why he’d agreed to be called by such a “short, undescriptive name”), stared down at him through buggy compound eyes. His mandibles opened and closed as a humming sound came out, mimicking a voice but carrying all the distortions of an out-of-tune radio. “Why are you opening it like that?”

Alan’s physiology was akin to a stick-bug that got fat, with a whole lot of thin but blindingly quick arms, each one covered in purple chitin that Liam was not allowed to touch (no matter how much he asked). The insect’s species was unknown to Liam, mostly because he was a hybrid spawned from hybrids. No singular feature could be pinned down to a race he knew of.

Liam glanced down at the albatross-like creature that he’d been told to prepare. “You… don’t want to separate the entrails?”

“Of course not, the Vruu eat that.”

Whoever the “Vruu” were, Liam did not know. He was certain he’d successfully identified every species on board the Barb, too. “Who are the Vruu?”

“One of your furred ones.”

“That doesn’t narrow down the list of options.” Liam would’ve crossed his arms if the act alone wouldn’t have smeared bird guts all over him.

“Not my fault there are so many of you.” Alan stepped in; four of its six rope-like arms snatched the knife out of Liam's hands alongside the body. He pulled out a second knife and began chopping away. The process was systematic, efficient, with the sort of coordination that was only possible for someone with years of experience.

Within less than a minute, the de-feathered bird was chopped up, its bones separated from the meat, the entrails tucked aside, everything neatly organized. “Like this.” Alan placed the knife on the cutting board and turned to leave.

Liam turned to look at the barrel of dead birds that was in need of processing.

For Liam, the two weeks on the Barb so far had been a slow but steady struggle to get himself back to full health. Long feverish hours trapped either in the room he shared with Hassim and Noor, or long hours trapped in the kitchen with Alan, or long, exhausted hours looking out to the ever-vast desert and trying to get his thoughts in order.

At least it left him with a lot of time to think, and to learn.

He’d managed to piece together a couple of things at least.

The first was that the “buried” memories pertained to more than just memories from before meeting Umira. There was a constant feeling of having words at the very tip of his tongue that never made it out, like whenever he looked upon the Barb, he thought of something… something about vacuum, and the aether-stars. Similar things applied to his apparent, weirdly chopped-up knowledge of things present, past, and future.

He was sure he’d figure it out, but after his second realization, he’d taken the executive decision not to dig too deep for the time being.

This was, mainly, that the blessing Maridah had given him would be gone the instant he regained the memories he’d “buried”. It had felt odd at first, getting a blessing that he knew paled in comparison to the usual ones she usually handed out during her heyday, but as with all things during this Age, it bounced back to Thalgrim. None of the divinities dared attach themselves too much to mortals, lest they become vulnerable to the machinations of the Goddess of Fate. And Maridah, not being among the pantheon, would’ve preferred keeping a low profile rather than risk the other divines hunting her down.

Were this the Age of Demigods, she would’ve probably just dumped a few hundred languages directly into his brain instead of addressing his linguistic shortcomings in such a roundabout way.

But what truly gnawed at him was the upcoming war.

It had taken him not even a full day of straining himself, and he’d been left bedridden and barely conscious for days, and too exhausted to even get anything done for a week. Compared to the other three, he was an approximation to dead weight.

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That would not do.

The quickest and safest 'get a blessing for thorough physical enhancements' was out. Gods would not get involved because of Thalgrim, and unless he planned to become the champion of the Goddess of Fate (he wouldn’t), then…

Then that left gambling.

But to be able to do so, he needed to learn a few things about wielding a knife and animal biology. Which was the exact reason why he’d volunteered to work in the kitchen.

"Hey, Alan, you work on the monster corpses too, right?"

"Some parts are worth rescuing, yes." The insectoid chef didn’t even slow down in his work, an orgy of knives and vegetables that was being dumped into a cauldron so large Liam could’ve used it as a personal…

Warm… bubbling… tub?

"If you want to pay off your debt, helping with the next big kill will get a chunk out of it." Alan continued, unaware of Liam’s lapse of focus. "Just remember that big monsters always have smaller ones inside. Some can burrow into exposed soft flesh like yours like it’s nothing, so remember to wear something to cover it up." He let out a chattering sound, a mimicry of laughter. "Otherwise, you will make for a bad meal."

"My body has so much coffee, I’m pretty sure whatever eats me will get a heart attack."

"Coffee." Alan visibly shuddered. "You humans and your poisons."

He shot the bug a faux glare. "I’ve seen you munching on bones, pretty sure I’d break a molar trying that."

"My mandibles are strong, and yours are weak." The chef proclaimed with a twitch of the head that Liam had learned meant smugness.

Nodding along to the little taunt, he split open the bird. "Say, have you heard anything about the monster we’re going after?"

"We? No, thin-fleshy-one, the Captain and the crew. We do not fight." Alan waved him off. "There is much in rumors, but no one knows a thing. Only that it came from the mountain and destroyed that Vruu village. Nuremo."

"I thought it was a city."

Alan did the antenna-wiggle equivalent of a shrug. "Vruu cities have so few in them, they’re villages to my people."

Liam perked up. "Your people?"

"Focus more on your work, thin-human, you’re wasting much meat." He declared in what could only be an obvious change of subject.

Liam grumbled a bit as he tried to carefully make sure the meat and bones were separate from one another. There was still one other thing… "Say, have you ever encountered strange meat inside a monster?"

"Strange meat?"

“That spoils fast, that is neither muscle nor guts nor tendons.”

Alan took a moment, slowing his movements… meaning he was still going several times faster than Liam ever would be able to. “Ah, rot-meat, yes.”

“And… where in the body is it, usually?”

“Neck and chest, sometimes shoulders.” He pointed an antenna at him. “Rot-meat is dangerous; it can explode.”

“Figured as much, aether circuits can’t hold on too well in flesh.” Liam nodded along. He was sure he had something like that too, what with blessings not being too dissimilar from monster abilities. “Have you ever heard of someone extracting some of it?”

“Are you insane? Rot-flesh does two things and two things only: rot or explode.”

Liam didn’t answer, nodding along. He’d figured at least alchemists would’ve made the attempt, but maybe the world just hadn’t reached that point in time? He could see a few reasons why it would become common knowledge during and after the war but not before.

Nothing like jump-starting technological advancement, then.

With a happy tune, he continued his prep-work, which was followed by Alan taking everything he’d made and throwing the various components into various pots and pans. Over the following hours, the meals were prepared for the whole ship. It was a highly sophisticated process, mostly because there were at least twenty different species on board, and the dietary limitations and needs between them were not the same.

Surprisingly, Liam was the only human on the Barb. Which even Alan commented to be an oddity since “you can always expect to run into a Vruu like you” (Liam was starting to suspect “Vruu” was some pejorative term to refer to mammalian sentient humanoids).

While everyone else ate, Alan and Liam spent their time cooking some more.

After everyone else ate, Alan and Liam spent their time washing wooden dishes, sometimes with some help. They did not use soap and water but ash and sand. The water was basically a splash after they’d rubbed off the worst of it.

Once everything was done, and Liam felt like his hands had been rubbed raw, the human dragged himself to bed and collapsed.

Idly, he tried to think about the monster the Barb had been hired to kill, but nothing came to mind. It was just one of dozens of places wiped out by the increasingly more active monsters that were sensing the approaching red star.

His next objective would be to learn how to use a ranged weapon like a crossbow and a spear. Out of all the options at hand, they were the only ones he had a chance to reach the skill-floor of before the big fight.

And who knows, maybe he’d get to start some spellcraft theory lessons from Umira.