Lus spun and looked at the communicator in horror. “Dinner?” he asked.

“Yeah, you know… the meal that we all eat at the end of the day? Like, every single day?” Nippy’s voice was short with annoyance.

Lus nodded. “Yes, I know what dinner is. We’re having… uh… it’s a surprise.”

“A surprise?” He asked. Lus couldn’t tell if he was angry or shocked, so he blundered on.

“Yep. I got some new recipes on the mission and I’m going to try one out tonight, but I want it to be a surprise for everyone.”

The communicator was silent for a moment. “Well then,” Nippy answered. “I look forward to it.”

The line clicked off and Lus let out a short sigh of relief. Crisis averted… for now. But he had promised something new for dinner, and now his new system expected it to be something miraculous.

Glancing hopefully at the recipe screen, he tapped on the one recipe: [Beginner’s Luck Soup].

Instead of the list of ingredients he expected, he found himself staring at a block of text.

“The origins of this soup are found in the rural Human system of…”

He shook his head, then began scrolling down. The text was far longer than he expected, but he finally found the ingredients list near the bottom.

“Flour, egg, salt, kechin meat, elsha oil, onnins, garoots, slerry, kechin broth, pasil, harvic, peppin,” he muttered. Biting his lip thoughtfully, he stepped over to the nitrobox and swung open the door.

The nitrobox was large and filled with boxes. There were four boxes of the red gervin meat the Captain favored and two boxes of chopped, frozen vegetables left from the previous cook. There were a few other small packages that he hadn’t really looked too closely at yet, but no kechin.

The white meat from small, flightless birds was more expensive than gervin meat and more difficult to prepare, so it made sense that they didn’t have any.

Still, he thought, it probably wouldn’t mess things up if he used gervin instead, right?

Steeling himself, Lus began pulling out all the stuff on the ingredients list and setting them on the shiny metal counter. Once he had everything out, he scrolled past the ingredients.

“Step 1: Make pasta,” he read. He smiled. Pasta was one of his favorite foods and he hadn’t had it in ages. Since it was more common in Human cuisine, the former Kremel chef had rarely made it.

The instructions said to pour the flour out onto a flat, clean surface. He frowned at the amount. 700 grams didn’t seem like nearly enough flour for the crew.

“How many people is this supposed to feed?” he asked aloud, scrolling back up. He found it just above the ingredients list: 5 people.

“So I just need to… 10 times that? Easy,” he said with a sigh of relief. He wasn’t bad at math, but he didn’t need the pressure of having to multiply everything by 9 when he was already in a time crunch.

He carefully measured out 7000 grams of flour into a huge pile on the counter, then made a small hollow in the center, like a volcano.

Next, he cracked 20 eggs into the hole of the flour volcano. He managed to avoid dropping in any eggshells, which was a true miracle.

Once he had the eggs in, Lus glanced at the recipe, then frowned and sprinkled a generous helping of salt over everything, since he’d forgotten to mix it with the flour beforehand.

Patting his hands in some of the flour at the edges, he took a deep breath and plunged them into the eggs.

He let out a rather unmanly squeak of surprise at the cold gooiness around his hands, then began mixing. The first deep yellow orange egg yolk he caught hold of surprised him. It was firm, almost like a little balloon.

Lus lifted it out of the egg goo and looked at it, passing it back and forth between his hands. It finally broke, covering his already sticky hands in a thick, yellow orange liquid. He gagged a little and plunged his hands back in, quickly squashing the rest of the yolks.

Once he had the eggs somewhat mixed together, he began slowly mixing the flour around them in. It took far more time and effort than he had expected and he had to stop frequently to rest his aching arms.

Finally, he had a giant mound of mostly mixed pasta dough. It was thick and light yellow, with streaks of white where he hadn’t quite managed to get the flour mixed in.

Checking the screen, he scrolled to the next step for the pasta and blinked in surprise and dismay. Now he was supposed to apparently roll this giant mound of dough out until it was quite thin, like true noodles.

Lus stretched his aching arms with a sigh and looked around for the heavy, smooth stone rolling pin that he had only used to smash nuts.

Taking the handles, he set it on top of the pile of dough and pressed down. It left a nice divet and he smiled as he watched the dough quickly flatten.

His smile disappeared quickly. After five minutes of strenuous rolling, he still hadn’t managed to get it nearly as thin as he wanted. It was still at least a centimeter thick and each roll seemed to do nothing to change that.

A soft beeping sound drew his eyes up to the clock and he gasped. “It’s late, oh Watcher it’s late!”

He needed to have the meal ready in an hour and he hadn’t even gotten to cooking the pasta. With a growl of frustration, he took out a knife and began cutting the dough into thin strips.

“This will work just as well as rolling it thin,” he muttered, tossing the strips of pasta dough in a pile next to the stove.

Once he’d finished slicing up the pasta, he grabbed the largest pot he could find and filled it with water. He set it on the stove, wincing a little as it sloshed over the sides and sizzled on the already warming burner.

While he waited for the water to come to a boil, he set to work on the meat. Thankfully, he’d planned to try something with ground gervin meat, so he had 8 kgs thawing in the interbox.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

He set the huge box next to the stove and pulled out his largest frying pan. He had too much meat to cook at once, so he quickly pulled out a few handfuls of the mostly thawed meat and plopped them into the pan.

He washed his hands and grabbed a spatula. He had just chopped the meat up and given it a turn when he noticed steam rising from the pot of water. Stepping away from the gervin meat, he hurried to his mountain of noodles.

Boiling water splashed over the sides as he dropped in a huge scoop of noodles. Lus gasped and jumped back, but not before some of it splashed on him. He grabbed his hot, damp shirt and pulled it off, tossing it on the chair at the small desk.

A noise at the door drew his attention up and he found Cewi-Bano watching him with an expression of confusion.

He squeaked in surprise, then recovered his balance. “Uh, hello. What- what brings you here?” he asked.

“I was just coming to make sure you were actually working on dinner. Nippy seemed to think that you might have forgotten.” She looked around. “But you clearly have it under control.”

“Yeah, yep. I definitely have it under control,” Lus answered with what he hoped was a confident smile.

“Then I will leave you to it,” she said. She turned to leave, pausing to call over her shoulder, “There are protective aprons in the closet.”

Lus flushed in embarrassment, glancing down at his bare chest. Hurrying to the closet, he pulled out one of the large, stained, white aprons and threw it over his head, tying a knot in the neck strap to keep it up. It fit him like a dress, but it was better than being caught cooking shirtless again.

An acrid scent pulled his attention back to the meat and he rushed over with another muttered oath. Thankfully, the bottom was just a little crispy. As he stirred it back in, it looked edible enough that he didn’t bother throwing it out.

He finished the meat and moved it to a large bowl, then threw more into the heated pan. While it started, he fished the cooked noodles out of the boiling water and put them in another large bowl, then added more to the pot.

As he alternated between stirring meat and changing over noodles, he found himself getting into a rhythm. “This is great,” he murmured. “I bet my cooking skill is going to go up so much!”

He finally scooped the last of the ground meat into the bowl and lifted the last few noodles from the boiling water.

Realizing he had no clue what to do next, he looked back up at the screen that he’d been ignoring. “Cook vegetables in oil… oh, I was supposed to do that before I cooked the meat… but gervin meat doesn’t need oil.”

He sighed and grabbed a box of frozen veggie mix from the nitrobox. Pouring it into the oil, he jumped back in shock as the pan exploded, shooting hot oil at him.

“Ow, ow, ow!” he shouted as the drops hit his exposed arms. After the first explosion of sizzling drops, the pan calmed down. He stepped forward cautiously and found the chopped orange garoots, green slerry slices, and white onnins sizzling happily.

With a sigh of relief and his spatula, he began stirring them around until they were cooked through, then pulled out another bowl to dump them into. He did a few more batches, then caught sight of the clock.

“Guess that’ll have to do,” he muttered, closing the box of frozen veggies and tossing it back into the nitrobox.

The next step in the recipe was to prepare the broth for the soup. It started with kechin broth, but since he was using gervin meat, he felt like it made more sense to use gervin broth.

Lus had never actually used the broth powder in the cupboard. He pulled out the large bucket of brown powder and began reading the instructions. He needed 4 tsp per liter, and he’d need a lot of liters, so he checked the conversion chart.

There were 48 tsp in a cup, so a cup of bouillon would be enough for… 12 liters. That would probably be enough broth for everyone, right?

He shrugged and hurried over to the autopot. It was a pot that came up nearly to his waist from its base on the floor. Unlike other pots, it had an automatic heating unit built in so he could prepare meals for the crew without having to use multiple pots on the stove.

“This would’ve been perfect to boil the noodles in,” he muttered as he measured in 12 liters of water. “But oh well… at least I’m almost done.”

He added a cup of the surprisingly sticky, brown broth powder and turned on the heat. Apparently he needed to bring the liquid to a boil to get all the powder incorporated and turn it into actual broth.

While that heated, Lus headed back to the seasoning cupboard. He hadn’t used any of the seasonings yet except salt and peppin, so it took him a little while to find the pasil and harvic.

The pasil looked like dried bits of leaf and the harvic was similar in appearance to peppin, but cream-colored instead of black. He carried them over to the pot with a glance back at all the seasonings he’d pulled out that he would have to clean up later.

The auto-pot heated quickly and he found it already boiling. He grabbed his measuring cups and quickly added 10 tbsp of pasil and 10 tsp of harvic. Leaving that to boil a little longer, he returned the pasil and harvic to the cupboard, quickly shoving in the rest of the seasonings as well.

“I’m supposed to boil until fragrant,” he read from the recipe. “Fragrant?” He took a deep sniff of the steam coming off the pot. “I mean, smells good to me! This might… this might actually taste alright.”

Turning, he grabbed the bowl of meat and veggies and poured it into the boiling brown liquid. “Doesn’t look like much,” he said sadly. “But hopefully the taste makes up for that.”

He watched the veggies and meat bits dance in the boiling liquid for a moment, then returned the bowl to the counter and went for the noodles.

Lus reached in to take a taste, curious at how his homemade noodles had turned out. Instead of one noodle, he found them stuck together in large clumps.

“That’s not right,” he muttered, breaking off a piece and popping it in his mouth. It was thicker and chewier than normal noodles and definitely not as flavorful as he had hoped, but… “This is pretty good,” he said with a smile.

Not wanting the noodles to be stuck together, he pulled them out of the bowl and broke them apart as he put them into the pot of soup.

Some came apart nicely, but most ended up in chunks instead of as actual noodles. He just shrugged it off. At least that wouldn’t affect the taste. And really, smaller pieces would make it easier to serve up.

At last, he broke up the last clump, then poured out the loose bits of pasta into the still boiling brown liquid.

“Now this is a proper soup!” Lus exclaimed excitedly, looking over his handiwork. He grabbed a small spoon and scooped up a taste. The meat was rather bland and the noodles were thick and tough, but the broth was flavorful and the pasta at least tasted like pasta. Overall, it was far better than anything else he’d made so far.

Glancing back at the kitchen, then up at the clock, he sighed. Everyone would be here any moment, so he rolled the soup pot out to the serving area and began setting out bowls and spoons next to it. He dropped the ladle in and turned back to the kitchen.

[Cooking Complete]

[XP Gained: 50]

[50 XP]? Is that a lot?” He asked aloud, but of course nobody answered. He considered going in and asking Leviathan, but the Demon had already made it pretty clear that Lus was on his own to figure this whole system thing out.

Besides, people would be showing up any minute to eat, and he didn’t want to get caught consorting with a demon. He shuddered at the thought.

Instead, he stepped back into the kitchen and looked around at the pile of dishes and the filthy counters. Thank the Suns he didn’t have to clean up after himself. If he didn’t keep the dinner shift, though, he’d soon be getting up early to make breakfast and dealing with cleaning up his own mess.

“This is going to save me,” he promised himself with more confidence than he felt. It had to.

His thoughts were interrupted by the murmur of voices as the crew began to flood into the large dining room. He listened to the clatter of dishes as they served themselves up and thought about going in, but he decided to wait until everyone had finished.

Lus didn’t think his nerves could handle the stress of standing in line and watching everyone take his food, but not knowing what they thought about it. Or even worse, hearing that they didn’t like it and that he was going to be demoted to breakfast cook. While he waited, he took the apron off and put his still damp shirt back on

It took a while, but eventually the sound of dishes stopped. He peeked out the door and saw everyone at the tables. Moving slowly so as not to draw attention to himself, he moved to the serving table.

“Hey Lus,” Nippy said softly. Lus jumped, wondering how the second in command had gotten so close without him noticing.

Lus looked up at him expectantly, waiting for the insults to start.