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Getting Lucky (2,534 Words)

The actual eating part was awkward for a little bit - I hadn't really gotten to know any of the guys before then. Fortunately, Jason, one of the other team members, mentioned that he'd seen me drawing in classes at some point, and I showed off some of my skills with a few quick sketches. They were really impressed.

At the actual arcade itself, my increased stats granted me some minor advantages. I was pretty sure that Agility handled both reaction times and running speed, given that I was definitely doing better in the lightgun games than I used to. I played with other guys, went head-to-head in the fighting and racing games, and just generally enjoyed myself and laughed.

Near the entrance to the arcade, though, were those crane machines. I hadn't even thought about them, since they were basically a scam (they intentionally release a majority of the time), but at some point as I was sipping water from a cup, my thoughts went to them for just long enough for me to make a connection between the way a crane machine operates and the Luck skill. If there was any multiplicative effect on Luck from the stakes, then a crane game or some similar semi-gambling-type machine might make my Luck climb again... it was very tempting to turn money into stat points, even if it was for a stat that seemed largely useless.

I didn't actually sit there and try to increase my Luck, though. I was out with guys, enjoying myself, so I focused on that for the time being.

It was the next day after practice - they didn't go out together after every practice - that I actually went to the arcade, stood in front of the crane game, and fed it about thirty dollars as I tried to grab the most valuable, expensive thing and carry it over to the hole. It took only a few tries before I manifested a crane game skill that was slowly ticking up, and by the tenth try, I was grabbing my targeted item every time. Whether or not the clamp had the strength to actually hold onto it was the random factor.

Eventually, though, I was delivered my prize: a large stuffed bear the size of my torso. When it was deposited down the hole, my Luck stat raised by two points, and I let out a sigh as I removed it. I didn't need the bear. But... more stat points.

I took a quick picture of the thing with my phone and sent Amber a picture of it, to ask if she wanted it. Her response was 'omg! so cute! yes gimme gimme'. She texted quite differently than she normally talked, which was cute as I headed over to her place. We exchanged a few more texts where my high Wisdom meant that I realized that she thought I had gotten the bear just for her sake, and also meant that I realized that saying I didn't actually get it for her would just sound tsundere, so I didn't try doing that. I just got to her place and knocked on the door.

"It looks nice in person too," she said, taking it from me and giving me - and it, by extension - a hug, smushing it into me. "Do you want to come in?"

"Is your dad here?"

She let out a soft, one-note laugh at that. "Yeah. But we can just hang out. He likes you now."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Amber agreed. "Come on," she said, taking hold of my hand and pulling me inside. I wound up watching some murder mystery show with her and her dad, the big bear resting in Amber's lap, one of her hands casually curled around it. Her other hand was on top of mine, fingers lacing together; she saw me off after about an hour, and gave me a kiss right on the lips, right in front of her dad.

It was a chaste kiss, but he didn't look even annoyed at her doing so, so I considered it a good sign. My steps were a bit lighter as I headed home, just from the general enjoyment of life I was getting.

I spent a third of my new stat points boosting my Int still further, and looked at the other two stats I was considering - Wisdom and Luck - while trying to carefully appraise them. Should I keep spending points on Luck, when it didn't seem to do anything immediately visible? What did it even do? I suspected that it was related primarily to games of chance and similar random events. In games, that was how it worked: some extra benefits to general resist/dodge, maybe, and winning at casinos and other RNG-based games.

It finally occurred to me that I might be able to grind it, which would also help me identify what it did. If I started making bets and winning them, would that increase my Luck? If it did, it suggested that Luck was mostly based around that kind of thing, since Amber talking to me or coming over to my place to have sex didn't get me any Luck, despite both of them being very fortunate events.

Over the course of the evening, I downloaded as many gacha games as I could, spending the free starting currency immediately and seeing what I got. By the end of it, I had two dozen new apps installed on my smartphone, and had gone through all their daily activities and whatnot. I'd managed to get two UR (or equivalent) items across all them, another six SR, and then several dozen HR and R.

I had been playing those games (and downloading new ones, and making new accounts, to try to 'mine' for RNG rolls) for three days before I got two UR items in a row on the gacha in a specific game, and my Luck finally ticked up by one whole single point. I let out an annoyed sigh at that, as it was revealed to me that, yes, I could earn Luck that way. It was also basically confirmation that Luck was for slots and gacha games and the like, not for my daily life. I definitely felt I was much luckier to have had Amber start chatting me up than anything to do with the Luck trait.

Amber and I kept going out, obviously, and we had fun together. My physical stats were nearly at their peak, from all the exercise I was doing on the football team, and I got a gentle squeeze here and there as she'd grope my bicep or my butt, which was genuinely incredible. Having sex a second time wasn't the easiest thing we ever did, but we did eventually manage to arrange another round while my parents were out and Amber's dad was convinced she was out with friends.

Okay, more than one more round.

I stopped raising my Luck stat with points, and wound up going half-and-half on Int and Wis, while my Luck slowly, methodically, pointlessly rose by another point when I once again got two UR items in a row; then another; then another... after gaining a total of five points that way, though, the next time I got a double UR, I did not get a Luck point. When my next double UR also failed to trigger a Luck point increase, I quickly uninstalled all that gacha garbage from my phone. I'd gotten what I was looking for out of it, and I wasn't likely to get a triple UR or anything else like that.

I did wonder if possibly real gambling, for real money, would produce bigger results... but I was seventeen. I wasn't allowed to really gamble. I guess I could have started gambling with friends, except I didn't have any, and if I approached Amber's friends with the idea of gambling for real money, I would seem like a weirdo. So I put Luck out of my mind and spent my points into Intelligence and Wisdom.

My mana bar was something I would sometimes just stare at. Intelligence and Wisdom increased the amount of mana and supposedly the speed of regeneration, so I wondered about it. Was magic real? I mean, I had this stupid Gamer power, so maybe magic was real... I wound up finding a translated copy of an old grimoire online, but unfortunately reading it did nothing. Later, wasting my money printing it, just in case I maybe needed to absorb it to get the spell, also did nothing.

It was just as well. The grimoire was all crap like, "write your name on this thing and bury it beneath a tree like this and then do this and that" for so long that it was clear that it was designed so that people would inevitably make a mistake somewhere that you could blame for the (nonexistent) magic failing.

After I finished increasing my Luck, I had no clear avenues of further advancement. Sometimes my Strength, Agility, and Endurance would increase as I exercised as part of football practice, but that naturally started to come more and more rarely. I still ran around doing just about every quest I saw, slowly gathering more XP, but that was very slow too. Just like any other RPG, you started off growing fast but each additional level got further and further apart.

My life, therefore, pretty much settled into a pattern: I would go to classes, go to football practice, make and sell art (or just practice it), and then back to the beginning. It was much easier than you might think, since I didn't need to sleep and my tendency to get bored had been significantly curtailed by Gamer Mind. I would spend time goofing around online, but I was also finding that I really enjoyed doing art, and when I didn't have a commission, I would often find myself just drawing, either covering pages of my notebook or working on my tablet to do something digital.

Things with Amber kept going about as they had been going. We would have sex maybe once a week, when we could sneak away, and while there was definitely the temptation to do it more often, my high Wisdom let me resist it to an extent I probably wouldn't have before. I did notice that Amber liked to start off sex with watching porn together with me, preferring something new each time, but I definitely didn't mind it as foreplay.

"What do you watch?" I asked her, as we sat on the bed, my laptop in my lap. She blinked at the question. "I mean, we always watch the stuff I watch. What do you like?" I had only the vaguest guesses at her preferences, from the stuff that really seemed to excite her, which tended to be porn that focused on the actual act - the face for a blowjob, pussy for sex, and so on - rather than anything about the emotions of the actors.

"Oh. I don't watch porn. I read smut," she admitted.

"We could read some of that?" I suggested.

"It's... I'd rather watch porn with you," she told me, and I decided to take her at her word on that. After we were done, she still wasn't willing to tell me about her smut preferences. I had to guess it was pretty raunchy, but I liked her, and I didn't want to mess things up by pushing her too hard, so I let it go.

I would mostly blame the fact that me and Amber never got caught on my high Intelligence and Wisdom. The former let me avoid making stupid mistakes born of just forgetting to do something, the latter let me avoid making stupid mistakes born of being too horny to do something. I was pretty sure that my parents figured it out at some point - possibly due to me owning condoms, who knows? - but there was no smoking gun or anything.

Football practice gave me something new after a couple months - I gained a single active Skill, Break Through, at that point. It increased by speed and footing at the cost of a constant mana drain. It was the first thing I'd ever gotten that drained mana, and it specifically was built up by Intelligence and Wisdom, which was honestly a tad bizarre. I wasn't really complaining, though. I found that I started ticking up in Agility a bit when I started to use it for long periods, and when I got almost-but-not-quite tackled to the ground during practice while it was running, I ticked up my Strength, too.

My skill in throwing had also increased, and with all my progress... normally I went home after practice was over, but at that point the coach called me over to talk. "Hey, Shaun," he said, sitting on the bench, patting the spot next to him. "Let's talk a bit, alright?"

"Sure," I said, sitting down. I couldn't really guess at what he was going to say, but I had probably gotten most of what I could out of the whole 'football team' thing anyway, so I wasn't too concerned. "What is it?"

"You are getting much better, really fast. I know your grades have gotten better lately, but I honestly think you might have what it takes to go pro." I honestly hadn't even been thinking about that possibility. Our school's football team kinda sucked. "I want to put you in as running back, maybe even QB eventually, but you've got to make friends with the other team members. After every practice, you head home right away. We're headed out to a pizza place and then to the arcade - do you want to come?"

When he put it that way, it really seemed like I didn't have much choice, but, in fact, I did, as I did not actually need to practice. My thoughts went back to my goal: making money. Professional football players made a lot of money. I could probably start doing football seriously in college, but it'd be better to start now. "Sure," I agreed.

"Great," he said, giving me a clap on the back. "You got the money to pay for your own meal? I can spot you this once, but you'll have to pay in the future."

"I have the money." I was actually making a surprisingly large amount of money off of my art - I could easily make $50/hour on good art, and with my lack of need to sleep, I was making over a thousand dollar every week, easy. I had spent some of it on things, obviously, like getting Amber a computer of her own as an anniversary gift, and taking Amber out, and other things that you spend money on when you lost your virginity to a cute girl and are seventeen and want her to keep on liking you, but I lived with my parents. I didn't have a whole lot to spend all that money on, so the bank account my dad had set aside for me had over five thousand dollars.