Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

The sun was up, and so was Arthur, staring down at the girl asleep on his arm and wondering if it was appropriate to escape. Not that he was desperate to get away, but he had woken up about an hour ago and had spent the time since then appreciating just how lucky he was to have someone like this.

Now, he was worried it was starting to get creepy and his arm was getting very numb, but there was no good solution on how to extricate himself. He didn’t want to wake Mizu up, considering she had been up until the late hours of the night waiting for him. He also didn’t want to sneak out, have her wake up, and see he had left without saying goodbye. They had enough trust between them that Mizu would know he had good intentions but that trust had been built by not doing stuff like that.

Arthur was just starting to figure out the practicalities of prying his arm out of her death grip when she woke up.

“You were trying to leave,” Mizu said in a flat voice.

“A little. I didn’t want to wake you up,” Arthur admitted.

“It’s okay. I can wake up. But it’s not time for work yet.”

“I don’t know. I haven’t worked in the past three days. At all.”

“You’ve done nothing but work.” Mizu patted him on the arm. “Good work, too. Now go make us tea.”

There was no boba in Mizu’s kitchen, which made the process of making the tea interesting. Arthur usually had a lot of different things to balance when he was making a drink, from flavors to milk or cream to which kind of boba he was using. Even ice was a more complex thing than he’d ever imagined it would be with shape, size, and age. This time, there was just hot water, a pot, and tea he had grown himself in his garden specifically for his very special customer.

Arthur got into the swing of things, bringing the water to a boil without any of his normal tools that would help him fine-tune the temperature. At this point, though, he had a pretty good feel for how water looked and sounded at different temperatures, and probably got it pretty close. He dipped the tea into the water, and steeped it to the perfect color and strength for that particular leaf.

It wasn’t a work of great precision. It was just the best he could do for someone he cared about in that moment, using every tool he had at his disposal. And when he felt his eyes go a bit fuzzy, he knew something had happened, even if it was a smaller thing.

Hospitalitea (Achievement)

Sometimes, and maybe too rarely, things are too much about perfection. They are about performance and precision and doing a perfect job in the most perfect way. While that’s always been an element of your tea making, it’s also never been the whole story. It was, for you, always about the people.

This achievement is something that in some senses you could have got on your first day making tea. But, like tea, it was better if given time to steep. From now on, when you make tea in lower-pressure, non-commercial situations, it will be just a little warmer or colder, as the situation calls for. It will taste a little better to whoever drinks it.

This is what others will inform you is sometimes called a friends-and-family achievement, something that enhances your own quality of life as much as it does others, and is more about living life than succeeding in work. While it won’t help your career, don’t worry too much about that. It won’t slow it down, either, except as it slows down as you live your nonwork life.

And that’s no loss at all.

If both Mizu and the System were telling him that it was okay to take a little time for life around all the worrying and work, Arthur wasn’t going to argue. Sighing, he felt some majicka flow out of him to up the pep content of the tea just a bit, and set it before Mizu.

“Some sort of skill?” Mizu asked, having long understood every little motion of Arthur.

“An achievement. One that says we should stay in all morning.” Arthur smiled.

“Oooh. My favorite kind.”

Somehow, Arthur had the idea to catch a passer-by and get them to ask one of the cooks to bring him breakfast. Though he didn’t know it, in doing so, he was the first person in the entire history of Coldbrook to successfully order in. He and Mizu had a huge breakfast of eggs and sausages, then just sat listening to the water and catching up on each other’s weeks until it was finally time to open the doors and let the world back in.

Arthur kissed Mizu goodbye and walked towards his shop. Earlier, he had been eager to get to the shop, to make the tea that helped the town run and to catch up on work he felt he had missed. Now, he felt ready. It wasn’t pressure. He just wanted to.

It was a good feeling.

—

“It’s the power squad.” Lily was excitedly explaining what she had been up to all week and puffed up like a balloon made out of feathers. “It’s me and Karra, when she’s not actively working on the walls and Milo, although we might lose him here in a little once he gets more metal, and Rhodia. We’re the power squad.”

“And you’ve been doing what with the power squad?” ARthur asked.

Arthur yanked the broom from Lily’s hands, having waited a few minutes to see if she’d calm down enough to actually sweep. She hadn’t. He picked up the excited owl and set her on a stool, putting a majicka-enhancing tea in front of her which she promptly picked up and started sucking down. She was so jazzed about giving her update that she didn’t complain about any of this, and might not have even noticed it.

“Everything, Arthur. Everything. Between us, we can do anything. Karra lifts. Milo makes little gizmos and gadgets, which he can do even if he doesn’t have a ton of metal. Rhodia makes weird stuff out of clay and fires it up. And I juice everyone so they work faster and go ‘hey, have you thought of this’ and make them stop doing things in weird ways.”

“And this has worked?”

“It has, Arthur. It really has.” Lily launched into a long list of what they had accomplished in just the past few days. There were some real wins in there, ones that even Arthur could understand.

The walls had been improved, courtesy of a drill Milo had built that could poke holes in the walls for spears or swords to go through. Normally, the Slapstone would heal those holes right up, but Rhodia created a glass glaze that would keep the damage from being repaired. The glass would probably break during the battle, but Slapstone wasn’t fast enough at sealing for that to matter. Karra used the drill and Lily was the one who found all the right spots for holes that would maximize damage and minimize losses.

Lily had even talked to the town’s ranged fighters to see what they needed to do their jobs better, and came up with a crazy kind of platform that would slightly overhang the monster horde and give them a better vantage.

It wasn’t just them. The whole town was pitching in for the defense, coming up with their own ideas thanks Arthur’s encouragement and Lily’s ideas.

They had a local alchemist who was just starting to get some serious levels after figuring out what local plants could be used in pills. The power squad, as Lily called it, constructed a garden, got local farmers to absolutely juice the hell out of it with their magic agricultural powers, and then automated a bunch of the pill-forming steps with machinery.

Lily also noticed that the alchemist was focusing on a few very powerful pills instead of tons and tons of weak one. The right idea in peace time, but with a monster wave, the town would pick up lots of little injuries which meant more weaker pills. And since they still had lots of emergency pills piled up from their initial government-provided supplies, there was no real loss as far as the healing they’d need on hand for the battle went.

The list went on and on.

Most things weren’t so absolutely huge that they’d make a noticeable difference all by themselves. But over the past three days, the group had put in place about a dozen optimizations that would all affect the battle in some minor way or another, not counting the few long-shots they had taken.

They had been busy and Arthur was glad to see it.