Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

“Should we be worried about them?” Arthur asked. “Maybe find them and put them somewhere safe?”

“No, no.” Lith shook his head and looked like he was trying to picture Arthur herding the Pratas. “Monster waves don’t move that fast. The quicker monsters are held back by the slower ones. Pratas are pretty quick for all their size. They’ll take care of themselves.”

“Okay then. Anything else, anybody?” Arthur looked at the rest of the council, then the crowd. As many worries as they probably had, nobody else raised a hand to speak. There was plenty of work to do, but the productive talk related to it would mostly come in the day-by-day, on-the-ground coordination between people. For now, there was no more use in additional words. “Good. Enjoy your food, everyone. Let’s all do our best.”

When Arthur made it back down off the stage, his reflex was to expect various people to come up to him and ask him what to do, or how to handle their projects. They always had before, until the meeting before this one had given the agency to pursue their own projects. After a few days of independence, they quickly broke into their own groups. To the extent he heard anything about projects, it was when passing people who were discussing this or that thing they might do, saying technical things he didn’t understand and knew he shouldn’t meddle with.

All that was fine. It meant that he could enjoy himself.

“So what’s next?” Mizu asked. After he found seats for himself and Mizu, Arthur was digging into his meal with real enthusiasm. Something about being on the other side of the stress of an upcoming speech left him starving, and he was glad to have an easy solution to that problem. Mizu was approaching her meal at a much more dainty pace, one that left her with space to talk as Arthur chewed. “Is it just making tea?”

“Tea, and things for tea.” Arthur washed down a particularly big bite of noodles with a drink of juice, and paused his eating to respond. “It’s going to take a lot of prep work to make sure everyone can have a drink at all times. Water alone will be a huge job.”

“Water is covered.” Mizu twisted some noodles up on her fork and nodded towards the wall. “I have pipes going to each wall. You can just pull what you need as you need it.”

“How did you do that?” Arthur asked.

“Majicka. And work.” Mizu grimaced. “A lot of work. Water doesn’t like to go straight up, especially that far.”

“What happens when the monsters wreck the pipes? It seems like it would be a pretty big leak in the system, and we know that first wall is going to fall at some point,” Arthur said.

“Milo made me some valves, so we can just turn each one off as that happens. Plus I have some plans for that.”

“Plans?” Arthur perked up. Mizu was, despite her quiet nature, a tricky person at heart. Her eyes had filled with mischief and there was suddenly nothing in the world that Arthur could think of that he wanted to know about more. “What plans?”

Mizu almost told him, then stopped and reconsidered. “You know what? I’m not going to tell you. You could use a surprise. Don’t worry, it will be fun. Exactly the kind of thing you’ll like when it happens.”

“Oh, come on. Give me a hint.”

“It has to do with water.”

“That’s expected!” Arthur leaned over the table with conspiracy in his eyes. “Come on, tell me. I’ll keep it secret.”

“No.”

“I’m the mayor!” Arthur said. “I’m supposed to know!”

“I know!” Mizu was positively gleeful now. “That’s why it’s so funny.”

“Fine. Be that way. I’m not going to tell you what I’m going to do with my tea, then.”

Mizu lifted up three fingers on her right hand, touching her upraised index finger with the other before bending it down. “Let me guess. First, you are going to make as much boba and harvest as much tea as you can.”

“That’s a given.”

“Second, you are hoping to level up your skills, and if you get any, you'll make as many new ingredients with those as you can before you run out of ingredients. You’ll sort the new stuff so it goes first, and only make tea using the old stuff if you really need to.”

“Good guess. What about third?”

“Named drinks. You’ll be overdrawing your majicka all day until the waves get here trying to make something special that can give us an edge.”

Arthur slumped. Those really were his plans. “I guess that wasn’t as hard to figure out as I thought it was.”

“Nope.” Mizu patted him on the shoulder reassuringly. “But don’t worry too much. You’ve already been surprising enough. You got a whole smelting class here, remember? Milo won’t stop talking about it.”

“That wasn’t me. If anything, it was Talca,” Arthur said.

“Sure, sure. Not like she got caught in the Arthur vortex or anything like that.”

Once they had finished their meal, Arthur and Mizu made their rounds, finding Milo locked in a discussion about smelting techniques with Hune as Talca held her hand and listened to every word she was saying like it was the most important thing ever.

“No, see, that doesn’t work,” Hune said loudly. “If I make the furnaces hotter, it breaks the clay that much faster. If I make the furnaces bigger, it’s more to lose on each one.”

“But you could do more total. More furnaces with more metal,” Milo argued.

“Nope. My class counts the total mass of metal I’m working on. I’ve tested it before, on little furnaces. If it’s twice as much ore, then it’s twice as much draw. Trust me, I’m topped out. I wouldn’t have even lasted this long at this pace if it wasn’t for Lily,” Hune said while glancing at Talca.

“Milo, are you giving her a hard time?” Arthur pulled out a chair for Mizu then sat down himself. “It’s only been a day of almost limitless metal, and you are tired of it already?”

“No!” Milo almost shouted, sending a half-worried look at Hune. “I have more metal than I can actually use. She’s a monster, Arthur. I’ve never even heard of anyone making this much iron at once.”

“I do have more help than smelters generally get.” Hune admitted. “But yes, I’m pretty great.”

“Then what’s the concern with output?”

“She’s trying to get an achievement. Another one, I mean. She feels like she is on the cusp of one.”

“It’s this close.” Hune held up her hand with her thumb and forefinger less than an inch apart. “I can tell.”

“Is that really even the kind of thing you can feel? When I get them, it’s like…” Arthur tried to remember the exact sensation of getting hit with a new achievement or skill. “Like I’m drunk all at once, for just a second or two. But it’s always a surprise.”

“Maybe not. But it’s worth trying, anyway. If it works, everyone gets more iron and I get the achievement. If it doesn’t work, everyone still gets more iron,” Hune said. “But most of the ways I could speed things up either aren’t safe or take more majicka than I have. Even with Lily, who helped me get the last one.”

“Well, do whatever you need to do, but be safe,” Arthur said. “I don’t think we can do the other things we need to without you and nobody wants to see you get hurt.”

Arthur ended up having a couple versions of the same conversation with different people who were pushing the limits of their own classes as far as they could. He even had one in the other direction, with Rhodia having the presence of mind to remind him that there were limits to how far he should overdraw his own majicka.

Arthur would have loved it if there were more conversations about things that weren’t the monster wave or the preparations for it, but everyone else was similar to him in that they couldn’t fully ignore the looming challenge before them. It was almost the end of Arthur’s evening when someone finally managed to break the pattern.

“Can you come by the shop tomorrow? I need to do a few more measurements,” Rebes, the cobbler, said. “I thought you’d check on the progress of the shoes or something by now, but nope. I had to chase you down.”

“Yeah, sure. No problem,” Arthur said. “When is good?”

“Early, if you can. Dawn?”

“Works for me. I’ll see you then.”

Mizu jokingly asked if Arthur wanted to come accidentally fall asleep on her couch again, but both of them had their own work to rest up for. Arthur would have never admitted it to her, but he was also so eager to get back to his own bed that he was almost more excited about that than he was about spending more time with her. Almost.

The magic sheets were just as good as he remembered. Despite his worries, he was asleep almost immediately, curled up in a cloud of comfort.