Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

After recharging a little while longer, Arthur made a third round of tea, ones that would help mental classes with their stats. This was the smallest batch he’d make, not because mental-stat focused classes were that rare, but because most of them wouldn’t have anything especially useful to do with their classes during the wave. They’d be chucking rocks with the rest of everyone else.

After that, they went down to the shop. Arthur had sacks and sacks of root flour there already, and his machinery for making the pearls was in the back of the shop. The pearls were the tricky part of Arthur’s boba teas. Tea went further and kept longer, and was less of a problem in general. Boba pearls, on the other hand, were far more finicky.

“Three batches of boba, too?” Lily asked.

“Nope. At least not if I can get this stupid idea to work,” Arthur said.

“What idea?”

“It’s something I came up with after talking with Mizu about how her runes work. Some of the runes do things like pump water or purify things. But one time, she told me that some of them don’t do that. They draw in majicka and feed the other runes. They’re more like… gears, I guess.” Arthur tried to sharpen his vision for what he wanted to do.

“You can’t make runed boba, right? That’s too much even for you,” Lily said.

“Not runed. But just as a power source, to feed other things? I think I can do that just fine. It’s just going to take a hell of a lot of majicka.”

The first batch of flour was worked into dough and sent through the forming machine. Arthur did every step with his own hands. That was important, he had found, especially with the machines in the mix. He needed some minimum level of involvement or the system wouldn’t recognize his efforts. It wasn’t a big batch, just something he was doing to experiment with his idea. It was for five or ten glasses of tea, enough that he felt the punch of the lost majicka but not his entire reservoir.

“Did it work?” Lily asked.

“Take a look for yourself.” Arthur flicked over the screen that had popped up as soon as he had completed the batch. “Pretty good, I think.”

Powerplant Boba

A bit of honey adds energy to a drink, and a bit of warmth helps someone save the energy they’d otherwise use shivering. Every element of a recipe does something, whether it’s adding flavor, making a meal nourishing, or promoting a certain texture.

In your medicinal teas, ingredients often work the same way. These days, you are less reliant on medicinal ingredients and more on the manipulation of your majicka and intent, but the same rules broadly apply. An element might work to comfort while another works to strengthen or heal.

Your newly created Powerplant Boba pearls serve a purpose as well, even if it’s not a purpose of their own. By storing your majicka, each pearl reduces the eventual majicka cost of the teas you make with the pearls, allowing you to prepare for a major event in advance and to do more over a short period of time than you’d otherwise be able to accomplish.

The conversion rate between majicka spent on and recovered from each pearl is not without loss but the difference varies based on several factors best learned from trial and error.

“That’s pretty vague,” Lily said. “Is it a ten percent efficiency? Fifty? It feels like that matters.”

“It does but it doesn’t matter right now. Even if it’s one percent, it’s energy I can store for the big battle. It means I can do more when it matters,” Arthur said.

“That makes sense. Shall we keep going?”

“Yup. Just keep your little majicka lamp shining and I’ll empty out my majicka stores. Let’s see how good that pill I took really was.”

By the end of the day, they had about a fifth of what Arthur wanted to prep but it was a start. He hung a quickly drawn sign on the front of his shop letting people know it was all conventional tea for the evening and started slinging tea for the rush. Out of all his close friends, it was Milo who found him first, dragging Puka behind him.

“Arthur, I’m buying this guy a drink.” Milo was covered in scrapes and dirt but beaming ear to ear. “Because he’s a genius and he deserves it.”

“I’m buying. No question,” Puka said. “The levels I’ve gained, Arthur, just today, are more than I’ve got in the last year. The entire year.”

“Things are going good, I take it?” Arthur handed over a couple cups of tea based entirely on what Empathetic Host was telling him they might like.

“Great. We finished a couple of the big traps. I’ll show you them tomorrow if you want. If they work, they’re going to make a big difference in how this fight feels.” Milo shoved Puka. “It’s this guy’s ideas, mostly. My mechanics driving them.”

“It will kill that many monsters?” Arthur asked.

“Not just that.” Puka lifted himself onto a stool, grabbed a notepad from his belt bag, and set it up on its edge on the counter. “Imagine this is the wall. Ours is much smaller than most cities that try defending themselves. And that’s a strength because we can concentrate a lot of force on that spot. It’s a small fraction of the overall force at any given time.”

“But it’s also a problem.” Milo moved his hand to the base of the pad. “Because all the force from the monsters is also focused on that one spot.”

“And it breaks down the wall?”

“Worse. The monsters pile up, which means the monsters climbing over the dead bodies are hitting the wall higher and they get better leverage. Plus, a lot of our defenses, like the holes in the wall the warriors are stabbing through, get pushed out of position,” Milo explained.

“And the traps… help with that? How? It’s going to be tons of monsters.”

“Wait and see. Mizu told us not to tell you in advance. She says you love surprises.”

“I hate surprises!” Arthur let his voice rise a bit, then controlled it back down to a normal level as he put the two cups of cold tea down in front of Milo and Puka. “Or at least I don’t want to wait to know all this stuff.”

“She said you’d say that.” Milo winked at Arthur as he grabbed the drinks and slapped a few coins down on the counter. “Come on, Puka. I’ll get you some food. You’ve earned it.”

Puka and Milo’s argument about who would pay for dinner got intense enough that both of them failed to notice Rhodia walking up behind them. As they left, she looked after them and sighed.

“He’s like that every time he gets into a project, for the record.” Rhodia shook her head as she watched the two friends walk off. “He’s a crafter, so when an exciting crafting thing happens, he ignores everything else for a little while.”

“On Earth, I think a spouse would get pretty mad about that,” Arthur offered. “Some of them, at least.”

“Oh, maybe. But remember that I’m a crafter too. So it goes both ways. Tea?”

“Sure.” Arthur mixed up something for Rhodia in equipment she had helped build and handed it over in a glass she had made entirely herself. Rhodia was an interesting class for Arthur. Most people’s professional paths went more and more specific as they progressed. Rhodia had gone the other way since she got to Coldbrook, getting more and more generalized and capable over a wide range of objects. Everyone generalized a little, as was the case with Arthur’s baking skill even though he was a teamaster, but most people stopped after a certain point. Rhodia jumped into generalist-mode headfirst.

“Can I ask you a question about your class?” Arthur asked. “There’s something about it that I don’t understand.”

“Sure thing.” Rhodia sipped her tea. “Shoot.”

“So don’t get me wrong when I say this because you’ve been really, really useful to the town the last couple of months. But I’ve been watching how you grow, and… I don’t know how to say this, actually,” Arthur said.

Rhodia laughed. “And you are worried I’m over-generalizing, and hurting my class for the sake of the town. Something like that, right?”

“Yeah, basically. I don’t think anyone would want that.”

“Oh, I might. If it meant that I could help the town, I might burn my class entirely and start over with something else. I mean, you’d do it, right?” Rhodia didn’t wait for an answer to that, which was good because Arthur wasn’t sure he had one. “But no, I’m not hurting my class. I’m not a chaser in the first place.”

“A chaser?”

“Yeah. Like Talca, or Milo. Or you, for that matter. People who chase after the top spot in their class. They push on every limit they can, focus hard on specific goals, and try to do… I don’t know how to put it. Big special things. Things that people will remember throughout the entire world.”

“Ah. I’m not sure that’s me.” Arthur did try to progress in his class, but he wasn’t sure he even cared if anyone knew it. “The fame part, at least.”

“Oh, it’s not for Milo, either. But people will remember him, all the same.” Rhodia glanced at her husband lovingly as he clapped Puka hard enough on the back that the trapper almost choked on a mouthful of fish. “There’s nothing wrong with that. Those people push the world forward. It’s just that I’m not like that. I never have been.”

Arthur gave another cup of tea to an incoming customer, then leaned on the counter. “So what are you like then?”

“I want to make things. I like that,” Rhodia said softly. “And I think I want… Okay, so imagine I had a shop. I will someday, I think. And imagine someone moved into town and they weren’t able to bring many of their things with them.”

“Like Hune.”

“Exactly. I want that person to walk into my shop and be able to get everything they need. Dishes. Pots. Vases. Big bathtubs. Whatever. And I want to get to figure out how to make all those things too. It might not be the absolute cutting-edge drinking glass that will change the entire world but who wants everything like that anyway? I’ll just make very good stuff people can use and a lot of it.”

“Hmm.” That made sense to Arthur in a Goose Sage kind of way. “Well, you’ve been essential for the town. Those furnaces you made for Hune are game changers all by themselves. What have you been up to since then?”

“I’ve been trying to make ammunition. Milo suggested it, that I see if I can make something with ceramics that’s better than rocks would be,” Rhodia laughed.

“How has that been going?” Arthur asked.

Rhodia wobbled her head a little. “It’s a mixed bag. Ceramics isn’t really a warfare skill, you know. But I might be able to get something that works by the time it matters.”

“Is that the best use of your time?”

“The funny thing about an incoming monster wave, Arthur, is that people tend to stop ordering cups. Imagine that.” Rhodia stood up. “It’s probably time for me to round up my husband. I’ll bring back your glass later.”

Arthur shook his head and went back to his work. A few more people came to get tea over the next few minutes but after that, he got the distinct sense that the town’s nightly post-work semi-party was wrapping up. Ducking into the back of the shop, he managed to make a pound or so of boba pearls before his energy stores bottomed out again, then went home and hit his new, absolutely lovely, sheets.