Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

Arthur woke up with Mizu already gone. That was sad in a way but happy in others. For one, he didn’t have to figure out the delicate balance of leaving while she was still asleep, or finding a way to get comfortable without waking her up. Those were both things Mizu didn’t care about, outside of using them to make gentle fun of Arthur and only then because she could tell he really did care a lot about them. But it was nice to not have to think about them this morning.

The happiest way thought was that he could make a beeline for his house. More specifically, his bathroom. The defense of Coldbrook had included a lot of tea, which meant Arthur was waking up in a panic. He quickly dismounted the hammock and took care of that problem before turning to the next one, which was that he was filthy.

After a day of being hit by dust from various explosions, sitting on roofs, and generally exercising, Arthur looked and smelled like a coal miner who had just participated in a marathon. He blessed the weird, possibly non-existent gods of this place that the town’s water supply had somehow managed to get through the whole ordeal unscathed, and that he had splurged on a good, solid hot-water apparatus just a few weeks earlier.

Soap was pretty good in the demon world. They were a bar-soap race while Arthur had been a gel-soap-and-foofie kind of guy back on Earth. Here it didn’t matter much. Demon-made soap, in whatever format, cleaned better, rinsed cleaner, and soothed skin like nothing else.

That was good because he needed it right now. He let the water rinse out the coarser bits of the dirt for a few minutes, waiting until the flow finally wiped away the worst of it. He then got to work with the soap, which effectively stripped away the rest of the grime, leaving him pink and shining. Arthur was glad nobody could see him right now in his red-from-steam form, it would have confirmed once and for all the idea that he was just a shaved-ape.

Clean now, Arthur reached for the valve to turn off the water but paused his hand halfway. Were there people who probably wanted tea? Probably. But there was also the feeling of just hot enough water washing down on him and, on balance, the water was winning right now.

Forget it. They can wait just a bit, Arthur thought. It’s a holiday, after all.

A half-hour later, he emerged, put on his comfiest new socks, donned his uniform, and put on his boots. He probably didn’t need the uniform, but it was a holiday, and on holidays people did what they wanted to do. Today, Arthur just wanted to be a tea-maker. And he was going to, just as soon as he surveyed the wreckage outside the gate.

“Oh, there you are.” Karra was standing and eating an enormous bread-wrapped breakfast meal, gazing serenely out over the tons and tons of rock that now covered the only way out of town. “I wondered when you’d get up.”

“Yeah, sorry I’m late,” Arthur apologized.

“No, it’s good. That way Lily doesn’t have to yell at you for not getting enough rest. You came to look at my rocks?” Karra guessed.

“I did. It looks like a job.” Arthur frowned at the sheer scope of the work to be done. “Are you ever actually going to be able to clear that?”

“Oh, sure.” Karra took another bite of her breakfast and used a gulp of juice to wash it down. “It won’t be a small job, but we can just shift it all to the sides while we repair the road, then use it to build up the wall. It will be ugly for a while but the road should be usable in… oh, I’d say three or four days from now.”

“That’s fast.” Arthur tried to visualize what that would look like and couldn’t. “You know I come from a world without stats, right? The idea that people could move that much stone by hand that quick is still crazy to me. I don’t think I’ll ever really get used to it.”

“Huh.” Karra took the last bite of her breakfast, chewed it carefully, and swallowed. “So it would be like a crew of guys like you trying to move everything?”

“Pretty much. Although we had better machines than you do here. I’m not actually sure how long the job would take on Earth with the same number of people and those machines to help.”

“I’d like to see it if I ever get the chance. Anyway, here’s the breakdown of how I have it planned. I figure if I tell you, that cuts both of us loose for the rest of the day just to enjoy ourselves.”

Karra’s plan was to cut a narrow pathway through the rubble so people could get in and out, then to move the rest of the rubble layer by layer, starting at the top and working down. Once it all was moved, the construction crew would start fixing the river’s course and patching over the holes the traps had left in their road, then reconstructing the road in general.

After all that, she’d start on the walls. The monster wave experience had given her a lot of ideas, which she was eager to implement into the coming project.

“Is there any chance we get another monster wave? Like the one we just got, but before we are ready?” Arthur asked.

“I asked Onna the same thing, weeks back. Apparently we’re in the clear, unless something weird happens. Monster waves tend to soak up any monsters that are in the vicinity as they approach, so we’d have to get spectacularly unlucky for any groups of monsters bigger than a few strays to get to us,” Karra said.

“Well, good.” Arthur smiled at that, took a deep breath, and felt much, much better. “Can I offer you a cup of tea, Karra?”

“Absolutely, Arthur.”

They strolled back to the plaza, where half the town was already milling around, eating, and celebrating.

“Hey, everyone!” Arthur yelled. “It’s a tax holiday for the rest of the week, and we will be distributing three quarters of the monster corpse materials for free to anyone that can use them. If anyone put out expenses that can’t be recouped from monster materials, let the council know. Not today though. Today, I’m making tea.”

The town cheered and Arthur got to work. Lily found him almost immediately and he was enormously pleased to see she was already in her little work uniform and ready to get to tea-making.

“Pep!” Milo pulled up next to him on a stool. “I want an enormous amount of pep, Arthur.”

“Way ahead of you.” Arthur had a pot of generic pepped tea so big it bordered on being a literal barrel and kept it stocked until the town was awake and lively. He then started making novelty teas, something he had been messing with before the monster wave had become an issue but hadn’t had much time for in the last few months. Now he did, and if he wasn’t going to take advantage of that, then his name wasn’t Arthur Teamaster, of Earth.

Tea of Jumping

This tea helps people jump higher and more easily, in addition to making them land slightly softer. Because it doesn’t work in combat conditions, this effect is slightly larger and lasts slightly longer.

Tea of Musicality

This tea gives a very slight buff to general musicality and ability with musical instruments. While a very slight increase might seem small to you compared to some increases your abilities can now make, you should ask musicians how they feel about it once they’ve drank the tea.

Since the practical applications of this tea are very limited, the effect will hold for an entire day and production of the tea requires less majicka than you’d expect.

Tea of Dancing

Like the tea of Musicality, this is an extremely focused drink with no practical applications outside of making one dance slightly better. It has a very slight long-lasting effect on footwork as it relates to moving in visual pleasing ways to music, as well as allowing a willing drinker to believe they are dancing slightly better than they are.

Arthur was pleasantly pleased to find that this particular genre of lets-all-have-fun tea pulled on his majicka so minimally that he could pretty much churn them out indefinitely. Once he produced drinks in accordance to all his own ideas for what would make the town festival better, he started taking requests, giving each person who asked a very specific, mostly-useless buff that enhanced their enjoyment of the day.

Skal’s particular ask was an absolute win, something that Arthur was shocked he hadn’t thought of sooner.

Aperteaf

This tea is specifically made for drinking with a meal, and very slightly enhances the drinker’s perception of the flavor they get out of their food. It has a similarly intense effect on how satisfied the drinker feels after their meal is done, making them feel slightly more hungry at the beginning of the meal and very slightly more comfortably full at its end.

“We withdrew from interactions with the outside world for months after the war, refusing to socialize until verbal apologies had been issued and slowing the reconciliation process between our peoples,” Mizu said.

“Oh, gods, Mizu.” Arthur winced. “What did I do?”

“Explain why I was handed a box of shoes this morning. Rebes pounded on my door while I was taking my shower and wouldn’t stop until I got dressed and opened it. And then he just said to ask Arthur when I tried to figure out why,” Mizu said sternly. “This has something to do with the measurements he took earlier, doesn’t it?”

“Oh, that,” Arthur said. “I won’t explain them.”

Mizu flicked him. “You better. I’ll get Onna.”

“Just put them on. You’ll see.”

Mizu gave Arthur an uncertain look but took the shoes out of the box and began to unlace her old footwear. Once the new shoes were on her feet, a dawning sense of realization washed over her face.

“Arthur, what are these? They feel like… like…”

“I can’t describe them either. The best I have so far is that they feel like the essence of happy feet. Did you get the socks?”

“There are socks?” Mizu fished through the box until she found a single pair of socks tucked away underneath the paper the boots had been packed in, then almost tore off the shoes to put them on. Once everything was in place again, she walked around the front of Arthur’s shop, bouncing up and down experimentally.

“Is your girlfriend in a shoe-daze? I didn’t even know shoe-dazes were a thing,” one of the newer town residents asked.

“They are pretty good shoes,” Arthur said as he finished making another cup and handed it over.

“They must be. How much did they cost?”

“Don’t ask.”

After Mizu managed to shake herself out of her newfound pumped state, she approached the counter looking sheepish.

“So I’m forgiven?” Arthur asked.

“Arthur, how long have you been planning these shoes? They must have cost a fortune,” Mizu said.

“Well, the money has to go somewhere. I thought you deserved them.”

“This is…” Mizu bounced in her shoes again, sighing at the sheer experience of them. “Give me tea. Something for weller work. I’m going to make you special water.”

“Mizu, it’s a day off.”

“Shush, you. There is a gift-imbalance in our relationship. It cannot stand. Tea. Now.”

Arthur brewed up some tea. Once he handed it over, Mizu was gone, muttering to herself about shoe-worthy water.

“Do you think she’s going to be okay?” Lily looked up at Arthur. “I guess she probably will be, once she gets used to them.”

“You don’t get used to them. It’s like that all the time. You just learn to hide it,” Arthur said.

Lily digested this for a moment.

“How much did you say those cost again?”