Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

“So are you running?” Arthur dished up Lith’s drink, which was a sleepy-time tea despite it being the early morning. Lith’s work hours tended to swing wildly depending on what he was hunting, and the influx of beasts coming back after the monster wave meant he was taking a few night shifts to bring in the game. “You would probably do well with the hunter and warrior classes, right?”

“I always forget you are an offworlder.” Lith sipped his drink. “Well, no, I don’t. But I forget the implications. No, I wouldn’t do well with them.”

“Why not?”

“They’re some of my most loyal friends. They’ll step in front of a charging monster with no hesitation to protect me, or give up on a great kill if it’s what I need for my class right then. But that’s different. Warriors won’t vote for other warriors for civil leadership. Ever.”

“Why not?” Arthur stepped back into the shop and took a look at a big pot of boba pearls that had almost but not quite reached the right consistency. “Seriously. If there’s an obvious reason, I’m missing it.”

“Part of it is that we know ourselves. Most warriors aren’t dumb, but they are smart in specialized ways that have to do with fighting. They pay close attention but only to fighting.”

“Ah.” Arthur remembered the example of Karbo. A genius at fighting and not so much at other things.

“And that’s not even the big part. The big part is that the work warriors and hunters do happens outside the town. That’s not true during a monster wave, but it’s true every other time. I’m just working alone most of the time, going off gut decisions. We have the world out there handled. It’s the world inside the city walls we don’t get. For that, you don’t want an athletic, outside kind of guy. You want… well, I don’t know how to put this.”

“An inside kid?”

“Ha!” Lith snorted. “Yes, an inside kid. Or if you can’t get that, someone like Karra, who maybe isn’t that good at writing things down but who spends a lot of time seeing what everyone else is up to.”

“Would you vote for Karra?” Arthur asked. “Honestly. Between just you and me.”

“In a vacuum? Sure. But there are other people running. If I’m being honest, my money is on Spiky. Or Mizu, if she runs.”

“Mizu?” Arthur hadn’t thought about that. “It’s hard to imagine her in that job. She doesn’t like to give speeches.”

“Maybe not, but she’s smart. And scary. That’s a good combo, I’ve found. Do me a favor and find out if she’s running when you get a chance. I’ll vote for her, if she is.”

Less than an hour after Lith left, Arthur got that chance. Mizu came into the shop, saw Arthur was busy with customers, and retreated to a table near the back. In peaceful times, this wasn’t rare at all. She would spend her extra time relaxing in sight and hearing range of Arthur. For a while, back in the city, Arthur had assumed she needed his attention from time to time when she did that, and made a point of periodically checking in with her so she wouldn’t feel ignored.

Eventually, he figured out it wasn’t like that at all. If he had time to talk with her, she enjoyed him taking a few minutes for her. If he didn’t, she didn’t mind at all. She was fully capable of enjoying herself by herself, and treating Arthur and the shop as a pleasant sort of background noise. If he wanted to deal with other things before talking with her, he had all the time in the world.

He had no intention of doing other things. Today, he had tea, and not just the drinkable kind.

“Mizu,” Arthur said as he made a fist with his hand and held it in front of his chest. “There are rumors and speculation that you might be running for mayor, in a shocking reversal of expectations. Do you have any comments for the viewers at home?”

“For the what?”

“Our television audience.”

“If this is Earthman stuff, Arthur, I’m not following.”

“Oh, it is,” Arthur said. “It’s offworlder nonsense. But still. I just had someone ask me if you were running, and it’s not like you’d do a bad job. Have you thought about it?”

“For a moment,” Mizu admitted. Arthur arced his eyebrows in surprise. “A short moment. A very short moment. I’d have to talk all the time. And keep track of things that didn’t have to do with water. I could do it, but…”

“But you don’t want to,” Arthur finished the sentence for Mizu. The bell on Arthur’s door rang as Onna, wearing street clothes, let herself in and plopped on the chair next to Mizu. It looked like they might have coordinated their days off to spend them together. Arthur was glad, if so. He saw a lot of friendships put temporarily on hold while the town dealt with its crisis. Seeing those relationships rekindle, even in small ways, did his heart good. “Did you hear, Onna? Mizu doesn’t want to run for mayor.”

“It’s a shame. She’d be good at it. Especially once she got used to making speeches,” Onna teased.

“Agreed.” Arthur nodded. “What about you? You could run. I know guards are kind of warrior classes, but it seems like that’s only about half of what you do.”

Onna waved her hand dismissively. “That’s half too much. Warriors shouldn’t be mayors, Arthur. Didn’t anyone ever tell you that?”

“Lith did. Not in those words,” Arthur said.

“Well, he was right. Actually, that’s part of why I’m here. I figure if anybody knows who is running right now, it’s you. Being in one place and talking to so many people, and all.”

“I’m afraid not. Spiky is in the running, but you know that. Karra’s workers are trying to get her to run but I don’t think she’s decided she wants to do that yet. Otherwise, people either haven’t decided to run yet or aren’t telling me about it.”

“See, this is the problem with a new town. In the city, you could just read the gazette,” Onna complained.

“That’s the second time I’ve heard someone mention that.” Arthur plopped a cup of tea in front of both Onna and Mizu, then sat down again himself. “And I lived in the city for a while and never even saw one.”

“You did so,” Mizu said. “It was a little piece of paper, maybe this big. People carried them and handed them around when they were done.”

“That was the gazette?” Arthur remembered what Mizu was talking, but it was about the size of a single piece of notebook paper, maybe a little bigger. “I thought those were just business reports or something.”

“I mean, how much news do you think there was in a typical day in the city? It mostly was business reports. How much of whatever rock got mined that day and that kind of thing.”

“No human interest stories? I guess they’d be demon interest stories here, but stories about people? None of that?”

“Oh, they had them. Usually, one a day. ‘Boku the herder lost a sheep, and found it in the mouth of a Grouk. Knowing the Grouk’s weakness for cheese, he quickly hatched a plan.’ That sort of thing.”

“Huh.” Arthur wondered how many stories he had missed out by not reading the small piece of paper. “Well, we don’t have one for now. Is there anyone in town who has that skill?”

“Leena and Spiky are the closest, and they stay busy.”

“Then we’ll just have to make do. It’s not the biggest problem.”

—

Most Demon World problems had a way of working themselves out. If the system hadn’t taken Arthur at his word that he was quitting the mayor job and removed his leadership window access, he might have known this particular issue was well on its way to being resolved. As it was, he had to find out the old-fashioned way, like everyone else.

“Oh, hey.” Arthur glanced up and saw a larger bird demon taking a seat at the outside counter of his shop. “I don’t think we’ve met. I’m Arthur. Are you settling?”

New arrivals to the town weren’t rare, though they had been somewhat on hold during the monster wave period. Most people weren’t willing to take a risk on a town that would most likely be leveled within a week or so. It made more sense to wait until the town was destroyed, come in then, and start on a more-or-less even footing with everyone else. This was the first new face Arthur had seen since the waves became a threat, not counting the temporary influx of people from Seaside and Peaktown.

“I’m Sett.” The bird shook his head. “And no, not a settler. Just passing through.”

“That’s rare,” Arthur commented.

“Is it?” The goose unslung a large leather bag from its shoulder, placing it on the stool next to him and pulling out a pad and paper. “In a lively town like this, I would have expected more visitors.”

“Settlers, sure. People coming here for business aren’t rare, either. But passing through?” Arthur nodded towards the cliffs and ocean. “Where would they be passing through to? We’re sort of at the end of the world here.”

Sett jotted something down on the paper with a pencil then let loose a honking laugh. He was either a goose or swan demon. Arthur hadn’t entirely figured out which just yet.

“Ha! Yes, I suppose that makes sense. I’m going to Seaside after this, then Drysand. Just a general tour of the ends of the Demon World,” Sett said.

“Seaside is a nice place, at least judging by the people. Drysand is a new one for me. What’s their story?” Arthur asked.

“They’re a desert town. It’s just a few buildings in the sand, from what I hear. They run a mining operation.”

“In the sandy desert? What do they mine?”

“Sand.” The goose made another note in his book. It was suspicious that he kept doing that, but he also seemed harmless enough that Arthur decided to just write the note-taking off as a quirk. “There are a lot of uses for sand. Making glass, filling in pits in the ground, that sort of thing.”

“Huh.” Arthur wondered if Karra could use any sand for her packed-earth wall design. That would mean holes in the wall would more or less self-fill and he figured sand might just be better than normal dirt for that purpose. “Any idea what it costs?”

“Not me. I’m a humble demon of letters. Plus, I haven’t even been out there yet. This is just what I’ve heard.” The goose demon glanced up to the menu again. He had been looking at it off and on since he sat down. “You are going to have to help me with this. What in the world is a boba?”

Arthur ran him through his usual explanation of all things boba. Yes, it was a drink. Yes, it also had food in it, kind of. No, it wasn’t meant to replace meals. No, it probably wasn’t as weird as the new customer thought, and Arthur recommended he just try something that sounded good.

The goose ended up ordering a full-pep tea with some of Arthur’s darkest, fullest flavored leaves. Arthur let Empathetic Brewer take a look at the goose’s preferences and found Sett wasn’t kidding or trying to put on a pretense of liking serious, heavy-flavored drinks like some people might. Arthur brewed him the strongest, darkest tea he could, relatively impressed at the hardcore nature of the goose’s palate.

“Oh, that is really good.” The goose had allowed Arthur to add just the smallest amount of cream to the drink to round out the experience, and gulped greedily on the straw as he got his first few tastes of the drink. “And these boba things are… interesting. Some kind of jelly?”

“Not really. They’re made of root flour. I released a pamphlet on it with my town’s librarian once.”

“Oh, really? I’ll have to track that down.”

The goose kept drinking as his eyes dropped to his notepad and he hurriedly scribbled out several lines of text. Soon enough, the drink was empty, and the goose patted his stomach as he let out a little ahhh of satisfaction.

“Well, thank you for this. And the conversation. You are the mayor, right?”

“Not as of a few days ago. We have an election coming up to deal with that change.”

“Interesting!” Sett bobbed his head and put his empty cup down on Arthur’s counter. “I’ll make sure and gather some impressions from people in the town about that.”

—

A couple hours later and unbeknownst to Arthur, Milo was entranced by the idea of printing presses. After an all-nighter with the put-upon goose journalist, they had a working prototype of a press that was enough to get out an early pamphlet about the elections.