Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

“You saw this, right?” Lily knocked on Arthur’s door early the next morning, gripping a piece of paper gingerly. “It’s pretty good. It has all the candidates on it and everything. And a bunch of comments about you. What did you do to this guy?”

“What?” Arthur took the piece of paper and read over everything. “Oh, Sett. I just met him yesterday.”

“Oh, I get it,” Lily said. “First Arthur contact. Yup. That would do it.”

Arthur was beginning to see the various puzzle pieces related to Sett start to fit together. It would be weird timing if he was right about who he was dealing with, but Arthur found the system soft-worked that way. It piled on coincidence after coincidence if it meant a beautiful world, shamelessly pushing the limits of probability to make sure everything was nice at all times.

A couple minutes later, Arthur found the goose in the town.

“Hey, Sett?” The goose turned around as Arthur called him, expectation on his face. “I don’t think you ever really told me. What do you do again?”

“Like I said, I’m a man of letters. A gazetteer, out to do a survey of the frontier and bring stories back to the cities. If you know of any interesting ones, let me know. I’m always looking for things to print,” Sett said happily, not at all

“Nothing springs to mind, but I’ll let you know.”

Arthur let Sett go. He was tempted to try to convince the gazetteer to stay right then and there, but something told him he’d only turn the goose off the town entirely if he was pushy like that. It was better to let him take a look around first and draw his own conclusions. He doubted this would be the last time he saw Sett, in any case.

The next meeting between the two came sooner than Arthur thought. As Arthur walked around town between the morning and afternoon rushes, the goose found him and approached him at a pace that could be defined as chasing him down.

“Arthur,” Sett said. “You don’t brag much, do you?”

“Brag? No, I guess not.”

“Consider it confirmed that you don’t. Did you really tame a Prata?”

“I wouldn’t say Daisy is tame. She’s more of a helpful friend. If anything, Rumble is the tamer of the two and even he just does what he wants.”

“Ah, yes, Rumble.” The goose looked exasperated. “Listen, not that it’s your job to provide me with stories, but if you ever feel like being helpful to a gazetteer, know that interesting stories about gigantic, untameable beasts who just decided to work as guardians for an entire town are a very good start. Can I ask you some questions about them?”

Arthur did his best to give Sett the full picture of the saga with Daisy and Rumble, such as it was. The goose seemed particularly interested in the idea that Rumble was a fiend for getting pets, and that they had became friends after a dangerous situation. Both of those, he said, were story gold.

After chiding Arthur for not telling him all that in the first place, Sett was gone again to talk to other people in the town. It was less than an hour before he found Arthur again.

“Arthur, you… listen. How much of this town is interesting to you? I mean really interesting in a way you’d tell me about.”

“A lot of it? It’s a pretty place. We have a lot of different trees out in the forest, and…”

Sett slapped his forehead.

“Not that kind of stuff. Lots of towns have that. You know what lots of towns don’t have? Children who forced the system to give them a class years early and who somehow managed to be a majicka-sharing assistant class. Do you know how valuable she’d be in the capital?”

“She’s pretty valuable here, actually. Helps out with a lot of things,” Arthur said.

“Helps out with a lot of things, he says. Well, in a big city, she’d be a strategic resource. She’d be on a team that had another full team just to figure out the best place to put her at any given time. And instead, your town has her. Because she’s your daughter?”

“Oh, not my daughter.” Arthur paused to consider things. “Well, kind of. Or my sister. We sort of adopted each other.”

Arthur could actually see the goose getting red under his feathers. Sett opened his mouth as if to chide Arthur, choked on his words, shook his head, and walked off, muttering about how people had no sense of what made an interesting story.

“You don’t want to know more?” Arthur yelled out after him.

“I’ll ask the girl!” Sett yelled. “Knowing you, you’ll miss all the interesting parts. Now, listen. That’s it? You really don’t have any more interesting stories to share? I’ve got all of them?”

“I think so?” Arthur said with a feeling that he was forgetting something. In a smaller voice, he added, “All of them that pop to mind.”

Sett left again, a determined glint in his eye. Arthur didn’t see him again until the dinnertime rush was about to start. The goose had set up outside of Arthur’s shop, spotting him a mile off and tapping his foot in annoyance until Arthur closed the gap between them.

“You know what happens whenever I talk to anyone at all, Arthur? Do you know?” Sett demanded.

“They tell you interesting things for your newspaper?” Arthur offered.

“Oh, they tell me those, all right. They say, ‘Oh, you should talk to Arthur about the time he saved three cities by sharing resources.’ Or they say, ‘Oh, yeah, Arthur makes magic tea that ignores alchemy stacks.’”

Sett was not, as far as Arthur knew, made of soap. That inconvenient fact was doing absolutely nothing to keep him from working himself up into a full lather.

“Oh, Arthur’s great friends with Karbo. That’s how he got Karbo to blow up an entire mountain that one time. Oh, that was Arthur. He convinced the best wagoneer and best smelter under the age of fifty in the entire world to move here and also they’re getting married.”

“Wait, Talca’s getting married?” Arthur’s eyes widened.

“That’s beside the point, Arthur! I just spent a day talking to an entire town about weird stuff you do. An entire day about how you drag in news once a week like a fisherman who catches whales. And that was before, Arthur, I found out you were an offworlder.”

“You didn’t know?” Arthur motioned generally at his own body. “I mean, I look like this.”

“I thought you were a monkey or something!”

“Well, no, I’m an offworlder.” Arthur scratched the side of his head a bit, bashfully. “I’m sorry for not mentioning that or the other stuff. I guess it all just seems kind of normal to me now. It’s how my life has been for a while.”

The goose paced back and forth a bit, visibly trying to calm himself down. He finally circled back to where Arthur was standing, looking a bit like he might actually grab Arthur’s collar to make sure he was paying attention.

“Arthur, I’m going to ask you one more time. Do you know of any interesting stories in town? Anything that I might be interested in that you can tell me about, so I don’t have to spend a bunch of time digging it up?”

“No.” Arthur was confident. “I think you’ve got just about everything. You know about the monster wave, and Lily, and me. And the town generally. That’s about all of it.”

The next time Arthur and Sett met, Mizu almost beat the gazetteer up.

Arthur and Mizu were having a pleasant stroll when Arthur was suddenly tacked from behind by a manic goose, turning around on the ground to see him looming over him, brandishing a notepad threateningly and with a crazed glint in his eye. Arthur raised a hand to stop Mizu as she glared at this new, confusing threat to her boyfriend.

“What, Sett? I told you everything,” Arthur said. “Everything I could think of.”

“Everything he can think of, he says.” Sett glared at Arthur. “He just forgets little details. Like how one of his town’s founding members was the freaking moonlight angler. You forgot to mention that all the town’s fish are supplied by the Lines-man of the Coming Dawn. Just a little thing like that.”

“Our towns bristled with frozen spears, pointed outwards as a threat to any who might dare to attack.” Mizu’s rare foray into the more violent and threatening of her greetings seemed to give the goose pause, which was probably her intent. “Arthur, who is this violent goose demon? And what did you do to him?”

“I asked him if there were any interesting stories in town, and he…” Sett’s voice trailed off as he looked at Mizu desperately, like she might have the sanity and grounding he had failed to find in Arthur. “Does he really feel like all this is normal? All….. this?”

“Ooooh.” Mizu’s face lit up with realization. “You’re dealing with Arthur stuff for the first time. Got it. Everyone goes through this. Carry on.”

Arthur looked at Mizu with exasperation as she stepped back, a glint of mischief in her eye. He tried his best to figure out how to patch things up with the increasingly annoyed gazetteer.

“Listen, man, I’m doing my best,” Arthur said. “Since I got here, everything has been like this. All the time. It’s my normal, okay? Fun stuff just happens. I thought it was how it was for everyone.”

“He really did.” Mizu laughed. “Like everyone has trained Pratas and gets named most valuable contributor to a major city’s monster wave a month after they get their class.”

“Oh, gods.” Sett sat down, almost missing the bench in his annoyance. “I’m going to have to stay here, aren’t I?”

“Probably,” Mizu said blandly. “Most people do.”

“I don’t even have a printing press.”

“Oh, that’s fine. Milo will build you something.” Mizu grabbed the goose’s elbow and started leading him away. “I’ll introduce you right now, and send the bad offworlder away before he upsets you more.”

“Mizu!” Arthur exclaimed.

“Now, Arthur, leave the nice goose alone. Give him some time to acclimate.” Mizu almost skipped away as she left with the gazetteer. “Just go make tea or something, and be glad you caught another one.”