Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

That night, Arthur did something he knew was a good idea but rarely got around to actually doing. He pulled out a pad and paper and tried to put a bit of structure behind the idea of improving his menu. As he sat down at the desk in his house, he realized with a sort of subtle shame that it was the first time he had ever actually used his very nice desk for its actual, explicit purpose. He wasn’t, in the end, the bookiest of demons, and to the extent he worked with words, it was usually on the run and in response to some sort of immediate need.

The first task he tried to tackle was the most boring, mostly consisting of writing out his regular menu with a few notes for himself on each item. He didn’t keep regular notes about purchases, but he had a pretty good idea of how much each item sold in terms of quantity. Right off the bat, there were a few ingredients he knew he could take off the menu if he wanted. Most people didn’t seem to like them, and the few who did could ask for them in a special order.

He also had some new ingredients that weren’t on the signs yet, but that everyone knew about. At this point, all the local fruits and ingredients in the vicinity had been more or less brought to bear by the town’s farmers, which left Arthur with a few new flavors and a few that more-or-less stood in for hard-to-get older ingredients.

Arthur marked every change he wanted to make to the drink menu within a few minutes, but didn’t feel any sense of accomplishment at just that. This was his physical menu, the one having to do with ingredients and flavors. Not that Arthur thought he was ever going to be fully done refining the delicious-normal-food parts of his craft, but right now, he had that part of his job down.

What he needed to do, as discussed with Lily, was figure out a better way to quantify the more majickal parts of what he did. Right now, he was playing fast and loose with Empathetic Brewer, trying to figure out what other people needed. That had been a lot easier during the ramp up to the demon wave, since he only had to find a few key places to dump most of his majicka each day. Now he needed to do it dozens of times in weaker, less-precise brews he could make a lot of before he ran dry. He needed more efficiency.

Taking up his pen, Arthur tried his hand at naming the normal, less exciting types of enhancement brews he made every day.

Lift

Work harder and longer. This drink enhances your vitality and strength, allowing you to put more of your shoulder behind any task of the heavy lifting, bashing, and shoving varieties.

Plus Enhancement (2 Coins): Focus the drink’s effects on a particular kind of heavy labor or intense combat.

March

Juice your vitality and dexterity to allow you to travel faster and complete light labor better. If you want to work faster instead of harder while still bringing endurance to the table, this is the drink for you.

Plus Enhancement (2 Coins): Focus the drink’s effects on a particular kind of detailed labor or travel.

Swing

Built for fighters and smith-style workers, Swing brings your dexterity and strength scores up to allow for more accurate strikes that hit like a falling boulder.

Plus Enhancement (2 Coins): Focus the drink’s effects on either combat or a particular heavy-labor, dexterity dependent task.

Aim…

The list went on. Aim increased dexterity and perception to let archers place shots better, or to help tailors thread needles. Etch brought up dexterity and intelligence, helping the rare Spiky-type professional do their writing better. Scry helped wisdom and perception. Think buffed intelligence and wisdom. Arthur kept working until he had a name and effect combination for several more possibilities, some of which he was pretty sure nobody would ever want, given the lack of general crossover between stats like strength and wisdom for most classes.

In the end, he had about seven combinations that were solid. He knew there were more than that, but took the fact that he couldn’t think of anyone who would be left out by the combinations he hadn’t covered as an indication that he was probably okay in what he had.

This was progress, but it was also the easy part of the task. All these drinks put names to things people already knew that Arthur could do. It was necessary and would streamline his shop, but it wouldn’t make him truly more useful. For that, he thought back to a drink he had made days ago, one that he was holding up as a model for the real and difficult part of his plans.

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.

That, Arthur thought, was what he needed more of. Where drinks like March helped people work, Aperteaf was a drink that helped them live. Arthur didn’t want all of his beverages to just be things that helped people do their jobs and for people to think of them as equipment in the same way they thought of hammers, swords, and pickaxes. He wanted the drinks to be a part of life after work as well, and to be as good for winding down as they were for pumping up.

The only problem was he had precious few drinks that did that, at least in a specific and focused way. Not that he couldn’t dull pain or help people sleep, but those drinks were different from what Aperteaf was. Whipping up another batch of the appetite tea, Arthur could feel that difference in his bones as the majicka ordered itself to enhance the drink.

He didn’t know what to call it, but teas like Aperteaf just fit into his class better, like they were sinking into a mold in his soul he hadn’t known was there, some cavity in his capabilities that the system had left open, waiting to be filled. The teas that were the most obviously like that were his named unique teas, which had clunked into place like they had always belonged in him and finally found their way home. Aperteaf had maybe a tenth of that feeling, but it was a big tenth.

Looking back, Arthur could only think of one other tea that really fit into that middle place between named teas and mundane stuff he made to help workers, and it was one of his oldest and funniest brews.

Hair of the Dog (Eito Festival Edition)

This tea takes simple pepped leaves, water, and an ample dose of passive majicka to offer slightly more than moderate relief to a very particular kind of self-inflicted suffering.

Crafted particularly for Eito with ingredients he is confirmed to like, this drink will work slightly better when consumed by its namesake.

Poor Eito’s consistent Karbo-fueled over drinking had provided Arthur with the biggest clue of how to proceed here. Eito’s drink worked better for him because it was made with ingredients specifically intended to increase his subjective experience. But that wasn’t just an effect that worked on a person-to-person basis. Reaching into his status screen, Arthur dusted off the very oldest and most neglected of his skills, shocked at how much had changed.

Food Scientist (Level 20)

You understand a bit more about the world around you than most. Other people might be able to manipulate it better, but you comprehend a bit about how it acts when it’s not being manipulated at all.

That knowledge grants you a better understanding of various aspects of ingredients, tools, and cooking conditions than most. At level zero, this skill will allow you to gather more preliminary information about your resources and predict the effects of various cooking techniques on them slightly better.

With your increased understanding of majicka, your excellent growth in several related skills, and your use of this skill in a variety of high-stakes situations, your level 20 performance does quite a bit more. When consciously leveraged, Food Scientist will strongly indicate an ingredient’s viability and efficacy in a particular brew.

This is true both of the flavor and recipe-appropriate elements of the ingredient, but is also now true of its interaction with majicka-driven effects such as those leveraged by Medicinal Brewer.

Arthur stood up from his desk, carrying his notebook with him as he went to the room in which he housed his ingredients. He creaked open the heavy door and breathed in the good tea-and-food smells as he entered, eyeing the shelves for likely candidates. Of all the possible components he could choose, tea was the easy part. He had dozens upon dozens of varieties here, most grown by himself but some imported from climates quite unlike Coldbrook’s to supplement his collection. He shuffled boxes on and off the shelves as he considered them, keeping his purpose firmly in mind and trying his best to give Food Scientist room to work. It had been a long time, or at least felt like it had, since he had really allowed the skill to run wild. And these days, there was a lot more power behind it.

Arthur Teamaster

Level 27

Stats:

STR: 10

VIT: 10

DEX: 10

PER: 24

WIS: 36

INT: 5

Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 21) Food Scientist (Level 20) Medicinal Brewer (Level 20) Empathic Host (Level 20) Comfort Baking (Level 15), Mass Prep (Level 10)

Achievements: Shop Owner, Buffer Against the wave, Whole-Body Health, I Ate the Works, Impromptu Leader, Founder, Bad Allergies, Talent Scout, Clutch Mayoral Action, Well-Earned Rest

Arthur’s highly leveled senses finally woke the skill up as it buzzed almost audibly as he passed over one particular tea. For boba, it gave a strong hit on his majicka-loaded battery-style pearls. He then spent a half hour leafing through various mosses, mushrooms, and other materials he had picked up over his career, finally landing on a combination of five or six of them that seemed suited for this purpose.

He brewed it all together, letting Food Scientist and his primary brewing skill guide him. The first brew was badly botched, but seemed to have promise. The fifth brew finally refined the ingredients to a point the system acknowledged, and to a power level that made Arthur sprint for his icebox to get some cheese after the first sip.

Aperteaf (Superior)

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.

This particular brew of Aperteaf is ingredient-optimized to make the best use of the majicka imparted to it. Less majicka may be allotted to the process to weaken the effect to the desired level.

I’ll have to do that. Arthur munched maniacally on cheese and crackers as he regarded his success. Unless I want the town to run out of food. Still, that means less expenditure for the same effect. I’d call this a win.

Arthur ate the rest of his snacks, then cleaned his dishes and forced himself to rest before he cleaned out his icebox. With a magically full-feeling stomach, he finally managed to quell his anticipation of the next day and let his eyelids droop down. He had tea to invent, starting tomorrow. And if he knew the system, that wasn’t going to be as simple and as boring a job as it sounded.