Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

“Kout, I wanted to ask for a favor,” Arthur said.

“For you? Probably. Anything besides my foraging shoes.” Kout noticed Arthur smirking and looked down at his shoes. “Wait, what are those?”

“These? Just something I had Rebes throw together. You like them?” Arthur asked.

“I love them. Not exactly what I need for my job, since I wade so much.” Kout lifted his pants legs to reveal boots that extended halfway up his calf, with a more sealed-up design than Arthur’s. “But still, I have an eye for shoes and those are really something. What did they cost?”

“Don’t ask. Or don’t ask me, anyway. If you want to get some, I’d strike while Rebes still has the best of the leather he salvaged from the wave. It is my understanding he is currently in possession of the potential to make magic belts too, if that’s your thing.”

“It might be.” Kout seemed to be honestly considering it. Living in the open as much as he did probably made clothes, tents, and shoes an even more valuable proposition to him than for most people. “Anyway, what do you need?”

“I need a tour.”

“A what?”

A day had passed since Arthur started his menu experimentation, and so far, it had been going just fine. He had managed to get Sett to put an advertisement up for him, explaining that he was looking for weird ingredients to do weird class stuff with, even including that wording. The town’s response had been immediate and overwhelming. He had mosses. He had roots. He had edible carapace fragments, ground tendon, a mysterious powder that Skal called boat sneeze, and a hundred other oddities.

Arthur had plenty of insights from looking at all those ingredients, which he would have thought would have done the trick under normal circumstances. It wasn’t like the drinks he was making weren’t better. They were. He was spending less majicka and getting better results from almost every one of his teas.

Where he was lacking was actual, honest-to-god new inspiration. All that practice had given him exactly zero new drink ideas, and having exhausted all the preserved ingredients in town meant he had only one last path for new recipes.

“A tour of all the ingredients you normally scavenge for the town, including the places you find them. I have a skill that assesses ingredients, and I haven’t been paying attention to it,” Arthur said. “I’m hoping that looking at the ingredients where they live might help. Or that the skill lets me identify things your skill doesn’t.”

“That makes sense. And you want to see every ingredient?” Kout asked.

“Anything a person could eat without getting hurt, I guess. The skill knows better than me what works, most of the time.”

“Not that I’m against it, but that’s probably a two-day trip. It’s a big loop. We might be able to do it a bit quicker, but it’s going to be at least one overnight.”

“I figured it might be that way. I don’t expect you to do it for free, by the way. I got you this.”

Arthur pulled a small roll of cloth from his pocket and tossed it to Kout, who started to untie the cloth strap holding it together. Arthur had spied it behind the counter of the tailor’s shop when he went to pick up the rest of Mizu’s socks for her, and had asked about it on a whim. He was glad he did. For this kind of gift-giving, time was usually a component. Normally, people wanted their clothes fitted, and different classes wanted different things out of apparel like gloves or shoes.

Everyone, though, wanted the same things out of hats. It was just a question of degree.

“This is a really, really big hat.” Kout looked at the shoulder-wide headgear with awe. “I can’t believe it even rolled up that small. It’s enormous.”

“Too big?”

“No.” Kout put the hat on and was suddenly standing in a body-sized shadow of self-supplied shade. “When you spend as much time in the sun as I do, there’s no such thing as too big of a hat.”

“It’s got the normal hat things. It’s water-repellent, and has something I didn’t quite understand called de-winding.”

“Yeah, that’s important. It doesn’t catch much wind. It makes it easier to wear during storms.” Kout reached up and straightened the hat on his head, nodding in a satisfied way. “It’s a nice hat. My last one got lost when I was running from some beast out there. I went back later, never found it.”

“Well, enjoy it. Whether you take me or not, by the way. I don’t want you to feel forced.”

“No, no. The gift of a hat is a serious thing, Arthur. I’m honor-bound to show you all my nature junk now. It’s a scavenger’s law.”

“Do they have those?” Arthur asked.

“They do now,” Kout laughed. “When can you be ready to go? If we are going to go today, we’ll want to leave soon.”

“Right now. I just have to go grab my pack.”

“You have food?”

“And tea stuff.”

“Great. See you soon.”

Arthur ran back to his house and got his pack, stopping at the town’s main well to bid a quick goodbye to Mizu and Lily. He had already done the bulk of his goodbyes earlier that day, fully expecting that Kout would appreciate the company on his rounds. In ten minutes, Arthur was back at the gate, now carrying a camping backpack loaded with lots of tea, but just enough food to get him through the next few days if everything went terribly wrong. He was traveling with a scavenger after all. Something would have to be pretty wacky for them to run out of what they needed to get by.

The first couple of hours were mostly of areas and things Arthur could have shown himself, and that he had actually mostly seen before. Here was a familiar tree, and there was a place the stream ran a little deeper, the first producing a moss Arthur had known about for months and the second bordered by some sort of flowering shrub that Kout said the alchemists were interested in.

Arthur didn’t get an especially strong ping from Food Scientist when he looked at either, but he gathered a bit of both into his pack anyway, just in case the combination of things would make a larger difference later.

A few hours more made all the difference. At some point, Kout veered off onto a footpath Arthur had never known existed and took him on a curling path that rose in altitude as they walked, stopping here and there to point at a plant or algae that did one thing or another. After a while, Arthur noticed that all the resources Kout stopped for were biological in nature, even though his usual hauls were just as much mineral as they were life-based. And he thought he knew why.

“Sorry I’m holding things up. I know you are probably missing stops because of me.”

“Just a few.” Kout pointed off to the left. “The only really big loss is a pit I’ve been digging off that way. It has some mineral in it that Milo and Rhodia like because it makes his forge and her kiln burn hotter. But I can get it some other day.”

“Why not today?”

“Well, it’s about an hour off track. And then another hour to get back on track. If I take you there, we automatically fall into the long version of this trip and you have to put up with another overnight. Which is fine with me, but…”

“You want to be polite. Because I bought you a hat,” Arthur concluded.

“It’s a really nice hat, to be fair.”

“Doesn’t matter. Make the stops you need to make, in the way that makes sense for you. I’ll walk as fast as I can to try and keep this on track. In fact…” Arthur shrugged his pack off. “You have five minutes?”

“Sure.”

Arthur whipped up a couple cups of tea, not bothering with a pot but instead making two separate, cup-sized batches directly in the cups themselves. Brewing on uneven ground with bad equipment and a travel-sized heating element wasn’t the best scenario for artistry ever, but his work with ingredients did at least prove the concept of the whole endeavor when the tea ended up being much better than his former norm anyway.

March (Superior)

This tea has been ingredient-optimized to make the most of the majicka supplied by the brewer during its preparation. Juice your vitality and dexterity…

At some point during his new menu development, the system had abandoned its own descriptors for the drinks and adopted his. Given that it was around the time he managed to get a superior rating on most of the easy ones, he regarded it as a subtle sort of system reward.

They gulped down their tea and started moving. Ten minutes later, it was evident that the tea really was helping. They were crossing more ground now, and the nagging sense Arthur had that his own cardio was holding back Kout’s pace was lessened, if not eliminated.

“So who are you voting for?” Kout said. “In the election, I mean.”

“Nobody’s really had a chance to convince me one way or another. Why? Are you campaigning?”

Kout snorted. “Me? Arthur, I hate being in the town longer than a lazy afternoon. You must have noticed that.”

“I know. You’re one of the outside kids and the outside kids never get elected.” Arthur hopped over a fallen tree and managed to not only clear it but stick the landing without shocking his knees, something he attributed almost entirely to the tea he had drunk. “That’s still weird to me, by the way.”

“Why? We spend most of our time outside the town, so we can’t do mayor things for it. And we want the place we come back to be nice.”

“I mean…” Arthur tried to figure out the best way to explain what he was feeling as an alien on a strange world, even if he barely was that anymore. “You never worry someone won’t look after your interests?”

“We have a voice at the council.”

“Which could be ignored.”

Kout gave Arthur an odd look. “Could, I guess. Have you ever seen anyone do that? Would you?”

Arthur chewed on that. Of course, he wouldn’t. And neither would anyone he knew, come to think of it. He was pretty sure that if he press ganged Kout into being the mayor completely against his will, even the scavenger would do the best job he could making sure everyone had a good life.

“No, I guess. And I know that’s the answer to the question, it’s just weird. Earth stuff wasn’t like that,” Arthur answered.

“Well, don’t tell me how they were,” Kout said. “I’m in the forest right now. Last thing I want is to be stressed out.”

Kout’s policy ended up being a good one for both of them. It didn’t ban talking about Demon World politics, which were stress-free, and after both of them confirmed they were provisionally for Spiky, the conversation was finally able to move on to other things.