Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

On paper, Milo and Rhodia had two houses. In reality, they were both using Rhodia’s place for house-purposes.

Where Milo had just picked the first piece of land he walked into after they laid out the plots, Rhodia found a better piece of land with a nicer view. Where Milo had built little more than a bedroom, bathroom, kitchen and smith’s shop for his place, Rhodia had laid out her house with more rooms than she needed to start, and built with an eye for later additions. And where Milo had forgotten to insulate his workshop for sound, Rhodia made sure hers was nice and quiet.

When it came time for them to move in together, there hadn’t been much question about whose house they went for.

Arthur met Mizu at her place and was glad he hadn’t misread the dress code situation. She was dressed fairly normally for her off hours, in a sleeveless shirt, one of her longer skirts, and her hair in what Arthur recognized as one of her easy-to-maintain braids. He was dressed about as simply. Men’s clothing in the Demon World had variety, but it also thankfully had a few standard looks that almost anyone could pull off and were acceptable in almost any situation.

Better yet, formal dress code wasn’t really a thing outside of a few very traditional festivals. So long as your clothes were clean and in good repair, there were very few mistakes to be made. The only real faux pas that Arthur knew of was overdressing, and that was more about how you felt about being noticeable than anyone else trying to make you feel bad. And Arthur wasn’t really the kind to try to stick out in that way.

Normal casual comes through once again. Nailed it.

“Hi, Mizu. You look pretty,” Arthur said.

“This is what I always wear,” Mizu said.

“And you always look pretty.” Arthur offered his arm and Mizu looped hers through before they strolled down the road towards Milo’s. “Any idea what to expect tonight?”

“Well, it’s the first time they’ve entertained. Knowing Rhodia, she’s going to try pretty hard. But it’s also the first time they’ve entertained, so I have no idea what she’s trying hard to do. There should be food, I hope.”

“Can Rhodia cook? I know Milo barely can,” Arthur asked.

“Everyone can cook a little,” Mizu said.

“True.” Even people who said they couldn’t cook could make simple stuff, Arthur had found. In a world where delivery restaurant food wasn’t really a thing and where even the most social people sometimes wanted to stay in, everyone was competent enough to make the simple-hot-breakfast-and-sandwich. “Should we have picked up Lily, by the way?”

“She’s already there.” Mizu laughed. “Rhodia dragged her off to help. Lily knows her way around a kitchen and I think Rhodia was a bit stressed about the whole thing. Lily’s been going a bit stir-crazy since you’ve been gone, anyway. I think it will probably do her good.”

All of the founding members of the town had built their houses fairly close together, so it wasn’t a long walk to Rhodia’s. As they got close, the smell of dinner filled the air. Unfortunately, it filled it in the form of smoke, which was billowing out of a kitchen window in a thick, greasy cloud, followed by shouts.

“How do we put it out?” Rhodia yelled. “It’s powder, right?”

“Not any powder!” Lily yelled. “Some powders explode. I’ve seen Arthur do it before.”

“What, then?”

“Clay! Get clay!” Lily screeched. “We can smother it!”

Arthur looked at Mizu. She looked back and shrugged.

“I’ll go get food,” Arthur said. “Lots of it. Go… do water things, I guess? At the fire. Unless there’s grease. I remember that much.”

“I’ll tell Rhodia you have dinner covered.”

“Thanks.”

Arthur walked down to the pavilion, wondering how he was going to figure out ordering and carrying back an entire dinner for five people. He opted to go to a cook named Islet’s stand first. She was a ferret demon and also a particularly nice woman. True to his expectations, she sympathized immediately. Exceeding them, she decided to solve the entire problem at once.

“I was just packing up, but I guess I could cook something fast. Actually, no. That would take too long. Stay here,” Islet demanded.

Arthur watched as the ferret ran into the back of her shop, crashed around for a while, then came out holding a crate almost bigger than she herself was.

“Go get the cart from over there if you could, Arthur. You’ll pull it, right? Your strength is higher than mine.”

“I can. What’s happening, exactly?” Arthur peeked in the crate and saw a jumble of ingredients, devices, and even bare knives bouncing around. “Are you fleeing the town? You don’t have to. You could just say no.”

“I’m coming over. Just long enough to cook. It will be faster, and I’m guessing Rhodia needs that right now.”

Five minutes later, Arthur was watching Mizu rinse soot off Rhodia’s thankfully all-stone kitchen as Islet went to work cooking. She was a wonder at it. Arthur could cook well, mostly as a result of Ella having poured hours and hours of her time into training him up in it. It wasn’t a class enhanced thing, though, and it wasn’t his main focus. For people like Islet, it was both. She somehow put together just the right combination of ingredients to make the menu she had in mind, or the right menu for the random ingredients she had. Arthur couldn’t guess which, but it was impressive either way.

Even more impressive was the fact that she managed to whip together a multi-course meal within the time it took to get all the fire-extinguishing clay and smoke under control in the kitchen. As she left, she promised she’d get a baker to stop by soon with some dessert, earning herself a permanent home in Arthur’s heart in one fell swoop.

“You dear.” Rhodia walked up and kissed Arthur on the cheek, which was a welcome surprise coming from a woman who might not have been thrilled about him inviting a relative stranger cook into her house. “You absolute perfect ape.”

“I like to think of myself as a chimp.”

“Then a chimp you will be in this house, forever more. My heating element failed, by the way. I’m not a great cook but I’m not so hopeless that I set things on fire. Lily wouldn’t have let that happen.”

Lily nodded. “It’s true. You should have seen it go. It looked like one of Hune’s furnaces blowing up, back when the wall fell. We were dodging flaming fruit like monsters dodging rocks in a wave.”

“Flaming balls of fruit?”

“Rhodia was baking apples.”

As Arthur nodded sagely and Rhodia began to fill plates around the table, Milo finally arrived. In the bustle, Arthur had hardly noticed he wasn’t there.

“Hi, honey. Dinner’s done?” Milo asked.

“Dinner exploded. This is a new dinner Arthur brought. I upgraded him from ape to chimp as a reward,” Rhodia said.

“Wow. If he keeps going at this rate, he’ll make monkey by next coldfall.” Milo eyed the food greedily. “It looks good, though.”

“It is good. I stole a bit of it earlier. Now go rinse off before dinner. Fast. We’re keeping our guests waiting.” She shoved him towards the back of the house. “And use soap. I got normal stuff so you don’t have to smell like flowers anymore.”

“I like smelling like flowers!”

“I know. I don’t like it. Now go get clean.”

To the extent Arthur had worried that Milo and Rhodia wouldn’t be able to find their own style of hospitality, he had worried about nothing. They were a casual couple-who-are-always-fun-to-be-around hosts and made everything work without any effort at all. Minus, of course, cooking dinner.

Islet had that part covered, making plenty of dinner, which meant everyone could have seconds. Or thirds and fourths, in Arthur’s case. Walking around the wilderness had taken a lot out of him. After dinner, they played an unfamiliar-to-Arthur game involving bouncing small balls into small metal cups in front of other diners, using cups Milo had built just for that purpose. Arthur was terrible at it. Lily, somehow, was an ace, managing to get a ball in everyone else’s cup and win the game in the same number of rounds it took Arthur to get one seat covered.

Everyone was still having a good time when dessert arrived, and at Milo and Rhodia’s prompting, they decided to take it out on the patio and eat it under the stars.

“This has been fun,” Arthur said.

“Well, of course. That’s not hard. We always have fun.” Rhodia tossed back a small honey-drizzled, fruit-filled biscuit with a piece of preserved fruit on it, visibly savoring the small bite of sweetness. “We are all friends.”

“Still. It was a pretty big disaster. I wasn’t sure if I should rush in and save Lily. Did you really use clay to put out the fire?”

“We really did. Luckily, there’s no shortage of it around here. It works great, by the way. As long as you keep five gallon tubs of wet clay at hand at all times.” Lily looked at Rhodia. “Don’t you think it’s about time for that surprise?”

“Oh, gods,” Arthur said. “Another surprise kept from Arthur? Is this the new game?”

“It’s not just from you this time!” Lily puffed up in joy. “I don’t know either. I’m not even supposed to know there is a surprise.”

“It’s true. I let it slip while we were putting out the apples,” Rhodia said. “Sorry, dear.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Mizu said. “I do like surprises. What do you have, Milo? It’s Milo’s surprise, isn’t it?”

“It is.” Milo’s face lit up with a smile so bright it rivaled the sun. “Do you remember how I sent a letter to a clockmaker, a while back? About the delivery cart system I could never get to work in the town?”

“I do.” The tracks for the carts were still laid, hidden under raised walls in some parts of town and underground in others. Milo had never been able the actual control mechanism to work, but the infrastructure was all there. “He finally wrote back? Did he figure it out?”

“Oh, Arthur. He did. And let me tell you, I would have never got it alone. It’s so far beyond what the mechanic class does, I could have worked on it for years and not understood it. It ended up being pretty simple to implement, though.”

“To implement? It’s done already?”

“I got the letter back weeks ago. I’ve been working on it every spare moment. Of which there have been more, lately.” Milo stood up and walked over to a shed in his yard, threw open the doors, and stood to the side as the porch lights suddenly shone on a mass of bronze gears and iron framing. “This is the brain of the whole thing. If you request a cart, it waits until the other carts are out of the way and sends one. If you try to send it back, it puts you into a queue. There will be a little wait sometimes, but never long. I made it work.”