Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

“You are a good father-thing.” Mizu patted Arthur’s arm. “Maybe the best one.”

“Maybe the only one. Now,” Arthur motioned at the plates, “are you ready for this?”

“Sure.” Mizu nodded and Arthur swept the cloths off the top of the plates. Mizu’s eyes went wide as the surprise was revealed, and her breath caught momentarily in her throat.

Mizu’s snacks for picnics and similar one-on-one moments she planned for Arthur ranged from full, complex dinners to simple little bowls of fruit for snacking on.

But often, just a little more often than chance would imply, she packed boards of preserved meats, cheese, and crackers. Arthur loved it, but he had never expressed a love for those things more than other parts of her preparation. At some point, he had decided that there was probably a reason for that, a preference she had but never expressed. He was betting on that now.

And as Mizu reached out a trembling hand towards pounds and pounds of thin-cut meat and cheese, he knew the bet had been worth it. It was confirmed. The girl liked charcuterie.

“Where did you get all this?” Mizu asked. “I haven’t even seen some of this before.”

“Well, the monster wave helped. There was a lot of meat flying around for a while. I talked to the preserver first thing, and she agreed that it was a good idea to focus on preserving as much meat as we could. And the cheeses have been getting better for a while. It’s not just Hings these days, you know. We have Truings and Skiols now.” The unfamiliar animal names rolled out of Arthur’s mouth awkwardly, which luckily had zero effect on the quality of the cheese. “That helps too.”

“What about the crackers? I know we don’t even have some of these grains yet,” Mizu said.

“Oh, that.” Arthur rubbed his head. “I ordered every cracker I could find about a month or so ago. Talca helped me figure out how. It took them a while to get here.”

“Every cracker you could?” Mizu asked.

“I may have gone a little overboard,” Arthur admitted sheepishly. “You should probably take some of them home with you. My closets are… full. Too full.”

“That’s a later problem. Right now, I need to eat this.” Mizu reached out her hand then pulled it back in hesitation. “I can really eat all of this?”

“Of course you can. Now start, before it gets warm.”

Mizu didn’t need to be told twice. Despite eating a full dinner, she became a food funneling machine as she wordlessly packed meat after cheese after cracker for the next few minutes. Her eyes sparkled as she demolished the food. Arthur had to wait for a bit longer than he expected for her to slow down her eating pace just a bit before he sprung the next surprise. Walking to the kitchen, he threw open a cupboard and pulled out three jars, popped them open, and set them on the table with the rest of the food.

“It’s preserved fruits and jams. The preserver told me they’d make this a bit more of a dessert,” Arthur explained.

Mizu wasted no time spreading one of the creamier cheeses on one of the sweeter crackers and heaping a sweetberry jam on it before biting it and sighing.

“Remind me to thank that woman,” Mizu said. “She’s a saint.”

“So I did good?” Arthur prepared a cracker himself and popped it into his mouth. “I’m a good boyfriend?”

Mizu swung her feet up on his lap and laid her head down on the arm of the couch. “The best one. I’m so full.”

“Well, good. I wasn’t sure this was going to be worth it, since you never actually said that this was your favorite…” Arthur’s words were suddenly cut short by a loud crack followed by a deep, near-by rumbling. “Oh, gods, that scared me. Is it a sea storm?”

Demon World weather was stable. It was pretty much an always sunny place. On the sea, it was a bit more chaotic. Clouds and violent weather would stream in almost instantly, pushed by strong winds from outside the continent. Before Mizu could even make a guess about what happened, the sound of rain suddenly sprang up from outside, rising from nothing to loudly pouring in a split second.

“Gods, that’s a lot of water. Do you think I should go make sure Lily gets home okay?” Arthur asked.

“No. She was with Karra and the Stampers. They’d fight a Prata barehanded before they’d let anything happen to her.”

“And what about you?” Arthur didn’t have an umbrella. He didn’t really need one. “You going home before it gets crazier?”

“Not unless you are kicking me out. And you want to carry me back home. I’m too full to walk.” Mizu reached into her bag and pulled out a book. “You could do that, or you could sit right there while I sing you these water demon poems for a while. Your call.”

Arthur didn’t have to think long before he chose joy over pouring rain. Mizu shifted her feet into a more comfortable position on his leg, sat up just a little straighter, and started to sing. Arthur laid his head back, closed his eyes, and just listened as she made her way through three different songs, all about the joys of water that fell from the sky by its own choice, wetting all the things wellers couldn’t get to.

“Are you asleep, over there?” Mizu nudged him. “You’ve been awfully quiet.”

“Nope. Just enjoying everything,” Arthur said. “You really could do better than me, you know.”

“Heeeeee.” Mizu let out the word as a kind of embarrassed, happy laugh. “No, I couldn’t, you dumb Earthling.”

“There are better-looking demons. More talented people. That sort of thing.”

Mizu sat up, swung her feet around, and looked at him seriously for a moment. “Go put the food away. In the coldbox. And then come back. I want to tell you something and I don’t want to have to look at you once I say it.”

Arthur did as he was told. When he came back, Mizu spun her body towards him, then came forward until she was close enough to Arthur’s head that he could feel her breath on his ear.

“Maybe,” Mizu whispered. “But you are Arthur. My Arthur.”

Arthur felt the weight of her head as her forehead settled into the hair above his ear.

“And that’s all you want?” he asked.

He felt her forehead scrunch up a little on his skin, the way it did when she was thinking about avoiding something.

“Listen to me. I’m only going to say this once.” Her voice dropped so low he could barely hear her. “I’d live in a desert for you.”

Arthur held very still for a while, considering not saying anything at all. Eventually, he decided against it, future trouble be darned.

“A desert, Mizu?” Arthur asked.

“Shush, you.” Arthur felt Mizu’s face flush, and knew he should stop. He couldn’t resist one more round, though.

“Where there’s no water at all?”

“Quiet. Or I’ll make you carry me home after all.” The rain had gone from pouring outside to a quasi-solid state, like people were pouring entire barrels of it over Arthur’s windows. “In the cold rain. And I’m heavy right now.”

“Fine. But if we’re sleeping here, I get the good side of the couch.”

“The good side?” Mizu rubbed his hand with hers. “Which one is that?”

“The one next to you.”

—

The next morning, Arthur woke up to Mizu at his desk, reading all his notes on his tea project.

“Is that entertaining for you?” Arthur said, blearily. “I would think it would be boring.”

“Not at all. It’s interesting seeing how you think about this. It’s all about how people will enjoy the tea. Even when you don’t say that.”

“I guess.” Arthur rubbed his sleepy eyes, and tried to convince himself it only felt early because the sky was so black outside. “That’s probably how everyone is, though.”

“No. It’s how everyone wants to be. But when I make water, it’s easy to focus on numbers and facts. It’s much harder to think about the people who will drink it and bathe in it. It’s one of the main things that holds wellers back.”

“Can’t have hurt you much,” Arthur said. “You are a once in a generation genius.”

Mizu glanced over her shoulder and smiled. “And who told you that?”

“Ma’ar.”

“Well, she’d know.” Mizu motioned towards the kitchen. “Don’t bother making tea just yet. I found your stash of Portable Arthur and made some of the pepped version for you. It’s pretty good, I think.”

Arthur smiled and lumbered his sleepy frame over towards the kitchen. The tea Mizu made wasn’t as good as what he could make himself. Still, it was good, and it was tea he didn’t have to make himself. In that way, it was one of the best cups he had drunk that year.

“If I’m reading this correctly, you have the hangover tea, the summer time tea, the portable you tea, and Aperteaf,” Mizu said. “And these stat teas, but those don’t matter much to you.”

Arthur didn’t argue. He didn’t know how she knew that, but she wasn’t wrong.

“And it seems like you aren’t done, either,” Mizu said.

“No, I’m not. Unless I am.” Arthur leaned on the shelf that topped the back of the desk, sipping his tea. “I’ve been pretty stuck the last couple of days. I might not get any more ideas for a while. I don’t know.”

“You seem oddly okay with that.”

“I don’t know if it’s odd. It just feels like it will happen if it happens.” Arthur shrugged. “The world isn’t ending. There’s plenty of time.”

Mizu looked at Arthur, then stood up and looked him square in the face.

“Who are you?” Mizu demanded. “And what have you done with my Arthur?”

“Have I really been that stressed out?”

“Normally something like this would kill you.” Mizu wrapped her arms around his waist. “This being-okay-with-things-Arthur is new. Nice, but new. What changed?”

“I think… hmm.” Arthur rocked back and forth a bit in Mizu’s arms. “It’s the town, mostly. The other day I was walking around, after I had decided not to be the mayor anymore. And I was worried about that. A lot. But then I realized that the town would just keep going. It feels like that now. Like it’s going to be here, no matter what happens.”

“I know what you mean,” Mizu said. “It was like the monster wave was a test.”

“Like it was the test, the big one. And now that we’ve passed it, everything feels okay. No matter what I do.”

“And that helps?”

“It frees me up to make things better. Not just to make sure we survive. That’s covered. Now I can make things good.”