Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

Mizu left them to go on with the rest of her day’s business, which included several water-related talks of different kinds as well as another handful of visits to important moisture-related sites around the city. Arthur and Lily found themselves in an agriculture talk next, listening to a farmer talking about how to care for soil, especially land being used to grow crop after crop at majicka-enhanced speeds. It was a bit more relevant to Arthur since he did grow a small crop himself. Still, the real value was in hearing how other people’s work happened.

And, of course, he was learning how to give an engaging talk. Which was not at all how he thought it would be.

“I don’t know what else would be interesting for you all. Tell me what you want to know,” the farmer said, surprisingly soon into his talk.

“What happens if you grind up dungeon monsters and put them in the soil?” Lily asked. Arthur was impressed. The town had an absolute overabundance of dungeon monster parts and was on the lookout for ways to make them useful.

“Good things. Almost always. They are majicka-dense beyond belief and have nutrients, all that.”

“What about the times that aren’t the almost always?” Lily asked again.

“If you accidentally grind up a monster that’s venomous in some way, sometimes it kills everything. Have you ever noticed how there aren’t many weed problems outside of city walls? It’s because of the monster blood during waves. There are usually enough venomous monsters in a wave to permanently sterilize the soil, especially over multiple waves. Anyone else?”

“How come some plants don’t drain the soil as much?” another attendant asked.

“Lots of reasons. The first one is growth rate…”

The beginning of the talk had been casual, but the second half was far more engaging. Anybody felt comfortable asking any question at all, no matter how ill-informed or barely-on-topic it was. The farmer did his best to answer, sometimes in a barely adequate way when the questions were outside of his personal expertise. Nobody judged him. It was fine.

Arthur felt a little better about things by the end of the talk, just in time for him to go give his first talk, which was on wall-building, a subject he was pretty sure he knew absolutely nothing about.

“You can do this, Arthur. You really can.” Lily was rubbing Arthur’s shoulders as he sunk down in a chair the same way a boxer might before a championship fight. “It’s a frontier talk. People know what to expect. Do you have Karra’s notes and drawings?”

“Right here.” Arthur patted a big stack of papers by his side. “And thank the gods. She isn’t a librarian but she’s been taking notes on everything she does.”

Arthur stood up, cracked his neck, and tried to psych himself out. He mostly failed, but it didn’t matter. It was time to start.

“Go get them, Arthur. Remember to thank Mizu later for being nice and not attending.”

He would. This would be harder if she was there. Arthur took the stage and was glad when everyone quieted down for his speech without him having to do anything. As he got his papers in order, Lily ran over to the snack table and stole another handful of nuts and fruit to eat while she assisted him.

“Hi, everyone. I’m Arthur Teamaster of Coldbrook and I’ll be presenting various notes and observations by Karra Workmaster, who has been overseeing our town’s overall construction. This talk will focus on our wall construction in particular, and the lessons that we learned surviving our first full-monster wave.”

The audience perked up at that and the first question came in much sooner than Arthur had expected it.

“Coldbrook is a frontier town, correct?” an older lizardman raised his hand, but launched into his questions before Arthur called on him.

“Correct. Our founding was less than a month after the frontier itself was opened,” Arthur answered.

“And you survived a full-force wave? By what definition of full-force?”

“By the militia’s. They judged it to be not unusually large, but not small.”

“And what definition of survival?”

“Umm… we all lived? I don’t know what you mean,” Arthur said. “The monsters were unable to breach our last wall until there were few enough of them that our warriors could clear them out.”

“Forgive me, but that’s not possible,” a mole in the front said. “Not without outside help, at least. With the wall or the fighting.”

“We had militia help.” Arthur leafed through his notes for a moment until he found one particularly large, printed sheet Karra had prepared. “Actually, if you’ll hold questions for a moment, I’ll explain. I agree that it usually shouldn’t be possible. But we had some advantages. Lily, could you hang this?”

Once the map was up, Arthur explained Coldbrook’s unusual local terrain, how that had allowed them to focus their construction efforts on taller and thicker walls. He watched the faces go from outright disbelief to grudging acknowledgement that it was possible.

“It’s still quite the feat to pull off. If you’ll forgive me for saying so, I’ve been in wall-building for thirty years and I’m just not sure the math works out.” The lizard was talkative, but that was okay. Arthur couldn’t have asked for a better lead-in.

“Actually, I’m glad you asked that. Because only part of this talk is about walls. In Karra’s own words, the walls she built were good, but only a normal kind of good. What made the difference were innovations she and others combined to take advantage of the terrain and other classes.”

The room looked at him blankly. He couldn’t figure out why. He knew they must understand it.

“Arthur, for the love of the gods. You are being so boring,” Lily said from the side. “Just say it normal, all right? It’s like your world tried to make presentations boring. Just do it more normal.”

“Oh, huh. Yeah, I could do that.” Arthur took a deep breath. “We hung traps from our walls. Giant, crazy traps. We had stabbing holes at the base. We had pitfall traps in front.”

“Those would have filled up fast,” the lizard man said. He still looked suspicious of the story, but he was at least leaning forward now.

“They did!” Arthur said. “But my girlfriend made an exploding well to wash the monsters into the ocean. That’s really the takeaway here. It’s not just the walls. It’s that Karra built them to work with the traps and then to self-destruct in a way that killed even more monsters. This is stuff that should work for any settlement built near a natural bottleneck.”

After that, he had them. He couldn’t educate the wall builders on how to build better walls, although some of them had some interest in Karra’s more-or-less disposable walls, or how her newer, rammed-Earth walls were designed. But all of them had an interest in the tactical approach, especially considering it had actually worked well enough to preserve a town that by all rights should have been leveled.

Afterwards, Arthur fielded just a few questions before explaining that he really couldn’t answer them well. Everyone accepted that with grace, especially once he explained that he was more than glad to give them access to Karra’s notes for the remaining time on the schedule. All the more serious wall-builders sprinted for them, commenting amongst each other as they shared interesting tidbits from the notes.

“Not bad, Arthur,” the lizard-demon said, nodding. “Sorry I came on pretty strong there. At first, I thought this was a presentation about fleeing from monsters. By most standards, the town shouldn’t have been able to survive an attack that intense. It only made sense when I realized how much work you all had put into it.”

“No problem. The questions helped, really.” Arthur scratched his cheek. “Actually, I have a question you can probably answer. Why does the government build as many settlements as it does?”

“Oh, you’ve been thinking, I see. Yes, if they planned for fewer settlements, there would be more population at each site and more chance to build walls. We wouldn’t lose as many settlements to waves,” the lizard said.

“Right. I think I heard somewhere that the average settlement gets leveled at least once,” Arthur said.

“That’s true. Some lucky ones don’t, but historically, it’s a matter of chance. Or exceptional work, like your town’s.Much of the infrastructure is always left for rebuilding. And, frankly… well, that would be a little harsh to say.”

“Wait, harsh? I’m interested now.” Lily had a mouth half-full of crisped grains, but turned around immediately when she sensed a fun controversy in the making. “Go ahead. Arthur can take it. If he can’t, I’ll take it for him.”

“Well, understand that this isn’t the official stance of the government. But not every settlement is meant to survive, long term. Quietly, it’s better for everyone of some of them fail.”

“Meaning?” Arthur said. “I can’t believe that the government would withhold support, or anything like that.”

“Oh, of course not. But imagine two towns get torn down, and one decides to rebuild while the other decides to give up and go to the other town. You can’t say exactly what it is, but even from a story as simple as that you can know that one town has more to offer than the other. Whether its resources, or location, or something else, it has something the other town doesn’t that makes it worth rebuilding.”

“So it’s competition?”

“Never directly, but yes. If you build twenty settlements and keep the best three quarters, you end up with a better mix than if you had started with fifteen.” The lizard frowned, apologetically. “And if that’s harsh, understand that it’s the kind of thing that ends up mattering for the better part of a century, all the way until the next expansion.”

“Huh,” Arthur said. Seaside and Peaktown, the two closest settlements to Coldbrook, had been ripped down and both were in the process of rebuilding. “So what happens if Coldbrook helps some town enough that they keep rebuilding, where they otherwise wouldn’t? Does that mess it up?”

“Oh, no, of course not. Because then Coldbrook is part of the resources and benefits of that other town. It still counts. Maybe more than other things.”

“See, it was a good idea, Arthur,” Lily said. “There’s no such thing as giving too much help when it doesn’t hurt you.”

“Wait, did you already do this? In addition to surviving the attack?” The man whistled. “How? You’d still have to rebuild your own walls, at least.”

“It was a lot of monster wealth,” Arthur said. “More than we could use, more than we could spend before the next wave. We decided to share.”

“Huh.” The man seemed mildly taken aback by that. “Awful nice of you. I’m going to go take another look at those notes now, but good job. I approve.”

And just like that, the first talk was over. Arthur sat down by the snacks, pouring himself some ice water and shoveling in calories to cover over his ragged nerves.

“So how did I do, Philbin? You see enough of these,” Arthur asked.

“Oh, well enough.” Philbin smiled. “The notes carried a lot of weight. This Karra is a treasure, I hope you know.”

“And the presentation itself?”

“You want my professional opinion?” Philbin searched Arthur’s face.

“Yes. I’d rather know than not,” Arthur said.

“Mediocre. Fine, not great. But not bad.”

“That’s about what I expected.” Arthur sighed. “I guess I can work on it.”

“Oh, don’t get me wrong. Most non-specialist talks are downright bad when it comes down to it. You at least understood what your builder friend was doing on a layman’s level. Some people don’t go to that trouble. How long did you study with her before she left?” Philben asked.

“Arthur? Not at all. Maybe an hour at the most.” Lily laughed. “He has tea to brew.”

“So how’d he know?”

“Because he helped her build it. Arthur helps everyone with everything. We have to yell at him to get him to stop.”

Philbin laughed.

“You know what? I think I’m going to like guiding you through this process. Good job, Arthur Teamaster. I’m looking forward to tomorrow.”