Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

“Lily.” Arthur had not reacted when his favorite owl approached, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t aware of it. “What evil have you allowed to fester in my absence?”

“The signs?” Lily asked. “I like them. Mine’s over there.”

Arthur craned his neck slowly to observe this new horror, finding a sign with a finger-painting of Lily’s puffy form and the words “Vote Lily! She’s younger than you!” in big, blocky letters.

“It’s… Lily, you know I love you, right?” Arthur said.

“Aww.”

“I’m serious. And I like your sign. It’s very nice. It’s also not a Demon World thing, and you know it. Why are those here?”

“You told Spiky about how elections were on Earth. He told us. It sounded fun.”

“You aren’t even running for mayor!” Arthur felt a new worry form in his stomach. “Are you?”

“No! But that doesn’t mean I can’t have a fun sign,” Lily said. “Almost everyone has one now.”

“Uh-oh.” Mizu walked up then, kissing Arthur on the cheek. “He’s freaking out, isn’t he?”

“Just a bit,” Arthur said. “These weren’t always a nice thing on Earth. It’s a shock to see them here.”

“Oh, all ours are nice,” Lily said. “They are mostly jokes. Come on. You have to see Mizu’s.”

“You have one?” Arthur exclaimed.

“I do.” Mizu smiled. “I like it. I’ve been waiting a whole day for you to get home and see it.”

Arthur followed her numbly through the town, seeing “Vote Spiky! He’ll make you get the point!” and “Skal on me, I’ll answer!” signs everywhere he looked. Even the people who were running for mayor in earnest had regarded the signs as an opportunity for a joke rather than an actual advantage.

Finally, they came to the front of Mizu’s house, where her sign sat. Arthur looked at it for a time, his mind cracking at the simple awfulness of it.

“It’s terrible, right?” Lily asked. “We took a vote on the signs as a test thing for the actual election, and Mizu’s won hands-down.”

“It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen.” Arthur looked at Mizu with admiration. “It’s honestly an abomination.”

“Thanks.” Mizu gripped his hand a little tighter. “I worked really hard on it.”

Arthur gripped back and kept looking at the sign. In a field of dark blue, a single lighter drop of water was drawn, next to flowing white text containing the slogan.

“Mizu for Mayor!” it said, without even a hint of shame. “She’ll do well!”

—

Arthur took a shower, then a long nap. Mizu joined him, in a way, sitting by his bed in a chair and catching up on her reading while he sawed logs in his dreams. He woke up and had a sudden moment of déjà vu moment. The soft afternoon light leaked through his curtains, and he was wrapped in sheets and experiencing calm on a bone-deep level.

If there was ever any question of whether the old man in the place between lives had done him right, it evaporated as Mizu somehow sensed Arthur was awake and found his hand with hers.

“You never told me how your trip went,” Mizu said.

“Pretty well. I found some deadly grass that freeze you to death,” Arthur answered happily.

“Sounds like you.” Mizu folded up her book, put it on Arthur’s nightstand, then knelt by the bed and put her forehead lightly on his. “Any ideas of how you’ll use them?”

“Of course. But I’m going to have to rope in an alchemist to make sure I don’t kill myself on accident.”

“Please do.” Mizu smiled. Arthur could feel it on his cheek. “That’s it, though? Nothing else jumped out at you?”

“Not really. I got some interesting ingredients and I’ll be able to up my game there, but mostly I think I’m just going to have to spend more time with people. Do Milo and Rhodia still want to have dinner?”

“Yes. Tonight, in fact, if you feel up to it.”

He did. A nap carried a lot of power for Arthur these days. And dinner time still left some hours of margin for him to do some work, clear his mind of impending tasks, and make sure he could actually enjoy it.

“I’m going to go find an alchemist, if that’s okay,” Arthur said. “You know how it is.”

“Grass burning holes in your coin-pouch. Got it.” Mizu stood up, stretched in a dainty, slender sort of way, and moved to the door. “I’ll finish my work as well. Sundown at Milo’s?”

“Sundown at Milo’s.”

Arthur laced up his boots and hit the streets. He had an alchemist to see.

—

“Oh, wow.” The first of the town’s few alchemists that Arthur found in was a cat-woman, one who had recently arrived in the town and was still putting the finishing touches on her workspace after the monster wave. Kelda had been clear when she arrived that she had no desire to work in direct competition with the town’s more mundane alchemists, which was good because they already had enough of those. “You picked these yourself?”

“I did. I used a knife to shoo them into the jar,” Arthur answered.

“Promise me you won’t do that anymore,” Kelda said seriously. “Let Kout get them. Or better yet, I’ll grow some for you in my contained garden.”

“That’s not too much trouble?”

“It’s not, especially if it keeps you from dying. My work deals with a lot of weird ingredients. It’s a research class, at heart.”

Kelda was a groundbreaker class, someone who focused on finding new ways to do things rather than doing things in existing ways particularly well. Most of her day-to-day work had to do with formulating medicines for weird, hard-to-treat diseases that nobody else had as much time for, then sending them out by post to be tried. Her actual wages didn’t come from the sale of those drugs since they weren’t really the kind of thing that could be charged for.

“Fine with me,” Arthur said.

“What are you trying to do with these, anyway?” Kelda asked. “I’ve seen them used in some emergency fever and burn medicines, but they aren’t particularly popular. They don’t like to be medicine, exactly.”

“Why’s that?”

“They are stubborn. The majicka in them wants to be cold, and nothing else. It’s hard to influence it to be subtly different and that’s what alchemy is all about, usually.”

“Well, I make drinks. And the way I figure it, there are enough people here who get heated up more than they want often enough that an especially cold tea would be a good thing to have.”

“That… hmm.” Kelda reached for an abacus and did some quick calculations. “That might work. We’d have to dilute it way, way down, of course.”

“That’s what I’m here for. How much grass per drink, do you think?”

“Well, not much. When I said I’d grow these for you, I expected you’d end up using more of them. I’d say probably you’ll probably have trouble getting through more than one of them a month.”

“That few?”

“These things are powerful.” Kelda shook a grass around in the jar. “Just touching them can injure you. The good news is that you won’t run out. But we do have to figure out how to formulate them to make them useable.”

Kelda went to her workbench and sidled up to a particularly large grinder painted in garish orange, one that had a difficult-to-remove weighted cap on it and a large sign reading “DANGER DANGER: POISON MATERIALS ONLY” hanging around the handle that required her to unwrap it before the machine could be used.

“I clean this every single time, but you can’t be too careful. Even a small amount of contamination to something meant for a sick person can be a big deal.” Kelda opened a jar, carefully shook out a grass stalk onto the top of the grinder, then pulled a few pins out of the grinder, which adjusted something in the machine with a loud clank.

“It’s a good machine. I brought it from home. I have it set to the finest powder it can do.” Kelda turned the crank until the grass came out the bottom mostly-powdered, collected it into a pestle, then ground the hell out of it some more with a mortar. She was left with a fine, moist mush.

“Now we need to figure out how to dilute this. Normally, I have adjuvants for that. Honestly, we should be putting it into a dry powder that can be stored for a long time, and a lot of the powder to dilute it.”

“I have root flour. I’m going to be making these into boba pearls. I just don’t know how much powder to put into how much flour.”

“Well, to the flour, then.” Kelda pulled another garishly labeled pouch from a locked desk drawer and scraped the grass paste into it. After several more locking-down-and-cleaning up-steps, she was ready to go. “It’s a lot easier to carry the paste than the flour, and we can make the pearls right there. By hand. With tools you are okay with throwing away, until we get the mix right.”

They worked the rest of the afternoon on getting things just right, using specialized alchemist tools to weight out exact proportions for tiny batches of boba until they narrowed down a dose that worked just right for cooling a person off in a noticeable, useful way without giving either of them the chills or making them feel like they had fallen into a frozen lake.

The system responded to Arthur’s satisfaction with the product with an almost immediate notification.

Warmtime Chilling Boba

These boba work independently of other drink effects by leveraging a minute amount of powerful poison to do their work. They can be used in any effect-bearing drink, or altered in any way you can alter conventional boba using your own majicka stores with only a slight reduction in majicka efficiency.

As a class-purposed food product, this boba is capable of bypassing poison resistance in the willing like alchemical products, cooling the drinker regardless of class defenses that would otherwise stop its effects.

“Got it,” Arthur cried out.

“Oh, believe me, I know.” Kelda grinned. “That was a weird one. I’m not surprised to say that I got an achievement for it too.”

“What’s it called?”

“Weird Medicine Nineteen. I have a series of those. They clump together after hanging out in my status screen for long enough. I think it’s easier for the system to keep track of that way.”

“So that’s it?”

“Not quite. We now want to make a big batch of this stuff. How much flour do you have?”

“Barrels and barrels. I stock up.”

“Good. Bring me one.”

Arthur brought one over on a dolly, and Kelda put her hands on either side of it, then on the poison. Arthur felt the majicka stir as she scooped a spoonful of the grass out, sunk it in the flour, and concentrated. After a moment, the flour seemed to shift slightly. Kelda pulled the spoon back up. It was clean.

“That takes it out of me,” Kelda huffed as she addressed Arthur’s confusion. “It’s a precision mixing skill. It’s necessary for things like this. How long will this boba last?”

“Months? A long time, anyway.”

“Good. Bring me over when you need more. I’ll charge, but not much. A large coin, maybe.”

“Sounds good. Are you sure that’s enough?”

Kelda shrugged. “It’s good experience and not how I make my living anyway. Save me some of that cold tea, though. Some pills take heat to make. A cooling drink would be nice after that.”

Kelda departed after accepting a few coins worth of token payment and extracting a promise from Arthur that he’d never, ever try to mix the stuff himself. Arthur decided to make a small batch of boba to show at dinner before he jumped into the shower, cleaned up, and put on his clothes for the night’s dinner.