Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

Arthur found the invention surprisingly endearing. That didn’t stop him from trying to poke holes in Milo’s logic though.

“What if the cart goes to your house and you don’t send it back? It’s out of commission?” Arthur asked.

“It is, but the next request pulls a reserve cart. It’s quite the thing,” Milo answered.

“And you can do all that with clockwork? I don’t believe it.”

“That’s great. You’ll be that much more shocked when it works.” Milo walked to a small stone structure in his backyard, opened a hatch, and dropped in one of the biscuit desserts. “See that? That’s me loading the cart. And this is me punching your house number into the machine. And this is me sending the cart. Now come on. Let's go check.”

At Arthur’s house, Milo pried up a piece of slapstone with a crowbar, revealing a hatch just like the one at his house. Arthur only dimly remembered him installing the contraption earlier in the month. Inside the hatch was a small cart, just big enough to carry an acceptable amount of goods and small enough that the tracks could be built in the first place. And at the bottom of the cart, safe and sound, was the biscuit.

“I don’t care if you proved it. I still don’t believe clockwork can do all that,” Arthur said.

“Clockwork and runes, to be fair.” Milo lifted the biscuit out of the cart and dropped it in his mouth. “I think we all agree I deserved that. I’m a genius, after all.”

“Not to doubt, but what do you think people will use it for?” Mizu asked. “Nobody has ever had access to anything like this before.”

“Not my problem to solve,” Milo said. “I made the thing. People can decide what they use it for themselves. That’s their job.”

After convincing Lily she was too large to ride the cart back to Milo’s, they all walked back the conventional way, then sat around in the series of ridiculously fluffy couches and chairs lining the room. Sinking into them, Arthur could immediately tell what luxuries Rhodia and Milo splurged on with their extra cash. You just didn’t get this kind of comfort without enchantments.

“We end up falling asleep in these at least once a week.” Milo lowered himself into a chair and sighed. “It cleaned us out getting these made. Totally worth it.”

“I have to say that if you asked me what the best part of dying and going to a new world was, I wouldn’t have said it was the furniture. But it kind of is.” Arthur wriggled his feet around in his boots. “And the shoes. Dear gods, the shoes.”

“What was that like?” Mizu looked at Arthur, suddenly serious. “Dying, I mean. You never talk about it.”

“There’s not much to talk about.” Arthur half smiled, trying to figure out how to talk about his own demise. “I didn’t really die, according to the man I talked to between here and there, but I gathered that that difference was mostly academic.”

“And?” Milo had perked up. “What did it seem like otherwise?”

“I expected to be scared. When I thought about dying, it didn’t sound like something that I’d enjoy. Mostly I was just confused. And then I was in a better place. Just like that.” Arthur snapped his finger.

“Was it that nice there? The in-between place?” Lily’s eyes were wide, and she was leaning so far towards Arthur in her chair, she was almost in his. Arthur reached over and patted her head.

“It was, but I didn’t mean there. I meant here,” Arthur said. “It’s a better place, here. It really is.”

Everyone digested that for a bit, just long enough for Arthur to feel a bit self-conscious about it, as people who find themselves the only person in the room to have died often do. He decided to deal with that like he dealt with most problems.

“Does anyone want tea?” Arthur asked.

“Oh, yes please. Only I don’t have tea here. We used up the last of what you gave us last week,” Rhodia said.

“No problem,” Arthur said. “Send that cart back to my house, Milo. I’ll get you set up.”

After a quick jog back and forth to his home and a few minutes in the kitchen, Arthur had a nice, warm drink ready for everyone. He thought about trying for Family, one of his named uniques he hadn’t been able to make in a while because of its requirement that he have a calm mental state. He decided against it, since the limitations on the drink meant he couldn’t serve everyone the same thing at once. Instead, he went for a normal tea, letting whatever majicka he forced into it go into feelings of comfort and contentment.

“Now this, Arthur, makes the night.” Rhodia drank sip after sip from her cup. “I can feel it all the way down to my heart. I swear it’s pure majicka.”

“Hear hear.” Lily raised her glass, matched by Mizu, who was enjoying her drink just as much, if not quite as loudly. “I never get Arthur-tea at night anymore. It’s just when the shop is open, or when I visit his house.”

“It would be nice if we could have a little miniature Arthur,” Milo said. “Just to put in the kitchen to make tea. A portable Earthling.”

“Huh.” Arthur was suddenly struck by that idea. Not of a miniature him so much, but of a portable version of what he could do, something someone really could keep in a cupboard waiting for all the perfect moments he couldn’t actually be there. “I wonder if that’s possible.”

“Of course it’s not possible,” Lily said. “Nobody would leave you in a cupboard. You’d keep them up at night worrying about everything.”

“You know what I mean. I’ve been working on my menu, right?” Arthur smiled. “I think I just got my next idea for it.”

—

The rest of the night went well, if a little more quietly. Eventually, it petered out and everyone left for home and bed, well satisfied with an evening well spent.

Arthur got up a little earlier than usual the next day to give himself time to figure out how to use Milo’s instructions for the cart system to send enough of his new ingredients to the shop for testing. He’d be able to do more of everything now, via efficiency enhancing ingredients.

The only question, really, was if anyone would notice the difference without him telling them he had upped his buffing game. He resolved to give everyone who knew to ask for a work-buffing drink an enhanced version that day, using the same amount of majicka he would on his older product to ensure a bigger overall effect.

Of course, the cooling tea was a different story. That was an obvious enough difference that he’d have to tell people what to expect, even disregarding the need for them to accept the effect for it to work.

By the time midday hit, Arthur had confirmation on both. The lunch rush brought with it both people curious to see why the drinks they had worked a little better today, along with another group of very thirsty looking manual laborers anxious to cool off. The latter confirmed the same things the former had. Arthur was on the right track to helping more people feel better in more ways. He just had to do the work.

As soon as the lunch rush was over, he started on the next step. Arthur brought out his pad and paper, jotting down ideas about what part of what he could do people would want bottled if they could get it. No one effect would really work for everyone, though. If anything, what they wanted was a blank slate that would take instructions, a sort of teamaster-on-demand that could meet their needs without the need for a thousand different premade teas to cover every eventuality.

And even that was doable, probably. Arthur spent twenty minutes with his ingredients, verifying that nothing he had in stock would actually help with the problem. There might have been some majicka-based, skill-storing grain in the world that would do what he wanted, but he doubted it after his skills didn’t so much as twitch at his entire storeroom. If there was a solution to this problem, his skill was telling him, it probably didn’t lie in ingredients at all.

Some problems still have to be solved with majicka. It’s not surprising this is one of them, I guess.

Arthur put a few pots of water on the boil, letting them heat up while he puzzled over the problem. If he wanted to make a person stab better, often the solution was to make tea while imagining them taking down a monster. The same went for helping a tailor sew or a demolisher knock down a building. The better his mental image of what they could do, the more he could impart to a tea.

This problem was harder because there just wasn’t any mental image that could cover every situation. The most general he had been able to make enhancement teas was when he covered a few stats at a time, usually no more than three before the effects got too small to be significant. To get this to work, he’d have to do something drastically different. He’d have to visualize in a whole different way.

He started thinking hard, trying to figure out everything he could about the current way he used imagination and memory to drive his drinks before it hit him.

I think I know how to do this. No drastically different techniques required.

Instead of making a pot of tea as he had planned, Arthur went to his tea processing equipment and dumped a load of leaves in, stirring his majicka as he dropped into the semi-meditative concentration he figured he’d need to pull this off. He thought of a man, a teamaker in a strange world, doing his best to make drinks that made his customers happy. He visualized the man trying his hardest to figure out what every customer needed, then to crystallize the right kind of help to meet that need into a tangible beverage.

Arthur imagined the man really caring about if people did better and felt better about their lives. He imagined the man spending his majicka and concern to make the best drinks he could. And without trying too hard to focus on one particular problem, he imagined the man handing out cup after cup of tea, complete with the love and thankfulness this world had taught him to feel.

The majicka drain wasn’t as bad as he expected. Arthur kept on his feet and almost wasn’t dizzy as success hit.

Portable Arthur

This drink abstracts the essence of your class into a product. If that sounds unusual, know that every crafting class does this to some extent. In a small way, every smith, tailor, tanner and baker leaves the imprint of their class on their work.

Where your tea differs is that where those other classes send out the completed version of their work, you’ve managed to store a primitive, weakened and ultimately incomplete version of what you do in a product, waiting to resolve itself in the same way a spring relaxes once the pressure constricting it is released.

When a user brews Portable Arthur with a particular goal that tea can accomplish in mind, the tea will do its best to satisfy their goals. This effect is unprecedented in the classes that make up the world’s preparers of food, and is balanced with severe restrictions.

Portable Arthur makes poor use of the majicka supplied to it, giving only a fraction of the same effect a tea prepared by your own hands would give, even when seeking the exact same goals. It can’t be used to enhance stats or abilities, and can only apply for the more homey, non-medicinal purposes tea is used for.

Despite these restrictions, Portable Arthur allows a customer to take some of what you do home, for use on cozy, lonely days reading by a window or late at night when shops simply aren’t available to meet their needs.

And that, Arthur knew, was a success. He had three products worth advertising, now, each with their own quality-of-life improvements ready to go. And he had done it without so much as a thought to combat, work, or enhancing the very effective efforts of the town’s alchemists in a way outside the normal purview of a slinger of tea.

His menu was almost there. He just needed a few more ideas, and after tonight, finding them no longer seemed like a chore.