Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

In the meantime, the system was trying to brew her own tea.

Of course, for someone like the system, an action like brewing tea had to go through several levels of abstraction to make sense. She didn’t exactly exist in the same way her children did, or interact with the universe in the same way. When she did something like baking a loaf of bread, it wasn’t something her children would recognize as related unless they knew an awful lot about how extra dimensions and were living at an acute angle to the passage of time. Their minds just weren’t built that way.

Bread itself had taken her a long time to get a good feel for, and it was a fairly simple thing as conventional universe objects went. As a system, she understood her children very well, and things like bread, meat, and edible plants satisfied very basic needs that she had a good understanding of. But that was on a simple, animal level. Understanding the joy of smelling it baking took her a long time. Understanding the vast web of interconnected feelings her children felt when they ate it, both conscious and subconscious, took longer.

Luckily, she had centuries multiplied on centuries to do it. These days, she understood it very well, having finally translated it to a level her own mind could understand in the same way. Bread was nice. Bread was warm. Bread was something you made when you had a house and safety, a sort of proof that you had those things, or something that made you feel like you eventually would even when you didn’t.

Tea was much, much harder. Oh, she could understand how her children related to it. She could see how they felt when they drank it. She could even enhance its ability to make them feel those ways, to add to the tea making them feel a bit more sleepy, or safe, or calm, or like they had more free time than they really did. But that was work she was already doing with demons and how they felt. It was all happening in a bubble.

Taking things out of that bubble and making them work for her was a whole different story. It might take her centuries to complete the job, working on it with her left hand while she guided her world with her right. It would be worth it, of course. When she was done, she’d understand herself a little better, which would help her understand her children a little better. She’d be able to help them that much more, and she’d get tea in the bargain.

It was a win-win-win, but one she had been putting off for centuries. Not because she didn’t see the value but simply because it was the biggest job she had ever undertaken since creating the bridge between herself and her children in the first place.

And she might have gone on putting it off too, if it wasn’t for her little offworlder guest. He enjoyed making tea so much. He didn’t even always know how much he enjoyed it. He’d just tinker away at his recipes or his kettle, thinking he was only working to help other people heal, while he was healing himself. He’d look so serious, but his soul would be positively humming.

Of course, the fact that he kept using his offworlder potential and the boost he didn’t know he got from helping out his friends to widen the boundaries of what his class could do was part of her motivation here. The system did have to keep up, to nudge his skills a little to keep them from being too very overpowered. But that was a minor concern and something she could do almost pretty well.

Smiling, the system took some actions that roughly corresponded to pouring a cup of the not-quite-tea from the kettle she had not-quite-heating. With one eye on the people she protected, she diverted a small amount of her attention to actually drinking the tea. It smelled mostly right. She took a sip. If she was very lucky, there would be some progress here towards making something that was tea for her in the sense that she could understand it.

She grimaced as the drink missed the mark by a distance that would have spanned galaxies, had it happened in a normal three-dimensional space. She didn’t even know where she had gone wrong, although she suspected her understanding of the pleasant sounds of boiling water had something to do with it.

Oh well, she thought. I have plenty of centuries. I’ll get it eventually.

—

The next day, Arthur had a slapped-up sign pushing his new inventions. Oddly, the initial winner of the morning was one of his old ones.

Hair of the Dog was not exactly a secret, but there had been a long gap between when he used to make it for Eito and when Coldbrook matured into regular alcohol consumption. Not everybody drank, but those who did were apparently doing so without the cure for their own excess. Some people Arthur recognized as occasional buyers of over-pepped tea immediately shifted to the cure when it was available, then went and nursed the drinks in the darkest corners of the plaza until the various cooks brought them greasy breakfasts to help them more.

“I worry that I’m contributing to a problem here.” Arthur handed Spiky a drink and a tin of Portable Arthur, which Spiky overpaid for. Spiky was one of the few wisdom and intelligence classes Arthur knew of, which made him the primary target for Think, but instead of ordering that Spiky was working on a cold, huge cup of March, supposedly to get him ready for a long walk Leena wanted to take. “Am I going to help people be alcoholics, or something?”

“To be what, now?” Spiky asked. “Alcohol…ic? Like they enjoy it especially well?

“Like they drink too much of alcohol. Too often, so it gets in the way of their lives. Or makes them sick,” Arthur said.

“Why?”

“Because they are addicted.”

“To alcohol? How?”

Arthur blanked. There were things you only realized when they came up. One of them was the fact that Arthur had never been asked to treat someone with a chemical dependence problem, or even heard of one. The closest he had come to meeting someone with one was Eito, who really only drank too much when he was around Karbo.

“There’s no addiction here.” Arthur tried to cram that knowledge into his head, and it wouldn’t fit. He tried to add more information into it. “Is it because vitality scores are higher?”

“Oh, I do know that word. People used to have that, yeah,” Spiky said. “Way in the past. Some heavy battle stimulant drugs people took constantly. Nobody would do that now. And for alcohol to do it… you’d have to drink a lot. I can’t do the math on how much. A lot, every day, for most of the day. And nobody would drink like that.”

“I think people did on Earth.” Arthur tried digging through his last-life memories only to find almost anything to do with addiction was heavily blurred. “Maybe it took less there.”

“It must have,” Spiky said. “Nobody would drink that much here. It’s for making fun times more fun, right? And drinking too much would get in the way of fun. There’d be no reason to do it.”

“Huh.” Arthur shrugged. Regardless of whether Spiky’s argument would make sense on Earth, it sort of made sense here, and that was where Arthur lived at the moment. “Well, I’m glad this can help then. Did you get enough information to understand how the new drinks work with the new ingredients?”

“I did. I’ll update it in my books later. Just being able to make more of your buffing drinks is big in and of itself. It will matter when the next monster wave comes,” Spiky said.

“Honestly, I’m surprised the work drinks aren’t selling more. A few people are buying them, but I thought more people would be going for that, now that it’s on my signage and I can make more of it. It’s free stats, right?”

“Oh, yes. And when those stats are important, everyone will want it. I guarantee you.”

“Aren’t they important now?”

“Oh, a bit. They’d always help on a particular task. But most people aren’t stretching the limits of their class every day, and even if they are, they don’t always want tea for it. Do you always walk around with one of your tea-buffs active?”

“Well, no.” Arthur rarely did, really. He drank plenty of his own product, but most of it was conventional stuff, pep-enhanced but carrying no effects any more complex than that. “But my net gain is less. I have to make the stuff. They get it for free.”

“It’s still a small advantage for you. On some level, I’m sure you just understand you don’t need it most of the time. It feels like a shortcut.” Spiky drank his tea, which Arthur motioned at with a questioning look on his face. “That’s part of my point, Arthur. This tea won’t affect my class at all. It will make my day a little better, but all the work I do today will come from me, and what I can do. And to most people, that just feels better.”

“Is this a goose sage thing?”

“Not exactly, but it’s related. Everyone in this world is a bit wary of shortcuts. When I say someone is stretching the limits of their class, I’m really just saying they are stretching the limits they can reach in that class. At least most of the time. The drinks don’t get in the way of that but they just aren’t always the right thing.”

“That actually makes me feel a little better,” Arthur said. “Some of my new teas aren’t really for classes at all. It’s all quality of life enhancements, at least so far.”

“And I think those will sell. Keep at it.” Spiky finished off his drink. “And with that, I think it’s time to go to work.”

“Enjoy it. How has campaigning been going?”

“Oh, I’ve hardly paid attention to it. I’m supposed to give a speech in a few days, I suppose, but besides that, I’m not sure I care very much to spend a lot of time on it. If people want me, they’ll vote for me. If not, I’ll help whoever they do vote for. It will all turn out fine.”

It would, too. Arthur could tell. If someone besides Spiky got hired, they’d bring their own specialties to the table and interact with mayoral powers in their own way. Spiky’s assistance would help them, as would everyone else’s abilities. It would be slightly different, but the town would still benefit in a real and substantial way. If Spiky won, he’d bring his librarian game as the primary foundational piece of the whole machine and everyone else would build on that.

It wasn’t that there was no difference at all. Spiky was a great choice, even judged in terms of absolute effect. But like with his tea, there was only so much that absolute effect mattered. It was a soft world, most of the time. And in a soft world, you could give weight to how things felt, and not just what the math and optimizations said you should do.

And, in Arthur’s book, a world that made sure everything fit was a nice place to be.