Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

“I’m not!” Arthur waved his hands in light panic as he tried to clarify that he wasn’t a rival teamaster. “I’m just visiting the capital. This is a date. A normal date.”

“Not normal entirely.” Mizu smirked.

“Well, no. But I’m not stealing recipes.” Arthur sipped the tea again. “Not on purpose, anyway. How did you get the Blister Root to work? I’ve been boiling it different ways for weeks. It’s always too strong.”

“How many hours do you have? It's not a simple plant.” The man motioned at his son to come from behind the counter and started barking orders as he approached. “Get a Divine Census and a Tranquil Customer started. He’ll want to try them.”

“Why?” Arthur asked.

“Because they are weird. Some teas are for the customers and some are for educational purposes. I don’t sell much of those blends, but I keep them around for people who can appreciate them. Proof of concept pieces, I guess you might call them.”

The teamaster jumped behind the counter and spent the next few minutes instructing his son in the finer points of the prep for those two blends before concentrating on his part of the task and returning with two smaller, sample-size batches of the new blends.

“Try those. I’m too polite to interrupt your date, I think, but those will give us something to talk about if you ever make your way back to the shop. How long are you in town?” the teamaster asked.

“For the full expo. I’m a representative,” Arthur said.

“That’s a big job.” The old man’s eyes flickered slightly, then lit up with understanding. “You must be from the new colonies, then. At your age.”

“Coldbrook. It’s out on the coast,” Arthur said.

“Coldbrook? I’ve heard of it.” The old man slapped his leg. “And now I know who you are. Boy, you better watch out. I know a teamaster who will be hunting you like a prey animal once she realizes you’re in town.”

“Is she the wife of a hotelier? I think I might already have committed to meeting her.”

“Well, just guard your secrets, if you have any. Some people try to be sly about getting tricks of the trade out of folks. She’s not subtle that way. Not about tea, anyway.” The old man nodded at Mizu and Arthur before lightly slapping the table. “Well, I’ll get out of your hair. Try those teas though. You’ll find them interesting.”

The teamaster went back to his rounds as Arthur grabbed two of the spare teacups and poured one of the sample teas into them.

“You want to try this? I get the impression he didn’t blend these to be tasty, exactly,” Arthur asked.

“Sure.” Mizu reached out and took one of the cups from Arthur, blowing over the top of it lightly to cool it. “Do you think you’ll come back here? He seemed like he’d be okay with that if you did.”

“Oh, absolutely. If there’s time.” Arthur sipped the tea, and immediately felt the flavors of it blast across his tongue. “Careful drinking this. Take a small, small sip.”

Mizu lifted her eyebrows but took the advice. She pursed her lips as Arthur watched her catch herself just before she spit it out.

“What was that? Arthur, is this tea a prank? It’s…” Mizu dropped her voice. “It’s gross.”

“I think he wasn’t kidding when he said it was a proof of concept. Or that he didn’t sell much of it.” Arthur took another sip. It was a blend of astringent flavors, all sharp edges and distinct impressions with no mellow tones or round tastes at all to balance it out. It was well-blended, in a sense, just well-blended so far in a particular direction it was almost impossible to enjoy. “I don’t know how this tastes to you, but for me, it’s like a library. It’s like drinking information.”

“About tea?” Mizu asked.

“Yeah.”

“You must be thrilled, then.”

“A little. Let’s try the next one.”

The next blend was the opposite of the last, so round and sweet that it reminded Arthur of drinking melted caramel. There were multiple flavors in play, but everything was so indistinct and muddled that it was hard to tell what was what.

“This is gross in a different way.” Mizu started as she realized she had said that at full volume, and wheeled around to look at the shop owner to see how he reacted. “I’m so sorry!”

“It’s no problem, miss,” the owner laughed. “I should have said you didn’t have to try them. Just ask him what they’re about. He’ll tell you.”

“What’s it about?” Mizu was back to whispering. “It’s just sugar to me.”

“It has a lot of sugar. You almost shouldn’t be able to taste anything over it.” Arthur took another sip. “I think that’s the point, though. All the sugar is from sweet things. He didn’t add any sweetener. And given that you can still taste the ingredients that went into it over all that, I want to say that’s the point. It’s about getting flavors to come out where they shouldn’t.”

“And this is helpful?”

“Kind of. I think.” Arthur took another sip of each of the drinks to set them in his mind, then went back to his normal, consumer-friendly tea. It was like a breath of fresh air, moving back to something that was supposed to be enjoyed after the two instructive teas. “I haven’t had time to think about them yet. But I think those teas are representative of how he thinks about making tea. They are experiments.”

“That I get. Like when I build a well to test out a new rune stack. Sometimes you build them in a certain way just to see how far you can push things,” Mizu said.

“That sounds about right. But yes, I need to come back here. This man knows a lot of things I don’t.” Arthur thought for a moment. “So does the hotelier’s wife too, I bet. I wonder how many teamasters I can actually visit while I’m here. There have to be a lot, right?”

Mizu smiled enigmatically.

“What?” Arthur looked around, then at Mizu. “What did I do?”

“Oh, nothing.” She stood up, leaving a small stack of coins on the table as she did. She grabbed Arthur’s hand and dragged him to his feet. “It’s just that I’ve lost you to the sweet call of teashops. Come on. I want to get at least one good date night out of this trip before you fall down the tea-hole and don’t come back out.”

—

The capital was huge. Arthur and Mizu walked for a few hours, taking in the sights before they started to loop back, and they still hadn’t seen even a small fraction of what there was to see. Not every street was meant to be visited anyways. Most places were just conventional in familiar ways, representative of the fact that people lived much the same way everywhere. There was food to eat. There were beds to sleep in. Everything was different, but nothing was alien except the sheer scope of it all.

“How do people get around the city?” Arthur asked. “I mean, when they have to travel from one side to the other, or something. I can’t think they just walk for four hours.”

“There are bigger roads, just for transporters.” Mizu pointed in an arcing motion off in the distance. “They can get you across town a lot quicker. They just go as fast as they can in a straight line like it’s a race. It’s kind of terrifying.”

“Oh, we have to take Lily on that, then. She’ll love it,” Arthur said.

They strolled back home on a different route, and in the process stumbled on a very nice park with a big, bricked platform in the center. There was a performer up on the stage playing a guitar-like instrument, backed by a percussionist on a small, handheld drum.

“He sounds pretty good.” Arthur’s feet were starting to ache a bit from all the walking, even in his magic shoes. “Want to take a breather?”

“Sure.” Mizu pointed at a bench near enough to the stage to hear everything was clearly. “There looks good.”

They sat close together as the instrumental piece the players were performing wrapped up. The next song started, an up-tempo number that had the percussionists hands working like lightning. The guitarist started singing, turning out to be pretty good at that, too.

There’s a town west of nowhere out beyond everyplace,

And he’s firing up his oven and he’s bringing out the plates,

And he’s cooking up the bacon while he’s frying every egg,

Don’t look down, don’t look back, it’s too late,

It’s the biggest breakfast ever made, a morning mealtime serenade,

He’s cooking till you burst and then he’s laughing at your shame,

He writes symphonies of bread and yeast and serenades with meat and grease,

He’s breakfast-man the first and earned the name.

“Hey, I actually think I know that guy.” Arthur blinked. “Not the musician. The breakfast man. This guy wrote a song about the breakfast man?”

“Wait, what? Arthur, everyone knows this song. It’s a standard. The breakfast man is a legend. You’ve met him?” Mizu asked.

“Yeah, I think so. Talca knows him. They’re like friends or something.”

“Well, count yourself lucky. I hear there’s an achievement if you actually manage to eat his whole breakfast.”

“That’s true. We got that. Well, Spiky did, mainly.”

“WHAT?!”

Oh they say his toast is crispy and his juice is freshly squeezed,

And the smells, they say, the smells are much too good to be believed,

But he’s feeding you and laughing while he knocks you to your knees,

Don’t look down, don’t look back, it’s too late,

It’s the biggest breakfast ever made, a morning mealtime serenade,

He’s cooking till you burst and then he’s laughing at your shame,

He writes symphonies of bread and yeast and serenades with meat and grease,

He’s breakfast-man the first and earned the name.

Arthur sort of expected another chorus and to be done with the song then, but when the singer launched into another verse he battened himself down for the long haul.

“How long is this song?” Arthur whispered politely, five minutes in. “He must have sung ten verses by now. There were two entirely about sausage.”

“Oh, this is the music version of an epic poem, Arthur. Depending on which version he’s doing, this might go hours.”

“Well, he can if he wants,” Arthur said. “I’ll listen. Are you okay with that?”

Mizu snuggled in as the light started to shift a bit more red from the sunset. “Of course. Put your arm around me, though. I don’t want to get cold.”