Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

Philbin told Arthur or Lily that he was taking them to something accessible and interesting. Neither of them cared enough to ask for more details, which meant it came as quite a shock when Mizu found them in their seats before the talk began, and stood over them with her hands on her hips.

“Where beasts failed to track your scents over rivers, our water-talkers found the history of your travel in the currents themselves, furthering our pursuit and driving you to the very edges of our civilization,” Mizu said.

“Oooh, that’s a good one. Arthur, what did you do?” Lily asked.

“No idea. Mizu, why am I in trouble?” Arthur said.

“You probably aren’t, but I can’t be too careful. Did you follow me here, Arthur?”

“No! I assumed you just saw us coming in. Philbin brought us here.” Arthur looked around for the frog, and couldn’t find him. “I’ll introduce you later. He’s a big guy. Toady. Tour guide. Very nice. Why are you here, anyway?”

“So you don’t know what this talk is on?” Mizu asked. “Really?”

“Cross my heart. You can ask Lily too. She’d think it was funny to get me in trouble if she could.”

“It’s true. He’s innocent. We have no idea what this is.”

Mizu sighed and sat down by Arthur. “All right, then. You aren’t in trouble. But you can only stay if you promise not to distract me with Arthur-things. This is an important talk for me.”

Before Arthur could ask why, A very blue man took the stage. He looked like a god of the ocean. Arthur said a silent prayer of thankfulness that whatever Mizu’s interest in him was didn’t seem to be entirely dependent on looks. If that had been her primary preference-driver, this chiseled-jaw, cyan man would have outclassed Arthur in an instant.

“We flooded our fields beyond what was needed for mere irrigation, wasting valuable water to stymie your progress to our settlements,” the man said, smiling. “Welcome to all wellers, or anyone else who has an interest in our work. I’m Mimasu, of Yasurt Village, and I’m here to talk about the finer points of well enclosures, specifically on matters of usability and on-the-job comfort that work hand in hand with the runes they are built to house.”

Arthur felt a person move closer to him from behind, and turned to see Philbin there. “Yasurt Village is a large settlement, known for its abundant water despite being built in an otherwise arid region. It’s a huge field of green in a desert that gets almost no rain. Experts from there are particularly respected,” Philbin explained.

Arthur nodded and turned back to the talk. It was interesting. Almost none of it was relevant to him, of course, but it had to do with Mizu’s work, which he was always eager to learn more about. Even more than that, it was just a complex subject he could still somewhat understand. Mimasu had a lot to say about the proper amount of elbow room needed for different numbers of people to work in harmony, as well as other practical concerns.

It was during the second ten-minute segment on pleasing well acoustics that Arthur turned and motioned Philbin forward.

“Phil, we have a problem,” Arthur whispered.

“What’s that? Are you not enjoying yourself?” Philbin asked.

“No, I am. It’s great. It’s too great. I don’t know this much about a single subject I’m talking about.”

“You do about tea, I’d imagine.”

“Well, sure. But I have to talk about wall construction. And wells. And smithing. And a bunch of other things. I can’t match this for all of them.”

“Arthur, he’s a weller,” Lily said. “He’s leading with this to get his nerves in order. He won’t know anything about tea if he has to talk about it. At least not any more than you do about water.”

“The girl is right. Your specialty is your key speech, the one most people will come to see whether they have an interest in it or not. Your speech on welling, less so. Although having a weller with you helps.”

Mizu turned, nodded quickly, then went back to watching the talk. The water demon demigod had begun elucidating the relative comfort of different moisture-wicking stone types when used as benches, and Arthur dimly hoped that Mizu’s interest in the subject was entirely professional. It probably was if he was honest. She complained a great deal about having to leave the well for lunch to avoid overly moist pants.

“Then it’s going to be fine. You’ll have help for more than a few of your talks, and a surprising amount of grace for those you don’t know a lot about. Trust me, Arthur.” Philbin patted Arthur’s shoulder with a webbed hand. “It’s going to be fine. Do you always worry like this?”

“Oh, you have no idea,” Mizu and Lily said in unison.

—

The talk wrapped up sooner than even Arthur wanted it to. Again, nothing was super relevant to his own class or anything he did, but he felt like he had a better grasp of general space arrangement as well as a bit more knowledge of majicka.

Majicka, Arthur reflected, was weird. It was presented to him as a given of the universe when he had first travelled to his new home from Earth, and had seemed weird to him then. But at the time he had thousands of new things to learn and think about, and never really got much further on the subject than a very simple it’s-just-magic-Arthur-please-make-more-tea understanding.

Majicka affected a lot of things. As Mizu went and asked a dozen very professional questions of the very professional water elemental who had given the speech, Arthur took some time to try to pin down what he actually knew about it.

First, majicka was something that was inside of him, in the same way blood was inside of him. It accomplished things and fueled his body and capabilities the same way too. The most obvious way this happened was through skills, since he could feel the majicka actually moving and pushing to make things happen when he tried to juice a particular tea with some effect or another.

He also suspected that it was fueling his stats too. He had never heard of anybody saying the system helped anyone accomplish anything except through majicka, and besides majicka and its various effects, physics seemed to be much the same on this planet as they were on Earth. The simplest explanation was usually right, and given that he had never heard anyone attribute his vitality stat’s endurance-enhancement or his strength stat’s ability to lift heavier weights to anything else, it was probably just plain majicka at work.

Second, majicka was outside of him. It was in the air. When he ran out, he didn’t make more. He drew it in from the surrounding area. He didn’t know if theoretical majicka dead zones existed in this universe, or if being in one would be the same as just being on normal, vanilla majicka-free earth.

Heck, maybe Earth had majicka and we just couldn’t use it because we had no system.

Which led into the third thing, which was that the system guided majicka use a lot. You couldn’t overdraw your majicka enough to seriously hurt yourself. The system wouldn’t allow it. Like holding your breath, eventually you’d just pass out. It wasn’t exactly healthy to overuse it and everyone seemed to steer away from it, but to some extent the system made sure there were plenty of safeties between you and majicka that kept you from hurting yourself by using it.

Arthur knew how to use his skills, and his skills used majicka on stuff or to accomplish things. But that didn’t mean, really, that he understood majicka even when using the skills he understood the best. It was like almost like how a person could play a video game without understanding how to code.

But it wasn’t exactly like that. He was still interacting with majicka in ways he could feel, day after day. When someone described their work, he could sense the familiar patterns of how majicka worked in it. When he got really close to someone’s work, it made him understand his own a little better, even if he couldn’t explain exactly how.

Fourth, majicka came in a lot of different flavors. He had seen freezing mushrooms that changed majicka to be almost pure cold, and had felt the differences in the power driving Mizu’s, Milo’s, and Lily’s skills when they did something class-based in front of him. Majicka changed people and things, but it was also changed by them, processed into different forms by different intents and unleashed for different purposes entirely depending on the goals of the people using it.

And fifth, none of this was metaphorical. It would have been easy to think of majicka as a very spiritual, non-physical thing, but Arthur had felt the differences in majicka in different environments. He had even been poisoned by being around too much of it once. It was magic, and it might very well defy thermodynamics as he dimly remembered them from Earth. But it was also as real as the oxygen in the air.

“You look deep in thought,” Mizu said. “Was the talk that interesting?”

“It was. And it also made me think about how little I know about some things,” Arthur said.

“Like?”

“Like majicka. What is it? I feel like everyone knows but me.”

“Actually, no.” Lily popped up from the side. “That’s actually one place you aren’t that different from everyone else. Nobody really understands it. One of the first classes I ever took as a kid was about majicka, and it was just… majicka is like the wind. It moves. Majicka is like fire because it can heat or burn. Majicka is like water. Majicka is like happiness, or sadness. But never exactly what it is.”

“She’s right.” Mizu sat back down, putting her notepad away in her bag for the time being. “There’s a whole science dedicated to trying to detect majicka in ways besides how it feels and how it works through the system. We know there’s moisture in the air not just because we can feel it but because we can extract it.”

“Like condensation on a cold glass,” Arthur said.

“Right. But we can’t do that with majicka. Yet. Which means each person understands it in the way they understand it. And it’s a little different for everyone and all those understandings are about equally valid.”

“Huh.”

“That’s part of why we have the expo,” Philbin added. “So people can understand majicka better, in general.”

“I get that,” Arthur said. “I got a lot out of this presentation.”

“And hopefully you’ll get something out of the next presentation, too. It’s in just a few minutes. Are you ready to walk?”