DEMON WORLD BOBA SHOP

Book 1

R.C. Joshua

To my family,
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without prior written
permission from Potomac Stories.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either
products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance
to actual events, locales, or persons, living, dead, or undead, is entirely
coincidental.

Copyright © 2024 by RC Joshua

Published in 2024 by Potomac Stories
www.potomacstories.com

Table of Contents
TERMS OF RELOCATION
DEMON WORLD
TREE DEMON AND INFERNAL
A SYSTEM WORLD
THE FIRST CLASS
DUNGEONEERING
NO FIGHTING
SOUP AND BREAD
TEAMASTER
DEMON CULTURE
FOOD SCIENTIST
BEING A KID
MIZU
STAT POINTS
FOREST DAY
BEING A KID
FOOD CART
PERFECTION
TEASHOP BREWMASTER
MAJICKA
PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
SALES TROUBLE
GENIUS AT WORK
MACHINES AND PARENTS
SKIPPING HOME
LOST CHILD SCRY
NEW RESPONSIBILITIES
PASSIVE MAJICKA
MEDICINAL BREWER
ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO ARGUE?
THE GREAT JUICING
SOURMOUTH MELTDOWN
MONSTER WAVE
TEA OF THE ROCK-THROWER
BEAR DEMON
ASSISTANTS
CITIZEN OF THE DAY
RISE TOGETHER
UNSAID THINGS
BOBA SHOP
SCARED
DUTY
ANTI-VENOM
THE TUNNELS
MEDICINAL BOBA
PROMISES AND EFFECTS
OVERPEPPED TEA OF THE WORKAHOLIC
HEALING
BOYFRIEND
EPILOGUE
HERE BE SIDE STORIES
THE VOICE AND THE BEAR
WRITING HIS OWN STORY
THE SYSTEM, BAKING, AND THE EARTHLING
FESTIVAL DAY
AUTHOR’S NOTE

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 CHAPTER ONE

TERMS OF RELOCATION

For Arthur, waking up was usually harder than this. Most days it was
painful, a cross between the not-quite-healed aches of a late night and the
bitter realization that he was about to have to get up, shower, and go to
work.
This, though? This was another kind of waking up. A better kind.
This was how it felt after a mid-afternoon nap in an absolutely quiet
house, surrounded by warm blankets and knowing that tomorrow was yet
another day off. He wasn’t even sweaty. The sheets were softer than they
should have been and somehow felt like they had just emerged from a
thousand clothes dryers all at once.
All in all, it was so damn comfortable that he almost didn’t mind
that his last memory before waking up here was falling to the ground. The
bed was so comfortable he almost wasn’t concerned about his recollection
of a tight, shooting pain in his heart and a curiously numb left arm. Almost.
He sat up, forcing his eyes open to see a room that looked as good
as waking up had felt. Everything in it was light-colored, not in a hospital
room stark-white way, but instead in a calming pastel array of whites, light
grays, and soft blues. The light was tinged with the same kind of soft
twinkle that reading near a window on an overcast day had.
It would have been entirely too nice, if it wasn’t for the fact that he
had just died.
“Now, now, don’t panic. Everything is going to be quite all right, I
promise.”
“Where am I?” Arthur said, already feeling calmer somehow.
An old man was sitting in a chair by his bedside, just now folding a
book closed and laying it down on a small table like he had been passing
the time while waiting for Arthur to wake up. Whatever else he might be,
the man had a talent for soothing raw nerves.
After a few moments of silence, Arthur ventured a guess, “Am I…”
“Dead?” the man said. “A bit, I’m afraid. Perhaps not in the most
technical of senses, but in all the ways you mean, yes.”
“There’s a non-technical form of death?”
Although there were more important things to be concerned about at
the moment, Arthur was far from immune to going off on rabbit trails. He
might be dead, but he was also fully nerd-sniped now. The old man
chuckled, apparently not put out by the question.
“Oh, yes,” the man said. “Dead is, well, dead. Your body dies, and
your soul departs. There are only a few destinations one might go, after that.
Your soul left your body, yes. But rather than leaving after your body died,
it left just before. That means more options.”
“That was a heart attack?”
“Yes. Quite massive, I’m afraid. We had to move very quickly.”
As distressing as not-quite-dying should have been, Arthur was
having a hard time being upset about it. His last week at work had been so
stressful that it should have been unbelievable. The reason it wasn’t was
because all his other work-weeks were equally bad, if not worse.
 He had pushed through them, promising himself that he’d find the
time to get a better job, or at least to figure out ways to make a more
sustainable schedule. After years of unfulfilled promises to himself, nothing
had changed. That kind of stress had to add up.
“Tea?” the old man offered. “It’s quite good.”
Arthur looked over to see the old man already pouring tea from a
small teapot into a delicate cup. He didn’t know for sure if that pot had been
there all along, but the tea really did smell wonderful. The old man added a
small amount of cream to the cup, just the way Arthur liked his tea, and
handed it to him.
“I thought about coffee, but it didn’t seem like that kind of day.”
“Don’t worry. This is wonderful. Thank you.”
It really was. Arthur liked tea, although he seldom had time to make
it. This was the best he could remember having, a heavily spiced brew that
felt warm in a way that went beyond temperature. He could almost feel the
liquid relaxing his muscles. It was serene.
Then he messed it up for himself. He realized, all of a sudden, that
his parents and siblings would know that he had died. They were kind
people. Loving. They weren’t going to take this easily.
And my job. My god. My project. It’s already behind. And I’m the
only one who knows how it works, and it’s going to go to shit, and everyone
will be mad at…
“You look distressed, Arthur.”
Arthur jerked with surprise. He had stressed himself out so much
that he had forgotten the man was there.
“It’s all right. Perfectly normal. I suppose you are thinking about
your family?”
“Uh… yeah. And my job.”
The old man took a sip of his tea.
 “I won’t pretend your family won’t be sad. But if I read your profile
correctly, they have families of their own, correct? People who love them?”
They did. Of all the people close to him, Arthur was the only one
who had gone down the workaholic path. The others skewed on the life side
of work-life balance. They were people with friends and family and lots of
hobbies. He didn’t doubt they’d mourn him, but they’d be fine, eventually.
With a sigh of relief, he realized that while they liked him, they didn’t
exactly need him for anything. They would be just fine.
“As to your job… was this project important? Making a new
medicine? Something that would save lives?”
It was a leading question, but the old man wasn’t wrong. At worst,
the project would fail, but nobody would die over it. At best, it would go on
without him and make someone he didn’t even like that much a little more
money.
And, he realized, he didn’t even really work there anymore. All the
tension vanished from his body as the truth that the world would go on just
like it had before washed over him.
Arthur sighed and stretched, enjoying the exquisite bed and tea just
a little more than should have been possible.
“Good,” the old man said, smiling approvingly. “That’s more like it.
Now, on to business, I’m afraid.”
“It’s all right. So, am I going… upstairs? I guess? Or…”
“Downstairs? No, I’m afraid this isn’t quite like that. You aren’t
fully dead, after all. Of course, you could choose to die just to see which
option you’d end up with, but both are awfully final.”
“You can make a different offer? Are you…”
“A god? I’m afraid not. Just a man with a job, so to speak.” The old
man sipped his tea and sighed. “But as far as the offer goes, yes. For
reasons I can’t explain to you and to accomplish goals you can’t know
about, I can make your death’s lack of finality much more permanent.”
“Immortality?”
 “No, but a new body. A different life. One you’d have more say in.”
Arthur sipped his tea and considered this. There was, of course, a
rule that the afterlife was going to be much better than regular life.
Whatever heaven might be waiting for him, should he get in, might be the
best possible choice. It was heaven, after all. But something kept him from
leaping at that option.
“Sir?”
“No sirs, please. But what would you like to know?”
“Would you say I had… enough life?”
The old man’s eyes widened a bit, and he set his cup down as he
considered this.
“That’s quite the question. I’m not sure how to answer it.”
“Your best try is fine.”
“I’d say you had a short life, one that you didn’t give yourself very
much time to enjoy. Enough is different for every person, but…” He
paused, hesitating.
“It’s okay. That’s about what I thought, too,” Arthur said. He swung
his legs out from beneath the bedding and sat facing the man with his legs
hanging off the mattress. “I think I’d like to take another shot at it.”
“Splendid. I’m not allowed to influence decisions before they are
made, but now that you’ve made yours, I can say that I don’t think you’ll be
sorry.” The old man looked distracted for a moment, his eyes focusing
downwards on nothing in particular. “I’m going to send you some
information in a moment. Please don’t be alarmed by the format. I assure
you it’s quite harmless.”
In the middle of the air, a small screen suddenly opened in front of
Arthur’s face. Under normal circumstances, it would have startled him. At
that moment, however, it registered as a mild surprise and nothing more.

Terms of Relocation
In accordance with his assent, Arthur Dennison (hereafter the
Transmigrator) is offered an opportunity to transmigrate to a
different world, realm, or combination of the two.
1. A new body will be provided, as close in appearance and
form to the transmigrators previous body as possible.
Some alterations and differences may occur in ways that
the Transmigrator would consider to be beneficial and
positive.
2. The body will be youthful enough to enjoy a long life, but
per guidelines, it will also be an adult as judged by the
culture into which the Transmigrator is transmigrating.
3. The Transmigrator will retain all of their memories, but
any memories that would allow the Transmigrator to
destabilize the host world, such as knowledge of how to
construct a thermonuclear device, will be blurred.
4. The Transmigrator will be restricted from revealing details
of their old home to inhabitants of the host world in any
scenario where the communication of those facts would be
harmful or destabilizing to the host world, its inhabitants,
or the Transmigrator themselves.
5. To the extent possible, the world that the Transmigrator is
introduced to will be one in which they have a good
chance of reasonable success.

As per condition five, the Transmigrator has been granted some

level of influence over the type of world they are sent to. The
Transmigrator is able to influence one element of the selection
process by emphasizing a specific word.
For example, a daredevil might emphasize the word “danger” and
find themselves in a world where danger is the norm while
another person who desires love might emphasize “love” or
“romance.”
The precise world chosen will, to the extent possible, be one that
is suited to the Transmigrator’s stated preference. It should be
 noted, however, that some level of accommodation might be
required on the Transmigrator’s part if a suitable world is not
available.

“I don’t know why they still include that last bit,” the old man said.
“The variance in things people wanted was never that large to begin with,
and these days there’s so many worlds that it hardly comes into play at all.”
“Can I quote you on that?” Arthur asked. “Legally, I mean.”
“Oh, heavens no. I’m a salaryman, Arthur. I don’t supersede that
document at all. But for what it’s worth, I’m a salaryman who isn’t trying to
trick you.”
Arthur believed him. In the worst case, that belief was coming from
some magic in the tea or the room influencing his feelings on the matter.
But if that was the case, he didn’t see himself having much choice anyway.
It was much nicer to just believe the man was on his side.
“Have you given any thought to your new world?”
“What’s the most popular word that people choose?”
“The most popular word isn’t one you’d understand, actually. But
the most popular word from your world is ‘adventure’, and it’s the most
popular by far. We’ve seen a sudden surge in ‘harem’ recently, but we do
our best to discourage that.”
Harem, at least, was easy to disqualify. Arthur got the appeal, but all
the anime and shows he had ever seen with that focus left him slightly
queasy in a way he couldn’t explain. Adventure was much more appealing,
really. He could have a sword, or do magic, or something. Dungeons could
be cleared. Loot could be hoarded.
But that didn’t seem quite right, either.
As much as he liked adventure in stories he read, he had never much
wanted to actually do the deed himself. The reality of adventure didn’t
really appeal to him. Some other guy could sleep in tents and fight giant
mosquitos.
 “Any ideas?” the old man asked. “I don’t mean to hurry you. We
have all the time you need. But I can help, if you’d like.”
Arthur thought about it. The prompt had assured him that he would
arrive as an adult, and he tried his hardest to remember the last time he was
happy, truly happy, as an adult on Earth. It wasn’t college, certainly. That
had been almost as busy as work, somehow. And work itself had been
miserable, always just one more miserable step towards success after the
other.
In his newfound clarity, he suddenly realized the last time he had
felt content. It was in a place like here. A calm room, a pleasant
conversation, soft cloudy-day light, and a good cup of tea.
“I don’t know if you can do this, but I think I have my word,”
Arthur said. “Is it possible that you could do something nice?”
“Nice?” the old man said, beaming. “Yes, I think I can do a great
deal with that.”
And he did.

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 CHAPTER TWO

DEMON WORLD

“Should we wake him up?”

The voice was almost a growl, so deep that Arthur could feel it
vibrating his bones like an organic subwoofer. He couldn’t see the source of
it yet.
The comfort of the bed had given way to the sensation of sleeping
face-down on something hard and cold, and Arthur kept his eyes firmly shut
as he tried to assess what kind of situation he had found himself in. Just a
moment ago, he had been there with the smiling old man.
“I don’t know. Have you ever seen this variation before?”
The new voice was significantly higher, but almost anything else
would have been. Still male. But probably younger?
“No. If he’s a demon, he’s not like any I’ve seen. And if he’s not a
demon…”
“Then what is he? I was thinking the same thing,” the second voice
said, in agreement. “Do you want to wake him?”
“Not without knowing anything about how he’d react, no.”
 “So, we wait, Karbo?”
There was a pause before Karbo’s bass boomed out once again.
“We wait.”
Now, Arthur found, he was in a bit of a pickle. He heard the two
settle in, apparently anticipating a long delay before he woke up by himself.
If he had actually been asleep, he might have appreciated the
gesture. Since he was awake, the combination of the courtesy of the voices
and his own deception meant all the time in the world to experience the
unique discomfort of a hard, apparently stone surface grinding into his face.
He settled on a time limit. If they didn’t leave in the next five
hundred seconds, he decided, he’d get up. Not that they seemed like they
were going to leave at all, really. He was aware, on some level, that he was
stalling. For the moment, he was fine with it.
“Hey, Karbo.”
“Yes?”
“I don’t think he’s actually asleep.”
Shit.
“Why not?”
“His lips keep twitching. I think he’s… counting?”
“In his sleep?”
“No. Who counts in their sleep? I’m saying he’s awake.”
The two voices suddenly became more muted as they whispered
back and forth. Arthur stopped counting, hoping they’d believe it was a
fluke.
“Hey. Kid. I get that you are in a weird spot, but my friend and I
aren’t going to hurt you, okay? We just have to make sure you are all right.”
Karbo joined in.
 “If we wanted to hurt you, couldn’t we have, by now? I swear on the
city, no harm will come to you.”
That was, Arthur thought, probably about the best he was going to
get. They could be lying, sure, but besides the panic of waking up in an
unfamiliar place, he had no reason to think they were planning on hurting
him. He was probably just being silly.
Sighing internally, he placed his hands underneath him and opened
his eyes to see that the hard surface he was laying on was actually some
kind of flagstone street paved with reddish rock.
With a push off the ground, he slowly rotated to face the pair. The
environment was, surprisingly, pretty normal. He was on a side street of
some kind, a sort of wide alley with not much going on besides a few refuse
piles and the back entrances of some buildings.
The people themselves were a different story altogether. As Arthur
twisted his head to an angle where he could see them, he found himself face
to face with real, actual monsters. Karbo, or at least the one he assumed was
Karbo, was a huge, red devil complete with horns that curved back over his
forehead, tracking the shape of his skull all the way to the back of his head.
“You okay?” The devil asked. The voice confirmed it. That was
Karbo. All four-hundred or so pounds of him, a mass of red muscles
crammed into a tank-top and simple fabric pants.
Arthur gawked, only to be distracted by the utterly bizarre variant
on the monster theme the other voice turned out to have come from. The
second man was slender and a much more normal size, so in that respect
there wasn’t much to be freaked out about. What was weirder was the fact
that his skin was bark, his eyes were made out of wood, and that his hair
appeared to be intricately carved out of a single tree stump.
“I don’t think he is. Look at him,” the tree-demon said as he pointed
a wooden finger forward. “He’s freaking out.”
On some level, Arthur knew that he shouldn’t be panicking over
this. He was in a whole new world. Somewhere, his more academic side
was telling him that this wasn’t even necessarily the weirdest thing he’d see
all day. He knew that his best bet was to take a deep breath, have a calm
conversation, and figure out more about where he was and what he was
doing.
And yet he was already running away. Fast. Faster than he actually
imagined he could have run, courtesy of his brand-new body.
“Wait!” He heard the tree-demon yell. “We want to help you!”
It might as well have been yelling at a startled wild rabbit. Whatever
was making Arthur run was much closer to instinct than rational thought.
But the running, he found, had been a mistake. Karbo and his friend weren’t
the only monsters in sight. What he had thought of as a town was a city, a
whole city, chock-full of them.
He almost ran smack into some kind of rabbit woman holding a
basket of produce, then swerved to barely miss some kind of human-shaped
cloud that appeared to be out for a stroll. Wherever he turned, there was
some kind of new impossibility, something more mind-stretchingly painful
to look at.
And then, somehow, Karbo was right in front of him, too close to
dodge around. He slammed into the demon with all the grace of a rotten
peach thrown at a brick wall, and then felt the monster’s huge arms curling
around him.
“There, there,” Karbo boomed. “I gotcha. It’s all right. Take a deep
breath.”
“Don’t hold him too tight, you oaf.”
“I’m not. Now, you, listen. Calm down. It’s okay.”
Arthur realized, somewhere deep inside himself, that it probably
was okay, or would be if he could just stop panicking. He had almost a full
second to consider that before he passed out.

“Looks like you’re waking up. Good,” a woman’s voice said. “Don’t open
your eyes, all right? Just lay there. I’m going to tell you some things.”
“Yes,” Arthur said. The permission to keep his eyes closed and the
kind, adult competence in the new voice made him feel better than he
probably should have felt.
“Since we don’t know why you panicked, I’m going to cover all the
reasons I can think of why you might have, and tell you why they aren’t a
problem. Is that all right?”
Arthur nodded, weakly.
“First, we suspect you aren’t from around here. If I’m guessing
correctly, you’re probably from another world. I want you to know that isn’t
unknown to us. It’s not common, exactly, but it’s not something new or
something that we get angry about.”
As he considered that bit of good news. Arthur heard a chair scrape
out from the wall and the sounds of a person settling into it
“You also don’t look much like us, which I suspect means we don’t
look very much like the kinds of people you’re used to. From your reaction,
I’m guessing we look a bit monstrous. Is that right?”
Arthur didn’t know how to respond to that one. He kept quiet. After
a few moments, the woman continued talking anyway.
“There are all sorts of demons living in this city. A lot of variety, you
might say. But I want to reassure you that, however we might look to you,
most of us are perfectly decent people. We get along with each other,
despite all the differences you’ve already seen. It won’t be much of a stretch
to get along with you.”
The person shifted their weight a bit, and Arthur suddenly became
aware she was leaning over him. He felt a warm hand settle on his shoulder,
as gently and lightly as a feather.
“Last, you might be worried that we might hurt you. Or want to. The
truth of the matter is we don’t. We actually have a duty here to take care of
people who find their way to us. It’s one of the more important duties we
have. You’re a guest here, one we intend to help, not harm. Do you
understand these things? Everything I’ve said?”
Arthur nodded. He really did, despite the fact that he was still
incredibly nervous about all of it.
 “Good. Open your eyes. Look at me.”
He did. The new voice turned out to belong to a rather small
woman, if you could call her that. She had a dove-like head, complete with
a beak, and wings that appeared to sprout straight from her back. But
beyond that, she appeared reasonably human. She had two arms, two legs,
and proportions close to what Arthur was used to.
And over in a corner, looking bashful, were Karbo and his tree-
friend.
“Not running? Good. Keep breathing, and don’t feel like you have
to talk, yet.” The woman lifted her hand to Arthur’s head, then nodded. “No
fever. You look well, despite the day you’ve had. When these two oafs
brought you in, you were as limp as a cooked noodle. I was afraid
something worse might be wrong with you.”
“I’m… sorry about that,” Arthur said, then looked over at Karbo and
the tree. “To all of you. It was sort of a lot to take in all at once.”
“It’s fine,” the tree said, with Karbo nodding in agreement. “We
understand. I’m Eito, by the way.”
“I’m Arthur.” Arthur looked at the bird woman, questioningly.
“Itela. A doctor of sorts. And don’t worry. We are going to get all
this sorted out.”
Over the next 20 minutes, Arthur learned a lot. He was, Itela said, in
a place called Stannen, a relatively large city on the continent. It was a city
of variety, one that housed commerce, crafting, and that even trained
adventurers of a sort.
“It’s a good place, I promise you. Everyone contributes to the health
of the city.”
“It does sound nice.” Arthur took a bite out of a small cookie-like
wafer that the woman had supplied.
“I’m glad you think so. It will be your home, for now. Now, am I
right in assuming you don’t have a system class, yet?” Itela asked.
“No. I don’t think so, at least,” Arthur said.
 “Ah,” Karbo said. “An initiate. That’s what I thought when I first
saw you.”
“I’m sorry?” Arthur asked.
“An initiate,” Eito said. “A demon old enough to have a class but
doesn’t have one yet, or who is in the first parts of learning how to use
one.”
“Oh,” Arthur said. “Class, like a warrior or an archer? That kind of
thing?”
“Those and a thousand others,” the bird woman said, standing from
her chair. “Anything useful you can think of can be supplemented by a
class. Not just combat but crafting as well. Healing. Cooking. Cleaning.
Whatever a person might do.”
Clearing what few dishes she had used to serve Arthur the cookies,
the bird-woman stood.
“But that’s something that can be handled later. For now, we need to
figure out where to put you,” Itela said.
“Put me?” Arthur asked.
She gestured at the two male demons, who had settled into chairs
around the room once it was clear that Arthur was calming down. “As the
people who discovered you, both Karbo and Eito are obligated to take care
of you for a time. But as they don’t live in the same home, only one of them
can go first. It’s a temporary thing, of course. You’ll likely be housed with
quite a few people before you are settled. Who would you like to go with
first?”

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 CHAPTER THREE

TREE DEMON AND INFERNAL

Arthur glanced away from Itela towards Karbo and Eito, both of whom
seemed to be trying and failing to look uninterested in who he’d choose.
Great. I treat these guys like terrifying monsters to start my day, and
now I have to tell them that I prefer one of them to the other. Fantastic.
He could see why Itela was leaving the choice up to him. It was very
polite. It was also the worst possible thing she could have done.
Without any real data to go off, Arthur went with his gut, which said
the smaller, less-obviously-strong person was the better way to go.
Probably. He had the sneaking suspicion that he was bumbling into some
kind of demon-kind stereotype and hoped that any social blunder would be
forgiven later as a first-day sort of thing.
“Eito, I guess?” Arthur said. “As long as I’m going both places
eventually.”
“Splendid. Eito it is.” She turned to Eito, smiling. “I trust you have
enough food? There’s a fund for the care of guests of the city.”
The way she said that last phrase seemed to imply some kind of
special status, like she might have said special lawyer, but without any of
the negative connotations the words usually carried. For his part, Eito
seemed disgusted at the prospect of taking money from whatever fund had
been set aside for this purpose.
“And shame my entire family? I think I can afford to feed a child for
a few days, Itela.”
“Oh, calm down. You know I have to mention the fund.” She turned
to Arthur, gripping his shoulders and looking into first one of his eyes, then
the other, as if she was checking for problems. “And you feel all right? No
dizziness? No shortness of breath?”
“I think I’m fine.”
“Good. Then get out of here and on your way. There’s still plenty for
you to take in, today.” She gripped both his shoulders a bit tighter and then
leaned close enough to whisper in his ear. “You chose wrong, by the way.
Eito’s a good person, but Karbo’s nicer.”
Karbo, having found out he was off the hook on the matter of
putting up the city’s guest for now, had begged the pardon of everyone
present and left as soon as possible. Eito and Arthur followed close behind,
completing the surprisingly long trek through a series of stone hallways
leading outside to the street.
“So was that like a city hall?” Arthur asked as he looked back. The
building itself was huge and shaped like a gigantic, three-story shoebox.
“That? Good gods, you must have come a long way. That’s a
church, Arthur.”
“Really? I wouldn’t have expected that it’d be so… minimal.”
“All churches are.”
“Why? The gods here don’t like fancy stuff?”
“Oh, no, some of them do.” Eito chuckled. “But they all like
different kinds of fancy stuff and have to share the same building. Guess
how church designers keep the peace in that situation.”
“By making everything look like a joyless, stripped-down
nightmare?”
 “Hey now,” Eito said, “even if you are right, that’s a little harsh. You
get used to it, either way.”
The walk home turned into a tour of the surroundings. Eito claimed
that the city was shaped a bit like a pie, with each big triangular slice of it
being considered its own ward, and to some extent its own local
government. The center of the city was the exception to that rule, itself a big
circular section that housed the city’s true government, its important
services, and its most important businesses.
“And the best food carts, on average,” Eito said. “But that’s only on
average. Every ward has its own geniuses in that regard. Don’t worry, I’ll
show you.”
“And you are sure this is okay? Feeding me and housing me? I don’t
want to put you out, and you don’t know me,” Arthur said.
“You’re the guest,” Eito said, as if that was a clear, final answer to
the question. “Our city takes care of guests. We always have. And it’s paid
off for us. It’s not like that where you come from?”
“Sometimes. Some individuals are that way. Our governments aren’t
generally great at it. But it’s a pretty different world.”
“Well, here, we’ve benefited. New people bring new skills, or at
least skills that sometimes aren’t as common. We get new food and new
music.”
Arthur nodded, understanding. “It’s a melting pot.”
“A what?”
“A melting pot. A bunch of cultures mixing together, becoming
something new.”
“Huh. I’ve never heard it put that way. I’ll remember it.”
Eito mentioned he lived about a quarter of the way into one of the
triangular slices, which turned out to be a pretty good trek. Arthur hadn’t
been in particularly bad shape back on Earth, but even so, this walk would
have been a lot for him. But now, it was easy, even with Eito setting a brisk
sustained pace.
 “Huh. That’s weird.”
“What is?” Eito asked, turning his head with concern. He was still a
bit jumpy around Arthur, which Arthur had to admit was a reaction he had
earned. He had been pretty quick to bolt earlier on.
“This body,” Arthur said. “I haven’t had a chance to take a good
look at it yet, but the man between your world and mine said it would be a
bit different. I just didn’t expect it to work this much better. It’s fantastic.”
Eito gave him an odd look. “The man between our worlds?”
“Yeah. An older man. One who looked like me. My species,
anyway. A nice guy. He sent me here,” Arthur said.
“Damn.”
“What?”
“It’s just, everything around here is normal for me. Besides you, I
mean, and you aren’t all that odd, really.” Eito shrugged. “It made me forget
that you’re not normal. Not yet, at least. You’ve had a hell of a day, haven’t
you?”

Most of the buildings in town were similar to one another, at least in terms
of materials. There were a few wooden structures here and there, but the
most common materials for walls seemed to be either white brick, red brick,
or similarly red and white blocks of stone. The roads themselves were lined
with a rock that wasn’t quite as crimson, but still carried a significant
reddish tint.
“Why is everything so red?” Arthur asked. “Not that it’s bad. It’s
just that everything seems to be either red or white.”
“Oh. That’s just this part of town. Red’s a pretty common color, but
the real reason why it’s so red is because when this section of town was
built, the main quarries supplying the city produced this color of stone.” He
tapped one of the flagstones with his toe. “It’s sturdy, and it was cheap.
Every now and again a quarry gives out, and the color changes. Some parts
of town are green. I’m so used to the red that it’s a little bit of a shock every
time I go there.”
They walked on for just a bit longer, with Eito pointing out various
buildings that he thought would be useful to Arthur. There was a library,
which Eito explained was just one of many around the city. Arthur thought
it would be a good idea for him to spend some time in it sooner rather than
later, if for no other reason than to get a feel for the world he now lived in.
The other locations Eito told him about were much more utilitarian,
falling much more into the line of things like laundromats, repair shops,
restaurants, and boarding houses. If anything, they made Arthur feel more at
ease than any of the other buildings. They were the kind of places you
didn’t hear much about in stories, but also places that every city had to
have. He bet the tech worked differently here and that there would be things
he didn’t understand. But for the most part, it was a place people lived, with
most of the same things you’d expect to see around civilization.
Soon enough, they were at Eito’s place.
“Is it made of bark?” Arthur asked, placing his hands on the surface
of the building. “No, stone. It just looks like bark. How do they do it?”
“They don’t do it. I do it. I’m a tree-demon, after all. We have an
aura. In a forest, it helps the trees grow. Anywhere else…”
“It makes things more tree-ish?”
“Something like that. You didn’t have tree demons where you came
from?”
“Nope. Just people who looked mostly like me. Besides cosmetic
differences like height and skin tone, everyone was pretty much the same.”
“Weird. I can’t imagine that.”
“Same, except I’m seeing it. Does every type of demon have some
special power?”
“No. But that’s not the kind of thing you want to talk about in the
street. Let’s go inside. I’ll make you some food and we can go over it.”
 Inside the house, nearly everything was wood, or at least looked like
it was. The exceptions were all metal objects, such as what appeared
suspiciously like a waterspout, a few hinges and locks, and books, which on
second thought were indeed also made out of wood. Eito went to his
kitchen counter, scooped out something from a bowl onto a wood-looking
plate, and plopped both it and a fork in front of Arthur.
“Here. I made it this morning.”
“I don’t want to be rude, but… what is it?”
The food in the bowl was from a family of food that Arthur tended
to think of as glops. Not that he didn’t like a good glop. Chicken salad was
fine, for instance. But as this was the first local food he had eaten, he
needed to make sure it didn’t kill him.
“Diced meat and vegetables. A sauce made of wine, eggs, and oil.”
Pretty much chicken salad, then. Arthur dug in. He really was
hungry, and the food was actually much better than he had expected it to be.
“Normally, I’d have bread, but you threw my morning plans into a
bit of a shambles. We can go out tomorrow.” Eito packed some kind of pipe
ash talked, lighting it with a match and beginning to puff away. “You asked
about the powers various demons have. Before I tell you about that, you
should know it isn’t something you would talk about in public, at least not
without good reason.”
“Is it secret?”
“Not secret so much as just not good manners. This city is pretty
good about security, and things are getting better all over, but not every type
of demon always gets along with every other type. Call it historical friction,
if you want.”
“People are still sore about it?”
“Wary, if you need a word for it. Everyone pretty much knows what
everyone else is capable of, but I’d recommend you read up on it rather than
ask about it. The library will help.”
“Got it.”
 “I can tell you a little, at least. Most differences between races tend
to be physical. Tree demons have an affinity for forests, which we’ve
already talked about. Water demons are similar, but more direct. They can
control moisture to some extent.”
“But they live on land?”
“Yeah. Geez. You really don’t know much, do you?” Eito shook his
head. “They tend to live near water, but pretty much every demon can live
in the same conditions. Whether they like to or not is a different story.”
“What about Karbo? I can’t help but notice that he’s…”
“Huge?”
“Yeah. That.”
“He’s an infernal. Infernals are pretty rare, as demon-kind go.
Almost all of them are big like that, all of them stronger than almost any
other kind of demon. Not by much, and not so much that leveling doesn’t
smooth out most of the difference.”
“Leveling?”
“Yeah. It tends to make things a bit more even, depending on where
you put your points.”
“Points?”
Eito stopped puffing on his pipe mid-draw, frozen mid-motion.
When he snapped out of it a few seconds later, he leaned so far across the
table, that he almost bumped foreheads with Arthur.
“Good gods, boy. Are you from a system-less world?”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FOUR

A SYSTEM WORLD

Arthur liked to think of himself as pretty good at reading people, but Eito
wasn’t exactly a human. Obviously, this system-less world business was
important, but the part of the conversation where his partner was a
humanoid tree was throwing off his social radar enough that he couldn’t tell
just how bad it was.
Oh well. I guess honesty is the best policy.
“I think so? At least I don’t know what you are talking about.”
Eito slumped back in his chair, took a deep draw off his pipe, and
sighed.
“Gods. That’s going to be tough to explain. I’ll do my best. So, how
do people learn to do things, in your world?”
“We just… do them? We practice. We read books about how things
work. Sometimes just trial and error.”
“And that works?”
“Sometimes. Not everyone ends up able to do everything.”
 “Got it. So, first, understand that I don’t know anything about
systemless worlds, except what I’ve heard, and that’s not much. It’s almost
like a myth, for me. Just so I understand, you’ve never seen a status screen?
From your parents or something?”
“No. I mean, yes, we have something like that in games. But I don’t
know if that’s the same thing you’re talking about.”
Eito’s hand came up and made little movements like he was fiddling
around with something in midair.
“I’m going to show you something. Now, I’m not showing you all
the details, but normally, I wouldn’t share my status screen with anyone
unless there was a very good reason. It’s considered pretty private. Can you
keep what you see to yourself?”
“I can.”
“Okay, then here.”
Suddenly, a small blue box popped up in front of Arthur, about as
big as a college textbook, floating in the air in front of him like magic. He
startled back a little.
It does look just like in a video game.

Eito Aspyn
Level 26 Trainer
Stats: Restricted
Primary Skills: Movement Assessment, Tactical Analysis,
Weakness Appraisal

“That’s a pretty stripped-down screen. When I look at it, I can see

several more skills, and a much more detailed breakdown of my stats.
You’ve never seen anything like that?”
“No.” Arthur’s eyes were still locked to the screen. “Not at all.”
“Well, everyone has one of those here. At least every adult. Most
children your age either just got them or are about to get them.”
 “And this shows you who you are? Quantifies it?”
“Not just that. It guides who you are, lets you improve who you are.
You couldn’t see my stats, but every single one of the twenty-six levels,
besides the first, came with points I could assign. I mostly put them to work
enhancing my ability to see, and into wisdom, which helps me make some
kinds of decisions better.”
“It actually makes you smarter?”
“Only in relation to some of my skills. It would be too big of an
advantage, otherwise. Strength, on the other hand, really does make people
stronger. In every situation. Karbo could pick me up and throw me over a
house.” He grimaced a little. “Has done it, in fact. You shouldn’t make fun
of his horns, by the way.”
“And I can’t do this until I get a status screen?”
“Right. That’s the first step. It comes with your class.”
“And I get that… how?”
“Well, it varies. You saw my class? Trainer? I thought I’d be a
dungeon crawler, like Karbo. Fighting monsters and such. I trained for it
with some other kids. But it turned out that I was more interested in the
training and helping other people improve part of things than actually using
any of that knowledge. So I ended up with the class you see. It lets me help
other people get stronger.”
“And they pay you for that?”
“The city does. It’s too important a service to deny people if they
can’t afford it. That’s how you lose adventurers.” Eito finished his pipe,
knocking it out into a small ashtray on the table. “Anyway, that’s all
important to what you end up doing. It’s not like the system handles
everything. People still train and they still have to make decisions. Use their
imaginations and judgement and all that. But without a class, there’s only so
far you can go.”
“Huh,” Arthur said. It looked like he needed to get a status screen, at
least if he wanted to be useful around here. From what Eito was saying, he
wasn’t all that behind the other people his age, except in knowledge. And he
could catch up on that.
The real problem is that I have no idea what I want to do. He
thought of his old world and his job there and shuddered. I guess I do know
what I don’t want to do, though.
“Any ideas? Of what you want to do, I mean.”
Arthur shook his head. “I was just thinking about that. Not really.”
“That’s okay!” Eito had a surprising amount of enthusiasm. “It
really is. We can figure it out. You’d be surprised how many young people
your age don’t know what they want. It’s nothing shocking.”
The reassurance was nice but it was still hard for Arthur to not feel
like he was in a hurry. It looked like he was already in for a long slog,
freeloading off other people’s kindness. Whether they minded that or not,
he wanted to keep it to an absolute minimum.
For the next few hours, he and Eito put together a game plan. The
best way to figure out what you wanted to do, Eito said, was to get exposure
to a bunch of different kinds of work and see if anything clicked. Beyond
that, there were specific group lessons and even a small city-supplied
budget that Arthur could tap into while trying to figure out what would
work best for him.
By the time they had plotted out the next few days, it had long since
turned dark outside. And as much as Arthur was eager to learn about his
new world, a long, hard day including at least one death was catching up to
him.
“That’s a big yawn. And I agree with it,” Eito said. “There’s a bed in
the room there and a bathroom down the hall. Luckily, I don’t have much
work this week. We can get started on all this tomorrow.”

The next day, Arthur woke to the experience of not knowing where he was,
and he wondered if the wood blankets were someone’s definition of a
practical joke. Then, the memories came flooding back and reassured him
that his all-wood lodgings and slightly unnatural new body were strange but
logically sound.
Eito didn’t seem to be up yet, and Arthur took the opportunity to
satisfy his curiosity about a matter that had been bothering him since he
woke up on the street the day before. Eito’s bathroom had a sink, tub, and
toilet, all of which he used in their various capacities. Only then did he get
around to the most important part of all, and took a good long look at
himself in Eito’s mirror.
Nothing big had changed. But a lot of smaller things had, enough
that they added up to an incredibly odd experience. He was younger, which
he expected. What he didn’t expect was that while his teenage face still
mostly looked like the one he’d had on Earth, every aspect of it had been
balanced and improved. He was more handsome in a way that even he
could see. On top of that, his skin was a little smoother, his muscles a little
tighter, and he looked overall just a bit better in every single way.
Well, fine. I’ll take it.
A knock sounded on the door. It was Eito.
“About ready? We can catch breakfast on the way, if we hurry.”
After yesterday’s excitement and last night’s light meal, nothing
sounded better to Arthur than checking out some of the city’s breakfast
cuisine.
“On my way!” he yelled. He threw on the clothes the system had
sent him in, which luckily were not that much different than anyone else’s
he had seen, and even more luckily hadn’t had a chance to get very dirty
yet. Then they were off, moving as fast as Arthur could keep up with
towards what Eito swore was the best breakfast in the city.
He wasn’t wrong. A few minutes later, they were both tucking into a
kind of large, sweet bread roll loaded with cheese, meat, and some kind of
non-spicy salsa-like sauce Arthur was unfamiliar with. It might have been
the best thing he had ever eaten. The owner of the stand was cranking them
out of some kind of multi-leveled wood-fired oven and apparently had
made everything herself from scratch.
 A few minutes later, Arthur and Eito were back on the road, moving
at a more leisurely pace and weighed down by a few thousand delicious,
carb-heavy calories.
“Our first stop is the collaboration lesson. You don’t absolutely have
to go to it, but it’s expected. The rest of the young people do unless they
have a good excuse not to.”
“And it’s for picking a class?”
“Sort of. The idea is that you talk to other children about what
they’ve learned and what they are doing. If you can, you collaborate. It
helps form connections that might be useful later.”
Like a networking event for kids. Neat.
The city zoomed by as they walked. They were going much faster
than was normal for humans back on Earth, but Arthur could still tell that
Eito was holding back on his speed. Some people weren’t moving much
faster than them but others zoomed by, walking at speeds he usually
associated with bicycles or even cars. Stats, apparently, were no joke.
“Here we are,” Eito said. They had arrived at what looked like a sort
of walled-in park, one that he could see a little of through the gate. It was
green. There were trees and flowers, and what looked like brick paths.
“This is sort of a multi-use city space. For meetings and the like. Anyone
can use it.”
“It seems nice.”
“It is. It’s almost pretty.” Eito put his hand on the gate latch, then
glanced back at Arthur. “Actually, would you mind waiting here for a few
minutes? These meetings have an adult supervisor of sorts. I’d like to give
him a heads-up about, well…”
“My bizarre origin story?”
Eito laughed. “Yes. That. I’m glad you have a sense of humor about
it. Wait here, and I’ll be back soon.”
Arthur leaned back against the wall of the park as Eito disappeared
into it. With little else to do, he demon-watched, soaking in the bizarre
images of various animal and element-themed beings walking by. There
was endless variety. He even thought he saw one person who was made
entirely of stone, moving slowly down some distant street before
disappearing into a shop.
If he might have otherwise felt bad about gawking, he was justified
by the fact that most of the passers-by gawked right back. As bizarre as they
were to him, he was reminded that for them, he was an entirely new form of
being they hadn’t seen before.
Eito talked as if Arthur was a demon, seemingly unaware that
human was a different sort of thing. And Arthur decided he’d just as soon
keep that little detail of their differences to himself, at least until he had
made some friends. He didn’t think the people here would make a huge deal
out of it, but there was no use risking making things harder on himself than
he had to if he could avoid it.
“All right,” Eito said, suddenly appearing back through the gate.
“I’m not sure he believed all of it, but the supervisor has been warned. He’ll
probably believe once he sees you.”
“Because I’m not made of bark?”
“Most people aren’t. It’s more that you are so pink, honestly.” Eito
stretched, then clapped Arthur on the shoulder. “I’ll hang back and let you
do your thing. Are you ready?”
“I’m ready,” Arthur said, without entirely feeling it. But he was still
excited. First impressions mattered. These were the first peers he’d run into,
and maybe the people or demons who would help him along for the rest of
his life. He shook out his limbs a bit, trying to throw off his nervousness
before heading in.
It was time to make some friends.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FIVE

THE FIRST CLASS

Eito set up shop near the gate, pulling out his pipe and settling down on a
bench before waving Arthur on to do his own thing. It reminded Arthur of a
parent trying to protect their kid from teasing by not getting out of the car
on the first day of school.
Arthur could see the demon struggling internally between joining
the class and also not wanting to embarrass Arthur by making him look
young and helpless. After a few moments, he settled down, content to let go
of Arthur’s leash for the first time.
The only problem with Eito’s decision was that Arthur really was
young and helpless. Eito was the only person he had really talked to, so far,
and his first friend of sorts in this place. He felt like he had just fallen back
to square one.
Arthur had walked into the park expecting some kind of class or
seminar setup, but that wasn’t what he saw at all. The other young demons
were doing things varying from intense exercise to nothing at all. The older-
looking turtle-person Arthur assumed was leading was in the latter group,
reading a book and only occasionally glancing up to make sure everything
was going all right.
 Holy shit. It’s a porcupine one. Don’t stare at him, Arthur thought as
he suppressed a jolt of excitement. There’s no chance this person wants to
hear about how many internet porcupine videos you’ve seen.
He stood fairly far back, observing the other young adults as they
went about their business. Two of them, a rodent girl and a smaller male
sparrow hybrid, seemed to be in the creation mode with a rough-looking
teapot and a rough-looking dagger lying on the ground next to them.
Another two demon-youth were sparring with sword-length sticks, but only
to the extent they were very slowly working through the same move and
response again and again, like they were trying to refine that one move to
perfection.
As Arthur tried to make sense of it all, he suddenly tensed. Someone
was watching him. He was sure of it.
“Oh, damn.” Arthur heard a male voice say, directly behind him.
“Good reflexes, though. People usually take longer than that to realize I’m
here.”
Arthur wheeled around and found himself face-to-face with a feline.
Not a house cat hybrid, he thought. Something about the darkness of
the fur and the structure of the guy’s face seemed to point more towards his
origins being an actual wild ambush predator of some kind, like a puma or
something in that family. Something dangerous.
While Arthur had to admit he was startled, the cat didn’t seem to
pose any actual threat to him, at least if the big smile and immediate move
to shake hands was any indication.
“Sorry about that. I wasn’t actually trying to stalk you without
asking. It’s rude. I was stalking them.” He waved his hand very generally at
the class, all of whom were apparently aware of his surveillance. “They’ve
all agreed to it. I’m supposed to get to level three on my stealth before I try
to sneak through the beginner dungeons, and I’m banned from stalking the
city. It plays havoc with other people’s detection skills. I kept waking up
guards from naps.”
Arthur nodded. The cat stood waiting for a second, looking confused
before a sudden lightbulb moment.
 “Oh, damn. Damn a second time. I’m Corbin. You have a name.
What is it?” Corbin asked.
“It’s Arthur.”
“Hi, Arthur. Sorry about that. I just got my class a few days ago and
I haven’t stopped thinking about it since. Everyone says I’m kind of a lot to
deal with right now. More than usual.”
“It’s okay. I don’t mind. I hardly know how skills work in the first
place.”
“Stealth skills?” Corbin said. “You just sneak around, and it levels
them. It’s much, much easier once you can go into dungeons. Then you
don’t have to make the whole town suspect there’s a burglar on the loose. I
don’t burgle, by the way. I want to be a rogue.”
“Got it.” If the cat wanted to assume Arthur was ignorant of only
one skill instead of literally all of them, that felt okay for now. He’d clarify
later if it became important. “How’s that going so far?”
“Great. I think. You know how combat classes are. You don’t really
know until you start fighting. That should be soon, though. It’s not like
crafting, where you practice for two years before you get to do anything
cool,” Corbin said.
Two years? Arthur was a bit distressed. He didn’t want to freeload
for two years. As nice as everyone was being, he couldn’t feel good about
being reliant on other people for that long. And that’s if they’d even let him
freeload for that long. He started almost hoping for a combat class, not
because he really wanted to fight but simply because he might contribute
faster.
“Are all the crafters like that? Years before they can work?”
“Dunno. Probably. It seems slow.” Corbin suddenly turned away
from Arthur towards the greater group and addressed them. “Hey! Crafting
friends!”
Arthur winced as Corbin’s shout made the entire group stop what
they were doing and turn to look at them. Every single one of the ten or so
youth present suddenly had facial expressions varying from mild confusion
to utter shock as they stared at Arthur, who likely didn’t correspond to any
kind of demon they were aware of.
Corbin seemed oblivious to all of that.
“How long does it take to do anything useful after you get your
class? Arthur wants to know,” Corbin yelled.
Nobody answered. Corbin scratched his head.
“That’s weird,” Corbin muttered. “They usually love talking about
this stuff. Do you know why they aren’t talking?”
“Um. I think it’s because of me,” Arthur said.
“Because of you? Why would they…”
Arthur heard the sound of a book slamming shut as the apparent
teacher of the class stood up, banged a cane on his nearby bench several
times, and generally drew the class's attention away from Arthur.
“All right. Sorry, Arthur, didn’t see you there.” The teacher
motioned with the cane at the ground in front of him. “Group up, everyone.
Arthur, could you come here?”
The class grouped up in front of the supervisor-turtle, keeping a
close eye on Arthur as he circled around the group to the front of the make-
shift class.
“This is Arthur. He’s joining our group as of today. Say hello,” the
teacher said.
The various members of the group waved and greeted him at
different levels of volume, still a bit visibly wary.
“You might have noticed he looks different. Arthur, I’m sorry to be
pointing that out, but Eito asked me to clear this up as soon as possible.
Arthur is a guest of the city, not just as a wanderer but in fact as an
offworlder.”
A few audible gasps came out of the group.
“Now, if you don’t know what that is, ask. But don’t ask Arthur. He
already has enough to get used to today without answering the same
question a dozen times. The important part is that the entire city has a duty
to help him get settled.” The turtle turned back to Arthur, taking a good look
at him before continuing. “Now, Eito informs me you have yet to be given a
class. Is that correct?”
Arthur was not a fan of public speaking. He gathered himself before
answering.
“It’s correct. I just got here. My world didn’t have a system, at all.
We trained for things manually.”
“Ah, interesting. Well, we will do our best to help guide you. Not
today, though. Class is almost over. I recommend you spend the rest of the
time getting acquainted with everyone. I see you’ve already met Corbin. It’s
pretty hard not to meet him, I’ve found.”
“He broke my stealth!” Corbin complained. “It’s not my fault.”
“How close were you standing?” asked an Armadillo-man, who had
been part of the sparring group earlier.
“Right behind him. But I did that to you earlier and you didn’t
know,” Corbin said.
“I didn’t say anything. That doesn’t mean I didn’t know.”
“But you didn’t even…”
The turtle banged the bench again with his cane, hard. The class
once again faced forward.
“I’m sure you can have this argument later. For now, I expect
everyone to help Arthur if he needs it. Don’t mob him but tell him anything
he needs to know. This is a duty, remember. Be kind.”
The turtle sank back down to the bench, apparently done with his
work for the moment. The cat was suddenly gone, apparently having moved
on to argue with the Armadillo about whether he had been spotted in his
stalking. Arthur stood there awkwardly for a moment as everyone went
back to their various activities, then forced himself to move forward.
Find something nice and low-key. You don’t want to spar right now.
With the battle-oriented demons already back to mock combat, he scanned
the crowd, eventually approaching the pot-and-dagger crafting pair he had
seen before.
“Oh, hello.” The mouse girl looked up, smiling.
It was odd. Arthur should have found all these animal-people to be
uncanny valley at best, and terrifying at worst. Instead, they all looked
natural. Some were a little less human looking, some a little more. The
mouse girl landed in the first group, looking a bit more like a mouse and
less like a human than most. But while she wasn’t attractive to Arthur, she
wasn’t ugly, either. She looked nice. Shy, even.
“Hi. Sorry for bothering you. I just wanted to see what you were up
to,” Arthur said.
“It’s no problem!” the sparrow said. “I’m Milo. This is Rhodia. I’m
a smith, she’s trying to be a potter.”
“No class yet?” Arthur asked.
The mouse girl shook her head. “I have the class, I just can’t make
anything useful. Not yet. But I think it’s coming along. See? What do you
think of it?”
She handed Arthur her teapot. He took it carefully, turning it over in
his hands. It looked functional, if a little rough around the edges. The lid
didn’t quite fit, and the spout was a little deformed, but Arthur thought he
would be able to make tea with it. If the normal Earth rules applied here,
teapots were one of the hardest things for a potter to make.
“I like it,” Arthur said. He honestly did. She kept looking, like she
was expecting more from him. “It’s a little rough, but I like it. I’m assuming
the class will help with that?”
“Yup! But it’s a hard class to level. Everyone does a bit of pottery in
school, so usually it either takes a lot of time or a pretty good piece to get to
a level the class recognizes as making progress.”
“But then it’s pretty fast. Potters can start making functional things
really quickly,” Milo said. He picked up his own dagger and scowled at it.
“I’ve been a smith for a month, and this is the best I can do right now, even
with skills. Nobody would trust their life to this. Look at it.”
 Arthur took the dagger. It was rough, but it didn’t seem like it was
about to break on him.
“It seems durable enough, at least.”
“Hah, it probably won’t break with how heavy and thick it is. Just
hard to handle and even harder to sharpen. My dad can make one just as
durable that weighs less than a quarter what that mess does.”
“How do you fix that?” Arthur asked. He was genuinely interested.
“Practice. I need to make more daggers.”
Practice ended up being the overall theme of every conversation he
had that day. Everyone was kind enough to avoid the fact that he was a
completely alien being, focusing on answering his questions, and being as
nice as they could. But every conversation always came back to the same
theme, which was that almost everyone knew what they wanted to do, and
just needed to work towards that goal.
Even Worse, most of them had known what they wanted to do for
years now, and had been pursuing their craft long before they had any
chance of getting a class out of it. Arthur was years behind, in many senses.
He tried his best to ignore that as he worked his way through the groups.
By the time the class broke up, he had talked to almost everyone.
The combat classes were exactly what they seemed, specializing in various
forms of fighting, usually with weapons specified by their classes. There
were a few more crafters, one who was an architect and another who
apparently specialized in pipes and plumbing. The porcupine was working
towards a librarian class, from what Arthur could gather. He was either so
incredibly introverted or so wary of Arthur that he could hardly get a word
out.
With the turtle dismissing the class and Arthur ready to go find Eito,
a sudden bashing noise on the path from the gate drew his attention. He
looked in the direction of the sound to see a massive red demon in a tank
top bounding towards him at an incredible speed.
“Arthur!” Karbo yelled, loud enough for everyone to hear. “You
have to come with me to the dungeon. It’s the rats. They’re everywhere.”
OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER SIX

DUNGEONEERING

“Rats?” Arthur said, absolutely dumbfounded.

“Wait, what’s Karbo doing here?” One of the combat students asked,
looking equally confused but excited. “Are you teaching today? Class is
almost over, but I’ll stay.” The remaining members of the class who had not
yet left seemed similarly interested and befuddled.
“No. Not teaching. I found rats, so I came to scoop up Arthur here.
To fight them.”
“You need me to fight rats?” Arthur asked.
“I want you to fight rats. There’s so many of them, Arthur. Dozens.
At least.”
Suddenly Eito appeared, jogging down from the same direction
Karbo had come.
“Did you not hear me say wait? Arthur is having his first class. I
didn’t want anyone bothering him while he figured it out.” He glanced
around, noting the extreme nature of the disruption Karbo had inflicted with
his rat-talk. “I guess that’s a lost cause now.”
 “I found rats. A whole spawn of them.” Karbo spread his arms out
wide as if to show how many rats he had found. “All trapped in one big
room. It’s perfect.”
“You’re excited about killing rats?”
“Not me.” Karbo thumbed at Arthur. “Him. I thought it would be
days before I could find something to test him out on. Maybe a week. And
nothing so good as multiple rats. It’s perfect, Eito. You have to see that.”
Eito sighed and turned to Arthur.
“What this giant ball of red muscle is trying to say is that he’s
managed to find a lowest-level mob in the dungeon. Rat monsters are rare,
we think it’s mostly because they aren’t very useful. They don’t give much
experience, don’t have much in the way of lootable resources, and aren’t all
that much stronger than normal rats.”
Arthur cocked his head to the side. “And they are useful in this
situation?”
“Yes. Because they are so weak, almost anyone can fight them.
Which makes them good for testing unclassed people. What this lunk wants
is to have you fight a couple so he can watch you do it and see if you’re any
good. And he isn’t wrong. They aren’t bad for that. It’s a good way of
seeing if you are suited for a combat class.”
“And if you are suited for a combat class, I’ll take over,” Karbo
said, looking visibly excited. “I’ll take you all through some dungeons and
show you everything you need to know until you get… whatever class you
get. It will be fun!”
Eito rolled his eyes and turned to Arthur. “You don’t have to do this.
If you really don’t want to fight, that’s a good sign you shouldn’t. And if
you don’t want to fight right now, there will be other mobs eventually. It’s
up to you.”
Arthur looked at Karbo, who was watching Arthur’s decision-
making process like a kid whose parents were discussing whether they had
time to go to a theme park that day. So while he was pretty indifferent to the
idea of fighting rats in a dungeon, Karbo looked like he’d be crushed.
 “Sure. Let’s kill some rats.”
“Yes!” Karbo yelled. “Come on. Let’s stop at my house on the way.
I think I have some daggers there; they’ll be the equivalent of short swords
for you.”
As Eito and Karbo turned to leave, Arthur looked back at the other
young people, almost all of whom were either slack-jawed with shock at the
weirdness of it all or actively laughing at what had just happened.
So much for a normal first day, Arthur thought. He was about to turn
and leave himself when he noticed one person who wasn’t laughing or
flabbergasted. It was the aspiring Sparrow blacksmith, Milo. He was
glancing at the trio as they left, cradling his dagger in his hands and looking
like he wanted something, but was afraid to ask.
“Eito,” Arthur said. “How dangerous are these rats? Do I need
special gear to kill them?”
Eito turned.
“Not really. You could use a brick if you wanted.” He pointed his
thumb at Karbo. “If there was any real trouble, he’d bail you out. The point
is more to watch how you move and react than anything else.”
“Okay, got it. One second.” Arthur turned and jogged back to the
sparrow, who looked confused as he approached.
“Hey, does anything good happen for your class if someone uses
that?” Arthur asked, pointing at the dagger.
“Um, yeah, actually. That’s part of how smith’s level skills. It’s
making stuff, and then having people use it.”
“Can I borrow it, then? Karbo says I need a weapon.” Arthur left out
the part where he had all sorts of probably better weapons he could borrow.
He didn’t want to make the sparrow feel like he owed him anything. “I
could bring it back to the next meeting, no problem, and it would save some
time. Just in case the rats run off.”
The sparrow’s beak parted as he beamed. “Yeah! Absolutely! That
would be great, actually. Are you sure? It’s not very good.”
 “It’s just rats. I’m sure Eito wouldn’t let me if there was much
danger.”
“Then sure.” Milo tried and failed to not look over-eager as he
almost shoved the dagger into Arthur’s hands. “And take your time
returning it. Honestly, you could keep it. I can always make another one.”
“Thanks then! We can talk about that tomorrow. I’ll let you know
how it goes.”
Turning once again, Arthur trotted back to Eito, who stood with
raised eyebrows but said nothing.
“Slow down, Karbo, for the fifth time. He can’t walk that fast.” Five
minutes into the trip, Eito was once again reminding Karbo that Arthur had
normal, only slightly enhanced human legs, and couldn’t keep a
superhuman pace. And, as with all the other times, he was yelling it out on
the open street, loud enough to make Karbo hear it from two city blocks
away. Which he was.
A half-hour later, they made it to the dungeon, which turned out to
look surprisingly like a brick shack with a metal door.
“This is the dungeon?”
“This is the case we built around the dungeon. A dungeon is a sort of
dimensional space. The entrances tend to be pretty small and aren’t too
visible. We build cases like this around them to keep people from
accidentally stumbling into them.”
“Why so small, though?”
“It doesn’t need to be bigger, and it helps if the monsters overflow.”
Karbo cut in. “Every once in a while, dungeons go on the offensive.
Monsters spill out. If the case is any bigger than this, they build up. So this
case limits how many can try to get through.”
“It’s a small advantage,” Eito said. “But it gives us time to react to
the problem. Every little bit helps. Karbo, you want to open this up?”
Karbo lifted a small crystal out of his pocket and held it up to the
door. Arthur half expected one or the other to glow and play music, but
apparently opening the door didn’t deserve that much fanfare. He heard a
soft click from the door, which Karbo then pried open.
“I’m going first,” Karbo said. “Everything should be clear, but you
know protocol.”
Eito nodded, and Karbo walked in, instantly disappearing.
“When you enter a dungeon, the most durable member of your party
goes first. Always. It’s probably the first rule of dungeoneering. It doesn’t
matter if it’s a low-level dungeon, or if you’re going back into a place you
just cleared. You always send your tank in first. Do you understand why?”
Arthur nodded. He could just imagine some mage-build stumbling
through by himself and meeting a group of wolves, or something. He hadn’t
expected the rule, but it made sense.
“The second rule is you don’t leave your tank alone for long. Go
ahead, Arthur. I’ll be right behind you,” Eito said.
Arthur nodded and stepped up to the door. For reasons he couldn’t
explain, he took a deep breath before stepping through, like a diver entering
a swimming pool. And then, suddenly, he was in a cave. Or a cavern, which
was a distinction he wasn’t sure he understood in the first place.
“Ah, there you are,” Karbo said, as Arthur appeared and Eito
materialized behind him. “We shouldn’t see any monsters, just yet. I cleared
them out not too long ago.”
“How far in are the rats?” Eito asked.
“About ten minutes, at his pace. They should still be there. I sealed
them in.”
The group started walking. Arthur took everything in. The cavern
looked exactly like what he imagined a cavern should look like. It was a
series of big, rocky spaces connected by fairly big, rocky hallways. Here
and there, shiny minerals glinted on the walls, capturing light that emanated
from an unknown source. The ground was littered with various monster
corpses, apparently slain by Karbo before he had come to get Eito and
Arthur for the rats.
 “Were those dangerous?” Arthur asked. Most of the monsters were
things he didn’t recognize, sporting big claws, sharp fangs, and generally
looking pretty lethal.
“To Karbo? Not at all. He’s pretty overpowered for this kind of
thing. It’s hard to determine this kind of thing exactly, but he’s probably one
of the strongest demons in the city,” Eito said, as Karbo beamed in pride.
“As much as I hate to admit it.”
“For you, they’d be a big problem.” Karbo cut in. “You don’t have
stats or combat abilities yet. The average monster here has both.”
Arthur noted that yet as another sign that Karbo seemed to be really,
really hoping he ended up in a combat class. Which he supposed could
happen. On Earth, Arthur had never been in so much as a fistfight. It was
possible that being a battle maniac was the kind of thing a person learned
about in the moment. And if he was going to find out his purpose in life was
bashing various evil little critters to death, it would be better to know it now
rather than later.
“Okay, we’re coming up on it now,” Karbo said. “Are you armed?”
Arthur waved his dagger, realizing that he was gripping it too hard
when the bones in his hand ached as he did so. He tried to recall what little
sports knowledge he had, loosening his grip a bit and trying to let his
muscles relax.
“All right. I’m going to lift up this rock and try to let one out. Only
one, if I time it right. You just take it down however seems best to you.”
Arthur nodded and felt a bit of reassurance as he saw Eito subtly
shift into something resembling a combat stance as well. Karbo gripped the
large rock he had set up against the wall and lifted it about a foot, revealing
a small, dark tunnel behind it. Before he dropped the rock, a dog-sized
mammal popped out from behind the wall, snarling and craning its red eyes
around as it looked for prey.
It found Eito and Karbo first but recoiled away from them. However
few talents the rat had, one of them seemed to be a kind of risk-assessment
that warned it away from the high-level adults. Arthur was a different story
altogether. As soon as the rat saw him, it snarled again, bypassed both of the
other adventurers, and charged.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER SEVEN

NO FIGHTING

Arthur stood his ground as the rat came in, trying to count the ways the
animal might be able to hurt him. Between the mouth and each of its clawed
legs, there were at least five that he could see, more than he felt confident
tracking. Rather than meet the charge head on and get tangled up in all
those possibilities, he decided he’d be better off avoiding the whole charge
entirely.
He waited, sidestepping the charge and hoping the rat would over-
commit and skid past him in a vulnerable way. But the rat was predictably
nimble, recovering from the near-miss almost immediately and leaping at
him once more. Reflexively, Arthur got the knife in between them just in
time. It wasn’t an attack so much as an awkward, flailing block, but the
edge of the dagger cut the rat’s skin just enough to make it think twice, kick
off his arm, and drop to the ground.
I need to actually fight this thing, Arthur thought. He doubted the rat
could kill him in a single blow, and Eito and Karbo were waiting in the
wings if he got in trouble, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t get hurt if he
didn’t get serious. Gritting his teeth in anticipation of possible pain, he took
some stooping steps towards the rat, stabbing with the dagger as he went. as
he did so, The rat scratched out at his arm catching him and drawing blood.
 It wasn’t enough to stop his entire momentum though. He managed
to get to the rat, sinking his blade through its back. It felt weird and wrong,
somehow. the feeling wasn’t enough to keep him from stabbing the rat a
few more times for good measure, though the squelching of the dagger
through its body was something he definitely didn’t enjoy.
Soon enough, the rat was lying still on the ground, and Arthur
backed away from it, puffing. Karbo caught his hand as he approached and
placed a pill in it.
“Take that, kid. It’ll heal up the scrapes. You don’t want to leave that
kind of wound open very long. Eito, did you see the kid?” Karbo was
excited. “He dodged it, blocked it, and killed it. That’s… it’s all the things,
Eito. How’d he do?”
Eito was interrupted from responding as a loud screech in the
distance drew all three of their attention away from the matter at hand.
Arthur looked in the direction of the sound and saw a number of flying
animals headed towards them, their leathery wings carrying fat, round
bodies and looking for all the world like flying Chinese dumplings.
“Grawls. I don’t suppose the kid is ready for those?” Karbo asked.
“No, he’s not. Take care of them, Karbo,” Eito said.
“On it.”
As Karbo bounded away towards the new threat, Arthur’s wounds
were already closed. Whatever was in that pill had been magic, literal
magic. In a few seconds, it closed wounds that would have otherwise taken
days or weeks. Given how unfazed Eito was by such a miracle, Arthur
guessed that such things were normal for him.
“So,” Arthur said, looking up at Eito. “How did I do?”
“You want my professional opinion?” Eito asked.
“Yeah.”
“First, your reflexes are fine. Your technique was terrible, but you
know that, and reflexes are a lot harder to build than technique. You made
some good choices, getting out of the way and blocking instead of taking
unnecessary injuries. And you chased it when it was time to put an end to
the fight. All that was good. Maybe a little better than good, for a first fight
and considering the weapon you’re using.”
Arthur had talked to other people in this way before, a long time
ago. When he was giving someone bad news, he’d start with the good parts
before revealing the stuff they had done poorly on. It softened the blow.
Eito was doing the same thing.
“But?” Arthur asked. “I can tell there’s a but.”
“But you didn’t enjoy it,” Eito said.
Arthur started to object before realizing there was no point. Eito was
right. The fight had been fine, and he was a little proud of himself. But he
wasn’t looking to do it again any time soon.
“Combat is essentially a manual labor job. People who work the
dungeons fall into specific stereotypes. You remember the rules I told you at
the entrance? There are dozens of those, all aimed at making sure people
stay awake, aware, and hedged against accidents. In this line of business, a
few mistakes can get you killed,” Eito said.
Eito motioned into the distance, where Karbo was hooting and
hollering as he slapped big, fat bird-things out of the sky with his bare
hands.
“You see him? He’s fighting enemies that drop trash-tier resources
and give experience that’s entirely meaningless to him at his level. And he’s
having a hell of a time. Whenever I’ve caught Karbo reading, it’s always
been a book about how to kill things better, faster, and safer. You saw how
badly he wanted you to love this, and that’s because he loves it and wanted
to share it with you.”
“And you can’t do it if you don’t enjoy it?” Arthur asked.
“You can, if you had set all your hopes on combat. And nobody
would stop you, not even me. But if you don’t love it, it becomes a slog,
and you stop paying attention. I’ve seen a lot of people meet their ends that
way,” Eito said.
 “Huh.” Arthur slumped a little. “I think I’m only sad because I
might like to do it, here and there, if only to see the dungeons.”
“You will.”
“Still? Even though it’s dangerous?”
“Everyone dungeoneers a bit. It’s too good for leveling to avoid
entirely. But it’s much safer when done as a once-in-a-while thing that’s
handled appropriately. You’ll provide support to a bigger team in some way,
in a dungeon that isn’t dangerous for you all as a group. There are safe ways
to make that happen.”
Karbo finally finished manhandling the monsters, leaving little piles
of dead bird monsters all over the ground behind him as he bounced back at
an insane speed.
“So? How’d he do?”
“He hasn’t asked how many rats are left,” Eito said.
Apparently, that was a mistake, at least as far as signaling
enthusiasm for rat-hunting went. Karbo’s face dropped.
“Ah, darn,” Karbo said. “I guess that’s that. Wouldn’t want you
going down the wrong path.”
“Do you have anything else you need to do here?” Arthur asked. “I
don’t mind spending more time if you need it. I could… watch, I guess?”
“Naw, that’s alright. It’s fine if we just leave now. If we go too late,
we will miss the lunch specials at the food carts.”
They began to walk out, a little more slowly, now that the
excitement of the possibility of Arthur becoming a mighty warrior was
gone. They were almost to the gate when the next monster showed itself, a
big buffalo-looking animal with metallic spikes sticking out from all over it.
“Ooh, a Bladebull. It’s been a while since I’ve seen one of those,”
Eito said. “It’s a little much for me, Karbo. Can you handle it alone?”
“No problem.” Karbo bashed his fists together. “Just one minute,
and I’ll have the way clear.”
 “Actually, Karbo? Does it matter what weapon you use here?”
Arthur asked.
“I have a big level advantage on it, so not really. Why?”
“I borrowed this from a blacksmith friend. I said I’d put it through
its paces for him. Would you mind…”
“Using it?” Karbo grabbed the dagger and gave it a once over. “No
problem on my end, but I’m probably gonna break it in the process.
Frankly, it’s not very good.”
“Somehow I don’t think he’ll mind. And thanks, Karbo. I appreciate
it.”
Karbo nodded, then sprinted over to the Bladebull, meeting it head-
on with a lunging stab. He wasn’t kidding about the dagger breaking. As
soon as it impacted the bull’s forehead, the dagger exploded into a rain of
metal splinters. Karbo, unfazed, moved on to beating the bull to death using
only the handle. By the time the beast fell, no recognizable parts of the
weapon were left.
Karbo returned, carrying the entire bull over his shoulder like a sack
of flour.
“You guys ready? These things are pretty good eating. I’m pretty
sure we can get lunch for free with this, if we want.”

Karbo wasn’t wrong about the free lunch. He took the entire bull to a stand
that dealt in large amounts of meat on sticks, who gladly traded the entire
bull carcass in exchange for an all-you-can-eat guarantee for the three of
them.
“So what now?” Karbo asked. “We going to try him out for
blacksmithing?”
“No idea,” Eito said. “Arthur, that dagger earlier. The one Karbo
destroyed. What did you think about it?”
“I dunno. It was a dagger, I guess? It was pretty rough, but I think
the guy who made it is just a beginner,” Arthur said.
 “What would you improve about it if you had the chance?” Eito
asked.
Arthur shrugged. He knew nothing about metallurgy. Milo had
managed to make a sharp, pointy object, already outdoing anything Arthur
would have been able to create.
“Not a smith, then,” Eito said. “At least not probably. Every single
smith I’ve ever met would have had dozens of thoughts about that weapon,
good and bad. Every one of them is obsessed.”
“I have a friend who does carpentry. We could try that,” Karbo said.
“Maybe. Or…” Eito and Karbo began listing everyone they knew
that was good at any particular thing as Arthur began working on his third
meat-stick of the meal. Whether this new body needed more calories, or he
was just burning that many more by walking everywhere, he found he was
absolutely starving. When he had just about polished it off, he heard a voice
behind him.
“Arthur!” It was Milo, beaming ear to ear. “Come here!”
Arthur excused himself from the other two as they continued
planning and went over to see his friend.
“What did you do with my knife? I got a system message saying it
was destroyed,” Milo said.
“Oh. Yeah, sorry about that,” Arthur said.
“Sorry? It’s great. Did you get Karbo to use it?” Milo asked.
“Yeah, he killed a Bladebull with it. Or tried to,” Arthur said.
“Well, I got two full levels to my smithing skill from that, and an
accomplishment for arming someone incredibly poorly for their level,
which sounds negative but is a really good thing to get. It’s a big deal.”
Milo grabbed Arthur’s hand in a feathered grip and shook it. “Thank you.
Really thank you.”
“It’s no problem, really. I’m just glad you don’t mind that it got
broken. I killed a rat with it, by the way. It worked fine, from what I can
tell.”
 “It was trash. It really was. My next one will be much, much better.”
Milo glanced over at Eito and Karbo, who were just now standing up from
their all-meat dinner. “Are you busy for the rest of the day? I wouldn’t
want to take you away from anything, but I’d love to have you over. I can
show you my shop.”
“I don’t know. Eito and Karbo want me to see at least one more
profession today. I’m still not sure what I want to do yet, and they’re trying
their hardest to make sure I catch up,” Arthur said.
“Oh, that’s great!” Milo said. “Hold on.”
Milo walked up to Eito and Karbo, getting their attention by waving
his arms.
“Eito, Karbo, can I borrow Arthur? I owe him for using my dagger
and need to repay him. And my mom is also home today. It’s her day off
from the restaurant, so she’ll be cooking at home.”
“Really?” Karbo said. “It could work. I can’t think of anyone who
can cover that particular option.”
“Arthur,” Eito explained, “that boy’s mother is a chef for one of the
best restaurants in town. I don’t say this lightly, but she’s probably the best
cook in the city. Go. Have fun. Bring back leftovers if you can.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER EIGHT

SOUP AND BREAD

Milo’s house was beautiful in the way some small, friendly-looking homes
often are. It was located in a part of town that had not come out of a quarry,
where most of the buildings were clay brick instead of cut stone blocks. So
the house was baked in a red hue with a slate-tile roof and wood trim.
What struck him most, though, was how few ornaments the house
had. Most of the buildings in town besides the church tried to show their
importance by tacking on metal ornaments and decorations on the outside,
or by having huge ornate signs. This house didn’t even have a flower
garden, opting instead to use up most of the flower beds and yard for a food
garden.
With smoke rising out of its chimney, the house seemed just like a
place where people lived, ate, and slept. But there was just one glaring
exception, a decoration that Arthur wouldn’t have even noticed if it wasn’t
for the complete lack of any other kind of ornamentation.
“That horseshoe.” Arthur pointed at a newish looking, almost shiny
metal object nailed into the mortar above the door. “Is that for good luck?”
“That? No, that’s an iron object. To tell people a blacksmith lives
here. Not that it helps much, but it’s how a blacksmith advertises their
services,” Milo said.
“Ah.” Arthur felt a bit dumb now. “Got it. So your mom… anything
I should know? I’m new in town, and I wouldn’t want to offend her.”
“Offend her?” Milo said.
“By being rude on accident, or something,” Arthur said.
“Arthur, I’ve known my mom my entire life. And you know what
she looks like when she’s offended?”
“What?”
“I don’t know either. It’s not really a mode she has. You’re gonna be
fine.”
The inside of the house was as welcoming as the outside. All of the
furniture was wood, and most of the chairs were cushioned, something that
Arthur hadn’t seen a lot of yet. Not that he’d been in a lot of houses,
though.
The family had hung little bits and pieces of art on the walls here
and there, almost all of them looking like they had been painted by
amateurs. The exceptions to that rule were drawings that looked like they
were made by actual children, framed professionally and hung alongside the
rest.
And yet, the most striking part of it all wasn’t even something
Arthur could see. It was the smell of the place. Even outside the wonderful
smells coming from the kitchen, the whole house was permeated and
infused with the aromas of food.
It’s a wonderful thing when the chairs manage to smell like the
memories of baking, Arthur thought.
“Is this the hero?” A woman’s voice rang out, and Arthur turned to
see a taller, somewhat grander sparrow-woman standing in the doorway.
“You should have seen my Milo, running around the house screaming about
notifications coming in. ‘First blood, mom! Someone blooded one of my
daggers! And then destroyed it!’ I thought he was going to faint, poor
thing.”
 She reached out and tweaked Milo’s beak, affectionately.
“Mom, stop trying to embarrass me. It won’t work, anyway. I was
pretty much the same way in front of him.”
“Oh? Good.” The woman turned to Arthur and bowed slightly. “I’m
Ella. Thank you for your help. It isn’t easy for young crafters to get started,
and I gather you’ve helped my boy quite a bit.” She seemed to hesitate a bit
before deciding to actually say the next words she had on her mind. “I hate
to be rude, but what exactly did he agree to? In terms of repayment.”
“Agree to? Nothing. It’s not really a repayment kind of thing. He
loaned me a dagger, which saved me a little bit of time, and it wasn’t any
trouble,” Arthur said.
“Really? You just offered to do this? For a child you don’t even
know?” Ella asked.
“It really wasn’t any trouble.” Arthur smiled. “Plus, I don’t have
many friends here yet. I thought it would be a good way to make them.”
“Hmm. Someone who helps without duty, just to make friends.” Ella
turned to her son with a mock-serious look on her face. “Milo, I command
you in the official voice of your guardian to be friends with this boy.
Henceforth, you shall play with him in parks and laugh with him in the
streets.”
“Mom.”
“You shall share your snacks with him even in the darkest of days.
Together you shall eat cookies in the field, singing songs of…”
“Mom!” Milo shouted, while Arthur lost his shit in the corner.
“Fine, fine. Still, it seems like we do owe you something, Arthur,”
Ella said.
“That’s what I’ve been trying to say, Mom. He doesn’t know what
he wants his class to be yet. He’s from a system-less world,” Milo said.
“Oh, really?” Ella asked. “Any hints yet, Arthur?”
 “It doesn’t look like I’m suited for a combat class. That’s what Eito
said, anyway,” Arthur said.
“Eito would know,” Ella said. “Not that he could tell you no if that’s
what you really want to do.”
“I don’t think it is.”
“Not that, then. And you didn’t feel any special draw towards what
Eito does? Or smithing, like Milo?”
“No,” Arthur said. “Not that smithing isn’t great, Milo. I just don’t
think it’s for me.”
“I brought him here to watch you cook, mom,” Milo said. “And to
eat dinner, too, I guess.”
“Oh, not a bad idea. Did you cook much back on your world,
Arthur?”
Arthur thought back to his life on Earth. His mom had always
cooked while he lived at home, but never took any special interest in
teaching him how to do it. After that was college where studying took
priority over cooking, and then work where food became almost optional.
He had basically lived on fast food and microwave pizza for most of his
adulthood.
“Not really. Not much, anyway.”
“Well, there’s no time like the present. Come on. I’m making the
bread balls for the soup, Milo. You should watch this too.”
The soup Ella mentioned was already pretty much done. It was a
pretty standard mix of what looked like meat, herbs, carrots, and some other
vegetables cooking in a large iron pot over the fire. She had Arthur taste the
broth, explaining a bit of what had gone into making what must have been
the best thing Arthur had ever tasted.
“It’s not just skills. Of course, the skills do help. I could never make
a broth like that without the system enhancing things behind the scenes. But
it’s a mistake to rely on your skills too much. Some cooks never go beyond
a certain point, and it’s almost always because they think more leveling will
eventually make the food perfect.”
“I’m assuming it doesn’t?” Arthur asked.
“Oh, gods no. Think of it like… a shovel, I suppose. A shovel is a
blade mounted on a lever. The blade cuts the soil, and the handle works like
a lever.” Ella pantomimed a little digging action, with enough expertise that
Arthur was able to confirm who had done most of the gardening he had
seen around the house. “But although the blade actually touches soil and
does most of the work, the tool wouldn’t be nearly as effective without a
strong counterweight at the other end. That’s where being creative and
making good choices comes in.”
“That makes sense. It’s actually kind of a relief, really. I was
worried everything would get automated at some point,” Arthur said.
“No. At least not if you want to be any good. And that goes for any
class.” Ella pointed her spoon at him, and then at Milo. “Let that be a lesson
to both of you. Even combat classes work like that. Karbo may seem
simple, but I’ve seen him talk about fighting. He makes more choices than
any of us.”
The soup was mostly done and simmering, which left what Ella had
called the bread balls, a subject upon which she was suddenly dead serious.
“This soup is a good example of what I’m talking about. This soup
traditionally calls for little pieces of bread. It’s a farmer’s dish, and the idea
is that the bread helps it fill you up. But if you use normal bread, it falls
apart. Gets mushy.”
Ella had built up a little dough in a bowl and showed it to them.
“This is flour, water, and yeast. There’s also a little bit of salt and sugar. If
you don’t know already, that’s what bread is, at a basic level. But unless
you want a mush, you need more than what we have here.”
She rooted around in the cupboard until she found a small bowl of
white powder.
“This is a special starch, made from the root of a certain plant that
grows in the forest near here. If I tried to make a bread using just this, it
would be too chewy. But if I add this and a little bit of oil to the dough…”
Ella did so, thoroughly kneading it in.
“There. That will make it so the bread holds together better in the
broth. Of course, it’s not forever, but it will last long enough to get through
a bowl of soup. Now, come help me with this.”
She took him over to a side of the kitchen where a metal apparatus
was mounted to the table, a sort of pipe with a press at one end.
“I’m going to load the dough here,” Ella said, opening a small hatch
in the machine and loading in the dough. “Now push on that rod, there.”
As Arthur pushed the dough, it made its way through the pipe,
extruding through the end like a thick noodle, which Ella snipped with
scissors as it came out.
“Of course, you can make the balls by hand. They come out rounder
that way. They even make a little tool for it. I think it would be a wonderful
birthday present.” She winked at Milo, who seemed to file the idea away for
later. “But this way is just as good, and it’s a bit quicker. Now we just pop
them in the oven and they will bake. It doesn’t take long with little pieces of
bread like this.”
Arthur was surprised to find her baking oven was fueled by wood,
but Ella assured him that the flavor they’d gain from the wood was worth
losing the convenience from a magic heat source. After a few minutes, they
were done.
Ella dumped a handful of them into a few bowls of soup and served
it up over the high table she had in the center of her kitchen.
“Here. A bowl for you, and a bowl for you. I think we can eat it right
here. Soup is kitchen food, at least in my book.”
The soup was amazing. The actual soup itself was perfect, but the
bread took it to a near impossible level. Every bite was enhanced by a
crusty, perfect little bit of bread, adding chew, flavor, and good old
carbohydrates to every bite. Arthur had eaten a huge lunch just minutes
before, but it didn’t matter. He tore through the soup with gusto.
 “Well, at least you appreciate food. It doesn’t mean you’ll be a cook
or a chef, but it’s a good sign for both,” Ella said.
“There’s a difference?” Arthur asked.
“Yes. Although it’s mostly just in how they level. Cooks level by
making people happy, and chefs level by making people impressed. Of
course, you level even faster if the person making the food can pull off
both,” Ella said.
“So you personally level very, very fast. Got it,” Arthur said.
Ella squawked in delighted laughter.
“Oh, Milo, I like this one. Don’t ruin this friendship. I’ll stop
feeding you.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER NINE

TEAMASTER

The rest of the day was spent going over various aspects of the kitchen,
with Arthur asking questions and Ella talking about her work. It was clear
she loved it, but even better was why she loved it. Other demons might
cook for money, or fame, or even power of sorts, but it was obvious that
Ella cooked for a shorter, simpler set of reasons. She just liked cooking and
making people happy through food.
That aspect of things really appealed to Arthur. He wanted to work.
But he didn’t want his work to be a repeat of what work had become in his
past life. A grind with barely a tiny glimmer of hope at the end. Making
people happy would help break things up in a way that Arthur could see
going a long way toward making his second life better.
“I wish I had known I was going to have guests,” Ella said, as she
steeped a large pot of tea for the three of them. “I would have made some
kind of dessert. I feel a little embarrassed about that.”
“Hmm,” Arthur said, silently agreeing with her on how good some
kind of dessert would be at that exact moment. Then inspiration struck. “Do
you still have some of those bread balls?”
“Oh, plenty. I always make too many of those. Why?”
 “If you don’t mind, I could try something. I’m not sure if it’s going
to work, though.”
“Oh, no, Arthur,” Milo said. “You don’t have to justify that to mom.
The fact that you’re doing an actual food experiment in her kitchen is the
opposite of a problem. It’s like you’re giving her a gift.”
“Okay, but I need a few things you might not have. This might be a
stupid question, but do you have ice and milk?”
They had both, the first was courtesy of a magic-driven icemaker
and the second, Arthur assumed, courtesy of an anonymous cow
somewhere. He imagined cream would normally be used for this kind of
thing, but since the milk was so thick and creamy to begin with, he
imagined it would do just fine.
Arthur purloined the tea that Ella had prepared, pouring it into a
large, thin bowl, which he then placed in a bucket of ice and water.
“Do you have cinnamon?” Arthur asked. “Or something like it?”
“I don’t know what that is. It must be an offworlder thing.”
“It’s… a spice, something you’d use in a sweet bread or a dessert.
Warm, comforting.”
Ella’s face lit up. “I know just what you mean. One moment.”
She dug around in her pantry, eventually coming back with a bottle
filled with a spice that smelled faintly of nutmeg and cloves.
“This is perfect. Thank you,” Arthur said.
“Careful. It’s strong,” Ella warned.
“How much should I use? I want this to be the primary flavor, but
only a bit stronger than the tea itself.”
Ella measured out a bit and showed it to him, then dumped it back
into the spice container. For whatever reason, she wasn’t physically
participating in a single part of this process.
I wonder why. Could it be local politeness, among chefs?
 Arthur added the spice before the tea cooled completely. When it
was the right temperature, he poured the mix into three cups, then added the
milk, a bit of sugar, an extra pinch for good measure, and plenty of ice.
“Oh, shoot,” Arthur said. “I forgot the straws.”
“You’d add straw to this?” Ella raised her eyebrows. “Interesting.”
“No, straws. It’s like…” Arthur held his hands about eight inches
apart. “Little tubes, maybe as thick as your thumb, about this long.”
“Why?” Milo asked.
“It’s a surprise. But it doesn’t matter if we can’t get them,” Arthur
said.
“Actually, I think I can help with that. Making pipes is a practice
thing for smiths. One second,” Milo said.
Milo ran off to his shop and came back a few minutes later with a
small handful of cut-off pipe fragments.
“Oh, that’s amazing.” There were three of them that were perfect,
much better than Arthur had expected. He gave them a quick wash in the
sink, then brought them back to the cups. “Now, watch this.”
He grabbed a handful of the raw bread balls, tossed them into a cup,
then did the same with the other two. Making sure all the ingredients were
mixed, he handed the cups off to the others, then worried with his own for a
moment before realizing that the others weren’t drinking yet.
“I don’t know how it is where you are from, but here the chef goes
first. Especially on something new,” Ella said.
Arthur took a cautious sip from the brim of the glass. The tea, at
least, was great. He then took a deeper drink from the straw, getting a bread
ball that was a bit doughier than he expected in the mix. It wasn’t perfect,
but it was close enough.
“It’s good, I think. Try it!”
The others took cautious sips themselves, then deeper drinks, before
finally just tearing into the drinks with wild abandon.
 “Arthur, this is amazing. Have you been lying about the class
thing?” Milo said, chewing on a bread ball.
“No, not at all. It’s that good?” Arthur asked.
“For someone with no skills?” Ella asked. “On an experiment?
Arthur, this is incredible. What is this even called?”
“In my world, there’s a drink called boba. It’s sort of a dessert, or
something like half a meal you’d drink as a snack. It’s confusing, but I like
it. This is a lot like that. Not exactly, though.”
If Milo and Ella cared about the culinary inaccuracy, they didn’t
show it. They both laughed and kept the compliments flowing as they
worked through all the tea, goading Arthur into making them more when
their cups emptied out. Finally, the supply of bread balls was tapped.
“That was truly excellent, Arthur. I’m so full, now,” Milo said,
leaning back in his chair with his stomach puffed out.
“Agreed. You saved the day. You are welcome in this kitchen any
time.”
Arthur was equally full, and basking in the glow of having done
something right, something that actually contributed to these nice people.
And then, all of a sudden, he wasn’t there anymore. He found
himself looking down on a wooden building, filled with chairs and tables
and demons of all sorts drinking tea, talking, and laughing. And amidst it all
there he was, serving drinks, joking, smiling, and having a good time.
He wasn’t sure what this vision was, but he felt immensely happy.
And anything that felt that good probably wasn’t an entirely negative thing.
It felt like the universe was showing him something good, almost as a
reward for what he had done with the tea. It was like a dream of what might
be, intermixed with a question.
It was just a feeling, but he knew what that question was.
It’s like it’s asking me if I’d be okay with this. Arthur looked back
down at the shop, feeling the warmth and happiness it promised, even while
he felt a certain edge of work and risk surrounding the comforting
atmosphere. It wouldn’t be all fun and games, he could feel. But nothing
worth doing was completely easy.
Sure, I could do that. I like it.
And then all the happiness and warmth went away, replaced by all
the cold of an ice-water bath.
“Arthur!” Arthur heard Milo yell. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine!” Arthur said, before he was sure of that. Opening his
eyes, he saw Milo standing above him with an empty bucket, and found he
was soaked. Apparently, that ice-water bath sensation wasn’t just a feeling.
Ella bent down to the kitchen floor where Arthur had ended up,
concern written in her face. “Arthur, I need you to tell me what just
happened. It’s very, very important you don’t leave out any details.”
Arthur relayed what had happened, as closely as he could. There
wasn’t much to tell, and the story wasn’t very long, but even before he had
finished it, there was a banging at the door that turned out to have come
from Eito and Karbo. Ella asked him to rehash the story until everyone had
heard it.
“And this was because of tea?” Eito said. “The first tea he ever
made? I don’t believe it.”
“You would if you had the tea, Eito,” Ella said. “Or if you had seen
him making it. He was lost in the process. Besides, if you were summoned
here…”
“I get it.”
“What’s going on here?” Milo asked. “Should I get a doctor?”
“No, not for this, darling boy. Your friend isn’t sick. But he does
need something, and soon.”
“That he does,” Karbo said. “And four is the traditional number.”
Arthur looked from face to face. Whatever was going on here wasn’t
something he had been fully able to track. Luckily, it didn’t seem to be a
bad thing, exactly, but he was still concerned when all four of his friends
suddenly lined up in the kitchen, looking solemn as they all faced him.
“Stand, Arthur,” Eito said. Arthur stood. “As the system-appointed
temporary guardian of this child, I call for witnesses. Who will witness?”
“I, Ella Kitchenmaster, witness.”
“I, Milo Metalsmith, witness.”
“I, Karbo Battler, witness.”
Definitely a ceremony, then.
“And I, Eito Trainer, witness as the fourth. We welcome this child to
the system, and vow to help him as he progresses in his work.”
“Eito, what’s going on here?” Arthur said, his head spinning from all
the weirdness. “Should I be concerned?”
Eito laughed. “Quiet, Arthur. It’s fine. It’s also necessary.”
“Really, Arthur. I went through this just a while ago,” Milo added.
“You have to do this, or it doesn’t sink in right.”
A tea-induced vision, a really weird ceremony, and something that
Milo had also recently experienced all pointed in one direction, a direction
that Arthur hadn’t intended on actually going just yet.
“It can’t be that. There wasn’t any warning, or anything,” Arthur
said.
“Honestly, what you’re going through is probably close to how the
system envisioned it in the beginning. Other people generally become too
specialized and bypass the system’s heads up,” Eito said. “Anyway, quiet.
You’re ruining all the atmosphere. This is supposed to be solemn.”
Gathering himself and forcing his own mouth to stop moving,
Arthur stood up straighter.
“I, Eito Trainer, acknowledge these witnesses, and I acknowledge
the step this young man has taken today. I pray that his path will be straight,
his work will be honest, and that he will move all of us forward. In this
ceremony, we abandon our surnames for our system classes, the roles that
define us more than our names could. The system has told me this young
man’s new name, the one he will speak when performing this ceremony for
others.”
Eito walked forward and put his hands on Arthur’s shoulders,
barkily.
“Welcome to the town, kid. I’m glad to be the first to introduce you
by your system name. Everyone, say hello to Arthur Teamaster of Earth.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TEN

DEMON CULTURE

Arthur felt a warmth wash over him as something deep inside him clicked
into position. Something had been wrong his whole life. For both of his
lives, if he was being exact. It had never been fixed, so Arthur had learned
to live with the wrongness. But now, he could tell, it was made right.
I just don’t know exactly what it is.
“What was that?” Arthur asked. “I mean, I know it’s something to
do with the system. But what exactly?”
“You have your class,” Eito said. “That’s what the vision you saw
was. I really, really should have warned you about that in advance.”
“You couldn’t have known, Eito. It’s never this fast,” Ella said. “But
what’s done is done. Arthur wouldn’t have chosen it if things didn’t feel
right. People have had great results with less.”
“I suppose. At any rate, Arthur, you should be able to call up your
status screen now.”
“How?” Arthur asked. “Remember, this is all pretty new to me.”
 “Just want to open it,” Eito said. “It’s not hard, or else Karbo
wouldn’t be able to do it.”
“Hey!” Karbo slapped lightly at Eito, who leaned out of the way just
in time to avoid the playful blow. Arthur smiled as he willed his status
screen to appear. Eito had been right that it wasn’t hard to do, and it popped
in the air in front of him almost instantly.

Arthur Dennison
Level 1 Teamaster
STR: 5
VIT: 5
DEX: 5
PER: 5
WIS: 5
INT: 5
Primary Skills: None

“Hmm,” Arthur said, underwhelmed. “I’m assuming five is the

baseline stat number?”
“That’s right. Those are your unmodified stats. Anything higher is
your species’ strengths, and lower are the weaknesses. Don’t worry about it
too much. You can even it out a bit later, once you level.” Milo puffed out
his chest proudly as he explained. “I’m already most of the way to
compensating for my low STR. It’s important for a smith.”
“Um… hm,” Arthur said. “I just have the fives, actually.”
The adults in the room focused on him immediately.
“On every stat?” Karbo asked. “All of them?”
“Yeah. Why? Is that bad?”
“It’s not bad, it’s just…” Eito thought for a moment, apparently
rolling the implications of it in his mind. “Milo said he was adjusting for his
stats. And that’s true, he can do that and nearly everyone eventually does. It
doesn’t make sense not to shore up weaknesses, and stat points come fast
enough that it hardly matters. Nobody goes all-in on one stat.”
“So it’s no difference?”
“Not exactly. Even once you make up for the stats, the system
leaves some… flavor, I suppose? Aftertaste,” Ella said. “Look at Karbo. He
and I could have the same strength stat number, but he’d still be stronger
than me. Not much, but a little. And at the same dexterity, he will never be
quite as nimble as someone from mine and Milo’s species.”
It didn’t sound that bad to Arthur.
“The point is: it doesn’t matter. Not really,” Eito said. “The reason
we’re all reacting this way is just that it’s never happened before. Every
demon has a specialty, some stat that’s a bit higher than the others.”
“Nobody’s just average?”
“Just you,” Karbo said. “At least that I’ve heard of.”
“I also don’t have any skills, if that matters.”
Ella hand waved that particular issue. “No, that at least is normal.
Nobody does. You get the class, then you search out the skills. Milo doesn’t
have his yet either.”
“That’s why I can make a dagger, but not make it pretty. All skills
are a little different, but generally speaking, smiths get their rough-work
and detail-work abilities from separate skills.”
“Finding them is part of the fun. And it’s part of why we set aside
time for young adults to settle into their classes. I still remember when my
last skill settled in. One day, I was breaking bones the old-fashioned way.
The next day, it was like they were breaking themselves,” Karbo said,
looking wistful.
“Enough with that,” Ella said. “As much as this is an exciting event,
I’m sure you two had something you were up to, before you came over.”
Eito and Karbo nodded.
 “I’m sure the people at the party are wondering where we went,
Karbo. We didn’t give them much in the way of explanation when we heard
that Arthur was in trouble.”
Arthur felt a bit of warmth at the idea of Eito and Karbo running all
the way down to where he was with that little delay. It was like he was
important, like he mattered.
“Go back,” he said. “I’ll be okay. Eito, I’ll be home soon, I’m sure.”
“Oh, no you won’t. Eito, this is a food class. I’m taking over. Milo,
go prepare a guest room for this boy. And you,” she said, putting her hand
on Arthur’s shoulder, “get ready. We are pulling an all-nighter, you and me.
Let’s get you that first skill.”
“Tonight?” Arthur said. It wasn’t late yet, but he didn’t want to put
her out. “You don’t need to sleep?”
“With a brand-new food classer in the house? I couldn’t sleep if I
wanted to,” she said, smiling wryly. “Could you?”
He almost objected before realizing that she was completely right.
No, he thought. I don’t think I could.
Seven hours later, the kitchen looked like a bomb had hit it. Ella was
busy sweeping the floors, but most of the counters were covered in flour
and starch, something Arthur was beginning to regard as an ever-growing
reminder of his failures.
“I don’t understand. It wasn’t this hard before. That’s the fourth
batch of bread I’ve ruined.”
“That’s the trick, though, isn’t it? I did most of the work before. The
tea was mine. The bread was mine. You did some assembly, but that was it.”
“I guess,” Arthur said, his shoulders drooping. “It felt like more.”
“Oh, don’t sulk. You did plenty. It’s just that you also have work to
do. You said you weren’t a cook or a chef on your old world, right?”
Arthur nodded, wiping down his work area as he did. Ella had said
they could clean the kitchen up in the morning, but he still needed a clear
space to work. “That’s right. I barely cooked. Not even as much as normal
person.”
“Well, there you are. You didn’t expect it to be that easy, did you?
That you’d just get your class and suddenly, you have world-class skills?”
He flinched. He had sort of expected something like that.
“No, no. It’s work. Hard work. You need to figure out how to do…
well, everything.” Ella paused to lean on the broom as she talked. “To build
a fire and keep it going. To use a knife. To boil water properly, for the gods’
sake. We all had to do it, once. You are just starting a bit later than some.”
“Yeah, I mean… It’s okay. I’ll do it. It’s just a bit slower than I
thought.”
“You do seem to be in an awful hurry about things. Why is that?
You must have heard you have plenty of time.”
Ella sat down next to Arthur, pulling away his tools to her side of
the counter. Whatever he was going to answer, it appeared she wanted to
hear it.
“It’s just… I don’t know. When I was back on my world, I never
really had to take anything from anyone. I paid my own way. I ran up my
own debts. But I took care of myself.”
“Always? Did you not have parents?” Ella cocked her eyebrow at
Arthur, confused.
“Well, no, I did. Still do, kind of.”
“Listen, Arthur. I know that things are different here than what
you’re used to. But I can’t believe your world is so different that it’d be
okay to ignore people talking to you.”
“What?” Arthur was genuinely confused. He had listened to
everything she had said the whole night, even when her instructions didn’t
make sense to him. He was listening now, too. At least he thought he was.
“No whats, Arthur. Answer me. How many times have you been told
that it’s part of our duty to take care of outsiders in the past few days? I
know it must have come up.”
 It had come up. Quite a bit, if Arthur was honest about things.
“Several times,” he said.
“And that it was an honor for us? Something we were proud of?”
“At least once.”
“Well, there you are. We don’t mind. It’s in our culture. Honestly,
Arthur, I can tell you aren’t dumb. Do you really think I’m the kind of
person who minds taking care of people? Of feeding them?”
On some level, Arthur still wanted to disagree with her, something
that was made harder by the fact that every atom of the bird-woman
screamed that she loved hospitality. In a society where nearly everyone was
fairly fit, she was very slightly heavy in a way that suggested the sheer
amount of time she spent around food, and she never talked about the food
in any context besides how other people would enjoy it as well as the things
she had to do to make sure that would happen.
Ella had welcomed Arthur into her home, demanded he stay longer
when it seemed like it might be good for him, and had been nothing but
nice the entire time. And here was Arthur, telling her that he was trying to
get through what sounded like an unrealistic amount of work so he didn’t
offend her.
“Just don’t worry about it, okay? Not just because nobody you’ve
met minds, but also because it’s making you worse at this. All of this. You
can’t hurry cooking, Arthur.” Ella went off to a cupboard, coming back with
a big metal pot for water and a small, rune pad about the size of a coaster.
“Do you know what these are?”
“A heat source and a teapot?”
“A heat source and a kettle. There’s a difference. Kettles are for
heating the water. Teapots are for steeping. If you’re trying to keep tea
going for several people, it matters. You can leave the kettle boiling and
always have hot water, without people having to handle a half gallon of
water in an iron case.”
 She filled the pot with water and put it on the heat source, hovering
her hand near the whole assembly for a few seconds until the heat source
began to glow. Then, she noticed Arthur’s fascination with the whole affair.
“You didn’t have these? Just wood fires, or something?”
“No, we had heat sources that seemed magical but weren’t actually
magic. They ran off electricity.”
“Like lightning?”
“Yeah. But controlled.”
She shrugged.
“Seems magic enough to me. Not important right now, though. I
think we’ve experimented enough with the bread for the day. Now I want
you to do something different. You’re making tea. Now, tell me what you
already know about tea.”
“You put leaves in hot water until it leeches out some of the contents
of the leaves. The water changes color and you have tea.”
“Good enough. Now, if I told you two different people could get two
very different results when making tea with the same leaves, how would
you guess that was happening?”
“One left the leaves in longer than the other?”
“Steep time. That matters. But that’s only one of the things. What’s
the other?”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER ELEVEN

FOOD SCIENTIST

Arthur couldn’t think of anything. He sat quietly as Ella waited patiently,

listening for the kettle to boil. It was almost a full minute before he realized
what it was.
“The temperature of the water when they add it. I bet it makes a
difference if the leaves are exposed to hotter or colder water.”
“That’s right. And do you know what the maximum temperature for
water is?”
Arthur actually did. This wasn’t just a cooking thing. It was also a
science thing and while he wasn’t a scientist, he knew at least a little about
that.
“Boiling.”
“That’s right. I don’t know why, but you can’t heat water beyond
boiling, and boiling can mean different things depending on where you are.
Now, go to that cupboard and get, let’s say, ten jars. Little ones and put an
equal amount of tea leaves in them. We’re going to do an experiment.”
Arthur brought the jars back just as the water came to a boil.
 “Okay. So design something here. You seem like a systematic
person. Make up a way to teach yourself to make tea. I’ll play the part of
your customer. Make some tea, and I’ll take a sip and tell you how it is. Sip
it yourself too. That’s part of it.”
Arthur ended up splitting the jars into two groups, one that he only
used boiling water with, with varying steeping times, and one where he
tried different temperatures of water with the same steeping time. He and
Ella both agreed the first group turned out poorly. Steeping time made a
difference, but with boiling water, all the leaves were scorched. The tea was
much worse than what Ella had made earlier, despite being the same leaves
and the same amount of water.
“Now this one is pretty good. It’s close,” Ella said, sipping on a cup
of tea from the second batch. It was one that was steeped with water that
had significantly cooled down from a boil. “Try it.”
Arthur did. It wasn’t quite as good as his memory of Ella’s drink,
but it was starting to taste very decent.
“This type of tea is what I’d usually describe as delicate. It wants to
be treated that way. Much cooler than this, though, and you start to lose out
on the other end, and the tea tastes weak.”
“I’m assuming different types of teas are… different?”
“Yes. Some are very hardy and want boiling water straight from the
fire. You learn about that kind of thing.” She took the tea back from Arthur,
and slumped a little while she sipped it. Outside, the sun was starting to
come up. “I think that’s probably about it for tonight.”
“Going to try to get some sleep?”
“Now?” She laughed. “No. I’ll go in to work in a few hours. Don’t
worry about it. I’ll be fine. You, however, can do what you like.”
They chatted about food for a while. Both were a little disappointed
that Arthur hadn’t managed to get a skill, but Ella admitted she had been a
little over-optimistic in trying for it the first night. He had, she repeated,
plenty of time to make that happen.
 “Oh, you know what?” Arthur said. “I actually know something you
don’t. Why the water won’t get hotter than boiling.”
“Really?”
“Yes. Well, at least why it was that way on my world.”
“Well, tell me, Arthur. It could be useful.”
He did his best to explain. Either Science was fairly basic on this
planet, or Ella just hadn’t been exposed to much of it. She didn’t have any
idea of molecules and atoms, which ended up taking the longest time to
explain to her. Once they covered that hurdle, it was a bit easier to get her to
understand.
“So the water that’s leaving as steam is taking more than its fair
share of heat with it?”
“Exactly. And it always does. So when you apply more heat…”
“You just get more steam. And the rest of the water stays at the same
temperature.”
“Right.”
“And everyone on your world knew this?”
“Not everyone. But when you come from a world without magic or
skills, you have to make things happen somehow. We had big metal
carriages that could blast through the sky carrying people places, and it was
all just based on this kind of thinking. Knowing more about things and
exploiting that knowledge. I think…”
Arthur stopped talking as he suddenly became dizzy for a moment,
almost to the point of blacking out. As his head cleared and he looked back
up at Ella, he found that she was staring at him intently.
“Sorry. I think I’m just a little tired.”
“Maybe. But I think not. Open your status screen.”
Arthur cocked his head to the side, confused.
“Just do it.”
 Arthur Teamaster
Level 1
STR: 5
VIT: 5
DEX: 5
PER: 5
WIS: 5
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Food Scientist (Level 0)

“Got something?” Ella said.

“I did. It says Food Scientist. Is level zero normal?”
“It is. I haven’t heard of that one. Try to get the system to tell you
more about it, if you can.”
He willed the system to tell him more, and it obliged, bringing up
the second system screen he had ever seen.

Food Scientist (Level 0)

You understand a bit more about the world around you than
most. Other people might be able to manipulate it better, but you
comprehend how things should be when it’s not being
manipulated at all.
That knowledge grants you a better understanding of various
aspects of ingredients, tools, and cooking conditions. At level
zero, this skill helps you gather preliminary information about
your resources and predict the effects of various cooking
techniques slightly better.

“It looks like it lets me know a bit more about ingredients and make
predictions about how to cook them,” Arthur said.
“Really? That could be powerful.”
“Yeah? It sounds a bit weak, to me.”
 “No, she’s right,” Milo said, walking out of his room. “It’s not just
what it does to your cooking. The skill helps you do the right thing more
often. Skill growth is driven by success more than failure. That skill will
accelerate learning. I wish I had something like that.”
The three of them started working on cleaning up the kitchen. Once
it was tidy, Ella started working on breakfast, conscripting Arthur to help
her as Milo sat, yawned, and began getting ready for his day.
“So you were up all night, Arthur? You must be beat.”
“Not really, actually.” Arthur rolled his shoulders as he sat down by
his friend. “I don’t know if it’s this new body, or what, but I feel mostly
fine.”
“Yeah? Well, good. There’s another meeting in the park today. You
should come.”
An hour later, Arthur found himself walking alone on the streets of
the city, full of a surprisingly large number of eggs and some kind of pan-
fried meat he didn’t entirely recognize.
Milo was meeting him in the park later, having begged off keeping
him company for the morning. The sparrow had a project to work on, one
that he was really excited about and that he thought might drive his class
forward. This wasn’t all that unexpected to Arthur, given what he knew of
Milo’s love for smithing. What was surprising was the subject of the
project.
Milo was, he had explained, unbelievably excited about making
more drinking straws.
“You don’t have straws at all?”
“No! It’s a new thing. I mean, somebody probably drank through a
reed or something at some point. But making a metal tube specifically for
drinking? I’ve never seen it.” He pantomimed drinking something through a
straw, holding his imaginary glass inches from his face. “Look how
convenient it is! You don’t have to drink from the brim directly. The ice
doesn’t get in the way!”
 “Yeah, absolutely.” Through Milo’s naïve excitement, Arthur began
to really consider what a technological marvel straws were for the first time.
“And if you make a lid for the glass with a little hole in it…”
Milo bonked his own head with an open palm.
“Then you can’t even spill! Arthur, people might actually like this.
They might want to use it. Do you know how big of a deal that is?”
“No. But I’m assuming big.”
“Huge, Arthur. Huge. I’m going to make dozens of these, today. Get
them right. Wish me luck.”
Arthur was hoping the straws worked out for Milo. He had been
halfway to asking for a chance to watch his friend work, but decided against
it when it turned out he had bigger worries. As he stood there considering
whether or not to follow Milo to his workshop, Ella had grabbed his arm
and unceremoniously plopped something into his hands.
“What’s this?” Arthur asked, gripping down on what appeared to be
a leather pouch.
“Money. From Eito. He left it with me last night.”
“I don’t need this, Ella.”
“No, you actually do. You see all this?” She waved generally at her
kitchen. “It’s mine. I don’t mind you using it, but these are all tools I need
to do my housework. You need your own. And, before you start getting all
reluctant, that money comes from the city. It’s yours whether you want it or
not.”
Arthur bit down the reflex to argue about it and pocketed the money.
“Okay, then. What should I buy?”
“Lots of things. Clothes, for one. Three more sets should do it.”
“Ah.” That was reasonable. Arthur couldn’t do laundry every day,
and he suspected he didn’t smell incredible after his all-nighter in the
kitchen.
 “After that, tools. Every chef and cook uses similar tools, at the
basic level. You need knives, mixing spoons, gloves, and that kind of thing.
It’s universal. After that? I’d say get a kettle, a few heat sources, some
crystals to recharge them, some teapots…”
“What about jars, or something like that? For experiments?”
“Good idea. Now, take this.” She gave him a scrawled note of
directions. “That’s the shop I use. The owner is a turtle-demon named Stil.
He’ll treat you right. If you get there soon, you’ll probably be his first
customer of the day.”
“Got it. So I should leave?”
“Yes. I’m going as well.”
She grabbed her bag, and started heading for the door, before
turning one last time.
“Arthur?”
“Yes?”
“You better spend every coin in that bag. Every last one. I mean it. If
I find out you tried to save any to give back, I’m withholding dinner.”

Back on the street, Arthur stood in front of a clothing store. Ella hadn’t
given him any specific instructions on how to handle that part of his day. He
had no idea what the right clothing store was or even that much about local
fashion. The people around him were dressed in a wide variety of ways,
ranging from outlandish to very simple. If there was a logic to it, he wasn’t
seeing it.
He realized, to his dismay, that he had no idea what a person his age
should wear. But that came with a little freedom as well. Since he had no
preferences, he could just ask or decide for himself. And in front of him was
a store that was probably filled with experts, just waiting to be exploited.
He swallowed whatever worry he had about his own unique-to-them
coloring and anatomy and crossed the threshold.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWELVE

BEING A KID

“Welcome!” A largish mole yelled at him as he entered, before starting back

a bit as he saw exactly what he was dealing with, and then continuing on in
a more muted tone. “What can I help you with?”
“I need a few sets of clothes.” Arthur decided just to lay everything
out. “I’m from a different world, this is my third day here, and I don’t know
how clothes work. My guardian is Eito and I’m staying with Ella, if you
know her.”
“Phoo!” exhaled the mole. “That’s a lot to take in.”
“Yeah, you’re telling me.”
“Well, okay then.” The mole grabbed a tape measure, moving
around the counter. “Arms up.”
He took some quick measurements, writing down Arthur’s
proportions as he went.
“Well, the good news is you aren’t bizarre. I had to make clothes for
a spider-demon a few weeks ago. All those arms and a non-standard torso.
She looked amazing afterward though,” he said, picking through fabrics. “I
should be able to just scale down my infernal patterns. They have pretty
much the same build.”
“No ready-made stuff?” Arthur hadn’t seen any clothing anywhere
in the store, outside a few models up front. Most of the store was consumed
with raw materials, like the rolls of fabric the mole was picking through as
he looked for something appropriate to Arthur’s needs.
“Oh, no. Not that kind of store. If the city was a little more uniform
in terms of species, maybe I could get away with that. But here? I just don’t
have the room to stock everything I’d need.” He pulled out a roll of fabric
from the rack, bringing it to Arthur to inspect. “I’m assuming you aren’t a
combat class?”
“No.”
“Good. That leaves us with a lot of options. You wouldn’t believe
what I have to do to keep Karbo’s clothing intact. What do you think about
this?” he asked, holding out the cloth in his hands.
“Looks nice.” It was light, and not too colorful. “To be honest, I
don’t have that strong of a preference. I think anything like this would be
fine.”
“You want me to just pick some things out? I could make the sets all
work together so you could mix-and-match.”
“That sounds great.” Arthur snapped his fingers as he remembered
something. “Actually, I’m not sure if this is the right place. But what about
gloves, for cooking. And an apron, I guess.”
“The apron I can do. The gloves are more specialized. I can make
them, but…”
“The cooking tools store would be better?”
“Yes. Not that I’d mind but you’re a new customer. I wouldn’t want
to lead you astray.”
The shopkeeper gave Arthur a price for the clothes in a
denomination he didn’t understand, before seeing his confusion, asking him
for his money pouch, and counting out the amount for him himself.
 “These small ones are Pensa. They won’t buy much by themselves,
so they usually used for making change. Ten of them makes a coin, which is
the main unit of currency here and pretty much anywhere in the demon
world. And ten of those makes a Majna. If you forget the names, the usual
slang is ‘little, coin, large.’”
“So this is one large, two coins?”
“That’s right. I don’t deal in pensa, except for raw materials. Too
troublesome.”
“This is a weird question,” Arthur said, “but should I haggle?”
The demon looked at him blankly. “Haggle?”
“Negotiate. To try and get a better price.”
“Ah. No, not usually. Is it usual on your world for a vendor to try
and cheat their customers?”
Arthur thought about that.
“Yes, actually. It wasn’t a great part of our culture.”
“Well, not here. You might negotiate the price on something
complex, like an odd barter or a very large purchase. For something average
like this, you’d usually accept the price or find a different vendor who
worked in lower quality goods.”
“Got it. I actually like that a lot better.” Not having to haggle was a
huge relief. He had never been good at it and would have been
disadvantaged here if it had come to that.
“I should say so. And I shouldn’t necessarily tell you what to do, but
if I were you, I wouldn’t bring up that haggle thing again. I don’t take
offense, but…”
Arthur felt bad now, in multiple ways. Without knowing that
negotiation on small purchases wasn’t really a thing here, he had more or
less accused the tailor of being a cheat, however unintentionally. On a sillier
level, he felt bad because he had just come to understand that the fifteen
coins in his pouch were kind of a lot of money, more than he probably
needed and far more than he had earned.
 He could only fix one of those things at the moment.
“Understood. And I apologize if I offended you.”
The tailor waved his mole-paw at him, casually. “Don’t worry.
You’re new here. I’d be a pretty poor friend if I couldn’t cut you some slack
for that.”
Having secured a promise that the clothes would be done that
afternoon, Arthur moved on to find the cooking gear vendor. Having
arrived, he found the building in question was very plain, just a flat stone
front on a building that was no more ornate or decorated than a warehouse.
If it wasn’t for a single iron pot insignia fastened above the door, he
wouldn’t have thought it was a store at all.
It was a very different picture inside. What the building lost in
aesthetics, it made up for in sheer size as the biggest non-church building
Arthur had been inside so far. Row after row of pots, pans, and various
other implements stretched out imposingly before him, like an army of
cookware ready to charge.
“Need some help?” a nearby bear in an apron asked. “You look
lost.”
“Yes, please. I am.”
The bear turned its massive head towards the back of the store.
“Stil! You have a customer.”
A voice boomed out from the back of the store in reply.
“You can help yourself! Just write your items down before you go.”
“Not me, you lazy idiot. A new customer. Some kind of…” She
looked at Arthur, helplessly.
“Basically a shaved ape!” Arthur yelled, trying for the assist.
“Yeah!”
With a clatter of goods, Arthur heard someone start moving toward
the store’s front, grumbling as he came. As he sighted Arthur, the giant
turtle’s expression changed from annoyance to surprise, then to mild
embarrassment.
“Oh, I’m sorry.” Stil pointed at the bear. “This one thinks she’s
funny. I thought she was playing a trick. You are sort of a monkey-man,
aren’t you?”
“A human, actually. I’m not from… nearby,” Arthur said.
“I bet. So what can I do for you?”
“Ella sent me. I just got a class related to making tea, and she said I
needed normal cooking gear and some tea-specific items. And heat pads, I
guess. Whatever you call those things,” Arthur said.
“Sources,” Stil said, waving the bear off. The bear shrugged, smiled
at Arthur, then went about her business as Arthur followed the turtle further
into the store. “Can I see your hands?”
Arthur lifted both hands, palm out.
“Pretty normal. That’s good news. The more specialized the handles
need to be, the more expensive. I can get you set up with a pretty standard
kit for four coins. That’ll be for a stack of pretty decent pots and pans, most
of the standard sizes and nothing you can’t get creative with to cover the
gaps. Spoons, forks, spatulas, and that kind of thing as well.”
“What’s the quality like?”
The turtle shrugged. “Good enough. It won’t fall apart on you. The
idea is that it’s good enough to use. They are real tools but you’ll end up
replacing most of them as you get better. Right now, you don’t have
preferences, so spending a lot of money up front for top of the line stuff
doesn’t make sense. Ends up being a waste.”
The turtle dragged him through the store, picking up a couple heat
sources as they went.
“Two is enough, for now. One direct source for pots and pans, and
another radiant source for ovens.”
“Ella uses wood in her oven.”
 “As well she should. But she also has some of these somewhere, I
guarantee it. Even if you were good enough to use a wood-fire well right
now, and you aren’t, you’d still want one of these for practice. And for
camping if you get around to that. These work well enough that you can
bake in a hole in the ground, if you want to.”
“What about tea things?” asked Arthur. Ella had a kettle, several
teapots, and several kinds of tea steepers.
“Some of that’s pretty easy. Kettles are all the same, besides size. I’d
recommend you go bigger rather than smaller, for now. These teapots,” he
said, lifting a plain brown pot off the wall, “are cheap. And good. They just
aren’t pretty. You never get all three in one thing. So unless you want to pay
more, these are your best bet.”
“Those should be fine for now. And for steeping?”
By the time they made several trips back to the counter, the turtle
had picked out a fairly large mountain of objects. Arthur now had four
different ways of steeping tea, depending on the kind of tea and the amount
he was making. He had bottles, glasses, and jars of various kinds for
experimentation and storage.
Best of all, it was all cheap. Even after buying several different
kinds of tea and various spices that the shopkeeper had found to fit his
awkward, vague descriptions, Arthur was walking out of the store with two
entire coins left.
Coins that he had to spend, lest his Mother Bird hostess stop feeding
him the best food he had ever eaten, and probably would ever eat.
“So I have two questions for you.”
“Shoot.”
“First, how do I get all of this home? I could make a few trips, I
guess…”
“Oh, no, son. We have people for orders this size. You said you’re
staying with Ella? We will get all of this there this afternoon, without a
crack or scratch. It’s part of the service.”
 “Oh, fantastic. Thanks for that.”
“And your second question?”
“I need a place that sells smithing supplies. Metal, I guess.”
“Hmm. For what, exactly?”
With some difficulty, Arthur explained the concept of a drinking
straw to the man.
“Hmm. No need for a smith for that, I think. Let’s see what we can
find here. I think I have something buried I can let you have for cheap.”
With some trepidation, Arthur came down into the basement of the
store, where the turtle cussed, fought, and generally did battle with crates
until he found the one he wanted.
“I have ten more of these, somewhere,” he said, prying open the
crate. “A smith who was passing through sold them to me. Good salesman,
really. He said they’d be for anyone who wanted to make temporary pans,
for covering food. Anything, really.”
Reaching into the box, he pulled out a large square of flexible metal,
silvery and shiny.
“Problem is, nobody needed them for any of the things he said. Or at
least not enough to be excited about it. It wasn’t worth the time to explain
how great they were supposed to be, especially when it kept people from
buying more durable goods. We lost money on the whole thing.”
“So it’s… foil?”
“Almost. A bit too thick to crinkle.”
This was just about perfect. Besides welding the edges together,
Arthur could wrap these sheets around a dowel and help Milo make straws.
“How much for the crate?”
By the time Arthur made it to the park, he was shopped out. He had
half expected Eito to show up to see how he was getting along, but he didn’t
see him or any of the other adults he knew anywhere.
 The semi-god agent he had talked to in the in-between place had
been telling the truth about at least one thing. He was, for better or worse,
an adolescent now. Everything felt as strongly to him as it had when he was
a kid. He was excited about most things, happy at something as simple as
good food, and generally had regressed to the age he appeared.
He could kind of remember what it felt like to be an adult. It was
stress, mostly. But it was like the experience was from a story he had heard
rather than something he had really experienced. Which was awkward to
think about, sure, but it seemed he didn’t have much of a choice: he could
ignore his chronological age, or just accepting the fact that he wasn’t quite
grown up anymore.
It was amazing.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MIZU

“Arthur! Over here!” Milo called. Arthur went to where his friend was
sitting on the ground, comparing notes with the same mouse from
yesterday. She had shown up with some vases today, made with a different
kind of clay if the color was any indicator.
“Look at what she’s done. She can’t make things fine enough or
durable enough for tea yet. I asked her.”
“Ah dang,” Arthur said as he looked over the vases. “Actually, it
doesn’t necessarily have to be that fine. I have some ideas for something
thick that might work.”
Working out a plan with the other two to make a kind of double-
walled brewer that would keep water cold for extended periods of time was
fun and occupied the better part of the next half hour. In that time, Arthur
had plenty of moments to contemplate how pretty the surroundings were.
Demons were supposed to be scary, but Arthur was finding it harder
and harder to be intimidated. The triple combo of getting used to how they
looked, the fact that his demonic hosts had all been very sweet, and the fact
that they had places like this were enough to change decades of
preconceptions.
 Whoever heard of villains that spent a lot of money on municipal
parks?
The trees were pretty, if a bit off from what he expected. The paths
were pretty, if all a little redder than he expected regardless of whether they
were made from stone, brick, or dirt. Someone had taken special care with
the flower beds, balancing them against the rest of the park to set
everything off and create something really special.
It was beautiful, heads and tails above anything Arthur had ever
seen from a human park. He was impressed. Dazzled, even, fully contented
by his surroundings and basking in the beauty. Then, in the distance,
something appeared that blew it all away.
“Who is…” Arthur started, then realized he was almost shouting.
Milo whipped his head up, while the mouse-girl stayed blissfully unaware.
Arthur controlled his voice, giving the question another shot. “Who is
that?”
Milo looked in the direction of Arthur’s gaze, confused, before his
eyes glinted with understanding.
“Ah. That’s Mizu. A water-elemental demon.”
And she couldn’t have been anything else. Everything about her,
from the fluid way she moved to the slight cloud of vapor that seemed to
follow her around, spoke to her origins being related to water.
“They aren’t really wet,” the mouse-girl said. “The same way the
rock demons aren’t really made of rocks, or how Eito is still flesh and
blood. They just look that way.”
The water-elemental had strolled into the group, taking a seat by
herself on a bench near everyone, but not actually close enough to be
considered actually with anyone. Nobody approached her, either.
“Do people not like her?” Arthur asked, a few minutes later. “She’s
alone over there.”
“Oh, no, it’s not that. She’s… interesting, I guess. Water elementals
are a little different. Think of them as being the opposite of how an infernal
is always itching for a fight. Just a bit… cooler, I guess.”
 “Ah,” Arthur said. He really wanted to talk to her, but was so far
from having the courage to actually do it that it might as well have been
impossible. He went back to half-heartedly sketching various tea equipment
he might one day need into the dirt, putting her out of mind for the moment.
“What are you doing?” Milo asked. “You need to go talk to her.”
“I do? Why?”
“Because you clearly want to.”
“Very clearly,” the mouse girl said. “Very, very clearly.”
“It’s that obvious?”
“You turned different colors. I’m not sure how you people work, but
that can’t be normal,” Milo said.
“Okay. Fine.” Arthur glanced back up at the girl, who was still
stubbornly refusing to be anything less than the most beautiful person he
had ever seen. “But that doesn’t explain why I have to talk to her right
now.”
“Because she knows you want to talk to her, you idiot,” the mouse
said. “I think everyone here does.”
“Dammit.” Arthur scratched at the dirt. “Dammit, dammit. Are you
sure?”
“We’re sure. Just go. Say hello. Introduce yourself. Talk a little bit
until it gets hard, then say you have to come back to help me with
something. I’ll wave you over so you can escape.”
Arthur tried to stand up naturally, absolutely failing as he jerked to
his feet like a hyperactive ultra-nerd, and took a step towards the girl.
“Arthur,” the mouse-girl warned. He turned to see the mouse
looking up at him. “She might say some weird stuff. Whenever she does,
just nod. It’s… cultural, I guess.”
“Thanks,” Arthur said. He wanted to ask more questions, but had
already stood up, and was beginning to feel a kind of embarrassed tension
building up in his chest that he hadn’t felt since junior high school, back on
earth. “I’ll keep that in mind.”
He made it over to her, somehow. She was aware from the first step
that he was walking towards her, and every one of the dozen or so steps
between them felt like a mile as he forced himself to keep going.
Do I smile? No, not yet. She’ll think you are insane. Don’t look like
a serial killer. That’s like the first rule of talking to a girl.
He finally made it, standing there for two or three seconds before he
realized he hadn’t spoken yet.
“Hi, there. I’m Arth…” He got out, before she interrupted.
“We hunted your people.”
“I’m… what?”
“We hunted your people. With guilt, with remorse, but we hunted
them. For this, I apologize,” she said. Arthur’s first thought was that he was
being pranked, that she was trying to embarrass him in front of everyone.
Then he suddenly remembered what the mouse girl had said about this,
forced a smile, and slightly bowed his head in a nod. She was joking,
probably.
“Thanks. I don’t think you hunted my people, though. I’m from…
not here. I’m from a different place.”
“I see. Still, it is the greeting of our people.”
“Um, yeah. Ours is… hello, or hey, or hi. My people really didn’t
have a special one.”
She looked away for a moment as a bird flew by, while Arthur stood
silently and cursed every bit of his non-existent game.
“You are odd, aren’t you.”
Mizu delivered this last statement in a flat tone. It wasn’t really a
question, and by the time Arthur recovered enough to answer, she had
moved on anyway.
 “Like an infernal,” Mizu said. “Only pink. And smaller. And not as
strong.”
“Yeah. I have exactly average stats, too. I’ve been told that’s weird,
too.”
“It is,” she said, brushing a wisp of water-blue hair back from her
face.
“Well, yeah. So.” Arthur panicked as he realized the sheer weirdness
of the girl had put him so badly on his back foot that he was already out of
things to say. “I just wanted to say hi and introduce myself. Again, I’m
Arthur.”
“My name is Mizu.”
“Nice to meet you.” Arthur looked back at Milo, who was as good
as his word in waving him back. “I hope we talk again.”
Mizu graced him with the slightest of nods, and he turned and
retreated with all the bravery of a Chihuahua running from a Samoyed.
“How’d it go?”
“Horrible. I ran out of things to say… before I even got there, I
think. Why did you let me do that?”
“I thought it would be funny,” Milo said. “It was.”
“It also didn’t go horribly,” mouse-girl said, looking up at him.
“That’s… more than I’ve heard her say to most people.”
“What does that mean, though?” Arthur looked hopefully back and
forth between his friends.
“No idea,” the girl said as Milo shrugged. “Water elementals are like
that. When she wants you to know what she’s thinking, she’ll tell you.”
“Oh, also don’t forget about forest day tomorrow,” Milo said.
“Forest day?”
“A big field trip into the nearby forest. It’s a bit of a rite of passage
for us,” the girl said.
 “Uh, sure, I won’t,” Arthur promised.
By the time Milo and Arthur broke away to go home, he was
exhausted. After picking up a quick lunch of meat and some kind of rice-
like grain at a stand, they made their way to Milo’s house, where several
boxes were already stacked outside his door.
“Oh, there’s my stuff,” Arthur said. “We should probably get it
inside before someone steals it.”
“Steals it? A package? In broad daylight?”
“Yeah.”
“Why would anyone do that? They don’t even know what’s in it.
Come on. I want to show you the progress I made with the straws.”
Milo took him not through the front door, but around the back,
where a large, flimsy-looking woodshed had been erected in the yard.
Inside was his shop, a pretty basic affair consisting of a rack for tools, a
square block of iron that seemed to be his anvil, and a foot-operated
bellows hooked up to a metal trough of unlit coals.
“Neat,” Arthur said. “Simple.”
“Yeah, and I’ll keep it that way if I can. A good shop only has the
tools it needs out at any given time. Helps keep things neat. Eventually, I’ll
need more space, but I like it.”
“Your anvils are a little different than ours were,” Arthur said.
“Every anvil I ever saw on Earth had a big pointy bit up front.”
“A horn. You use them for banging things into round shapes. Like
shoes, for cattle. I don’t need one like that yet and it was more expensive,
so… I’ll get one eventually if I have to have it,” Milo said. “Actually,
because of you, I needed to make a new tool. It’s mounted over there.”
Where Milo pointed, Arthur saw a long metal pole about as thick as
his thumb mounted to two metal sticks driven into the ground.
“I made that length of metal as round as I could, and I’ve been
working all day to pound out plates as thin as I could get them, to wrap
them around. Here’s a sample,” Milo said.
 Milo threw one of the straws to Arthur. It wasn’t perfect but
compared to what they had been using last night, this straw was much more
refined. It was thinner, for one, and a bit rounder.
“It’s not as thin as I wanted it to be, and the weld isn’t perfect,” Milo
said. “I realized too late that iron won’t be a good base for this. It’s fine for
a while, but it’s going to get really rusty really soon. And all the stuff you’d
do to make iron not rust means you can’t use soap when you clean them. I’ll
try to find something different.”
Arthur grinned as he remembered the metal he had bought at the
cooking supply store. it seemed, as if the water-girl had blown all his
memories of the morning straight out of his head, and they were only
rushing back now.
“Actually, I have something for that. Come on.”
Together, he and Milo went and dug through the boxes until they
found the sheets, which Milo went crazy over. If Arthur had to guess, they
were either aluminum or something like it, but they were at least much
more flexible than the iron plates Milo had been using before, and much
thinner to begin with.
“These are great. Come on,” Milo said, dragging the crate of metal
plates with him as he went around the back. “I’ll make you the best straws
this world has ever seen.”
The rest of the day was restful. There were hundreds of metal plates
in the crate. So Arthur sat observing Milo work, watching him improve in
real-time as every weld he made was a little cleaner than the last until
finally, they were good enough to grind flat without leaving any gaps.
Eventually, Ella came home, joining in on the fun and admiring the
new straws while also mocking the boys for making so many when there
were only three of them to use them. Then, she helped unload the crates into
Arthur’s room, where they organized them into the rough shape of a
workshop kitchen, somewhere he could experiment and work on his craft in
his own time.
When he brought up the idea that they’d eventually have to move all
his stuff to some other house when his fostering period with Ella ended,
both she and Milo just looked at him like he was an idiot.
“What are you talking about? You live here now, Arthur.”
“Milo’s not wrong, you idiot. Where were you going to go next?
Karbo’s?” she said, scoffing. “That infernal can’t even make toast.”
And just like that, Arthur was home.

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 CHAPTER FOURTEEN

STAT POINTS

“And what is this?” Ella said, eyes wide. “A mad alchemist’s shop?”
“I’m trying to be systematic.” Arthur’s room was surprisingly large,
especially considering it was a guest room of sorts. The best part was that it
had some sort of previous life as a utility room. As such, it had no shortage
of shelves lining the walls, as well as pegboards, cabinets, and all in all, the
biggest abundance of places to set or store things Arthur had ever seen.
Besides the spaces occupied by the door or directly under the
windows, the entire room was lined with a sturdy, belly-button-high shelf.
That meant there was an easily accessible surface only a few steps away, no
matter where he was in the room. Arthur had made a line of jars on that
shelf, all of which were now sitting full of steeped tea.
“And you need so many?”
“I have them organized in groups of five,” he said. “I got this
stopwatch timer thing from the supply store, and I’m trying to get the steep
timing right for a single tea.”
“Down to the second?”
 “Not exactly. I narrowed down the water temperature part already.
That was this morning.” He pointed to the four groups of five bottles on a
different part of the shelf, each group slowly browning yet also a slightly
different color than the others.
“In every group of five bottles, I’m running a different steeping
time. So these are done.” He pulled the tea infusers out of the first group of
bottles, then let them alone to cool a little more. “Each bottle in each group
has a different spice in it.”
“Ah, I see. So you aren’t just testing how long to steep, but…”
“Yeah. I’m testing to see if different steeping times work better with
different spices.”
“Can I try?” Ella asked, moving towards the first group as Arthur
continued watching the clock for the second group. “By the way, remember
that today is Forest Day for your class with Milo and the others.”
“Yup, he told me last night. And please, feel free to try them.”
“Hmm.” She took a small sip from each of the bottles, through the
straw Arthur had left in each. “Just based off this, I’d say the shorter
steeping time works better for the weaker spices, if anything. The stronger
flavors are overwhelming the tea, at least at this point,.”
“Right. Although I need to run the same experiment again, with
cream,” he said, then realized he had been subconsciously planning to steal
Ella’s supply of dairy for that purpose. “Where do I get my own cream, by
the way?”
“I’ll put in an order. But I have to say, this is pretty promising,
Arthur. You have a long way to go, but most people don’t get this exacting
with their process until much, much later. I’ve never seen someone do it
before they had their primary skill, anyway.”
“Oh, actually, I had a question about that.” Arthur said, pulling up
his status screen and mentally flicking it towards Ella.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 2
 STR: 5
VIT: 5
DEX: 5
PER: 5
WIS: 5
INT: 5
Unassigned Stat Points: 2
Primary Skills: Food Scientist (Level 3)

Ella’s eyebrows arched.

“Level three in a skill, already?”
“Yes. Apparently, food scientist likes me doing… scientist stuff.
That’s fast, right?”
“A bit. It’s not unheard of and leveling is easier at the beginning. It’s
not insane. But it has a bit of a downside.”
Arthur moved into position to take the tea infusers out of the second
to last group as Ella tasted the next batch of teas, making some notes on one
of Arthur’s notepads as she did.
“And that downside is?”
“right now You are picking low-hanging fruit. And maybe your fruit
hangs particularly low, but…”
“When it’s gone, it’s gone?”
“Right. Unless you can up the complexity and keep up with newer,
crazier experiments all the time, eventually you will slow down. And
eventually, everyone tops out. I’ve been at the same level in my primary
cooking skill for years and years. I’ll probably die before it moves again.”
“Oh,” Arthur said, wincing. Progress felt good, he had found,
especially progress he could see and feel. His food scientist levels were
already giving him a vague, feelable sense of how he could expect the tea to
react to his methods and letting him know in very broad terms how much of
each ingredient was sane to use.
 It wasn’t precise, but he was already addicted to feeling those
capabilities tick up. He couldn’t imagine the day where all that process
stopped.
“Oh, don’t pity me. My level is plenty high. I was one of the lucky
ones. I work in a good restaurant, and people know my name. That’s
enough. More than enough, really.”
“That makes sense. What if you hadn’t got quite as high?”
“I’d work in simpler foods, maybe running a food cart or as a cook
in a merchant’s house, something like that. There’s no shame in it, and no
use putting myself in danger to try to level my way out of it.”
“Ah. Actually, that brings up my next question.”
“Where to put your stat points?”
“Exactly.” Arthur took the next set of tea infusers out of his next
experimental batch, finding them all to be a bit over-steeped for any but the
strongest spice. He was betting the next set of bottles would be a total loss,
which was just fine. He now knew the limit, and that was a gain in and of
itself.
“Eventually, you’ll want a few points in strength, vitality, and
dexterity. Everyone takes at least a few, for quality-of-life reasons. You can
carry more for longer, move faster, and are less likely to drop things. But
I’d skip those for now, if I were you.” She tasted the latest batch of tea as
well, grimacing as she made her way through it. “Wisdom and intelligence
have their place, especially with the one skill you already have. One or the
other will make the skill work better, I’m betting.”
“So I should put them there?”
“Eventually. Right now, if I were you, I’d focus on perception,” she
said. “It’s more useful than you think.”
“It helps me see better, right?”
“That, and also every observation you make. Your sense of taste
won’t become stronger, but it will become more precise. You’ll be able to
estimate amounts of ingredients better and that sort of thing.”
 “So if I taste a soup and it’s not salty enough…”
“It won’t make the salt taste stronger, but you’ll be more likely to
notice that it needs more salt. It’s not more accurate information, exactly.
It’s hard to explain.”
“I think I get it. It doesn’t change the taste of the soup, but it helps
me pay closer attention. So I’ll reach the right conclusions from the same
amount of information.”
“Close enough. Really, the best way to understand it is by
experiencing it.”
Arthur was already way ahead of her.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 2
STR: 5
VIT: 5
DEX: 5
PER: 7
WIS: 5
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Food Scientist (Level 3)

With his new stats in play, he re-tasted all of the batches. None of
his opinions changed all that much, really. But he was suddenly more
certain he was correct about his observations.
“I see you went ahead with it.”
“Yeah. I see what you mean now,” Arthur said. “Nothing tastes
different. I just understand what I’m tasting a bit better.”
“My advice would be that you save your next points. Until after you
get your primary cooking skill, at least.” Ella, having figured out the
intervals on the tea-steeping herself, took the last batch of tea out of the last
experiment group, and tasted each. “Echh. Yup, you found the limit.”
Arthur tasted each, agreed, and began the cleanup process.
 “Why until after I get my primary cooking skill?”
“Because depending on how the system describes it, perception
might not be the best stat to use next. If you get something called ‘Wise
Brewing’, you are going to wish you saved those points for wisdom. It’s
usually not that obvious, but it happens.” Ella finished dumping the last of
the jars into the big tub Arthur was using for discarded liquid, then grouped
them on the shelf. “I really should get you a water supply and a drain in
here. You already need it.”
“I can’t get a magic stone? Or something like that?” Arthur had half
expected there would be some sort of magic water-stone solution to that
problem. “It has to be plumbing?”
“I keep forgetting exactly how new all this is to you. No, water and
food don’t come from magic. They can be improved by it, sometimes. For
all the system’s powers, it can only help arrange building blocks. The
building blocks themselves have to be found. It’s one of the few absolute
rules.”
“Got it.” Arthur almost objected to Ella’s decision to embark on a
big, expensive project to renovate his room, then let it go. If she wanted to,
or if the city wanted to fund it, he had long since found that wasn’t much of
his own business. He’d pay her back some day, in his own way.
“Well, you’d best be getting on. It’s forest day, remember? Milo’s
probably waiting for you with an entire bushel of daggers. Be safe out there,
okay?” Ella said.
“I’ll try,” Arthur said with a smile.
The idea of spending the entire day in the forest was, Milo had told
him, mostly just to simulate travel. Every class had the potential of getting a
little bit of experience if the system thought they were going on a trip to
further its work. For combat classes, travel might count as a patrol. For a
hunter class, it could count as a hunt or scouting. Even classes with no
reason to walk around at all, like the mouse-girl potter, had a chance of
getting some experience if they managed to find a new resource or just got
lucky enough that the system considered the trip significant to their growth
in some way.
 It got more profitable when you considered that the trip was also an
opportunity to outfit people, to give them one of your pots for water or one
of the weapons you made for self-defense. The more they used these items,
the better, but even just carrying around a crafted good often gave out the
skill experience that crafters seemed so desperate for.
Milo wasn’t missing this opportunity. He didn’t actually have an
entire bushel of daggers, but he did have a lot of them.
“You need one of these?” he said, pressing one into Corbin’s hands.
The cat sneak assassin was visible today, apparently. From what Arthur had
learned about Corbin, he really did have to make the most of his
opportunities to sneak around without negative repercussions. And Arthur
hadn’t seen him much since that first day as he soaked up every second of
stealth practice he could.
“I already have one, Milo. More than one,” the cat said, pressing the
dagger back. “My dad gave them to me from his stash. You know what kind
of daggers my dad would have.”
“Yeah, I guess.” Milo’s shoulders slumped a bit as the cat pulled out
an exceptionally shiny dagger from his belt, one that was thin, pointed, and
refined far beyond what Milo could do right now. “You aren’t wrong. Those
are better.”
“Are we expecting to use them?” Arthur said, grabbing the dagger
from Milo and tucking it into his belt. “I thought this trip was supposed to
be pretty safe.”
“Oh, it is. And hi, Arthur,” the cat said. “There might be some beasts
in the forest, but usually nothing that can hurt you unless you sit still and let
it. Most of them will just run away.”
“Then why the daggers?”
“Oh, you never know, really,” Milo said, pulling out another one and
looking for another target to gift it to. “Sometimes dungeons overflow, and
beasts can wander a long way when that happens. And something bigger or
meaner might have made its way into the forest.”

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 CHAPTER FIFTEEN

FOREST DAY

“How worried should I be about this?” Arthur wasn’t exactly scared, but he
was only several days into a new life. He didn’t want to find himself
bleeding out on a forest floor because of some unexpected threat on what
was supposed to be a nice trip.
“Hardly a risk at all. We won’t be that far from the city. It would
have to be something that wandered in this direction, which is barely a
chance at all, then decided it wanted to stay in the forest, which is barely a
chance again, and then is fast enough that we can’t run away and strong
enough that a dozen of us can’t take it.”
“What if it just overpowers us? Say it’s a level ten monster and we
can’t touch it.”
The cat shook its head. “It doesn’t usually work like that. Numbers
are a stat all on its own. You have thirty or forty stat points, right? So do I.
So does Milo. If you put our whole group together, we add up to a crazy
tentacle monster with dozens of eyes, arms, and weapons. Most monsters
don’t have a way of dealing with that.”
“Oh, huh.” Arthur hadn’t expected balance to work that way. “So a
sufficient number of people could take Karbo?”
 “Kind of. Battle-crazy is also a kind of stat. But to answer your
question, even he could never take a city by himself. Not even if all the
strong fighters were away. Thousands of people are scary, they could defeat
Karbo by just throwing rocks at him.”
Arthur grabbed another dagger from Milo, looking it over before
tucking it into the cat’s belt.
“I told you, I have daggers!” the cat yelled. “Good ones!”
“Oh, shush. Just take it. It’s another backup. And it should make
sneaking harder, right? You could put it real close to another dagger and try
to control the clinking noise, or something.”
“Not how it works.”
“Still. It helps Milo out. And if you take it, I’ll let you close-range
sneak on me as much as you want. You can try to breathe down my neck the
whole trip.”
The reason the cat rarely got caught in his stealth was that he was
barely allowed to stalk outside the class in the first place. For some reason,
most people didn’t like the concept of someone sneaking up on them. And
even with the class, the general rule was that Corbin could sneak, but only
from a distance where it wasn’t possible for him to accidentally bump into
someone and startle them. From what the mouse-girl had said, it slowed
down his progress a lot, but it kept prey-animal personalities like hers from
feeling constantly hunted.
However, that rule changed if someone was willing to give him
permission.
“Really?” Corbin asked.
“Really,” Arthur said.
The cat looked down at the dagger, then arranged it in his belt to
travel better. “Deal.”
“All right, everyone!” Ix, the turtle-teacher, yelled abruptly. “Group
up. It’s time to talk about safety. This trip is classified as minimally
dangerous. As initiates, you could all take this trip by yourselves and
probably come out all right. But just because a trip is mostly safe doesn’t
mean it can’t be even safer. I’m going to go over a short list of rules, and
guidelines to keep you safe. The first and biggest of those is…”
Arthur never got to learn the first and biggest rule of field trip
safety. As the teacher started to get into the nuts and bolts of the best way to
not die on a pleasant nature walk, Milo suddenly nudged him with his
elbow and nodded off to the right. Arthur looked and found himself
immediately distracted by a late arrival to the group, one who settled into
the group with all the fluid beauty of a moonlit lake.
“Don’t stare.” Milo hissed under his breath.
“I wasn’t.” Arthur was staring. It was hard not to. He didn’t
understand what beauty standards demons operated under, but he really
didn’t get how everyone wasn’t staring at Mizu all the time. He tried not to
look at her too much, glancing out of the corner of his eye every now and
again as she paid attention to the teacher’s instructions, apparently unaware
Arthur was there at all.
“And that’s how you survive, both in safe forests and less safe
places.” The teacher ended his lecture, dooming Arthur to possible future
death from his own short attention span. “Now, follow me. Do try to keep
up. I’m not as fast as some, but I’ll be setting a brisk pace.”
Any thought of slyly making time to talk to Mizu was washed
completely from Arthur’s mind after the first few minutes of walking. The
combat students all seemed entirely capable of making the pace, probably
because they dumped their points entirely into stats that favored their
physical capabilities. Corbin was also having no trouble, at least judging by
the fact that he was nowhere to be seen. Mizu was gliding along in the
distance, apparently unbothered as she easily kept pace.
Even Milo had some points in dexterity and strength and was mostly
fine as he huffed along.
But Arthur had all his points in perception and was dying as he tried
to keep up. Off to his side, the mouse girl, Rhodia, seemed to be in a similar
boat, working her short legs as fast as she could to try to keep up. He
glanced at her, trying to beam over whatever sympathy he could spare, and
she breathed heavily in solidarity as they both struggled along.
A half-hour later, Arthur collapsed on a thick layer of humus, his
lungs burning with relief as they finally saw their chance to get back on top
of his oxygen deficit.
“All right. We’ve made pretty good time. The students who had a
hard time keeping up might consider an investment in their physical stats,
when it makes sense.” The teacher glanced at Arthur and the similarly
unlucky crafting-class nerds strewn about the forest floor. “Otherwise, take
a few moments to recover, then feel free to mill about. Just remember not to
go too far.”
Ix set himself up on a fallen log, propping his apparently unneeded
cane against the bark and popping open his book. Various members of the
combat students paired up and moved out, looking to take full advantage of
the opportunity to run patrols and perhaps beat up some unlucky forest
creatures if they proved aggressive.
“You gonna be okay?” Milo asked, looking down at Arthur. “I
thought you were going to die. You didn’t puke, at least.”
“Not yet. I didn’t puke yet.”
Arthur forced himself to a sitting position and took a better look
around the forest. From what he could see, it wasn’t that different from
forests back on Earth. There were very good trees, a bunch of shrubby little
plants growing in the protection they provided, and not a whole lot else.
“I’m going to go off with Rhodia. She’s looking for interesting clay,
and I’m looking for rocks that might have interesting metal. There’s a
synergy there. You can come along if you want.”
“I think I’m... I need a few minutes. Plus, there’s a mushroom over
there that’s calling my name.” There really was. His food scientist skill was
twigging slightly on a lot of things around the forest, telling him that it
would be a good idea to go and inspect them further. “I’m not sure how far
I’ll be able to get from here, honestly.”
 “Got it. Well, have fun.” Milo glanced at the water elemental, who
was moving around in circles around the glade, glancing at the ground as
she did. “And try not to be too… you, I guess. Try to be only moderately
yourself.”
After everyone had left and Arthur churned through several more
lungfuls of air, he pushed himself painfully to his feet and began examining
the plants. His skill wasn’t giving him full, screen-based descriptions of
what he saw, which Ella said might be a possibility at higher levels. But it
immediately gave him the idea that a few mosses and plants might be useful
as additives for teas, and that the mushroom he had seen was probably
either poison or medicine, depending on how it was used.
He had picked up a few sacks from a weaver-vole classmate. In fact,
once she had found out he actually intended to use them for scavenging, she
basically forced them on him.
Within a few minutes, he had dozens of different materials sorted
into categories of “poisonous” and “probably not poisonous”. There was
plenty to collect, and it was oddly entertaining putting his own skill through
the paces of telling him whatever it could gather about the materials. The
class was spending hours here, and originally, he had wondered how he’d
pass the time. Now, it didn’t seem like nearly so much of an issue,
especially when his skill suddenly ticked up another level.

Food Scientist (Level 4)

You understand a bit more about the world around you than
most. Other people might be able to manipulate it better, but
you comprehend how things should be when it’s not being
manipulated at all.
That knowledge grants you a better understanding of various
aspects of ingredients, tools, and cooking conditions. At level
zero, this skill helps you gather preliminary information about
your resources and predict the effects of various cooking
techniques slightly better.
This skill has reached an improvement threshold. Further
improvements to the skill will move it to a new tier of function,
 potentially granting it further capabilities.

“Yes! Awesome,” Arthur quietly said to himself. Glancing in his

bag, he confirmed that every ingredient he had gathered so far was giving
off a slightly stronger signal to its potential use, with more than one
mushroom now confirmed as fully poisonous and unhelpful to him. With
renewed enthusiasm, Arthur started walking away from the grove in a
spiraling pattern, trying to identify as many new ingredients as he could.
After another fifteen minutes, his bags were starting to fill, but his
progress was starting to slow. Most things he saw on the forest floor were
now duplicates of plants he had already collected. He accumulated some
more of the particularly promising mosses, but otherwise left enough space
for anything new he might find as he milled about. With any luck, he’d
have full bags by the end of the trip, and despite the fact that his legs were
still complaining at him, he was determined to make that happen by the end
of the trip, pain be damned.
All that determination flew out the window in a second when Mizu
came back into his field of view, right as he was stooping down at the base
of a large conifer to scoop off some of its sap with his dagger. He froze,
with just enough self-awareness to decide not to take the opportunity to
stare at her. The water-wisp had given him exactly no indications she was
especially interested in him, and the last thing he wanted to do in this new
life was the kind of guy who would make someone like her uncomfortable.
As he began to force himself to look away and go back to his work,
she stopped him from doing so by suddenly smiling.
Most of the time, Mizu didn’t make many facial expressions at all. If
he had to put a word to it, she was stoic. He had seen her look mildly
interested at other people’s training, and she had seemed slightly pained and
embarrassed when she had apologized for hunting his people, which as far
as he knew, she hadn’t actually done.
This wasn’t a big smile, but it was genuine, and a kind of reaction he
hadn’t seen from her before. As much as he wished it were aimed at him, it
wasn’t. Mizu’s gaze was focused on something behind him, something that
made her happy, something that had managed to crack her cool demeanor.
 Arthur looked behind him and found a flower blooming, a speck of
vibrant blue standing out on the forest floor. When he turned back around,
Mizu was in front of him.
“We pursued your people through the hills, armed and fighting.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER SIXTEEN

BEING A KID

“Oh, hey,” Arthur said, thrown off by her greeting.

She nodded at him slightly, then stood there. And stood there. She
seemed content to stand quietly and politely until he said something. “So
you were looking at that flower?”
“Yes.”
“Just looking, or do you know something about it?” Arthur said,
then realized that might be a bit pushy. He tried his best to adjust. “I’m new
to this world. I don’t know much about the plants here.”
“I see. I know of this flower. My mother told me about it, once.”
He took a shot. If he knew one rule of conversation, it was: ask
people about what they are interested in. It almost always worked.
“Could you tell me about it?”
She seemed to consider that for a moment, then nodded and went to
the flower. He waited for her to talk until he realized she was waiting for
him to approach. He trotted up to her side, barely stopping himself before
he put the flower in danger of getting squashed.
 “They call it a blue star. Or at least that’s what my mother called it,”
she said. “It only grows in places like this, in shade, protected by other
plants. It’s too delicate for the full force of wind, and it gets burned by the
sun.”
“It’s rare?”
She shrugged, slightly. “In places like this, they’re not common. You
can find them. I try to.”
That was something. She was looking for this flower. The smile he
had seen was her relief at finding it, or something. But she hadn’t picked it.
“It’s valuable?” he asked. “Or useful?”
“Oh, yes. It’s good for many things. For making medicine. You can
grind the leaves up to make additives for various crafts. It can also be made
into dye, if you have enough of them.”
His food scientist perk was going crazy, telling him the same thing.
This plant was usable in tea and some different foods, he could sense it. The
skill didn’t know exactly how, but it had some guesses, and all of them
pointed to this being a high-quality, versatile material. The skill was almost
pissed at him for not picking it immediately.
“But you’re not picking it.”
He thought he saw a bit of surprise as she turned to face him again,
her mouth opening a bit as she considered her words before she finally
settled on something simple.
“No. I’m not.”
They stood there for a few moments regarding the flower. It really
was beautiful. To Arthur’s eyes, it was more purple than blue, but he could
see how “blue star” rolled off the tongue a bit better. It was a large flower
on a short stalk, a single bloom shaped like a bell except around the outer
lip of the shape, where it broke into four gentle, rounded triangular points.
That was probably the source of the other part of its name. From above, it
looked enough like a drawing of a star to justify it.
 Whatever tension Arthur had introduced to the situation vanished as
Mizu stared at the flower. She showed just the barest hint of a smile as she
appreciated it, making no move to do anything else but just enjoy the sight.
“Why do you like this flower?”
“It’s as I said. It’s a useful flower. You can use them to heal or to
create. They are easy to harvest and fetch a good price. It’s a useful plant.”
“That’s why you need it. Or why you’d pick it,” Arthur said. He had
seen her eyes when she first saw the flower. Most of the time, Mizu had the
same expression. At first, he had thought it might be a look of boredom, but
her eyes moved too much and seemed to pay too much attention for that.
She just didn’t show a lot of emotion. But for these flowers, she had smiled.
“Why do you like them? I mean, you aren’t picking this. You seem
to just want to enjoy it. I can tell they mean something to you.” He turned to
look at her face, seeing some hesitance there. “You don’t need to tell me if
you don’t want to. I’m just curious.”
She stood there for a full five seconds before she moved.
“Hm.” The water elemental bent down, gently brushing the petals of
the flower with her fingers. “I suppose I do like them, don’t I?”
Her hand lingered on the flower for a few moments as she
considered both it and how to explain her affection for the plant.
“Look there,” she said, finally. She pointed off to a bare patch on the
earth a few feet away.
“At the dirt?”
“No, I mean… here.” She reached up, gently grabbing the crook of
Arthur’s elbow. He very narrowly avoided jerking away in surprise. “Come
down here. Look past the flower to the earth.”
He bent down with her, their heads almost touching. Looking where
she pointed, he saw it. The purple of the flower was highlighted by the
brown of the earth, framed in its contrast. It was a pretty flower, but being
backed by the dark brown of the soil gave it a vibrancy it didn’t have
before. It was beautiful.
 “I see it.” He really did. The flower had gone from pretty to
breathtaking in a moment.
“When I first saw the flowers, I was small.” She held up her hand to
a child’s height near her eye line, as if showing him exactly how small.
“And this is how they looked to me back then.”
She reached down as if to pat the flower one more time, then
seemed to reconsider, putting her hand on Arthur's shoulder instead and
using it for balance as she stood. He followed her back up.
“I haven’t thought about that in a long time. Thank you,” she said. “I
do like them. I had forgotten. Or at least forgotten why.”
“Thank you for showing me that. I won’t pick them, either.” Food
Scientist nearly jerked in his chest as it told him how stupid that was. “They
really are beautiful.”
She nodded. “They are.”
They stood together for a few more moments. Arthur was beginning
to think that awkward pauses weren’t rare occurrences for the girl. They
certainly didn’t seem to bother her, not that he could read her at all yet.
He’d learn to match the rhythm, eventually, but for now, he was far from
used to it.
“I make you nervous,” she said. It wasn’t a question. Arthur thought
about denying it.
“You do.”
“I don’t talk well. Even for a water elemental. My mother called me
calm. It makes it hard for others. I don’t know how to solve that, for them.”
Arthur looked at her face, and found her eyes were pointed firmly
and unwaveringly at the flower.
“I wish I did.” She almost whispered.
“No. It’s not… that. You could talk much more, or much less, and
I’d be the same. It’s not about how you talk. It’s something different. I’ll get
over it.” He couldn’t let this poor girl think his general ineptitude was her
fault. “I like the way you talk.”
 “There’s not enough to like.”
“There is,” he said, realizing for the first time it was true. “I’ll get
used to it. That’s my job. If it’s hard for you to talk to me, that’s fine. You
can ask me to stop any time and I will. But I’ll get less nervous eventually. I
promise.”
She stood there, looking at the flower for a full minute, before
reaching down and suddenly plucking it from the earth, roots and all.
“Take this,” Mizu said.
Arthur looked at the flower in her hand in shock. “I can’t. You like
those.”
Mizu shook her head, grabbed his hand, and put the flower in it.
“They are useful. Useful things are meant to be used. I could tell you
weren’t picking it because of me. I’ve already looked at it. That’s enough.
Take it.”
Arthur curled his fingers around the flower, his hand warm from
where Mizu had touched it. Somehow, he had expected her to feel damp,
even after having been told she wasn’t by the mouse girl.
She feels warm. Just like anyone else.
By the time he had put the flower in his bag, she was already
moving away. He watched her go, reluctant to make things more awkward
for her with more words. At the last moment, just as she made her way
beyond a tree, he heard her voice one more time.
“Arthur?”
“Yeah?”
“You make me nervous too.”
And then she was gone.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

FOOD CART

“Arthur. Arthur. The demon world would like a word.” Noises that sounded
suspiciously like Milo’s voice floated through the fog that was Arthur’s
head. “Arthur. Wake up.”
Arthur felt a sudden impact on his arm, which finally snapped him
out of the mist of romantic fantasies.
“You hit me!” Arthur rubbed his arm.
“I did. I was worried you were poisoned, or something.” Milo
grinned at him. “Now that I see you aren’t… you talked to her, huh?”
“Yeah. It was not bad, I think?” Arthur looked down at his open
pack, where the plant she had given him was still nestled at the top of his
other goods. “She gave me a flower.”
“Well, well. That sounds promising.” Milo looked legitimately
surprised. “I’ve seen other demons try to talk to her before. She usually
freezes them out.”
“I don’t think she does that on purpose. For what it’s worth. She’s
just… I think words are hard for her.”
 “Well, anyway, we have about an hour left. You need to do more
foraging? I’ve already found just about everything I’m going to find.”
Arthur had almost forgotten why he had come to the forest in the
first place. He had some good stuff but could definitely fit a lot more into
his bag, even considering the fact that he now had a semi-precious flower to
take care of.
“Yeah, let’s go.” Arthur closed his bag and began to walk, Milo at
his side. “By the way, I meant to ask you and never did. What’s with the
whole ‘my people hunted yours’ thing? The way Mizu greets people, I
mean.”
“Oh, that,” Milo said. “Most demon races are peaceful now. But
every now and again, the city gets attacked by some mountain tribe of
demons, and we drive it off. That’s about the worst of it, and we’re also
considered a frontier city. It’s been that way for a long time. But a few
centuries ago, it wasn’t that way. There were wars, big ones.”
“And the elementals fought in them?”
“One of them. Less than any other species.”
Arthur tried to puzzle that out. “It must have been pretty bad, if
they’re still asking everyone to forgive them.”
“Arthur, you’ve seen our town. There’s a dozen species of demons
there. Do you really think everyone hasn’t already forgiven each other?
They have. It’s all over. We exist in harmony and all that,” Milo laughed.
“Theirs was a war of defense, one they lost, and by all accounts, one where
they tried to limit enemy casualties as much as possible.”
“So why are they apologizing still?”
“Because they never forgave themselves. Believe me, everyone has
tried to get them to. They just won’t. War is pretty incompatible with who
they are, I guess.”
Arthur tried to imagine the kind of people who, as a race, would still
hold themselves accountable for killing others, centuries after everyone else
had forgiven and forgotten.
 “I like that about them,” he said, deciding he really did.
“Everybody does. That’s why they get invited to parties still, even
though they don’t talk much.”
Soon enough, it was time to head back. Milo didn’t go into detail on
what he had gained experience-wise from the trip, but he looked pleased
enough and said the foraging for materials and dagger-loaning had been
enough to push his blacksmithing skill up by one more precious, hard-to-
attain level.
Arthur hadn’t come away empty-handed, either.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 3
STR: 5
VIT: 5
DEX: 5
PER; 7
WIS: 5
INT: 5
Unassigned Stat Points: 2
Primary Skills: Food Scientist (Level 4)

“Gonna put those in vitality and dexterity?” Milo asked, looking at

the screen Arthur had flicked over. “You had a hard enough time walking
here.”
“I… shoot.” He wanted to. He really did. But Ella had said
perception was the most important thing right now. “I think I have to put
them in perception. Damn.”
“Well, it’s your legs. Good luck, buddy.”
The walk back was a new kind of hell. His new perception points
showed up right away, mostly by letting him know that virtually everyone
else, even the crafters, had dedicated at least one point to some stat that
helped them keep up. He didn’t have that luxury. By the time they got back
to the gates of town and were waved through by an amused looking guard,
he collapsed on the ground. The only thing Arthur was thankful for was
when he found out that Mizu had just kept walking and couldn’t see his
pain.
“I told you,” Milo said.
“You did.” Arthur sat up, desperately trying to rub the cramps out of
his thighs and calves. “It was probably still the right choice, but I don’t
think I’d make it again.”
Milo sat down next to him.
“You don’t need to wait for me, Milo. Go home. Eat dinner. Catalog
your rocks.”
“I’m not leaving you in the street. Even if you are stupid. And weak.
Physically inadequate in so many different ways that…”
“I get it. I’ll put a point in dexterity, next time. Or vitality.
Something.”
“You should. It’s hard being friends with someone who looks like
they are going to topple over every time the wind blows.”
Milo’s teasing was cut short as the road suddenly exploded in noise
as a massive, red object descended from the sky. It crashed down with
enough force that it kicked up a cloud of dust and drove a few cobblestones
down into the earth.
“I found you!” the meteor boomed, uncurling into the form of a
large, red man. “What took you so long coming back?”
“Dammit, Karbo!” the guard shouted, moving in from the gate with
his halberd pointed at the big red ball of danger. “I’ve told you not to do
that! Not everything is an emergency!”
“This is! It’s very important!” Karbo waved his arms in front of him,
as if in explanation.
“Is it? What’s so very important it that you had to save two extra
seconds by jumping buildings?”
 Karbo looked at Arthur, his face suddenly grave.
Arthur’s thoughts went into a spin. Milo’s here, so he’s not hurt. Who
else could it be? Eito? Ella? Did they decide that humans aren’t welcome,
after all?
Karbo suddenly bent down, matching his eyes to Arthur's, still dead
serious.
“Arthur.”
“Yes? What’s wrong?”
“A food cart has opened up. Near the town square. It’s vacant,
Arthur. Vacant.”
Arthur looked at the guard, half expecting him to stab Karbo in
frustration. Instead, he looked shocked.
“Wait, really?” the guard asked, eyebrows arched.
“Are you sure?” Milo looked similarly surprised, springing to his
feet.
“I saw him packing up myself. Apparently, his mother isn’t doing so
well, and she’s in the capital. He’s moving home.”
Arthur glanced from person to person, perplexed. “And this is
important, why?”
Milo bent back down, grabbing Arthur by his shoulders and trying
to drag him back to his feet. “Because you’re a food class, you idiot, and
because this never happens. It could be years before another cart opens up
in a good part of the city.”
“Yeah, kid. Big opportunity.” The guard stored his halberd. “Almost
big enough to forgive this idiot for breaking the road. You know I’m still
fining you, right?”
“No problem. But, Arthur, I need you to get up. We need to go now
if we’re going to beat the rush.”
Arthur looked to Milo for confirmation. Milo nodded. “He’s not
wrong. Go. Fast. Work out the details later.”
 “Well, that might be a problem. I can’t really walk right now.”
“Wait, from a forest stroll?” Karbo said. “You burned out your legs
after a simple picnic?”
“Look, man, I’m trying. I just don’t have any points in physical
stats, just yet.” Arthur winced as Milo finally hauled him to his feet. “I can
go, I’m just not going to be that fast.”
“Oh, no, that’s not gonna work.” Karbo reached down and looped
his arm around Arthur’s waist. Arthur yelped as the infernal tossed him over
his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, then he looked at Milo.
“You can get home, without getting a cramp?”
“I’ll be fine.”
“Okay, then I’m off. And sorry about the road, Dena.”
“Just don’t do it again.”
Karbo flexed his legs slightly as he set himself for a sprint.
“You know I’m going to.”
And then Arthur was flying. He realized now that every time he had
seen Karbo move, he had been holding back his speed to let Arthur and Eito
keep up. Now, in some kind of a hurry, it was like riding a racing
motorcycle that steered itself and carried you in a way that didn’t allow you
to see what was coming. It took several seconds for Arthur to give up on his
own preservation-of-life rigidity, take a breath, and determine that he was
going to do his best to enjoy the ride.
“So, what do you think?” Karbo asked.
“I think that guard is going to stab you with a halberd,” Arthur said.
“Dena? Don’t worry about him. I’ve known him forever. I’ll buy
him some wine later, and all will be forgiven,” Karbo laughed. “But I meant
the ride.”
“It’s terrifying. But you can really move, can’t you?”
 “Oh, yeah. That’s the whole point of a physical class. The world
gets out of your way. Now, how do you feel about windows? I promise you
won’t get cut.”
“Wait, what?” Arthur said, a moment too late, as Karbo pushed off
even harder, took to the air, and shouted something nearly incomprehensible
about broken glass. Arthur closed his eyes and braced just in time to hear
the shattering of glass all around him and to feel the sudden deceleration of
Karbo slamming into the stone floor interior of some building.
“Karbo, you twice-damned musclebound ass!” A new voice rang
out. As Karbo flipped Arthur off his shoulder and back onto his feet, he
caught sight of a small, spectacled badger-person rising from his desk. “I
just fixed that! Just now. Just today. Why are you breaking my windows?”
“It’s this boy!” Karbo yelled. “He’s the offworlder!”
“He was an offworlder before too! When you broke my window the
first time!” The badger strode up to Karbo and started kicking his legs
without much visible effect. “These things cost money!”
“I’ll pay for the window!” Karbo yelled.
“That’s not the point!”
“You said it was!”
Arthur decided it was about time to interrupt.
“I’m sorry to bust in, but why am I here?” he asked. “Besides being
an offworlder. Which I already knew.”
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” the badger said. “I was distracted by a big
ball of idiot. I’m Pico. And you are Arthur, which I’ve already heard. I’m
glad to welcome you to our town. Even if you helped increase this fool’s
mass. My poor window.”
“Pico’s the mayor,” Karbo said. “He’s a good guy. And he’s in
charge of food carts.”
“Samu’s in charge of food carts.”
 “You know he’s not. Arthur, food is important to the town.
Especially food near the center of the town. And this guy eats. So he makes
all the final decisions on the food, whether he admits it or not.” Karbo
brushed some glass off Arthur, straightening out his human clothes with
huge infernal hands before pushing him forward towards Pico. “Pico,
Arthur is a food class. Already. He needs a cart. The sausage cart is empty. I
want him to have that space.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

PERFECTION

“I bet you do. And I wish I could tell you no as punishment for breaking my
window. But it wouldn’t be fair to the boy, I suppose.” Pico nodded towards
a small meeting table at one corner of his surprisingly large office. “Sit. We
can talk this out.”
After calling for some cold drinks and cracker-like snacks, Pico
looked at Arthur across the table. “So you already have your class? That’s
quick.”
“It was sort of an accident. I didn’t know about the visions. And I
was working with Ella.”
“Oh, really? That’s a point in your favor. You can’t find much better
guidance in the city.” Pico popped one of the crackers into his mouth and
chewed. “Another point in your favor is, frankly, that you’re an offworlder.
There are guests and then there are guests, you see. the fact of you coming
from exceptionally far away, doesn’t necessarily mean our duties to you are
larger, but…”
“But we’d be a pretty poor excuse for a city if we didn’t try to
support you as well as we could,” Karbo said.
 Pico nodded. “Something like that. But that doesn’t mean those two
things are enough. What’s your class? Do you have your primary skill yet?”
Arthur shook his head. “Only one of my secondary skills. I don’t
have my primary yet.”
“Any idea what it will be?”
“The class is teamaster, and I’m guessing the skill will be related to
boba. That’s what triggered the vision, anyway.”
“Boba?”
As succinctly as he could, Arthur tried to explain what boba was, as
well as the variations of it he knew and planned on replicating. The badger
looked fascinated by all of it.
“Well, that makes this even harder.” Pico tapped the table in front of
him. “Normally, not having your primary skill would make me say no. It’s
very, very early to entrust you with a cart. But you are talking about novel
food from a strange world. That’s… valuable to us.”
“Who else is applying?” Karbo asked.
“Nobody yet. Most people were reluctant to damage my office
windows to get here that quickly. But if I had to guess, I’m going to hear a
few proposals for meat stands and noodle vendors. The usual. And we have
plenty of that kind of thing.”
He rose from the table, slapping the tabletop with his hand as he did.
“I think what I’ve decided is this. I’m going to hold off on the decision for a
few days, claiming exceptional circumstances. Arthur, that means you have
a chance. If you can get your skill up and running by then, and if you can
bring me something that justifies your request as a sample, I’ll consider
giving you the stand. But if you can’t…”
“I understand. You can’t just waste it.” Arthur stood as well. “Are
you sure that I deserve a shot though? I’m sure there are people with a
higher cooking level.”
“It’s not like that. If you fail, you fail. It won’t be the end of the
world. But if you succeed, you will grow rapidly. Everyone needs that
chance. Giving it to you isn’t a waste. Especially if this… what did you call
it?”
“Boba.”
“If this boba tea ends up being as you describe, I think it will be a
wonderful addition to the choices in this area.” He walked over to a nearby
door, opening it and signaling another badger into the room. “My assistant
will be glad to show you out. I’m sure you have a lot of work to do.”
“It sounds like it.” Arthur bowed his head, slightly. “And thank you
for the opportunity.”
“No problem. And not so fast, Karbo,” the mayor said, grabbing a
wincing Karbo by the arm as he tried to sneak away. “I think we still have
some talking to do about my window.”

“So they’re giving you a cart? Just like that?”

Ella was back home from work, and had prepared some cold meat
sandwiches for herself, Milo, and Arthur to eat as they talked. Given the
exercise of the day, both he and Milo were sucking down the calories like
there was no tomorrow, and once again Arthur found himself debating
whether or not he was eating the best food he had ever tasted.
“Not just like that. I need my primary skill. And to impress the
mayor. And, I guess, to know how to run a small business. It seems like a
lot.”
“It is,” Milo said. “But there’s no use waiting. You need to get
experience somehow, and usually, it takes the city a lot longer to figure out
a way to do that. You need to do this.”
“Yeah. That’s the impression I got.”
“Nobody is going to force you into this, Arthur,” Ella said, pushing
another sandwich at him as he polished off his second serving. “I, at least,
remember that it’s only been a few days since you got here. And it’s going
to be an awful lot of work, whether you succeed or not. Is this something
you want to do? I can explain to them if you don’t.”
 “Thanks.” Arthur appreciated Ella more than she knew, not just for
her hospitality but also because of what she was doing now. Everyone else
was excited. Besides Eito, Arthur didn’t know a single person besides Ella
who considered the stress and consequences of an action instead of just
pushing forward. “Do you think I even have a chance?”
“Normally, no. Frankly, you can’t cook yet,” Ella said. “But that’s a
matter of time and effort. And I saw you working the past few days. You
love this, whether you know it or not.”
“And that makes a difference?”
“It does. I think you know it does.”
Arthur thought back to his life on Earth. He had never been good at
his job. It was part of the reason why it was hard. Other people in his
department, even people he had surpassed, had it easier because they
enjoyed the work. They put in more hours with less stress and got more
done than other people. Arthur, on the other hand, had brute forced it,
pouring in more and more effort until he got the results he wanted. But he
had never liked it, it had always been hard, and he had always been
miserable trying. He envied the people who made it work without all that,
who got to accomplish things without getting ulcers.
“Maybe.”
“Definitely. And I’ll help, Arthur. I thought something like this
might happen, and I have a bit of time off I’ve been meaning to take. I can
help you figure out the best way to train yourself into that skill. The only
question is, do you want to?”
Arthur looked at Milo, who nodded encouragingly. And looking
inside himself, he found he was doing the same thing, trying to give himself
permission to work towards something he wanted, despite how fast
everything was moving.
“Yes. I do. And thanks, Ella.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” Ella said, standing up and clearing plates
from the table. “Help me clean up this food mess, Arthur. I suspect we will
need the space by the time this is all done. And get ready for work. It’s not
going to be entirely fun.”
Ella wasn’t lying.
Were there fun parts? Sure. Setting up his workspace for the big
push was a blast. Ella brought in every spare heat source and brewing
vessel she could lay her hands on, dragging in tons of equipment until every
corner of the kitchen was set up for baking, brewing, cooling, or drinking in
some respect or another.
The experiment design was fun, too, even though it wasn’t very
simple. Ella would provide minor guidance, correcting major mistakes
before they absolutely ruined batches of food. Otherwise, she said, helping
beyond working as an assistant would hinder Arthur’s growth. He’d make
his own choices regarding how long he’d knead bread, how long he’d let it
rise, what temperature he’d bake at, and how long he’d leave it over the
heat.
“That’s what the system wants to see. Not that there aren’t assistant
classes; I employ some. But that’s not what you want, so you have to drive
the major parts of this yourself.”
After a few hours of organizing that Ella swore would pay off in the
end, Arthur was ready to go. And then, for the most part, the fun stopped.
He ruined batch after batch of bread, either cooking it too long, leaving it
too doughy, or just generally messing up one important step or another. He
brewed batch after batch of tea, eventually narrowing down his brewing
methods for two or three different varieties of leaves to what Ella told him
was an acceptable range.
And he ground, and ground, and ground his skills. Food Scientist
shot up by another level, taking him to level five and pushing forward his
bread skill enough that he got his first acceptable batch of little doughy
lumps for the tea. That let him start experimenting with cream in his various
brews, adding it at different points in the cooling process to learn what
effect that had.
It was stressful, but it was progress. Everything was getting a little
better constantly. But still, his primary skill made no appearance. He baked
more, and brewed more, and hours passed, but nothing happened.
“Arthur. That’s the last batch for today.”
“It can’t be. Nothing has happened,” Arthur said.
“That’s not true. Just because the skill hasn’t appeared doesn’t mean
you didn’t make progress.” Ella pulled him away from the baking bread and
brewing tea and more or less shoved him onto his bed. “I’ll clean up. You
need to sleep.”
“I can keep going,” Arthur protested.
“You certainly could. But you won’t. It wouldn’t help at this point,
anyway. Just rest. We can try again in the morning,” Ella said.
Arthur didn’t hear her. He was already asleep.

That night, he had a dream, different enough from his normal dreams that
he recognized it as another system vision.
In the dream, he was perfect. He knew exactly what heat, down to a
fraction of a degree, was needed to bake the bread. He weighed tea to the
gram, knew the fat content of his cream, and applied spices with a precision
that bordered on the molecular.
In every way, dream-Arthur was the master of his kitchen. He
spilled nothing. He ruined nothing. Everything always came out exactly as
he wanted it to, as he developed new innovations that would let him shave
off even more remaining variables, creating perfection out of chaos and
leaving nothing up to chance at all.
He didn’t realize the dream had been a nightmare until he shot up in
bed, fully awake, drenched in sweat, and breathing like he had just won a
footrace with a rabid bear. He checked his status screen in a dead panic,
breathing a huge sigh of relief as he realized the vision hadn’t heralded the
coming of a new skill.
He laid back down on a different patch of sheet, flipping back the
covers to let his clammy skin evaporate back to dryness. Whatever the
vision had shown him, it was pure terror. Every bit of joy Ella brought to
the kitchen, every pinch of flour selected with love and thrown haphazardly
into a bowl in a kind of imprecise homey magic, was absent entirely. It was
cooking-as-career in a dark way, with all the soul and fun of a corporate
lawyer taking a shot at making partner.
And whatever it was, it was the opposite of what he wanted.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER NINETEEN

TEASHOP BREWMASTER

By the time Arthur had bathed, put on his newly tailored clothes, and
returned to his workshop, Ella was waiting. She wasn’t alone. With Milo in
tow, she walked up to Arthur, handing him a kettle and a fresh pail of water.
“Make this boy tea,” she said. “Your boba tea.”
Arthur looked around the room. Ella had cleared out every speck of
food he had prepared last night and replaced it with new ingredients. He
had nothing ready.
“I don’t have anything ready.”
“It doesn’t matter. Start from scratch. Is that okay with you, Milo?”
Milo nodded.
Ella continued, “He’s your friend, Arthur. Just talk to him. He’ll
keep you company.”
Arthur kneaded the bread, started to heat the water, and prepared a
few mugs for morning tea. The brew he chose was one that, according to
Ella, had “pep,” which he assumed was this world’s word for caffeinated
beverages. If nothing else, it would help them wake up.
 The resulting tea wasn’t quite a disaster. The bread wasn’t sturdy
enough but held up at least long enough to get a few firm pieces of it
through the straws. The tea was scorched, but only a bit, and the cream was
almost at the right level.
Those imperfections didn’t matter as much, with Milo there.
Company made food better, and they drank their tea while talking about the
day before them, as well as the day they had just experienced, all
interspersed with Milo’s merciless ragging on Arthur for his interest in
Mizu. It was fun.
Soon enough, Milo had to leave to do his own work, and Arthur got
ready to grind once again. Before he could, Ella showed up again, this time
towing a mouse-girl, one Arthur fully recognized.
“Ella?” Arthur asked.
“Now her. Make her tea,” Ella said, whooshing from the room
before Arthur had a chance to argue. He turned to Rhodia, who shrugged
her shoulders and sat. It was more awkward than with Milo, but soon
enough they found common ground.
“A stand? An entire stand? So soon?” Rhodia asked.
“Yeah, although I have to do a lot to get it. It’s a long shot,” Arthur
said.
“Still that’s a big opportunity,” Rhodia said.
“And I have to figure out… like, I have no idea how to run a
business, at least not that kind of business. Like, where do I even get the
stuff?”
“Like ingredients?”
“Ingredients, equipment… I need matched cups. With lids that let
these through.” Arthur pointed at a straw. “They don’t make those.”
“Arthur, I’m a ceramics class. I can make you those things,” Rhodia
said.
“I’d need a lot of them. And I don’t have… a lot of funds,
probably,” Arthur said.
 “You can pay me back later.”
“It would be too long. I don’t even know if I’ll make money.”
Arthur suddenly felt mousey hands gripping the collar of his shirt as
the much shorter girl pulled him down to her level.
“Do not,” she said, almost growling, “Do not make me beg you to
let me make cups for your actual operating business. Cups that will be used
by actual customers, and will provide me with tons of experience. Do not
do it.”
Arthur was beaten and knew it. Luckily, they were best friends again
just as soon as he relented and had a great time talking about various sizes
and shapes of things she could make for him. She assured him that she’d be
perfectly glad to make an entire set as soon as he needed it, on surprisingly
short notice. Rhodia, after all, had her primary skill already.
Her tea was about as good as Milo’s, and she thanked him before
leaving and being replaced by a large, burly combat-class Armadillo who
Arthur also recognized from class, whose name Arthur learned was Chuck.
“Chuck? We had that name on Earth, too.”
“It means thrower-of-heavy-things.”
“It also meant that on Earth. Kind of. Not as the name, though.”
“Chucks couldn’t throw?”
“Well, I’m sure some of them could.”
Just as on Earth, Jocks were easy-mode as far as feeding people
went. Arthur made a double batch of bread for his newest customer and
loaded up the Armadillo’s cup with as many calories as he could fit. He
abandoned his cream-discipline, loading up the drink with as much of the
smooth and creamy goodness as he could without entering into the realm of
the ridiculous, and adding more sugar than he suspected was exactly right.
It was the right call. The armadillo sucked it down like it was
nothing, burped, and then politely asked for seconds. After that, Ella didn’t
bring any more people to his lab. Instead, Milo did, complaining the entire
time about having to serve as Arthur’s recruiter but still dragging in almost
every member of the class, one at a time.
Arthur still didn’t get his skill, but by the end of the day he didn’t
mind so much. He had been so busy that he hadn’t even had full
conversations with nearly as many of his peers as he wanted to. Almost
everyone was interested in one way or another in Arthur’s new boba but
only a few of them had overlapping skills.
That was probably for the better. Once Milo found out what Rhodia
had negotiated, he demanded the rights to make all of Arthur’s metal tools.
But all in all, everyone liked to eat, or drink, and the novelty of doing both
at the same time seemed to make everyone okay with the time commitment
it took to get one glass.
“No skill yet?” Ella asked, looking up from a book she was reading
as Arthur entered the kitchen.
“Not yet. Just did some cleanup. Everyone else is at the park now, I
think. It’s time for class.”
“Are you discouraged? I know you’ve been working hard.”
Arthur pulled out a chair and snagged a cookie from a plate on the
table, sitting down and leaning back as he enjoyed it.
“No, not really. It was a good choice, what you did. I’ve been
meaning to meet everyone, anyway.” He took a bite of cookie, chewed it,
and swallowed. “I have a question, if that’s okay.”
“Shoot.”
“How much do you vary recipes for your audience? I mean, I was
making a lot of changes up there for various people that weren’t ideal at all.
Too much sugar for someone who liked things sweet, more bread, that sort
of thing.”
Ella set down her book and thought. “Well, at the restaurant, not a
lot. A little, of course. Some people like their meat cooked more and some
like it half bloody, some people dislike certain vegetables, that kind of
thing.”
 “But here?”
“Oh, for individual guests? I change a lot. I try to match the person.
That’s actually one of the big differences between a chef class and a cook.”
“I don’t think I ever really understood that.”
“It’s because it’s not a real distinction. The system never talks about
it, really. It’s just that chefs cook for the food. They try to make perfect
things. Cooks cook for the people. They try to help people become better
through food. It’s a blurry line. You’ll hear people call me a chef. And my
class even works that way. But at heart, I’m a cook. I want to watch people
eat my food and be happy.”
“Ah. Gotcha.”
“What about you?”
He told her about the nightmare, in detail, glad to have an
opportunity to finally unload the story.
“Oh, wow. Yeah. That does seem terrible,” she said. “System visions
aren’t law, you know. Even though it seemed like a chef vision, you could
still be a cook.”
“Right. It wasn’t terrible because of what dream-me was doing, if
that makes sense. Like I’d watch someone work that way and enjoy it. It
was terrible because it wasn’t what I wanted to do.”
There was a sudden noise at the door as Milo barged in, followed by
the entire class. Well, almost the entire class. Arthur felt a mix between
relief and disappointment as he saw Mizu wasn’t there.
“The turtle said we needed to come watch you work.”
“Oh, shoot. That’s going to be boring. Sorry, everyone.”
“Not a big deal, Arthur,” the Armadillo said, snagging a cookie.
“We’ve all done it with each other. A lot. This is as new as anything else we
could be doing.”
“Still,” Arthur said. “Well, I guess I can make it up, I hope. I’ll get
some food started, so you can watch.”
 His room wasn’t big enough to hold everyone. He glanced around
the kitchen, which was a large enough room with enough chairs everyone
might just fit.
“It’s okay. Get started. I’ll bring your things down,” Ella said,
folding her book closed. Arthur nodded, then started explaining as best he
could what he had been doing the past few days. All the experimentation
and refining seemed to be lost on most, with only a few crafting classes
nodding along in agreement.
“What have you been doing for water?” A voice at the door said. He
turned. It was Mizu.
“Just… water, I guess?”
She held up a small clay vessel in her hands. “I brought you this.
You can use it, if you like. I thought it might help.”
“Oh, that’s neat,” the mouse said. “That explains why you are late.”
“It’s… different?” Arthur said, completely lost.
“She’s a weller. Sort of like a plumber, but for water sources that
come from the ground,” the armadillo explained.
“Chuck, that’s…” The mouse rolled her eyes. “They do more than
that. Wellers balance the water that comes out of the ground. They improve
wells in terms of output, balance mineral content…”
“And are a treasure,” Ella said, returning to the kitchen and taking
the water from Mizu as she did. “Use this, Arthur. And thank the girl.”
“Thanks, Mizu,” Arthur said. “That’s great of you to do. I really
appreciate it.”
Mizu smiled.
Arthur went to work, bringing the water to a boil as he selected tea.
Food Scientist, for once, was loud, pointing to one particular brew and
assuring him it was his best bet for a group that large. It made sense. It was
a light, unoffensive flavor, one that he imagined everyone would like if not
absolutely love.
 But then the skill kept talking, directing him back upstairs. He
excused himself, running back up to find the flower Mizu had given him.
Without a clear immediate use for it, he had put it in a cup of water, hoping
it would survive. Now his skill was asking him to use it, in front of the
person who had given it to him.
Pretty high-pressure choice, skill.
Bringing it downstairs, he stood behind everyone and motioned for
Ella, who assured him that his combination of instincts and skills were on
the right path.
“Mizu, is it fine if I use this?” Arthur was nervous in his ask, but
Mizu just smiled and nodded. Taking the flower to the kitchen table, he
carefully removed a small portion of the petal, grinding it with the round
part of a spoon until it was mashed, then added it to the tea mixture. Finally,
Food Scientist was satisfied.
Arthur poured the tea, added the cream, and shoved handfuls of the
bread from the best batches he had made throughout the day into each of
the cups, then let everyone dig in, waiting nervously for their reaction.
But there wasn’t a reaction, really. Everyone was talking and having
fun, enough that they took the drinks and dug in without thinking about it,
much. Arthur watched as they simply enjoyed the drinks, draining glasses
and asking for refills as they had fun in each other’s company. The tea
wasn’t the point. And Arthur was fully content with that, happy to just have
his tea help in making the fun complete.
Somehow, he wasn’t surprised at all when he felt something click
into place in his soul, and hardly had to check to know his primary skill had
come.

Teashop Brewmaster (Boba Specialty)

You make tea to make people happy. This skill helps with that, in
various ways.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWENTY

MAJICKA

“Oh shit. I got it.” Arthur looked up from his skill before even
reading the whole thing. “I got the skill, Ella.”
“No way. Just like that?” Milo jumped up, ran over, and leapt to
wrap Arthur in a big, feathery hug.
“Just like that. I think… Actually, Ella, what happened here? I
wasn’t even all that careful with this tea.”
“Tastes pretty good to me,” Chuck said, slurping the last pieces of
soggy bread off the bottom of his cup.
“Thanks, but it’s not even really boba yet, honestly. It’s… dessert
bread tea, I guess? Which is close. But it’s not the same. I think the flower
helped, and the water helped.” Arthur glanced at Mizu to make sure he
wasn’t insulting her by downplaying something she had contributed to.
“But the work wasn’t my best. And you’d think that would be part of it.”
“Close,” Ella said. “It is part of it. But why do you think I had Milo
carting your friends in all day?”
“To keep me company? That’s what you said.”
 “Sure. But also because you aren’t a chef. I’ve seen a lot of people
get chef classes, Arthur. By the time you finished yesterday, you had
optimized how you make tea as much as anyone without a class possibly
could. You weren’t going to do much better, no matter what you did.”
“But it’s different for a cook?”
“It is. Because for cooks, the guest is just as important as the meal.
More, actually. You didn’t really have to tell me your dream for me to see
you were burned out, you know. Your face showed it. And considering you
got your class from cooking for me and Milo, it didn’t take a lot to put two
and two together on the best way to move forward.”
“It was trickery!” Milo said. “And I was in on it.”
“So were most of us,” Rhodia said, then followed Arthur’s glance
over to Mizu, who was still sipping serenely on her tea. “Not Mizu, though.
Nobody told her to bring the water. She’s just nice.”
“Anyway,” Ella broke in, bringing things back to focus. “The point
is, I thought making drinks for your friends might get you back on track.
And it did. Now read us the skill. Everyone’s waiting.”
in his excitement, Arthur had forgotten there was even a description
to the skill and dropped his eyes back to his system screen as he called it up
in its entirety.

Teashop Brewmaster (Boba Specialty)

You make tea to make people happy. This skill helps with that, in various
ways. In addition to increasing your ability to cook in general, this skill
takes a special interest in helping you select, brew, and serve the drinks
that please your guests best and improve their days the most.
At level 0, your existing cooking skills are codified in your mind, making
them easier to duplicate and increasing your consistency. In addition,
some of your passive Majicka output seeps into the foods you make,
bending reality to make the impossible slightly more possible and the
possible slightly tastier.
 Leveling the skill increases these effects, as do investments in your
perception and wisdom stats.
Synergizes with Food Scientist at all times, but especially when using
new ingredients, creating new recipes, and developing new preparation
methods.

“Oooh, a wisdom stat emphasis. Interesting,” Ella cooed, the most

excited of anyone there but Arthur.
“That’s unusual?”
“A bit. Almost all cooking classes run on perception. Chefs tend to
have dexterity or intelligence as a secondary, depending on what they try to
do. Cooks are the same, except usually they don’t have a secondary
emphasis at all. That’s how my class is. I have a few points in a few other
things, but mostly it’s just perception.”
“What’s that mean for me? For how the skill works, I mean.”
Ella shrugged. “No idea. It probably has something to do with
judging your customers a bit better, based on how you read them, getting a
better feeling for what they want, whether they say it or not.”
“And it increases majicka output, of course,” Milo said.
Arthur paused to make sure he had heard his friend correctly. “I
have no idea what that means. This is the first I’ve heard that word.”
As Arthur finished letting that particular fact slip, the entire room
stopped around him. A few people’s jaws went slack with shock, and even
Mizu looked noticeably surprised.
“You don’t know what majicka is? How?” Chuck was suddenly up
from his chair. “It’s… well, it’s everything. It’s in everything. How do you
not know?”
Arthur shrugged. “I’m new, I guess. Nobody ever said it, and we
didn’t have it on Earth.”
“You’re sure?”
 “Pretty sure. Nobody ever mentioned it, anyway.”
“A whole planet without majicka,” Chuck said, settling back down
into his chair. “How do you do anything?”
Arthur shrugged again.
“Now now. He can’t know everything. And not everything is going
to be the same. But how do you explain majicka?” Ella said, rubbing the
bottom of her beak.
From the back, the porcupine suddenly made an excited, almost
whining sound, raising his hand desperately. Arthur knew the demon by the
name Spiky. Milo swore that was normal for his subspecies, something that
applied to almost all the young male porcupine demons he had known.
“Please, please let me explain this,” Spiky said. “I’m a librarian
class. We gain levels by helping people find information. I don’t know what
happens if I successfully explain majicka to an adult who doesn’t know
what it is yet. I don’t think anyone knows.”
“Come on down, then.” Ella waved him over, and he pushed his
way through the kitchen, naturally creating some space around Arthur as
everyone else pulled away to make room for his spines.
“It’s like this. You know how Milo makes daggers, correct?
Roughly, I mean. You’ve seen him do it.”
“Not daggers specifically, but I’ve seen him forge metal. He made
these straws.”
“Okay, great. Now how do you think he gets better at it?”
“Practice. And I’m guessing the system makes that practice count
for more.”
“That’s a big part of it,” the porcupine said, nodding excitedly. “The
first way the system makes us better is guidance. It steadies a smith’s
hammer, it makes a sword move faster in a swordsman’s hand. The second
way is stats. Once it’s guiding the hammer, strength makes the hammer
come down harder. At the same time, strength usually makes the guidance
better. Milo, your smithing skill runs off strength and perception, right?”
 “Right.”
“So the more guidance he has, the better his strength and perception
can work, and the more strength and perception he has, the better his
guidance works?” Arthur asked.
“Right. And it’s the same with you, perception, wisdom, and your
brewing skill. With a theoretically infinite amount of stat points, your skill
could guide you to do almost anything. With an infinite skill level, you
could make your stats do as much as they possibly could. Theoretically, at
least. It’s actually all very interesting, and there are some books I could loan
you if…”
“Majicka, Spiky,” Ella said. “Let’s focus.”
“I’m getting to that,” the porcupine said, calming himself down.
“Now, the daggers that Milo is making right now are pretty normal.
Eventually, they’ll be lighter, prettier, and sharper, just from the guidance
and his skill. But there’s a limit to what something like iron or steel can do
as a material. He’ll hit that ceiling around level ten, if he’s like most
smiths.”
“It’s true. That’s about as high as it goes, assuming my smithing
skill keeps pace,” Milo confirmed.
“And Chuck, over there, will get pretty strong. His stats will make
him faster and stronger than any non-physical class gets, and the guidance
will help him put those extra muscles to better use. But even that tops out.
And what comes in after that? To break those limits?”
“Majicka?”
“Yup! It’s a force. When Chuck said it was in everything, earlier, he
wasn’t quite right. It’s in everyone. It’s a force that people generate,
naturally. You have it, I have it, Milo has it, and so on,” the porcupine said.
“And there are two kinds. Active and passive.”
Arthur knew that, kind of, from his skill description. He even had
guesses for what that meant, but he kept himself from spouting the
speculations. He didn’t want to steal the experience from Spiky if he could
help it.
 “Only some classes get active majicka. That’s an actual expression
of that power outside their bodies, usually something you can see. You
know Karbo?”
“I do. Well, I’ve known him for a few days.”
“If Karbo ever starts glowing, you should run. He has battler skills
that do that, or so I’ve heard. And when that’s happening, he’s actively
burning majicka to make himself stronger and to shield his body from
damage. Other fighters can make their swords catch on fire, make their
arrows explode. Wizards can throw fireballs. That kind of thing. That’s
active majicka.”
“And passive?”
“Passive doesn’t just happen like an on and off switch. You don’t
activate a skill to make it go. It just filters into whatever you are working on
as you work on it. So, for Milo, that means any dagger he makes is just a
little better than it should be, judging by his stats and skill. His steel is
better and stronger because he’s pumped his own power into it. At a high
enough level, smiths can make swords that weigh half what they should and
are all but indestructible.”
“For a cook,” Ella broke in, “it means about the same thing.”
“I can make ultra-durable bread?”
“Not quite. But you can make bread that doesn’t get soggy when the
laws of natural things say that it should. Or gets soggy faster. Or tastes
better or is chewier. Or any combination of all those. It all depends on your
majicka output.”
“Huh. And does wisdom play into this?”
“Oh, yeah. Wisdom determines how much majicka you can produce
and push out per second. More is always better, of course, but most classes
can only use so much of it. It’s the kind of thing most people improve as
they need to, when they find it’s getting in the way of their work. You seem
to need to invest in it for your skill, so if nothing else, you should never
have the problem of not having enough majicka.”
 “Huh,” Arthur said. It wasn’t that foreign of a concept, overall. Like
a lot of things, it tracked with vague ideas from video games and fantasy in
his world enough that it wasn’t that hard for him to visualize. “And it’s
normal that I can’t feel it?”
“Yes. It’s not something you can feel, in its passive form. Unless
you are running out, in which case it hurts a bit,” Spiky said. “Not that I
know. I’m a wisdom and intelligence class too, you see.”
“Well, thanks. I think I get it now. Did you get… whatever you were
supposed to get, out of that explanation?”
“Not yet. Maybe later, if you ever put any of that to use. Don’t let
me down.”
The rest of the night was nice. Arthur offered to cook or make some
more tea, and was promptly shut down by Ella, who insisted he was too
tired. She wasn’t exactly wrong.
Instead, she shifted into full host mode, showering Arthur, Milo, and
the rest with a seemingly unending stream of snacks, drinks, and general
calories that left all of them distressingly full. Arthur noticed that nobody
held back on eating here. He hadn’t noticed a single person in this new
world that wasn’t in pretty decent shape, craftsmen included, and that
seemed to have implications for how people approached food. When the
opportunity came, people ate well, at least from what he had seen so far.
I wonder if majicka plays a role there. It has to come from
somewhere, after all. Maybe being mystical has metabolic implications.
Arthur himself was so full by the end of the night that when people
staggered out under the weight of cookies, sandwiches, and other goodies,
he didn’t even notice as Mizu left. He made a mental note to thank her later,
for both the flower and water.
As he drifted off to sleep, it occurred to him that it might mean
something beyond the obvious when a water demon gave you a gift of
water. He would, he decided, ask Milo about it later.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT

After his skill came, everything started happening very fast.

Ella sent a message to Pico, letting him know about Arthur’s class
and asking for a day or so more to break it in. And the mayor eagerly
agreed. And she did all that, Arthur noted, without breaking a single
window.
Arthur’s next day devolved into a mad scramble to put together real
boba. So far, he had been preying on the demons’ innocence, presenting
them with bread that simulated some part of the drink he was trying to
make without quite being the right thing at all. Real boba, in the human
world, was chewy. It was clear, at least some of the time, and bouncy like
gelatin. The stuff he was making was nothing like that.
From what little he could remember, boba in the human world was
made of starch. Flour had starch, but he also remembered things with starch
that weren’t flour back on Earth. Without details, he started experimenting.
Ella supplied him with everything she could, either dipping into her own
seemingly endless stock of ingredients or ordering him new ones. He didn’t
know which, but he had long since stopped questioning her generosity. It
upset her and he could pay her back later.
 Arthur went through over a hundred rapid-fire batches before he
stumbled onto something that kind of resembled boba pearls. That wouldn’t
have even been possible without his new cooking skill, which went into
overdrive with hints as soon as he started a project it recognized as
something new and innovative.
“Those look… interesting,” Ella had said, on his second to last
batch. And they were. He had figured out a process to make the gelatin,
something that was close to how he would have made corn starch and water
into an Oobleck semi-solid in school, only with more steps, more heat, and
infinitely more trouble. Rolling them by hand had been a whole other thing,
taking forever in a way that made him want to spend another week on
automation if he had had that kind of time.
But he didn’t. By the time he got the pearls looking half-way decent
and with only limited taste tests, it was time to stand in front of the mayor
and present his progress. With Eito, Karbo, and Ella at his back, he was
now watching the mayor work out how to slurp the little pearls from the
bottom of the drink, chewing on them as he drank and ate his way through
the cup. Halfway through, the mayor looked up, almost surprised to see
everyone was still there, watching him drink.
“Oh, I’m sorry. I got distracted. Arthur, the shop is yours,” Pico said.
“Just like that?” Arthur asked.
“Just like that. Ella, you said he’s only level two in his cooking
skill?”
“Yes, but he was level zero when he made those. The success
pushed him over.”
Pico arched his badger eyebrows a bit at that news. “Well, even
better. Arthur, this is good. There’s novelty, yes, and we don’t have anything
like this here. It’s an invention of yours, correct?”
“No, not exactly,” Arthur said. “Call it something I brought from
home.”
The mayor waved his hand dismissively. “Nearly the same thing, as
far as we’re concerned. There’s potential here, Arthur, and from everything
Ella and the others have told me, you’ve worked exceptionally hard to
realize some of that potential in a remarkably short amount of time. The
stand is yours.”
“Well, thank you,” Arthur said. It was just that easy, it seemed. He
was floored by the generosity.
“Well, don’t thank me yet.” The badger pulled a long, handwritten
list out of his desk. “There are still some requirements to meet and not a lot
of time to meet them. Get these done, and if you still feel gratitude, I’ll take
it.”

“Four days!” Arthur exclaimed in the safety of his home. “I only have four
days to get an entire shop running. And to get customers, real ones, who
come in by themselves. Who I don’t know. Who enjoy their drinks. And
who pay, with real money, that they earned. It’s impossible.”
As Arthur griped, he was vaguely aware of an odd sort of attention
from Milo, who suddenly rose, tackled him off his stool, and crammed a
chunk of bread in his dumbstruck mouth before Arthur could summon
enough of his reflexes to close it.
“Eat, Arthur. Breathe. Good gods, you are high-strung,” Milo said.
“Do I have to sit on you for you to calm down? Or can you get yourself
under control?”
“It’s four days!” Arthur said. “Nobody could do this all in four days!
I’m going to find the mayor and beat him up. He’s cursed me. I’m cursed.
Ow!”
Milo was now flicking him in the forehead, using his superior
physical stats to hold Arthur down as he did.
“Take a breath, Arthur!” He flicked Arthur in the forehead again. “I
can flick all day. A full breath. A real one. Swallow that bread. Calm down.”
It took several more flicks, but eventually Arthur was forced to
follow instructions. A minute or so later, he was hungrily consuming an
entire loaf of bread with butter as Milo gloated about his superior insights
into blood sugar and the mood of non-demon earthlings.
 “Calmed down, now?”
“A bit.” Arthur tore off another piece of bread with his teeth,
swallowing it almost without chewing. “But it’s still not going to be easy,
you know. I wasn’t lying about the four days. I don’t see how I’m going to
get it all done by myself.”
“You aren’t by yourself, idiot. You haven’t figured that out, yet?”
Milo laid out his plan, which he and Ella had come up with while
Arthur was ranting about badgerian unfairness. It was a good plan and
would probably work. Milo had to beat him up for another five minutes
before he’d accept it.
Arthur didn’t like the plan, but that wasn’t because it was hard or
weird or complex. As Milo put it, Arthur just needed to focus on the parts
he could do and let everyone else focus on what they were good at. And, in
ways Arthur wasn’t sure he deserved, he had a lot of “everyone else” right
at the moment.
Rhodia had already promised to help out with ceramics and was
reportedly hard at work already pumping out a dozen or so cups in a few
different sizes. She was attempting to build the dual-walled tank they had
talked about for cooling tea and creating another few tubs for milk and
cream.
Milo was making dozens of little tools he figured Arthur might
need, from funnels to measuring cups to scoops, spoons, and even more
refined straws suitable for customer use. Arthur asked about the non-
disposability of the drink cups and straws and how those costs might add
up, only to get strange looks from both Milo and Rhodia, who explained it
was typical for people to either eat or drink their food at the stand, or else
return the containers at the next reasonable opportunity to do so.
That wasn’t all. A textile class demon who Arthur had never met
before was working to spruce up the cushions on the stools and refresh the
awning. Spiky’s librarian skills couldn’t contribute much, but his father was
a carpenter who promised to get the stand sanded, re-oiled against weather,
and generally fixed over the next couple of days.
 And, worst of all, he found out Mizu was helping. Not just helping,
he learned, but using her skills to build a pumped well behind his stand,
optimizing the water output for beverages. The convenient source of liquid
that would save him hours each week.
Arthur had only been slightly surprised to learn that Mizu had the
highest level of any of the people in their peer group, and was so advanced
in her class that she was already getting work. Real work. She wasn’t just
helping to get exposure. This was costing her actual time she could use to
get paid. For that, he was willing to brave more forehead-flicking.
“Milo, how long is this going to take her?”
“Days. At least. It’s manual labor, though not as much as you’d
think since there was once a well there, a long time ago. She just needs to
drill down to it again. And then do her magic on it, or however wellers
work.”
“You can’t let her do that!” Arthur said, tearing his hair out. “Whose
idea was this?”
“Hers,” Milo said, flexing his flicking finger. “She went to the
mayor’s office to propose it, from what I gather. That’s where the pump is
coming from. The city is overjoyed to have another source of water,
especially one that a weller seems to be particularly attached to
maintaining.”
“Great. She had to talk to people for this, too. That must have taken
a lot for her. How could you let her do this?”
“Her idea. Her plan. I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said,
calmly inspecting his bird-claw fingernails. “Neither do you, honestly. Just
deal with it. Seriously. Have you even considered what it might mean that
she’s doing this for you? Or what it would mean if you stopped her halfway
through, said you didn’t want it, and told her to go away?”
Arthur hadn’t, and could easily imagine how it might leave him
looking like the world's most ungrateful jerk. Eventually, he just had to
accept that he had helpful friends who wanted him to do well, even if he
couldn’t do much for them just yet.
 For his part, Milo and Ella had decided that he had to make boba.
Real boba. There was simply no bigger impact he could have than
improving the product ahead of opening, and he had tons of room for
improvement in both the quality of the pearls and the amount of time it took
him to make a single drink.
So, he began ripping off little pieces of dough and rolling them by
hand. Milo was working on a tool to help him, but wouldn’t have it finished
before the opening. That meant endless repetition of the process, getting his
hands trained up to do the same task again and again. At some point, he’d
get so good that he could rely on muscle memory to reach the beautiful
round pearl shapes he wanted to provide to his customers.
On top of that, he was still only a level two in his class skill.
Pushing that forward, even by a level, would have a big impact on how well
he could make the tea. Going from level zero to two had helped a lot, but
there was still a lot of room for improvement. If he could get to level three
or even four by the time the shop opened, he’d be that much better off.
So he made dough, mixing the starch with hot water and beating it
to an even consistency before making dozens of pearls, then storing the
pearls to dry before starting over. At some point, he lost count not only of
the number of pearls he had in hand, but also the number of batches. He
made pearls, ate, and slept, falling into a sort of production trance broken
only occasionally by the embarrassment of knowing his not-at-all-a-
girlfriend-yet was doing unpaid work on his behalf, bringing her gift-count
to three while he still hadn’t figured out a single nice thing to do for her.
And then, just like that, he was out of time. He went to bed full of
the knowledge that tomorrow he’d be a boba stand operator, whether he was
ready for it or not.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

SALES TROUBLE

Uniforms, it turned out, were not really a thing for food stand owners. The
associated gaggle of friends who had shown up to watch him set up the
shop had been very clear on that subject.
“No paper hats, or anything?” Arthur asked.
“No, why? It’s not like it’s hard to tell that you work there. You’re
the guy on the owner side of the counter. Who else would you be?” Rhodia
said, leaning on the side of the stand. “Are those cups going to work? I’m
going to rework them again later, especially once I get glass.”
Arthur held one of them up to the light. They were the best work he
had seen her put out, by far. They had lids to hold the straws, though it
seemed to fall short on keeping the liquid inside the cup. But since locking
lids weren’t really a thing yet, from what Arthur had seen, that was
probably fine. She had glazed them a dark gray and overall, they were
pretty, functional objects.
“Yeah, these are going to work just fine. And the tools, which are
fantastic, Milo. And this water…” He took another sip of it and felt Food
Scientist’s general approval of it for the tenth time that morning. “Where is
Mizu, anyway? I haven’t seen her, and I really need to thank her for this.”
 “No idea. We weren’t here when she finished, and nobody has seen
her since.”
“Well, okay. But everything’s fine, really. I just need to get started
on prep. If anyone wants, the first drink is on me.”
Of course, everyone wanted a free drink.
Arthur poured a generous amount of boba pearls into boiling water,
then stirred them as they inflated to their full glory. Once they were fully
cooked, he pulled them out of the water with a sieve Milo had put together
and dumped them into one of the large bowls that Rhodia had made. And he
covered the finished pearls with a weak sugar syrup to keep the air from
drying them out too fast.
“Does anyone want it hot?”
“You can make it hot?” Chuck asked. “You’ve always iced it
before.”
“That’s just the more common way. I can make it hot, if you want.”
Most people still took it iced, given the warmth of the morning, but
both Milo and Spiky tried the hot version. For ten minutes or so, Arthur and
his young friends joked, drank, and had a good time.
It really does help to take the edge off. Maybe if I had more friends
at my old job, it might have been more bearable.
Then, gradually, people cleared their drinks. Spiky was the first to
go, having work that he described as ‘a lot of books to sort through.’ The
others peeled off one by one, until eventually only Rhodia and Milo were
left.
“The boba's good,” Milo said, “Just wait for people to notice. You
don’t have to do anything besides that. I think.”
“You will do fine, Arthur,” Rhodia said. “If nothing else, you’re
new. Things will pick up over time.”
“Got it. And guys? Thanks again. I couldn’t have done it without
you two, especially.”
 They walked off, and Arthur got to work washing the last of the
glasses his friends had used while he waited for the morning rush to begin.
“Pensa means small. Coin means coin. And Majna means large,”
Arthur reminded himself as he worked. He hadn’t really used money since
he got to the demon world, mostly having been freeloading off his hosts.
Now he’d have to be fluent in the money system, which wasn’t impossible
but added up to another thing he’d have to learn.
He looked again at the small change-taking tower Milo had made
for him, a sort of primitive cash register made of three tall tubes the coins
could just drop into, with cuts in them so his fingers could get in to force
coins up and out. It was a nice touch. He sat there practicing making change
until he heard a voice.
“Ahem,” the badger-mayor cleared his throat.
“Oh, hello, Pico. Look, I made it.” Arthur gestured at the whole
stand. “Everyone helped a lot, or I might not have been able to do it.”
“It’s very nice.”
“It is! Look at this change counter Milo made.” Arthur spent the
next minute or so showing the mayor everything, hoping it came up to his
standard. The mayor was polite, oohing and aahing at the correct times, and
generally appreciating the stand. But at the end, where Arthur expected him
to either approve or disapprove of his setup, he stood there, quietly. Like he
was waiting for more.
What does he want? That’s the entire store.
“I think the store is very nice, Arthur. But…” Arthur braced for the
bad news. “I sort of want to buy some of your drink, and you won’t sell me
any, for reasons that escape me.”
“Oh!” Arthur said. “Oh. Very sorry. I was confused as to why you
were here. We have pep tea, no pep tea. And you can have either in a
stronger or lighter brew. And of course, you can decide how much cream
you want.”
“The weaker pep tea, and heavy on the cream, please.”
 “Got it!” Arthur quickly put together the tea, handed the cup to the
mayor, and then asked. “Is it… good?”
The mayor hadn’t drunk yet.
“Arthur, do you know why I’m glad I stopped by early today?”
“Um… I’m hoping for the tea. And the conversation? My sparkling
conversation?”
“It’s because you have the jitters. Which is fine, Arthur. It’s
understandable. But I’m glad I can help you work them out. And part of that
help is telling you that when you give a customer a product, it’s customary
to make them pay for it. And to tell them how much.”
“Oh! Yes. Of course. It’s seven pensa or one coin.” Ella had helped
him work out the price. From what Arthur could tell, a coin was about ten
dollars in terms of what it would buy in a demon market. But that came
with some complexity. He had bought a set of clothes, for instance, for
about four coins. But things like clothes and other durable goods were
cheaper than on Earth, at least by a bit.
Food was the thing that tracked the best, which meant he was
charging either seven or ten dollars per drink, depending on whether or not
the person was the kind to carry Pensa around. To the extent that demons
tipped, it seemed to be through an informal hatred of small change. Just
another thing to get used to, he supposed.
“A coin for you, then. And you don’t have to say the last part.
People know how to round up themselves.”
“Got it.”
Drink in hand, the mayor finally sat down for a bit. It turned out that
Arthur didn’t need to impress him much. Actually making the deadline was
enough. The fact that he was capable of serving a drink had bought him
much more time all by itself.
“Where this gets hard, Arthur, is that you now need to progress.
What the city cares about from here is the number of customers you serve.
You do have a tally sheet, correct?”
 “I do. Ella gave me one.”
“Good. If you serve sufficient customers, the city is pleased, that
and the taxes you’ll eventually pay. If you have trouble getting that many
customers, you can always lower prices, but…”
“I have to make money. The city won’t subsidize the business end.”
“That’s right. We can help, but there’s a point where it becomes
unfair to the other vendors.” The mayor stood. “This was good, Arthur. Not
the best. But your class is growing, and the uniqueness of this experience
will help you more than you know. But you need to keep pace with your
skills. More kinds of tea. More kinds of these things that you call pearls, if
that’s possible. I’m sure Ella has talked to you about that but work hard to
make sure you don’t lose that initial edge.”
“Of course. And thanks for the advice.”
“No problem.” The mayor walked off. “And Arthur?”
“Yes?”
“You might want to check your status sheet. I’m guessing there
might have been a bit of a change.”
Arthur cocked his head a bit, confused, then pulled up his sheet.
What he saw there made him sit down in shock.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 7
STR: 5
VIT: 5
DEX: 5
PER: 9
WIS: 5
INT: 5
Unassigned Stat Points: 8
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 5) Food Scientist
(Level 7)
 Achievements: Shop Owner, First Customer (Rolling into shop
owner)

he knew Food Scientist had already leveled in his mad rush to get
ready for the shop opening, moving to a new tier and starting to work in a
different, more subtle way. Its suggestions now felt more and more like his
own thoughts. But Teashop Brewmaster had so far barely progressed.
not now. That one cup of tea, from a paying customer, had driven
his class skill forward three levels as well as a bunch of personal levels. He
moved to examine the skill more closely, then aborted as he saw another
possible customer approaching, a large elemental hybrid of the rock variety
he had seen around town a few times before.
Luckily, I know just where those stat points are going.
Dumping the points in a way that rounded him out a little better took
no time at all, and he got in one last glance before the customer made it to
the table.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 7
STR: 5
VIT: 6
DEX: 6
PER: 12
WIS: 8
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 5) Food Scientist
(Level 7)
Achievements: Shop Owner, First Customer (Rolling into shop
owner)

The sudden rush of stats hit hard, leaving Arthur just enough time to
clear his head before the customer started talking.
“What is this?” the rock-man said. “Tea?”
 “Boba Tea,” Arthur replied. Using his new-found dexterity, he
speared one of the pearls out of his bowl with a small, dual-pronged fork.
“It’s a tea, with cream, usually served cold. And it has a healthy handful of
these at the bottom.”
The rock-man eyed the pearls suspiciously before pinching it off the
fork and popping it into his mouth.
“You suck those through these straws as you drink,” Arthur
explained.
“It’s a tea you can eat? Like a meal?”
“More like a heavy snack.”
“Got it,” the rock-man said, then turned to leave. “Thanks! I’ll see
you later.”
Arthur almost reached out for the demon, unsure of what he had
done wrong. But he let the man go. Whatever social norms he was about to
learn at his food stand, he doubted that they included hard-selling boba to
reluctant customers. With the rock-man gone, he waited for his next chance.
That opportunity came in the form of a busy-looking rabbit woman.
Like the rock-man, she took a sample, then thanked him and left as soon as
she learned what the overall drink actually was.
Has everyone just been pretending to like this?
As the morning wore on, Arthur got more and more worried. He
managed to sell one more drink to a wind-elemental, who took the cup with
them. But mostly, he was way under quota, and it was almost entirely
attributable to the fact that he wasn’t closing the sales. There was plenty of
interest and curiosity, but almost nobody bought.
“Hey, Arthur. How’s it going?”
Arthur startled out of his worry to see Ella standing there, smiling
and shoving a sandwich into his hands.
“I thought you could use a little food. Worry burns a lot of energy.”
 “Thanks. This helps.” Arthur started chewing. “It’s not going great,
honestly.”
“I could tell that from all the way across the street, Arthur. You have
to smile, you know. Nobody wants a sad shop keep.”
“True. I’ll try to do better.”
“Now, why do you think you are doing poorly?”
“I’ve sold two drinks. Lots of levels for that, oddly, but nobody else
has bought. It’s like the drink sounds bad to everyone.” He frowned. “I’m
failing, Ella. Nobody wants this.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

GENIUS AT WORK

“Do you think it’s something that you’re saying?”

“It could be, but I can’t think of what.”
“Well, let’s give it a shot. Try selling me something, Arthur. Like
I’m a new customer.” She curled around the counter to the front, then put
on a fake new-customer persona. “Oh, hi! This stand looks interesting.
What do you make here?”
Arthur ran through his little routine, handing her a pearl, listing off
the kinds of teas available.
“So it’s a tea… with bread?”
“Yes. It’s filling, like a heavy snack. Think of it as about half a
meal.”
“Ah, I got it,” Ella said, dropping out of her new character back to
her plain old bird-mom mannerisms. “I don’t think you have anything to
worry about, Arthur.”
“Why?”
 “I’ll let it be a surprise. But give it some time. I think things will
turn out all right.”
Ella left soon after that. Arthur tried to focus on her reassurance but
felt only slightly better despite his great trust in Ella’s experience as a cook.
Another hour came and went, with several more people stopping by for
samples and only one more sale. Arthur eventually threw out the boba he
had made that morning, made a new batch and hoped that people would
eventually make the purchases that justified it.
And then, like magic, a big shadow fell over his stand once more.
He looked up, seeing the rock demon from that morning.
“Hi, again!” he said. “I’m hungry now. I wanted to try your tea, if I
could.”
“I… oh, of course. What would you like?”
Making the rock’s tea seemed to set off a chain reaction. As if on
cue, everyone who had passed his stand all morning started coming back,
almost in the same order they had shown up in before.
“It’s so interesting,” the rabbit woman said. “I wanted to try it
earlier, but you know how it is. I was already full from breakfast.”
Ella knew this was going to happen the entire time.
Arthur was used to serving food to other teenagers, who, like him,
basically never stopped being hungry. They were growing, burning calories
doing their new jobs, and more or less on the move at all times. Normal
people weren’t like that. Ella mostly ate at mealtimes, only snacking in-
between, and anyone her age was probably pretty similar.
I’ve been telling people who just ate breakfast this is an entire light
meal all morning, and then acting surprised when they didn’t want it just
yet. I’m an idiot.
And so the lunch rush began.
The rock man had triggered another level up, one that Arthur
initially intended to keep back until he could think about what to do with
the points. Instead, he found himself desperately dumping them into
dexterity, needing every ounce of speed and precision he could get to keep
up with the speed of the orders. Soon, his backup pot was in place, getting
more pearls ready. Soon after, the backup to the backup made its
appearance.
“Who wanted pep heavy?” he yelled, seeing four hands go up, and
loading four cups at once before figuring out cream preferences for the
group. When someone had a special order, he’d slow down, but otherwise
he was moving at top speed at all times, whipping out as many drinks as he
could without actually compromising on quality.
The worst part, the hardest thing, was the cup situation. Rhodia, the
mouse crafter, had made plenty of cups. Or at least that’s what it seemed in
the morning. Now, with various demons walking off with the cups and
others taking their time drinking, he was on the edge of running out. Soon,
he’d have to tell people to wait, something they might not enjoy doing.
The solution to that came in the form of a young barn-owl looking
child walking down the street, who Arthur caught the eye of and waved
over. Up close, the kid was dirty, and obviously suspicious of the weird
pink non-demon who was demanding her time.
“What do you want? I’m busy.”
Arthur almost abandoned his little plan right then, but little
unoccupied children appeared to be at a premium in the square that day.
“Listen, do you want to make a coin?” He asked. Suddenly, most of
the child's surliness evaporated.
“Probably. What would I have to do?”
“Do you know Rhodia? A mouse-demon, about this tall, makes
pottery?”
“No.”
“Well, go looking for her. Tell her I need cups. Lots of them. As
many as she can make, as fast as she can make them. Tell her I’m paying.”
He took a coin and pressed it into the child’s hand. “She’s probably at the
park, over that way. You know which one?”
 The child nodded, but when Arthur went back to work, she just
stood there.
“Do you need something? Did I forget something?” Arthur asked,
harried by keeping up with the customers.
“You are paying me now? Before I do it?”
“Yes. In case you can’t find her. If you look and she’s not around,
you can just keep it.”
The child looked at the coin in her hand, then walked off with
confusion evident on her face. Arthur didn’t have enough time to confirm
the kid’s intentions as he jumped right back into making more tea.
Finally, thankfully, the lunch rush was over. It took hours. From
what Arthur could gather, everyone started their day in the morning, but not
at a particular standardized hour. Lunch was, essentially, the entire middle
part of the day. So while he had been able to keep up with the rush, he was
almost completely exhausted by the time two or three hours had passed.
“You look dead.”
Rhodia shuffled up, a large wooden crate balanced on her hands in a
way that made her look even smaller than normal.
“I am. I’m completely out of boba.”
“You ran out of cups too?”
“Barely. I didn’t expect it to be this fast on the first day.”
“Well, good idea sending that kid. She said that ‘some kind of pink
monster needs cups. He pays good’ then ran off like I was going to eat her.
But I got the picture. Here’s two dozen more cups. Enjoy.”
Arthur slid open the storage of the stand, sliding the cups in next to
the now-clean batch he had been using all day.
“How much do I owe you? For both sets.”
“Those are still low grade, so not much. Call it a majna?”
 “A large? Got it.” Arthur counted out ten coins from his overflowing
money-tower and handed it over. Most demons paid in coins, and he hadn’t
taken an order for a majna yet.
“Holy gods. You really did do well.” Rhodia’s eyes bugged out as
she saw the day’s take.
“I did. Although I’m pretty far from paying everyone back, still.”
“I wouldn’t worry. I got a level earlier from those cups being used,
and another one right now when you made it a paid relationship. Everyone
involved will be patient for that.” She sat on a stool. “Milo said to get home
when you can, by the way. He’s working on something for you.”
“Got it.” He collapsed into the stool he reserved for himself. “Damn.
I still have to make boba tonight, for tomorrow. Or else use the stale stuff.”
“How did you do on levels? That might help.”
“Well.”

Arthur Teamaster
Level 9
STR: 5
VIT: 6
DEX: 8
PER: 12
WIS: 8
INT: 5
Unassigned Stat Points: 2
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 6) Food Scientist
(Level 8)
Achievements: Shop Owner, First Customer (Rolling into shop
owner), Lunch Rush Success (Rolling into shop owner), Satisfied
Customers (Minor, Rolling into Shop Owner)

“Level nine?” Rhodia exclaimed, reading over the screen he had

flicked over. “I’m jealous. I’m still stuck at six, and you helped me get two
of those.”
“It seems unfair. I’m getting those because of my situation. Not
because of talent.”
“Well, everyone levels out, eventually. Tomorrow won’t be the same
as today. You see those achievements?”
“Yeah. I was going to ask about them.”
“Unless something truly crazy happens, those usually just reward
experience. And I’m guessing the ones you’re getting comes from the easy
parts of your job, stuff you get just for doing your job for real the first few
times. I just got one from you, actually.”
“So tomorrow I won’t get the same bumps…”
“And everything slows down. And I keep making you better and
better cups, and I catch up, and then I can make bigger orders for more
people.” She reached out and grabbed a cup from Arthur as he served her
the last tea and boba of the day. “Plus, I’m only competing with other
potters, who all have the same problems. It evens out.”
On the way home, Arthur gave up on his responsible plans to keep
the two stat points he had for perception or wisdom and dumped them into
vitality. His legs and feet were killing him, and he still had a long night’s
work ahead of him. He felt a rush of energy like caffeine surging into him
once the points were in place. He’d be able to make it now, probably.
The biggest problem ahead of him was making the boba pearls. He
was still rolling them by hand, and it took forever. Outside that problem, he
could have made ten times more. The dough was easy. Manual dexterity-
driven labor was hard.
When Milo caught him at the door with something that looked like a
high-energy friendship interaction, Arthur almost brushed him off. Milo
didn’t deserve that, though. When he grabbed Arthur’s arm and dragged
him towards the back of the house, Arthur just let the sparrow have his way.
“I made something today. I have to show it to you.”
 Milo unlatched the door to his shop, threw on his magic light, and
dragged Arthur in front of what looked like a large mass of pure mechanical
insanity, a mess of rough gears, tubes, and a large crank.
“What is this?”
“This, Arthur, is genius at work.” Milo grinned. “Turn the crank.”
“I’m exhausted, Milo.”
“Just turn it. Trust me.”
Arthur turned the crank, watching with alarm as a large knife
assaulted one part of a tube near the top, dropping through a slit in the
machine and audibly bottoming out on bare metal. Just beyond it, the pipe
was halved, forming a sort of half-pipe platform that was getting bashed
every now and again by what looked like a large overhead-press.
“The timing was the really hard part. Well, that and making sure the
press was exactly the right size, it kept leaving little ridges on the test stuff
mom gave me.”
“Milo, I’m… just pretend I’m stupid. What is this thing?”
“You really can’t see it?” Milo looked at the machine, confused.
Below the machine was a basket, from which he withdrew a small round
object before tossing it to Arthur. “It’s a press. For your little dough balls. It
does six of them every time you turn the crank. Dozens of them a minute.”
“Wait, what?” Arthur turned the crank again. He could see it now. It
was an extruder with a press built onto the end. The press plate had little
circular indents in it that hit the dough in the half-pipe section, forcing them
into little nearly-round balls. “This is fantastic, Milo. How’d you think of
this?”
“It’s like mom’s extruder. Only with a few more tools built in. It
wasn’t hard to blueprint. Building it was… a thing. A whole thing.”
“How much?”
“What?”
“How much do I owe you? For this. It’s incredible.”
 “You don’t have to pay me, Arthur.”
The resulting argument went on for the better part of an hour before
Arthur remembered that his new dexterity stat meant he was probably a bit
faster than Milo now. Dodging another forehead flick, he got behind him
and threw a large-coin majna down his friend’s shirt, running away before
Milo could give it back.
“Arthur, I’m going to catch you eventually. And you’re going to
have to…” Milo’s voice rang out from the shop, then stopped suddenly as
he was distracted by something. “Actually, never mind. I’m keeping this.
Two levels, Arthur. And… hell. Arthur, I just got a new skill.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

MACHINES AND PARENTS

Arthur poked his shell-shocked friend as Milo stood there. The sparrow’s
eyes panned back and forth at the empty space in front of him. “Is it good?
The skill?”
“It’s a machinery skill, Arthur. An actual machinery skill.”
“That’s amazing,” Arthur smiled and side-hugged his friend, trying
his best to share in the excitement. “I’m happy for you. And it should as
always be noted that I have no idea how good that is, or why. But I’m
psyched if you are psyched.”
“Oh, right. Your Earthling ultra-ignorance strikes again. Mechanical
skills are very good. They aren’t unheard of, and anyone can make
something mechanical if they put their mind to it. But most smiths don’t get
them, and the next closest thing is clockwork skills that jewelers get. And
they could never use clockwork skills to make something like what I just
did.”
“Because a machine’s too big?”
“Basically. And it’s more about generating force than precision,
which… Let me think of how better to explain this. It’s a specialty skill, and
pretty much every specialty skill is a gigantic deal for crafter classes. It’s
level zero right now, but…”
“Eventually, you can build automated death armor?”
“Nothing that cool. But, yeah, eventually I can make cool stuff.
Which means you need to help me carry this big heavy press to your room
so you can make your boba, and I need to get to work playing with this skill
so I can figure out how it works.” Milo glanced back down to his screen.
“And, dammit, it scales off INT. I guess I need some points there, too.”
“I could have told you that.”
After ten minutes of straining, cursing, and generally bashing their
fingers against walls, they had the boba press upstairs. Milo rushed off as
soon as he could, saying he wanted to do some leveling on his new
machinery skill.
That left Arthur working with the press for the first time, and he
found it was excellent. There were a few bugs to work out, like the fact that
the food-handling surfaces of the machine worked much better if he oiled
them a bit. But overall, it was a wonder. After getting the rough strokes of
the machine’s operation mostly worked out, he made a big batch of dough
and converted it into hundreds of boba pearls in just a minute or so.
The machine didn’t output perfectly round pearls, but neither did his
hands. For now, it was pretty close, and Milo had sized the punches on the
machine to produce pearls that almost perfectly matched the width of the
straws.
Arthur’s despair about the sheer work it would take to keep up with
the supply-side of his job dissipated pretty quickly. Especially when what
should have taken him the whole night to do only took half an hour. Which
ended up being a very good thing. After a very tiring first day, he was
asleep as soon as his head hit the pillows.

The next morning’s work was much, much easier for Arthur to come to
terms with. A few of his lunchtime customers returned, apparently not
having eaten as big of breakfasts with the knowledge that boba was now an
option. Some of his adult acquaintances had also got word of the grand
opening. Karbo, Eito, and even Itela, the church-based doctor from his first
day, stopped by to see how he was getting on and order drinks.
Arthur easily kept ahead of the pace of the orders, dishing out boba
quickly and even having time to chat with some of the customers as they
drank.
“It seems better today,” the rabbit-lady said. “Chewier. And…
something else.”
“It might be levels? I picked up quite a bit from opening day.”
“That would do it. Keep it up. It does get slower from here. But
that’s part of the long grind of becoming an adult.”
Overall, the repeat customers said stuff roughly to the effect of he
was making better drinks than before. Arthur confirmed it himself as he
tried the first glass of his own product he’d drunk in the last day or so. He
was slightly better at making boba now, in a way even he could notice. The
pearls were chewier and had a nice lingering taste instead of just a plain
flour taste.
He had improved. It felt a bit like cheating, since the system was
driving most of the change, but it was also a product of his work and effort.
He’d accept it.
Soon enough, the morning rush was over. He had picked up a fair
amount of coins, more than enough to justify his needs for the day. That
morning, he had asked Ella what to do with the excess, and her advice was
to hold on to everything he could in anticipation of buying better
equipment, more space, and generally completing his loadout with tools
that would last him the rest of his life.
It was good advice, but also weird for him. The equipment he was
using now was just fine for his purposes. Really, the only thing he needed to
improve in the short term were the cups, and those would improve as
Rhodia sharpened her craft.
He'd figure it out later.
 For better or worse, the costs of tea leaves and dough for the pearls
were pretty low. Even if he had to spend double the amount on ingredients,
he’d still have enough left over. But unexpected costs were a thing, and he
had no idea what the ongoing expenses of the stand would prove to be.
For now, he could use the money to maintain the stand, contribute to
the household he lived in, and save some money for a rainy day fund.
Soon enough, he was prepping for the lunch rush. His nerves were
already kicking in, remembering the sheer pressure of keeping up with
yesterday’s speed. He’d need to clean cups, make tea, serve, fetch water,
take payments, and just generally run himself ragged keeping up with
things.
And then, like a blessing from the gods, he saw the surly owl-child,
prowling the streets like a gift.
“Hey!” Arthur yelled. “You. Want work?”
The owl approached cautiously, a little less fearful than yesterday, if
he was reading her correctly.
“Maybe. What is it?”
“I’m about to have a lot of customers. I can’t keep up by myself. I
need someone to clean dishes and fetch water. Maybe some other stuff. Can
you make change?”
The owl nodded.
“Good. I can pay you.”
“How much?” The owl’s face was once again shaded with
suspicion.
“Uh…” Arthur wracked his brain, trying to figure out what would
be an appropriate amount. Help was necessary for his physical wellbeing,
and providing a better experience for customers was a big deal. He was
making plenty, from what he could tell.
“Two coins?” he said, drawing them out of his money bin, and
pressing them into the owl’s hands. The kid just stared up at him, not saying
anything. “It’s not enough? We can… adjust, I guess, based on what you
end up doing.”
“Do you not know… normal things?” the owl said. “It’s like you
don’t know things that everyone else does.”
“That’s, well, that’s a long story. But close enough, yeah. I don’t
know normal things.”
The owl took one of the coins and pressed it back into his hand.
“One coin. That’s the standard wage for help from a system-less person.”
“So it’s what you pay kids?”
“Yes. If you pay more, it’s charity. I don’t take charity.”
“Fair enough. Okay, get ready. Here they come.”
The owl was right about being unskilled. She broke the lid of one of
the cups and the body of another as she tried to get the hang of dunking the
cup in soapy water, cleaning them out, and rinsing them. She made change
well, but slowly, and a few times Arthur had to step in, do the mental math,
and expedite the process.
Overall, though, this is helping. After the first several minutes of the
owl warming up to the job, the extra help lowered the time it took to finish
an order to be faster than the rate that customers were coming in. So Arthur
wasn’t making his customers wait for other orders to finish before their
drink was filled. It made a significant improvement on how well the cart
functioned.

“Well, that worked out,” Arthur said, handing the kid the last of the lunch-
rush boba in a glass of un-pepped tea. It wouldn’t do to stunt her growth
with the demon world equivalent of caffeine. “It helped a lot, actually. I
don’t know what your schedule is like, but I’d take your help whenever you
can give it.”
“That’s… most days,” the child said, thoughtfully. “You want me
that often?”
“Sure. It’s worth it what I get out of it.”
 Arthur looked down at the girl. The help she gave was fine, and
would probably only get better, so he didn’t need to fix much there. She
was, however, dirty. So were her clothes, which were also just a bit
threadbare in places, fraying around the edges.
Maybe her family is poor? Arthur hadn’t seen a lot of poverty in the
city. On the contrary, it seemed to be a place where almost everyone was
functionally rich. His own income was high compared to his needs,
although he suspected his offworlder status had given him a leg up in that
regard. Still, there must be outliers, somewhere.
“Here,” he said, pulling five coins out of the till. It was a good
chunk of his profit for the day, but without immediate non-starch expenses
to deal with, he thought he could handle it. “Buy some clothes.”
“I don’t want charity.”
She’s poor somehow. That’s the second time the charity thing has
come up.
“This isn’t charity. I need the stand to look a certain way. I can’t ask
you to buy a uniform with your own money. Buy clean clothes. Clean up.
It’s just part of the job.”
The owl glared at him for a few moments before softening slightly
and swiping the money from his hands.
“Fine. But I’ll only wear them for work.”
“Your call, but sure. Whatever you think.”
As the owl turned and beat it to parts unknown, Spiky appeared
around a corner, watching her leave with an odd expression on his face.
“Oh, hey. I wanted you to know that I’m getting experience from the
majicka explanation. An achievement, even. I picked up a whole level from
it.”
“Good! I’m glad that your explanation helped more than just me.”
“What was that all about?” Spiky nodded in the direction of the owl.
“Selling boba to kids now?”
 “Her? I hired her. I need help on this stand, at least until I get better
at things.”
“Did it actually help? Hiring her, I mean.”
“Oh, sure. She’d be worth it for dish-washing alone. And I think
she’s getting better.”
“Well, good. I’m sure she can use it. Do you know how much to pay
her?”
“She said a coin a day.”
“That’s a little high if she doesn’t know what she’s doing, but not
too far out of the realm of pay.” Spiky put seven small coins down on the
counter. “Pepped, please. Lots of cream.”
“You’ll have to wait a bit. I’m fully out of boba.”
“No problem. Anyway, I’m glad you could get help. And glad it’s
her, really. I don’t think anyone knows what to do with that one.”
“Because of the chip on her shoulder? She’s a surly little thing.”
“That, among other things. But you’re doing a good thing there.
People will appreciate it.”
“Because I hired a kid? I needed to hire a kid. Is it that odd?”
“Oh, no,” Spiky said. “That’s common. But you don’t actually know
about her, do you?”
“No, not beyond a few conversations.”
“Her parents died in a monster wave a while back, Arthur. She’s an
orphan.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

SKIPPING HOME

A bunch of information suddenly clicked into place for Arthur. A distrustful

kid, one who was just a little dirtier and less taken care of than all the
others. A bad attitude that was always on the defensive. A reluctance to take
charity. It all made much more sense now.
“You didn’t know? What did you think?” Spiky said. “It’s pretty
obvious nobody is taking care of her.”
“I thought maybe her family was poor or something. And I’ve only
talked with her a few times. They… died? In a monster wave? I don’t even
know what that is.”
“It’s an occasional thing. You’ve noticed the city has walls? That’s
why. Every once in a while, a bunch of monsters overflow from dungeons
out in the wild, which are always popping up. They group up and start
marching. If the city’s in the way…”
“They attack it?”
“Yeah. Which isn’t as dangerous as it sounds. We have a big wall.
We have people like Karbo, plus everyone in the town showing up to do
their part, even if it’s just throwing rocks. But that’s only if you’re inside
the wall. Her parents were outside of it in the last monster wave, they were
some kind of travelers.”
“And nobody takes care of her? That doesn’t seem like this city.”
Arthur considered all the people who had more or less shoved resources and
opportunities into his hands. “Everyone talks about duties all the time. I
can’t believe nobody has a duty to her.”
“Oh, we do. All of us. Everyone in the city. There are places that
take care of kids like that, and half the moms in the city would scoop her up
in a second if they could.”
“Then why not?”
“She won’t accept it. Says she doesn’t want charity, wanders around
looking for salvage and odd work. People try to give her work sometimes,
even if they don’t need the help, but she can sniff it out when the work’s
fake and runs off.”
“And you can’t force her to accept help? What’s that, another duty?”
“Just a rule. People can refuse help. Even kids.”
“Huh.” Arthur looked the way the girl had gone, wondering if she’d
be able to tell that he knew her background once she came back. “Don’t tell
her I know, okay? Not that you would, but…”
“Oh, believe me, Arthur. I wouldn’t tell her for all the world. Why
would I ruin it?”
After Spiky moved on, Arthur worked for a few more hours before
closing up shop. Talking to the customers had given him a better idea of
how food stands worked, schedule-wise, and it turned out that nearly every
stand had a different schedule. Breakfast stands worked in the morning,
sometimes even sharing space with another occupant that focused on more
nighttime friendly foods. He was expected to be there several hours a day,
but any worries about constant twelve-hour work-marathons vanished with
the conversation. He decided to work from around the time people went to
work until just a bit after the lunch rush.
Today, that meant he was still missing the initiate meeting in the
park. Tomorrow, though, he should be able to make it. And it would leave
him time to experiment with new flavors and new teas as well.
“We were unrelenting in our pursuit of your deaths.”
“Oh, hi.” Arthur started up, face to face with Mizu for the first time
in days. “I haven’t seen you in a bit. How have you been?”
“Fine.” She slid one coin over the counter. “I would like one of your
drinks, please.”
“No, no. See, when you spend two days digging that.” Arthur
pointed over at the well. “You get your drinks for free.”
He saw a wave of blue wash through her cheeks as he finished
talking. Was it some kind of water-demon version of blushing, maybe?
“I can pay.”
“I know you can. I won’t let you. So what will it be?”
Making one cup of tea was easy. Arthur flipped his sign to closed as
he did. Mizu ordered the strongest, most caffeinated combination of things
he had, then sighed as she took her first drink of it.
“This is better now.”
“It should be. I’ve picked up a lot of levels.”
“Have you?”
He flicked her over his status screen, which was only a bit more
improved after the lunch rush.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 10
STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 8
PER: 12
WIS: 10
INT: 5
 Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 7) Food Scientist
(Level 8)
Achievements: Shop Owner, Employer (Rolling into shop
owner)

“Fast,” she said, looking at the screen and sipping her tea. She
wasn’t surprised that he had shown her. At the lower, learning-the-ropes
levels, Milo had said, it wasn’t uncommon to share status screens. There
wasn’t much worth hiding. It was mostly adults, like Eito, who hid the
details of their overall screens.
“Yeah. I just put the last two points into wisdom, which I hope was
the right choice. I thought about more vitality.”
She shook her head. “You don’t need more vitality right now. Eight
is enough to make most days easy, in terms of fatigue. More perception
would be good though. It’s good for almost everything. Putting points there
is never a mistake.”
It was one of the longest sentences he had ever heard her say.
“Can I ask you a question?” Arthur asked.
“Yes.”
“You said once that you were quiet even for a water elemental. Are
there… loud ones? Like Karbo?”
“Nobody is like Karbo. No matter what kind of demon.” She smiled
slightly. “I saw him forget that churches have doors once. It took them a
week to fix.”
“You know what I mean, though.”
She shook her head as she sucked one of the pearls from the bottom
of her cup.
“All water elementals are… calm. We speak with each other only
when it’s needed. And a bit more, when we are friends. But not like others.
We are learning and changing, but we still talk less.”
 “Ah. Let me know if I’m ever talking too much. Humans on Earth
sort of talked a lot. I don’t think I was an exception.”
“Don’t worry. I like listening. Tell me more about your stand.”
Arthur spent a few minutes letting her know about how things had
been going, about how busy the day before had been, and how he was
struggling to keep up with it. She nodded along, and seemed especially
interested when he told her about employing the owl-girl. It was subtle, but
he could tell she was listening, not just suffering his monologue silently.
“That is good,” she said.
“What about your work? It’s good?”
“It is. It’s not like yours. It takes time, but it isn’t hard.”
“I doubt that. Although I’ll admit that I don’t really know what a
weller does. I’d love to see you work, sometime.”
“You would?”
“I would.”
She stood up from her stool, handing back her glass and grabbing
him very lightly by the wrist.
“Come, then,” Mizu said.
“Right now?”
“Are you doing anything else?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Then let’s go.”
He followed her as she walked fluidly through the town, politely
returning greetings to the few people she seemed to know. It turned out not
to be a short walk, and Arthur’s improved stats helped him keep a pace that
would have been unreasonable just a few days before.
After several minutes, they came to a small, nondescript building,
one made of simple brick with a heavy metal door and virtually no other
features.
 “It looks like a church,” Arthur said. “The churches here, I mean.”
She nodded.
“You work in here?”
“In a way. There’s more in there than it appears.” She pulled a small
token from one of her pockets and waved it in front of the door, where it
unlocked with a click. “The other wellers will be home. I can show you
everything.”
His eyes took a moment to adjust to the inside of the building before
he could see much, and once they did, he saw there wasn’t much to see
beyond a few dim lights and a staircase heading down.
Mizu didn’t hesitate, taking to the stairs and walking down. Arthur
followed, seeing little besides a dim glow beyond Mizu. He started to hear
more and more. There was water down there, somewhere, rushing and
splashing around.
“Wow.” When they reached the bottom, Arthur found the water. It
was something unlike anything Arthur had ever seen before. The room they
had entered had a large whirlpool at its center, maybe five or ten feet wide
at the mouth. But this whirlpool seemed to be running in reverse, sucking
up water from below rather than swirling down. At the top, the water
entered several channels through gates cut into the stone, from where it
presumably flowed on through tunnels to provide the city with the water it
needed to function.
“You did this?”
“Not me. The city has a master weller. Look.” She pointed at a place
on the ground, where Arthur could see runes etched into the rocks. “He
created the flow of the water here. It’s the deepest, most productive well I
know of. These runes power it.”
She took his hand, pulling him down and setting his finger on the
cuts in the rock. He could feel the rock humming with energy in a way he
couldn’t explain or understand.
“Majicka. We add ours, every day, to keep the runes powered. And
then, where we can, we improve the well.”
 “How?”
“Balancing the content of the water. Keeping it clean. Even I can
improve the output of this well, gradually.”
Mizu let go of his hand, sitting back on the stones by the whirlpool
and looking at it. The room sounded a bit like being near a river, and the air
was wet and heavy in a pleasantly cool sort of way.
“I love it here,” she said.
“I think I do, too.”
After that, Arthur couldn’t think of a single thing to say, but for
once, that seemed just fine. They sat there side by side, watching the water
for a long time.
“You can find your way home from here?”
After an unknown-to-Arthur amount of time had passed, Mizu
seemed satisfied and led him out of the underground and back into the light.
Neither of them said anything until they were outside, and then suddenly
the spell was broken. It was okay to talk again.
“I think so. It’s that way?”
“Yes.”
“Thanks for showing me that. It was amazing.”
“Thank you for seeing it with me. It made it new, for me.”
Arthur nodded, and she turned to leave. He watched her go for a
moment, then turned to make his way back to his own home.
“Arthur?” She paused in the street and looked at him intently as he
turned around.
“Yes?”
“Thank you for knowing when not to speak. It was… right.”
Arthur nodded, then walked away, silently blessing the old man at
the in-between place who somehow had known just what Arthur needed
when he asked for a nice place. Yes, the demon world took some getting
used to, and yes, it was taking a lot of work to find his place here.
But for all that the demon world was different from Earth, he had
never felt as light and happy as he did now. It was like gravity barely
affected him. And he didn’t have it in him to walk back home in any kind of
dignified manner.
Instead, for the first time in two lifetimes, Arthur skipped his way
home.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

LOST CHILD SCRY

The next week went by fast, and slow, depending on how Arthur
looked at it. up to that point, every day had brought something vastly
different, some new test, struggle, or triumph. It had all been novel, new,
and changing.
People had warned him, again and again, that eventually things
would slow down. The levels would still flow in, but as drops rather than a
big torrent. The progress would come, but only with painstaking work.
Eventually, they said, it would all calm down.
He had heard them, understood them, and believed them. He just
hadn’t expected it to happen so soon.
And so it was slow. Every moment was a lot like the last, but it
wasn’t boring. He was getting better and better at his job, learning a bit
more about the customers, getting to a point where he understood what the
regulars wanted and could prepare it for them before they even asked for it.
He also knew what a lot of them did for a living. It was fun.
In an unexpected way, it was even more fun now that he wasn’t
alone working the stand. The owl-girl wasn’t talkative, really. If anything,
she actively resisted conversation. But she was there.
 He had learned, finally, that her name was Lily. That was 100% of
what he had learned about her, except what a few other people had filled
him in on. But she was there, hanging out, making things slightly more fun
just by being another person on his side of the counter.
She worked hard, too. By the time they finished out the second day,
she was handling anything he threw at her and anticipating things before
they even came up. His rinse-buckets were not only always full, but were
now always clean. The cups were restocked as soon as she had them
washed, fully dried.
Once, he even found that she had stolen from the till and
disappeared, only to have her return a half-hour later with more ice, his
change, and the credit for saving the day by keeping the larger-than-average
order of drinks cold during the lunchtime rush.
“It’s always that way on church days,” she said. “Nobody wants to
sit through a whole sermon dry.”
It was also fast, or at least felt that way. At the end of the week, all
the days that came before blended together. It felt like one long day, and
nowhere near a week. It did come with benefits, though. However slow his
progress was, it was still progress.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 11
STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 8
PER: 14
WIS: 10
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 8), Food Scientist (Level 8)
Achievements: Shop Owner, Employer (Rolling into shop owner)

Another level and a couple of points in perception made a difference

in plenty of ways, and not always in ways that made sense.
 Somehow, Milo’s machine began producing boba pearls that were a
little rounder. And with no improvements to his formula, Arthur started
getting tea with flavors that were a little better balanced, pearl textures that
became a little chewier, and an aftertaste that was just a little more
satisfying.
Even that got boring after a few days. His customers were satisfied,
business was going well, and he started praying for something different to
happen. Anything, really.
“Where is she?” Arthur said to himself. He hadn’t realized how
much he had come to rely on Lily’s help until one day she suddenly wasn’t
there. “Damn. Folks, I’m sorry, I need just a minute to do a bit of catching
up.”
He managed to make it through the day with only a few hangups,
but still had a bad feeling about it the entire day. It wasn’t just that the owl
girl needed the money. She did, and he doubted she’d make more
elsewhere, or risk the steady work even if she could. Despite all her prickly
demeanor, she seemed to like the work. She never shirked and had only
been improving. He thought he had even caught her smiling once or twice.
She wouldn’t stop, just like that.
“Milo!” Arthur yelled, just after the lunch rush, as he saw his friend
in the distance.
“Oh, hey!” Milo walked over, smiling. “I feel like I hardly see you
now. When you come home, you’re always either tired or walking on the
Mizu-cloud.”
“You know how it is for us professional adults. It’s a go, go, go
world.”
“Yeah, yeah. Give me one of those green ones you made, okay? I’ll
hang out for a bit.”
Arthur had recently sourced a kind of powdered tea that was very
close to what he knew as Matcha back on Earth, except a little earthier in
flavor and made out of peas, if the word of the shop keep was to be
believed. He loved it not only because it let him offer another flavor, but
because it could be made cup-by-cup without steeping a giant batch of tea.
He whipped one up and handed it over.
“So what’s up? You look worried.”
“I am. Lily’s missing. Well, maybe. She’s not here. And she should
be.”
“You think she’s hurt, or something?”
“I have no idea. She didn’t seem any different when she left
yesterday.” The worst was, it was a big city with lots of buildings, alleys,
and other places the kid might be holed up in. “How do you even find a kid
like that?”
“A lost child scry, probably.”
“A what?”
“A lost child scry. You mean you never got lost in the market, or
anything? Oh, right, Earthling. I do sometimes forget.”
A lost child scry, it turned out, was a citywide spell, legitimized by
the government, and cast by the church. It was used for quickly finding lost
children. It was a sort of magic version of the PA system at a grocery store
in that sense. Little kids would go missing, parents would panic, and a two-
way link would be established between them, letting each know the location
of the other.
“It’s mostly for toddlers, and it doesn’t wear off until you get your
system class. She doesn’t have hers yet, so it should still be active.”
“So how do I do that, then?”
“You? I don’t know if you can. It’s mostly for parents and
guardians. That kind of thing.”
“I don’t think she even has that.” Arthur drummed his hands on the
counter of his stand for a bit before suddenly making a decision and
flipping his sign to closed. “Where does this thing get cast from? Like, who
do I talk to?”
“I’m afraid I can’t just ‘fiddle with the spell’ like you asked, Arthur. It’s not
like that.”
The person to talk to about the lost child scry, it turned out, was
Itela. And while she seemed actively pained at the thought of a lost child,
she was proving very bad at delivering easy, convenient answers.
“It’s a spell. I have to think you can like… tweak it?” Arthur said,
keenly aware he knew nothing about how majicka worked. “Like just cast it
at an angle, or something.”
“This isn’t the kind of thing where you are going to put some spin
on it and hope you get lucky, Arthur. It’s a clerical spell.”
“Oh, shit,” Milo said. He had tagged along. “I didn’t know that it
was clerical.”
“Clerical spells,” Itela explained, “Are spells cast by clerics. Only
by clerics. And the reason they are only cast by clerics is that the spells
draw their powers from the gods. The god of the right, in this specific case.”
“I don’t think I’m following.”
“She’s…” Milo said, before glancing at the expert, who gave him a
go-ahead type of gesture. “She’s like the god of putting things right. All of
her spells have to do with correcting wrongness.”
“And this isn’t wrong enough? Tell me her name. I’ll pray to her. I’ll
explain how it’s wrong.”
“It’s not like that. The gods aren’t people.”
“Well, they might be.” Itela broke in. “It’s an open theological
question.”
“Just…” Arthur slumped his shoulders, defeated. “Just start from the
beginning, I guess.”
“The gods, as we call them, are always represented as individual
entities.” Itela gestured towards a statue, one that was perfectly symmetrical
in all respects, and clearly sculpted to enhance that impression. “But we
don’t actually know if they are people, in the sense we understand things to
be individual thinking entities. What we do know, what we're sure of, is that
they operate as forces.”
“Like physical forces?”
“Similar, but different. The particular god we are talking about acts
as a force for a return to acceptable normalcy. Or, as Milo put it, setting
things right. And a child away from its mother, afraid and alone, is a pure
wrong. Something that is wrong on a cosmic, spiritual scale.”
“And thus the god is willing to step in and fix it?”
“Exactly. But you aren’t this child’s parent. Or guardian. Or relative.
Would you even call yourself her friend?”
“I don’t know if she thinks of me that way. I’d like to be.”
Itela patted him warmly on the shoulder. “I know you would. But
the spell isn’t cheap to cast, Arthur. And in all but a very few situations, it
would reject you as a valid target. The only way I can see this working is if,
first, you really genuinely feel responsible for this child. Not that you are
worried, or that you think you might be responsible, but that you feel it’s
wrong that you can’t find her.”
“And second?”
“She’d have to think the same thing. And I think I know the child
you are talking about. She’s an owl, yes? Prickly? Defensive?”
“That’s the one.”
“I thought so. That child, who trusts no-one, would have to feel, on
some level, that it was wrong that you couldn’t find her. Whether she
admits to it or not. And these two things are harder than you think. They
can’t be faked. And I can only cast so many spells per day, Arthur. If
someone comes to me sick, or in a dangerous mental state, or any number
of different things, they might find me tapped. And it’s just too large of a
risk to take casually.”
Arthur understood. Some days there were outlier amounts of
emergencies to deal with. And so long as there was a limit to what she could
do, it made sense to be careful with her magical resources.
 “I mean, I have a food stand. I make snacks, in liquid form. It’s not
that important,” Arthur said, lamely. “But… it just seems like she’s
supposed to be there. It feels wrong that she’s not. And I don’t know that
she’s in trouble. Maybe she just ditched the job. But I don’t see it.”
“Why?”
Arthur thought about that for a second.
“When I met her, she wasn’t anything, besides suspicious. She was
just pissed, I guess. Angry. And I think if that’s all she was, if it wasn’t
something that could have been helped. And she wouldn’t have been very
good at the job.” He was babbling now, aware that he wasn’t making much
sense. “But she was good. Not because she had the system, but because she
was trying really hard. And I have to think… I don’t know. It just doesn’t
seem like she would have tried hard if it didn’t feel right.”
Itela tapped her fingers on the desk.
“I know it’s silly. And I’m not her parents, or her guardian, or
whatever,” Arthur said. “I guess I’m sorry for taking your time. I’ll find her
another way.”
Arthur had wheeled around and made it through the door with an
alarmed Milo in tow before he heard Itela’s voice behind him.
“You know what? Screw it. Let’s give it a shot.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

NEW RESPONSIBILITIES

“What do I have to do?”

“What do you have to do?” Itela asked. “Not a thing. I however,
have to do sort of a lot.”
Itela stood from her desk, suddenly glowing with light.
“Being a god is about being part of the universe, a medium that
everything resonates with. Being a cleric is about resonating a bit harder
with that material than most.”
“What’s she doing?” Arthur asked, nudging Milo.
“Shh. Let her work.” Milo’s eyes were open. “Normally, you have to
be hurt to see this.”
“Hear me, goddess. A child is lost. They are not where they should
be.”
Everywhere in the room, runes started to light. On the walls, floor,
ceiling, and even on some of the furniture, intricate shapes started to shine,
shaped by glowing lines as fine as a hair. Arthur could feel the air vibrating
with sheer power.
 “They say she’s the highest level of anything in the whole city.
Higher than the mayor.”
“Shh, boys. This is the tricky part.” Itela walked over to Arthur,
placing her hand lightly on his chest, palm spread. “Look at the heart of this
boy. See beyond his words, goddess. Beyond what he says to what he feels
is true.”
She raised her hand from his chest, bringing a glowing mote of light
out of him as she did.
“Find the child, goddess. Wherever she is in this city. Find her, if
she wants to be found. And if she wants to be found by this boy, help them.
Bring them together, regardless of what words they might say.”
Raising her hand towards the sky, Itela suddenly pulsed with power
as the mote of light began to spin and brighten, shooting away unhindered
by the walls of the room into the world beyond. Itela’s hand suddenly came
down, slapping into Arthur’s shoulder as she braced herself on him for
balance.
“Whew.” All the glow was gone from around her. “That confirms it.
The spell is absolutely not supposed to be used that way. It fought me every
step.”
“It didn’t work?” Arthur looped his arm around Itela’s back,
supporting her as she made her way back to her chair and plopped down.
“I wouldn’t say that, but you tell me. Are you feeling anything out
of the ordinary?”
“No, I don’t think…” Arthur stopped talking as he realized he really
did feel a bit different. “Actually, how is this spell supposed to work? I feel
like I’m getting sucked into something. Or somewhere.”
“That’s it.” Itela smiled, weakly. “At least all that majicka didn’t go
entirely to waste. I’m absolutely tapped.”
“So I just… follow this? The feeling?”
“It looks like it. Of course, that just means it worked on your end. If
that little girl doesn't want you there, it’ll just lead you around the city for a
bit. Nowhere near her, of course. You have to hope she wanted help, and
you’re who she thought of as maybe able to give her that.”
“Any reason she should?” Milo said. “You haven't known her very
long.”
“In a way, I sort of hope it doesn't work,” Arthur said. “If I'm her
best shot at help… that means she doesn't have much to rely on at all.”

Ten minutes later, Arthur and Milo were racing through the city, dodging
slower-moving pedestrians as they ducked through alleys, streets, and even
through parks.
“Are you sure this is working, Arthur?”
“Nope. Not at all. But it seems like this is the way we should be
going.”
“Could she even have walked this far? This is getting pretty close to
the wall.”
“I was going to ask about that. Why is it so sparse?”
“When the city was built, the wall was built soon after. The idea was
to leave room to grow.”
The closely packed residential and business-related buildings of the
more central part of the city had long since given way to warehouses,
salvage yards, and even the odd completely vacant lot here and there.
“And the ring of nothing? By the wall?”
“The city will only let people build so close to the wall. For their
safety, and I guess so they can organize supplies and people when we get
swarmed.” They were standing at the edge of the cleared ring now, able to
look miles in each direction across the flat, packed earth that ran the
perimeter of the city.
“It doesn't look like there's anything here.” Arthur's heart sunk. It
was beginning to look more and more like the spell hadn’t worked.
 “Oh, don't give up yet. Are you still getting directions from it? It's
still telling you to move forward?”
“Yeah.” Arthur could still feel the subtle pull of the spell deep in his
chest. “But now it's just pointing at the wall. A little to the left there. And
there's nothing here.”
“Well, maybe,” Milo said. “But we came all this way. We might as
well see it through.”
They walked across the cleared area.
There can't be anything here. Which means I can't help. But it also
means she doesn't want me too. Why are those things equally sad to me?
Then, all of a sudden, he saw it. There was a board on the ground. It
was one of many. Bits and pieces of various litter and debris apparently
found their way out here pretty often. But this particular board was special,
not only because the spell was screaming to him, but because it was just big
enough, flat enough, and intact enough to conceal something underneath it.
Arthur bent down to the ground, curled his fingers under the wood
and flipped it over, revealing what against all odds looked like an honest-to-
god tunnel dug into the earth.
“What in the world?” Milo said. “How is this here? Do you think
she dug it?”
“Only one way to find out.” Arthur was already in the hole on his
hands and knees. The tunnel extended at least a bit further onwards, but
exactly how far was hard to say. He thought he could see a bigger space in
the distance, but it was entirely possible it was just an illusion of some kind,
a trick of the light.
“There's no way it's safe in there. And if it doesn't cave in on you,
you'll get stuck.”
“If it could cave in on me, it could cave in on her, too.” Arthur
crawled forward a bit, brushing the sides of the tunnel with one shoulder,
but not quite both. “I think it's wide enough, anyway.”
“Barely.”
 Arthur ignored Milo's squawking as he continued on into the tunnel,
praying that lily had cut it uniformly throughout, and that he wouldn't
actually get stuck halfway through. Or that the spell wasn't just leading him
to literally the worst, scariest part of the entire city just to screw with him.
Luckily, it seemed the tunnel would stay wide enough for him to
make his way through. He was getting covered with clay and dirt
everywhere, and had to stop occasionally to spit out particles of dirt his hair
had rubbed from the roof and dropped into his mouth.
As Arthur’s eyes adjusted to the light, he was able to confirm that
the tunnel did, in fact, open up at the end. After several feet of travel, he
eventually came to a chamber about three times as wide as the tunnel and
dug just a bit deeper into the earth, reinforced by boards propped up with
planks.
Here and there in dug-out ledges on the walls were a few
belongings, mostly of the practical object variety interspersed with little
chunks of shiny scrap, set up like the porcelain knick-knacks on an old
lady's hallway shelves. There were candles, what appeared to be a bundle of
socks, a basin and washrag, and a few other necessities packed into the
room. In the center of it all was a pile of rags, cast-off-towels and blankets
that bulged several inches from the ground.
A pile of rags, blankets, and towels that appeared to be breathing.
“Hey. Hey!” Arthur said, shaking the pile of cloth and feeling a
small, fragile form moving beneath it. “Wake up.”
“I can't.” He heard a muffled voice coming from under the blankets.
“Too tired.”
Arthur uncovered the head and found a clammy, sweaty face, one he
could tell was feverish somehow even through the feathers.
“I'm gonna need better than that. Are you okay?”
“I'm...” She stopped talking for a few seconds, eyes scanning the
room. “Fine. I'm fine. Cleaning more cups. Will have them done soon.”
“Ok, I think that's enough.” Arthur reached under the blankets,
hooking Lily's arms and dragging her after him into the tunnel. It was just
possible to carry her and move backwards at the same time, however
slowly, and however much she complained through her delirium that she
didn't need help.
“Let me sleep,” she said. “I'll have the ice up soon. Let me sleep.
Don't need help.”
“Shh. I'm gonna get you somewhere safer.” Arthur finally managed
to get his feet out of the hole, yelling for Milo to drag him the rest of the
way out.
“Oh, wow, you got her. She doesn't look good at all, Arthur,” Milo
said.
“No, she doesn't,” Arthur said. “We need a doctor. Or a cleric? I
don't know how it works. I haven't been sick here yet.”
“Doctors first, and they call the clerics if it's something they can't
handle. There's overlap between what they do, but this looks like normal
sickness.”
“She's delirious. That's not normal.”
“It's not good, but still in the range of normal sickness. Come on.
We need to get her somewhere that can help. That means finding people.”

“And what is this?” Ella said. “And who is this? Milo, this child needs a
doctor. Now.”
“She's had one. Four fever-break spells, a pill, a potion, and a bed-
rest plan somewhere clean and soft. That's here.”
“This is your little assistant?” Ella reached over to Arthur and half
took, half jerked Lily out of his arms. “How'd she get sick?”
“No idea. She didn't say anything about feeling bad. She just didn't
show up to work one day.”
“And you still found her?”
“Arthur got Itela to cast a missing child spell. Led him right to her.”
 “That shouldn't have worked.”
“Mom, we know. It was quite the thing. But we have… bigger
things.” He waved an arm at the little girl. “Little invalids who need care.
We can cover the details later.”
“Fine, fine. Point taken. Arthur, I’m going to give this girl a bath. A
nice, cool one. Take money from the jar in the kitchen, and go buy her some
clothes. Pajamas, probably. Fit doesn't matter much with pajamas.”
“I can pay for that,” Arthur said. “My responsibility.”
“Says who?”
“Says the spell working.”
“Can't argue with that. See you in a few.”
An hour later, the tailor got the clothes done. Telling them he had a
sick orphan to take care of was more than enough incentive for the tailor to
get the work done quickly. Arthur gave up his bed, and within a few
minutes from the delivery of the pajamas, Ella had the little girl cleaned,
deposited in warm sheets, and looking a good deal better.
At that point, Arthur had nothing to do besides wait. He tried that for
about five minutes before he came to the conclusion that just waiting was
an impossibility.
He didn't have a lot of tools in his toolbox, but when people were
sick, you made them chicken soup. If tea could help in any way, he was
going to figure out how.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

PASSIVE MAJICKA

“No medicinal tea leaves? None?”

“For the third time, Arthur, that's not a thing.” The restaurant supply
store manager was doing his best to stay calm in the face of Arthur's worry-
driven disbelief. “There's medicine, and there's tea. The best I can do for
you are some brews that are supposed to help you sleep.”
“Do they?”
“Anything does if you think it does, and it doesn't have pep. But
really? Probably not.”
“Dammit. There must be something.”
“Not that I know of. At least not here. If you really want to try, there
are alchemist supply stores. They might be able to help you, but I don't
know. It seems like if it were that easy, someone would have done it by
now.”

Ten minutes later, Arthur was out of breath in a new store, one filled with
cauldrons, odd tools, and the best-quality glassware Arthur had seen
anywhere in this world.
“Whoa now. Slow down,” the wind elemental behind the counter
said. “There are lots of things you could break, running in here like that.
What's the hurry?”
“I want to buy… leaves, I guess. Leaves that are medicine, or used
to make medicine?”
“For someone? Son, if you’re here to pick up someone's order, you
are going to have to squeeze more information out of them than that.”
“No, look.” Arthur flicked over a heavily censored version of his
screen. “I'm a teamaker. I have a sick kid at my house. She has medicine for
now, I just… I want her to have something for when she wakes up.”
“And you think boiling some leaves will make medicine that does
that?” The wind elemental leaned forward. “You do know, of course, that
this is insane?”
“I don't, actually. I'm an offworlder.”
“Ah, got it. Yes, that would explain some of the insanity.”
“It's not possible? To make medicinal tea, I mean.”
“Well, it's unlikely. Alchemy is… complex. Most ingredients are
meant to be refined, mixed with adjuvants that make them work better, and
enhanced through various skills, via stats and majicka. Boiling them just
isn't enough.”
“Well, I want to try,” Arthur said. “Money is no object.”
“Oh, I think you will find it is. But… child, you say?”
“A sick child. An owl. A cute, angry owl who doesn't want help but
desperately needs it.”
“Oof, I surrender.” The wind elemental ducked over to a shelf,
pulling out a few boxes. “These are your best bet. A variety of leaf-based
reagents. Petals and the like. We sell them to beginner alchemists, so they
can work through a bunch of ingredients to push their skills forward. Take
this, boil it, and see if it turns into something.”
 “How will I know if they work?” Arthur put up his hands
defensively as the wind elemental huffed in frustration. “I know, I know. I
just don't have any way of knowing if what I make is medicine. Do you sell
appraisal rods? Efficacy scries?”
“If we did, you couldn't afford them. Don't worry, kid. If you make
this work, I suspect you won't have to guess at it. The system will let you
know.”

Luckily, the medicine Lily had taken was a sedative, and Arthur didn't
disturb the owl one bit as he dragged all his equipment out to the yard. Soon
enough, the yard was a mess, heat sources and pots crammed on every flat
surface available, overflowing onto stones, garden borders, and just about
every other place where something could be safely balanced.
It was like getting his primary class skill all over again. He was
mixing various medicinal ingredients and teas leaves together, boiling them
for varying lengths of time, messing with concentrations, and generally just
manipulating as many variables as he could.
One of the big differences between Earth and the Demon World was
how primitive the latter's technology ladder was when the system didn't
interfere with its skill-enhancing cheats. Without system skills and the same
amount of experience, a blacksmith on Earth would easily best their Demon
World counterpart. To the extent people could do amazing things, it was
because they knew how to do so in the context of their skills, squeezing the
most benefit out of the system possible.
That meant, in a lot of ways, the Demon World was more advanced,
almost to the point of being post-scarcity. But they had major gaps in their
knowledge for things that the system wasn't participating in, like finding the
medicinal value in leaves.
And for the Arthur of that moment, it didn't matter that with the
system they could make pills that would close wounds in seconds. It only
mattered that it couldn’t do what he needed at the moment. There was a gap
to fill, and he was going to fill it, odds be damned.
 He knew that some of the leaves must have medicinal qualities.
Some teas were caffeinated, a type of medicine all its own, one that had
real, measurable effects. There just had to be some of the same effects
hiding out in other ingredients, waiting to be found. It was just a matter of
finding them.
And yet nothing was clicking. Lily was still asleep, but she wouldn't
be forever. That was great, unless you were also trying to make her
something comforting for when she woke up, something that would make
her feel cared for. Something, Arthur realized with a shock, that he hoped
would make her stay.
“No progress yet?” Ella came out to the yard, carrying a sandwich
and a glass of milk for Arthur, who accepted them gratefully.
“Not yet. It's looking more and more like the alchemy shop guy
might be right.” Arthur almost dropped his sandwich as Ella brought one of
his test-batch samples close to her face, looking like she might be taking a
drink. Luckily, she saw his shock and pulled back at the last moment.
“Bad idea?” she said.
“Very bad. I have no idea what the dosages on any of these things
are supposed to be. I'm guessing more of them are poison than aren't.”
“Well, it smells like it is, anyway. I wouldn't worry so much. I doubt
anyone is going to drink anything that smells this much like floor cleaner
voluntarily.”
“You know what I don't get? How this doesn't exist already.” Arthur
tore a bite out of the sandwich, swallowing the chunk without chewing.
“You have people enhancing stones to make things hot. You have
blacksmiths who can make armor that doesn't weigh anything.”
“They don’t weigh much, but they still have weight. Everything has
to weigh something.”
“Okay but when it's something like this, nobody has ever done it.”
“Who is to say?” Ella walked over and leaned against the back
fence. “Maybe someone figured it out and it just didn't work well. Or had
downsides. Lots of people have dead-end skills on their status screen,
Arthur. Not everything works.”
“We had teas with medicinal effects on Earth.” While that was
probably true, Arthur realized he had never really drunk any of them. They
were in the realm of the kind of medicine he didn't try. “Or at least I'm
pretty sure we did. It almost has to work, even if the system doesn't want it
to.”
“Well, maybe. But consider that the leaves you bought could also be
used with Alchemy, which does work. They could be potions. Or pills. Or
infusions, or salves, or any number of things which do work, often very
well.”
“So this is a waste?” Arthur asked, looking at his nearly empty
regent boxes. “I should have just saved the trouble and materials?”
“Nobody is saying that,” Ella said. “We don't have an unlimited
supply, but a few low-level reagents aren't going to create a medicine
shortage all by themselves. Anything really rare wouldn't be in those boxes
to begin with.”
“It's still a waste, then. Just smaller.”
“Arthur, has anyone ever told you that you are a downer?” Milo
said, poking his head out of his workshop. “Fatalist, I think the word is.
Everything is bad all the time for ol’ Arthur. That's not what Ella's saying.
She's saying, nobody has ever made this work before. That's it.”
“Point taken. Sorry, Ella.”
“Don't apologize to me.” Ella bonked him lightly on his forehead. “I
think it's cute how much you want to help that little girl. Milo, I re-
command you to remain friends with this nice boy who does nice things and
makes beverages.”
“Done.” Milo took the cup of milk from Arthur's hands, took a swig,
and handed it back. “But both of you are missing the point, here.”
“How so?” Arthur was all ears.
 “You whine, Ella reassures you, because that's who you are and
that's what you need. But I remember the old Arthur. Last week's Arthur,
who didn't know what a system screen was. Remember that guy?”
“The one who stared at our beaks all the time?” Ella asked. “I like
this one better.”
“Hey, I was new. We didn't have bird-folk on Earth, okay? Cut me
some slack.”
Milo smelled some of Arthur's probably-poison tea and grimaced.
“The point is, yes, that guy. Arthur has a class but it's easy to forget he's
only been here for a bit. And I'm willing to bet he's missed something big,
something nobody else would have missed.”
“What?” Ella looked interested. “You’re right, of course, but what?”
Milo walked over to his mother and whispered a sentence or two,
low enough that Arthur couldn't hear it.
“There's no way. Even he knows that much.”
“He doesn't. Guaranteed. If he did know, he's forgotten.”
“Care to clue me in, guys? I'm the first to admit I don't know much,
but I'm sort of working on a clock here.”
“It's something really simple, Arthur. Remember what Spiky told
you, that one day? What he thought might get him a special achievement?”
“Majicka. The thing that makes stuff work better.”
“Yup, that. And it really does work by itself. But do you think it
works entirely by itself? Do you think that once my passive majicka and
skills are high enough, my daggers will be the same as everyone else's at the
same level?”
“I can sense the answer is no.”
“Damn right. My daggers will be different. Not necessarily much
different, not necessarily better, but different. Because I’ll tell them to be
different. I'll want different things from them, and I'll focus on making sure
that happens. With majicka, partially.”
 “How?”
“By trying, Arthur. Whatever the system is, it's not mean. It exists to
help people meet their goals. To survive. To thrive.”
“It’s just focused trying, I guess. Directed wanting. Or something
like that.” Ella paused for a moment, trying to find the right words. “I don't
think I can explain it.”
“You don't have to because he hasn't tried it at all. Arthur, I
command you as your surrogate brother friend to stop forgetting you live in
a world with both a system and magic, and to try again. Do you think you
can handle that?”
Arthur picked up a kettle, dumping its contents in a bucket so they
wouldn't kill the grass. “I don't think I like your tone, you iron-jockey
birdman. But yeah. I think I can give that a shot.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

MEDICINAL BREWER

It was really, really hard.

It wasn't just hard because Arthur didn't really know what he was
doing. If that had been all it was, it would have been bearable.
This was hard in a different way, like running laps after a long
winter of sitting on the couch. Arthur made the mistake of awkwardly
asking the system to make the teas have some magical healing property,
offering himself as a fountain of majicka for that purpose. That was a bad
idea. It was like being hooked up to a very large, very fast mosquito, one
that sucked out every last bit of his strength in seconds.
“Dammit. This is the worst,” Arthur said, collapsing on the ground.
He now had to sit down after almost every batch of tea, breathing heavily
and trying to recapture whatever the tea-making process was suddenly
taking out of him.
And it wasn't working. He was making tea that smelled viler, not
less. They were more poisonous instead of slightly curative. Not only was
the big bucket he was emptying his kettles and pots into after every batch
getting full, but he began to worry that it was going to flat-out melt.
 But he had to keep going. Struggling to his feet, Arthur tried a
different tactic. He had just been asking the system to make the tea magical,
based on his understanding of the system. But he hadn't really been telling it
how to make the tea magic. On his next batch, he imagined a cup of tea that
was glowing green, like a cure spell in a video game. One that was
brimming with the ultimate power of restoration and would cure all ills.
I doubt it will actually do that, but aim for the stars, hit the moon. I
guess.
The next batch of tea was especially bad and dangerous. He
confirmed that right before losing consciousness from majicka draw.
Majicka shortages were fast becoming a familiar friend to him, in all their
stomach-churning, dizziness-inducing glory. They felt like... he couldn't
explain it.
It felt like someone who was disappearing in the future because a
time traveler had done something, mixed with a witch melting because the
traveler had splashed her with water.
Luckily, the effect only lasted a few minutes. He didn't have an
majicka gauge to watch as he refilled with the resource, but he could feel
when he had enough for another try. He struggled back to his feet and got
his water ready again.
This time, he tried something different.
Food Scientist progressed from strategic experimental grinding. So
that was the direction Arthur had gone in. He had visualized the tea, focused
on the magical healing properties he wanted, and generally tried to be
precise in his mixtures.
But his class had never really progressed that way. When he got the
class itself and his class skill, it had been because he was trying to feed
people, to make them happy. He was what Ella called a cook class. And he
got the sinking suspicion that he had been going about the medicinal tea in
an entirely chef-class kind of way.
He also shot for a more conservative goal. Instead of imagining a
person drinking his boba and glowing with healing power, never again to be
sick or broken, he imagined the idea of someone drinking it and feeling just
a bit better. He thought of people having chicken soup when they had colds,
or the thing where people would drink ginger ale when they felt nauseous
from the flu.
The man at the restaurant supply store had talked about having teas
that helped you sleep, so long as the drinker believed they could. Arthur
aimed one notch higher than that, at something that was slightly but
verifiably better than placebo. Something where people would drink it and
go “ahh” in satisfaction, knowing it was giving them a slight-but-real relief
before it even hit. Like an old ritual from childhood, something a mother
would make when their kid was sick.
As he finished up the batch, he felt the draw on his majicka
intensify, but only a bit. It was a trickle compared to the draw from the
other batches. Instead of feeling like he was on his fifth blood donation and
long past the point where the little cookies could help, he felt more like a
person who was tired at the end of a long day at the lake.
He sniffed the tea, which for once wasn't obviously poisonous to his
nose. Food Scientist also claimed it was okay, or that at the least it wasn’t
going to kill him. He glanced around for Milo and Ella, who luckily weren’t
in place to see the next part. Knowing it was a stupid thing to do, he
brought the tea up to his lips and took a tiny, experimental sip.
As soon as he did, he felt better. Any suspicion he had of a placebo
effect was instantly cleared as the system, unbidden, popped up a window
up just under his nose.

Product Invented!
You have created a new form of tea. This new beverage taps into
memories of your old home and with a powerful desire to help people out
and breaks through a few barriers that would keep most from this path.
Other people have attempted similar things and failed, while still others
have succeeded, only to abandon the path when they saw the results of
their effort.
Nothing about this tea rivals a pill, and potion makers should have no fear
of you putting them out of business. In both cases, you’re lucky if this
 type of concoction will reach a single digit percentage of what a real
alchemist can do.
But just because something is weak doesn't mean that it comes with no
rewards. In the end, it's your decision whether those rewards are worth it.
Created Product: Cold-soother tea
Product Effects: The tea provides a slight soothing effect on sore muscles,
while slightly promoting recovery and providing a slight resistance to
fever.

All those “slights” added up to the impression that Arthur had made
a really weak concoction, but he didn't care. Not even a little.
“Wooo!” he yelled, walking around the backyard with his arms in
the air. “Woohoo!”
Milo poked his head out of the shed. “You got it?”
“I got it. The system just told me.”
“Wait, an actual system message? What was the header?” Milo was
approaching him with an odd look in his eye that Arthur was starting to
associate with having done something weird.
“It said ‘product invented,’” Arthur said.
“Check your system screen.”
“I need to get the tea ready first.”
“Just check your stupid system screen, you weird offworlder. Now.
It's important.”

Arthur Teamaster
Level 12
STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 8
PER: 14
 WIS: 10
INT: 5
Unassigned Stat Points: 2
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 8), Food Scientist
(Level 8), Medicinal Brewer (Level 1)
Achievements: Shop Owner

A level up was nice, for sure, and Arthur didn't have to think
hard about where the points should go after a full day of bottoming out
his majicka. Dumping them into wisdom, he focused on the medicinal
brewer skill, which came in at level one instead of the normal level
zero.

Medicinal Brewer (Level 1)

When you make tea, you can actively choose to spend your
passive majicka on either the entire concoction or an individual
component. Successful attempts at doing so will result in a drink
that provides limited medicinal effects to the drinker.
The success rate of these attempts is broadly tied to the brewer's
intent. Large effects will almost always fail, both because they
are inherently difficult and because the draw on majicka is much
more intense than it would be for a similar effect produced by an
alchemist's product. Smaller, more subtle effects will be
successful much more often, while still failing occasionally.
While any tea can theoretically be given a small medicinal
effect, some tea recipes will prove more cooperative with your
efforts than others. Various ingredients can be added or removed
from recipes to manipulate this effect.

“A third skill,” Arthur explained, immediately starting work on a

full batch of tea for Lily. “Medicinal Brewer. Helps me make weak
medicinal teas.”
“How weak?”
 “The one I made said all the effects were slight.”
“Slight is tiny. Beyond tiny. A slight increase in sharpness is barely
noticeable to most people when a smith makes a knife. But it's not nothing.”
“Yeah, it's fine. I'm not looking to be an alchemist.” Arthur took the
kettle off the heat, pouring the water over the tea leaves as he focused on
making the same product as before. He counted on his new stats and skill to
make it slightly better for his little invalid owl-friend. “I just wanted to be
able to do this to be nice.”
“Well, you’re going to want to figure out some way for it to be
useful. There isn’t a hard limit on the number of skills you get. Some people
have a lot of them. But they are much harder to get as time goes on. Three
is where it turns the corner from easy to tough.”
“So I spent something getting this?”
“Yeah. Is that a problem?”
Arthur reached into the rudimentary ice-chest Rhodia had made
him, pulling out some cream and a sugar syrup to make the tea a bit heavier
and sweeter, like the honey tea his mom had made him when he had a sore
throat growing up. He hoped the extra calories would be helpful as well.
“Not if this works. Come on.”

By the time he and Milo got upstairs, there was a fight happening.
“I don't care. You’re staying right there. Even little balls of anger
have to rest after they are sick,” Ella said.
“I don't need help!” Lily yelled, trying to sit up and getting
immediately pressed back into the mattress by a large, feathered mom-hand
in response. “I can take care of myself!”
“You actually can't. You were sick. Very sick. If Arthur hadn't found
you when he did, you'd be in real trouble,” Ella sternly said.
“Arthur?” Lily's voice squeaked out. “He's the one who found me?”
 “Of course he is. Don't be stupid. You think that boy wouldn't check
up on you when you disappeared? He's practically the embodiment of duty
overreach.” Ella chuckled a bit. “Funny that he ended up with you, the
avatar of duty resistance.”
“I’m getting out of here.” Lily weakly tried to spring out of the bed
and was immediately caught.
“No, you aren't,” Arthur said, entering the room. “I need you to get
healthy. I can't make tea without my assistant.”
Theoretically, he could make tea all day without his assistant. But
given that he had tried that and hated it, he figured it was close enough to
the truth to get past the little girl's radar.
“You can too!” Lily was defiantly struggling against the big bird
hand that was gently keeping her in bed, but visibly tiring from the effort.
“I've seen you do it.”
“You have. And I was slow and made mistakes. I need the help.”
Arthur set down the teapot, grabbed a cup, and poured Lily a glass of the
new concoction. “Drink this.”

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 CHAPTER THIRTY

ARE YOU SURE YOU WANT TO

ARGUE?

“No. I won't.” Lily pushed the tea away, careful not to slosh it. “I don't have
to.”
“Oh, okay. My mistake,” Arthur said. “I thought you wanted to
work.”
“Work?”
“I need this tea tested. It's new. And you’re the only sick person I
have working for me. I could find someone else, but…”
Lily eyed the tea warily, but Arthur's perception caught some
undertones of actual hunger leaking out in the same glance. “And this is
useful?” she asked.
“Very. I just got a new skill and I need to test it out. It makes
medicine. Very weak medicine, but medicine. Where else am I going to find
a sick person?”
Glaring warily at the cup, Lily reached out for it, then withdrew her
hands suddenly.
 “This is a trick.”
“It's not, stupid.” Arthur stole a trick from Milo's book and flicked
her softly on the forehead. “Tell her, Milo.”
“It's true. It's the first batch he's made for anyone to drink. I pretty
much watched him get the skill.” Milo leaned on the door frame and
smirked, just a bit. “It's as likely to kill you as it is to make you better, I
bet.”
“Arthur wouldn't do that,” Lily said, snatching the tea from Arthur's
hands. “Fine. Watch.”
Holding the cup up to her nose, Lily took a cautious sniff, then the
smallest possible sip. Her eyes widened as she did.
“It's sweet.”
“That's part of it,” Arthur lied. “Makes it work better.”
Lily went back in for a bigger drink, and then bigger and bigger
gulps as hunger got the better of her, and she downed the entire container in
a matter of a few seconds. Arthur poured her another smaller cup, which she
drank almost as fast.
“Well?”
“It makes my arms feel better. And my legs.” Lily let out a big
yawn, big enough that she couldn't talk through it. “And it's... nice. Warm.
Good.”
Ella smiled as the little girl leaned back, pulling the blankets over
her again as she continued trying to explain it.
“It doesn't have those...” She yawned again. “Those bobas. The little
balls.”
“Pearls, and no. I didn't have time to cook them.”
“It should.” Lily's eyelids drooped a bit. “Arthur's tea should have
the bobas. That's what makes it Arthur's tea.”
And then she was asleep. Ella shooed both Arthur and Milo out of
the room and closed the door as silently as possible behind them.
 “Well, that went well,” Ella said. “I couldn't get her to eat anything
before, you know. You have a way with kids.”
“What's in that tea, Arthur? Sedative?”
“Don't be foolish, Milo. That little girl was barely ready to wake up
in the first place.” Ella put her hand on the door affectionately. “She just
wanted to escape help. She's that kind.”
“She did conk out pretty hard,” Arthur said.
“It's always that way. Feed a sick child, give them medicine, and
their body does the rest. Now come down to the kitchen.” Ella walked down
the stairs, with purpose. “It sounds like you have a new skill to tell me
about.”

“That's a lot to take in, Arthur,” Ella said. “And probably a bigger deal than
Milo told you.”
“I don't know. It's pretty weak, right? I can't see anyone using this
instead of medicine.”
Ella shook her head. “Then you aren't looking right. Not every sick
person is sick enough to need medicine, or to want it. Did it say there's a
limit on what kind of medicinal effects it can produce?”
“Not really. Just that stronger effects are harder.”
“Medicine is a big word, Arthur. Covers a lot of things. Do you
think I've never wanted a tea with stronger pep before?”
“You could brew it stronger.”
“I could and it would taste like garbage. And that's before I even get
into stat buff medicine. Even a fraction of a point's worth of vitality effect
would matter to someone who had to work a particularly hard day. A bit of
dexterity would be valuable to any craftsman.”
“Wait, stat buffs can be medicine?”
“Anything consumable that has a system or healing effect can buff
your stats.”
 “Huh.” Arthur couldn't imagine all the implications at once, and
started just thinking about what it would mean if he could make pepped tea
have a stronger caffeine-like effect. Not everyone would want it, just like
not everyone could handle energy drinks back on Earth. But the people who
did, they would definitely pay for it.
“So, what's to keep me from just making everything medicinal?”
“Majicka. Definitely,” Milo said.
“But it refills.”
“It doesn't, not really,” Ella said, reaching out with the back of her
hand and touching Arthur's face. “No fever, which is good. But you should
see yourself, Arthur. You look like death. Have you been running yourself
dry all morning?”
“Yeah. That's bad?”
“You've probably lost three pounds.” Milo looked slightly worried.
“It's one of the things we forgot to teach you. Nobody runs themselves dry
like that, again and again.”
“One day of that won't hurt you, Arthur. And everyone does a big
push every once in a while. What's your wisdom stat at?”
“Twelve. I just pushed a few more points into it.”
“Well, that's not low. You can probably make about ten of these
drinks a day, or bottom out your majicka pool twice, whichever comes first.
And you’ll have to eat more.”
Arthur had already been eating more, ever since he came to the
demon world. People ate more here in general, just to keep up with the
system-driven metabolisms everyone seemed to have. Teenagers ate more
than that, and Arthur had been told that pure physical classes, like Karbo,
ate the equivalent of a small village’s worth of food. Eating more was crazy.
He said so. Ella told him he was stupid.
“I don't care what it was like back on Earth. New body, new rules.
You need another full meal every day, minimum.”
“That seems expensive.”
 “Oh, Arthur. Sweet Arthur. I don't think that’ll be a problem.”

Ella was, as always, right. Arthur returned to work the next day equipped
with a big paper poster, one with a simple message that Ella assured him
would be more than enough to get the job done.

Over-pepped Tea
Request our experimental over-pepped tea, courtesy of a new,
untested skill. Unexpected reactions may occur. Buyer beware.
Price: Three coins
Our shop is limited to ten orders of over-pepped tea per day.

“Expensive,” the rabbit woman said.

“Yeah. It's sort of a trial. We have normal tea for the normal price.”
“How do I know it works?”
Arthur glanced around the square. The rabbit was almost always
early, as compared to anyone else. “I'll make you a deal. You pay, and if it
doesn't work at least a little better than normal pepped tea, I'll refund your
money. But if it works…”
“I tell people?”
“Something like that.”
“Deal.”
Arthur put together the special order. It took a bit, considering he
didn’t have his normal helper. The majicka draw was definitely present, but
much more manageable on a single cup than when trying to juice an entire
pot.
“Here you go,” he said, handing over the cup. “Let me know how it
works, okay?”
 “Fine. I'll see you later, Arthur.”
It was a little more than an hour before Arthur hit the ten-cup limit.
He felt like he could do more but didn't want to risk losing his Ella-cooked
meals and dutifully took down the sign.
“This hits hard. Real hard.” One of the rockmen who frequented his
shop had stayed, watching with amusement as Arthur peddled the new drink
and enjoying his own over-pepped concoction.
“It's not that much stronger. Just slightly.” Arthur hoped to the
heavens that was true. Neither of the birds he lived with could handle much
caffeine and had reacted strongly to the mix. Still, system-descriptions were
usually pretty accurate.

Product Invented!
You have taken a pick-me-upper which can not only pick you up,
but also throw you short distances. This peppier tea is not the
strongest tea that exists yet. Still, it's on the high range of pep
content compared to what's available, and much higher than most
people have experienced without compromising on flavor.
Created Product: Over-pepped Tea
Product Effects: Slightly higher pep content.

“See, that's where you're wrong,” the rockman said. “The system is
seeing this in percentage terms. Maybe this brew is only 5% stronger or
something like that. But have you ever seen someone switch to a stronger
tea, before? Their reaction isn't exactly proportional to the increase. I
haven't felt juiced like this in decades.”
“Good feedback. So it works?”
The rockman finished off the last of his pearls. “Oh, it works.”
Arthur washed a few cups and started cooking up his next batch of
pearls when he suddenly felt himself being watched. He looked up from
behind the stand to see the rabbit woman standing there, her eyes slightly
wide. Even without his perception stat, he could tell she was over-
stimulated, or even a bit angry. With the stat, he could see the truth. She was
absolutely, 100% wired to the gills.
“Was it... okay?” Arthur asked. “Did it work?”
“I just did two hours work in a half hour. Two hours, Arthur. I
have... no more paperwork left for the day. That never happens.” She
reached out, grabbed his shirt, and dragged him close. “I need to reserve
one of these drinks for tomorrow. I must.”
“Are you sure that's a good idea?”
“Maybe not. But are you sure you want to argue about it?”
Arthur made a mental note to lower the caffeine content for the
rabbit’s next cup, but no, he decided. He didn't want to argue about it.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

THE GREAT JUICING

Now that Arthur had had at least some mild success with his shop,
he had a bigger job ahead of him. He had customers, sure. But a good
portion of the interest in his boba was driven by novelty. If he lost the
thread on that bit of things, the long-term prospects of his business would
suffer.
And that meant variety. It wasn’t just a hunch. The customers had
been telling him so.

“So there’s the darker tea, the lighter tea… and a dark and light pepped tea.
And that’s it, for now?” Pico asked.
“I’m actually working on a new type of tea,” Arthur answered.
“Unpepped?”
“Very slightly pepped. But not so much that you’d notice, Pico.”
 The mayor was one of his first customers and still one of his most
enthusiastic. If he was looking for more, then others would be too sooner or
later. And that meant work. A lot of crazy, brain-hurting research work.
Luckily, some of that work was done for him.
In his previous job, the one he had on Earth, calories had played a
big part in the coping mechanisms that got him through his days. He had
gone through a lot of boba over the years, working his way through the
entire menu of the store closest to him. He had some ideas.
After closing up his shop for the day, he took off for what his
customers had assured him was the best produce market in town, the one
with the freshest product and the most complete selection. He arrived
within five or ten minutes, or at least he arrived where the directions said to
go. Instead of a fruit market, he found a large supplier of various kinds of
furniture hinges. It was neat in its own way, but not at all what he needed.
A quick search cleared up the confusion. Off to the side of the
furniture store, topped by a simple carved wooden sign of a fruit Arthur
didn’t recognize, was a cellar straight out of a cartoon, the kind with two
doors and handles set up at a shallow diagonal to the ground. He reached
down and tested the handles. The doors were both unlocked and easily
pulled aside to reveal a stone staircase heading down. And down. Whatever
was below the hinge supplier, it was significantly more underground than
Arthur expected.
“Close that door behind you!” A female voice called out from
below. “You’ll let all the cool out.”
Arthur obeyed, and then turned and trotted down the stairs once the
door slammed shut. The space was well lit. Both the stairway and the space
beyond were clearly visible, lit by some magical light source that Arthur
couldn’t spot. He kept himself busy enough looking for it, so that when he
finally took a look at the underground room he had reached, it hit him all at
once.
That, Arthur thought, is a substantial amount of fruit.
Where Arthur had expected a few rows of fruit, he found a solid
acre of bins, all filled to bursting with greens, reds, yellows and every other
shade of botanical color he could think of. Arthur realized, then, that he had
made a miscalculation. He had been planning on rounding up some
strawberries, apples, and raspberries, plus whatever other fruits he knew
well and could mix-and-match to taste. But among the hundreds and
hundreds of square yards of fruit, there wasn’t a single one he recognized.
“Daunting, isn’t it?” a large boar-woman said. She kept her head
down as she smoothly sorted and placed fruit from her cart into the bins.
“First timers are always like that. Just start and walk until you see
something you like. I promise it works out fine.”
“It’s a little harder than that, I’m afraid. I’m not exactly local.”
The woman looked up then, snapping her mouth shut when she
caught sight of Arthur.
“Oh, I see. Some kind of… actually, what are you?”
“Human. I’m an offworlder. Most people around here seem to
interpret me as some kind of hairless monkey.”
“Or an overgrown piglet. I could see either. Anyway, welcome.” She
stood up straight, looped her arms behind her back, popped it, and stepped
towards Arthur. “Damn stoop work isn’t as easy as it used to be. My back’s
getting old. So you’re saying you don’t know what any of these are? At
all?”
“Nope.” Arthur picked up a kind of ridge-skinned green fruit about
the size of an orange. “This could be sweet, sour, or packed with meat for
all I know. I’ve never seen it.”
“Sour. Very, very sour. That’s not for eating by itself.”
“And this?”
“Much sweeter. Tastes a bit like… actually, just take a bite. It’s
okay, I have plenty.”
Arthur toothed into the new fruit, which felt and looked a lot like a
large, oval peach. It tasted reasonably similar, too, except with firmer less
sweet, flesh and no pit.
 “Oh, that’s good. I’ll have to get some of these. What happens to
these when you crush them? Do they… pulverize well, I guess?”
“You’re going to have to clarify that a little for me. What are you
planning on doing with these fruits?”
Arthur let her in on the whole plan. She had, it turned out, heard
about his store, despite somehow missing the bit where it was run by an
offworlder. Once she found out she was dealing with the prospect of a
regular bulk-purchase customer, her eyes lit up a little brighter as she more
or less force-fed him bits and pieces of various fruits to acquaint him with
her entire catalog.
“On my world, we had a drink, basically a mix of juices from a
sweet berry and a very sour citrus fruit, with sugar added.”
“Is the sugar a must? Or would just counteracting the sour be
enough?”
“The latter, I think.”
“Try this, then. Take a small, small bite.”
Arthur took the marble-sized berry from her hand, dutifully only
taking a small nibble from it, and was immediately glad he had done so.
“Whoa. That’s… a lot. How is it so sweet?”
“Don’t ask me. I just sell them. But when something’s called a
sweetberry in a world with a lot of sweet berries, it’s going to be very
sweet. People use those for jam. Just one or two will sweeten a whole
batch.” She tossed him another berry, this one larger, orange-ish, and with
long leaves that curled down the sides almost to the end of the fruit.
“Don’t eat the leaves on that one. Just the flesh. And you take as big
of a bite as you want, with that one.”
Arthur obeyed, finding the fruit was a bit like a stronger-flavored
blackberry, a bit tart and so juicy that it actually squirted some liquid onto
the floor as he bit into it.
“I figure you either use the sweetberries and something sour, or the
tart berries and sugar, or both berries together, depending on what kind of
flavor works best.”
Food Scientist practically nodded inside him. It didn’t know which
was the best option yet, but Arthur’s skill augmented instincts were telling
him he’d be best off if he tried all of the above, letting their performance
determine the eventual winner.
By the time he had made his way through even a quarter of the
store, Arthur had to beg for mercy and call it quits. He was loaded to the
gills with fruit, so full that the boar woman actually guided him to a chair,
gave him some water, and let him rest for a bit while his stomach made
sense of the sudden deluge of produce he had subjected it to.
“Good to see you appreciate it, at least.” The boar-woman eyed him
approvingly, then offered him her hand to shake. “I’m Orcina. And I look
forward to doing business with you.”
“Arthur, and same.”
“So what’s the next step?”
“I buy some fruit. And then I get to chopping, I guess.”
Orcina was nice enough to loan him a small wagon to carry the fruit
home in, one that she said he was welcome to keep so long as he was
making regular purchases from the store. Bloated and highly satisfied,
Arthur waddled home, dragging the wagon and its heavy contents behind
him.
And then the chopping began. As far as Arthur was concerned, there
were three ways to go about this project. The first was to make what
amounted to a fruit-and-milk concoction, no tea involved in the
conventional sense. He knew it was stretching the definitions a little, but he
hoped the fact that the skill was boba-specific would let him draw outside
the lines a little bit while still benefiting from his system-granted ability to
augment the flavor of the drinks.
The second way was to use the juice with tea, and he had some ideas
there as well. There were some types of tea in his ever-growing collection
that were a bit too acidic or too mild to do well in regular boba. He hoped
he could tone down some and spice up others with the fruits he had in tow.
 As for the third option, he figured he would probably be able to
infuse the pearls themselves with flavor. He had never been much of a fan
himself, but the boba shops he had visited on Earth usually had the option
of flavored pearls, colored to look like candy and just as sweet. If he could
do something similar here and provided that the pearls were still hardy
enough to be stored from one day’s production to the next day’s use, he’d
have a bit of flexibility to prepare some of his new variety in advance,
simplifying the work he had to do at the stand.
And he really, really hoped that third option would work. Even
when Lily was at the top of her game, Arthur still found it hard to keep up
with the flow of customers. He could crush fruit for drinks as the customers
came in, but he had no idea how to fit that particular sticky, juicy process
into his current workflow.
But that’s tomorrow’s problem. I can worry about that then. For
now, I need to find some mixtures that work. The rest can be figured out
later.
He got to it. At first, he tried to handle the job with knives, dicing
various fruits as finely as his inexperienced hands could handle. After
several minutes of cut-finger near-misses, he had hardly any fruit to show
for it. Giving up, he went out to the yard, grabbed a conveniently sized
rock, and brought it back to his room. After boiling it in clean water, he got
back to mashing, gratified to see that his primitive-violence approach
worked much better.
It would have to. He had dozens of different types of fruit, all with
different flavor profiles and enough possible combinations that even Food
Scientist was reeling. He’d have to mix and match, take notes, and use the
process of elimination to find what worked and what didn’t.
Arthur was prepared to pull an all-nighter if that’s what it took. He’d
bash and pulverize. He’d mangle fruit and extract juice until the demon-
world equivalent of roosters crowed if he had to. In the pursuit of beverage,
he knew, there was no cost too great, no sacrifice too large. Hoisting his
rock aloft, he brought it down onto yet another unfamiliar fruit, freeing its
flavors for use.
And so the great juicing began.
OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

SOURMOUTH MELTDOWN

“What in the world happened in here?” Milo said, staring at the

thoroughly pulp covered room in awe. “It looks like an orchard exploded.”
“That’s not… Kind of. I’m doing some tea experiments. I’m not
sure how it’s working out so far.” Arthur gestured towards the juice
combinations he had accumulated on the counter. “Want to try some out? I
could use a second opinion on some of them. All of them, I guess.”
“Oh, absolutely. But wait a second while I get mom. She wouldn’t
miss this for the world.”
A few seconds later, Ella entered the room, her eyes widening only
slightly as she took in the carnage.
“What’s all this? It looks like you lost a fight with a farmer’s
market.”
“Har de har. Very funny, everyone.” Arthur picked up a cup and
shoved it at Milo, then took another and gave it to Ella. “Milo, that’s a sour
fruit mix, with sweetberry to make it tolerable. Ella, yours is just a bunch of
sweet things. I don’t know the name of everything, yet.”
Milo tried his, his beak somehow puckering against the sour.
 “Whew, that’s got a kick.” He took another sip. “Do you have ice?”
“Yeah, here.” Arthur pulled a few cubes out of a bucket and tossed
them in the cup. “Try now.”
“Oh, that’s better,” Milo said. “Refreshing even.”
“Yeah, that’s my thinking too. How’s yours, Ella?”
“Sweet.” She took another sip of hers, then traded out with Milo.
“Not a bad mix of flavors, but too sweet for me.”
“Think I should tone it down?”
“Absolutely not. Some people like the sweet. Especially children.”
She took a sip of Milo’s sour mix. “That’s more like it for me. It’s very
good. Have you tried mixing it with tea? Or cream?”
“Tea yes, cream no. But there’s some cream over there if you want
to try it. Here’s the tea mix for now.”
“Interesting. I think you should offer all of these with tea.”
“I thought about that. But it seems like it would make the menu
complex.”
“It doesn’t have to. Just say you can mix and match between the
categories.”
“That’s chaos,” Arthur said. “I can’t control the flavors that way.”
Ella took a sip of her citrus beverage now-mixed-with-cream. “Oh,
shush. You can’t control all the flavors all the time anyway. People have
their little preferences. They like to have their little special requests. Let
them. It’s part of the job.”
Arthur tilted his head a bit, accepting that tidbit. “Fine. I guess I can
warn them about the grosser combinations.”
“Oh, interesting. What are the gross ones?”
Arthur motioned to a cup on the table filled with purplish-green
liquid. “That one is gross. I was trying to do something with one of the
purple sweet ones. It didn’t quite work out.”
 Milo rushed over to the table, taking a quick slug of the drink and
grimacing.
“It tastes like someone tried to sweeten a lawn.”
“Agreed. Most of these were failures, really. It’s just a few that
ended up being good.”
Arthur guided Milo and Ella through the rest of his successes, and in
most cases, they agreed with his impressions of how good they were. Which
was a relief, really. After hours of mixing fruits randomly like he was trying
to brute-force a keypad combination, it was nice to find out he hadn’t gone
completely insane in the process.
“I can help you fine-tune these a bit, if you’d like.” Ella glanced up
at the clock on the wall. “I have about an hour before bedtime. Early day
tomorrow.”
“That would help a lot.”
“And you’ll get full credit for everything you did yourself, and
partial credit for any improvements I helped with. The system’s pretty
generous with collaboration.” Ella took another drink of her favorite fruit
mixture, now with fruit-flavored boba mixed in, and nodded approvingly.
“The only reason you wouldn’t do it is if you think you can improve these
much more by yourself.”
“Nope. That’s my limit. At least for now.”
“Then let's get to it.”
“Actually, before that.” Milo had been watching Arthur’s attempts at
cleaning up with interest. “What’s your plans for juicing all of these? I
mean at the cart itself.”
Arthur held up his rock, which was still gory with pulp from the
fruit crushing that had occurred only shortly before.
“Oh, no. I can improve that for you, Arthur. Just give me an hour.”
“You sure?”
 “I’m sure.” Milo walked out through the door, waving over his
shoulder. “Just comp me some drinks later.”
“Deal.”
What followed Milo’s exit was a masterclass courtesy of Ella.
Arthur had known she was good at cooking. Very good, in fact. If nothing
else, her skills would have assured that. But what he was watching now as
she went from fruit to fruit sampling flavors and then mixing them didn’t
seem to be a function of her skills, or at least not entirely. It was mostly
hard-won experience and judgement at work, guiding her to make tiny but
perfect adjustments to mixtures Arthur had already created.
“That one? That one doesn’t even have a flavor.” Arthur eyed the
cucumber-like vegetable warily. “Why use it?”
“Balance. It adds substance and a subtle savoriness to the mix. Let’s
you get more out of the ingredients you already have.”
In only an hour, Ella managed to improve Arthur’s recipes to a new
level of perfection that he couldn’t have reached on his own, on top of
helping him create a few others whole-cloth. They even had time to get
through a few batches of boba, and Ella confirmed Arthur’s earlier intuition
that the simple, single-flavor infusions of the pearls were best to keep things
simple. By the time she left for bed, his menu was more or less fleshed out,
at least as far as fruit was concerned.
Shortly after Ella left and Arthur finished with his clean-up, Milo
was back. In his hand was what could only be described as a slapped-
together contraption of a few metal wheels, with welded crank handles
butted up against each other and suspended over a metal bucket.
“Here, give me one of those juicy ones. The blue ones.” Milo
snapped his fingers, his arm reaching out for the fruit, visibly locked in a
blacksmith trance of some kind, having for the moment lost his ability to
focus on anything but his new mechanism. “Now watch. You put the fruit
here and push it down a bit so it will catch. And then you turn the crank,
and…”
The fruit rolled in place for a bit before being caught by the rough
metal, forced between the two wheels, and pulverized down to pulp and
juice, which fell into the bucket.
“Oh, that’s neat. Really neat,” Arthur said, feeding another fruit
through the machine and giving it a try himself. It was janky, sure, and it
took most of his strength to get it through, but it was much faster than
hitting fruit with a rock. “And I can take this?”
“Absolutely not. I’m nowhere near done with this, you weirdo. This
is just proof of concept.”
“Well, consider it proved.”
“Yup. And now it looks like Milo’s pulling an all-nighter.”
“You don’t…”
“Have to do that. Yup. Shh. Gotta go do metal things. With metal.
Enjoy your oddly sticky juice room. See you in the morning.”

“I have to say, I hate all of these fruit drink names. All of them. Every
single one.”
Arthur looked up at his new menu and smiled.

Mix and match! All drinks are available with any tea, milk,
cream, and any fruit mix.

Classic Teas
Gadarjia (Strong)
Loyat (Mild)
Matcha (Powdered tea)
Over-pepped (Limit 10 per day)

Fruit Teas
Powerberry Sugar Blast (Very sweet berry mixture)
Sourmouth Meltdown (Sour and sweet acidfruit combo)
Ella’s Highbrow Fruit Punch (Sophisticated blend of subtle fruit
flavors)
 Boba Toppings
Standard Boba (chewy)
Sweetberry Boba

Prices:
Tea Drinks: 7 Small
Fruit Tea Drinks: 1 Coin
Over-pepped Tea: 3 Coins

“Yeah, just a touch of Earth naming conventions.”

“They are all so stupid. So very, very dumb.” Milo grimaced. “Why
are they working on me? I want them now.”
“Advertising. Just a type of Earth magic you aren’t inoculated to
yet.”
“Excuse me.” Arthur’s loyal rabbit-woman customer had appeared
at the front of the stand. “May I have a Loyat Sourmouth Meltdown with
cream and Sweetberry Boba? My, that’s a lot to say, isn’t it?”
“It’s fun though, right?”
She smiled. “It is.”
Arthur took the fruits required for the drink and walked them over to
the contraption Milo had put together. Instead of the hard-to-turn direct
drive system, it was now a geared machine, one with several sets of
interlocking toothed wheels feeding into their own little juice collection
buckets. Because they were separated, Arthur didn’t have to clean up
between every drink like he had worried he might.
“Glad to see that pulp catcher is working.” Milo eyed the removable
mesh screen below the crushing gears with obvious smith pleasure. Once
fruit was fed through the gears, it emerged on the other side as a mass of
pulp and juice, the juice draining into the bucket and the pulp getting caught
on the mesh for collection or to be discarded, as the case may be.
 “Oh, right.” Arthur said, making a mental note to add “pulp or no
pulp” to the sign that night. “Do you want the fruit pulp mixed into the
drink? It makes a bit more filling.”
“Yes, please. Oh, gods, that’s another thing to say. My own little
beverage sentence.” The rabbit woman sat down, mouthing her order to
herself and apparently reveling in the sound of it.
Arthur mixed the pulp in, passed the drink to the rabbit woman, and
smiled when she warmly approved the finished product.
After Milo left for a well-earned post smithing coma, Arthur spent
the morning dishing out a whole new variety of drinks to his customers.
Eventually, they’d get tired of these variations, and he’d have to make
more. But there were plenty of fruits out there, and more than enough
possible combinations. There were vegetables and herbs and potential
smoothies out there, just waiting to be exploited.
He didn’t know how he’d process those or keep up with orders once
there were thousands of permutations to cover. But he was starting to
realize that Milo, despite trying to hide it, might be a genius. The sparrow
hadn’t failed him yet, and Arthur was hopeful that whatever he needed to
do, Milo would have a mechanical solution for.
And if Arthur got in over his head on flavors, Ella was always there
to give him pointers and keep his feet out of the fire.
Despite no effort on his part to make it happen, he had somehow
ended up in the perfect town in the perfect country with the absolute ideal
friends and family to be successful.
Not only that, but he liked them. He liked them a lot. He searched
his mind for a single person, customer or friend, he had yet met who he
didn’t like, and came up blank. The academic types were nice. The crafters
were kind. Even the jocks were pretty good guys, once you broke them
away from hitting each other with clubs long enough to have a
conversation.
It’s a beautiful, beautiful place. Arthur dished up another drink to
yet another customer, clinking his coins into his cash register and moving
onto the next drink. I just hope I can someday become someone who
belongs here.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

MONSTER WAVE

Between the over-pepped tea and the new fruit tea combinations, a
new wave of interest swept over Arthur’s food cart. Enough demons were
trying, enjoying, and complimenting his drinks that Arthur felt like he was
serving the entire city every day.
After a particularly busy lunch rush, Arthur noticed something
strange.
Everyone who was walking in the square was moving oddly, just a
bit faster and more determined than normal. He hadn't sold tea to nearly
enough of them, so his new over-pepped tea wasn't the cause, or at least not
all of it. But there was a definite tone shift in the area. It was loud enough
that his perception stat wouldn’t let him miss it.
“You want meat?” Arthur heard a large-sounding voice say as he
stooped over his things. “It's just going to go to waste, now.”
He popped his head up to find himself face to face with the large
bear woman who ran a honey-glazed meat stand across the way. “Sure
thing, Urtha. You don't want me to pay?”
 “Naw. Just make me one of those pepped teas you've been juicing
people with. I'm gonna need it for the rest of the day, and I bet you have at
least one left in you.”
“Long day ahead?”
“Oh, right, I keep forgetting. You are one of those offworlder fellas.
You probably don't know.” Urtha sat down heavily in a stool, handing off an
over-loaded meat skewer to Arthur, who snacked on it as he put together her
drink. “It's gonna be a long day for everyone, Arthur. Whole town comes
out for these things and works until they are done.”
“What things? Remember, I don't know anything.”
“Oh, yeah? Well, get ready to learn. Today, Arthur, is gonna be your
very first monster wave.”

“We found your people where they hid, and bound them with ropes,
restricting their free expression of movement.”
Arthur had packed up shop and moved with the crowds towards the
wall. The rule, Urtha explained, was that you went to the closest wall
outpost you could once you heard about the monster wave, cutting a straight
line from your current location to the outer border of the city.
Arthur had bent his line just a little to make sure it crossed the
water-treatment building where Mizu worked, and it had paid off.
“Hi, Mizu.”
“Hi.” She used his greeting for the first time. The word didn't seem
to fit right in her mouth, like a child cursing in front of his friends for the
first time to look cool. Arthur grinned like a maniac for a second before
catching himself.
“I don't think I know how this works. Any of this. Usually, Milo
would explain it to me, but...”
“He would have a different outpost.”
“Right.”
 “So should you.” Mizu smiled, very slightly.
“You caught me. Are you going to turn me in?”
“No, you can stay.” She flushed a bit with a few different shades of
blue. “I'll show you what to do.”
They were standing in a cleared ring of dirt, watching people walk
towards the wall. Mizu grabbed his wrist and started moving, dragging him
in the same direction. It was easy to miss from a distance, but once they got
closer, Arthur could see that the wall had a set of stairs built into it.
“We have time. I can show you what to do. Climb.”
Arthur blessed his few extra points of vitality as he walked up the
stairs. The wall wasn't short, reaching skyscraper-like heights he suspected
wouldn't have been possible if it weren't for system shenanigans. Soon
enough, they crested the top, where Mizu grabbed his wrist again and led
him to the edge.
“Remember Lily?”
“Yeah,” Arthur said. He was about to mention how he had found her
sick, but that didn’t seem like what Mizu wanted to talk about.
“Her parents died defending the city. Monsters can overflow from
dungeons out in the wild, and they attack the city.”
Arthur nodded. “A monster wave.”
“They might come from anywhere. The scouts didn't spot this wave.
The city's runes did. They aren't as specific.”
“So we have to man this whole wall? Are there enough people for
that?”
“There are. People will move with the beasts.”
“And once we know the direction, everyone groups up?”
“No. Not necessarily. When the monsters arrive, they spread.” She
looked down, tracing a semicircle with her finger that tracked the curvature
of the wall. “In big waves, they can surround the city.”
 “So how do we defend? Stop them from getting in?”
“Some monsters can dig. A few can fly. And —” She was startled as
a loud shout came from below them on the city side, followed by a large
mass of red muscle bouncing up dozens of stairs at a time. As Karbo
reached the top, he waved briefly at Arthur, then launched himself off the
wall, landing hard enough on the dirt below to leave an actual crater.
“Some are like him and don't pay attention to walls anyway.”
“Good to see him out there, at least.”
“Yes. Karbo will hunt the large, dangerous beasts, and so will other
hunters. The city takes care of the rest of the swarm.”
“How?” Arthur said. “I want to help, but I don't have anything that
can reach from here to there.”
“You do. We all do.” She reached down, pulling a large stone from a
pile near their feet and dropping it downward. “Rocks.”
“Really? We chuck rocks at them?”
“Drop. The monsters swarm, and a falling rock is a fearsome thing.
Some of us drop the rocks, others carry new ones up. The quarrymasters
work all year to make sure we have enough stones to make it work.”
“That must take forever.”
“Days.”
“Do monsters get through?”
“Some. Hunters guard the inside of the wall, and the city guards are
strong inside the city.”
“Hmm,” Arthur said. “I guess that makes sense. But it's just rocks.
Not the most impressive weapon.”
“You haven't seen it yet.” Mizu said. “The city is strong in numbers,
Arthur. And a storm of stones is impressive in its own way.”
By the end of the day, Arthur saw what she meant first-hand. After
Mizu left to supplement the wall-adjacent water supplies, Arthur was
conscripted by a large wolverine guard, who set him on throwing stones.
Dropping them, really. But he wasn't dropping them alone. As the wolverine
barked out orders, hundreds of denizens of the city would grab stones, lift
them over the edge, and let loose all at once.
Not every stone hit, but most did. The monster swarm was a
writhing, sharp, deadly sort of thing, a moat of death that had gathered at
the base of the wall. Those kinds of numbers made them hard to miss.
Every volley of stones would throw them back and defend the city from the
attack.
There was an almost, work-like attitude to things. The others acted
as if it were normal that the city should be attacked by a horde of monsters,
and Arthur didn’t know enough about demon world history to question
otherwise.
It still wasn't enough. The monsters advanced faster than the stones,
and selection effects meant that after a long enough time, the monsters
closest to the wall were also among the strongest the wave had to offer. But
every time that happened, Karbo, or another hunter like him, took care of
things. Arthur would see a glint of light, then watch as a red shape
bulldozed through hundreds or thousands of monsters.
And then the cycle would begin again. And again. And again. By the
time the wolverine tapped him on the shoulder and told him to go home, his
hands were bloody messes of popped blisters, second only as providers of
pain when compared to his poor lower back.
Next time, I'm lifting with my legs.
“But I can't go now,” Arthur said. “The monsters aren't done.”
“We work in shifts. You did a good job. Go home and rest.”
Arthur looked back to his spot on the wall only to find it was
already filled. Half-dead, he nodded, then turned to stagger down the stairs
and all the way home. Mizu was nowhere to be seen, which for once he was
thankful for. He'd probably survive all this, but if he didn't, he wanted to
avoid her last memory of him being a hunched, out-of-shape figure
moaning in pain.
“Look who made it.” Milo said, not even bothering to smile. Despite his
superior physical stats, he looked about as beat as Arthur felt. “We had a bet
going that offworlders knew not to jump into the monster swarm. Looks
like I lost.”
Ella rolled her eyes and put stew and bread in front of Arthur. She
didn't look nearly as tired as either of the two boys probably due to superior
stats, or just as likely because she had a job she was better suited for.
“No, I knew that much at least. What I didn't know was what stones
would do to my poor hands.” Arthur gave up on trying to use his spoon,
lifting the bowl with both of his swollen hands and drinking down the stew
directly from the lip.
“You think that's hard? Try pounding on iron all day. I've been
making these.” Milo held up a softball sized lump of iron, spiked on every
side with vicious looking sharpened cones of metal. “It's an emergency
weapon for strength and dexterity classes. If something big manages to get
up the wall, they thunk it with one of these bad boys.”
“And that works?”
“Better than rocks. Anyway, you probably haven't checked yet, but
chances are you picked up a level or two from today. Once you wash
yourself up, you should dump it into vitality. It’ll help your hands close up.”
“Ah, yeah, I'll do that.”
After dinner was over and Arthur had washed and changed clothes,
he felt like a new man. Almost. Hands were apparently the last thing vitality
got to. But before he got around to assessing his status screen, he had a stop
to make.
“Hi, Lily.”
“Hi, Arthur.”
“Still trapped in bed?”
“Yes. That terrible bird woman won't let me help with the monster
swarm.”
 “I don't think it's just her, Lily. They probably wouldn't let you on
the wall at all. It's just initiates and older folks up there.”
“Still. I could do something.”
“I bet you could.” Arthur started making her some tea, juicing it
with his majicka as he did. “I think I probably could do better too. I'm
throwing rocks, but I have to think I could do more than that.”
“They don't want tea?”
“I don't think they have time for it. Just food and throwing.”
Lily rolled her eyes. “Not normal tea, dummy. Magic tea. Like you
made me.”
“Hm. That's an idea,” Arthur said. “If I could get a recipe that
worked. But it would still be hard. I can't be dizzy up on the wall, and I
can't make the tea in advance. It would be stale, if it even lasted that long.”
For better or worse, people in Arthur’s new world would only drink
the tea if it tasted halfway decent, and none of the teas Arthur had worked
with kept very well. Even at the stand, he needed to refresh his supply every
few hours. The taste buds of demon kind were far pickier than the human
equivalent.
“Yeah,” Arthur concluded. “I just don't think it's practical. Even if I
could make the tea that fast, I couldn't get it up the wall by myself.”
“They don't have water up there?”
“They do, but I can't bless that much tea that fast. Too much majicka
in too little time. Looks like I'll just be chucking rocks.”
“No, you won't.” Lily got out of bed. “I'm helping. You can't stop
me.”
“You can't leave the house, Lily. You’re still weak.”
“I'm getting better. And your problem isn't a real problem at all. You
don't have to bless the tea, Arthur. You can bless the bobas. The ball things.
The pearls.”
By the time Arthur's hands stopped burning, it was almost dawn. With a
huge outlay of majicka on his to-do list, he had to dump the few points he
had picked up into wisdom. But it wasn't until he had picked up all the
sacks of starch from the nearby stores and worked halfway through the
night that some levels in his skills and a new achievement kicked in to fill
in the gaps, making his ad-hoc plan realistic in one fell swoop.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 13
STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 8
PER: 14
WIS: 14
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 8), Food Scientist
(Level 8), Medicinal Brewer (Level 2)
Achievements: Shop Owner, Mass Prep

Mass Prep (Achievement)

You have planned on making a food item for a huge number of
people, then followed through on that plan by focusing down
on one particular component.
After preparing ingredients in advance, it makes
assembling the final product a little faster and easier. Effects
dissipate once you stop a particular work session.

Between his mass-production capabilities pushing along the process

and slightly better majicka efficiency from Medicinal Brewer, he managed
to make just a bit more boba than he had thought possible. Was he sick to
his stomach from bottoming out his majicka dozens of times? Absolutely.
But Ella had cleared it as a one-time emergency thing.
 With Lily soundly conked out in bed and his wagon loaded up with
thousands of boba pearls, Arthur set out for the wall once again. It was
going to be a more effective day.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

TEA OF THE ROCK-THROWER

“And what do these do again?” The wolverine commander was glaring at

Arthur out of his one good eye. Probably. It was possible he just always
looked like that. Arthur tried hard not to take it personally.
“It’s a small buff to vitality and dexterity. Not much, but I can make
a lot of these.”
Having dragged his wagon to the bottom of the wall, Arthur was
now dealing with a problem he hadn’t expected. It was also one that made
perfect sense. A random new demon showing up at a battleground with a
cart full of unproven things was bound to raise questions. Not everyone
understood Arthur’s story that the round balls of dough could do magical
things.
And he had an absurd amount of boba pearls and had light-flavored
tea to make barrels of finished product. For it to be useful, though, he had to
convince the commander that they would help in the defense. And there was
a real effect. The system said so.

Tea of the Rock-Thrower

 This tea was made specifically with the unskilled thrower of
things in mind. With this drink, the sore back and weak eye of
the amateur David are mitigated a bit. And every little bit helps.
The drinker of the Tea of the Rock Thrower gets both a slight
boost to their stamina and a very slight boost to the effects of the
dexterity stat when throwing a rock of some kind. On an
individual level, it’s not much. Spread out over large groups
however, the effect can add up quickly, slightly improving the
flow of a battle, so long as that battle largely consists of throwing
chunks of local granite.
Effects: Slight increase in vitality, slight conditional increase in
dexterity
Effect duration: 30 minutes
Cooldown: Two hours

Arthur thought about asking the wolverine why the system knew
about an Earth hero, then decided against the question. Apparently, without
a merchant-class skill, he couldn’t just flick an item description over to
someone else and the wolverine didn’t have a way of reading the
description either. So Arthur needed to focus every aspect of his being on
the worst possible aspect of any job.
Sales. I guess you can’t avoid sales.
“I can drink this,” the wolverine said. “The problem with drinking it
and verifying your frankly unbelievable sales pitch is that I’m currently
running with buffs provided by something like two Majna’s worth of pills
and potions, all carefully selected to not clash with the others. And this…”
He motioned at the pile of goods Arthur had spent the better part of
an hour carting up to the wall.
“Will likely upset that apple cart and replace all of them. If I drink
this and it’s just some over-enthusiastic bid to get class experience… I
won’t be pleased. And I won’t forget the lost coin. Is that a liability you
really want to take on?”
 Arthur’s hand instinctively went to his money pouch. He did have
about that much money. But if the wolverine didn’t see the value in the
drink, he’d be out almost all of the money he’d spent on prep, plus the little
he had held back to restock his shop once this was all over. It wasn’t a small
risk.
Screw it. If there was one thing Arthur knew, it was that at least one
of his friends would be willing to help. He nodded weaker than he’d have
liked and pushed the sample cup of boba towards the wolverine.
The wolverine took the drink, eyed it cautiously, then took a sip.
“It’s sweet.”
“It has to be. The syrup keeps the pearls fresh longer.”
“And it’s not working.”
“You have to drink the whole thing.”
Fine-tuning the amount of boba had proved to be a tough nut to
crack. It turned out that when he blessed the pearls, the number of pearls he
put in determined the potency of the brew. It took an hour to determine the
minimum viable dose to make the damn stuff work.
The wolverine sucked up some of the pearls through one of the
dozens of extra straws Milo had put together for him the night before, then
apparently decided it was too much trouble. Tipping his head back, he
dumped the entire contents of the cup into his mouth, pearls and all, and
swallowed it. He didn’t chew. Arthur suspected he didn’t even taste it.
For a moment, the wolverine looked both smug and angry, and
raised his finger to point at Arthur accusingly. Then, just as quickly, his eyes
widened and the finger dropped.
“Hell.”
“You got the buff?” Arthur asked.
“Yes.”
“I know it’s small but I figured over a large enough group it
might…”
 Arthur’s sales pitch dropped off as he noticed the wolverine wasn’t
listening. He was staring at the cup in his hand, his eyes darting back and
forth slightly as he did some kind of obscure mental math. Suddenly, he
snapped out of it.
“Cat! Stealth cat! Come out of stealth right now. Come here.”
Suddenly, just beside Arthur, a cat dressed entirely in black was
there. Not materialized, just there.
Of course, it’s Corbin. Does he spend his entire life in stealth? I
almost forgot he existed.
“Hi, Arthur.” Corbin waved weakly. “And yes, sir? What can I do
for you?”
“This boy is going to make you nine cups of tea. You’re going to
carry them all the way around this damn wall and give them to the other
commanders.”
“That’s going to take hours.”
“Then it’s going to take hours. Arthur?”
Arthur scooped out boba into ten cups, poured tea in them, and set
them out on the table. The commander rooted around in his supplies until he
found a crate just big enough to hold the ten cups, crammed everything
inside, and sent the cat on his grumbling way.
“Does he… does he have to wear all black like that? It makes the
stealth skill work better?”
“No. That’s a choice he’s making.” The commander watched the cat
go, then shook his head and turned back around. “Your drink didn’t reset
my other buffs.”
“It didn’t work? Then why…”
“No, listen to me. It didn’t reset the other buffs. It went on top of
them, additively. The cat said your name was Arthur?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Do you know why I’m a commander?”
 “No, sir?”
“I was chosen for this position because I have at least one skill that
shares some of my stats with the people around me. It stacks on top of
whatever buffs they might also have.”
“Ahhh.” It was beginning to come together. “So even if only you
drink this, it helps the overall effort.”
“I can’t do the math on the total effect, but it’s not nothing. It
matters.” He looked down at the empty mug again. “Weird that it didn’t
mess things up. Stacking alchemicals is a complex thing. It should have at
least cancelled one of my other buffs.”
An hour later, Arthur was dishing out drinks as fast as he could
make them, giving them to people as they arrived and circling the wall with
crates when he could get away from the prep process for a moment. That
delivery-delay was costly though. For every trip he made, he lost the chance
to complete more drinks.
As he finished his next crate of drinks, turned off his heat sources,
and got ready to make his next delivery, he looked up to see the crate
floating in the air. Someone else had already grabbed it and was beginning
the delivery run.
“Lily, you shouldn’t be here,” Arthur huffed when he saw the owl
girl. “You are supposed to be in bed. Resting.”
“Nuh-uh. The doctor came by. He said I could do light activity,
now.” Lily threw her shoulders back in smug defiance. “Said I had to.”
“And this is light activity?” Arthur said.
“It is. Ella said so.” Somehow, the little ball of trouble had read the
relationship between Arthur and Ella well enough to know that Arthur more
or less felt like he had to do what Ella said. He could see it in her smug little
owl eyes. “Only for a few hours, though. She said I have to come back for
lunch.”
“Well. Okay. But you stop the moment you feel the least bit sick?”
Arthur said. The help would be nice, provided she didn’t faint doing it. “Is
the normal pay okay?”
 She looked at him like he was stupid.
“It’s wall day. For a monster swarm. People don’t take pay for that.”
And then she was off, carting the drinks to anyone who didn’t have
one yet, bringing back empties, washing them, and overall doing everything
Arthur needed outside of the actual batch cooking of the beverages. He had
almost gotten used to not having help, but having his helper back was such
a breath of fresh air that he could almost feel the stress-knots coming loose
in his back.
“Arthur. More drinks for the commanders.” Hours later, the
wolverine was back, now with both Corbin and another fast-looking feline
demon of a more cheetah-like variety. “These two will take them.”
“I just got back!” Corbin whined. “Just now.”
“Quiet,” the cheetah commanded. “You and I both know you
stealthed the whole way. How many levels did you gain.”
“One,” the cat said. “And most of another.”
The cheetah looked at him, almost offended. “And you’re
complaining?”
“Well, yeah. Force of habit, I guess.”
Once the drinks for the commanders were gone, Arthur moved to
get back to drink prep.
“No, not yet. Take a break. Come with me.” The commander moved
back to his table, passed it, and stood looking over the wall. “Look at that.”
Arthur did. Where there had once been a mass of monsters gnawing
at the stone wall, there was now a much sparser presence of enemies. More
were coming in, of course, but all the build-up was gone. The commander
pointed off to the left, where a not-Karbo hunter was cutting through a
much denser accumulation of enemies. As he broke through to the area
Arthur had been supplying with drinks, the warrior paused for a moment, as
if confused, then sprinted past the area to the still-dangerous area on the
right.
 “I don’t want to overstate things. The drinks you’re supplying
hardly help. To someone like Karbo, they’d be more or less useless. But as
a resource in a war of defense? It’s a huge difference.”
“Are we goofing off now?” Lily was returning with a box of drinks.
“I can still work, you know. But not forever.”
Arthur glanced at the commander.
“Go, go. I just wanted you to see what your drinks are doing. And
see me after your shift. I’m working on something.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

BEAR DEMON

As the sun pulled high in the sky, Lily was puffing away on a crate. The
exertion had finally caught up with her and weakened her enough that she
had actually listened to Arthur when he forced her to sit, crammed a drink
into her hands, and told her to rest.
“I could still work. After I rest.”
“No, you couldn’t. And Ella said you need to come back,
remember? She won’t let you come anymore if you don’t listen to her. You
know how she is.” Arthur doubted the little girl actually knew how Ella
would react if she disobeyed the mother cook’s command. He wasn’t sure
he knew. From what he could see, no one had ever actually tried it.
“Fine. But what are you going to do?” She looked around at the
accumulated throng of rock-chuckers. “To get them the drinks, I mean.”
“Just carry them myself. That’s what I was doing before.”
“No. That’s dumb.” She finished slurping her drink and stood up.
Arthur’s perception told him she could probably handle at least that much.
“Wait here. I’ll fix it.”
 Arthur watched with a curiosity that turned to horror as she walked
up to the commander, who initially tried to shoo her away. She didn’t leave.
The conversation became animated, with large, swinging arm gestures from
both, before the commander finally stopped, sighed, slumped his shoulders,
and nodded. Lily nearly skipped her way back over, her eyes shining with
triumph.
“He says you can have an assistant. For when I’m not here.”
“How… why… What happened over there?”
Off in the distance, a large non-Karbo infernal suddenly yelled. “I’m
doing what?”
“I just explained to him how much slower you’d be without help.
And that you wouldn’t ask for help.”
“Who says I wouldn’t ask for help?”
Lily shrugged, then bent down to clean her cup out before she left.
“Everyone.”
As Lily left, Arthur bent down himself to get back to work, only to
be suddenly covered in a monstrously large shadow, one that blotted out the
very sun.
“Hello.” The infernal stood awkwardly, his hands behind his back.
“The commander said I’m reassigned to beverage logistics. Do you… know
what that is?”

Arthur worked for a little over eight hours before his boba supplies gave
out. After cleaning up his gear for the next day, he wandered over to the
commander’s desk.
“Done?”
“Out of materials. I’ll have more by tomorrow.” Arthur sat. “You
wanted to talk to me?”
“Yes. I did. I heard someone saying those drinks were different from
usual. How are they normally?”
 “They’re sweeter. And have cream. I stripped down the recipe so I
could carry everything.”
“Ah. Well, don’t do that tomorrow. Full recipe. It might not work
better, but it’s worth doing these kinds of things right. The cost is low
enough anyway.”
“Respectfully, it’s not that cheap. I have some money left, but…”
“Not for you, foolish child. For the city. You thought we’d let you
bankrupt yourself over this?”
Arthur considered everything he had seen from the city’s
government until then. “No, I suppose not.”
“We wouldn’t. And if what that loud little owl-girl said was true,
you don’t even know what’s coming tomorrow.”
“Probably not. I’m… new. Real new.”
“Monster waves come in surges. It’s not easy to see. But they have
phases, patterns they generally follow. The first day is always a bit denser.
But the last day, which our scouts tell us should be tomorrow, is always the
worst. The dungeons release the worst monsters last and throw out every
monster they’ve accumulated in the meantime.”
“Sounds bad. Any idea of why they do that?”
“I’m no scientist. But if we were to lose people over this, tomorrow
would be the day. We need any edge we can get. And so, tomorrow, you
won’t report here for work. You’ll report to the city center and will be
assigned dedicated runners. You’ve already met two of them. And you will,
Arthur Teamaster, supply the entire wall with drinks.”
“Respectfully, sir, this is about all the boba I can make. I mean, I
leveled…”
He had. And it wasn’t a small level, as single levels went.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 14
 STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 8
PER: 14
WIS: 16
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 8) Food Scientist
(Level 8) Medicinal Brewer (Level 2)
Achievements: Shop Owner, Mass Prep, Buffer Against the
Wave

Buffer Against the Wave (Achievement)

You have cut your other-people-augmenting teeth
against the iron of war. When buffing individuals who are
resisting a monster wave, your buffs are a small fraction more
effective.

Arthur continued, “But there’s a limit to how much boba I can

make. I run out of majicka.”
“Let us worry about that. Some orders have already been made to
help. You’ll find out more about those when you get home. Besides that,
we’ll understand if you can’t do more than what your body allows. We just
ask for your best.”
Arthur nodded.
“You’ll have it.”
The commander slapped a rectangular piece of paper down on the
counter, gesturing for Arthur to take it. He did so, finding that it was
covered with technical language he didn’t have the time or energy to
understand.
 “It’s a credit voucher. Any shop will sell you almost any product
related to food production at no charge to you if you show them that. I
regret having to mention this, but these do get audited after the wave. Be
careful to use it responsibly.”
“Got it. For ingredients and materials too?”
“Anything you need for tomorrow. And since I probably won’t see
you until after the battle, good luck.”

Arthur made it down the steps, absurdly happy that the battle was taking
place on top of a wall rather than at the bottom of a canyon. His legs were
shot from squatting down and making tea all day. He doubted he would
have had the energy to get home if it was uphill rather than down.
“We built prisons of wood and metal, and confined you in them.”
“Oh. Hi, Mizu.”
“Hi.” She was getting better at the word. Arthur could tell she had
been practicing. “You made a large amount of tea today.”
He really had. After the bustle of the day and the frantic pace of the
work, Mizu’s matter-of-fact tone was oddly restful.
“I did. They’re putting me at the city center tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Arthur wasn’t sure, but he thought Mizu looked slightly
disappointed.
“I have some time before I go home. Were you… doing anything?”
“Nothing until the wave tomorrow.” She held up a bandaged hand
and forearm and let it drop, limply, to her side. “I’ve used too much
Majicka. They told me I need to recover.”
“Your arm is hurt? Did something get through the wall?”
Mizu shook her head.
“No, not really. A large insect bit me when I was tending to the
waterways. We still have to tend them, even during a wave.”
 Arthur set his fingers lightly on her arm and leaned over to examine
the bandage.
“And you saw a doctor about it?”
“First aid only. People get hurt during monster waves. The town’s
doctors are busy, and…” She lifted her arm and dropped it, apparently
showing him that she wasn’t hindered by the injury. “There’s no pain. I was
careless. That’s all.”
“Well, I can’t let an injured friend travel unaccompanied, anyway.
Walk you home?”
“Please.”
They walked side by side for a while, silently. Arthur was still
getting used to that particular dynamic. Mizu never seemed to mind when
he talked. She also never seemed to mind when he didn’t talk. Arthur did
feel awkward about the silence, at least a little, but it was getting better. And
today, when he was so tired he was sure he’d make a fool of himself if he
babbled on, silence was wonderful.
Eventually, they ran into something that forced him to break his
silence.
“That,” he said, “Is the weirdest statue I’ve ever seen.”
In the center of a large market street was a fountain. In the center of
that fountain, surrounded by a number of waterspouts, was a foundation
holding a statue of a very large, very undignified bear. Instead of standing
tall, he was sitting in a way that implied laziness. He was smiling. He was,
Arthur would have sworn, designed to look stupid.
“Oh. The bear-demon.” She looked at Arthur’s eyes. “You don’t
know of the bear-demon?”
He shook his head. She glanced around and, finding an unoccupied
bench, pulled Arthur to it. He sat down, and she sat very close beside him.
“The history of our planet is one of war,” she said. “You know that.
And at the worst of the conflict, when things were the hardest, the bear
came.”
 “From… somewhere else? Or was he native to this world?”
“From another world. Under another system. The histories say he
could never explain it well, but he was blown from there to here by some
calamity having to do with a disruption in the soil.”
“In the soil?”
“Under the ground. In the dirt. The translations differ. The bear was
not… skilled at communications.”
“Got it. And then?”
“Under the powers of two systems, he became strong. Untouchably
strong. He was defending himself, until he was too powerful to be attacked
at all.”
“And then he took over?”
“No. He now had time to ask questions. And after a short year’s rest,
he did. And he found there were no enemies here, as he defined them. That
it was just demon killing demon.”
“Huh. You know, on my world, there were only humans. But
different nations of humans. We made war.”
“The bear would not have allowed it. He used his power to end the
wars.”
“How?”
“The histories don’t say. But they ended. And all agree that it was
because of him.”
She looked up at the dumb face of the bear. It looked ready to fall
asleep after a big meal and also as if it had never, ever read a book. And she
looked reverently.
“In a way, all this is his. The peace, the things that peace built.
Every demon respects him.”
They sat there for a while, just regarding the bear. Arthur slowly
began to come to terms with the fact that this world’s greatest hero looked
like he just finished gorging himself into a diabetic lethargy on honey. From
what Mizu had said, everything he liked about this world was the bear’s
contribution, a function of it seeing war between demons, deciding it didn’t
make sense, and then stopping it.
Hip to hip with a beautiful girl in one of the many beautiful streets
of the beautiful city that centuries of peace had made possible, Arthur found
he liked the bear.

“You stay here?”

“Yes.”
“With your family?”
“No. My family is not here. I rent a room.”
“Oh, I’d love to see it sometime.”
Mizu flushed more colors of blue than Arthur had thought possible,
surging across her face like an all-blue prism was passing by at the speed of
sound.
“Oh, I… didn’t mean… that,” Arthur said.
Mizu opened her mouth to reassure him, looking as calm and
collected as always. She wasn’t, though, if the fact that she failed to make
words was any indication. Instead, she let out a short squeak, panicked, and
fled into the house.
Arthur stood there for a minute, not knowing quite what to do. A
large lizard girl whom he didn’t know poked her head out of the house,
scanned the street, spotted Arthur, and came out to meet him.
“Arthur? Mizu says you can go. Something about having to rest for
the work tomorrow.” Getting closer, she got a better look at Arthur’s human
oddness and stopped. “You two are… friends?”
“Yeah, I think so,” Arthur said. “I like her, anyway.”
“Got it. I think.” The girl eyed Arthur with a kind of amused
suspicion. “Anyway, she says she will see you around. What did you do to
her, anyway? I could have sworn she was embarrassed. I’ve never seen that
from her before.”
“Um…” Arthur considered asking the girl about it, then decided
he’d rather not embarrass Mizu any more than he already had. “Ask her
about it. If she wants to talk about it, she can.”
“Good answer.”
Arthur shuffled a little, awkwardly. “Well, then. It’s nice to meet
you…”
“Onna.”
“Onna. Very nice to meet you. But I have some work to do tonight,
so I’ll be going.”
“No problem. Good luck with that. And Arthur?”
“Yeah?”
“She’s a really nice girl. You know that, right?”
Arthur nodded.
“I do. The nicest I know.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

ASSISTANTS

Arthur made his way home.

The worst part about his walk was a moderately sore set of legs. It
almost felt wrong. This was a place everyone referred to as the demon
world, a land of magic completely different from his previous humdrum,
unsatisfying life. In almost any fantasy story he had ever read, that meant
learning to use a sword. It meant chucking fireballs. And, very relevantly, it
meant almost always getting ambushed with some kind of trouble when you
were just trying to walk home.
And yet, after a short few minutes of daydreaming about a girl who
blushed in blue, he was home. In strict defiance of fantasy-world rules, it
was only after he got home that things started to get weird.
“Arthur Teamaster?”
“That’s me. Still getting used to the last name.”
Whatever language shenanigans the system was going through to
help him understand the language of the demon world as English worked
pretty well. Credit where credit was due, the system had somehow made
words work so seamlessly for him that he hadn’t thought about the language
part of things until days after he arrived in this world. And then he didn’t
think about it again because it just wasn’t an issue for him at all.
Visually, it took some time to get used to how demons looked. Most
demons, he more or less understood what he was looking at. They were, by
and large, animal-ish. They were close enough to rabbits, bears, wolverines,
sparrows, and porcupines, that he could make the mental leap. Even
Karbo’s species of infernals was somewhat understandable.
And now, somehow, that was all falling apart. These men were
skinny, almost to the point of what he’d consider rope-like. But their heads
were large, square, and flat, with huge, equally square eyes. They had round
mouths, and metallic-tinted skin. And when Arthur went to look for a
comparison from his earth-life to try to determine what he’d call them, only
one came to mind.
I don’t care how much they look like it, there’s no way in hell these
are USB cord hybrid people.
“I’m sorry, I had a question, just real quick,” Arthur said. “I’m an
offworlder, as you might know.”
“We were informed so, yes.”
“And my planet only had one humanoid, sapient species. Unless you
count dolphins, which… never mind actually. The point is that I haven’t
quite figured out every species of demon, yet.”
“It’s nothing to worry about. We are, as you would understand it, a
representation of the metal concept, much like water elementals are of
moisture, or as infernals are of the concepts of force.”
“Ah. Got it. And thank you.” Breathing a sigh of relief that the
system hadn’t forced him to accept calling them Usbians, it suddenly
occurred to Arthur that the men were likely there for a reason. “And how
can I help you?”
“We’ve been sent by the city.” The more talkative of the two not-a-
cable men fished into his pocket and pulled out a small piece of paper not
entirely unlike the credit voucher the wolverine commander had provided
him with. “To help you produce goods for the monster wave resistance
efforts.”
“To help? In what way?”
The less talkative metal elemental shrugged. “In whatever way you
can use us best. We’re both relatively versatile assistance and support
classes. You will find we are up to most tasks.”
“Oh. Hm.” Arthur wished that the wolverine had given him more of
a heads-up about this. He hardly knew what to do with them. Pulling the
credit voucher out of his pocket, he showed it to the pair. “Can you use this?
In lieu of me, I mean.”
“If you wish.”
“Alright, then. I’ll need a few things from the market, if one of you
can go and get them. I’ll make a list. And whoever wants to stay can help
me get set up while we wait. It’s going to be a long night.”
A few hours later, Arthur’s room was a factory of polished, efficient
production. Whatever else these metal elementals might be, they were at a
much higher level than Arthur. More than that, they were experienced. They
had, Arthur learned, worked in dozens of different environments while
gaining the initial levels in their class, and had seen set-ups much more
professional and thought out than his.
Once they realized Arthur wasn’t going to give them trouble in some
pride-fueled resistance, they helped him optimize his own workflow. They
fed him ingredients just as he needed them, brought the finished products
from one beautifully planned station to the next, and more or less turned his
room into an assembly line for boba pearls.
Best of all, this didn’t seem to have any downsides. So long as
Arthur was pumping out majicka, the boba pearls seemed to get the full
benefit of his involvement, just as if he had handled every step.
“It’s part of the class,” the less talkative man said when Arthur asked
why that was. “A normal helper might actually disrupt the production. But
the combination of our high-level and class skills allows for efficiency
gains without product quality loss. It’s a win-win.”
 “Well, I’ll certainly take it. It’s just a shame I can’t keep up, really.
As of now, I’m officially on majicka cooldown.”
Across the room, the other man jerked as he suddenly seemed to
remember something. “Oh! I did forget, didn’t I?”
“What?”
“This.” He brought out a small packet. “From the city. It’s meant for
healers whenever they need to keep up with some kind of disaster affecting
a large part of the city, but the overall mixture is sound for anyone trying to
optimize their majicka production.”
Arthur took the paper packet, opening and dumping out six pills of
various colors and shapes into his hand. After double-checking to make sure
he was supposed to take them all at once, he downed them.

Buffs Active!
You have consumed various alchemical products. For convenience’s sake,
the system has assembled all the separate effects into a shorter, easier to
read, summary.
For the next four hours, your majicka replenishment rate is doubled. Your
passive and active Majicka use are both slightly more efficient for the
same period, and majicka-consuming tasks now cost slightly less to
produce the same effects.
Your majicka stores have been immediately refilled. Note that this
particular combination of alchemical products can only refill your
majicka once per day.

If the explanation wasn’t enough, Arthur got the gist of what was
going on just from how he felt. It was like a combination of a solid cup of
coffee, a massage, and the perfect amount of sleep. He was suddenly raring
to go.
“Okay, great. You guys ready for a long night?”
“Of course.”
 “Good. Let’s get down to it.”

Four hours later, they had created a mountain of boba pearls, one that the
two metal men had packaged in barrels and taken away to parts unknown
every time Arthur took a break to re-up his mana. It was a remarkable thing.
“How much to hire you guys?” Arthur said. “Not that I have the
need just yet, but just in case I ever get there.”
The two men looked at each other and laughed. “More than you’d
think, even if you could hire us. You’d have to bid us away from the city
first. They consider us a… what’s the term?”
“I think it’s ‘a resource most valuable for balancing purposes.’ They
use us to clear bottlenecks in the local economy when it’s needed. Which is
fine by me, at least. Variety keeps things fresh.”
“Makes sense. Too bad, though. We could have gone national with
this thing.” Arthur’s majicka stores weren’t quite full yet, but from the
night’s experience, he knew they would recover entirely by the time he got
far enough into the tea-making process for the majicka draw to kick in
again. “I’m ready for the next round if you guys are.”
“No, it’s done.”
“What? We can make more. There’s… I mean, there are a lot of
hours until dawn.”
“There might be, but one of our functions as assistants is safety. You
overdrew your mana last night, correct?”
“Yes.”
“One of our orders from the commander was to make sure you
didn’t overdo it tonight. Remember, you have to be functional for
tomorrow. As far as we know, nobody can assemble these drinks besides
you and keep the effect.”
Arthur looked at the boba press longingly. “You’re sure? I really
could keep going.”
 “We’re sure.” The two grabbed their workbags and what few tools
they had taken out of them to help with the work, then walked to the door.
“Thanks, Arthur. We both had fun.”
“Yeah, absolutely. Next monster wave, maybe?”
“Maybe. Have a good night.”

Before dawn the next morning, he was shaken awake by Lily, who rushed
him out of bed, slapped a pepped hot tea Ella left for him, and more or less
dragged him to the city center.
“Lily! I need my stuff!”
“Those metal elementals said not to tell you until this morning, but
they said all your stuff is there already.” She stiffened up in a rough
imitation of their posture. “It was like, ‘Tell him that we will prepare his
equipment with the same attention we gave to the pearls.’ Just like that. So
it’s taken care of.”
And it was. Not only was his cart and every piece of equipment he
needed already set up, but they also somehow managed to duplicate every
part of it. He had more heat sources, more pots, and more kettles, all
arranged in an efficiency-boosting way similar to the night before.
“Oh, hell yes.” Arthur walked over to some unidentified crates and
opened them to find dozens and dozens of back-up cups in addition to his
own usual serving gear. There were carrying trays and bottles and tubes and
everything else he might need, all conscripted for his own private beverage
war.
Somehow, and Arthur swore he’d find and thank both of them for
this, they had even known about his private, Mizu-optimized well. A note
on top of a set of several large barrels informed him they had drawn it fresh
last night, and had it transported here, ready for him to dip into.
That tears it. Professional assistants are unreal. And they really
were unbelievable. If Arthur managed to get someone with even half the
effect one of them had, he’d be set for life. It would have been hard to
imagine a better assistant than them if it wasn’t for the one standing right in
front of him.
“Oh, yes. That’s a LOT of stuff,” Lily said, then suddenly raised her
hand, pointed at the wall, and spun around. “We’re going to make tea for
ALL the people in the city. Every one of them. For all day. Ella and the
doctor both said I could.”
He couldn’t help it. He reached down, threw back the hood of her
jacket, and rubbed the top of her feathery head like she was a kitten, fully
ignoring her annoyed squawk and attempts to get away.
“Hell yes, we will. Lily, let’s get to it.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

CITIZEN OF THE DAY

From the moment Arthur put his first pot of water on a heat source,
the day became a blur.
Lily worked like a whirlwind, running to get him water, taking pots
off heat when they were ready, bringing him tea leaves, and generally filling
whatever gaps she could. The drink-runners showed up with almost perfect
timing and carted off crates of drinks as soon as they were ready. They then
sprinted back with empty cups, which Lily furiously cleaned to put them
back into service.
Somewhere in the commotion, Arthur was aware he was leveling.
He ignored it, dumping the first few points into dexterity and splitting the
rest between perception and wisdom. He lost track of his progress after the
first level. In the storm of tea making that was happening, it could have
been two or a dozen. He didn’t have the time to let it register.
Runners ran, a little owl girl worked herself to exhaustion, and
Arthur fell into a zone that would rival any runner’s high as he produced
gallons and gallons of tea for his contribution to the city’s defense.
 And then he was shocked clean out of the zone by the realization
that disaster was looming.
He was, despite the most massive night of production he could
imagine, running out of boba pearls. He looked up at the sun and confirmed
that hours had indeed passed, but nowhere near enough. It was an hour or
so before noon, and he was already almost out of the only magic resource
that made the drinks work.
Somewhere, around this wall, is the biggest threat of the last few
days. Screw it. Let’s take the problems one at a time.
He hunkered down, returned to every boba barrel to shake out any
missed pearls, and did everything but individually count the pearls he put in
each cup to extend his dwindling supply. His efforts added up a couple
more cups.
He tried and failed to turbocharge his last few cups of boba with
even more majicka, discovering that double-dipping into his stores of
mystic energy wouldn’t work, at least not how he was trying it.
And then, finally, he was tapped. The runners left with the last few
drinks he had managed to make, and there was nothing left to do but throw
in the towel.
“That’s it, Lily. We’re out of pearls.”
“Already?! We can’t be. Arthur, it’s only noon.”
“I know! That’s all I could make last night. Even with help.”
Lily huffed. “I could have helped. You would have had more then.”
“You did help, Lily. I wouldn’t have had the help I did unless you
made that wolverine give it to me. How’d you do that, anyway?”
“Oh, him?” she asked, rolling her eyes as if somehow browbeating
the scariest person Arthur knew outside of Ella and Karbo was a boring
procedural type of thing. “He’s a big sissy. I don’t even think that eye patch
is real.”
“Be that as it may, I couldn’t do it. Or any of this, without you.”
 Arthur surveyed his work area. It was a mess. Even with Lily
working overtime to make sure that everything was clean, there were
dozens of dirty pieces of cookware, spilled boba pearls, and heat sources
that hadn’t quite managed to unfoul themselves of tea spills yet. He walked
around deactivating all the magical devices, scooping up pots, pans, and
kettles as he did and tossing them into the cleaning tubs to soak.
“How many people do you think we got drinks to?” Lily asked.
“Honestly? No idea. Hundreds, at least. Maybe thousands?” Arthur
shook his head. “Probably not thousands. But a lot.”
All at once, the exertion of the morning hit him like a rock to the
head, and he became aware of exhaustion beyond anything he had expected
washing over him. He sat down flat on the ground, letting his majicka
recharge.
“I think you did okay, Arthur.”
“Thanks.”
“Oh, that’s it? I was wondering when you’d run out,” Corbin said,
de-stealthing into view from just to the side of the other two.
“Good gods, you have to give me some warning when you do that,”
Arthur exclaimed tiredly. “How does that even work, anyway?”
“I’m sneaky, and the system makes it work better. If you had more
points in perception or were looking for me, you might have noticed me.”
“I’ll keep that in mind.”
“Arthur’s being depressed. He wanted to make more boba,” said
Lily.
“More than you made?”
“Yeah. It’s the dangerous day, right? And I could have done more.”
“Done more?” The cat caught Lily’s eye. “Is he stupid?”
“A little.” Lily smiled.
 “Hey, now!” Arthur started to object before a cheer came that
wrapped around the entire city, rising in volume until Arthur was almost
deafened by the shout.
“See? It’s over. Last monster slain, and we’re safe now.”
“So soon?” Arthur said. “All the other days went longer. I thought
there were supposed to be more today.”
“Well, yeah, there were. But on the last day, we pull out all the
stops. More people on the wall. Every hunter and dungeon crawler on duty.
The mayor burns some of his every-once-in-a-while buffs. Stuff like that.
That’s just the first reason, though.”
“What are the others?”
“He really is slow on the uptake, isn’t he?”
Lily nodded, sagely, and patted Arthur on the head condescendingly.
“He is. But people like him.”
“Arthur, the other reason is you. Do you think the city did all this
just for novelty?” Corbin gestured out to the whole setup, waving his arm
vaguely at all the pots and things.
“They are nice a lot of the time.”
“Not this nice. Not during a wave. Somebody thought this would
make a big difference. And it did. Everyone’s talking about it.”
“He’s right, actually.” A new voice said from behind Arthur. He
turned to see the mayor walking up, Karbo and Eito in tow. “We’ve fine-
tuned our city defenses for decades. Having a new percentage boost,
however small…”
“Makes a big difference. Kid, do you know how much more support
I got from the wall this time? The stone tossers tossed stones better. The
archers… arched? They had superior arching. I kept hitting gaps that had
nothing to kill.” Karbo looked annoyed and glad at the same time when
stating that last fact. “I could hug you. And throttle you.”
 “Karbo’s bloodlust aside, Arthur, he’s not wrong. And we’re going
to have to talk more about just how you’re able to do this,” Eito said. “It’s
not absolutely unheard of, but a more or less stable buff that works outside
of alchemy is… a bigger thing than you probably think it is, anyway.”
“Ahem,” the mayor called attention back to himself, holding out a
hand to Arthur and pulling him to his feet as Arthur fought against the last
few bits of physical fatigue that his vitality hadn’t fixed yet. “We can
address all that at a later time. Will address it, actually. See to it, Eito. But
for now, are we all in agreement?”
“Yeah.” Karbo nodded. “If not him, then who?”
“Absolutely. Karbo can’t win it every time.”
Ignoring Arthur’s confusion, the mayor plowed through. “Alright,
then. I’m sending the announcement now.”
Arthur looked to Lily for an explanation and saw her face filled with
an impossibly smug type of happiness, before a system notification forced
itself in front of him.

Citywide Announcement
Congratulations, demons! The monster wave is broken. While
non-combat classes are advised to stay within the city walls until
the surrounding area is confirmed cleared, the danger to our
home is abated, and we are once again safe.
As your mayor, I am enormously pleased to state that this wave
caused no deaths, and a much lower-than-average number of
injuries, even accounting for the normal bone-break, strained
muscle, and stubbed toe types of wounds we usually see. In
addition to that, we finished far ahead of schedule.
We have the entire city’s efforts to thank for this, but as always,
we highlight one citizen’s efforts that stood out above the rest
and contributed to our victory in a particularly impactful way.
Arthur Teamaster’s Boba did both, pushing nearly a thousand of
us to levels of performance we otherwise wouldn’t have reached.
He is named citizen of the day.
 Please note that as a recently arrived offworlder, he has no idea
what this means. Act accordingly. Don’t swarm the poor boy.
Otherwise, enjoy yourselves. The buying hour will commence in
two hours, and meat will be available for pickup at the gates
starting now. Have a great time!

“Look at him. He doesn’t understand at all,” Lily laughed, moving

around the work area and stacking Arthur’s heating elements as she went.
“I don’t. And I can’t emphasize enough how much it seems like I
should.”
“You’re the champion of the day,” Karbo said. “The big winner. The
guy everyone likes. People clap you on the back and say, ‘good job.’ It’s
fun.”
“There are also certain other advantages. Usually, we’d leave the
exact shape of the rewards up to the winner, but…” The mayor looked like
he was trying to find the words for something delicate. Karbo cut back in,
determined to help.
“But you don’t know anything about anything.”
“Well, yes. Are you comfortable if we figure it out ourselves, once
all this is over? I can consult Eito and Ella, if you’d like.”
“Sure,” Arthur said. Really, he couldn’t think of a single thing he
needed at the moment. Whatever they wanted to do was fine. “Lily, leave
some of that out. I’m probably going to go back to the house to make more
boba, later. I guess we can open shop later today?”
“No! Arthur, did you not hear all that about the buying hour? You
can make boba, but…”
“Only for the next few hours,” Milo said, walking up. “You guys
can go. I’ll fill him in on the rest.”
Eito, Karbo and the Mayor all said goodbye, congratulating Arthur
again as they did. Once they were gone, Milo helped Arthur pack up the
essentials he needed into crates for the walk back home.
 “Right now, the scavengers are working to get whatever meat they
can off the better-tasting kinds of monsters. There will be tons of it.
Literally tons. And once they’ve done that, they pack it up by the gates for
anyone to take. Defending the wall was a community effort. That means
community rewards. All the other materials go into the city’s treasury, and
people can buy them cheap if they need centipede carapace for armor, or
whatever. I’m gonna get some of that, for sure.” Milo shivered in his weird
blacksmith anticipation of a new project. “But it’s a lot of wealth, right?
And a long time ago, the city decided that the best way to get rid of it
was…”
“To have a party!” Lily almost screeched. “A big one. Everyone
walks around and gets food from everyone else. People go to each other’s
houses and eat until they pop, and then do it again. Karbo gets drunk!”
“Karbo gets drunk?”
“And breaks things!” Lily said. “Until Itela makes him stop!”
“Wait, how does she get him to stop?”
“She’s his wife, Arthur. They live apart because she has to live at the
church, but you really didn’t pick up on that?”
“No!” Arthur was reeling from the massive information dump. He
decided to process the Itela-and-Karbo piece of it later. “So the buying hour
is…”
“It’s the last time you can buy stuff for the next day and a half. It’s
all at a really steep discount, city funded. If you need boba stuff, now’s the
time. There’s a limit to how much you can get, but it’s higher than you’d
think. Don’t hold back. It’s an economic bump for the city, so you aren’t
doing anyone any favors by not taking advantage of it.”
“Got it. So what’s first?”
“Meat. Even if you don’t want to cook it. Mom will use your quota
for you,” Milo said. “And then shopping, I guess? I have a whole list.”
“Alright. Let's go.”
“Yeah!” Lily said, jumping up into the air. “Shopping time!”
OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

RISE TOGETHER

The buying hour was magical. Arthur’s pocket money was light compared
to a few days ago, but by the time he had spent his last coin, he had
replenished his stock of starch, the teas he generally used, a few spices, and
even bought an upgraded icemaker.
With Lily’s help, he pumped out a bunch of boba in record time,
then ran downstairs to help Ella with her preparations. The entire kitchen
was in use. Every heat source was busy either baking bread, roasting meat,
or toasting crackers. Dozens of bowls were lined up on the counter, all with
different sauces, glazes, and dips.
“Mom’s house is a popular stop. Not just because of her cooking.
She has a lot of friends,” Milo said. “Between you saving the town this time
around and all our friends, it’s going to be crazy here.”
As Ella finished cooking her food, Arthur and Milo left to wander
around the city, Lily in tow.
On every street, people were grilling meat, making snacks, and
opening up their houses for anyone who might come by. Arthur saw dozens
of demons laughing and shouting on a large porch, definitely violating some
kind of maximum occupancy building code.
 “We used to have these things where I lived, they called them art
walks,” Arthur said. “All the galleries would open up, and you could go
look at the paintings, and sculptures, and… usually just a lot of art. This
reminds me of that.”
“That sounds about right. Except that here, you’ll see people who
don’t even talk while they enjoy this thing, they just make a beeline from
one grill to another, packing it in until they can’t stand up straight.”
“Milo! Arthur!” Rhodia yelled from down the street. “You working,
or walking?”
“Walking, for now. You?”
“Walking, but also doing this.” She balled up her fist and punched
Arthur hard in the center of his chest. “You! What in the hell did you do
with my mugs?”
“Ow, I had to give everyone boba, right? And…”
“Not that. I understand that you did that. Why didn’t you warn me?”
“Warn you?”
“Arthur,” Milo said, “you know that levelling up is a big deal, right?
And that all the classes are more or less balanced in how hard it is to gain a
level. Do you know how potters level?”
“They make ceramics? And have people use them?”
“Yes, but how they use them is a big part of it. Mostly, potters just
give people their cups and hope they use them to take a drink from time to
time. Like they’ll sneakily put them in other people’s cupboards for that.”
“And what, Arthur Teamaster, do you think happens,” Rhodia said,
“when dozens and dozens of people use some of your glasses on the same
day?”
“I…”
“And those people are some of the highest-level people in the city?”
“Well…”
 “And that somehow, you manage to get them to use the cups in a
way that has significant tactical importance to the survival of thousands and
thousands of people?”
“Okay, enough, enough. Lily’s going to murder you if you keep
yelling at me like that.” It was true. Off to the side, Lily was glaring at the
mouse in an oddly effective way. Despite the owl’s small size, Rhodia
recoiled slightly, as if she actually felt danger. Arthur hurriedly placed a
hand on her head. “It’s okay, Lily. Rhodia’s mostly joking.”
“Only mostly. Milo, I’m assuming you had the same problem?”
“Yeah. Mine happened at night when I was trying to sleep. Ding,
ding, you got another level. Ding, someone made a metric ton of boba
pearls for the fifth time tonight, your skills are better. Ding, ding, ding! All
night long.”
“Exactly. Try that but when you’re trying to chuck failure pieces of
pottery down at a monster horde. I almost fell off the wall.”
“Get anything good, though? I got a class level, and a bunch of
levels to my mechanics skill.”
“I wasn’t as high of a level as you, so two levels. And a bunch of
upgrades to my pottery skill. And…” She spun around in place, throwing
her arms up in the air, palm up, to display two badly flawed but overall
shiny beads.
“No way.” Milo’s eyes went wide.
“What? What is it?”
“It’s glass. Glassmaking skills are… like my mechanic skill. A
slightly rarer variant of the main thing. Her career just got a lot better.”
“Yes, it did. Thanks to you.” She suddenly hugged Arthur. “What I
don’t get is why. Usually, you don’t get a skill like glassmaking unless
you’re actively grinding for it, which I wasn’t. Or if you tried to do a job
with the wrong tools, which I wasn’t. Cups for liquid. It’s pretty simple. It’s
not like you always secretly needed glassware and kept it a secret from
me.”
 “Oh, well, so….” Arthur blushed a bit. He hadn’t had the heart to
tell Rhodia that part of the appeal of boba was seeing the little pearls swirl
around at the bottom of the cup. He definitely hadn’t had the heart to
actually buy or commission glassware from someone else and leave one of
his few friends out in the cold.
“Arthur, you idiot.” This time Lily was the one hitting him “You
don’t do that. You get what you need to do your job right.”
“I was just being nice!” Arthur said.
“No, you weren’t. Or you were, but you weren’t.” Rhodia visibly
considered also hitting Arthur, then decided Lily was doing a good enough
job. “Arthur, we help each other. We absolutely don’t hold each other
back.”
“But if I didn’t, then…”
“Then she would have found another way to level, Arthur,” Milo
said. “And it would have been fine. Although she probably wouldn’t have
gotten glass.”
“Is that a problem? Like I forced it on you?” Arthur was suddenly
filled with visions of being the guy who ruined Rhodia’s build and felt
himself starting to sweat.
“No, it’s not like that. The system wouldn’t force it on me, and it’s
something I wanted to learn. Except now, I’m going to have to start making
dozens of glasses this week and learn how to make glass lids. Milo, can
you…”
“Glassblowing stuff? Absolutely. And maybe a press for the glass, or
something. We can talk about it.”
The three of them finally continued on, snacking and picking up
friends as they went. Spiky found them first, followed by Chuck, and then
Corbin. They cruised around, finding food everywhere. All the while,
Arthur’s eyes were peeled for Mizu, but he couldn’t find her anywhere.
That problem suddenly solved itself when he heard a familiar voice behind
him.
 “Those we released; we released without recompense for their
imprisonment.”
“Oh, hi, Mizu.” He turned to see Mizu smiling, her eyes sparkling,
and looking as pretty as he had ever seen her. The bandage on her arm was
still in place. Mizu probably had more vitality than him, but that still wasn’t
enough to instantly heal every possible injury. He knew that from direct
experience with knife-slips in the kitchen.
“You used my water. You used a great deal of my water.”
“Oh, yes. Barrels of it.” He winced as he remembered the beating he
had just taken from Rhodia overusing her ceramics in unexpected ways. “Is
that… okay?”
Rather than hearing an answer, he suddenly found himself in a hug.
A warm hug. The kind where his arms were over her shoulders, her arms
were curled around his torso, and her head was pressed against his chest.
“Yes, it’s okay. I like that you used the water.”
“It’s good water.”
“Really?”
“The best.”
The hug lingered for a few moments until both of them suddenly
realized the rest of the group was, to their credit, doing their very best not to
stare at them. But they weren’t doing a great job looking away.
Arthur and Mizu shook loose from each other, and everyone was
nice enough not to mention anything. The night continued, with everyone
finally circling back to Ella’s house for what was undoubtedly the best food
of the night. They stuffed themselves all over again with all the baked
goods and meat they could handle, and Milo got out every single failed
weapon he had ever made to hurl at a wooden target he hastily erected.
Arthur was terrible at it, to the point where the much-more-accurate
Mizu took pity on him and showed him how to do it better, which saved
Ella’s poor fence from his throws. Eventually, Arthur was press-ganged into
making everyone boba, a feat for which he was now much better equipped.
Arthur Teamaster
Level 16 Teamaster
STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 10
PER: 17
WIS: 19
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 9) Food Scientist
(Level 10) Medicinal Brewer (Level 5)
Achievements: Shop Owner, Mass Prep, Buffer Against the
Wave, Rise Together

Rise Together (Achievement)

Again and again, you’ve tied your victory with the success of
others. Far from riding coattails, you’ve helped anyone you
could, regardless of whether you knew them well or not.
If it were just once or twice, this might go unnoticed. But
you’ve done this enough that helping others isn’t only a
common occurrence for you, but the defining feature that the
majority of your friends know you by. They understand that you
feel obligated to help others, in a way they don’t quite
understand yet.
Because of this, your fate is now tied to those you help in a
more direct way. As you help others progress, your progress
also grows a small amount. There’s only one catch: this perk
won’t work with knowledge that it exists. It’s a reward for
altruism, and nothing destroys the altruistic impulse like
knowing there’s some kind of eventual benefit.
If you’d like to claim this achievement, you must first agree to
forget about it. It will exist, working in the background of
everything you do. If you don’t claim it, you will gain a
 significant amount of experience as with most achievements,
but nothing more.

Arthur understood the logic. The system had seen something it liked
and wanted to reward him for it. But the act of rewarding him for it would
mean he would have an incentive to game the process, helping people out
for his own gain instead of the niceness that the system wanted to reward.
It bothered him that he’d have to forget the achievement, but
everything else about it seemed just right to him. He wondered how many
more hidden achievements like this were floating around, rewarding people
on the sly like a more tangible form of karma.
He smiled and gave his assent for the memory wipe, and a second
later was left with no recollection of the achievement besides a faint,
unexplained sense of happiness.
“You gonna stand there smiling all night, or get us tea?” Milo
yelled. “Mizu said she’s going to die of dehydration any minute now.”
“I did not say this.”
“He knows, Mizu. It’s just fun.” Lily explained.
“All right, all right,” Arthur surrendered. “Let me get my stuff.
Don’t eat the rest of those cookies without me, okay?”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

UNSAID THINGS

The night wore on to the still-dark early hours of the next day before people
finally started peeling off. Although Ella had made a literal mountain of
food, it was still finite, and Arthur’s friends weren’t the only ones eating it.
When the food was finally gone and everyone had calmed down, it was
time to say goodbye.
Rhodia peeled off first, promising to come by tomorrow to help
Milo design and make the tools for her glassblowing. The combat-classes
were next, which surprised Arthur until he learned they had a hunting trip
planned the next day. Apparently, they were going to venture through the
weaker parts of the dungeon just for fun.
Milo said he was laying down for just a minute or two to “let the
food settle,” and ended up conked out on the cot he kept in his blacksmith
workshop. Lily only outlasted his sleepiness by a few minutes, getting
carried up to bed by Ella as soon as her little head drooped down.
And then, eventually, it was just Arthur and Mizu, sitting in the
backyard, looking up at the stars. After a bit, Arthur felt a head on his
shoulder. He just let it stay there. It didn’t seem to need words.
 Finally, after the silence had settled down around them for a while,
he spoke up.
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.” Mizu tilted her head up to look at him.
“Your people, the water elementals. Are they as quiet with things
like romance as they are with everything else?”
He thought he felt her tense up just the slightest amount at that.
“Much quieter than most. It’s… the sort of thing that’s felt, rather
than talked about. Both people know but it goes unsaid.”
“Ah.”
They sat like that for a few more minutes.
Don’t chicken entirely out, Arthur, he thought.
“So, then, this. What we have. It’s the kind of thing that goes
unsaid? It’s fine if we both just know it?”
He felt her face get warmer on his shoulder and could almost
imagine the palette of blues washing across it. Moments passed. Finally, he
felt her hand slip into his.
“Yes.”

Arthur wasn’t sure when she left the bench, but when he woke up, she was
gone.
Please, please let this new body not snore. How do you even find out
if you snore? It’s not like you can ask someone to watch you sleep. Mizu’s
certainly not going to mention it.
“Oh, look who’s waking up,” Ella said, bustling out to the yard. “I
have eggs and toast in the kitchen, ready to go.”
“You didn’t have to cook, Ella. You must be tired from yesterday.”
“Oh, not that tired. And I felt I owed you.”
 “For what?” Arthur tried and failed to think of a single thing Ella
could owe him a debt over. If anything, it was the other way around.
“Oh, just the sight of you and your little friend on that bench,
sleeping. It made me feel young again. Milo’s father and me were like that,
once.” She opened her beak and actually, really, honest-to-god giggled. “It
would have been rude, but I wanted to set up an easel and paint the sight.
So cute.”
“I… I… dammit, Ella. I’m not awake enough for this.”
“That’s why I’m doing it now. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. I’d
sooner die than embarrass that poor girl.”
“What about me, Ella?!”
“Oh, you? You’re much more fun to embarrass. That’s not my fault.
It’s not like I made you this way.”
Arthur sighed with frustration and escaped to the kitchen, where he
made himself a sandwich with the toast, eggs, and butter and poured
himself a large cup of tea. It was the simplest meal Ella had made, and it
was still mind-bendingly delicious. Outside of system shenanigans, Arthur
couldn’t see how that was even possible.
“Oh, by the way, Eito stopped by.”
“This early?”
“Oh, gods no. Very, very late last night. Drunk. Being carried home
by Karbo, bless him. Given how he looked, I’d guess he won’t be up for
several hours. But he said for you to stop by his place later today, to talk
about your boba. He seemed to think it was important.”
Arthur decided to put that off as long as possible. By the time he and
Ella managed to get on top of the dishes, cookware, and general mess from
the night before, Lily and Milo were both up and milling around.
“So are there customs I don’t know for a day off after a wave?
Special foods? Special outings?”
“Nothing much,” Milo said. “The point of it is to do what you’d
like. Hunters go hunting. Fishers go fishing. That kind of thing. I’m
probably going to work just a little with Rhodia today, and then go on a
walk. I still feel heavy from all the food.”
“What about you, Lily?” Ella asked. “Anything you’d like to do?”
“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “Nothing really. I think I’ll go back
to my place.”
Arthur had been dreading this. As much as he liked Lily, and as far
as she’d come, he hadn’t figured out a good way to solve her must-be-
independent loop.
“Your… place?” Ella looked horrified and did a poor job at covering
it up. “The hole Arthur told me about?”
“Yeah. I want to make sure no monsters dug into it and messed it
up.”
“No. Absolutely not.” Somehow, Ella made this prohibition seem
casual. “You live here now. Milo doesn’t use his room anymore. Always out
in that shack. You can be there.”
“I don’t want charity. I’m going home.” Lily crossed her arms over
her chest and tilted her head back in defiance. “You can’t make me.”
“Oh, I can’t? Watch this.” Ella looked over at Arthur. “Arthur, this
little girl is not allowed to help you make a drop of tea until she lives here.
Permanently. Not a drop.”
Before Arthur could even consider which side to take in this
argument, Lily rendered his decision moot.
“You can’t do that!” she yelled.
“Oh, I can, and I did. You live here now. I will feed you. You will
like it. I might even make you pretty little clothes, and you will like those
too.”
Lily looked at Arthur, who shrugged helplessly.
“Okay, fine! I’ll live here, but I don’t have to…” Her little voice cut
off suddenly as Ella shoved a cookie into her mouth, completely blocking
her verbal traffic. She sat there, glaring at Ella, chewing, and possibly
planning a coup.
“And Arthur, you’d better be going,” Ella said. “Eito sleeps late, but
not that late. He’ll be expecting you.”

“Ah, yes, come in,” Eito said. “And try to keep your voice down. I had a…
hard night.”
He certainly looked it. His bark was droopy, for lack of a better
word.
Eito definitely had a high vitality stat and as evidenced by Arthur’s
recent experience, vitality could make a person pretty tough. The amount of
alcohol necessary to make the tree-demon look as bad as he did could
probably be measured by the barrel.
“Want some pepped tea?” asked Arthur. “That’ll probably help.”
“Yes, pepped. Yesterday’s. As stale as a grandfather’s joke,” Eito
said. “I couldn’t bring myself to make my own this morning.”
“Well, let me get on that.” Arthur stood and walked to Eito’s
kitchen, ignoring the man’s weak non-verbal protest and doing his best to
exude an Ella-like authority over all things food. “We can’t get much done
with you like that anyway.”
The water was boiling within a few minutes, courtesy of Eito’s top-
shelf heating element. In the meantime, Arthur found the demon’s tea,
sniffed his milk to make sure it hadn’t soured, and readied the teapot for
steeping.
As he poured the water, he did his best to imagine it clearing away
un-metabolized toxicants from his friend’s bloodstream, summoning images
of Eito sighing in relief as his headache gave up, let go, and allowed him to
go back to his life. As the tea started to darken, he felt majicka surge out of
him towards the tea, invisibly altering it to something new.

Hair of the Dog

 This tea takes simple pepped leaves, water, and an ample dose of passive
majicka to offer moderate relief to a particular kind of self-inflicted
suffering.

It wasn’t the most complex description Arthur had seen, but the
“moderate” language was the most powerful effect he had yet made. It was
probably due to the simplicity of the goal rather than any growth Arthur
himself had seen.
“Oh, that’s much better. I can’t believe I tried to stop you.” Eito
poured in an ample amount of milk, cooling the tea down enough that he
could gulp the cup, then refilled it from the pot. He took another sip, sighed,
and Arthur could swear that the man visibly recovered a bit right in front of
his eyes. It was hard to tell with a tree. “Did you… do something to this?
My stats are the same and I’m not showing a buff, but I suddenly feel…”
“Moderately improved?”
“You could say that. So yes, you did. And therein lies our problem.
Not that it’s much of a problem.” He took another sip of tea, sighed again,
and set down the cup. “We have no idea where the limits of your class are.
What have you made, so far? I mean in terms of effects, not flavors.”
“I mean, not that much. I made a tea to help Lily feel better when
she was sick, to work with the medicine she was taking. I didn’t know that
there was a possibility that it could have conflicted with the medicine back
then. And then the tea I made for the rock-throwers, which gave a buff. And
now this.”
“So one status buff and two illnesses, of a sort at least. I think it’s
safe to say you could probably make something that treats most illnesses
once you’ve leveled that skill. And if you can buff any stat…” Eito did
some math in his head. “That makes you useful in an astounding number of
situations. I assume you haven’t made anything… detrimental?”
“Like poison? No. Why would I?”
“I’m of the same mind. Please do not encourage your class to make
toxic tea. But given what you can make, I think the next big thing to
confirm is that the tea truly doesn’t conflict with alchemy at all. It’s
possible, however unlikely, that we just got lucky with the previous few
brews.”
“Why would the system do that? Let me have a loophole in that
way, I mean.”
“Probably because the effects are so weak. You couldn’t replace an
alchemist. Their specialization makes whatever they do tens or hundreds of
times more powerful. But, like you saw, in a situation where every percent
matters, it can have a huge effect.” He slapped his hand down on a stack of
papers. “A big enough effect, in fact, that I put together a plan to power
level you, last night.”
“While you were drunk?”
“I said it was a plan. Not a readable one. But I looked at it this
morning, and the gist of what I wrote was a plan to send you off with
Karbo, power-level your stats, and get your tea-making as strong as we
could in as short a time as possible. But we aren’t doing that.”
“Why not?”
“It’s risky, with no reward. You might get hurt, and there’s no
looming catastrophes to deal with at the moment. For now, you can
progress just as you’ve been. It’s not as if your progress has been slow.”
Arthur looked for any flaws in the logic, but there didn’t seem to be
any. As much as he’d like to gain all the levels possible, there really wasn’t
much of a reason to get hurt if he could get to the same point eventually
without all the pain.
“Fine. Then what’s next?”
“I introduce you to a tremendously boring toad who bores you half
to death while he tests your powers for the better part of the day.” Eito
sipped his tea and sighed once more. “Shame, really. Some part of me
thinks that sending you to the toad is a betrayal, especially after you made
me this.”

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 CHAPTER FOURTY

BOBA SHOP

Eito wasn’t lying about the toad’s tremendous lack of charisma.

It took five minutes for the toad to relate a single fact: that he was an
alchemical research class, one who mostly provided alchemists with the
information they needed to improve rather than making medicines himself.
He was undoubtedly the longest-winded person Arthur had ever
met, a sort of tornado of tedium who talked constantly without injecting
even the slightest amount of flavor into any of his dialogue.
And Arthur was prisoner to it. The toad forced his apprentices to
down various alchemical combinations meant to do anything from curing
illnesses to strengthening muscles for battle, then tested Arthur’s tea against
the combinations to make sure there were no conflicts. At least in that,
though, he was quick and efficient. Whatever he may have been as a
conversationalist didn’t extend in the slightest to his work.
After a few hours and several combinations of pills pushed through
his assistants, he had reached his conclusions.
“Well, it looks like it’s just as Eito said. I hardly believed him when
he first came to me with a claim about your class. Such a thing isn’t
unprecedented, but to be effective and versatile against a variety of
circumstances without the slightest bit of harm and only minor production
costs?” The toad shook his head. “Unheard of. Astounding. I wouldn’t have
believed it unless I saw it. Didn’t believe it, in fact. I thought Eito was
pranking me.”
“So I can use my tea on anything? I don’t have to ask about
medications, or anything?” Arthur asked.
“It’s always possible that I’ve missed something, but in a practical
sense it’s very likely that, no, there won’t be any problems. Rather the
opposite, in fact. Are you sure, by the way, that you want to continue in the
realm of food service? I’d be willing to offer you a very lucrative position
right here, if you wish.”
Behind the toad, a ferret assistant instantly began making various
‘don’t do it, run away’ pantomimes. Arthur decided to take the assistant at
his silent word and beat his retreat as quickly as he could.

Between his morning at Ella’s, his meeting at Eito’s and his time at the
toad’s lab, Arthur had burned up the better part of the first half of the day.
By now, Ella was likely out with Lily somewhere, and Milo was almost
sure to be busy in his smithy with Rhodia. Arthur was, for better or worse,
on his own time. With nothing better to do, he decided to go on a walk.
Very non-coincidentally, his path first took him by the place Mizu
rented her room, and then the building in which she worked. Luck was,
unfortunately, not with him at either place, and he saw no signs of blue.
Moving on, he took a wide, looping path back to the area he sold boba.
He was surprised to see that someone had already returned the stand
to where it was originally, a sign that the city didn’t shut completely down
on these rare holidays. A quick check of the contents showed him that
everything was where it was supposed to be. Even better, the city had
apparently decided he could keep most of the redundant cooking equipment
it had loaned him the day before.
“Checking out your old workplace?” A booming voice sounded out
behind him. He turned to see Karbo and Itela standing hand in hand,
watching him as he went over the inventory.
“Yes. And someone did a great job moving it back, I have to say. A
place for everything, and everything in its place.”
“What a charming phrase.” Itela beamed at him. “Did you hear that,
Karbo? The child’s a poet.”
“No, not me,” Arthur said. “It’s a saying from my old world.”
“Oh, well then. Thank you for bringing it here, all the same.” Itela
tracked Arthur’s eyes back to her and Karbo’s hands, which he had been
glancing at periodically the whole conversation. He liked both Karbo and
Itela. Very much, in fact. It was just hard to imagine them together.
“Oh, out with it, Arthur. It’s not like we aren’t used to it,” Karbo
said, laughing. “She likes me for my muscles. All of them.”
“Oh, shush. I like Karbo because he’s kind, Arthur,” Itela said. “Like
I told you that first day. You should have seen how disappointed he was
when he saw that you weren’t meant to be a fighter. I swear, he would have
dragged you all over this continent for training sessions if you showed
interest in fighting.”
“I do like your muscles, come to think of it.” Karbo prodded Itela’s
soft arm with his massive finger. “And your not-muscles. The whole
package, more or less.”
“And we’ve confirmed, once again, that Karbo is not a poet. It’s too
bad, really. I do like poetry.”
“I’ll read you some. So, Arthur, how does it feel to lose the stand,
finally?” Karbo said. “You didn’t have it long, really. Must be weird to be
moving on so soon.”
“I’m sorry, what?” Arthur said. “My stand’s right there.”
He couldn’t imagine Karbo was lying, but Arthur had no idea if he
had inadvertently done something wrong. Had he messed up someone’s tea?
Gotten someone sick? Was it simply that he misunderstood how long he’d
get to use the stand?
 I’m not going to be able to sell tea anymore. It’s all over. I have no
idea what I’m going to do with my time. I’ll…
“Karbo, you idiot. The boy has no idea what you are talking about.”
“Sure he does!”
“He looks like he’s going to faint, dear. I’m confident he doesn’t.”
Karbo took a closer look at Arthur, then whitened slightly. “Oh, hell.
They didn’t tell you.”
“They didn’t,” Arthur said, forcing his voice into a non-despondent
tone. “You’re the first.”
“Well, I’ll… dammit!” Karbo yelled, suddenly scooping up both
Itela and Arthur in his arms, and immediately flaring with a golden aura as
he activated some skill. “Hold on!”
Karbo then leapt. It wasn’t the normal terrifying leap Arthur was
used to, it was much worse.
Tucked under the infernal’s arm, Arthur kept rising higher and
higher. At some point, he suspected this was the highest that Karbo could
actually jump. The city became tiny below them as they sailed through the
air in a tight, high arc, going up farther and faster than would have been
possible if Karbo’s aura hadn’t kept Arthur safe.
“Your mistake here was letting him see you distressed,” Itela said in
a flat, disinterested sort of voice. “He can’t handle that very well. It’s part of
why I fell in love with him all those years back. The first time I met him
was when a wagon fell and trapped some poor child. He picked the wagon
up and threw it in the air. I don’t think they ever found the wagon.”
Finally, Karbo crashed back to earth on one of the main
thoroughfares that fed into the city center, a nice, wide street that Arthur
recognized as being about a quarter mile from his cart. Pedestrians scattered
as he once again cratered the street, leaving a wide indent and a few broken
cobbles at the point of impact.
“Karbo, for the last time. I don’t care how thoroughly you kill
monsters. I will ban you from hunting and absolutely forbid you from
beating things to death, if you don’t stop breaking the damn street,” the
mayor yelled out of a building in front of Karbo. “I don’t care if you can
pay for it. The pavers are sick and tired of it.”
Despite his new stand-less circumstance, Arthur couldn’t help but
appreciate the building’s beauty. The front of it was more window than
anything else, all small triangular panes separated by a sort of lead lattice.
Where most structures in the city were made from stone, this was the rare
house made out of wood. And it was clearly built for commerce, with a
counter that extended from the inside of the building all the way to the
outside, jutting out to meet the street in a way that enabled a merchant to do
business in either place. Despite the mayor’s screams, it was a calming
place, relaxing and warm with plenty of good light.
“Oh, dammit, why did you bring him?” the mayor said. “I haven’t
even talked to him yet, Karbo.”
“So, about that.” Karbo scratched his head. “I might have mentioned
that he didn’t get to use the cart anymore.”
“Dammit, Kar…”
“I know, all right? But what could I do?”
Itela finally managed to squeeze her way out of Karbo’s grip, falling
to the ground. “It was an accident, Mayor. It really was. And you know how
Karbo is when he sees someone upset.”
“When he sees anyone besides me upset, you mean.”
“Sure.”
The mayor took a deep breath, finally turning to Arthur, who had
just managed to get away from Karbo himself to find his footing on the
reddish cobbled street.
“Well, Arthur, I’m afraid there won’t be quite as much pomp and
circumstance about this as the moment deserves, considering that
someone…” He glared at Karbo. “Took it on upon themselves to upset my
schedule. But no, you won’t be able to use the cart anymore. We talked it
over, and decided it just wasn’t an appropriate set-up for a teamaster of your
caliber.”
 Arthur wilted. It made some sense, really. He was still too low
leveled and there was only so far he could expect other people to go out of
their way for him.
It was, at least, a fun ride while it lasted.
“And why,” Ella said, coming out of nowhere with Lily in tow and
in what Arthur suspected was her full battle-mode. “Does it look like you
are making my adoptive son cry?”
“Ella, dammit, it’s not my fault. I was just about to tell him…”
“Because I wouldn’t want to have to — and I don’t think you would
want me to have to — but I’m going to have to — Soon, if someone doesn’t
explain what’s going on.”
Ella left the have-to’s hanging, but apparently the adults present
knew exactly what kind of threat she was throwing around or didn’t want to
find out. Itela stepped in at that moment to defuse things.
“Dear, my husband is here. And I’m afraid…”
“Oh, I’ll take him out too.”
“I didn’t do anything on purpose!” Karbo yelled, his eyes filling
with terror as the sparrow advanced on him.
“Dammit!” the mayor yelled, amplifying his voice with a skill so
loud that everyone present winced. “Just let me finish, Ella. Give me a
second, get that owl to stop glaring at me, and kill me after if you still need
to, alright?”
Ella nodded. The mayor turned back to face Arthur.
“As I was saying before, we don’t think it’s appropriate for someone
at your level of accomplishment to be working from that stand. Instead,
we’ve prepared something a little different. The cleaners aren’t completely
done with it yet, and the pavers will now need to be out to do a few repairs
thanks to Karbo, but both will be done almost immediately after the city
returns to work.”
Arthur was lost. Ella, however, wasn’t.
 “Ah, I see,” she said, suddenly smiling. “Please continue.”
“Arthur Teamaster of Earth. In recognition of your rapid progress
towards mastery of your class and as a partial reward for your exceptional
performance in the monster wave, I grant you the right to lease this shop,
with rent waived for one month while you get settled in.”
in a daze, Arthur, pushed past the mayor, walking up to the wood
counter and running his fingers over the smooth surface. He could see
through the windows to the interior, which wasn’t huge, but was more than
large enough for what he had in mind. He had dreamt of the day where he’d
have his own shop since the first few days after he got his class. It was
cozy. It was beautiful. It was perfect.
“Sorry about ruining the surprise,” Karbo said. “I didn’t know you
didn’t know.”
“It’s… fine. It’s perfect. And are you sure…”
“I’m sure,” the mayor said. “You’ve talked to Eito, so you might
have a sense that there are reasons we might want you to have a workspace.
But I assure you that we’ve thought things through. This is just fine, Arthur.
Welcome to your new boba shop.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FOURTY-ONE

SCARED

“You get all of this?” Milo said. “That’s mental. Absolutely crazy. Not that
you don’t deserve it, but…”
“No, you got it right. I’m not sure if I should take it.”
“Oh, you should take it.” Ella was stooped over examining the
shelves built into the back side of the counter. “I was never much for
actually running a business myself. But you have a bit of that gift. And the
storage space alone, Arthur. You could fit a Triung back here.”
Skipping over the untranslatable word, Arthur had to agree with Ella
about the shop. It had apparently been built to be a cigar shop, or at least
something enough like cigars that the system chose to translate it that way.
The owner had been nice and the products had been good, there was just the
unfortunate fact that almost nobody in the city smoked, nor wanted to start.
The front counter was massive, easily big enough to hold all the
equipment Arthur would need it to. The sitting area was big enough for at
least a half-dozen tables, and Arthur could just imagine them, round and
wood, with simple padded wooden chairs to sit around in.
 Lily was running around the space, ducking in and out of the back-
of-shop area and running up and down the stairs to the cellar. That was, the
mayor had explained, part of why the city wanted him to have the shop.
With more space, he could make and store more product, especially once
Milo improved the automation for him. Catastrophes in the demon world
were rare, but they did happen, and the city wanted him ready for when
they did.
“Can I run it by myself?” Arthur asked. “That’s a lot of hours.
Breakfast, lunch rush, dinner… stores on Earth were open all day.”
“Not here. Set some hours, something reasonable. Maybe have two
shifts and work a few hours for each shift. Eventually, hire an assistant. But
nobody expects you to work every single hour, Arthur. When it’s open,
they’ll see that it’s open. If it’s not open, they’ll come back when it is. They
know who you are and what you serve. It’s hardly like you’d need to
advertise at this point.”
“There’s also the matter of money. I think I have most of the tea-
making equipment I’ll need, if not all of it. And I can lean on Milo and
Rhodia for what I don’t have, or what breaks. But furniture… I have to
think that’s expensive.”
Ella waved her hand dismissively. “Not a problem. I know some
people. Some favors are owed. It won’t be expensive, and I’ll cover the cost
for now. No, be quiet, Arthur. Just be glad I’m letting you pay me back at
all.”
“But…”
“You aren’t going to win, Arthur,” Lily said. “Just save your
energy!”
And that was that. Ella led him to the carpenter friend she had
mentioned, a large spider who hissed when she talked but was otherwise
perfectly pleasant. She went over to see the space, where she and Arthur
compared notes on what they envisioned. Like most professionals Arthur
dealt with here, she knew more than he did and offered several suggestions
that not only improved what he had planned, but addressed problems he
hadn’t even thought of.
 “So eight tables? You’re sure?” Arthur said. “That’s nearly fifty
people.”
“Yesss. You don’t have to fill them all. It’sss about having the
capasssity when things get busy.”
“And they’d fit? The tables, I mean.”
“I think so, yesss. Worsst case, you might have to hide one or two
and only bring them out when you need them. I wouldn’t worry. I build
them light.”
Arthur talked to her for almost an hour before she returned to her
shop, promising she’d have the furniture ready to go in a week. He then
spent the better part of an hour carting over the must-have essentials from
his former workspace, arranging them on the counter as he went. It looked
great. He could see where he might want a different container here or
something to block the view of his heating apparatuses there, but overall, it
looked like a tea shop should.
Rhodia eventually found him, showing him prototype glassware that
weren’t quite entirely clear yet and nervously asking how long she had
before he’d need the real deal. After hearing that he didn’t have plans to
open at least until after the furniture was in place, she breathed a sigh of
relief.
She planned to level for a week, and then remelt and reblow the
glass as needed. The fact that Arthur wanted to pay her for this and use the
glasses in an actual shop was enough of a boon that he suspected she’d keep
redoing them until they were perfect.
After she left, Arthur stood facing the counter and the workspace
behind it, imagining what the wall racks would look like loaded up with
boba pearls, tea, and little signs explaining all the options customers could
try. With this much space, he could have those options. He could keep some
standard items always brewing for people ordering from the street-side
counter, but inside, the sky was the limit. And if Ella would teach him how
to bake, he could even have snacks. It was a whole new world.
Just as he was becoming completely lost in his daydream, the doors
burst open.
 “Arthur!” A panicked voice came from behind him. It was Onna,
Mizu’s lizard friend, standing in the doorway, slightly wide-eyed and out of
breath.
“What’s wrong?” Something must have been. Onna had no reason to
find him if there wasn’t, and given their only common connection, he
thought he knew what was wrong, or at least with whom.
“It’s Mizu. She’s sick. And she’s asking for you.”

“Family? Does she have family in town?”

“No.” Onna was, it turned out, a combat class, a year or so ahead of
him and significantly better leveled. She was moving as fast as Arthur could
keep up with, leaving him only a few spare breaths to understand the
situation.
“No. Not that I’ve seen, anyway. And she doesn’t talk about that.
She has a sort of guardian, but she’s already there. And the doctor, and a
cleric.”
“Then why does she need me? I can’t do anything.”
Onna stopped in her tracks, turned around, and rolled her eyes.
“Don’t be stupid.”
Without waiting for a reply, she turned around and kept running.
Arthur followed.
“There you are,” Itela said. “Somehow, I wasn’t even surprised
when she said your name after I asked her who she wanted.”
“Is she okay?”
Itela’s face went sterner than Arthur had ever seen it before.
“Honestly? Not great, Arthur. This isn’t… a broken arm. Or a bad
fever. Those things we can almost always heal or cure. This is… harder.”
“And what is it?”
 She shook her head. “I can’t tell you that. I’m sure she will. She’s
right in there.”
Arthur looked at the door and gulped.
You can do this, Arthur.
“I know it’s hard, but you can do this, Arthur.” Itela mirrored his
thoughts. “It’s hard for anyone. We do it anyway. Nobody says it, but no
one really wants to visit the sick. It’s… hard. There’s nothing in it for the
healthy. That’s why it’s the most important duty.”
“Is it?”
“Tied for it. Visit me at the church sometime and I’ll lay it all out.
But for now…” She nodded at the door to Mizu’s room. Arthur nodded as
well, and walked to the door without looking back before he lost his nerve,
opened it, stepped through, and closed it in one swoop.
“We visited your cities, not in friendship but in open war, paying no
heed to the locks on your iron gates.”
“Hi, Mizu.”
“Hello.”
The doctor and the guardian were both already gone. Arthur didn’t
know what he had been expecting, but it wasn’t that Mizu would be fully
clothed, sitting up in bed. She didn’t look strong, exactly, but whatever she
had hardly seemed life-threatening.
He crossed over to her bed and sat down.
“You said you wanted to see my room.”
“And you panicked and ran away.”
“Yes.” Mizu smiled. “And now I’m making you.”
“It’s a nice room.”
“Thank you.”
Her feet were in socks. He put his hand on one of them, just below
the ankle.
 “The insect bite.” She held up her arm.
“The same one from the tunnels during the monster wave? I thought
you said it was fine.”
“It didn't heal. And I didn't see the doctor as soon as I should have
after the wave. It was poisonous.”
Arthur felt sick. He had worried about the bite, but he hadn't made
her do anything about it. It wasn't his place to, really, or at least that was
how it had seemed at the time.
“Poisonous?”
“In a slow way. Today will be the best. And then it’ll get worse.”
“Medicine won’t help?”
“It helps. Enough to give a person a chance. Raises vitality and
poison resistance. Otherwise, most of my points are in wisdom and
intelligence. I am,” she smiled weakly, “not suited for recovering from
venom.”
“There’s more to overcoming sickness than that,” Arthur argued.
“You’re tough. We didn’t have stat points on Earth. And you couldn’t
exactly quantify vitality like you can here. Some people were just fighters.
Lived through things by just deciding they would and sticking to it.”
“No stats at all?”
“Some people were stronger because they worked to be. Some
people were smarter because they were born that way or developed it. But
sometimes, a mom would lift a car off a child because she had to, whether
she was strong enough or not.”
“A car?”
“Sort of a fast wagon that ran on explosions. I think. It’s getting
harder to remember Earth these days. I might have dreamed it.”
They sat for a while, quietly.
“Mizu?”
 “Yes?”
“You have a doctor, and a cleric.”
“Yes.”
“And a friend. Onna.”
“Yes.”
“What can I do for you? Why do you… need me?”
“Because…”
She sat there for a bit, silently.
“Because I’m scared.”

Arthur left not too long after that. He was going to come back the next day.
And the next. He had decided that already. Mizu knew that too without any
words being exchanged. After a little while, she said she needed to cut him
loose so she could rest.
He didn’t need perception to know that was a lie. Maybe she did
need to rest, but she was telling him to leave so he’d feel more comfortable.
And so he found himself slumped against the wall outside her room, crying
silently enough that he was sure she wouldn’t hear.
“I thought I should probably double back. Looks like I was right.
You need me?” Itela asked.
“Probably just for a minute. Until I calm down.”
Itela sat with him, rubbing his back until he could stop the hiccuppy
sort of sobbing. He always cried like that when he was trying to hide it. And
then, trained cleric that she was, she left before he had a chance to be
embarrassed about it.
Standing up and walking home, he considered how crazy it was. If
Mizu was his girlfriend, it was only barely. They had talked or rather-not-
talked about it only once. They had maybe, just maybe, been on a few dates.
And she had called him over because she was sure, somehow, that he was
the guy who could help her be less afraid. Like he’d drop everything and do
whatever it took, no matter how stupid, to figure out a way to let her beat
this thing.
And the craziest bit was that she was right. He was already thinking
about how to get started.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FOURTY-TWO

DUTY

“And she has potions? Clerics?” Ella frowned. “And it’s still… close? Who
said that?”
“Itela.”
“Then it’s close. She knows her business.” Ella drummed her fingers
on the countertop. “Which makes this next part hard, Arthur. I don’t know
how it was where you came from, but here, we give sick people almost
everything they need. Particularly, the young. And even the… not town
favorites. Actually, I take that back. Even if she was disliked, she’d get what
she needed. But that girl? She’s sweet. She already has everything that can
help her, Arthur.”
“Not everything. I have this.” Arthur tapped his tea kettle, which
was just now coming to a boil. “I got tested before. My tea-making skill
works outside of alchemy. Completely outside of it. No interactions, no
destroying of pre-existing buffs, no… nothing. But it’s not very strong.”
Ella shot a look of concern in Arthur’s directions, the feathers on her
face scrunching slightly.
“Yet.”
 Arthur nodded.
“Yet.” He took the water off the heat, pouring it into the strongest,
most herbal tea he had been able to buy. As the water started to pull color
from the leaves, he focused on infusing as much majicka as he possibly
could, envisioning the insect poison getting pushed out of a wound. As an
added bonus, he imagined any remnant poisons that couldn’t be expelled
would get neutralized by some unknown chemical reaction.
Come on. Come on.
It didn’t work. There was no update to his status, no draw on his
majicka, no notifications. No nothing.
“Dammit.” Arthur violently dumped the tea out in the sink, put new
leaves in the cup, and reached for his kettle. Just as his hand made it to the
wooden grip, He felt a feathery hand close over his.
“Arthur.”
“Ella, I have to do this.”
“No, you actually don’t. And I don’t think anyone has explained this
to you yet. Not well. So sit. I can’t actually stop you from doing anything,
and I’m not going to try. But my word to the ears of the gods, I’m not going
to let you do this without knowing what your obligations are.”
“I don’t have time for this, Ella.”
“You do. She’s sleeping. And the job you’re trying to do won’t get
done in one night. Now sit down.” The last three words were said in a tone
that left Arthur little room to argue. He sat.
“Now, you might have noticed that people treat it like an odd thing
that you’ve helped Milo so much. Or Rhodia. Or… anyone you know,
really. You insist on paying for things people would give you for free.
Why?”
“I’m just trying to be nice.”
“And you’re succeeding. And everyone likes it. And you. So why do
they treat it like it’s weird? Have you ever stopped to think about that?”
 “No. Not really.” And he hadn’t. He had noticed what Ella was
talking about a couple of times, but just barely. He attributed it to a kind of
politeness he hadn’t quite figured out yet.
“It took me a week to figure it out, too. From the other side. I asked
myself, ‘Why, does this boy keep helping? When people don’t ask, and
when he has no obligation?’ And that’s when I realized you hardly ever talk
about duty. I don’t think I’ve heard you say it once.”
“You all talk about it an awful lot.”
“That’s because it’s foundational to our society, Arthur. A long time
ago, someone decided it wasn’t enough to leave niceness up to chance and
goodwill. So we turned to obligations. To duty. Everyone knows what they
are supposed to do for other people in a variety of situations. They don’t
usually have to, but it’s expected.”
“Nobody is ever nice just because they want to be? Is me living here
just… because you have to?”
“No, not at all. There’s only so much room to compel people to be
kind. I’m sure that people in your world sometimes do nice things out of
duty. It’s the same here, just flipped.”
Arthur chewed on that for a moment.
“So what does that mean?”
“It means you need to know what your obligations are. You and that
girl are involved?”
“Yes. Unless I’ve misread things.”
“You haven’t. I saw you two.”
“Right.”
“That obligates you to not be involved with anyone else, until things
between you and her are over. And I suppose telling her when things are
over if they end. And that’s it. That’s your duty.”
“No dates? No flowers? No… I don’t know, nice notes about how I
feel?”
 “Very nice to do, but not an obligation.” She smiled. “That falls into
the ‘nobody’s business but yours’ category of things. And it really isn’t part
of your duty. Everyone’s a bit different, and so is every couple. If you’re
both happy without notes, then duty doesn’t care.”
“Okay. Good, actually.” Arthur felt like he was getting the talk, only
a nicer, less awkward version. “But I still don’t see what this has to do with
what’s going on.”
“It has to do with you because it means that nobody, not even Mizu,
expects you to do all this. Did she say why she called you down?”
“She said she wanted me there. She was scared.”
“And that was, I promise you, what she said it was. It was what she
wanted. What she expected. What she did not expect, Arthur, was for you to
kill yourself doing every single thing you could possibly do to help,
especially when it was to your own detriment. To stop developing your
shop, even for a moment. To do things that are bad for you just because
they are good for her.”
“But…”
“Just listen for a bit longer. Nobody expects all that of you, Arthur.
She has doctors. Medicine. Spells. There are probably a few commanders in
range of her all day, giving her what little they can in buffs. And that’s a lot,
Arthur. What can you add to that?”
“Not much. But something.”
“True. But I needed you to understand that this, all the effort I can
tell you’re planning on expending, might not make a difference. People are
nice, Arthur. The world isn’t, at least not always. And nobody, not me, not
Mizu, would blame you if you did just what you have already been doing.
Being there for her. Helping her with fear. Encouraging her.”
Arthur let all that sink in. He was aware that he had only been in this
world a few weeks and had only been involved with Mizu for a few days.
She’d probably understand if he didn’t do much more to help. “Being there
for her” was a real option, and he could just do that. It would still be hard,
especially if Mizu got much worse. But he understood what Ella was
saying.
“What if…” he said, looking Ella dead in the eye. “What if I just
need to do this? I know we haven’t been together long, and I probably
shouldn’t feel like I do, but what if this is just the most important thing to
me right now?”
“More than the shop? Leveling? Just being young?”
“Yeah. More important than those.”
“Then we get to work.” Ella stood up and put his water back on the
heating element.
“Just like that?”
“Just like that. If it’s important to you, it’s important to me. And I
doubt I could stop you, anyway. I have a lot of points in perception, and I
know when someone’s pretending. She’s really that important to you? This
soon?”
“I couldn’t tell you why. But yeah, she is.”
“Let's get started, then. The water’s almost boiling.”
Arthur shook his head. “Actually, just dump that out. By accident or
not, I slowed down long enough to think, and I don’t think I’m starting at
the right part of the project.”
Arthur moved to grab a couple of things, then headed towards the
door.
“Well, I’m glad to see you have a new idea. Where are you headed?”
“To find Spiky. I need a librarian.”

A quick trip to the library closest to him allowed Arthur to find the location
of the library that Spiky actually worked at, inconveniently located almost
exactly as far away from Ella’s place as it was possible to be while still
staying inside the city limits. He sprinted across the city, momentarily
pausing his mental help-Mizu-process to marvel about how fast he could
move now that he had so much invested in his dexterity.
“Arthur? What brings you here?” Spiky said, looking up from a
cartload of what appeared to be unsorted romance novels. “The library by
your house is actually better, you know. More selection.”
“I need your help.” Arthur leaned on the handle of the cart, catching
his breath. “Not a duty thing. Just me asking. I could owe you. It’s for
Mizu.”
“If it’s for Mizu and you, then shut up about owing me. I owe you
for letting me explain majicka to you, and even if it wasn’t for that, we’re
friends. What do you need?”
“Books,” Arthur said. “Dozens of them.”
An hour later, Spiky was reading to Arthur out of an alchemy book.
It turned out that was a much faster method, and something Spiky’s class
specialized in. It was a sort of reference librarian thing, a skill that let them
identify the tidbits of information someone actually needed to know much
faster than if they read the books themselves.
Both Arthur and Spiky were working under the assumption that
what Arthur needed was the gist of how other classes worked. He wasn’t an
alchemist, after all, so the exact details of how they did their work would be
lost on him. But knowing a bit about the ingredients they used to achieve
certain effects would help on top of anything he could gather about their
class mechanics.
“So it’s any ingredient for any pill? That doesn’t make sense.”
“Not quite. The part you’re talking about is majicka intent. It can see
what they want, and it tries to help them do it.”
“I have that too, sort of.”
“Most crafting classes do. A high enough level alchemist can
theoretically make healing potions, real ones, out of dirt. But using the right
ingredients helps. Nobody can do their best work with materials that aren’t
meant for the job.”
 Which partially explained why Arthur was failing at making an anti-
venom tea, at least so far. He had a low level and none of the ingredients he
was using made Food Scientist buzz at all. Which brought him to the next
reason he was here.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 16 Teamaster
STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 10
PER: 17
WIS: 19
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 9), Food Scientist
(Level 10), Medicinal Brewer (Level 5)
Achievements: Shop Owner, Mass Prep, Buffer Against the
Wave

For a while now, Food Scientist had been more or less stalled
compared to his other skills. And while he only dimly understood how it
worked, it seemed to him that learning, experimenting, and observing was
how it leveled. While Spiky worked his way through the alchemy books,
Arthur was reading recipe books, books written about the proper use of
various ingredients, and tea-prep manuals as fast as he could get through
them.
“I’m surprised there are so many,” Arthur said.
“Why?”
“I dunno. There’s a system, it guides you, and makes you better at
things. Something made me think the manuals would be redundant.”
“No, no. Not at all. People use them for the same reason you are. It
gives them an edge. Or at least some people. Not everyone is the studying
type.”
 A few more hours passed, and Arthur finally got a bump of a single
level to his food scientist class. But better yet, he had ideas.
“Spiky. I have to go. Can you…”
“Study for you? Absolutely. I’ll throw together some notes and bring
them by tomorrow. What about you?”
“I’m going to the alchemists. And then, if I can, I’m going to find
Karbo.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FOURTY-THREE

ANTI-VENOM

“As a general rule, we don’t let anybody into our storehouse. And we
certainly don’t let non alchemists in. I’m sorry, sir. That’s something money
won’t change.”
Arthur didn’t have a lot of funds, but he would have spent them all
to get to the back of this shop, if only to expose Food Scientist to as many
ingredients as he could and level it. There was also an outside chance that it
would react to something in the storehouse itself and point in him a good
direction for his tea-making. He had hoped the alchemy shops would have a
laid-back attitude toward the idea, but things were a bit harder than he
expected.
“I won’t touch anything, I promise. And I won’t…”
“Sorry. This is a firm no.”
Arthur’s shoulders slumped. This was the biggest alchemy store in
town, and supposedly the best. Any other shop would have a lower chance
of having what he needed. But at least there were other shops to check. He
nodded to the deer or elk demon, whichever it was, and walked towards the
entrance to the shop.
 “Wait,” a bigger, older voice said. Arthur turned to see what
appeared to be his first ape-demon.
All demons had vaguely human features, even if it was a stretch to
see them that way. Elementals were even closer. Besides the fur, the
combination of already human-like features and the general slant of demons
looking humanoid made this person as close to looking like him as anyone
in this world ever had.
“Why do you want to look? It can’t be much help to your cooking.
None of these ingredients were selected for taste.”
“It’s… important. It’s not just about making tea. It’s about making a
certain kind of tea. For a friend.”
“Tell me more.” The old ape-man’s face softened a bit. “Tell me
everything.”
Arthur dumped it all on the ape. After a few moments, he realized he
was babbling a bit, but he didn’t stop. He told him about his medicinal tea
and his entire class, not hesitating to send the uncensored version of his
status screen to back up what he was saying. He told the ape about Mizu,
and the insect bite, and had just moved on to how sad she looked laid up in
bed. Finally, the ape held up his hand, signaling for Arthur to stop.
“That’s quite enough. Young man, you should have mentioned that a
life was at stake.” He turned to the deer-elk-man and tossed him a key.
“Take him back. Show him everything. I’ll mind the front.”
“Are you sure? I wouldn’t want you to get in trouble,” Arthur said.
“Young man, I own this shop. Nobody can get me in trouble here
except my wife, and as far as I know, I haven’t done anything to anger her
today. Yet.” He laughed at his own joke, then waved them off. “Go. I hope
you find what you are looking for.”
The storehouse was underground. It was a remarkably large stone-
lined cellar, full of shelves filled to bursting with various bins, bottles, and
boxes filled with alchemical reagents. Arthur’s eyes bugged out at the sheer
size of it all.
 “We bought the rights to several cellars from the owners of the
surrounding buildings,” the deer said. “Not cheap, as I understand it. But it
does give us the room we need. So, where do you want to start?”
Arthur shrugged his shoulders. “It’s sort of a needle in a haystack
search, honestly.”
“Neat phrase. I’ll remember that. But if you don’t know what you
are looking for, start there. Everything on that side of the cellar is durable
reagents, the kind we can store without sealing them up. I’ll be here if you
need me.”
Arthur got to work, examining each box, basket, and envelope in
turn. Where it seemed helpful, he even smelled them. As he did, he focused
on his purpose, hoping that Food Scientist would get the hint and point him
in the right direction. But after an hour, he was coming up blank. Most of
the ingredients caused no response. The rare few that did produced the
mental equivalent of a ‘danger, poison’ label. It was even worse once he got
to the bottled things.
“About done?” the deer asked. Arthur sighed quietly to himself. He
couldn’t blame the guy for wanting to get back to work, and it was looking
more and more like this whole idea was going to be a bust.
“Yeah, it’s looking like there’s nothing here that will help. Not yet,
at least.”
The deer packed up his things, leading him back to the stairs. And
then, just as Arthur began to climb them, Food Scientist twitched. There
was something about the stairs that mattered.
No, not the stairs. Something under them.
Arthur hopped down, following the sense until he found a big, open
barrel of a green-blue powder. Despite looking like the most poisonous
thing possible, his skill was assuring him it was exactly what he needed, in
some way or another.
“What is this?”
“That? It’s stabilizing powder. It’s an adjuvant.”
 “I don’t know that word.” Arthur was getting close enough to the
powder that he was afraid he’d sneeze and ruin it. He backed off to hear the
deer’s answer better.
“Adjuvants are… filler that does things. Not completely inert, not
the active ingredient. They make things work better. This particular powder
is for stabilizing different mixtures. It locks in potency and keeps it from
fading.”
“What’s it made out of?”
The deer shrugged. “Some plant, somewhere. It’s not a local
product. It gets shipped in.”
“It’s expensive?”
“Oh, no, not at all. People buy it by the barrel.”
A few minutes later, Arthur arrived at the front counter with a few
pounds of the powder bagged up, ready to pay. The ape waved him off.
“No, no. If that’s all you need, it’s on the house. Just tell me how
this all went when it’s over. You have a fascinating class.” He stood up
creakily from the stool behind the counter, giving way to the deer. “And I’ll
look in on this friend of yours if I find a moment. It sounds likely I can’t do
anything, but you never know.”

Finding Karbo was a more complex problem than Arthur wanted at that
moment. The infernal was like the manifestation of good-natured chaos. He
went where he wanted, when he wanted, and kept no schedule.
As Arthur neared the square and his mouth began watering from the
food smells there, he found the solution to that problem. If there was one
constant with Karbo, it’d be how much he liked meat. After that, it only
took Arthur a few minutes to find the big guy, chewing away happily at
what appeared to be several pounds of meat.
“Arthur!” Karbo waved him over, separating out what looked like a
full steak from his pile of meat, slapping it on a piece of bread, and handing
it to him. “How are things going with the boba shop?”
 “Okay enough. But that’s on hold for a few days. Bigger problems.”
“Oh?” Karbo arched one of his massive eyebrows. “How so?”
“You know Mizu?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Water elemental. My age. About this high.” Arthur held up his hand
to what he considered to be the best height.
“Oh, yeah, I’ve seen her around with you kids. Pretty.”
“Yes. Anyway. She’s been bitten by some kind of insect.”
That got Karbo’s attention. “Outside the dungeon?”
“Yes. And underground, I think. Something the wards are supposed
to keep away but didn’t.”
“That’s a bad one. For a crafter class with crafter vitality, bad news.
Most don’t end up getting ahead of the game.” Realizing what he was
saying, Karbo winced. “Sorry.”
“Not your fault. I’m trying to find ways I can, you know, help.”
“Your tea!” Karbo said. “That would give her an edge, wouldn’t it.
You bring her any yet?”
“I haven’t managed to make any that will help yet. Hopefully
tonight. But I’ve been reading a lot today, trying to get a lead on how to
approach this, and one of the ways is venom.”
“More of it?”
“Processed venom. On my world, we made anti-venom out of
venom. By injecting it into an animal and then extracting any resistances
that the animal develops.”
“Gross.”
“Yes, but I’m hoping to not have to do that here in magic-demon-
land. The problem being that I need sort of a lot of venom, and probably
from the same bug that bit her. The alchemist I went to didn’t have it.”
 “So you want to hunt some up?”
“Basically, yes.”
“Deal. Absolutely. Three conditions, though.” Karbo reached into
his bag and grabbed a small dagger, much finer and lighter than the one
Arthur had used before. “First, I need someone along to show me what I’m
looking for. I’m assuming that you have some sort of skill that will tell us
what bug you need?”
“I do. And I planned on going anyway. What’s the second
condition?”
“That you fight. The waterways are restricted access. If taking you
down there, it has to be as a hunter’s assistant. Not that anyone would
probably find out, but the city’s water supply is serious business, and we
need to stay on the right side of the rules with this one.” Karbo gulped
down another massive bite of meat as he talked. “You’ve never been in the
waterways, but there are all sorts of bugs in them. And we might have to go
deep, into unwarded sections. Those bugs aren’t monsters, but some of
them are real beasts. Dangerous, in their way. Hunters clear them out from
time to time, but they gather back, and we haven’t had manpower to do so
since the last monster wave. You wouldn’t be entirely safe, not even with
me there.”
Arthur held the alien-feeling dagger for a few moments, then
decided. “I can handle that. What’s the third condition?”
“Just that you don’t wet yourself and you see it through.”
“Done.”

Karbo took another five minutes to eat what looked like ten thousand
calories worth of meat, then grabbed Arthur and sprinted to an entirely
different anonymous building that opened up to a labyrinth of water
channels winding beneath different neighborhoods and various rooms
where runes were set up to process the water in some way.
If what Mizu had shown him before was the heart of the city’s water
supply, these stone-lined tunnels were the arteries, the bit that actually
delivered the goods to the entire city. At first, they were clean and empty.
But fifteen minutes in, Arthur started to see insects and spiders of different
kinds. Big ones. Scary ones. Things the size of small dogs with pincers or
scary, brutal mouths.
“They don’t ward these tunnels at all?”
“No. There’s too much ground to cover. There are stronger spells set
up at a few key points, but otherwise it’s cheaper and more effective to just
send hunters down here periodically to clear them out. In between those
trips, it looks like this. Got that dagger?”
“I do.”
“Good. I’ll be alongside you, so you should only ever have a few
bugs to deal with, tops. But you have to be fighting one pretty regularly if
we’re going to follow the spirit of the law. If things get rough, I should be
able to cut in and save you. Should being the operative word there. Nobody
is truly safe in a fight. You might get hurt. You will get hurt, if you aren’t
careful.” Karbo reached up and scratched the base of one of his horns.
“That’s part of the fun for me, but I feel like I have to check again. You’re
okay with all that?”
“Yeah.” Arthur thrust and swung the dagger a few times, getting a
feel for it. “Let’s go find some monsters.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FOURTY-FOUR

THE TUNNELS

The long walk through the tunnels was much, much worse than Arthur
thought it would be.
The rats that Karbo had found for him all that time ago were
apparently the lowest of the bottom-barrel low when it came to monsters.
Of course, this was information that Karbo and Eito had told him, but they
had severely understated just how low the rat was on the monster hierarchy.
After cutting his way through dozens of large but not all that tough
insects, Arthur’s first real monster encounter was with something that could
best be described as a land-bound stingray the size of a corgi. It shot acid
from its tail, something that Arthur found out the hard way when the poison
hit him square in the eye.
“Don’t worry!” Karbo had shouted, as he curb-stomped a dozen
bigger, meaner insects that had swarmed out of the same broken place in the
tunnel wall. “You won’t go blind! That’s just how it makes an opening to
pinch you!”
Arthur managed to ignore the pain in his eye just in time to decode
the unspoken part of Karbo’s message, which was that the stingray was
probably trying to pinch him at that very moment. He managed to sidestep
the attack, which came from the hidden extendable mandibles that flicked
out from underneath the monster’s body. After that, Arthur decided just to
slug it out with the thing, falling on it, flattening it to the floor with his
knee, and stabbing it again and again in the part that seemed the most like
its forehead.
After a few minutes of rest to get vision back in his eye, they moved
on again. Karbo explained that he was trying his hardest to taunt the
tougher monsters away from Arthur, something he was pretty good at but
didn’t exactly have a skill for. Arthur kept the infernal’s apologetic tone in
mind as the most terrifying beast in a wave closed in on him like he was
made out of ham, forcing him to go all-out to keep his limbs attached. That
scenario was followed by another just like it. And another. And another.
Karbo seemed to feel genuinely terrible about it, but once the fight was on,
it was on.
There was a bright side. Somewhere among all the combat, he
leveled.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 17
STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 10
PER: 17
WIS: 21
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 9), Food
Scientist (Level 10), Medicinal Brewer (Level 5)
Achievements: Shop Owner, Mass Prep, Buffer Against the
Wave

“Oh, huh. Leveled.”

“Nice. That’s the other upside of all this. There’s a reason people go
into the dungeons when it doesn’t do anything for their class. The
experience you get from fighting is separate from what you get from your
normal stuff. It can break bottlenecks.”
“Seems tilted in favor of combat classes.”
“It is, until you realize that fighting is the only way we get
experience at all, and leveling means either an endless grind or constantly
risking our lives. Or both.”
“Point taken.”
“What level, anyway?”
“Seventeen. Dumped the points in wisdom. I need the majicka.”
“Dammit, boy. Why not strength or dexterity? You’ll need it in here.
Did you not hear the ‘you might die’ bit of my explanation?”
“Ah, yeah. Oops.”
“Oops, he says. Next time you level, toss points in strength. Or
dexterity. I don’t care which.”
Chastened, Arthur followed at Karbo’s heels, immediately noting
the wisdom of the infernal’s words a few minutes later, when he found
himself struggling with his one-member share of a subterranean wasp
swarm. After taking one of Karbo’s pills to make the swelling from the
stings go down enough to walk again, he followed on.
He was picking up smaller bugs as he went, stowing their corpses in
his pack. Food Scientist wasn’t keying in on any of them, but in the worst
case he could dump them later. For now, he was hedging his bets as much
as he could. Anything venomous, he either took or took a sample of.
“Ah, there it is.”
“There what is?” Arthur asked. Karbo motioned towards a fallen
section of wall, one that had crumbled into their tunnel to reveal another
dry, waterless tunnel beyond.
“It’s an abandoned tunnel. It only meets with the normal tunnels at
this point, and it’s warded. But the bigger bugs chew away at the ward.
Every few years, it crumbles. If the bugs that bit your friend came from
anywhere, it’s probably here. It’s the bugs’ turf in there. Watch yourself.”
The abandoned tunnels, in addition to promising near-infinite
potential pain, also held the ugliest biome Arthur had ever been in. Despite
the fact that no water was sent through it, all the rocks were moist with
condensation or water seeping in from above. That encouraged mosses and
molds of various shapes and colors to grow, which in turn made the ground
slippery. That mattered as he and Karbo cut through swarm after swarm of
weird bugs. Arthur managed to keep his footing just sound enough to keep
himself safe, but only barely.
Finally, they made their way to a large, empty room, something that
had once probably been something important for the city’s water but had
now decayed into a dark, useless space. Karbo spent a few minutes clearing
it of insect dangers before meeting back up with Arthur in the center of the
room.
“So what’s going to happen now is that you are going to stay right
here. And I’m going to go kill poisonous things for exactly ten minutes. If
at any time you see anything dangerous at all, you yell. And for the sake of
the gods, don’t try to fight anything on your own. Or go anywhere. Or do
anything,” Karbo said.
“What happened to ‘everyone has to hunt?’ I thought it was a rule.”
“Well, yeah, but it’s not my rule, Arthur. You came. You hunted. I
don’t want you to die, and nobody comes to the abandoned tunnels unless
they get sent here. You just stay here, say you hunted some stuff later if
anyone asks, and we’ll call it square. Unless Ella asks. In which case, you
tell her I cheated like hell and did all the fighting.”
“Got it.”
“Good. Then I’ll be right back.”
It was an uneventful ten minutes. Arthur walked around and
surveyed the mosses and molds, which all gave off a very “don’t screw with
us and we won’t screw with you” vibe when filtered through Food Scientist.
 Meanwhile, the place itself was quiet. Nothing came at him, but
there was also a distinct lack of noise from wildlife. No insects moved or
chirped. No drafts blew. It was unsettling in a very calm sort of way. And
then, suddenly, it was loud again. Arthur heard a sound as if the stones were
cracking in half under heavy footfalls. Karbo was back, carrying an
impossibly big load of semi-random, venomous-looking animals.
“Check these out with your skill. I’ll go get some more.”
He bounded back off into the tunnels, apparently overjoyed to have
a good reason to hunt without a nearly useless assistant slowing him down.
Eito had been right. There was no way that Arthur could ever love dungeon
crawling nearly as much as Karbo did, or even in the same kind of way.
While Karbo filled the tunnels with the echoing sounds of joyful
violence, Arthur picked through the corpses. He found out, to his great
relief, that Food Scientist not only worked on the monster bodies as overall
ingredients, but could also focus in on the parts he should be interested in.
He managed to get a pretty definitive “no, definitely not” from a scorpion
tail, and an “interesting, but probably not what you are looking for” from a
millipede fang in the first few seconds. The rest of the pile was similarly
near-misses, things that had poison, but not poison that was even potentially
medicine.
Karbo came back with another pile of dead monsters soon after.
“There’s only so many species in these tunnels. I’m going to go look
for the last few, but the next trip will probably be the last. Just fair
warning.”
“Got it. You can’t do any more than you can do, Karbo. Even this
much was asking a lot.”
“From me? Arthur, I found you. Eito was going to walk right on by,
and I said, ‘What’s that funny shaved monkey?’ I owe you at least this
much.”
The second group of fangs and stabby-bits didn’t appear too useful
either. Arthur sat down on a log, determined not to worry so much as he
patiently waited for Karbo. But just as he began to settle down, a sudden
movement near the wall caught his eye.
 That’s it. As he sighted the small, fanged beetle, Food Scientist went
absolutely crazy. This was it. He rushed towards the beetle but was too late.
It disappeared into a small gap in the wall as soon as he moved on it.
“No you don’t, you bastard.” The stones in the wall were loose, and
Arthur turned his dagger on them, pushing it between various rocks,
chipping out mortar, and prying out whole sections of the wall until a good
portion of it revealed a hollow, dug out space beyond it. It was a tunnel of a
different kind entirely. It was all earth. It looked stable enough for now, but
he knew enough to realize that might change in a hurry. Worst of all, it was
small. He could make it through, but he’d be crawling. If something went
wrong, he wouldn’t be going anywhere fast.
Arthur didn’t hesitate. He shook his head to dissipate his fear as he
dropped to his knees and crawled in, his dagger death-gripped in his hand.
He didn’t have to go far. Ten or fifteen feet in, a small dug-out alcove to his
right revealed the bug, hissing and baring its fangs at him. He set himself
against the wall and stabbed to the side before the bug could bite him. The
insect jerked on his knife, then went mostly still.
He dragged it back out of the tunnel, all the while feeling out of
breath as the adrenaline in his veins started to wear off. Once he was able to
stand up, he sat down on a large log someone had dragged to the middle of
the room.
Wait, a log? Why would that be down here? Arthur realized he was
sitting on something that had no right to exist in this place, just a moment
too late to prevent what happened next.

You have been poisoned! (Paralytic)

Some source of venom, poison, or toxin has entered your
blood stream. You are currently afflicted by a spreading
paralytic poison and will lose a significant proportion of your
mobility per second until completely paralyzed or cured.

Arthur tried to stand up, but his foot was already out of commission,
and he instead flopped face first towards the ground. Catching himself on
one arm and putting his dexterity to good use, he spun around to face the
log, landing on his butt and drawing his dagger to prepare for whatever was
about to crawl from under it.
From under the log, he thought. Hopefully, not from under my butt.
He had made a mistake, though, one he saw almost immediately
after turning around. His enemy wasn’t going to come from under the log. It
was the log, itself. It was some kind of mimic-like trickster beast, scuttling
towards him with a slavering mouth and two long, needle-tipped arms.
“Oh, this isn’t good.”
The log-monster whipped one of its poison needles at him, and
Arthur just managed to parry it as he tried to yell, only to find the paralytic
had been at work robbing him of his voice.
Makes sense. Can’t be an ambush predator if your prey can call for
help.
Another arm whipped out, and Arthur was ready for it this time.
With a chop, he severed the needle, sending the whole log retreating in
screams.
Arthur tried to seize back the initiative, only to find that everything
below his waist was kaput. As the log recovered and stabbed out at his legs,
there wasn’t much he could do. It plunged the stinger deep into his leg but
had made one serious mistake. He couldn’t feel that leg anymore.
He didn’t like seeing himself get stabbed, sure. But he also had the
presence of mind to make the most of it. Pushing himself up, he grabbed the
arm and staked it to the ground on the other side of him.
The log shrieked again but kept advancing. Arthur lost function in
his legs completely. He still had working hands and arm, which put him
ahead of the log, at least in that way. But the log had big jaws that looked
perfectly capable of cutting him in half, which kept it ahead on most other
metrics.
Suddenly, and in a completely unhelpful way, Arthur found the log
over his waist, its big teeth extending towards his face. Even if he wanted to
go anywhere, he couldn’t. He was backed up against a venomous pile of
monstrosities, surrounded by stingers, pincers, and mandibles all dripping
with danger.
I can’t go any further back. In a last-ditch effort, Arthur flailed
about, using the same the poisonous bug he had previously hunted and
managed to score a hit against the inside of the thing’s mouth. The thing
roared, and then surged forward over Arthur’s body, driving him down with
its weight and smashing his head against the floor in the same crushing
motion.
He was still conscious, if only barely. His head swam and his eyes
went uselessly blurry as he waited for the log to end things with a single,
horrible bite. But that bite never came. Through the fog, he heard Karbo
bashing through the tunnels again, and then a smaller, fleshier crash as the
weight on his chest suddenly disappeared.
“Oh, hey there,” Karbo said. “Looks like you had a little adventure.”

Ten minutes later, Karbo’s anti-paralytic pill finally got Arthur back on his
feet.
“Good job staying alive. That’s one of the ones even I don’t tussle
with directly. Paralytics are nasty, especially from woodbugs.”
“Such a cute name for a terrifying thing.”
“Aw, it’s not so bad. Probably the weakest thing here, as long as you
know what you’re dealing with. You really didn’t notice that log appearing
out of nowhere? Logs don’t just appear, Arthur. Especially underground.”
“I really didn’t. But I got another level. Should I put it in strength or
dexterity? Your call.”
Karbo dismissed the idea with a shake of his head. “Not that useful
now. This isn’t a dungeon, so nothing will spawn on our return route. You
can dump the points wherever you want. But, Arthur, I do want to
apologize. If that had gone a little different, you’d have been stung high
enough up for that venom to get to your heart. And that would have been
it.”
 “Stung? I got both its stingers, Karbo. I remember that very clearly.”
“No, you didn’t. You got two out of three.” Karbo flipped the log
over. “The real nasties, the big dangerous ants and the like, they don’t sting
you with a tail. They use the one in their abdomen. Or their feet.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FOURTY-FIVE

MEDICINAL BOBA

Driven by the sheer mass of weird he was putting Food Scientist through,
the skill had actually leveled earlier, and then loudly told him that none of
the things he was looking at was what he wanted.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 18
STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 10
PER: 17
WIS: 23
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 9), Food
Scientist (Level 11), Medicinal Brewer (Level 5)
Achievements: Shop Owner, Mass Prep, Buffer Against the
Wave
 “How’d you delay it from that last hit, anyway? I wouldn’t think
you were strong enough to pierce the bark,” Karbo asked.
“Oh, that? I got him in the mouth with this bug’s venom, and it
didn’t like it much. See? Here’s where it hit.”
As Arthur neared the monster, Food Scientist went absolutely
mental again. It was pointing at the bark now.
“Karbo. Do you have any way to de-bark this thing?”
“Me? Sure. Lots of ways.” Karbo rummaged through his pack until
he found a large leather bag and a tool that looked somewhere between a
drywall spatula and a saw. “Monster parts are big business.”
“I hope there’s enough.”
“Monster this size, you are gonna get quite a bit, if it’s all useable.”
“It’s going to be a weird conversation with Mizu when I brew this.
‘Hey, here, I got you this tea. There’s monster wood in it!’”
“Why? It’s in a lot of foods. Your people didn’t eat monster stuff?”
“Not so much.”
“Well, a bit of wood in something isn’t gonna faze people here. Or
you could just not tell her.”
“Probably not a good idea.”
Karbo shrugged. “To each his own.”
After cutting the bark off as well as he could and stuffing it into the
sack, Karbo tied the whole thing shut, slung it over his shoulder, and started
walking towards the portal out.
“Good thing we got it. I forgot to tell Itela where I was going. If I
didn’t even get anything out of it, there’s no way she’d let me get away with
things.”

Karbo was nice enough to fly Arthur home and was also conscious enough
of Ella’s wrath that he avoided leaving a crater in her front yard.
 “You’ve got it from here?” Karbo loomed huge but a bit awkwardly
above Arthur. “I’d like to help more, but…”
“Mizu has both an alchemist and a doctor. It’s alright, Karbo.
You’ve already done a ton for me. I really appreciate it.”
“Well, then. Good luck, Arthur. And I’m guessing Itela won’t be
pleased with me for going missing, so wish me luck too.”
Before Arthur could actually get the words out to do what Karbo
had asked, the infernal jogged off at speeds that would make racing
motorcycles jealous. Arthur unlatched the front door, dragged his big bag of
monster bark through, and got to work.
Food Scientist, for better or worse, was not a recipe book. It didn’t
deal in exact weights and measure or cook times. What it did do, however,
was give him a general idea of the kind of ingredients he was dealing with,
and a very vague impression of what was reasonable and not reasonable to
use them for.
The powder he had picked up at the alchemists, for instance, was
not tea. It wasn’t meant to be used to thicken the liquid either. The skill said
so. It was a little vaguer on what the material actually was for, but the
process of elimination left just the boba to try.
The bark was much less informative. “I’m important”, it seemed to
say. “I do something. Guess what,” it teased.
And Arthur tried to guess, suggesting different uses of the wood to
food scientist and getting back the mental equivalent of a shrug. It or he,
depending on how you looked at it, just had a feeling about it.
But he had a starting point.
Up in his room, Arthur boiled a small amount of water in a pot,
added equal amounts of his normal starch and the stabilizing powder, and
mixed it until he got the perfect consistency. It took a little bit of time,
considering the stabilizing powder wasn’t a 1-for-1 equivalent to the starch.
It absorbed less water and worked into the dough differently. Eventually, he
got a dough that looked somewhat appropriate.
 The only problem was that it wasn’t right. He could tell. Not just
from the skill, which assured him it was a miss, but from the smell and feel
of it. It felt too strong, too much like medicine and too little like a
component for his tea.
Arthur quickly whipped up a new batch, using only half as much
stabilizing powder. It was closer, but still a miss. It wasn't until he had
mixture of ⅛ stabilizing powder to ⅞ starch that the skill felt ready to let
him proceed.
He quickly rolled a bunch of pearls, popping them into a small cup
for storage as the system messaged showed up.

Medicinal Boba (Unloaded)

These boba pearls are crafted from a powder meant to absorb,
contain, and preserve medicinal potency. They have not yet,
however, encountered a medicinal potency to contain. As it
stands, they will stay edible for significantly longer than
standard boba, but that’s all. They are a component searching
for an active ingredient.

Now that, Arthur understood. And luckily, he had a big bag of active
ingredients ready to go. Pressing some of the boba back into a dough, he
took a reasonable amount of the wood, ground it with a pestle he had stolen
from Ella’s kitchen, and folded the wood dust into the dough.
The result was something that Food Scientist assured him was not
quite poisonous, but still actively unhealthy to eat.
It was unsanitary, the skill said. It claimed that this was raw food.
And not the good kind.
Arthur rolled the dough into pearls and tried cooking it. Still wrong.
Still raw in some inexplicable way.
Placing the failed dough aside, Arthur realized that he needed to
cook and infuse the dough in one fell swoop. Mixing the dust in with the
raw dough wasn’t enough. Refilling his pot with water, he brought the
liquid to a simmer, then added a small section of the bark to it, steeping it
like tea. Color started to seep out of the bark, staining the water a very
slight red.
Not quite enough. It feels like it wants a bit more.
Arthur turned the heat up, bringing everything to a rolling boil that
he would never subject tea leaves to. The water’s hue shifted from red to
deep purple as the heat went to work. Once the color stopped darkening,
Arthur turned off the fire and let the water cool. At room temperature, he
mixed it with flour and made a new dough.
This, Food Scientist was exclaiming, was right. It was the missing
slot that the monster ingredient component needed to lock into, and Arthur
was applying it in just the right way.
As soon as the dough was pressed into pearls, the system confirmed
the success in the biggest possible way.

Medicinal Boba (Anti-venom, inferior)

You processed monster venom in a venom-resistant monster,
forcing antibody production like you wouldn’t believe. You’ve
now imbued that concept into a specially crafted edible
container, one optimized to lock in every ounce of poison-
resistive power that the bark has to offer.
But all that comes with one catch, and that catch is you. In
creating the antivenom, you had to bridge the gap between the
plausible and the attainable using a combination of majicka
and your Medicinal Brewer skill. And, frankly, your majicka
stores are still low, and your skill is only beginning to develop.
Does this product work? It does. It creates a very slight anti-
venom effect in its consumer.
But in all other regards, it’s a counterfeit, an inferior knockoff
of the boba that you’ll one day make. When you become
capable of that feat is up to you.
Effects: A very slight anti-venom effect is produced when
these pearls are consumed as part of a complete Boba Tea
 beverage. As with all your medicinal teas, this product will not
interfere or interact in any way with alchemical products.

Dammit, Arthur thought. Well, no, wait. Keep it together. Very slight
isn’t nothing. This is a start. You can work with a good start. It’s more than
you had this morning.
Arthur had enough boba made for one drink. It would have to do.
Karbo had claimed the bark was good for at least a few days, and longer if
cooled. Tying the bag shut and placing it in Ella’s cooler, he gathered
together the minimum gear he needed to make the tea, then jogged as fast as
he could to Mizu’s place. When he got to the door, an older metal elemental
was just exiting the room, closing the door softly behind himself.
“Hello, young man. Arthur, I presume?”
“Uh… yes. How did you know?”
“Itela said you might be by. She more or less threatened me with
disaster if I didn’t agree to let you see Mizu when you were able.” The
doctor visibly grimaced at the memory. “She didn’t even need to. No doctor
worth their salt would deny patient visits.”
“Is she doing okay? Today, I mean.”
“Not as badly as you’d imagine. Worse than yesterday, yes. But
better than I had expected. What I’m more interested in, however, is that.”
The doctor motioned to the small bag into which Arthur had crammed the
boba pearls. “I can smell medicine in there. I hope, Arthur, that you aren’t
planning on rendering a very carefully planned medicinal treatment null
with that.”
Rather than try to explain, Arthur took a shot in the dark.
“Can you assess medicine? By holding it, or something?”
“I have a skill that shows me the descriptions of most products,
yes.”
“See if it works on this.”
 Arthur handed the doctor a single pearl, watching as the man’s glare
shifted into a mild expression of surprise as he rolled it around his hand.
“I’ve tested my skill with an alchemist,” Arthur added. “It seems to
work just like the description says. Doesn’t interfere with anything.”
“Interesting,” the doctor said. “Normally, I’d say absolutely not,
system description or no. But in this case, I’m weighing the risks against the
rewards. And without an edge, those risks are as great as they can be. I’m
going to clear this, Arthur. But I’m also going to observe.”
“Can I have a few minutes before you do? I need to make the tea,
and I’d like to… visit, I guess. Be a friend.”
“Of course.”
Arthur moved past the doctor, who sat down on a small chair in the
hallway that appeared to be there for just that kind of wait-your-caretaker-
turn-with-Mizu purpose. It was time to test the product. Arthur knew that.
Even if it worked, the system had said that it would only have a very slight
effect.
He just prayed it worked at all.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FOURTY-SIX

PROMISES AND EFFECTS

“Our wood and metal went not to building, but to craft implements
meant to harm.”
“Hi, Mizu.”
“Arthur.” Mizu smiled, weakly. Arthur noticed that her blue skin
was just a bit paler than normal. She was sitting up in bed, almost no
different in appearance than she was the day before. It was terrifying, in a
way. Here she was, possibly dying, afflicted with something that wore
people down until they couldn’t fight any longer.
Well, not if I have anything to do with it.
“I brought you something.”
“One of your boba teas. Good. I’ve wanted one.”
“Well, this one might taste a little different. No guarantees. It’s
special.”
“Special?”
“You’ll see. How are you feeling?”
 “Not… very well. But better than I had thought I would feel. And
odd.”
“Odd?”
“The medicine makes me stronger. And the poison makes me
weaker. I think I could lift a heavier weight, right now, than before I was
poisoned. But I don’t have the energy.”
Arthur took his heat source out, placed it on a table, and poured
some water from Mizu’s well into it. It would be a few minutes before it
boiled, and in the meantime, he went to the bed and sat on the side opposite
Mizu, their knees more or less lined up as they faced each other.
“That is weird. Although a lot of things are weird for me.”
“Compared to your home?”
“Yeah. Earth. No skills, no magic. Just science. The only things I
can think of that made you stronger like that in the short term were drugs
that would just kill you if you used them too much.”
“Your sick just died?”
“No. We had science. Without skills, we learned details of how the
universe worked and leveraged those into things that weren’t quite magic,
but might have looked like it to you.”
“Could they have cured this?” Mizu held up her arm, which was
bandaged thicker than before, perhaps to hold some sort of topical salve.
“Maybe. Hard to say. Might have been beyond them, might have
been as easy as that.” Arthur snapped his fingers. “The water is boiling. I’ll
be right back.”
He left the water on the heat as he prepared the tea leaves, then
carefully poured the water over them in a cup.
“Hot or cold, do you think?” Arthur asked.
“You can drink it hot?” Mizu said.
“Of course.”
 “Hot, then. Please.”
Arthur nodded, leaving the ice in his pack as he opened up the small
jar where he had stored the special boba pearls. He added a healthy amount
of them to the drink, and then a small amount of milk. Whatever the venom
did, he figured a few extra calories wouldn’t hurt Mizu’s chances of
fighting it off.
He had very little idea of how it tasted, which worried him. But if
didn’t make her throw up, it probably wouldn’t do more harm than good. As
long as she would drink it.
“Here you go. Drink up. And tell me what you think,” Arthur said.
Mizu took the cup and sniffed it lightly, then took a sip through the
straw. It was a little weird handing someone hot tea with a straw and Arthur
knew it, but he had no idea how she’d get the little pearls off the bottom
without it, short of pouring them all into her mouth at the end of the cup.
After taking her first sip, she paused for a moment, then let out a little sigh.
“Strong,” Mizu said.
“Too strong? I can water it down,” Arthur said.
“No, it’s nice. It’s clearing my head.” Mizu took another sip. “How’s
the shop going.”
“Well… not much progress. I think my tables and the new glasses
Rhodia is making should be done in a couple days. But I haven’t been there
much.”
“There’s that little to do?”
“Not exactly.”
Mizu paused mid-sip and eyed Arthur suspiciously.
“Arthur. What did you do instead?”
“I… hmm.”
“Arthur.” Mizu more or less always talked in a monotone with very
slight variations. This was about as close to being firm or harsh as Arthur
had ever heard from her. “Tell me what you were doing instead.”
 “I sort of went hunting.”
“No!”
“With Karbo! It was safe.”
“It’s never safe. Not in those tunnels. Not even with Karbo.” She
considered that for a moment, taking another sip of her tea. “Maybe even
less, if he’s there. Did he make you fight much?”
“A couple times. But it was okay. I only got hit once. By a log.”
The log thing caught Mizu off guard. Not only did she laugh,
covering her mouth to keep tea from escaping, but he thought he caught the
slightest, cutest hint of a snort.
“A log? Really?”
“Yeah. A big mean one. With stingers. I got it, though. Won the
fight.”
“With the log.”
“Yes.”
Mizu finished her tea, setting the glass off to the side.
“But again. Why?”
“Because… Okay, so, you have medicine. And spells, I think. But
my tea works on top of all that. So I needed ingredients. To make tea that
would help…”
Suddenly, Mizu’s lack of energy evaporated, and her mouth fell
open as she looked at her now-empty mug. Then, all of a sudden, she was
almost on top of him.
At first, Arthur was nervous and terrified, simply because they
hadn’t so much as hugged for longer than a few seconds yet. That ended
quickly, as he became nervous and terrified about the fact that Mizu was
actively slapping his arms and chest while yelling at him. Quietly yelling,
somehow. Yelling in a restrained, dignified manner. Yet still yelling in the
sense that he was in trouble. She was letting him know that he took things
too far, and he was getting the message loud and clear.
 Luckily, her already gentle beating became much gentler after only a
few seconds, fading to almost nothing as her already low stores of energy
seemed to bottom out. Eventually, she was just leaning on him, one of her
hands on each of his upper arms and her forehead on his chest. And, most
alarming of all, she was trembling.
It took a second for him to realize she wasn’t doing so out of anger.
She’s sobbing. Shit.
Very slowly and impossibly gently, he lifted his arms and wrapped
her up in a hug as she melted into his chest, still crying hard enough that he
could feel the moisture in his shirt.
“Stupid.”
“Yeah. I’m sorry. It was the only way.”
“I don’t care. Promise you won’t do it again.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise I won’t.” As he said those words, Arthur knew he
probably would. He’d need more ingredients. Better ingredients. Food
Scientist would send him back down to the tunnels, sooner or later, to pump
beetle venom into different kinds of monsters until he found the perfect,
most overpowered antivenom possible.
In fact, I bet Karbo would take me back tomorrow if I asked, and
then I could get a head start on…
“No. Believe your promise. Now.”
He had no idea how Mizu knew, but she knew. As much as he
wanted to argue, when she lifted her tear-filled eyes up to meet his, he knew
she had already won. She really didn’t want him to. even Worse, she looked
like she’d be mad if he did. Worst of all, she could apparently see right
through him, and she might not drink the tea if he broke his promise.
And so it was decided, whether he liked it or not. She had the right
to say no, and she was saying no. He’d have to find another way.
 “Okay,” Arthur said, and the moment he said it honestly, it was
enough for her. She lowered her head back into his chest. Slowly but surely,
she got her crying under control. They sat like that for a while.
“Arthur?”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you. Not for the risk. But for why you took it.”
“Yeah.” Arthur gulped. “It was… it seemed worth it.”
He waited for her to respond for a bit before he realized she was
asleep. He gently set her back on her side of the bed, resisted the urge to
kiss her pale blue forehead, gathered his things, and left.

“The young man, Ella. The offworlder. I need to talk to him.”

After the longest day Arthur could remember having since he
arrived at the demon world, he fell asleep so fast and so hard that he didn’t
actually remember getting into bed.
His sleep was long, hard, and dreamless. He might have even said
that he slept like a log were it not for the fact that logs on this world seemed
to want to eat people. Now, with the sun beaming in through his open
window, he was suddenly aware of a pair of loud voices arguing on the
street below.
“I know who you are and I’m more than aware he’s an offworlder.
I’m just not going to let you wake that boy up. And I’m certainly not going
to let you scold him before I get a chance to. He went to the tunnels with
Karbo without even telling me. There’s an entire bag of bark in my cooler,
and I have no idea why. You have to wait your turn. I’m the lady of the
house, and I get to kill him first even if you’re a doctor.”
“Dammit, Ella, I don’t want to yell at him. It’s about the girl.
She’s…”
Suddenly realizing he was talking about a medical matter out in the
open, the doctor’s voice suddenly muted. Arthur could still hear them
talking but couldn’t make out the words to gain any more information. Still,
knowing it was about Mizu was enough to get him out of bed, no matter
how good his pillow felt.
Splashing some water on his face, Arthur made his way downstairs.
Ella had pulled the doctor inside and was now angrily yet graciously
serving him a generous, expertly cooked breakfast. The doctor, in turn,
looked suitably daunted by her motherly-rage and also grateful for a
heaping pile of pan-fried meat and eggs. As Arthur came into view, their
conversation ground to a halt as they both turned to look at him.
“Arthur, you don’t…” Ella started, apparently still in mother-and-
protector mode, regardless of what she’d said to the doctor.
“It’s okay, Ella. I’ve slept. If it’s about Mizu, I want to know.”
Ella reluctantly nodded and crossed the kitchen to fix Arthur a plate.
The doctor pulled out a chair, and Arthur sat, pulling in his food as soon as
it hit the table.
“Well?”
“In the interest of time and patient confidentiality, I won’t explain
much in the way of details. But your tea is working.”
Arthur sat up a bit straighter in his chair, suddenly hopeful.
“Really? She’s doing better?”
The doctor slumped a bit. “Not exactly. If I had to quantify it, I’d
say she’s doing significantly worse. She has less energy. Her color is worse.
She’s having more trouble resting, and that’s bad news with this kind of
thing.”
“So in what sense did the tea work, then?” Despite his best effort to
control it, Arthur was sure his voice leaked a hint of despair as he spoke. “It
sounds like a failure to me.”
“It worked because she’s better than she should be. This isn’t the
first time I’ve treated this condition, Arthur. Far from it. For a young
woman her age, she’s been progressing about how I expected in all respects,
at least until last night. She’s doing poorly. At best, these are always a close
thing. But she should be doing worse and she’s not. And the only variable is
your tea.”
“Don’t say it, you bastard. I’ll take that breakfast back,” Ella chimed
in.
“He has a right to know, Ella. And you know that.” The doctor
turned to Arthur with a serious look on his face. “The honest truth of it is
that Mizu has less than even odds of surviving this. It’s an endurance race,
one she’s losing. And there’s only one variable we have any chance of
adjusting.”
The metal elemental stood, took a few final bites of his breakfast,
and spoke to Arthur one last time before he left.
“The long and short of it is this. If you want that girl’s chances of
getting through this to get better, you need to get your tea making skill
working better. Fast.”

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FOURTY-SEVEN

OVERPEPPED TEA OF THE

WORKAHOLIC

As soon as the door closed behind the doctor, Arthur's sixth sense yelled out
that there was an immediate threat just behind him. As he turned around, he
saw Ella, armed with a wooden spoon that she seemed more than willing to
thwack him with, should things go a certain way.
“Do not,” she said, brandishing her doom-spoon, “do anything
stupid. Which includes going into any more tunnels with Karbo, doing
anything stupid with what appears to be a bag of slightly poisonous bark,
or…”
“Ella. Mizu made me promise not to take any more risks.”
“That’s easy to do. It doesn’t mean…”
“It does. She called me on it. Made me believe my own promise.
She won.”
“Oh. Well.” Ella set down her spoon and pushed Arthur’s food
closer to him. “Eat your breakfast. Have I mentioned how much I like that
young lady? You’d be stupid to let her go.”
 Arthur winced.
“Oh, gods. I’m sorry, Arthur. I didn’t think about how that would
sound.”
“It’s okay. It’s hard.” Arthur stood from the table. “Could I get some
slices of bread? I’m going to take this breakfast as a sandwich.”
“And where are you taking it?” Ella stood up and cut a few pieces of
bread, pushing them over the counter to Arthur, who began forking as much
of his eggs and meat onto the bread as he thought they could hold. More
than he thought they could hold, really. It was possible this would be his
only chance to eat that day, and if so, he wanted to make sure not to
squander it.
“Well, you heard the doctor. I have to get better, fast. And as far as I
know there’s only one guy in town who can help me with that.”

“Wake up, Eito! I need your help.” Arthur banged on the door for the fifth
time since he got there. “You’re supposed to be my guardian or something.
I’m pretty sure you can’t just ignore me when I come calling.”
The door finally swung open, revealing a very peeved-looking Eito.
His eyes were heavy with sleepy, lethargic fury as he beheld Arthur at his
door.
“Being a guardian, Arthur, means that I have to help you. It does not
specify a specific time when I help you.” He rubbed his eyes with his hand,
squinting them against the light. “It’s more of an unofficial title, anyway.”
“I’m sorry. It seems mean to ask, but what happened here?”
“Not every kind of training takes place during the day, Arthur. I go
where the job demands. And until two hours ago, the job demanded I go
somewhere besides my bed.”
“Oh.” Arthur felt shitty now. But the fact that he didn’t have much
of a choice prodded him forward. “Well, I am sorry. Hopefully, I don’t have
to take much of your time. It’s about Mizu.”
“The water girl? I heard she was sick.”
 “She is. Some degenerative poison. It’s a race between her vitality
and the poison’s growth. I don’t quite understand it. Not as much as I
should.”
“I know the one. And she’s not a combat class, or a labor class in the
physical sense.” He shook his head. “Sorry, Arthur. I wish I could say her
chances were better.”
“Thanks, but there’s not a lot of time for sorry. She’s not improving,
Eito. And she has all the drugs and blessings she can hold.”
“And you think…” Eito’s eyes finally woke up a bit as he realized
the implication of Arthur’s presence. “Okay, I get it.”
“Good. Because I need advice. How do I level? As fast as possible.”
“Fine. Come in.” Eito walked into his kitchen and sat down at his
table. “But you’re making the tea. I’m not doing this without pep. Lots of it.
Spend majicka if you have to. Twice.”
Somehow, Arthur had never thought of simply amplifying the
caffeine content of his over-pepped tea even more, but it turned out this was
absolutely something he could do.

Over-Over-pepped Tea
With a combination of skills, intent, and raw majicka, you
have increased the pep content of this tea. Due to the
simplicity of amplifying a relatively mundane effect the tea
already possessed twice, the effect is stronger than what you
could usually produce. The resulting tea is moderately more
potent, but gains no bonuses to the duration of the stimulant
effect.

“That does pack a kick. Thank you.” Eito slurped down his first cup
and poured himself another. “Now, to business, then. What’s the status of
your leveling? I wouldn’t normally demand this, but show me everything.”

Arthur Teamaster
Level 18
 STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 10
PER: 17
WIS: 23
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 9), Food
Scientist (Level 12), Medicinal Brewer (Level 7)
Achievements: Shop Owner, Mass Prep, Buffer Against the
Wave

“Gods, you’ve come a long way. You’ve likely outdistanced most of

your peers, if not all of them.” Eito scratched his chin. “But you’ve also
managed to reach a bottleneck of sorts. You might not have noticed yet, but
your days of quick progression are over.”
Arthur nodded. Eito slurped his tea and looked at the sheet again.
“My skill rarely lies. It says that it’s pretty hard to break this kind of
bottleneck through skill alone. I assume you already know that actual
combat breaks bottlenecks of this kind. But I’m reluctant to send you that
direction, for a few reasons.”
“Mizu said the same. I went out with Karbo earlier. She made me
promise not to put myself in any more physical danger.”
“Good girl. But it’s not just the danger. If it were just about levels,
combat grants those. The reason we don’t simply have Karbo bus every
young person through the dungeon, besides danger, is that combat leveling
is hollow for non-combat classes. I’ve seen instances where young,
overambitious fools paid their way to high levels through combat, only to
find that they became underpowered for their level. Classes progress the
way they do for reasons, Arthur.”
“So what do I do, then? I guess I could go to my shop and start
selling tea. But it might not be fast enough. Am I stuck?”
Eito waved his hand, somehow making Arthur’s screen visible to
both of them.
 “Not exactly. If you want a shot at this, focus here.” Eito poked at
one of Arthur’s skills, expanding it to its full description for the first time
since the system had granted it.

Medicinal Brewer (Level 7)

When you make tea, you can actively choose to spend your
passive majicka on either the entire concoction or an
individual component. Successful attempts at doing so will
result in a drink that provides limited medicinal effects to the
drinker.
The success rate of these attempts is broadly tied to the
brewer's intent. Large effects will almost always fail, both
because they are inherently difficult and because the draw on
majicka is much more intense than it would be for an
alchemist replicating the same effect. Smaller, more subtle
effects will be successful much more often, while still failing
occasionally.
While any tea can theoretically be given a small medicinal
effect, some tea recipes will prove more cooperative with your
efforts than others. Various ingredients can be added or
removed from recipes to manipulate this effect.

“What you are trying to make for Mizu is fairly complex, I

assume?”
“Kind of. To make a long story short, I poisoned a monster with
another monster’s venom. Then I took the monster part that developed a
resistance and managed to add it to my tea. All with the help of majicka.
The system says it’s weaker than it should be. Because I suck, basically.”
“I wouldn’t be so sure. It’s quite possible that nobody else in the
world can do what you are doing in the first place. But yes, you could be
better. And if it were me, this skill is where I’d focus those efforts.”
Eito finished his second cup of tea, appeared to consider a third,
then decided against it. “I haven’t known many offworlders, but it seems
almost as if the system helps you make up for lost time. If it really is doing
that, and you focus all your efforts on that one point of leverage, it might
just be enough.”
“And how do I do that?”
“You make medicine. Go find some sick people. That part, at least,
is not a giant mystery.”
“Will do.” Arthur stood up from the table, dismissing his status
window as he did. Before he left, he had one other task to accomplish.
Gulping down a quick cup of extra-pepped tea himself, narrowly avoiding
burning his mouth in the process, he poured Eito another glass, added
cream, and added in a generous amount of majicka that he hoped would
recharge by the time he found his next patient.

Overpepped Tea of the Workaholic

By focusing on the undelivered promises of Earth’s energy
drinks while preparing a beverage, you have made a drink that
goes beyond mere caffeine into the crunchy, often fraudulent
realm of supplements. This drink is something that Guarana,
Taurine, and Creatine never quite lived up to. It grants its
drinker not only a pep high, but an overall increase in stamina
and wakefulness which replaces a slight amount of rest they
failed to allow themselves.

“I hope that makes up for some of the rest I stole. And thanks, Eito.
I appreciate it more than you know.”

Getting his tea stuff from Ella’s didn’t take long, but finding the one doctor
he knew would have taken significantly more time. Rather than risk it,
Arthur ran to Itela’s office in the church, bursting through her door so fast
he startled the poor, long-suffering cleric.
“I need sick people.”
Itela recovered from her startle before Arthur could notice and
apologize for it, replacing her shock with a wry smile.
 “That’s an odd thing to say, Arthur. I’m assuming there’s some
context I’m missing.”
“For my tea. To level a skill. For Mizu.”
“Oh! I understand. Will any old illness do?”
“I’d imagine so.”
“Then come with me. Sadly, the sick are not in short supply.”
Itela led Arthur through the halls of the church, twisting through
several corridors until they arrived at a large, sunlit room. All around it,
various demons were sitting in chairs, talking, and playing card games that
Arthur didn’t recognize. At first glance, it looked like a low-key social
gathering. But his perception stat disagreed with that assessment. With its
help, Arthur found that there was more to the peaceful display than met his
eye. And once he saw the truth, he couldn’t unsee it.
“Are they all in pain?”
“They are. Chronic diseases. Alchemy can do a lot, Arthur. So can
the types of things a cleric can accomplish. But not everything. Old age
catches up with some, and others just get unlucky.”
“Why gather them here?”
“The room helps. It’s a long-term project of the various religions
that gather here. A sort of mass enchantment. Being around other people
with similar problems also helps, or so I’ve heard them say.”
“And you want me to make them tea? For their ailments? I can do
that.” Arthur looked out over the varied group of people present and gulped
a little. “Can I… Is there a list of their ailments, somewhere? Something I
could reference?”
“No. And I don’t think you’d really want it if there were. Just go talk
to them, Arthur. Help them, if you can.”
Walking over to the wall, Itela went and grabbed a small pushcart
and put it in front of Arthur. “I’ll let the workers in this room know to give
you some space. Go. Heal some people.”
OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FOURTY-EIGHT

HEALING

The first person Arthur treated was not an anteater, although that was the
closest thing he could analogize to her. She told him that she had taken a
heavy blow to the back of the head when she was a little girl. The surface
wound healed just fine. But the damage to her nerves was permanent. A few
times a month, she got nauseous for days.
The tree demon that came next was old, perhaps the oldest person
Arthur had met in the demon world. He had gone places and done things.
He had seen sights. He had accomplished great feats, loved, lost, and loved
again. And now, at the end of everything, he was cold. He could deal with
his joints aching. That was just pain. What really bothered him was the
betrayal of his metabolism, one that left him frigid to the bones even in
warm rooms.
More than anything, he was surprised at how minor some of the
problems were.
He talked with demons with bad joints, or ones that were
embarrassed to tell him that their digestion wasn’t so good, anymore. He
met a demon with pyrophobia after a magic fire once almost burned them to
cinders, and a person who simply couldn’t sleep more than a few hours a
night.
People were suffering, yes, and he took that seriously. But in a
world of magic and alchemy, he had assumed the kinds of things that went
untreated and unhealed would be things like detached limbs, or massive
curses that plagued them day and night with unspeakable pain. But much
more often than not, their pain was mundane. Most cases of arthritis were
curable here, but not all. Most people’s headaches were treatable, but some
resisted both drugs and spells.
Some of the people he recognized, and he would have never guessed
they had problems based on what he saw from them in public. They moved
around the world, quietly and without complaint, simply tolerating their
pain while trying to accomplish as much as everyone else did.
And Arthur, to at least some extent, knew how they felt.
Nobody liked a buzzkill. He had hated his job back on Earth. The
longer he had been living in the demon world, the fuzzier his memories of
all that had become. Still, however faint his recollections were, he was
becoming more and more sure that he had disliked most parts of his Earth
life.
But he had never really told any of his friends or family just how
much he wanted out of everything. The acceptance of a painful existence
had been so deeply ingrained in him that it took weeks of better living to
undo.
“Here. Try this.”
He handed the next patient their own custom-brewed, magic-infused
boba. He didn’t have any special ingredients with him, nothing that would
be a magic cure-all for every disease. Instead, he sat with the people,
listened to how they hurt, and then tried to imagine it for himself. And once
he had a good mental image of what the tenth sleepless night or fiftieth time
an old wound had reopened might feel like, he imagined a tea that gave
some relief.
He didn’t aim high because he knew he wouldn’t make it.
 Digestive Tea
This tea has a very slight stomach-settling effect and promotes
better digestion.
Duration: Twenty minutes

Warming Tea
This tea imparts warmth to the drinker slightly better than
another drink of similar temperature would. In addition, that
warmth is slightly persistent, sticking with the drinker for a
short while after they consume the beverage.
Effects: Slight warming effect
Duration: Two hours

Every time Arthur made a new cup, he took special care to listen to
the people he was serving. He put as much majicka as he could in each cup
of tea, maximizing his regeneration during the long conversations.
That wasn’t something he had planned on. At first, he wanted to
speed run the room and make as many cups of tea as humanly possible. But
as soon as the demons began speaking, he felt the wrongness of that idea. It
wasn’t right to listen to someone’s problems and then do just the bare
minimum. It wasn’t nice.
So he’d empty himself out, dumping all his majicka reserves into a
single cup. Then he’d catch his breath and do it again. And again. And
again. It wasn’t until hours later that he felt a pair of hands suddenly
grasping his shoulders, and another moment after that before he realized
he’d collapse on the ground without them.
“I thought so,” Itela said, guiding Arthur to a chair. “You see young
healers do the same thing sometimes. They go into a sort of trance. Here,
take this.”
Arthur took a small green pill from her hand and downed it, dry.
“For majicka regeneration?”
 “For the headache. You should be getting one any moment now.”
Arthur began to explain that he was fine. And then the first wave of
the headache hit. He was not fine, it turned out. He groaned and laid his
head down on the table.
“Why is it so horrible?” he asked. “I’ve been overdrawing my
majicka for weeks. It hasn’t been like this.”
“Well, that’s part of your answer, right there.” Itela picked idly at
her fingernails. “But you’re in a heavily enchanted room, pushing yourself
again and again while the room assists with your regeneration. Didn’t you
notice you were filling back up on majicka quicker than normal?”
Arthur decided to treat that question as rhetorical. He kept his head
down and his eyes closed for what felt like minutes until the pill finally
kicked in, taking the worst of the pain away in a sweet wave of relief.
“Oh, there you are.” Itela smiled. “Good to have you back.”
“Thanks. Good to not have mind-bending pain anymore.”
“I have to say, Arthur, that I’m impressed. Some new clerics, people
who would swear up and down that they want to spend their entire lives
helping people, don’t figure out the whole talk-to-the-suffering bit until it’s
pointed out to them.”
“Really?”
“Really. I swear some of them pick up being a cleric because of the
image. Someone had the genius idea of writing romance novels with female
clerics in them. The darling of the heavens, the maiden of light, curing all
ills with her mighty magic only to be swooped up by the charming, utterly
handsome man. And people have been trying to become clerics ever since.”
“You can’t blame them. You do bring a certain level of style to the
job, Itela.”
“And Karbo does so well as the soft-spoken, mysterious man.” She
chuckled. “But yes, you did well.”
“Couldn’t have been that well. I don’t think I broke a ‘slightly’
effect threshold all day.”
 “You don’t have the right mindset on that, Arthur. If you’ve been
living with the same pain for years, treated as well as it can be treated, how
much do you think you’d appreciate a new relief, no matter how small?”
“A lot, I guess.”
“That’s right. Several of these people made a point of asking me
what you did and I pointed them at your shop. They were sad when they
heard it wasn’t open quite yet.”
“Oh thanks,” Arthur said. “So I guess I’m good to come back
tomorrow, and train again?”
He hoped that he was. The day had been far from useless. He
examined his status sheet, flicking it over to Itela so she could take a look
too.

Arthur Teamaster
Level 18
STR: 5
VIT: 8
DEX: 10
PER: 17
WIS: 23
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Teashop Brewmaster (Level 10), Food
Scientist (Level 12), Medicinal Brewer (Level 9)
Achievements: Shop Owner, Mass Prep, Buffer Against the
Wave

“Oh, that’s good. Right on a threshold with that medicinal skill. You
should see a bump in power as it crosses over level ten. Sometimes, people
get new aspects of how it works when it crosses that hurdle. Yes, come back
tomorrow. We can see if we can get you over that hump.”
“Not an option, I’m afraid.” A new voice sounded from a few steps
away, forcing both Arthur and Itela to look up. It was the doctor, still in
what Arthur recognized as his work clothes. “I’m afraid the young woman
has taken a turn for the worse.”
“How?” Arthur cut in. “She was in good shape last night. Not
perfect, but…”
“She’s just not very strong, Arthur. Physically, I mean. Mentally
she’s as tough as they come. Which is probably why you thought she was
doing better than she was.” He sighed. “Why I thought she was doing better
than she was, very honestly. Skills only tell you so much. The rest is
judgement, and…”
The doctor slumped a bit.
Itela stood up and put her hand on his shoulder. “It happens to all of
us. Nothing you can do about it now but move forward.”
The doctor took a deep breath and let it out slowly, recovering a bit
in the process.
“Thank you. But the fact remains that she’s doing much worse. And
while your drink certainly helped, tomorrow will be an important day for
her. Maybe the most important. We are pulling out all the stops we can to
help, but…”
“You need more tea. Got it. I’ll get her one tonight, train tomorrow,
and…”
“No, Arthur,” Itela said. “It doesn’t work like that.”
“But the threshold. If I can push over it, it should be better. Right?”
“She’s right, Arthur. Skills have a sort of endurance all their own.
The hundredth cast of the day is going to be different from the first cast. So
even if you get to level ten, the tea you make might not be as good as it
should be. Sometimes even to the point of failing completely.”
“Ah.” Arthur slumped in his chair. “So, what’s the move, then?”
“Does he have enough majicka for one more tea today, Itela?
Without damaging his abilities tomorrow?”
 “Probably. You have to go home to get the right materials for it,
correct?”
“Yes.”
“Then yes. Although that headache is going to come straight back.”
The doctor nodded. “Good. Go home, make the drink. Have it sent
over.”
“I can’t bring it myself?”
“Not today. She’s resting now. And once she has the drink, she will
need to rest again. And you need to get every ounce of rest you can
yourself, too. Eat a large meal. Sleep as much as possible. Rest as much as
you can tomorrow, then take the absolute best shot you can. Do you
understand?”
Arthur didn’t know how he was going to manage any of those
things, feeling like he felt. But if this was the best chance they had, he’d
have to. He nodded.
“I’ll send Milo with the tea.”
“Good. I’ll see you tomorrow evening, then.”

Arthur made a second anti-venom boba. For all intents and purposes, it
looked exactly like the one he had made Mizu before. But he could tell that
it was just slightly worse.
After sending it down to her by Milo express, Arthur sat down,
explained the need for a big meal to Ella, then sat back as she spent the next
hour preparing dish after dish. He stuffed in as many calories as his body
would tolerate before forcing himself up the stairs and to his bed.
And then he laid there. And laid there. He couldn’t sleep. He was
exhausted, majicka-drained, and emotionally depleted like he’d never been
before. And he couldn’t sleep. Which was the entire reason he was able to
notice an owl-head poking around the door to see how he was doing.
 “Oh, hi, Lily. You can come in.” Arthur turned a bit onto his side,
his cheek still down on his pillow but facing the door a bit more. “I’m sorry
I’ve been ignoring you the last few days. It’s been tough.”
She walked into the room and pulled up a chair to the side of his
bed, struggling with the weight of it as she slid it across the floor, set it at
the right angle, and sat.
“Because of that girl?”
“Mizu, yeah. She’s sick. I’m trying to help.”
“You like her.” It wasn’t a question, really, or even a little-sister-
jealousy type of statement. It was just a statement, a flat declaration of fact.
“I do.”
“So it’s hard.”
“It is.”
“Ella said not to bother you so you could sleep. But you can’t
sleep?”
“Not yet. But you don’t have to worry about that.”
“I can help.” Suddenly, there was a feathery hand on his forehead,
softly stroking back to his temple. “My mom used to do this when I
couldn’t sleep, before… A long time ago. It works. You have to close your
eyes though. Or it doesn’t work.”
“I really can sleep by myself.” Arthur yawned. “Eventually.”
“It’s okay. I want to help.”
Later, Arthur vaguely remembered arguing a little longer as the tiny
owl stroked his head. But before too long, the motion triggered some long
forgotten conditioned response from his childhood. Drained of both
mystical and normal physical energy, he slept like a log until morning.

OceanofPDF.com
 CHAPTER FOURTY-NINE

BOYFRIEND

“It’s time to wake up, Arthur.”

Arthur didn’t have to be told twice. As deep as his sleep had been,
the moment it was disturbed, his slumber state popped like a soap bubble
hitting an apprentice librarian’s back. He threw off the covers and
immediately sat up, ready to go.
“Oh, no. Not like that,” Milo said. “Stop with that hurrying.
Doctor’s orders. Literally. And mom’s.”
“There must be something I can do besides sit around.”
“There is. Come downstairs. Mom made breakfast. It’s pockets.”
Arthur had no idea why Milo said the name like that, but the sheer
culinary greed in his eyes was making promises Arthur wasn’t confident
any food could actually keep.
“I don’t even know if I can eat.”
“Neither does she. That’s why she made pockets in the first place.
This is a problem that takes care of itself now. Trust me. She said to hit the
showers first, though. And to be fair, you are pretty ripe.”
 “At least I don’t smell like coal and tortured metal.”
“The smith’s musk, we call it. Drives the girls wild.” Milo waved
back over his shoulder as he left. “See you down there. And hurry. Mom
won’t let me eat until you’re there.”
Arthur posted up in the shower, letting the magically heated water
wash over him for a minute or so, trying to melt away the tension in his
shoulders and neck. It only kind of worked. He felt better, but not much.
Soaping up and rinsing off, he threw on a clean set of clothes and went
downstairs.
“Pockets!” Milo yelled. “He’s here. You have to give them up,
mom.”
“I already have mine,” Lily said, sitting in a corner of the kitchen
chewing on something bready.
“Don’t taunt the boy, Lily. You only got yours because you’re cute.”
“I’m cute!” Milo yelled. “I’m plenty cute. Now feed me.”
“Fine.” Ella plated up a few of the pockets, which looked a lot like
good-sized fried calzones. “Here you go.”
“What’s in these?” Arthur asked.
“Everything,” Lily said. “Everything good that has ever been are in
these.”
“She’s not wrong.” Milo’s mouth was already full, and he was
talking through a mess of eggs, bread, and other stuff Arthur couldn’t
identify on the fly. “Meat. Cheese. Eggs. Syrup. Spices. Other stuff. Pockets
are… the universe.”
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“Just take a bite first and say that same thing again. I dare you.”
Arthur felt oddly sick sitting in a happy kitchen with people he
loved while Mizu wasn’t doing well. But in an odd way, he didn’t have a
choice. Everyone who knew better than him had told him to rest. To eat. To
relax if he could. That this was the best chance he had to make a difference.
So as backward as it may have felt, he lifted up the pocket and took a bite.
It was like tasting the birth of a galaxy.
“Well?”
“Shut up, Milo. I’m eating.”
“That’s what I thought.”
If Ella wanted to trick Arthur into eating 5,000 calories of bread,
protein and sugar, she had picked the right deception. By the time she ran
out of dough, he was bloated. Guilty, yes, but also swollen up with food like
a horse that got into the oats.
“So now what? I can’t just sit around here all day. I’ll go crazy.”
“No, Arthur, you can’t. Milo, would you please show him what
you’ve been working on with the others? Your project?”
“Sure. You good, Arthur?”
“Yeah.” Arthur just about rolled out of his chair, and headed to the
back, towards Milo’s shop.
“No, not there. It’s somewhere else.”
“I helped! I did the hard parts!” Lily chimed.
“She did, too. Come on, I’ll show you.”
Milo led him through a labyrinthine route of streets, side streets,
alleys, and even a person’s back yard. It took so long that Arthur had begun
to think they were trying to walk him around in circles when they finally
made it to a nondescript backdoor behind a row of shops.
“Ready?”
“I doubt it. Am I going to get ambushed in there?”
“No promises.”
“Just go!” Lily screeched. “I’ve been waiting forever!”
 Arthur frown-smiled and reached for the door, entirely unsure of
what he’d find inside. Just as the door swung open entirely, Milo used his
superior strength to thrust Arthur through it, sending him off-balance which
he took several stumbling steps to correct. By the time he did, he was deep
in the shop. And once he managed to raise his head and look around, his
jaw dropped.
“You did this?” Arthur looked wildly around the space, trying to
take it in. “All this?”
“I can’t believe that worked. You didn’t recognize your own shop,
Arthur?”
“I told you it would,” Lily said. “He never went out the back door.”
There were tables, chairs, and even little lamps set in the center of
each table, casting a gentle light on their own individual areas. The floors
had been cleaned, sanded, and repolished to a dull matte shine. The
countertop had been… something? It was different, at least.
“Is that paint?”
“It’s like paint. They call it rockwash. It’s something bricklayers and
masons can do.”
Arthur ducked behind the counter and took a look. It was like a bar.
All of his smaller equipment was set up behind a little concealing wall, just
like he had envisioned but never told anyone. His larger brewing equipment
was nestled under the counter itself, where shelves had been cut out to
accommodate them.
Even better, everything was where he would have put it himself.
Every lesson from the efficiency expert metal-elemental assistants was in
play here, putting everything he’d need exactly where he could reach at any
given moment in his process.
“Who did this? You?” Arthur bent down to Lily.
“Yes!” She smiled excitedly, before a hint of doubt bled into her
expression. “Did I do it… good?”
 “It’s perfect. You paid attention to how it was set up during the
wave, right?”
“Yeah. I did all the parts you said you liked.”
He mussed the feathers on the top of her head. He couldn’t help it.
For once, she didn’t squawk about it.
“You did great. This is perfect. Milo, this must have cost a fortune.
Who…”
“Nobody. Well, everyone, kind of. The city paid for it. You
remember that allowance for materials you used once and then forgot
about? It’s been piling up. Ella told Pico to give it to the entire class to use,
and we voted on how.”
“Oh, you found him?” Rhodia said, pushing through the door with a
huge crate. “Well, help me with these. There’s a bunch of them.”
“What’s that?”
“Less talking, Arthur. More crate-moving. I haven’t got all day,”
Rhodia said.
Milo laughed. “You do have all day now, you know. He’s your only
customer and his order is filled.”
After Milo was shushed, the three of them made quick work of the
crates, and Rhodia moved to the nearest one and cracked it open to reveal
the straw packing.
“Now, this is just a first try, you understand? These are the first
glasses I wouldn’t be embarrassed to show people.” She cleared some hay
from the top of the crate, then slowly and gingerly lifted out one of the
glasses.
“Oh, Rhodia. Those are perfect. I actually love them.”
The glasses were about the capacity of the ceramic cups from before
but sacrificed width for height to make an overall taller glass. The material
itself was far from perfect and uniform, with little waves and distortions
here and there. The glass itself had bubbles throughout it, which might have
been intentional, for all Arthur knew about glassblowing. But whatever the
flaws, they were perfect in their imperfection, each a tiny little bit different
from the last.
“We couldn’t get the mural done in time. That should happen
tomorrow.”
“The mural?”
“Milo’s idea,” Rhodia said. “Don’t ruin it for Arthur. It’ll be better
as a surprise when he sees the complete version of it.”
For the next few hours, Arthur was truly distracted. They organized
glasses on the shelves on the wall behind the counter, running out of space
well before they ran out of vessels. The rest were stowed behind the
counter, ready for big rushes or as to-go cups. Then, as a team, they went
and started moving Arthur’s equipment from the house to the store. That
took longer, especially when it came time to move the mechanical boba
press and the latest, most improved version of Milo’s juicers. The former
moved to the workshop area below the shop, and the latter was mounted to
the wall, ready to pull the essence and pulp out of as many different fruit
varieties as Arthur could imagine.
And all of a sudden, it was a shop. And it was also time to go.
“That’s a long enough of a distraction,” the doctor said, walking into
the shop. “Arthur, thank you for doing as I said and resting up. It couldn’t
have been easy.”
“I had help.” Arthur turned to the group and smiled, loving how they
looked in his perfect, beautiful store. “Milo, I’m on my way. Can you close
up?”
Milo nodded, and Lily looked ready to protect the shop with
violence if that was needed.
Arthur breathed deeply as he walked behind the doctor, trying to not
let the tension sink back into his body. He’d need to be at the top of his
game for this.
“How is she?”
 “Frankly? Not well. She has a fever, and she’s in and out of
consciousness. The good news is that if her fever breaks, she’ll be set. I’ve
never had a case where the patient’s fever broke but they didn’t recover
from whatever was ailing them. But if the fever doesn’t break…” The
doctor pulled a handkerchief from his pocket, and from behind it was hard
for Arthur to say whether he used it to wipe his forehead or his eyes.
“That’s why we’ve pulled out all the stops. And the last piece is you.”
“And if I fail…”
“No. Listen to me carefully. There are a dozen people working on
this, Arthur. You’re the last piece, but not the only piece. If the worst
happens, it’s not one man’s fault.”
“I guess.”
The doctor turned. “No. You know, and you’re also going to
acknowledge you know it. Because it’s true, and because you are too young
to carry an undeserved weight like that on your shoulders. The health of a
patient is the burden of their doctor. Not anyone else, and certainly not the
people close to her. Do you understand?”
Ella was the toughest person Arthur knew, in the sense of
demanding other people rest or acknowledge things. But behind her, this
doctor was turning out to be a close second.
“I understand. And thanks.”
“It’s part of the job,” the doctor said. They had finally arrived at the
building. “Are you ready?”
“As much as I’ll be. Let’s do this.”
Arthur walked through the hallway towards Mizu’s room with the
doctor yet feeling very alone. Despite the doctor’s best efforts, he could feel
the pressure crashing down on his spirits.
How can I do this? He felt a creeping, near-forgotten terror as the
worst stress he had ever felt in either of his lives filled his chest, squeezing
at his heart and choking down his lungs.
 “Well, look who forgot again. I told you he would. He thinks he’s
alone, Itela.” Ella walked up to Arthur, flicking him hard in the center of the
forehead. “And you said he’d get it by now. Look at him. He’s shocked.”
Standing around a table already set up with all his equipment were
people he recognized and people he had never seen before. Besides Ella,
there was Itela, Nico, the owner of the alchemist shop, the restaurant supply
owner, and the wolverine among those he knew. A few other adults were
present that he had never met, smiling at him through faces that looked just
as nervous as his.
“What is this?”
“This is help, Arthur. Buffs, alchemical and magical. Commander
stat-sharing.”
“Better cookware. My own, in fact. You can’t keep it, but every little
bit helps,” said the restaurant supply owner.
Another person could supplement Arthur’s majicka, which was
apparently something people could do. Ella and a beverage shop owner
were standing by, as well as someone they said was the very best assistant
in the city. Between the three of them, his skills would be as focused as
possible.
And, as always, there was still Karbo.
“Is this the one?” Karbo extended his hand and showed Arthur the
vibrant blue flower. To the big lunk’s credit, he appeared to have treated it
as gently as he would have treated an infant. There wasn’t a single mark on
the flower. For once, Food Scientist was almost completely silent. It didn’t
suggest the flower would turbocharge anything, or ruin anything, or have
much of an effect at all. To the extent he got anything at all from the skill, it
was just a slight sense of warmth and rightness.
“That’s the one, Karbo. And thank you. All of you. I can’t repay
you.”
Ella stopped him there.
“Repay us? I have told you before in a dozen ways, Arthur, but you
are never alone in this city. Never.”
 Arthur stole the handkerchief from the doctor’s shirt pocket, wiped
his eyes, and got to work. It didn’t take long to make the tea. Something
inside of him was saying that his product was good, but not great.
But he had one last trick. Plucking the petals from the Blue Star
flower, he slowly lowered them into the drink and watched as they swirled
in the liquid.
And it was done.

Medicinal Boba (Anti-venom, Minor)

You processed monster venom in a venom-resistant monster,
forcing antibody production like you wouldn’t believe. You’ve
now imbued that concept into a specially crafted edible
container, one optimized to lock in every ounce of poison-
resistive power the bark has to offer.
You’ve bridged the gap between plausible and attainable using
a combination of majicka, a newly minted level 10 Medicinal
Brewer skill, and the unconditional assistance of others. This
drink is much improved, if still substantially weaker than a fully
realized version would be.
And while you will not be allowed to remember this bit, know
that I’m rooting for you, Arthur. I rarely get guests, and the few
that came before you were all joys, people who made my world
better, not worse. People who helped rather than conquered. So
far, you’ve lived up to every inch of the precedent they set. I
only regret not being able to tell you that in a way you’d
remember. I’m rooting for you, friend.
Effects: A more than slight anti-venom effect is produced when
these pearls are consumed as part of a complete Boba Tea
beverage. As with all your medicinal teas, this product will not
interfere or interact in any way with alchemical products.

Reverently and with the utmost care, Arthur handed the drink over.
The doctor took it into the room, then came out a few minutes later.
 “No good. I can’t wake her up. She’s delirious. She doesn’t
understand. And if she can’t wake up to drink this… I’m sorry, Arthur.”
Arthur’s shoulder slumped, and he felt as if he might faint.
“He doesn’t get it, Itela,” Ella said.
“No. He never did. A very good doctor, usually, but a bit academic,”
Itela responded.
The doctor glanced from face to face, confused.
“Send the boy, Doctor,” Ella said, taking the drink from the doctor
and handing it back to Arthur. “That boy in her room, with a gift? If
anything will wake her up, that will.”

It turned out Arthur’s presence didn’t break her delirium, exactly. She was
flushed the darkest shade of blue he had seen, still beautiful but clammy
and burning up as he brushed the hair out of her face.
“It’s me, Mizu.”
“We flooded your temples with… with…” She paused as she lost
her thread of thought. “Hi, Arthur.”
“You need to take this. I made it for you.”
And, like magic, she did. He wasn’t sure she’d remember any of
this, or that she even really knew he was there in any substantial sense. But
only a short time later, the drink was drained. He tried to take the glass and
found he couldn’t. She locked it to her chest like a kid with a teddy bear,
keeping it close with an iron grip.
“What now?” Arthur asked once he was back in the hallway.
“Now? We wait. We wait, we pray, and we hope.” The doctor took a
seat in one of the three chairs in the hallway, next to Onna, who Arthur was
just now noticing was there. “And the rest of you go home. I’ll get word to
you soon.”
Slowly, everyone filtered from the room but the doctor, Onna, and
Arthur. Onna, the lizard demon, patted the chair next to her, and Arthur took
it thankfully.
“You’re going to wait? The whole time?” Onna asked.
“Yeah, I think so. I couldn’t do anything else right now, even if I
tried.”
“Arthur? I think you might be a good boyfriend. I approve,” Onna
stated.
“Boyfriend?” Arthur said, scratching his head. “You think she
thinks…”
“Arthur? Don’t be stupid.”
And they waited.

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CHAPTER FIFTY
OceanofPDF.com
 EPILOGUE

Three days later, the boba shop was absolutely packed. It wouldn’t hold up
like this, but for an opening night test run, the standing-room-only crowd
was about as reassuring as it could be. Everyone had their tea in hand,
having tested Arthur and Lily with a variety of choices that stretched the
menu to its absolute limits.
And now all the demons, be they rabbits, sparrows, or infernals
looked up in anticipation. Milo had the floor, standing in front of a large
makeshift curtain draped over the majority of one wall.
“As you all know, Arthur hasn’t had the easiest of weeks.”
Milo paused, glancing over to his friend behind the counter. Arthur
nodded, making a go-ahead gesture with his hand.
“And because of that, we all pulled together to help him get the shop
ready for his grand opening. Behind this curtain is the last thing we did for
him, something we think will tie everything in this shop together. Arthur,
this is a gift from us to you, as thanks for making every day you’ve been
here a lot more interesting for all of us. Enjoy.”
With a flourish, Milo pulled the rope in his hand, collapsing the
curtain and revealing a massive mural of the city center. Nearly everyone
Arthur knew was represented in the picture. Karbo was eating meat at a
stand. Itela was blessing someone in front of the church. Everyone else was
milling around, shopping, or otherwise living. There were painted
miniatures of everyone Arthur loved, and they were all enjoying the city he
had come to call home.
Front and center, stood Arthur, his back to the viewer, towering over
his cart and slinging tea for all he was worth.
 “I… I love it. It’s perfect. There’s only one small quibble, Milo.”
“Which is?”
“Why am I eight feet tall?”
“Oh, that. The artist had never seen you, and you were rushing
around town so we couldn’t introduce you. So she did her best with our
description.”
“And that description was that I was a gigantic bubblegum-pink
behemoth?” Arthur asked as he pointed at his figure.
Milo opened his mouth, finger extended from his fist, then paused,
thought, and continued a little more sheepishly. “Well, you are pretty tall.”
“Unexpectedly tall.” Eito nodded at his table, slurping up pearls
noisily from the bottom of his cup. “It’s easy to forget how tall in between
seeing you. There’s a complete personality and size mismatch. It’s weird.”
Arthur looked up at his portrait again, taking in his cotton-candy
skin tone and enormous stature one more time before shaking his head in
resignation.
“Doesn’t matter. I love it. We are never changing this.”
The shop erupted in a cheer, clapped, and then went back to their
conversations. Everyone was having fun, talking, joking, and for the first
time all evening, they didn’t need Arthur for anything. And everything was
as it should be. Almost.
“Hi, Mizu. Are you holding up okay?” he asked, sitting down next
to her.
“Hi, Arthur. Yes, I’m fine.”
With Onna and the doctor, Arthur had spent the night outside Mizu’s
room grabbing fits of sleep. But that was all rewarded the next morning,
when the doctor smiled for the first time in Arthur’s memory. The fever had
broken. Mizu hadn’t woken up yet, the doctor had said, but the worst was
over. She was resting, and every single indicator was pointing to a full
recovery.
 It was hard to say for sure that it was Arthur’s tea that had done it,
but everyone treated it that way. Including Mizu, who woke up soon after,
found herself clutching an empty cup, and somehow browbeat the doctor
into immediately bringing Arthur to her.
Before Arthur could protest, his new demon friends determined that
the grand opening of his tea shop could wait a few days. He went along
with it, spending his sparse schedule talking to Mizu, fetching her lunches,
and even just reading in silence.
She mended fast. Looking at her now, Arthur could hardly tell she
had ever been sick. He could still see she was a bit weaker than she had
been before. But Mizu reported that the danger had come with some
benefits. The achievements she had gleaned from surviving the whole
ordeal meant that once she recovered completely, she’d be quite a lot
stronger in a physical sense.
“No apologies for war, today?” Arthur asked. “I didn’t know it was
optional.”
“Oh. Hmm,” Mizu said, searching for words. “It’s hard to explain.”
“It’s not, Mizu.” Onna said, laughing. “She only has to do that with
most people, Arthur. If she’s sure you like her very much, she can just greet
you. Isn’t that right, Mizu?”
Mizu turned very many shades of blue indeed. Arthur gripped her
hand and pretended to ignore it.
“She does still forget sometimes, even with me. I like it, though.”
“Arthur! This is great.” Rhodia walked up to the table, dragging
Milo by the arm. “I’m getting so much experience. I’m taking this brute to
the park after this. It’s nice at night. Do you two want to join us after you
close?”
“Oh, sorry. We can’t. Mizu’s taking me to the wall. She says you can
see a lake from the south side.”
“Secret couple time?” Milo worked his mouth in an imitation of a
kiss then stopped the joke as he noticed both Arthur and Mizu tense up.
“Oh, you have to be kidding me. You haven’t yet? After all that? Arthur, are
you still afraid of this girl?”
“No, I’m… dammit, Milo.” Arthur tried and failed to catch his
friend and flick him in the forehead. It was a habit he was both pleased and
disturbed to find he was picking up from his bird hosts. “It’s just…”
“Yes, he is.” Mizu cut in, curling her arms around Arthur’s and
laying her head lightly on his shoulder. “He always has been. I like it very
much.”

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 SIDE STORIES

HERE BE SIDE STORIES

Demon World Boba Shop is a slice of life story.

That means a slow, relaxed world. It means very little combat. It
means frequent, funny misunderstandings that get resolved in nice ways.
But what it doesn’t mean, if I can help it, is a lack of plot. Like most novels,
Arthur tries things, learns lessons, and grows as a person over the course of
a single book.
That also means we don’t have as much time where Arthur just
makes boba in his shop, as some of you might expect based on the title of
the series. Often, the tea shop just serves as a launching place for stories
that range over the entire city. Or, later, the entire world.
We also wanted to spend some more time with the world around
Arthur.
And so, I wrote these stories. Some of them are lore-building, others
follow side characters around, and the bulk of them capture the plain,
unadorned warmth of an everyday day, and the boring beauty of little
plotless stories that capture the unexceptional moments that make Arthur’s
life happy.
Sit down. Make yourself a cup of tea (or buy one from your local
boba shop) and enjoy the stories. I wrote them just for you.
 SIDE STORY 1

THE VOICE AND THE BEAR

For a bear demon, most things were confusing.

Even the smartest of the bear demons was not all that bright by the
standards of the spawn of the demon lord. Were they strong? Yes.
Surprisingly fast? Sure. Could they nap better than most? Always, for-sure,
and absolutely. But in terms of thinking power, they weren’t the best. They
were arguably the worst, really, and it was something every bear demon
lived with.
So the bear was used to seeing things he didn’t understand. He’d roll
with them, mostly. Pretend he understood the orders and hope it made sense
later. But this was different. He was gazing upon the tower of the demon
lord, the dreaded diabolical spire, the home of the lord who held power over
the souls of every demon. And, against all of what he knew about the world,
it was falling.
That wasn’t confusing. It was impossible. It was a thing that must
not and could not be.
His hackles rose, and he growled in terror as every atom of his being
told him to get out of there. But there was no time. The base of the tower
disintegrated as a round, devastating pulse of energy issued from it, too fast
to flee from and far too powerful to survive. He felt the atoms that made up
his ursine figure ripping apart before everything went black.
And then, suddenly, there was light.
Which was impossible and disturbing in a different way because, as
far as he knew, he didn’t have eyes anymore. No matter how he tried, he
couldn’t see his body. No matter how he bent, he couldn’t glimpse a single
one of the hairs on his thick coat.
Consigning the matter of his mysterious perception of light to the
stack of things that were too confusing, he decided to focus on his
surroundings. He was somewhere in the middle of the sky and moving fast.
He decided to enjoy the ride.
And what a ride it was. Not only was he passing stars, he was also
moving so fast that he was flying through the space beyond the stars
themselves. Then, at the outer border of everything, he hit a wall. It was a
barrier, and he felt it steal all of his momentum, invisibly halting his
movement all at once.
And then, somehow, he sunk into the wall, passing through it like a
red-hot penny through a pile of marshmallows. The nothingness of
everything intensified further. It wasn’t warm. It wasn’t cold. It just wasn’t.
Faced with an impossible quiet, the Bear decided to do one of the
few things he knew almost always worked for problems. And so, heroically
and stoically, he napped.
And then, moments or centuries later, he woke up.
“Oh.” He heard a voice. “A visitor. That has never happened.”
He had nothing to say to that, but he was on familiar ground now.
When people said things you didn’t understand, it was best to nod along,
avoid saying anything dumb, and wait until they told you what to do. And,
just like that, he sat there for an hour, waiting patiently for the next step.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” the voice said. “Well, I suppose you
couldn’t. Not in that state. It’s rare that something becomes formless to this
extent. You must have been in quite the situation. Would you like a form,
again? That’s something I can help with.”
Now that the bear understood. She could give him his fur back? And
something to stick it to? Absolutely he wanted that. He tried desperately to
answer her, only to suddenly remember he didn’t have a voice. He wouldn’t
be able to tell her, and she’d think he was being rebellious, and she’d
probably beat him with big hard objects, and…
 “Oh, shush. Such a nervous guy. I get it, you’d like the body. Good.
I’ll do that. I just need to know what kind of body you want. And, sadly,
there’s not enough left of you for me to figure out what you were. Could
you think about it real hard? For me?”
He did. He thought about his snout first. He had always liked it. It
was one-half of how he opened his mouth to eat, and the entirety of how he
smelled. From there, he moved back, thinking of warm fur, a convenient tail
that hardly ever got in the way and didn’t wag, thick paws, and every part
of his heavy, beary mass of bear.
“Oh, I see. What an interesting creature. Sort of like a family-size
raccoon. Yes, that should be doable.”
Instantly, the bear was a bear again, gloriously so in exactly the way
he liked. And, wonder of wonders, she had also made a chair, a table, and a
very large bowl of berries, sitting just off to the side and waiting to be
devoured. He looked in the direction of the voice’s barrier questioningly,
afraid to ask permission and desperate to avoid slighting his unseen
benefactor.
“Don’t be silly. Of course you can eat them. I made them for you.
We’re friends, bear. I like you. You’re my first visitor ever, too. I can’t be a
bad host.”
Somehow, the bowl was just as full after every bite of berries as it
had been before it, never emptying and always producing more for him to
eat. He didn’t hesitate to take full advantage of that, ballooning up in a ball
five minutes later and laying on his back in the nothingness. It was as full as
he had ever been. And, he thought, he had a friend now. That had never
happened before.
“Good. Now, if you don’t mind, I have a question. Do you have a
place? To go, I mean. After this.”
The bear did his best to explain why he wasn’t so sure about that.
For all he knew, the entire world of Ra’Zor had blown up in that blast. And
even if it hadn’t, there couldn’t be demons without a demon lord. At least
that was what everyone had always said.
 “I see. Hmmph.” The voice was thoughtful now. “That is hard. I
can’t just leave you out here. And I can’t be at the edge of everything all the
time to keep you company. Were you headed somewhere? I could throw
you there.”
The bear explained that he was, for better or worse, currently
without a destination. It was surprisingly easy to explain that part. Like his
brain was working better.
“Oh, I’m sorry, that was me. I just gave you a bit of a hardware
upgrade. Not much, but just so you’d be confused by things less often. That
seemed to bother you. Do you want me to roll it back? I can.”
The bear didn’t. He’d keep the new brain, if that was all right. But,
he explained, he could absolutely leave and find some other place to be if
she wanted.
“Oh, it’s not like that. Actually, if you want, I could bring you in
here. I won’t be able to talk to you, anymore, not like this. That’s not how I
am down there. But you’d at least have a place to be, and I’d be able to see
you even if we couldn’t talk. Would you like that?”
The bear asked if it was a nice place.
“In some ways. It could be very nice. But mostly it’s just sad.”
The bear asked why.
“The people down there fight. Quite a bit. I don’t like it much, but I
work for them, not the other way around.”
The bear asked if she had asked them to stop. That had never
worked for him, personally, but it seemed like it might be an option for her.
“I can’t talk down there. I can’t even tell them that’s what I’d like.
So I can’t blame them, but… things could be better, I think. And I really
think they’d like it more, if it was just more peaceful.”
The bear nodded. He had the gist of it. It was a mean, rotten place,
not at all nice like the bleeding demon-fields of Ra’Zor. But it was his
friend’s place, so even if it was hard to live there, he was sure it would be
fine.
 “Oh, it won’t be that hard. Not for you. You’ll see. One way or
another, you dragged quite a bit of potential with you from the place you
came. That’s not mine to take. But I can help you organize it if you want.”
The bear nodded and thanked her. He had no idea what she was
talking about, which was a pretty good sign she could probably handle
whatever it was better than he could. He felt her fiddling with something in
his soul, and just calmly accepted it. Whatever it was didn’t seem to hurt.
“There, done. And you are sure you’d like to come in? I won’t be
offended at all if you don’t.”
The bear told her that he’d love to come in, and asked if she was
sure she couldn’t talk to him there. She couldn’t, she said, not like they
were now. But she’d be there for him, and would help him, anyway. He
thought that was nice of her.
“All right, I’m ready if you are. Did you have any questions before
you go?”
He only had one.
“Oh, I don’t really have one. I don’t work like that. But most people
down there call me System.”
And then she was gone.

The next few minutes were a bit like his trip to meet System, but in reverse.
He felt himself pulled towards the wall, which he melted through like
before. He once again built-up impossible speed through the nothingness
until he reached the place where there were still stars and kept speeding up
from there. He couldn’t explain why but these stars felt different from the
stars before. Warmer, somehow. Friendlier.
Just as he had begun to wonder how big balls of magic could have
personalities in them, a big ball of not-fire-magic suddenly rose up in his
vision, then filled up every inch of what he could see. A moment later, he
thumped softly into the soil of his new world.
 Opening his eyes, he beheld a terror beyond his imagining. He was
surrounded by green. There was grass. There were trees. Leaves. Here and
there were flowers, adding vibrant, beautiful colors to the view.
System, he thought, had betrayed him. She had set him down in
human territory. It was a place he had never been, at least in part because it
was a place he had never wanted to go. He was going to be cut apart by
human heroes, and there was nothing he could do about it. He didn’t even
know the way to the red side of the world from here.
Just as suddenly, he realized that couldn’t be what was happening.
System was his friend. His best friend, in fact. She wouldn’t do that. And, he
thought, that meant he was safe.
At least safe enough to figure out if he could eat the green grass on
the ground. Bears could eat a lot of things, and plants were among them. If
the ground here wanted to be a plant and thus food, he was fine with that.
But it seemed too good to be true, and a test was necessary.
Planting his snout down to the ground, he took a cautious sniff. His
bear instincts claimed it could be eaten. Cautiously, he opened his mouth
and closed his mighty jaws on a single blade of grass, pleased to find it
perfectly edible. It wasn’t good food, but it was food, which meant System
had sent him to a world carpeted in unlimited vittles. She was a saint.
He swallowed, and a system window opened. Funny, he thought,
how she was named after that. It was always a bad idea to ignore the
windows; the demon lord got mad whenever he did so. He sat up, opened
the window, and read.

Blade of Grass Defeated!

Due to a massive amount of pre-existing potential, your experience gains
have been adjusted from 0 to a number too large to be meaningful to you.
Processing this experience will take a somewhat large amount of time,
and would, if you experienced it, be quite painful. In lieu of that, you will
soon enter a short hibernation until the process is complete.
Enjoy your nap, Bear. And remember to check your status screen after.
 He did actually feel sleepy. He laid down in the grass, closed his
eyes, and went to sleep.

“He’s been here for a year. He was here when we walked by before,
remember? You said he was dead. But he’s not dead. He’s alive, and he’s
the biggest raccoon demon I’ve ever seen. Those guys give a tough fight
even when they are small, Ghet. We have to take him out, now, before he
wakes up.”
“Seems unsporting.”
“Since when have you ever cared about sporting?”
“Since we found a very sleepy raccoon. Let’s wake him up, then kill
him.”
The bear was very groggy indeed, but waking up to voices that were
angry at him for reasons he didn’t understand wasn’t an entirely unknown
experience to him. Experience taught him that it was often a good idea to
pretend he was still sleeping. Sometimes, though not often, problems would
go away if you pretended you were asleep for long enough.
And, besides, System had asked him to do something. He decided to
use the time wisely.

Bear
Level ? Bear
STR: 2000
VIT: 2000
DEX: 500
PER: 10
WIS: 1
INT: 5
Primary Skills: Bear Things
Achievements: Universe Hopper, Interdimensional Slingshot,
Ultimate Immigrant, System-friend
 The screen was different from what he was used to, but the numbers
seemed nice and high, which was reassuring. Bear Things didn’t seem to
need much elaborating, but he figured he’d check it out just for the sake of
completeness.

Bear Things
You are a bear. When you do things that bears do, you get a
200% bonus to all stats. That’s a bit overpowered, but you were
dragging an awful lot of potential with you when you came here.
You are also the only bear. Which means “things bear do” is a bit
undefined, as of yet. You may define them. Pick three things you
like to do, and those will be Bear Things from now on.

The three things were easy to think of. He liked eating. He liked
sleeping. And he liked working to protect demon-kind from threats. While
he had never been very good at the last one, it had always been his job and
he looked forward to doing well at it for once.
“I don’t think this bear is asleep anymore, Hyde.”
“Why not?”
“He’s mumbling something about eating.”
“Well, then.” The bear heard a sword being drawn out of its
scabbard. “That sort of settles the sporting thing, doesn’t it, Ghet?”
Another sword drew. “Sure does.”
The bear now identified this as the type of situation where trouble
didn’t go away just because he faked being asleep. Which meant this was
his least favorite type of situation.
He tried to roll himself lethargically up to his feet, only to find that
slow and lethargic wasn’t an option. He found himself standing so suddenly
it was like he had teleported. Which, he guessed, made sense. His body-stat
numbers were all pretty high.
“Gods, Ghet. Did you see that?”
 “I saw it. Get to stabbing. Now.”
Both of the swords came at him, and he had just enough time to
throw his paws in the way before they stabbed into him. Both swords came
forward, hit his paws, and shattered like glass.
“Shit. Hyde, run.”
“Can’t. Too scared.”
“Me too.”
The bear noticed that whatever else was going on, the two falcon
demons in front of him appeared to be done fighting. He asked, politely,
why they were trying to kill him. He wasn’t aware of disobeying any order,
he said. Was it wrong, he asked, to eat the grass?
“No, it’s not. I don’t think. Please don’t hurt us.”
The bear explained that he wouldn’t hurt them. They didn’t believe
him. He then explained that he could tell they were demons, and thus there
was no reason to hurt them.
“What does that have to do with it? We kill other demons all the
time.”
The bear asked why they did this. Was it a plot to kill more humans,
somehow? And then they made the craziest claim he had ever heard,
something both so confusing and so impossible that it simply couldn’t have
been true, even in a new world.
“What are humans? It’s a word I don’t know. I’ve never heard of
any, anyway. Ghet?”
“I’ve never heard of them either.”
The bear pointed out that they had swords. The two demons didn’t
follow. He explained, slowly, that the whole point of swords was to kill
humans. If there were no humans, there would be no swords. If there were
swords, there must be humans. It was simple logic.
“We don’t know what humans are, sir. We use these for killing
demons. In the wars.”
 when asked to explain further, both Ghet and Hyde began a terrified
attempt at explaining that demons often killed each other, that they had been
at war with each other for generations, and that they didn’t need humans to
start fighting.
At first, the bear found it funny, until he realized with horror that the
two demons in front of him thought they were telling the truth.
Slowly, a long-dead ember of rage began to rekindle in the bear’s
gut, coming alive with light and fire until he found himself pinning both of
the falcon-demons to the ground with his massive paws, roaring in rage.
“No! Please don’t!” Hyde screamed. “We’ll do whatever you want!”
The bear calmed down, just enough to roar that what he wanted was
for them to realize that if humans were all gone, there was no reason at all
for there to be any wars whatsoever, much less any wars where demons
killed demons. The point of demons was to kill humans and promote demon
interests in the process. If there were no humans left, the next thing to do
was to find another way to promote demon interests, not fight each other. It
was simple, the bear said. And he demanded, roughly, that they begin to
understand it right away.
“Fine! Whatever you say!”
“Yes! Fine! Just don’t eat us.”
The bear explained that demons do not eat demons. They accepted
the truth of that very quickly.

Ghet and Hyde, it turned out, were not an isolated pair of badly confused
demons. Every demon the bear encountered seemed to be laboring under
the same delusions as the original two. Luckily, the trick to teaching them
the truth was pretty simple. He’d tackle them, roar a bit, and break their
weapons if he had to. After that, he’d tell them to get behind him, and he
just kept walking.
After a while, there were sort of a lot of demons behind him.
 Luckily, it turned out that almost every one of them knew how to do
something. Most of them had food already, but a lot of them were good at
finding more. Others could cook it. And still others were good at setting up
tents, making warm mats to sleep on, and doing any number of other useful
things.
That was good because the bear wasn’t sure he could let any of them
out of his sight, just yet. Of course, he couldn’t see the end of them
anymore. They stretched on like an endless plain of people, further than his
eyes would let him see. But he could see the group, and Ghet told him that
nobody felt much like disobeying him.
He kept walking, eating food wherever he found it, especially when
there was better stuff than grass to eat, which there usually was. And then,
one day, another falcon approached his group, this one wearing a helmet
made from yellow metal instead of the usual steel.
“Are you… the bear?” the falcon asked. The hundreds of other
falcons behind him seemed to tense up as he did. The bear confirmed his
identity, at which point the falcon asked him to stop telling his men to quit
killing demons. The bear refused, asking why they needed to kill demons in
the first place, when they could be out finding more food. The falcon could
not explain this adequately but made clear that he refused to stop anyway.
And then his men charged at the bear. Without any better options,
the bear gathered them all into one big pile of falcons and roared at them all
at once. The king, the gold-helmeted falcon, suddenly changed his mind,
and ordered his men to change their minds too.
The bear thought that was great. It was much more efficient. He
asked the falcon king if he knew where any other golden-helmet demons
were, just so he could save time. It turned out the falcon king did.
Everything went kind of fast after that.

One day not long after, the bear woke up in his cave, wandered out, found
some berries, drank some water, and then laid down in the sun. It was a
pretty good life. After roaring at all the kings at once, he had only needed to
make a few trips to roar at new unruly demons.
 Soon, he hoped, the idea that demons should not fight each other
would sink in.
System, to her credit, seemed to be helping. When people wanted to,
she let them cash in their combat classes for different things, like shaping
metal or tanning leather. More and more people were taking her up on that,
which meant fewer and fewer people who could fight even if they wanted
to. And without humans to get in the way, things seemed to be getting better
all the time.
As for the bear, he didn’t need much. He had berries, sun, water, and
absolutely no orders to follow besides his own. He could see now what
System had meant by the world not being very nice, but that seemed mostly
resolved now. He couldn’t fix everything, but he had never thought that he
would. That was a job for smarter people than him. He just hoped that, in
some small way, System approved of what he had done. They were friends.
Her opinion mattered.
And somewhere very far away yet very close indeed, System looked
down on the bear as he fell asleep for the second time that morning. She did
approve, actually. Very much so.
 SIDE STORY 2

WRITING HIS OWN STORY

Stealth took a lot of math. People didn’t understand that. They’d talk about
how soft a good rogue’s feet were, how quickly they moved over the
ground, or how they melded into shadows. What they didn’t talk about was
how quickly the rogue could solve a quadratic equation in their head, which
was approximately four tenths of the job, and easily nine tenths of the
training.
As Corbin saw a Hawk-Demon Architect coming down the road, he
ran that equation so fast it would have made the head of anyone else his age
spin, except maybe Spiky.
And they call us rogues.
If people had any idea the sheer complexity of mentally estimating
the detection capabilities of people whose stats you had never seen, they’d
never think to associate the stealth classes with mere criminals. If they
knew that he was mapping a series of complex Euclidean equations to the
real-world terrain, they’d probably be shocked. But Corbin wasn’t only
doing that. He also ran a completely separate group of formulae on various
objects to determine how much cover they might provide compared to the
detection ability of his target.
Corbin did all of this so fast, he still had time to dive behind a barrel
and avoid the house-builder bird breaking his stealth and ruining an hour’s
work. If they knew, they’d call him a nerd. An academic.
It didn’t matter.
The most important jobs in the city required stealth. When the city
needed to scout a monster wave, it needed someone who could cut through
thousands of monsters without catching a single eye and make it back to the
town’s more secret entrances. When some pill-jockey needed a hard-to-get
flower, they needed someone who could run into the forest, pick a few
mushrooms, and make it back to the city without anyone being the wiser.
He couldn’t do any of that yet. But one day he would, and he was
proud of every bit of the mental prep-work that was moving him towards
that goal, whether people acknowledged it or not.
There were also some immediate advantages to being stealthy.
Cowering behind a barrel full of seeds, Corbin thought back to the
day before, when the new, pink demon had approached the blue water girl.
People really didn’t understand how great it was to be able to have a clear
vantage of entertaining moments like that. Where others had to observe
from afar, he was able to close the gap and see every moment of Arthur’s
discomfort in glorious, beautiful detail. He saw the tension in his shoulders
build as he dealt with water-elemental awkwardness for the first time.
Of course, everyone got that much. No matter how far away they
were, they could see Arthur’s awkwardness.
But only Corbin was close enough to watch the subtle but real way
Mizu’s eyes tracked the new kid as he left.
Mizu was pretty. Real pretty. But for anyone who knew her, it was
an open question of what her romantic fit would be. Judging by the fact that
she never looked entirely away from Arthur again after that, Corbin knew
she had found it, whether she knew that yet or not.
Corbin had considered telling Arthur how much better he had done
than his own pink-ape estimates of success, then decided against it.
Eventually, stealthers heard a lot and saw a lot that they shouldn’t.
There was no way to avoid it, and the only reason everyone forgave them
for it was that anyone with a stealth class learned to be absolutely discreet
about what they saw. If he was going to be a good at his job, and he
intended to, he would need to get good at that sooner rather than later.
The hawk was now far enough down the street that Corbin could
leave cover, but he waited a few moments before he did. One of the most
repeated pieces of advice his mentor had given him was to never, ever start
moving again before carefully examining his surroundings. Letting
impatience choose your movements was a recipe that eventually got
stealthers killed.
Instead, Corbin carefully looked up and down the street, assessing
each person on it, running some numbers, and making sure he could get
back in motion without destroying all his potential experience multipliers in
the process.
Stealthers gained experience based on several factors, but the big
ones were the number of entities he was hiding from, how skilled those
entities were at detection, and how much time and covered ground fit into a
single sustained session of undiscovered sneaking. Right now, he was ten
minutes from a brand-new personal record, and the difference in experience
he’d get if he broke that time barrier was probably a multiplier of… five?
Six? It was big.
That made what happened next even harder to handle.
As he panned down the street, he saw a rabbit woman herding her
two small children to the city square while carrying two large canvas bags
filled with her day’s shopping. She was distracted watching other things and
would have been beyond easy to hide from, up to and including the moment
her money pouch dropped from her belt to the street.
The dilemma was real. First, he wasn’t a jerk. He knew that woman
needed her pouch. Even if she didn’t particularly need the money in it, she
had enough kids that going to look for it would be a pain, and she’d have to
worry until she found it. Normal unstealthed Corbin would already have his
hands on it by now and would be a second from pressing it into the
woman’s hands.
But with an entire session of stealth on the line, the decision was
much harder. And someone else might see the money pouch. If they didn’t,
she probably had some identification in it so it could be returned to her.
Most people did.
It would very likely be fine without him touching it at all, and he
had a lot to lose by doing so. And yet, he glanced at the street one more
time, jumped from behind the barrel, and scooped up the wallet.
Now he had another decision. He could destealth, giving the woman
her wallet with zero risk of misunderstandings. Those kinds of mishaps
happened from time to time with stealthers. As much as you might be
careful, you couldn’t always control just when and how people spotted you.
When you got noticed, sometimes it was near someone’s door. Sometimes,
it was just behind someone. And sometimes, it was near a merchant’s
goods.
Crime was rare, and most stealthers were good people. But not all of
them. Stealth meant people couldn’t see you, and even those who were
well-off sometimes fell prey to the impulse to steal, to listen to things they
shouldn’t, and to go places they shouldn’t go. Everyone had heard the
stories. For not the first time, Corbin wondered how many of those stories
were fake, or at least misunderstandings.
Because I’m about to do something stupid and if it goes wrong, I’ll
become one. Probably.
Creeping up behind the woman while sticking to the shadow cast by
a row of buildings, Corbin waited until she turned a corner and darted
forward into her blind spot. That much was easy. The rabbit was still
distracted by her two bunnies, and none of them had the perception to
notice him unless he literally tripped over one. The trickier part was going
to be tucking the purse back in her belt. Physical contact was the best and
quickest way to break stealth, and if he was going to manage this, he’d need
to be quicker, smoother, and overall better at it than he’d ever been before.
But there was no time to worry about that, at least not if he wanted
to do this before she got to the city square. There, people would break his
stealth easily no matter what he did. Twisting the mouth of the cloth bag
into a narrow, rope-like shape, he darted his hand out and shoved the wallet
through the belt, counting on the tension of the belt to hold it once he did.
Then, darting back to cover, he winced. As quick as he was and as smoothly
as he had got it through, he still felt the catch.
Hiding was not a thing that always made sense.
With a big enough level and skill advantage, he could walk directly
through someone’s line of sight and still not have them notice. When
someone did notice him when he was stealthed, it wasn’t a battle between
his skill and their eyes, at least not entirely. Instead, it was system-screen
against system-screen battle of stats. The catch was the feeling of that battle
engaging, a kind of friction against his system-augmented concealment.
And nine times out of ten, it meant he’d be discovered.
At the very least, he was glad it wasn’t happening with his hand on
her purse in full view of the street. If she pushed for it, she’d find him here,
and that would be it for his training day. A good deed done, and a lot of
experience to be made up for tomorrow.
And then, like a miracle, the best possible thing happened. One of
her kids stepped on the back of another’s shoe, something that was taken as
an immediate declaration of war. The smaller, weaker-looking stepped-upon
child immediately turned, let loose a lagomorphic cry of rage, and bit the
shoe-stepping offender on the arm.
The catch immediately let go, and Corbin ran into a back alley,
stealth unbroken. A few minutes of low risk prowling later, he got the
achievement he had been waiting for.

Ready to Pounce (Improved)

You have once again managed to increase the time you can spend
undetected in populated areas. In addition, you’ve managed to do so
while having an up-close-and-personal physical interaction with one of
your targets.

Rewards: Skill generation, Experience

Hot damn, he thought. A new skill.

He was excited. The only thing that kept him from fumbling the act
of opening his system screen was that it was technically impossible. He
ignored the absolutely massive amount of experience and the few level-ups
the experience had given him, going directly to his new skill.

Help from the Shadows

Rather than harm, you slink through darkness trying to find opportunities
to help. Rather than theft, you look for lost things to return to their
 owners. While some do good in the full sight of others, you do it in ways
that might well never be rewarded, or even noticed. But you do good all
the same.

When you are using your stealth in service to other individuals or the
greater good, you get a bonus to both your stealth skills and any skills
that operate in conjunction with them (Example: Feline Pounce). The
effectiveness of this improves with your primary stealth skill and your
dexterity and perception stats.

This is a best-case scenario skill. Every sneaky guy helps other people
eventually. This skill just makes that easier. It’s keyed to both primary
stats you’re focused on.

It’s a big, big day for hiding. And this does change the game a little.

Before, he wandered around, soaking in the experience he needed

from whoever was nearby. Now, he’d need to find ways to help people
while doing it. And there were only so many dropped wallets to sneak back
into pockets. He’d have to get more organized.
But he knew just the guy.

The wolverine commander was just then sitting down to his lunch, satisfied
to have at least one break. It had been a long day maintaining the wall,
organizing what few volunteer troops he commanded, and generally making
sure there weren’t exploitable gaps in the city’s defenses that would get
someone hurt or killed. He did all that and made time for when Pico needed
him to apply small buffs to a wizard, cleric, or a suddenly very important
locksmith trying to open a flammables depot door without blowing anyone
up.
It was a long-hours, high-stress job. But this sandwich was going to
fix all of it.
Every once in a while, a day’s schedule lined up just right to take
him to his favorite bread store, the best roast meat vendor he knew, the
produce market that had the best fixings, and the one store in town that
knew how to make his favorite condiment just right. He had shaved the
meats, prepared the cheeses, piled everything high, and stared down at a
work of perfection that required the efforts of ten skilled masters to create,
whether they knew it or not.
His mouth watered. He let it.
And then, the peace was broken. He felt his system catch on
something, the same way a hair might enter an eye. His arm shot out into
the nothing before the system even had a chance to resolve the conflict,
dragging a young, terrified predatory cat into view.
“I’m sorry! I…”
The wolverine growled.
“I do not care how stealthy you are, Corbin. If you touch this
sandwich, I will sew bells through your hide myself. Can’t do much hiding
then.”
“Old man, I’m not here for the sandwich!”
“Then you’re a fool.” The wolverine looked back down to his meal.
“Look at her. She’s glorious.”
“She?” Corbin asked. “I don’t think you can assign genders to a
sandwich, old man.”
“I can do whatever I want. Especially in my own house. Which you
are burgling.” He sat down, holding up a quieting hand as he pulled half of
the sandwich towards his mouth and took a bite. The bread was even
crustier than he had hoped. He chewed away, finally satisfied. “Now, I do
have to say it’s impressive you got this far. New skill?”
“Some levels and a new skill. I got lucky on my last prowl.”
“I bet. Of course, that leaves the question of why you chose to use
those new powers here.”
“The new skill says it works better when I help people. I figured you
might have some ideas.”
“Ah, one of those. Yes, I can probably think of something.” The old
man chomped into his sandwich again, taking a bigger bite this time.
Corbin waited a good ten seconds before the commander’s mouth cleared
enough to talk again. “There are always monster waves.”
 “Sure. Glad to help when one comes. But that could be months,”
Corbin said.
“I don’t think so. The air smells… ready. Probably one coming
sooner than you think.”
Corbin had learned not to question the old man about smells. It
wasn’t even a skill thing. The old man could just tell when things were
going to happen. Corbin had once seen him successfully predict a marriage
proposal from the odor of the local atmosphere. He had no idea how the
man did it.
“Fair enough. But what about in the meantime? And after?”
The old man looked at the sandwich in his hand lovingly, sighed,
and set it down before walking to his kitchen and retrieving a pencil and
pad. Sitting back down, he scrawled a note.
“Take this down to the church. You know Itela?”
“Not well.”
“Not sure anyone but Karbo knows her really well. Doesn’t matter.
Give her this. Tell her it’s for the problem we talked about.”
“Which problem?”
The old man paused mid-bite, fixing his one good eye on Corbin
with a glare that could have burned a hole in a chunk of granite.
“Do you really think you need to know more and interrupt me eating
this sandwich?”
Corbin didn’t even consider the question.
“No, sir. My apologies.”

“So it’s courier work?”

“Basically. Really, it’s rumor suppression.” Itela was working on a
lunch of her own, but was much more laid-back about when she snuck her
bites in. “The church is in plain view of everyone. When we send out
communications, or ask for them, people tend to get ideas. Sometimes
wrong ones, sometimes right. And they talk. But if you did it…”
“They wouldn’t see the courier, and they couldn’t gossip.”
 Itela smiled.
“I’m glad to see you get it. Now take this.” She pulled a small
leather messenger’s pouch from behind her desk. “You know the smaller
alchemist’s shop on the west side of town?”
“The one with all the flowers out front?”
“That’s the one. Give this to the owner. Then come back. I’ll have
more tasks by then.”
“Do you think you have enough to keep me busy?”
“Oh, you’re worried about leveling? Don’t worry, Corbin. I won’t
run out. From here on, the church officially intends on working you to the
bone.”

Itela wasn’t kidding.

Corbin found himself all over the city, maintaining stealth better and
better, except when meeting the insane high-level demons who Itela tended
to communicate with. Even that wasn’t without its perks though. He tried
out all his new ideas and approaches on those guys, judging how good they
were by how quickly they failed. Soon, they’d be the only people he could
use as a yardstick at all. A few more levels and he’d be able to sit on the
shoulders of an average person in the city without them knowing he was
there at all.
As a result of all this, he was leveling fast. And before he knew it,
he was facing what other stealthers had told him was coming. The crisis,
they called it. For every stealth specialist, there came a moment when they
realized the real impact of spending more time invisible to the world than
participating in it.
While they could always unstealth, there was a sensation that built
up in all of them that they had at some point become less tied to the world
than they used to be. It was like standing outside of a glass window and
looking in. According to them, it was the main cause of class failure in their
professional realm. Some people just couldn’t take the loneliness.
After a quick trip to the forest with his class, one where he might as
well have not gone at all given how many people could tell he was there, he
felt the weight of that lonesomeness fall fully on his shoulders. He was a
cat-demon, sure. Independent. Self-sufficient. But that didn’t mean he was
immune to being alone. The funny thing was, he assumed he’d be just fine.
But over the next couple of days, as he watched his peers pull together to
help Arthur set up his stand, he felt that disconnect.
He was close to the action, but not quite part of it. The plot, as it
were, was advancing without him. The world was becoming someone else’s
story.
Just as things were about to come to a head, he saw her. If he hadn’t
been on a particularly long-range delivery mission, he would have missed
it. A family of cat-demons were moving into a house on the edge of town,
unpacking furniture and bags from a big wagon into their small home.
And with them, doing more than her share of the work, was the most
beautiful demon he had ever seen. If Corbin was a predatory cat, she was as
much the opposite as you could get. Smaller. More delicate. More
domesticated looking, somehow, although he knew better than to describe
her that way. She had simple clothes, almost to the point where he thought
that was what she was shooting for. But her eyes were a different story.
Those were complex, not only in their multi-faceted glory but also in how
they moved. They were quick. They went from object to object, taking their
attributes in, and she planned on the fly where every bag that still needed to
be carried would go.
They were intelligent, knowing eyes. And then, all of the sudden,
they were on him.
Caught? Impossible. She’s too far away. Corbin glanced around,
convinced someone closer and higher level must have snuck up on him.
There was nobody. And when he looked back in her direction, she was
already headed his way.
“It’s rude to stare, you know.”
“That’s amazing. How did you know?”
She reached her hand up and tapped her temple, just to the side of
her eye. “High perception, for one. But also my class. I’m a finder.”
Finders were not scouts. Scouts went out to see what they could see,
maybe to find big things like armies or monster swarms. They covered a lot
of ground, getting the lay of the land. Corbin, eventually, would probably
work as a scout. He was suited for it.
Finders, on the other hand, found needles instead of haystacks. If a
marriage bracelet slipped off, if a key fell down a grate somewhere, finders
were the ones who could track them. Some of them even worked with
combat teams sometimes, helping to spot tricky camouflage monsters
before they became an issue.
“That explains it. Still though. Good catch.”
“I feel like you should still explain why you’re standing across the
street staring at my family.” She looked stern, but he could see a spark of
mischief in her eye.
“Oh, yeah. Sorry. Just curious, I guess. First day here?”
“Yeah. Mom and dad are enchanters, and… well, they move a lot. I
think they get itchy.” She waved around at the surroundings, lazily. “I think
this is just the next place to scratch the itch.”
“Ah. Do you like that? Moving all the time?”
“I used to. Now it’s a bit harder. You lose friends, you know. You
can write letters, but it’s hard when they can’t see you.”
“I get that.” He really did.
“Anyway, I need to be getting back. I’m Dilah, by the way.”
“Corbin. Can I help you unload?”
“No.” She waved down at his courier’s bag. “Unless that’s full for
no reason, I think you have work to do.”
“Oh, right.” He had completely forgotten. “I guess I do. But I’ll see
you around?”
“Sure.”
Corbin smiled and nodded, turning to walk away before his
impulsiveness got the better of him.
“Where can I see you around?” he asked. “If I were trying to do that
on purpose, I mean.”
“Oh, don’t worry,” she said. “I find lost things, remember? I think
you count.”
The document got delivered, the workday got finished, and just like that,
Corbin’s crisis was over. He laid on his bed in the last of the waning sun
coming through his bedroom window, searching for even a little bit of the
loneliness he had been feeling before. It was gone. Dilah had somehow
flushed it out.
He could sort of understand how other stealth guys got through it
now. He wasn’t really part of the obvious story, but it almost didn’t matter.
Most people couldn’t see him, but some people could and would, no matter
how sneaky he got. And if he couldn’t be part of the main plot, he thought,
that didn’t matter.
It was looking more and more like he could just write his own story.
 SIDE STORY 3

THE SYSTEM, BAKING, AND THE

EARTHLING

Somewhere far, far away and yet very close in ways that mattered, the
System looked down as a few of her children were making an absolute mess
in the kitchen. Their working space was covered in a mix of tapioca-like
flour, sugar, and eggs. There was only a single clean surface left to prepare
food on.
That didn’t stop them. They were all hunched over in concentration.
And they were making mistakes. Even the older, wiser child was letting
things slip that she normally wouldn’t, letting her enthusiasm leak through
the cooking perfection she had built up over the years.
Her hands would reach for the wrong things. Her eyes would miss
slight mistakes in measurements that normally would stand out like a forest
fire. She’d drop a plate or a utensil and just let it lay where it had landed,
grabbing some other tool that was close enough for her purpose and using
that instead.
To others, she might seem like an adult. To the very young, she
might even seem to be an elder. But to the system, she was the same as all
the thinking inhabitants of this world. A child. One who needed guidance
like all the others.
Of course, the younger one was a tornado of wrong in comparison.
He’d crack an egg, getting more shell than white into the mix. He’d spill
entire bowls, add the wrong ingredients, and forget about things in the oven
long enough to convert what should have been dessert bread into clouds of
black smoke.
 And looking down on all the chaos, the System smiled.
The boy had put more than enough effort into the process to qualify
for the skill he wanted. She gave some people skills more quickly and with
less work, but they tended to be people who either needed them
immediately to survive or folks who couldn’t or wouldn’t get results
without the skills.
But this boy? He’d try and try and try. The System had only had a
few visitors from other places over the years, but on average, they were
shockingly positive influences on her world in their own ways. This
particular boy’s path to goodness seemed to be that he’d work at anything
that might make a positive difference. He’d pound and pound endlessly at
walls as long as there was a promise of something good once they fell, only
stopping when someone else made him.
The end result was that for someone who came to her planet with
the belief that he hated work, he did a truly shocking amount of it. He’d
work himself tired, sore, and stupid if there was a reason. Better yet, he’d
enjoy every moment of it without ever realizing that he loved the purity of
good work.
For children like that, the System had something better than a free
skill to offer. She could give not only the destination but also the journey,
letting them steep their eventual prize into a deeper and richer thing,
something that connected smoothly to the greater picture of who they were
becoming.
The older child helping him was similar, just more set in her ways.
And if the System planned to help her too. The boy would probably play a
role in that, even though she couldn’t ask him to do so directly.
It didn’t matter. He seemed to have a knack for helping people.

“Arthur, if you drop another ball of dough, I’m going to crumple you up
and shove you into an oven myself.” Ella scooped the dropped mess off the
floor with her bare hands, chucking it into one of the several trash bins they
had dragged into the room to help with the process. “You’re supposed to be
a seasoned professional now. A veteran. A bearer of learned hands.”
“Something I’d take more seriously if you hadn’t just dropped an
entire bowl of spices on the counter,” Arthur said as his hands kept
working. “I’d expect a bird of your age...”
“Careful,” Ella warned.
“Of your expertise. I’d expect a demon of your illustrious reputation
to be more precise.”
Arthur was, against all odds, the owner of a tea shop now. A boba
tea shop, to be precise. And while the long, chaotic road that brought him to
that point had taught him a lot of things, including how to make a proper
cup of tea, it had been a lot shakier on other things people expected from
that kind of shop. Specifically, he didn’t know how to bake. Not really.
“Actually, you aren’t wrong,” Ella admitted. “There’s only so long a
person can work at the same task before they start to slip. I think I’ve
probably hit that limit.”
“Really, Ella? Throwing in the towel?”
In addition to being the kind of person who would take in a wet-
behind-the-ears human without a second thought, Ella was usually the kind
of person who wouldn’t blanche at the thought of a bit of extra cooking.
Nine tenths of the time Arthur had spent around her been while she was
cooking in some way.
She could do a lot of things besides that, including giving advice
that always turned out shockingly accurate. But her primary way of
interacting with the world always had and always would be feeding it, and
Arthur was a little surprised to find she was giving up already, in just the
fourth hour of overtime after a routine training all-nighter.
“Yes.” Ella lifted some bowls and spoons out of the way, then swept
her arm across their workspace, sending a load of flour, spices, and sugar
careening to the ground. “And so are you.”
“I think if we just went on a little longer, I might get it.”
“You might. But you probably wouldn’t. The system is a little tricky
about things like this, Arthur. Some skills are easier to get than others. If
this was one of the easy ones, I think you’d have it by now. You’re not
going to get it with a few more batches of botched cookies.”
“I thought I was getting better at the cookies.”
 “You were. Your failures have gone from horrific lapses of judgment
to being much more subtle. Yet botched they remain. Honestly, it’s
impressive. Your improvements have kept ahead of the fatigue.” She
clapped her hands together. “The point is, kiddo, that you’re not the kind of
person who usually gets the system to move with simple grinding alone.
Some people need something else mixed in with the practice to get there.”
“And I’m one of those?”
“Arthur, you are their king. And it looks like a bomb went off in
here.” Wincing at the mess, Milo brought the sparrow-demon count in the
kitchen from one to two as he walked in, located a mostly clean stool and
took a seat. “Your skills all have stories. Always have. Hell, a lot of other
people’s skills have stories just from being around you.”
“You should have seen him earlier,” Ella teased. “He used three
different kinds of flour for a single batch of cookies. By accident.”
“And that’s a story?”
“It is when it kind of worked.” Ella tossed Milo an only almost-
burned cookie. “Try that.”
Milo sunk his teeth into the cookie, which more or less exploded in
his mouth.
“Huh.” Milo said through the crumbs. “It’s like it blows up into
flavor. Only problem is that it’s a gross flavor.”
“I didn’t say he got anything else right on that batch. But something
about the combination of starches did something here. Arthur, it was a good
find.”
“You think so? I’m not sure exploding cookies is something the
customers are clamoring for. Look at Milo.” Arthur nodded at his brother,
who was trying his hardest to brush the crumbs off his shirt. “He looks like
Karbo jumped him through a cafe.”
“Well, maybe it’s not suited for cookie forms. But think about pie
crust. That’s thinner. Or crispy dumplings, where the oil will make keep it a
bit more flexible. Or…”
“Oh, I’d better leave,” Milo picked up the conversation. “She’s
gone.”
 “Gone?”
“Yeah. Look at her. She’s in food-idea land. This used to happen a
lot, when I was a kid.” Milo waved his hand in front of Ella’s face, who just
went on mumbling about cooking methods, glazes, and ratios as before. “I
haven’t seen it in a while, now that I think about it. But she’ll be like that
for hours. You might as well go to work. Or sleep.”
“Sleep, I think. It’s been a long night.”

The system watched as the majicka in Ella swirled and changed, as

active as it had been in years. All her cooking skills danced with her in-born
intuition for all things having to do with the kitchen, creating new ideas and
concepts from thin air and combining them with the library of things she
already knew.
Everyone hit bottlenecks, including geniuses of Ella caliber. When it
happened to someone who was young, the natural energy of their youth
tended to push them through. But when it was someone who had already
reached great heights, the motivation was often lacking. And so, the system
usually found herself like a cook with a pot of soup that needed stirring,
only without a spoon to roil the mix.
In that time of need, the boy did not disappoint.
As Ella turned Arthur’s chaotic inspiration into new culinary
wonders in the days to come, some of the potential she generated would be
preserved. Eventually, it would find its way to Arthur to speed his own
growth instead of circulating through the population as it normally would. It
was slightly inefficient, and took much more work than usual, but the
System would do it anyway. She had given him the achievement that made
it possible to help other people for a reason.
The disruption in the normal way of things was more than worth it,
in the System’s opinion. If the boy followed his normal pattern, he’d pay it
back tenfold.
 SIDE STORY 4

FESTIVAL DAY

“So, are you going to bed after this?” Arthur asked after he forced down an
oversized mouthful of eggs, bread, and butter.
Milo had walked into breakfast with a shell-shocked look in his eyes
and Arthur immediately recognized it as an all-nighter spent at his forge.
Somehow, Milo had emerged mostly clean of grease and coal dust,
something that Arthur attributed to Milo’s primary smithing skill. Arthur’s
primary tea brewing skill came with all sorts of little hidden perks and
benefits that weren’t explicit in the class description. He could only assume
that the same was true of Milo’s skill, allowing him to walk around only
slightly soiled instead of becoming a mass of filthy feathers.
“Probably. At least for a few hours, anyway. I was up all-night
working on that noodle extruder,” Milo replied as he grabbed the nearest
food item to him.
“Did you get that working? I know Ella’s looking forward to it.”
“Thick noodles only. Anything thinner breaks. I’m not sure why yet.
But it’s getting there. What about you? Normally, you’d be at the shop by
now. Are you taking it easy today?”
Arthur stretched out a little, assessing his own condition, not that it
mattered much to his plans.
“Not at all. It’s a price festival. People are going to be milling
around, looking for tea. And I have some plans for getting rid of my money,
too.”
The city had a lot of unexpected elements, and their largest theme
was an expert encouragement of commerce. When Arthur had first arrived,
it seemed like there was no limit to what both the citizens and government
of the city would do to help him catch up, get a class, and establish himself.
Complementing the incredible support that the city gave to people just
starting out in their classes, it also kept the wheels of the local economy
whirring by massaging various pressure points that controlled trade.
It had a lot of different tricks to make that happen, but Arthur’s
favorite were the festivals. Of course, there were reasons for them that went
beyond economics, like this particular festival’s unity-between-gods theme
Arthur didn’t fully understand. But that was okay. All he needed to know
was that the festivals were times to eat and buy, where everything was
subsidized by the local government to come with lower taxes. And nearly
the entire population of the city came out to celebrate.
The ultra-consumer part of it had struck Arthur as weird until he had
asked Eito, his guardian-on-paper trainer and general source of demon-
culture wisdom. Apparently, when nine-tenths of your gods were related to
either prosperity or keeping an orderly society in motion, there wasn’t the
same kind of conflict Arthur was used to. And even if there was, people
loved these holidays. Merchants sold off all their excess goods, people
loaded themselves up to the gills with the things they wanted, and even the
recycling-classes in town got a ton of business as people rotated the old out
for the new.
Arthur wasn’t exactly rich yet, but compared to his life back on
Earth, he was now firmly in the upper-middle-class. The rent on his shop
was inexpensive, the components for the tea he made were cheap, and while
the shop wasn’t completely packed at all times, he had been doing very
brisk business since opening. He was finally going to spend his excess all in
one go, and he was as excited about that as a person could be.
“Where are you going? To get your supplies? I’m coming. You can’t
leave me,” Lily yelled.
Coming down the stairs was a tiny owl girl with an air of perpetual
sass, only slightly tempered by her little-kid cuteness. She was much
happier these days, now that Arthur and Ella had convinced her into
abandoning the orphan life and accept a new family. But that didn’t mean
she was quiet. Not at all. She lifted one of her feathered arms and slugged
Arthur with it, squaring up with him like a diminutive prize-fighter.
 “Ow, what was that for?” Arthur said.
“You were going to leave me, even though you know I like it,” Lily
said.
“He wasn’t, Lily. He said so this morning. Now sit down and eat
some breakfast.” Ella put a plate down on the table in front of her, loaded
with food.
“I can’t! Arthur’s leaving now. I’ll eat later.”
“You’ll do it now.” Ella’s voice dropped to a more serious tone.
“Now eat.”
Ella rarely gave commands, and Lily rarely obeyed instruct ructions
when they came from less authoritative sources. But when Ella commanded
you to consume food, you did.
Lily glared at her food, then tore in, consuming the calories as fast
as possible with zero concern for manners. It was a spectacle. Arthur
thought she’d choke, but she managed to make it through all right. As soon
as she was done, she staggered over to him, an entire pound of breakfast
heavier.
“Okay, I ate. We can go now?”
“We can. Let's get our shopping on.”

Arthur’s tea supplier was by far the most calming shopping-related

establishment Arthur had ever been in. The aroma of the place was strong,
not in an overpowering way, but in a heady herbal manner where the scent
steeped into everyone one of his pores. The shop was organized into
hundreds of wood drawers, each waiting to be pulled by its own small,
hooked brass handle.
They didn’t make tea here. The wood-elemental owner of the shop
was pretty clear about that. He was a merchant class, a person whose skills
all focused on organizing stock, calculating sales volume, and figuring out
customer’s needs. A long time ago, he had tried to brew tea and admitted
that it was barely decent despite the materials he used. And so he settled
into becoming a salesman.
The tea merchant could have sold anything, but he focused on tea
for the simple reason that he liked it. That love for his product showed in
every corner of the store.
“I’m afraid you might have to narrow it down a bit more than that.”
The merchant motioned at the shelves lining his store. “I have quite a bit of
tea, you see. And many of my blends are popular in the winter.”
“Fair enough,” Arthur said. “What I’m trying to do is rework my
menu, but I don’t know much about this kind of thing as you’d think a tea
shop owner would. I’m not exactly from around here.”
The owner glanced at Arthur’s face with mirth in his eyes. “So I
gathered.”
“I’m trying to find flavors people would recognize. Things that
would remind them of childhood, of home, and that kind of thing. Warm
flavors that go well with spices, mostly, but even things that stand alone
would be fine,” Arthur said.
“Hmm. It’s a good idea, at least. But what I’m hearing is that you
want to find cozy tea, and, well, most tea is cozy. Most tea is warm. I think
we’re going to have to do some browsing. Come along now, both of you.”
The middle-aged wood elemental led Arthur and Lily through the
shop, asking them to smell a couple canisters of tea. Between each, he had
them smell a small thimbleful of herbs he claimed, “cleaned the nose,”
cleansing his palette for the next tea.
“These teas, from there to there, are all what I’d consider to be
smoky. Mostly that’s because they’re cured over actual smoke, and they
keep some of that savory flavor. Most of these are strong, hearty teas. They
won’t hide behind those spices you want to mix in.”
Arthur smelled a few dozen teas in the process and found that his
favorite one was this blend called Grayscale. Selecting five that were
particularly close to what he needed, he jotted down their names and a bit of
what the owner said about them. After that, he picked up a few weaker teas.
“These are a different kind of thing. The smoked teas are going to
stand up to your flavors. These won’t. They’ll sit back and let your other
ingredients have their way. Depends on what you want, really. But these
give you some options.”
The shop owner then pointed him to the closest pepped equivalents
for each, and Arthur was off to the races.
 The whole trip, Lily was just watching as Arthur did his work. For
all her good qualities, Lily didn’t have much in the way of a preference with
tea. Whenever Arthur made her tea, he would randomly choose whichever
blend was closest and she loved them every time. But she liked visiting the
tea shop in her own way. If past evidence was to be believed, she would
spend the next few days talking about the places they visited today,
remembering the furniture and people she saw.
Lily was the best kind of company, something he had never
expected from someone as young as she was. She had been worried he’d
leave her behind, but he never would have. She made every trip better in
her own way.

The next shop was the preserver’s cellar. Like the fruit market, it
was completely underground, taking up what would otherwise be cellar
space for several buildings. Unlike the market, it appeared to actually cut in
under the roads themselves, which meant huge wooden structures that
propped up and reinforced the streets overhead.
It was obvious why the space was needed, but the youngish wolf-
woman who ran the shop clued Arthur in on the details anyway.
“The city subsidizes the space every preserver needs. As far as
they’re concerned, the preserved food is a community resource. I own it,
but they have certain rights to it as well if the city has needs.”
“How many preservers are there in the city?”
“A dozen or so. It’s good work in the sense that there can’t be too
many of us. But the more food we have stored under the city, the more
secure everyone is.” She slapped her hands down on her legs, as if she was
shaking dust off them. “So, what are you looking for?”
“Have you been to my shop, by chance? The boba tea shop,” Arthur
asked.
“I haven’t.”
“Okay, not a problem. Would have made it easier to explain, but
basically, I’m looking for a variety of preserved fruit to experiment with,
for research and development purposes.”
“You’re putting fruit in tea?”
 “It’s a different kind of tea. But let’s start with things that would
taste good in warm milk.”
“Gotcha. Let’s start over here.”
Something about the fact that most of the fruits were canned made
the whole process much less alien to Arthur than it had been when he was
dealing with fresh produce. Cut up and suspended in syrup, the flesh of the
fruits was easy to see and understand.
“Is it okay that you’re opening so many jars for me? It seems like a
waste.”
“It’s fine. Even opened, one of those jars will last for weeks and
weeks in a cold cellar,” the merchant said as she cracked open another. The
scent of sugary fruit soon filled the store. “I would have cracked them soon
anyway. So are you looking for just fruit, or fruit in syrup?”
“Both? Is the syrup sweet?”
“It’s basically just sugar. Sugar preserves things.”
“I thought that was salt.” Lily jumped into action at the mention of
sweet preserves. “Like pickles.”
“That too. But sugar does the same thing.” The woman pulled out a
few little wooden sticks from her apron pocket, spooning out a bit of fruit
for both Arthur and Lily to sample. “This one is nice. The canning process
makes it a bit soft, but it holds together well enough that it’s not entirely
mush.”
It was a heavy citrus flavor, the acid of it tempered just enough by
the sugar syrup to mellow while still leaving a bit of tang.
“That’s good. What is it?”
“Field fruit. It grows all over the wild, but you can’t farm it very
easily. Doesn’t matter because there’s so much of it to be had for anyone
with free time and a sack.”
“Why haven’t I seen it before? It’s great.”
“Because you can’t eat it right off the tree. It would be too sour.
Cooking it under pressure calms it down a bit, and the sugar bath does the
rest. It’s one of my favorites because it’s entirely a preserved food. Now try
this.”
 Eyes closed, Arthur would have sworn the next fruit was good old
Earth peaches. Despite the green flesh and little black seeds, the familiarity
of the flavor shocked him.
“This tastes like peaches,” Arthur said.
“Which are?”
“A fruit from my home. They have one big stone seed in the center
instead of the little black seeds, and white flesh. We ate them as hand-fruit.”
“Interesting. This is a kind of melon. Most people couldn’t eat them
as a hand fruit. I have to first cut through it with a chisel to scoop the meat
out.”
Unlike the tea shop, nearly every preserve in the basement was a hit
with him and Lily. At some point, he had so many jars set aside, he had to
stop. Five fruits would have been enough and a dozen was bordering on a
lot. Any more than that and his experimentation would get muddled. He
didn’t want to paralyze himself with choice, which meant showing some
measure of restraint, even if that meant leaving the better part of the city’s
fruit stores unexplored.
“So that’s it?” the merchant asked. “Good choices all. And I have
plenty of each in stock, so you shouldn’t have to change things up very
often if any of them work out.”
“That is good. Although I probably will anyway, sometimes. People
like variety.”
“Actually… hmm.” She thought for a moment, tapping her fingers
behind her on the side of the shelf. “So if that’s the case, I might stop by the
shop from time to time with samples, if that’s all right with you. Some fruits
don’t keep all winter. And if I have extra that’s just going to go to waste, I
can sell it at a discount. The city helps with that.”
“Sounds good.” Arthur paid her, then loaded his collection of jars
into a few crates for hauling back to the store. “I’m Arthur, by the way.
When you stop by the store, the first drink is on me.”
“That works for me. And I’m Tandy. It’s good doing business with
you.”
“I can’t believe how much we have already. Arthur, are you rich?” Lily
measured how much was in their wagon with her arms. It wasn’t quite full
yet, but there was a surprising amount in there. “Are we rich?”
“I don’t think so. I think stuff is just cheap here,” Arthur said.
“Compared to Earth, anyway. A little money buys a lot of stuff.”
“Why?”
Arthur pulled another few fried meat skewers from the warmer in
front of them. “Dunno.”
“I do,” the old turtle woman running the stand said. “If you really
want to know.”
“Sure,” Arthur said. “I’d appreciate it.”
“So, this starts with a little history. Stop me if you’ve heard this.”
“He hasn’t. I guarantee you,” Lily said.
“Well, back before the bear, there was war. And, if you can believe
this, people starved. Too many people were fighting and dying. Each faction
had farmers, hunters, and scavengers. Luckily, those classes were so strong
enough that there were able to keep everyone mostly fed with a few
exceptions. Same with blacksmiths, and leather workers, and any other
support classes. There was need, so they leveled. And leveling made them
faster and better at what they did, so they could support more and more
people.”
“And then the bear?” Arthur knew this part of the story and he
couldn’t resist showing that off. “With the roaring and the peacemaking?”
“Exactly. Where food was once scarce and farmers were working
around the clock, now there were five or six times more people with soil-
working classes. Food became cheap and plentiful. And every class
followed suit. Without the resource draw of war, everything became…”
“Post-scarcity?” Arthur offered.
“Post what?”
“Sorry. A word from home. It was a dream back on my old world.
To live in a world where there was so much, that everyone could have
pretty much anything.”
 “That’s a good way to put it.” The woman waved her arm at her
price-festival sign. “The city also does a lot to keep things moving. They
subsidize. They recycle. They make sure there’s an opportunity for people
to stay busy. Of course, I have it easy. Meat is an easy sale.”
“Especially since there’s Karbo.”
“Oh, you have no idea. Did I tell you he once forgot to take the
metal skewer out of the meat before he ate it?”
“No way,” Lily said. “This isn’t real.”
“It really happened. My hand before the gods.” The old turtle held
her palm up towards them, smiling. “He just said ‘oh, no’ and ran off when
I pointed it out. Itela told me he had to keep his combat aura up for a few
days, until the problem… solved itself.”
“I want to believe this is false,” Arthur said. “But it does sound like
him.”

“I thought you said you’d spend all your coins. There’s still tons in here,”
Lily said.
After a long day, they went back home, unpacked, and got ready for
dinner. Arthur looked over his new-found wealth of stuff. He had new
specialty utensils, new teas, new ingredients of all kind, and even some
stuff to decorate his store.
“I tried, Lily. I really did. I feel like I need to take a lesson in
distributing personal wealth, or something.”
“You should.”
“I’ll see what I can do. But in the meantime, I actually have an idea
for some of these.” Arthur pulled out a handful of coins and shoved them
into another bag, then tossed it at Lily. “A raise. Retroactive to day one. You
now make double what you did before.”
“Arthur, no. We’ve talked about this. You don’t pay unclassed labor
that much.”
“Maybe other people don’t. You’ve been working as hard as me
since your first day. Harder, even. I couldn’t do most of what I do without
you at this point. That calls for a raise.”
 Lily puffed herself up subconsciously as Arthur talked, looking
pleased, over-confident, and bashful all at once.
“Well, I am pretty great,” Lily admitted.
“You are. Just don’t use it as leverage to get another job.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” Lily said. “I don’t think I could find
anyone who needed me as much even if I tried.”
Arthur didn’t disagree. As far as he was concerned, she was
absolutely right.

“I think that’s about it for the lunch rush.” Arthur dumped out the remainder
of some now-stale tea into the sink drain, a bit dismayed at the waste. “I can
probably teach you to play Archi now if you want. At least what I know of
the game. I still don’t think I’ve scored more than a march and a half on
Zuni yet.”
“I think Zuni might be good at it,” Lily said. “Really good, I mean.
The other old people won’t play him.”
“I guess that makes me feel better,” Arthur said.
 “It probably shouldn’t. I’m pretty sure you’re still really bad.” Lily
grabbed a rag, wetted it, and started wiping down the counter. “But I think
we should wait on the game. Look back there.”
Arthur craned his head, and sure enough there was a customer in the
shop, sitting as far back from the windows as he could, head in his hands.
“Is he… sad?” Arthur whispered.
“It looks like it.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a person be sad in public here before.”
“It doesn’t happen often.”
Arthur looked at the snake, hopeful that he would snap out of it of
his own accord. He didn’t.
“Is it possible he’s just asleep?”
“Maybe.”
“Oh, no,” the demon said to nobody in particular. “What do I do?”
“I don’t think he’s asleep.” Lily pushed the side of Arthur’s hip
towards the end of the counter, and the mournful customer. “You should
probably go.”
“And do what?” Arthur hissed. “I’m not a cleric.”
“No, but you are here, right? And he’s sad. Give him advice.”
“Why don’t you give him advice?”
“Because I’m a child, Arthur. I don’t know how to give advice to an
adult. Besides you, but you barely count and don’t know anything.”
She has a point.
Arthur made his way awkwardly towards the table, glancing back at
Lily to find she had already gone deep into her table-wiping-and-ignoring-
awkwardness mode. Anti-buoyed by her lack of support, he took the last
few steps to close the gap. To the snake’s credit, he snapped to attention as
soon as Arthur came close, looking slightly embarrassed.
“Oh. Sorry,” the snake said. “I forgot where I was for a moment
there.”
 “It’s no problem. You weren’t bothering anybody.” Arthur looked at
the other seat at the table. “You want company?”
“I couldn’t make you do that,” the snake said. “They aren’t your
problems. No reason for you to get involved.”
“I can though. I’m happy to help.”
“You have no obligations here. It’s fine.”
“Man, look.” Arthur sat down anyway, deciding to run what Lily
called the outsider maneuver intentionally for the first time. “You’ve
noticed I’m some kind of weird non-demon thing, right?”
“I wasn’t going to say anything, but yes.” The snake nodded. “A big
pink pig monkey, or something.”
“Yeah. You got it. That means I’m not from here. And where I’m
from, we help those we find in distress.” Arthur was lying, a bit. Crying and
yelling in a coffee shop was as likely to get you kicked out as anything else.
But it could have been like what Arthur was about to do, if the right people
were working, and he liked that version better. “So just do me a favor and
let me help. Or else I’ll be in trouble.”
“With who?”
Arthur said the first thing he could think of. “The care bears.”
The snake nodded like it wasn’t a completely bonkers thing to say,
then suddenly dropped his head to the table again.
“Can’t.”
Arthur looked at Lily, who shrugged. He motioned at her to come
over. She shook her head no with a jerky kind of desperate enthusiasm. He
motioned again, trying to summon whatever authority he could to get her to
come help. She had already turned back to shop-work, and pretended not to
see him as she swept the floor with all the focus and myopic directionality
of a space telescope.
Arthur couldn’t think of a good response. He decided to go with a
bad one.
“Can too,” Arthur said.
 The snake looked up suddenly. “You can’t just counter me with that.
We aren’t children.”
“Nuh-uh.”
“Stop that,” the snake laughed, despite himself. “I’m a businessman.
You are too, aren’t you? Be dignified.”
“He doesn’t know what that is,” Lily yelled. “He’s some kind of
alien. You should just humor him.”
“I can’t!” the snake yelled. “It’s personal.”
Lily finally broke, striding up to the table.
“Look,” she said. “You think I don’t get it? The offworlder calls you
over, says hey-let-me-help-you-for-no-reason. You say no. He does it
anyway. You let him just so you can get away, right? And then a few days
later, you go hide in a literal hole in the ground, and there’s the offworlder,
filled with magic from who knows where, and he drags you out of the hole
by your feet. There’s no stopping this guy. Trust me, I know.”
“That didn’t happen,” the snake businessman said in disbelief.
“It did.” Arthur nodded. “Also, I didn’t drag you out by your feet,
Lily. You weren’t conscious at the time.”
“This is all beside the point,” Lily said. “What’s your name again?”
“Styga.”
“Styga, he has his teeth in you now,” Lily said proudly. “We all go
through it. It’s weird. But if you don’t let him help you now, he’s going to
go home and fret, which I’ll then have to watch. And then he’s going to help
you anyway, somehow. It’s inevitable. So just let him help, okay? Save us
all some time.”
Lily ducked into the storeroom without waiting for a response, and
suddenly, they were alone.
“She’s a bit terrifying.” Styga looked in the direction Lily had gone
with admiration. “Like a bodyguard made of feathers. What do you pay
her?”
“Not enough.”
 “I bet. Well, fine, then.” The snake sat up a bit straighter in his chair.
“It’s like this.”

Arthur listened and listened as the snake laid out his tale.
Styga had only been in the city for a few months, having come from
the capital for some business. What was supposed to be a simple trip turned
into a longer-term assignment helping with some obscure part of improving
the city’s foot traffic Arthur didn’t understand. Whatever it was, it wasn’t
the crux of the snake’s problem. Styga seemed to think he was pretty good
at it, at least, and had it well in hand.
The problem was only tangentially related to the job. In the course
of his work, he had discovered something. A secret lying in wait in the city,
something he would have never found otherwise, something that on
discovery had knocked him so thoroughly off-balance that he might very
well never recover.
“Wait,” Arthur said. “This is about a girl? Really?”
“Not a girl. An adult demon. A beautiful adult demon.” The snake
sighed. “As far as I know, the most beautiful one in the entire world.”
“And you can’t talk to her about it? Aren’t you… old?” Arthur
asked. The snake cast Arthur a slightly offended glare, and he backtracked
as quickly as he could. “I mean old enough to have learned to handle this
kind of thing.”
“I was, Arthur. I really was. She knocked that capability right out of
me. You should see her. She reads books about infrastructure.” The snake
man cradled his forehead in his hands. “Gods, she knows so much about
infrastructure design. She understands what I do. Do you know how many
people understand what I do?”
“Two?”
The snake was momentarily stunned. “That’s actually not a bad
guess. It’s beside the point though.”
“Can’t you just, you know, jump into it? Blurt it all out? It’s like
jumping into a cold swimming pool. If you just do it, you can’t take it back.
And then it’s over, one way or another.”
 “I’ve tried that. And it’s the oddest thing. I freeze. It’s not anxiety,
Arthur. I’m just incapable of doing it. And I can’t have anyone talk to her
for me, of course.”
“Why? I’d do it.”
“Because I’m not fifteen years old, Arthur. I’m a grown demon. You
can’t just reveal to another grown demon that you never learned to do
romance in an adult way. It’s pathetic.”
“I wouldn’t say pathetic.”
“I would,” Styga said.
Lily poked her head out of the storeroom. “I think it’s kind of
sweet.”
“Be that as it may, there’s nothing I can do about it. I’m leaving in a
few months. Four at the most.” He groaned. “We even spend time together.
The other day we strolled, Arthur. I had dozens of chances. I just simply
can’t move past that step.”
“I… Lily, do you have a solution for this?” Arthur asked.
“No. Not off the top of my head,” Lily said.
“And you can’t give her a note or something?” Arthur offered.
“Absolutely not. I’d die of shame,” Styga said.
“Hmm.” Arthur sat there, considering his options. He wasn’t
absolutely obligated to help, obviously, but he felt for this adult. He even
kind of understood how something like this could happen. It was a minor
miracle when he talked to Mizu that first time, even if he made a fool of
himself doing it. By forcing him to, Milo and Rhodia had set the whole
thing off. A week later, and it would have been much harder. “I don’t know.
I feel for you, but I don’t know what to do.”
And at that moment, the door opened. A wind elemental woman,
beautiful enough in her way, walked through the door.
“There you are. I looked all over, you know. Pico is trying to find
us.” She noticed Arthur sitting at the table and seemed to pick up some of
the weird vibe. “What’s going on here?”
 The snake opened his mouth to say, came up blank, and sputtered
out trying to come up with a good excuse.
“He was helping me,” Arthur said. “I don’t understand foot traffic
very well. He was trying to help me understand where it comes from. You
know. Around the city.”
“Oh.” She looked surprised. “That’s a complex subject. And you
were trying to do this over lunch?”
“Well, you know. If someone asks for help, you try.” Styga
shrugged. “Did it help?”
“It helped me understand that I can’t understand it,” Arthur said.
“But maybe you could help later?”
“Next time I come in.” Styga looked at Arthur helplessly. “Maybe
we can find the solution then.”
“That’s Styga,” the woman said, smiling. “Always helping.”
She crossed the room, grabbed the snake’s hand, and dragged him
up out of his chair. “Now come on, you. I’m too excited to wait any longer.
I think they’re going to let you build the extension to that road. Right up to
the wall.”
“No.” Styga was shocked. “I thought they said no. They didn’t
understand why they needed it.”
“Well, I convinced them.” The woman looked proud even as she
dragged Styga towards the door. “I told them you had to have it or the
whole trip would be a waste and they understood that. Good, right?”
As Arthur watched the helpless snake get dragged towards the door,
he was suddenly hit by a twinge of suspicion. Something else was going on
here, something the snake had not told him.
But he has to know, right? He couldn’t have missed it that badly.
Against his better judgment, Arthur decided to take a big risk on
Styga’s behalf.
“You two are fun. How long have you been seeing each other?”
Styga turned his head in shock, his face twisting into a mask of
embarrassment, anger, and despair that almost immediately dissipated as the
wind elemental turned, smiled, and responded.
“A week! A whole week today. I thought he was never going to
make a move, and then he asked me on a stroll.” She hugged into Styga’s
arm affectionately. “It’s been so busy that we’ve hardly been able to see
each other outside of work since. But a whole week, and you’re the first one
to ask me about it.”
“You look happy,” Arthur said.
“I am.” She smiled and grinned like a loon. “Do you know how rare
it is to find someone who knows about roads? I mean, really knows how
they should go? I think I got the only one. Now come on, Styga. We need to
get down there now before they change their minds.”
The door closed behind the two as Arthur heaved a sigh of relief.
The big gamble had paid off.
“That was honestly impressive.” Lily’s eyes narrowed in suspicion.
“I hadn’t figured that out. I’m not sure how anyone could, through all the
talk about roads. How did you?”
“It was when she was dragging his arm. I saw that, and I thought,
this snake clearly isn’t in control of the situation. And if he wasn’t in
control then…”
“Then maybe he didn’t know everything that was happening.
Smart.” Lily narrowed her eyes even more. “Maybe too smart. Are you the
real Arthur? Or has he been replaced?”
“No. It’s just, you know.” Arthur pulled a small sweet biscuit from
the batch he had made earlier that day and munched on it. “I just figured
that I never know what’s going on with Mizu. She has to tell me. And I
knew I couldn’t be the only one like that.”
“Huh,” Lily said, looking at the door. “So he’s kind of like your
twin. Funny. You’d never know by looking at him.”
 END

AUTHOR’S NOTE

New book but the same old traditions.

After every novel, I try to write a quick note letting you know both
the why and how of the novel. When I started doing this, I think my
conception was that these notes were mainly a service to the writer and
soon-to-be-writer types in the audience, to give them a perspective on how I
connected the various nuts, bolts, and lag screws that hold each book
together.
It turned out some readers like it too, as a sort of peek-behind-the-
curtain thing that lets them know a little bit more about the characters they
liked, or the events and plot points that they enjoyed. And if that’s you,
great. I’ll try to provide every last little interesting nugget I can wring from
my increasingly poor memory in the hopes it lets you enjoy Demon World
Boba Shop all just that much more.
As always, this is your disclaimer that these author’s notes are
lightly edited, are written in a rapid-fire stream-of-consciousness fashion
and are kept purposefully raw so that I don’t revise history too very much.
You don’t want me doing that, by the way. I’ll paint a picture so
unrealistically positive of myself that you could sniff out the bullshit even
hundreds of miles away.
I’ll be getting into the meat of this note pretty soon, detailing
character and setting design for you as well as I can. But first, you get a
weird story about formative experiences. I know, I know. But you clicked
on the author’s note. This is really your fault if you think about it.
 When I was ten or eleven, everyone I knew who loved me had
always loved me. I had brothers and sisters, and they pretty much had to
love me, whether they liked it not. My parents loved me. My aunts and
uncles and some percentage of my grandparents did, too. But everyone who
loved me mostly did so because they were supposed to — I was their son,
grandson, brother, nephew, etc. It was expected.
At the time, I lived in a house that, I swear to you, had no ground
floor. Some guy who owed my dad a bunch of money built the house as a
way to pay him back, back when houses were still cheap enough that
human beings could buy them with normal salaries. But between building
the upstairs and the basement, the dude had run out of money.
So to the extent there was a normal first floor, it was just a small
hallway about as big as two twin-sized mattresses laid end to end, with both
a staircase up and a staircase down extending from it.
And, at ten or eleven, I was sleeping in my shared-with-three-
brothers room when I had a dream. I don’t remember the particulars of the
dream besides the one part of it that mattered, which was that there was a
girl in it. Probably, I’d imagine, a ten or eleven-year-old girl. And in the
dream, we talked for a bit, she explained carefully and slowly that she liked
me (I think just as a person, honestly) and was glad we had talked.
I had friends before that and had even had people who had declined
to be my friend before that. The former was good, and the latter hurt. But
that dream, for whatever reason, was the first time I think I realized the
special value of people who choose to love you, who liked and valued you
for you, and didn’t have any particular obligation to do so.
The second theme of this book relates to something entirely
different. Skip forward about ten or twelve years, I was receiving help for a
problem I had caused entirely for myself from a person who absolutely did
not want to be helping me and who, reasonably, was pissed about it. To
clarify, there wasn’t anyone forcing them to do it. And I, stupid and young,
mentioned that.
At which point, the person explained to me that what I had done was
stupid, that they were angry about that, and that while nobody was forcing
them to help, they nonetheless lived by a certain self-imposed code that
required they help people in certain situations. While I certainly didn’t
deserve the help, they said the whole point of having principles in the first
place was to force yourself to be better than you felt like being. To be
something more than instinct and law, basically.
And it was then that I started to understand the value of people who
raised the bar for themselves, who were their own moral bosses in a way
that actually meant something. The principles squeezed more good out of
them than their own feelings-in-the-moment could have. Later on, that same
respect grew to include certain kinds of groups, but you get the picture well
enough on the individual level that I think we can leave off there.
I’d be lying if I said that I was thinking about either theme when I
started writing this book, but Demon World Boba Shop is sort of about both
anyway. It’s about all kinds of love, and what that love motivates people to
do. It’s also about how the concept of duties can reinforce and strengthen
normal goodwill. And it’s about what the world might feel like after
generations of those two forces working very, very well.

The Story’s Backstory

The idea of Demon World Boba Shop was, as you might already
know, created in an actual boba shop. Dotblue was on a road trip, we met
up, and he asked me what I was thinking of working on next. And, mostly
as a joke, I said “probably something slice-of-life. Like a guy opening up a
Demon World Boba Shop.” And then, like a lot of spur-of-the-moment
ideas, it sounded good enough that I just ran with it.
Now, understand that every part of the story I just told you is true. If
someone asked me how it came to be in an interview, that’s what I’d tell
them. But at the same time it’s not entirely true, in the sense that any story
that incomplete can’t be called the entire truth.
To flesh out that story, we have to start before that particular meet-
up, at the point where I had just finished the second installment of How To
Survive at the End of The World. At that point, I had written about five
honest-to-god full-length novels in about as many months. I was tired. And
while I like that book and think it’s generally good, it’s also frankly not the
best work I’ve done. The first book in the series was better, and so were all
three books of Deadworld Isekai.
And while it was fine, and people liked it, I was vaguely aware that
if I wrote the entirety of the next novel right away, it would end up sucking.
Like not just by my own standards for myself, but also in a way where it
wouldn’t be good for the series.
I needed a break, or else I’d be the “well, he used to be pretty good,
but…” guy, and that guy doesn’t usually get to go on to avoid the drudgery
of a normal job for very long.
So that left me in a place where I needed to figure out how to do
three things:
1. Take a break while still writing
2. Entertain people while making their lives a little tiny bit
better
3. Not suck

And the best idea, at least that I had right then, was to do something
very nice, italics intended. Something that had very low stakes and a vibe
that would be as relaxing to write as it was to read.
If that sounds weird, understand that the weirder bit is that it
worked. The rest of this note is about what took place in bits and pieces
over the next month or so as I planned and wrote. It’s the characters, the
place, and the mechanics of the thing. But the more important half isn’t that
stuff, or at least I think it isn’t. I’d argue it’s the part where I needed to calm
down a bit, and that put me in a place where I could at least have a decent
shot at helping other people calm down a little too.

The World
If you are trying to tell a nice story, it’s a good idea to at least try to
have a nice place to tell it in. Are there other options? Probably. You could
have a very nice, very strong person arrive in a not-nice place and fix it. But
if you have a person who is weak, injured, or otherwise in need of nursing
back to health, you need the place itself to be nurturing in some way or
another.
Arthur isn’t exactly destroyed by his life on Earth, but he’s not
exactly whole either. Worse, his big problem is stress, which is basically a
universal bad in almost any world you can imagine. Even worse, stress is
interesting. When you’re excited during a fight scene, it’s because there are
stakes. It feels like things could go wrong. If you completely remove the
stress, you lose all the stakes with it, and there’s no story left to tell.
So what I needed was a planet where there was still stress, but all
the stress was either generated by Arthur himself, or was a reasonable,
beneficial kind of stress. While that’s possible, that’s hard.
What I settled on was creating a planet that had once had war, strife,
bloodshed and murder, but was now mostly over those things. Say some
force moved in, corrected the worst of it, set them on the right track, and
then the entirety of the population of the world kept on that track for a few
centuries, and now things are not only nice but a reinforced, steel-plated,
dry-aged kind of nice that stands the test of time. That kind of world was
what I wanted.
So when you see hunters in this world, they hunt for materials.
When you see weapons, they are for monsters and beasts, not for other
people who think and talk. When a city has walls, it’s to keep things and not
people out.
Now imagine what people would use a LitRPG system for in that
world. Hell, think about what you could do with one here. If you could
make yourself artificially better at applying yourself to a full day’s work, or
better at painting, or any task like that. As an individual, you’d get rich, or
at least do well. As a society, you’d do even better. Goods would be cheap.
Food would be delicious. Everything would be just a little better, driven by
magic and stats in a way that otherwise wouldn’t be possible.
The Demon World isn’t entirely ahead of us because they’ve never
had industrialization (or a reason to have it). But they’re doing just fine.
There’s plenty for everyone, provided they contribute to the plenty
themselves. To the extent anything is expensive, it’s luxuries. The basics of
life are easy to get and maintain.
And because of that, most people spend most of their lives relatively
happy. It’s not perfect because nothing is, and there are still problems
because there always are. But when people react to Arthur’s chronic stress
and anxiety as if it’s an odd state of being, it’s because those emotions are
indeed odd to them. In the best way possible, they just don’t get it. It’s that
kind of world.

Characters
Arthur
Earth Arthur is like a lot of people. He’s been sold on the idea of
working very hard to get ahead, and never managed to actually get ahead
OR get off the high-pressure track. Most young people don’t have heart
attacks, but some do, and he’s one. Maybe he was born with a weak heart,
but it’s the stress that triggers his pre-existing problems.
Arthur’s greatest gift, one he doesn’t mention or question, is
probably that his relocation contract states that his memories of Earth will
slowly seem less important to him as he accepts the demon world. If that
wasn’t so, he might never fully recover. Memories, for better or worse, have
a long half-life. But given how fast the demon world proves itself to him,
it’s a very short transition to him, considering it home.
Arthur’s personality was a weird balance to try and hit. I wanted the
average reader to be able to put themselves in his shoes, to imagine
themselves going through the same experiences. For some of the readers
(I’m looking at you, every woman reader) this is much harder just because
he’s a man.
I try to limit those details, so you can feel like you could be Arthur.
But if I limit every detail about him, he ends up not all that interesting. So
in most ways, I went for relatable rather than completely without
characteristics. Arthur doesn’t like freeloading. He doesn’t like stress. He
gets tired when he works really hard and worries about blowing big
opportunities.
Morally, he’s what I call “reflexively good.” He’s not pushy, at least
not that we ever see. He takes advice from people who seem to know more
than him. He tries to pay back favors and tries to help where he sees the
opportunity to do so.
And, importantly, he’s the kind of person who was probably nice on
earth, but whose niceness really has room to bloom on the demon world.
The niceness he brings to the demon world is earth niceness. It’s noted a
few times through the book, quietly, that Arthur tends to be nice proactively,
where nothing is owed. And as nice as the demons are, that’s not how they
generally do things.
Most of the niceness Arthur experiences from most people are either
paying him back for something, or because of the overall societal
agreement to be nice in a codified, organized way. Arthur’s habit of being
nice to people he doesn’t know very well (or at all) isn’t unheard of from
demons, but it’s something that would be above-and-beyond for them.
And off in the distance, seeing all this happen and hearing about it
from the conversations of other kids in the park, is Mizu.

Mizu
Originally, I wanted to write Mizu as sort of an Aubrey Plaza type of
character. I got about two words into her dialogue before I realized that was
flat wrong and a horrible mistake. Don’t misunderstand; I like Plaza just
fine. But she’s far from a calming character. She’s a kind of bottled chaos, a
monotone wrecking ball. It’s the wrong vibe for the world and would have
ended up driving more comedy rather than genuine heartwarming moments
for Mizu and Arthur as a couple.
Instead of going wacky, I went for “quiet, but not actually shy.”
Mizu is easy to embarrass, and we see that several times, but we never
really see her feeling that awkward around Arthur or anyone else. She’s
culturally different but seems fine with that.
 One constant complaint I've heard from quiet people is that loud
people often assume that they must be uncomfortable just because they
aren’t saying much. The same loud people then try to get them to betray
their own quiet natures, which actually does make them more
uncomfortable. Mizu is in that realm of folks. She’s a woman of few words,
someone who likes to be around other people, participating with her
presence rather than sheer volume.
When Arthur cuts off their first conversation when he runs out of
things to say, that’s a plus for her. When he manages to shut the hell up and
enjoy their first date, he gets even more points. She’s a quiet girl, playing a
quiet game, and he can hang. And, considering how obviously he likes her,
there’s very little worry on her side about moving things forward.
And move things forward she does. An old guy once told me that
women make all the important decisions in the early stages of a
relationship, from flirting all the way through to marriage, sometimes.
Then, he said, they let the men think they made those decisions themselves.
I don’t know how right he was or how universal that is, but it’s true here.
Mizu gives Arthur flowers before he would have ever dared even think to
give her any.
She completes a manual labor task for him to prove she’s handy. She
brings him the best water (in two ways, if you count her too), plans and
executes their first date, and generally keeps track of the progression of
their relationship for both of them.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about Mizu. She lives alone in a
big town, has a close female friend we don’t know that well yet, and has yet
to mention a single thing about her past, her family, or where she’s from.
But for now, she’s a young woman who likes a certain nervous young boy,
and that proved to be more than enough for her in book 1.

Ella
Ella is my favorite character in the book because she’s my favorite
kind of person in real life. She’s a person who found out that sometimes
people get hungry and dedicated her whole life to feeding them. You might
say, “RC, is that really a big deal?” Yes, it is. And it’s not just about the
food.
When I started writing the book, I was shuffling through adults
pretty fast. Arthur meets two competent, kind men first, but neither of them
can help him much. He meets Itela, but she’s both too busy and exists in too
professional a setting to feel right. He meets the teacher of the class, but
he’s a boring character (and thus we don’t see a ton of him) and doesn’t feel
right either.
And then Karbo beats a monster to death with Milo’s dagger, and I
was searching for a way for Milo to repay Arthur and get that friendship
going. And Ella was born. At first, she was just a source of home cooked
food, and then from her first line I knew that she was the missing piece.
Ella is an authoritative, respect-commanding cloud of coercive
nurturing who not only thinks she knows best, but actually does. Like most
smart, goodhearted people, she’s perceptive. She meets Arthur, realizes he’s
a good guy, and immediately decides to adopt him. Note that at this point
he’s shown no talent for cooking at all. He’s interesting to her because of
who he is morally, not practically.
Throughout the book, there’s almost not a single reaction in which
she isn’t looking out for Arthur in some way. When he’s pushing too hard,
she makes him slow down. When he’s going down wrong paths, she helps
him look for the right ones.
And, most importantly to me, she’s able to force him to seek and
receive help.
A story:
One time I was fixing a car and stuck my finger where it didn’t
belong, badly injuring myself. I cleaned it, wrapped it up, took some
antibiotics I had lying around, and was fully prepared to just tough it out.
Was that a bad idea? Yes. Could anybody convince me to go to a doctor?
No. And at this point it’s relevant to tell you that I had actual broken bones,
tissue damage, and a lot of other things that probably would have spelled
bad long-term news if I had stayed on that path.
 And then an older (in the sense that she was older than me, not
ancient) woman heard about it, found me, yelled at me, and made me go to
the doctor. There’s a good chance I got to keep the injured part of my hand
because of that.
Ella is important to me because she has that gift. It’s a kind of mom
magic, yes, but it’s also just that she’s seen a lot of the world, understood it,
dealt with problems, and now knows how to help you with yours.
Arthur gets a lot of help from a lot of people, but none of them are
as important as Ella. She’s the first person he really trusts, who he really
knows deep down in his heart is trying to help him. He and I both love her
for it.
I had a conversation today with Doxis, a guy who does art and has a
good understanding of the genre, if anyone needs to hire art talent for
covers. He’s good. But I was trying to explain Ella a little better and
realized that if there’s one character I had in mind when I made her, it was a
36-year-old version of the Oracle from the first matrix movie. Just young,
wise, and slinging cookies at people like there’s no tomorrow.

Lily
A long, long time ago, I had a dream that my wife was getting home
from the store. When I went around the back of the car to unload the
groceries, my daughter was standing there. She was in one of her introvert
moods where she didn’t want to be bothered, holding a gigantic book, and
generally being cute by being incredibly surly.
This was a dream.
In real life, I have two sons and no daughter. And so it was that I
woke up from this incredibly realistic dream and was sad for a few days
because of the sudden (not actually real) loss.
Lily from DWBS and Lucy from Deadworld Isekai are cut from
similar molds, both crafted to fit the general shape of my (still non-existent)
daughter. They are sort of angry, voluntary introverts who are being forced
to interact with much louder, more social doofus father figures, and trying
their best to pretend they hate it.
Lily differs from Lucy in that she’s actually weak and vulnerable.
She’s lost people, lost trust, and has suffered not only in the heart from it
but also in her actual body and lifestyle. I decided that on some level she’s
linked “accepting charity” with admitting to herself that her parents are
actually dead and not coming back, and thus won’t do it at all.
One big immediate conflict with that idea is that nobody actually
believes the demons would let a child starve or be in danger to any
significant degree. The only thing that makes this work is that the demons
are, for the most part, pretty socially independent. It’s a norm for them that
most people should be able to do most of the things they like most of the
time.
So when a child breaks out and refuses to be recaptured and taken
care of, they settle on something like, “Well, we'll keep an eye on her.”
When Arthur offers her work, she takes it for two reasons. The first
is that Arthur does seem to actually need the help. The job is real, and she
can see he’s having trouble keeping up with it. The second is that Arthur
himself is in a few specific ways even more of a child than her. He doesn’t
seem to understand the world he’s in, right down to the point of not
knowing how much things should cost.
For Lily/Lucy characters, that’s a crux characteristic. At their core,
they want to correct ignorance and stupidity and are drawn to people who
accept those corrections
Later on, she’s adopted by Arthur/Ella/Milo, bringing that family
unit to a count of four very different individuals. Ella forces her hand a bit
in that decision, but in my head less than you’d think. Lily might have been
able to give up the unlimited free food, great people, and constant
interesting activity to go back to her hole and starve, but she didn’t really
want to. Ella forcing her to just gave her an excuse to be happy without
feeling like she was betraying her parents in the process.
 Milo
I could write “Milo is Arthur’s best friend and also sort of his older
brother” here and be done with it. In fact, I’m basically going to. If you’ve
ever had either, Milo makes a lot of sense to you. If not, he’s still a fun ball
of energy.
Milo fills a couple different friendship-related gaps for Arthur. He
knows more than Arthur and he’s stronger, so he can both tell Arthur about
the world and physically force him to accept some aspects of it when Arthur
gets rowdy. He has a lot of free time and likes Arthur a lot, so he’s not only
immediately a friend, but also broadly available to help.
He often functions as a third arm for Ella when it doesn’t make
sense for her to be around, or when she’s just corrected Arthur too much
lately.
Milo and Rhodia are having their own romance in the background of
the story from the first time we see them, but as they are both no-nonsense
sorts, I found it was one of those things that was more fun for me to know
about as an author than it was to make it explicit. Even at the end of the
book, the fact that they are dating isn’t explicit.

Karbo
The point of Karbo was, initially, to have a guy who looked scary
but turned out to be very nice as a way of easing you into that concept.
Once that usefulness was exhausted, he became a way to answer the
question of what a guy who yelled, “Cannonball!” before firing himself out
of an actual cannon would be like.
I really, really don’t like systems where people become smarter
when they raise their INT score. I think the book that handle INT better
make it so a person thinks faster, or can do mental tasks specifically related
to their skills better. But the part where you have a stat that makes all your
friends and family more boring to you when you raise it has always been a
horror story to me. A high-INT class would eventually only be able to hang
out with other high-INT classes; everyone else would seem like children to
them.
Whatever Karbo may be, it’s not because of bad stat investments.
He’s just like that. He likes to eat lots of food so he has energy to fight
things. He tends to go through (or above) things rather than around them
when he’s in a hurry. And luckily for anyone in his general vicinity, he’s
gentle and doesn’t possess a single mean bone in his gigantic red body.
For the record, his name wasn’t originally supposed to have
anything to do with carbohydrates or loading up on them before a workout.
It does now because that makes much more sense than whatever weird free
association thing I did to get from “fire” to “carbon” to “Karbo”.

Itela
Itela is a cleric. She’s the non-mom career-track version of Ella. If
you had to choose between the two of them when getting advice, Itela
would be better for almost any complex and boring adult problem. She’s
nurturing and kind, but also a little harder-edged than Ella, in a way that
reflects her job being harder and sadder than she’d like.
The point of Itela in a character mechanics sense was to have an
early female character to mop up after the mess Karbo and Eito made of
Arthur’s “waking up in a new world” experience. Later on, the fact that she
was a sort of magic-wielding cross between a hospital nurse practitioner
and a social counselor meant that she had a bunch of utility for Arthur when
he found himself in situations that interacted with those roles.
For me, the high point of her character is seeing Arthur give up on
the idea of her helping him find out where Lily disappeared to, reading the
worry on his face, and deciding to break a rule. It’s her being kind and using
a kind of flexible, wisdom-driven judgement to take a risk that pays off just
as it should.
Fun fact:
There’s a James Michener book in which one of the characters, who
is a nerdy archaeologist, asks a female colleague why she spends time with
a hunky cowboy musician when she’s in town, considering the gulf in their
educations. She explains to him, as one might to a child, that the guy in
question is kind of hot, as well as being at least reasonably nice to her.
For people who are confused about why Itela and Karbo are a thing,
this is sort of the same thing. He’s a big nice guy with 20-pack abs, a
flexible work schedule, and a fun one-day-at-a-time approach to life. For
someone who often needs to put her work entirely out of mind, what’s not
to like?

Eito
I did not use Eito enough in this book. He does some exposition
work, sure. But we really don’t get to hang out with him a lot, and I wish
we did. Luckily, I can and will write more of these books, so it shouldn’t be
a forever thing.
Eito was supposed to be the kind of guy who was born with the
mentality and seriousness of a 40-year-old, and who stuck with it his entire
life. He has a house. He has his work, which he seems to enjoy and be good
at. He gives good advice. But he’s underutilized, and I want to spend more
time on him.
I do really like the part where he slowly turns everything around
him into trees. The fact that I never actually got him into a real forest might
make you angry. I’m with you. I’ll fix it, I promise.

Rhodia
Rhodia falls into a set of characters I think of as “mini-Milos”. She’s
a kid about Arthur’s age who spits exposition, can build things he needs,
and gives him company and a minor amount of guidance. She has her own
voice, but so far, she’s only had minor utility as a character.
Like other mini-Milos, she’s going to be more important in the
second book.
 Spiky
Another Mini-Milo. Besides being able to do things Milo can’t (like
reference librarian tasks), he’s not that interesting or useful yet.
Besides his potential in books to come, I do like that Spiky isn’t his
name. It’s a temporary nickname that’s standard in his culture, the same as
how some cultures have nicknames for people born on certain days of the
week. Given that nobody seems to know his actual first name, it’s probably
how he introduces himself.
I think it’s hilarious that one day he’s probably going to say,
“Actually, I just turned 18, so my name is Steve now.”

Chuck, Corbin, and any other kid from the class in

the park.
More Mini-Milos, to be fleshed out later, except for Corbin. Corbin
has, accidentally, my favorite “good mistake” outcome of any character I’ve
written.
For context, there are some writers who plan out every single aspect
of every character and part of the world before it ever touches part of the
story. And because they’re doing this, some of them even know how all
those things will eventually interact. So if they show you a gun on a mantle,
they not only planned it but know when/into whom it will fire, who will
want vengeance for that, and so on.
I don’t do this at all. I have a pretty good idea of how I want the
world to feel, a lesser idea of where I want to start and where I want to end
in the book, and distressingly little else. So when I wrote Corbin, I basically
said, “I need Arthur to have peers; here’s one. He’s a cat that does stealth.”
This was a mistake because Arthur has exactly zero use for stealth
as a skill. He works out in the open. If anything, what he needs is
advertising, which is the opposite of stealth. So seconds later, when he met
Milo and Rhodia, Corbin stopped being interesting in most ways. And at the
end of that scene at the park, he presumably (I did not write this) re-
stealthed.
Now, Corbin is a stealth class who explains he’s actively working on
leveling his stealth skills. And it must be working, at least a little, because
we then don’t see Corbin at all until he is yelled at by the commander, de-
stealths, and then enters the story again for just a few moments. After
which, as far as we know, he stealths again, rolls a crit, and apparently is
successful enough that he’s able to stealth out of the story entirely.
I once wrote a story in which there were basically no characters OR
objects (Deadworld Isekai). That was hard, but I made it work. I think
anyone could probably do something similar if they wanted to. But writing
a character who is actively and successfully hiding from the main character
yet still in the story? I don’t think I have a solution for that yet.
Anyway, Corbin is getting a side story. Not my fault. Well, my fault,
but not my plan.

Onna
In a mechanical sense, Onna exists to say things that Arthur needs to
know about Mizu that Mizu won’t say herself, and to let us know that Mizu
isn’t lonely. That last part was important to me. If Mizu is lonely, then her
affection for Arthur might just be desperation to have friends at all, or relief
to be getting any attention. With Onna in play, we can be pretty sure she just
likes him.
That aside, I like the little of Onna we see. She likes Mizu a lot, and
her early interactions with Arthur reflect that. Once she realizes Arthur’s a
decent sort of guy, and she doesn’t need to protect Mizu from him, she
shifts into a stance of trying to help speed things along, mainly by letting
Arthur know he’s not hallucinating the whole relationship or misreading
Mizu’s hints.
 The System
The system is a character that is, to the reader, almost entirely
invisible. But for me, it was important that she had a personality. Initially, it
was just that she felt like a mom to every thinking being on the planet. She
wanted them to be happy, healthy, and to thrive. In the world’s warlike past,
she would have been unbelievably sad about all the fighting and killing.
The big decision point for her was deciding how much people on the
ground knew that. I decided it made the most sense if two things about her
were true, the first being that she worked for the people, rather than the
other way around. If they wanted war-like skills, they got them, and there
was nothing she could do about it. The second was that she couldn’t
communicate with people at all outside of a very subtle influence and
hidden system-notification messages they wouldn’t consciously remember
after reading.
In The Voice and The Bear, we get to meet her for a little while, just
long enough to confirm these things for us and to set events in motion that
vastly improve the world she serves. In Arthur’s time, she’s presiding over a
world that is fully aligned with her peaceful, nurturing tendencies, and it
benefits both them and her immensely.
In a writer way, it was important for me to know all that not because
I planned on telling you this eventually, but so I could imagine the kind of
world that system would build if it could. It’s an “iceberg thing,” the kind of
thing that fleshes out the world without being an explicit part of the text.

Last words
I always thank you guys in these, and this time is no exception. You
all read, write comments, leave reviews and sometimes even support the
work financially. That lets me do what I like to do, which is an incredibly
big deal for me.
I know everyone says that kind of thing, whether they believe it or
not. But believe it. I needed this nice world, but there wasn’t a moment I
was writing this where I wasn’t thinking of the readers and saying, “Is this
good enough? Will this make them happy? Is this fun? Will they smile
when she says she’s nervous?”
Nothing makes me happier than the fact that it appears to have
worked. I love you all, and I look forward to seeing you in book two.

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