Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

Arthur was up before dawn, eager to get to work but with a stop to make. Throwing on his clothes and old shoes, he made his way to the cobbler to take the new measurements. But once he got there, he found it wasn’t going to be quite what he expected.

Of course, they did this. Once Arthur cracked the door, he saw an enchanter and cobbler standing before him, looking enormously pleased with themselves and holding their arms outstretched over a table of completely finished goods. They’re demons. They couldn’t resist the pageantry.

“We rushed it.” Rebes grinned. “Couldn’t resist. It was too good of a job. We worked a couple of overnights to make sure it got done.”

“Not that I’m not excited, but…”

“Don’t worry. There are only so many projects that need either of us right now. After this, I’m pretty much done until the attack, and Lina couldn’t start working on the wall until today. Nobody lost anything except a couple nights of sleep, and we weren’t going to sleep much these days anyway.”

“Yeah.” Lina nudged the table a fraction of an inch towards Arthur, actually sliding it over the wood floor in her excitement. “So shut up and try them on. Hurry.”

Arthur threw his hands up in mock resignation, grabbed a pile of the clothes, and went into Rebe’s back-of-shop area.

The uniform went on first. Arthur had better walking-around clothes than this, but compared to his old work things, the various comfort-and-cleanliness enchantments on the new uniform made them feel a mile better than before. The shoes and socks were a different story. As he slipped the socks over his feet, Arthur realized he was in a whole different world of footwear, watching a beautiful fabric vista open up before him. His feet immediately felt dryer, healthier, and better kept. He eyed the boots suspiciously. If the socks were more of an afterthought in this whole project, he couldn’t imagine what the star of the show would feel like.

Arthur lifted one of the boots respectfully from the floor, loosened the laces, and slipped his foot in. It slid into place like he was sliding on a second layer of skin. He quickly shoved his foot into the second boot, laced both up, and took a few practice steps. It felt like the world had snapped into place, that the planet itself was a better, more trustworthy surface to walk on now. And that was before he even got to comfort.

“Guys, this isn’t possible. This feels like… I don’t even know how to describe it. I’d say it’s like walking on clouds, but it’s not,” Arthur said.

“You’d be surprised how many people request walking on clouds. It sounds good, but word choice and shoe design rarely line up perfectly,” Rebes laughed as he glanced down at Arthur’s shoes and checked the fit. “What you have there is a pair of shoes that makes you feel like you have better feet.”

“Much better.” Arthur bounced in place a few times and thought he could walk across the continent without getting tired. “How much of it is shoes, and how much of it is enchantments?”

“Not possible to say,” Lina said. “When you get to this level of project, the enchantments interact with the materials and vice versa in such complex ways that you can’t really know who contributed what aspect of things. Rebes is a little better of a cobbler than I am an enchanter, but I think he will back me up on this.”

“I will, partially. She’s a little lower level than I am but not a worse enchanter. She’s right about the contributions to the project getting mixed up, though. It’s like trying to say what ingredient made a meal delicious. It just doesn’t work like that,” Rebes said.

“Ah. I see.” Arthur bounced a few times in his boots again, absentmindedly. They were much, much better than what he had been wearing, the best shoes he had worn on two different planets. They were going to improve every moment he spent standing up, and while it hadn’t been cheap, they didn’t feel like a waste of money at all. “How do I maintain these? I feel like I am going to be a bad boot owner if you don’t tell me. Do I… oil them? Is there magic boot oil?”

“Arthur, you naive, beautiful man.” Lina walked up to him and held his cheeks between her hands. “It’s a great question, but no, you don’t have to maintain these. They are made out of the best parts of horrifying monsters that took the efforts of teams of people to kill, and overlaid with rune structures that would have usually taken me a week of work to compile.”

“She’s right. Bring them in every couple of years for a check-up, but these should outlive you. I’m not exaggerating. On a non-combat class, these are an heirloom-quality pair of shoes,” Rebes finished.

“Well, thanks so much.” Arthur tried to find the right words to express how happy his feet felt. “They feel so nice that I feel like I don’t deserve these.”

“That’s… hmm.” Rebes looked at Lina. “That might be the perfect customer reaction.”

“No kidding. Thanks, Arthur. And don’t worry about the rest of the uniforms. I’ll deliver them to your house sometime today,” Lina said.

“You sure? It’s no trouble.”

“I’m sure. I’ll have a lot of downtime between rounds of working on the wall. I’ll have to take plenty of strolls to recharge, and I can just take care of this on one of them.”

“Good stuff. Thanks,” Arthur said. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go try this stuff out in real-world situations.”

“Run them through their paces. And Arthur?” Lina handed Arthur a piece of paper. “That’s a voucher. I didn’t start on any of your shop improvements yet. If there’s… I mean, if the shop doesn’t…”

“I get it.” Arthur lifted the piece of paper up a bit. “I appreciate this, Lina. We’ll be just fine, but thanks for thinking of me.”

The morning rush at the shop came and went fast. In a weird way, it was like the boots were a passive form of entertainment. Every time there was a lull, Arthur remembered just how good the shoes were and marveled at how much less strain his knees and ankles were under. He would feel like a nerd for loving his shoes so much, stop, and repeat the entire pattern a few minutes later. It was a vicious cycle of noticing comfort after he had already benefited from it, and one he was glad to not escape from.

Arthur held back just a little bit of majicka as he gave out drinks, preparing for the big draw on his powers he knew was coming. He had just finished cleaning up the shop when Lily found him.

“Hey, Arthur. It’s prep day, right?” Lily asked.

“Yup. I’m just about to go back to the house and gather tea. Then I’m coming here and making boba the rest of the afternoon. I figured the tea-picking will give me time to recharge, so I’m doing it first,” Arthur said.

“Good plan. Let's go. I’ve got the whole afternoon, just for this,” Lily said happily.

“Wait, what? You should be at the wall. Or with the stampers. Or something.”

“Nope. I talked to everyone last night. They even made a note.”

Lily handed over a small envelope, which she handed to Arthur. He extracted the note inside it and read it. It was about what he expected.

Dear Arthur,

Shut up and take the help.

Love,

Everyone

“Dammit, Lily, I’m not the most important thing right now,” Arthur said.

“See, that’s not true. You are prepping tea we’re going to be using the entire wave. If it’s a little better, everyone else is a little better,” Lily said.

“A fraction of a fraction of a percent,” Arthur tried.

“Which matters.” Lily hopped off the stool she had climbed up and started pulling Arthur towards the edge of the plaza. “Everyone gets a turn, Arthur. And I think you know this, but I’m your assistant. For everyone else, I’m just out on loan. It’s your turn now. So stop pushing me away.”

There was no way to dissuade Lily and it was doubly true when she had the backing of the entire town council behind her. Arthur chatted with her as they picked leaves from a good half of his tea plants, then went into the back of his house and fired up his Milo-crafted processing equipment.

“So this is part of the process too? It takes majicka and everything?” Lily asked.

“Yeah. Not a lot, per pound, but when you make a lot of it like this, the drain gets pretty bad,” Arthur said.

“How much does it affect the end product?”

“Not a lot. It’s a lot cheaper to make the final product, when the time comes, but it’s less flexible. That’s what this is about.”

Arthur pulled out a small box he had Milo make months ago. It was iron with a thin leather strip on the lid that helped seal it. Into it, he loaded the best of the tea they had picked, stocking five or six varieties on top of a bag of normal, unenhanced boba. He sealed it back up, then tossed it in his coldbox for the time being.

“See, if I have that, I can make whatever I need for specific people that need a specific boost,” Arthur said. “And the rest of it I need to design to be a lot more general.”

“What are you thinking? Vitality and strength?” Lily asked.

“Back in the city, I made a Tea of the Rock Thrower.” Arthur paused. “But our walls aren’t tall enough for me to make a tea like that again. I think we go for something different. I’m doing three different teas. Vitality and strength, vitality and dexterity, and wisdom and intelligence. If I’m working all day for the next two days, I think I can split it up like that.”

“I see what you are trying for.” Lily nodded. “Let's get to it.”

Over the course of the next hour, Arthur drained his majicka reservoir twice. He was sitting back and drinking a glass of water when Lily slapped a majicka-restoring pill in his hand.

“Don’t argue. We have plenty,” she said.

Arthur took the pill, feeling his majicka regeneration kick to a slightly faster level as he did. It was a bigger, stronger effect than he could get with his own teas, and it wasn’t just by a little. It was humbling. He was the world’s worst alchemist, besides the one little detail where his work was additive to theirs instead of a substitution for what they could pull off.

“What are the alchemists types up to, these days?” Arthur said. “I know you must have worked on that a little.”

Lily frowned. “I did. It’s the worst. You know how my powers work better when I understand what’s going on?”

“Yeah, I know that,” Arthur said.

“Well, alchemist work is the worst. It’s worse than enchanting. I don’t understand what they’re doing at all. It’s not like cooking, like you’d expect. It makes my skills itch,” Lily complained.

“The town salutes your sacrifice, anyway.”

“Yeah, thanks. But they are almost done with prep. There’s only so many pills people can take, and they have one for almost everyone, for almost every minute of the day.”

“What, you mean… customized?”

“No, of course not. It’s a lot like what you are doing here. They have pills that stack alchemy effects in different ways for different purposes. It’s all general. But it’s a pretty strong effect, and everyone will be running it at all times.”

Arthur did some quick mental math. “That has to cost a fortune.”

“Nope. At least not as much as you’d think. I heard Spiky and them talking about it. Most of what they’re making comes from local stuff the scavengers can find. We scavenged for miles and miles, but they got a lot of it. Spiky said it won’t scale for once the town gets bigger, but for now, everyone is covered and it mostly just costs cheap stuff and time.”