Chapter 141: Wedding Planning

“Arthur!” Spiky stood up from behind the counter, almost knocking over a stack of books he had perched near the edge. “Imagine walking into this humble place of learning on a sunny day like today. I wasn’t expecting you.”

“Ah, yeah.” Arthur scratched the back of his head, apologetically. “I don’t get as much time to read as I’d like to, lately.”

“Honestly, if I hadn’t seen you do it before, I’d wonder if you even could. But I get it,” Spiky said. “I just have the books to deal with, and a little bit of keeping up on how the city is changing for documentation purposes. It seems like you have a lot more than that.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” Arthur said. 

Arthur took a moment to look around the space. It had changed a lot since the last time he had been there, which was the grand opening of the building itself. Since books themselves were heavy and hard to move, the library was still a fairly small building. But one day, it would become a much larger building that would serve as the intellectual cornerstone of the town. Though that would have to wait until the roads finally opened up and the town started taking in enough tax revenue to support both Spiky and Leena in earnest.

That didn’t mean there were no changes at all, though. For one, the shelving was done, built using a deep-toned wood that grew in abundance not that far out from the town. Here and there, but especially near the front, were tables and chairs set up for people who wanted to sit and read, and some benches near enough to the windows to catch the sunlight. It was a nice space, and Arthur could tell Spiky had worked hard on it.

“Arthur needs help, Spiky.” Lily hopped up and sat on one of the few library counters in the space. “Math help.”

“Oh?” Spiky perked up. “I’m absolutely available for that. What kind of math are we talking?”

“People math. Arthur needs to feed, seat, and entertain however many people are coming to Milo’s wedding. And to do that, he needs to know how many that is,” Lily said. 

“Oh,” Spiky said. “Oooooh. That’s actually really fun. I think I need the big book of averages.”

“The what, now?” Arthur glanced at Lily for clarification, but she failed him by shrugging and indicating she also didn’t know.

“Listen, librarian.” Lily tried to flick Spiky, who was just fast enough to get out of the way. “Do you want to show us what you’re talking about?”

“The big book of averages?” Spiky said it again, then drooped a little when he realized they didn’t know. “How do you people get through your lives?”

Spiky regained the bounce in his step once Lily pointed out that this was a moment that would allow for teaching. He through the shelves, coming back in a few seconds with what did turn out to be a very large book.

“Okay, so,” Spiky said. “Say you’re a shoemaker and setting up shop in a new town. For the shoes that you aren’t making to order, you need to know what styles to make, what sizes they should be, and how many pairs to make.” 

“Eyeball the people in the town?” Arthur asked. “This seems like the kind of thing you could just do by feel.”

“Maybe, although some people are too hopeful. Or not hopeful enough. Or just want to be as exact as possible. That’s where the big book of averages comes in. The shoemaker could come to the big book of averages, where someone has already done all the calculations for shoe consumption depending on how many people are in the town, what their average level is, and how many other shoemakers there are.” Spiky hugged the gigantic book to his chest. “This book has that, and a thousand other things. This book, Arthur, has so many tables. Even I haven’t read them all.”

The book, Spiky said, was organized with more relevant information near the front. The parts related to food, it turned out, were in the front tenth of the book and grouped together with things like dungeon overflow charts and minimum wall sizes needed to protect various settlements depending on dungeon proximity and fighting-class availability. The fact that food was together with safety was proof enough that demons took sustenance very seriously.

“So we are going to work under worst-case scenario rules here,” Spiky said. “Basically, we want to assume the people are half starved, have had a full day’s work that day, and haven’t eaten.”

“Is that necessary?” Arthur asked. “Considering that none of those things are likely to be true, I mean.”

“Oh, yes,” Spiky said. “For one important reason. Ella. If she’s cooking, people will eat everything their stomachs can hold. Think about it. You have to have seen that happen a thousand times.”

“And that scenario’s already calculated?” Arthur asked. 

“Yes, in a combination of three tables.” Spiky thumbed through the book, writing down some figures on scratch paper as he went. “Will there be more than one course?”

“Probably salad, main course, and cake.”

“Okay, just give me a minute.” Spiky did some quick calculations. “I’m going to actually give you three numbers, and all of them are going to be slightly bigger than they need to be. Because we don’t know how much food of each type people will want. Some might hold out for more cake or go heavy on the salad because it’s first. So… here.”

Spiky handed over a sheet of figures, measuring things in quarts of salad, pounds of a meat-heavy meal, and cubic inches of cake. It was slightly staggering.

“And you think all of this will get eaten?” Arthur asked. 

“I don’t. The most likely thing is that there will be a lot of waste. But it’s much better than running out, right?” Spiky noted Arthur’s thoughtful nod and continued. “If there was a shortage of food here or if we needed the food for something, it would be a different story. But if anything, we’re going to have to dig extra cellars to hold the sheer amount of ingredients we have in reserve. Assuming we ever get a preserver, that is.”

“We actually did,” Arthur said. “This morning. I noticed it on my mayor screens.”

“Your what?” Spiky said. “You have… what level?”

“I don’t know what that means,” Arthur said flatly. 

Spiky slapped his forehead. “Arthur, I chronicle the development of this settlement. It didn’t occur to you that I might want to know more granular information about, oh I don’t know, new changes?”

“Oh.” Arthur blinked. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. Want me to read them to you now?”

Spiky did. For the next half hour, Arthur dumped every statistic and piece of information on the screen to his librarian, who wrote all of them down. A few new screens had even opened up since the last time he had looked, although none of them seemed incredibly useful all by themselves. Spiky begged to differ.

“I need updates on this stuff once every day or so, Arthur.” Spiky went to work with his pad and pencil again for a few minutes, adjusting some of the math he had done before. “Here. This is a closer estimate of what you’ll need. I also worked out what size of space you will need in terms of area just for seating everyone. Anything extra you want, you’ll need to add in yourself.”

“Thanks, Spiky.” Arthur pocketed the information. “It helps to have more exact numbers.”

“Just adjust them to town population as it goes up,” Spiky said. “And good luck. It seems like a big job.”

It was a big job, but within the next few hours they had a lot of it under control. The town’s carpenters were more than happy to make an excess of tables, especially when they heard that Arthur wanted them outdoors-suitable so they could be used even after the wedding. The number was only daunting to them because they couldn’t speak to the availability of wood, but a quick visit to Davin the lumberer showed that wasn’t a problem at all.

“Not only can I get it, I already have it,” Davin said. “Milo’s been having me clear trees for what he calls a rail way out a few miles. I’ve been leaving the cut wood near where I topple them, but I’ll have Karra bring them down tomorrow. It should be plenty.”

Ceramic vases were a bit awkward to source, considering they only knew one person who could make them and asking her would mean that she’d be laboring for her own wedding. But when Arthur asked Rhodia, she responded by immediately leading them to a room full of crates near the back of her house.

“I don’t just make bricks, you know.” Rhodia poked around a few boxes before finding the one she was looking for and handing it over. “If it’s just a few flowers, those should do fine. And there are dozens of vases. I make them as practice pieces. Do whatever you want with them.”

Whatever was true of vases turned out to be doubly or triply so with plates and bowls, which they left at Rhodia’s house for now. There were probably already enough forks, knives, and spoons in the town to cover them, but they went and asked Milo if he had the time to pound out a bunch of them anyway. He did, especially considering his dad was going a bit stir-crazy and offered himself up as an assistant.

“I think you were right,” Arthur said. “This is helping. What’s next?”

“Meat. We have to make sure we can get enough of it,” Lily said.

“We’re doing meat or fish,” Arthur said. 

“Really? Two meals?” Lily asked. 

“Just one,” Arthur said. “But it’s tradition. You give people a choice between meat, fish, or neither.”

“Now we’re doing three meals?” Lily scratched her head.

“Just two. We just have to make sure that the salad is really good, and we make an extra amount of it.”

The two of them went and tracked down Lith and Skal. Lith promised that he’d do his best to in hunting the game animals in the vicinity but also pointed out that unlimited amounts of monster-meat were just a short conversation with Karbo away. When Arthur asked Skal if he could catch enough fish, the old man just laughed at him and said not to worry. Skal had it covered.

Arthur and Lily relayed that information to Ella, who seemed pleased to find her job was more cooking and less planning. And then, finally, the little stuff was done.

“There is a question of where we should hold the wedding,” Arthur said.

“What’s the usual on your world?” Lily asked. 

“In a church. But the churches here are… different. On Earth, they were usually pretty buildings. Some of them were the prettiest buildings we had,” Arthur said. 

“Oh, huh.” Lily glanced at the city’s mostly-unused church, which was probably almost big enough for the event but had all the visual appeal of a concrete pillbox. “Yeah, that’s not how it is here. So outside?”

“We could,” Arthur said. “There’s no shortage of room closer to the gates. Or even outside them.”

“Outside seems like a risk,” Lily said. “Daisy and Rumble could come play, but if another beast shows up…”

“It might hurt people.” Arthur finished her sentence. 

“No. Karbo might vaporize it.” Lily made a poof motion with her hands. “It would kill the mood.”

“That leaves… over there?” Arthur pointed at a big open area, one that sat by the stream and was perfectly adequate for what they needed. Not incredible, not unbelievable, but fine. Once he got a farmer to trim down the high grass, it would work.

“Yeah. It should do,” Lily said. 

Arthur sighed.

“It won’t do?” Lily asked as she poked him in the side. “What’s going on?”

“The field is fine. I just feel like we could do better, somehow. But it doesn’t matter. We can figure that out later,” Arthur said. 

They were halfway home before he got the idea. There were a lot of things he needed to get right for it to actually work, of course, but it was perfect. There was no better place in the valley, even if the exact place didn’t exist yet.

They would, Arthur had decided, have the wedding in the sky.