Chapter 139: Deejay

The party went on for a few more hours until people either started getting pulled away by work or went to rest for the day. Karra, Kout, and Lith were the first to peel themselves off, followed by Skal, who never stuck around in big social situations all that long and went back to the beach to check on his fishing lines. Work never really stopped for that long in Coldbrook, and the visitors were still coming in over the next few days.

Any chance that this return-to-labor would be viewed as rude was eliminated by the fact that most of the visitors were looking for some time to themselves as well. Minos was far too travel-savvy to be tired from the trip, but Ella was much more susceptible to feeling drained and was very open about the fact that she hadn’t taken a real shower in days.

Rhodia and Milo helped get them set up in a guest house and, Arthur suspected, to get a few moments alone with Rhodia’s soon-to-be-in-law-parents for a few private words that wouldn’t have fit in the group setting.

Itela was presumably already rested from a few days of mostly-idle non-activity in the village, but still pulled away the almost-entirely-immune to fatigue Karbo for an afternoon nap.

Eventually, the plaza was mostly clear. With Mizu leaving to find her mother and put in some hours on the main well, Arthur found himself with only a few choices in terms of things he could do. He needed something that was both productive and didn’t put much strain on his majicka reserves, which Itela had commanded him to keep full for the next day or so.

Lily was in a similar dilemma. She had been a great help to both Mizu and Maar in their work on the well, but things were progressing beyond what Lily could help with. And so she was as free as Arthur and stuck to his side like glue, even when he decided that he was going to do what she considered to be the most boring task in the world.

“I can’t believe you are going to be picking tea,” Lily said. “Get ready, Eito. You are about to spend a few hours watching a fully-grown demon say ‘hmm’ at tea plants. And spending five minutes to pick a single leaf.”

“Are they difficult to pick?” Eito was tagging along for an entirely different reason, but was interested in all forms of work. “Too delicate to do easily without a class, or something of that nature?”

“No!” Lily yelled, spreading her arms in a frustrated owl-y protest. “He could harvest the entire farm in an hour. He just lingers at each plant for an hour anyway.”

“There’s no reason to rush it, and I like it,” Arthur said. He was very fond of his little tea-farm. The agriculturalists came by every once in a while, but besides that bit of majicka fertilization, the farm was almost entirely the product of Arthur’s own work. When he took leaves, he tried to take the very best the farm had to offer at that moment, especially since he didn’t need to do a mass harvest for cold season stockpiles. “It’s not an hour anyway. Ten minutes per plant, tops.”

As Arthur milled around his garden pruning leaves with a pair of hand-sheers and sorting them into various compartments of a basket he had commissioned just for that purpose, Eito finally managed to corner Lily to talk about her class. In large part, that was why he was there in the first place. He wanted to make sure that Lily had a roadmap that would let her progress without hurting herself and her future.

“So you can’t choose how much majicka to give to someone else?” Eito asked.

“I can’t,” Lily said. “It just takes everything. Almost everything. It leaves a little so I don’t get headaches.”

“What about if you activate the skill halfway through your majicka recharging?” Eito asked again.

“Then it just takes as much as I have. But I don’t like doing that. The only reason my majicka would be low like that is if I had just infused someone a bit ago. When I do it again before I’ve rested, it feels bad,” Lily said.

Eito scowled. “It hurts?”

“Not hurts. Just feels… bad. Like the skill doesn’t like it. There’s almost no reason to do it, either. Most of the time, running Majicka Lamp off a full tank is just better.”

“Hmm.” Eito made a few more notes on a pad, then sat thinking about them for a moment or two. “I hate to say it, but I don’t really have much advice here. I half expected to find you doing risky, over-the-top things to power level your class. It’s almost disappointing to find you’ve been so measured.”

“Blame him.” Lily pointed at Arthur. “He won’t even let me go in the dungeon.”

Eito flicked her. “You shouldn’t have asked. Did you not notice the part where your skill descriptions have a very specific, almost hostile attitude against combat?”

“I did, and it’s annoying. I’m an assistant! I should be able to assist in battles.” Lily huffed and sat down, chafing at the unfair system restrictions. “I don’t get why it picks and chooses.”

“One, you’re an expediter, not an assistant. And two, because the system, Lily, sees combat classes and non-combat classes very differently. You aren’t a combat class, and the system wants to separate you from anything like fighting. It’s not that hard to understand,” Eito said.

“It doesn’t do it to him, though.” Lily pointed at Arthur. “He can make tea for Karbo that makes him even more tough, and the system doesn’t care.”

“There are reasons for that, too,” Eito said slowly.

Arthur listened to Eito’s explanation out of the corner of his ear, learning a few things he hadn’t before. The system cared more about keeping people away from combat if there was an equivalent combat-focused class that could do the same job. Since there were combat buffers in existence, Lily got a harder deal. She got an even worse deal since she’d have to physically go to the dungeons if she wanted to help, which the system absolutely hated seeing for non-combat classes.

All in all, Eito said no to Lily power-leveling in the dungeons, yes to her spending time shining the light of efficiency down on work crews, and yes to using her majicka-infusing powers once or twice a day.

“I’d give you advice, Arthur, but I’m sure you won’t follow it,” Eito said.

“Hey, that’s untrue,” Arthur protested. “I’ve always followed them as much as I could.”

“You’ve always tried. I’m not saying that.” Eito looked both wry and resigned as he gazed over at Arthur. “I’m saying you won’t follow them, whether it’s your choice or not. Originally, I thought you’d be a nice, boring carpenter or something. Maybe a cook, once you went to Ella’s. Then you invented a new drink, and it all went in an odd direction.”

“I didn’t invent it. Not really,” Arthur said.

“Which, in Arthur-fashion, made almost no difference at all. And then you managed to turn your odd beverage class into an even odder half-alchemist class, now complete with ad-hoc baking and a dollop of skills normally reserved for mental health professionals, which you then set into overdrive to make yourself constantly psychic, and thus almost killed yourself.” Eito sniffed. “And somewhere in there, you tamed a massive death-beast Prata to serve as a guard for your town, not using your skills at all. Is that about all of it? Did I get close?”

“Close enough, I guess.” Arthur was blushing very slightly. “Don’t people believe me when I say I’m not actively trying to do this? I’m really not. If I had my choice, I’d just make tea every day. I really would. The rest of all that just sort of… happened.”

“I think they do,” Lily said. “At least I don’t think anyone thinks you could have planned all this. You don’t have it in you. No offense.”

“I agree,” Eito said. “And I actually had a theory about that, believe it or not. How familiar are you with The Bear, Arthur? Our stories about him, I mean.”

“A bit.” Arthur raised his hand a bit to indicate how little of a bit. “Big hero from another world, came and granted peace to all through being very large and scary.”

“That’s about as much as anyone knows. I believe that time was so chaotic that many of the stories about him are now unreliable. We know he lived, we know he had an impact. And most of all, we know he was strong enough to subdue an entire world. But how?” Eito said.

“I assumed he was just that strong when he came here,” Arthur said.

“Maybe,” Eito said. “The other idea, the one many scholars accept, is that offworlders bring something of their world with them. A kind of energy or potential, something that puts their lives on an unusual track as it slowly burns itself out. Of course, that would be easier to see in a world-pacifying hero than a teamaker, but if it’s true, it might explain how one relatively normal, calm child keeps finding himself at the center of odd circumstances.”

“You think that’s it? I mean really,” Arthur asked.

Eito shrugged.

“My point was just that giving you advice, Arthur, is like trying to advise a boulder rolling down a hill on the best direction to take to the bottom. Even if it wanted to listen, it doesn’t control every aspect of its own trajectory. You will, I’m sure, get to the bottom eventually. But how you will make that trip is anyone’s guess,” Eito said, exuding an air of surprising wisdom.

“That’s actually a really good way to think about it,” Rhodia said, walking up the path from Arthur’s house to his garden with Milo in tow. “I’m going to remember that the next time someone asks me why Arthur is riding a dragon, or whatever.”

“Guys!” Arthur put down his tea-picking bag and rushed over. “Congratulations again. Sorry I didn’t take more time to congratulate you before.”

“Arthur, you get a pass. A big, big pass.” Milo held up an empty drink cup and waved it wildly. “This thing was all the congratulations anyone could hope to get. I’ve been smelling the cup, trying to catch the last little bits of the memory.”

“He really has,” Rhodia said. “I’m now on track to be the wife of a cup-smeller. The engagement is still on, but it’s been a close thing. Actually, the drinks are part of what we are here to talk to you about. And the joining ceremony.”

“Ah, yeah. I wish I had held back on them now. Since you won’t be able to drink them then,” Arthur said.

“That’s totally fine. Not a problem. But the way you talked about your… whatever your word for joining ceremonies was got us thinking. We want that. The whole thing you said. The weird rules, the weird clothes. All of it,” Rhodia said.

“Wait, really? What about the joining ceremony?” Arthur said.

“That’s whatever,” Milo said. “We can still do that. Nothing in your weird ceremony overlaps with that part, and it’s only like two minutes long anyway. There’s always a party afterwards, too, and that ends up being whatever the bride and groom want. So we’re going with your Earth weirdness on that, too. It feels right.”

“It does.” Rhodia nodded. “We just had one question.”

“And that is that?” Arthur said.

“What’s a Deejay?”