Chapter 129: Arthur’s Best

“I haven’t…” Mizu looked at Arthur, who nodded encouragingly. “I wasn’t using many runes for pressurization and travel. I’ve worked something different out. The explosion was about something else.”

Mizu’s mother’s face assumed an odd look that nobody there could read, and she focused entirely on her daughter for the moment before taking another small drink of her tea.

“Explain,” Mizu’s mother said.

Mizu took a deep breath, looked in the direction of the main water channel to town, and gathered her thoughts for a while. Her mom seemed completely fine with this. More than completely. Like Mizu, she seemed more than content to enjoy long silences.

I hope the two of them being quiet people is additive. If it’s multiplicative, we might be here for hours.

Soon, Mizu seemed to have all the puzzle pieces she needed.

“Do you know what level I am?” Mizu looked at her mother intently.

“I can guess.” Her mother’s eyes moved back and forth as she did some mental estimates. “Twenty-two. Maybe as much as twenty-six.”

The exact number apparently didn’t matter much when Mizu nodded and continued. “And I have a whole town to supply with water. A growing town. But just one weller.”

“For now.”

“You know how few wellers there are to go around. There’s not likely to be more until the other settlements are established,” Mizu said. “I can do the math on what I can handle, which means you can too. What does this town’s water look once the population doubles? Triples?”

“With one weller, you’d have to make compromises. My rune stack requires labor, but it scales down. You’d have to accept a bit more sediment. A bit less purification and less utility enhancements. It’s not…” Mizu’s mother searched for the right word, one that presumably would allow her to talk less. She was visibly uncomfortable having this conversation out in the open, which surprised Arthur. “It’s not up to the standards of what we both know you could do. But it’s acceptable. There’s no other choice.”

“There is another choice, I think.” Mizu motioned to a bench, recently installed courtesy of some of the town's last fragments of Slapstone. She and her mother sat, and she laid the whole plan out. The basics were things Arthur knew.

There were only so many runes that one could apply. Like the accumulated effects of a handful of alchemical pills, there came a point where adding one more rune would knock down all the other effects. Mizu’s workaround was to replace some of the runes with pumps and other implements, developing a new stack entirely for the work that was left.

It had sounded very simple to Arthur, before. He now realized had been getting the simplified, layman’s explanation.

Mizu spoke with so much weller-specific lingo that Arthur wondered if there was something wrong with his translator. Eventually, he accepted that there was a weller dictionary that just didn’t make sense to non-wellers. Mizu’s mother would occasionally ask a question that Arthur could somewhat follow. But then Mizu would give an explanation that was so far outside of Arthur’s comprehension that it made him question how much he understood how his own tea skills worked.

The we-don’t-talk-much rules doesn’t apply to water elementals when they talk about work. Got it.

Even with all the information flying back and forth, Arthur couldn’t make any guesses how Mizu’s mom was taking any of this. When one of her questions was answered, she’d just nod and move onto the next, leaving no indications to work with beyond the fact that she had heard the response.

His confusion and interest must have been visible too.

“I know she understands the plan,” Onna said out of the corner of her mouth, in a voice low enough that probably only Arthur could hear it. “No clue whether she approves of Mizu’s methods or not.”

“So if I understand this correctly…” Mizu’s mother raised up her hand to keep count with her fingers, touching each one with the index finger of her right hand as she listed off her points. “You’ve abandoned my rune stack completely. You’ve tried something new, but overloaded it and left your settlement nearly without water. And you intended to hide all this from me. That you’ve created a new system outside of mine.”

“That’s all true.” Mizu nodded. Arthur could see her wilting under all this. Becoming smaller. He almost jumped in front of her to protect her. Almost. She hadn’t asked him to, and he understood very little of what was going on. “I thought it was the best choice. Your stack is incredible, mother. Everyone knows it. But here, without labor…”

“It never occurred to you to ask me for help?” Mizu’s mother interrupted, her tone almost sharp for a moment. She took a deep breath. “I’m upset at you.”

Mizu didn’t crack, but Arthur felt like he could see her soul crinkle a little bit under the strain of that last short sentence. Her posture slumped just a little, and she stood silently as her mother watched her, waiting for a response that never came.

“I’m going back to the guest house. For a time,” Mizu’s mother said. “I’ll… we’ll talk later.”

And then she was gone, leaving just Lily, Onna, and Arthur beside Mizu. As Mizu sat on her bench with her head down, Onna and Lily exchanged a look, then shoved Arthur towards her before leaving themselves.

Arthur sat by Mizu and waited. Mizu just gazed at her well as Arthur gazed at her. She had always been quiet. Even as she got more talkative with their group and more comfortable in the town, she talked less than others.

But she had never been uninteresting, mostly because of how she watched others. Her eyes would dart back and forth, taking everything in. She’d react to everything, in a non-verbal way. Arthur had noticed that when others made jokes or came up with good ideas, they’d sometimes glance to Mizu to see how they had done, reading her expressions for approval so they could gauge how funny or persuasive they had been.

That was part of why their relationship worked. Mizu was quiet, but her face was always honest. As long as Arthur was willing to accept the lack of words and take a closer look, he could always know where he stood. But now, for the first time Arthur could remember, she was expressionless. She looked shocked, for lack of a better word.

After a minute or so of that, Mizu finally reacted, scooting in a little closer to Arthur and sighing.

“Thanks,” she said. “For staying.”

“It’s no problem. I thought about stepping in, there. It didn’t seem like the right thing to do,” Arthur said.

“It wasn’t. She’s my mother,” Mizu said.

“I’m…” Arthur didn’t want to criticize Mizu’s family, but didn’t see how he could talk about what had just happened without coming across a bit hostile. “I’m sorry that didn’t go better. Has she always been defensive of her runes like that?”

Mizu shook her head. “I don’t know if she was defensive of them. In the past, she’d bring home awards and put them on a shelf, but she’d never really talk about the runes or the awards. I’d see her looking at the awards sometimes. But she’s… with my mom, you only really know what she tells you. And we never really talked about changing her rune stack before.”

“Because it was scary?” Arthur asked.

“No. Because I didn’t know this would be the right way to go before I got here.” Mizu looked up at Arthur. “Do you know why my mom’s runes are good?”

“Not really,” Arthur admitted. “I get that they work better than whatever came before.”

“They are perfect. Beyond perfect. She’s a genius. She took ideas that had been impossible to combine for generations and rearranged them until they fit. Nobody else could have done it,” Mizu said. Arthur could catch a slight hint of pride in her face. “And in her lifetime, every city adopted them. Most settlements, too. Any place demons live that uses anything beyond a simple well has my mother’s work in it.”

“That’s impressive,” Arthur said.

“It’s… more than that. My mother is the greatest weller genius in a few hundred years. That’s not an exaggeration, Arthur. There are books that describe her that way.” Mizu shuddered slightly. When she started talking again, her voice cracked just a little. “And I thought I could… do better. Am I stupid, Arthur?”

In that moment, Empathic Host leveled up twice.

Arthur didn’t even need his status screen to tell him the change. Each level was like a punch to the ribs, bringing Mizu’s emotional state into blurry focus and then crystal clarity. She was looking to him for help, but it wasn’t only that. For the first time in two lives, Arthur knew that a person was completely open in front of him. It was like she was taking everything in her heart and shoveling it towards him, desperate in the hope that he could do something to unravel the emotional tangles she was feeling.

The whole time Arthur had used the skill, he had mostly thought of it as a skill meant for tea. It worked better when people had some idea of what kind of food they wanted, and worse when they were closed off to the idea of help. The skill’s description had said, “This effect is limited to knowledge of a customer’s preferences regarding consumable food objects.” It had never occurred to him that, sometimes, people were looking for help in the form of a cup of tea.

And now, Empathic Host was desperately trying to figure out how to take a dozen conflicting emotions and translate them into a cup of tea. It failed. There was just too much weight there, too much complexity.

Arthur could feel a miniature version of all the pain and confusion Mizu felt. Even the scaled version of her turmoil was a lot.

I hate to say it, but tea is not enough here. The cup of tea it would take to fix all this simply did not exist. Arthur could see a model of what that tea would look like forming in his mind, and it was an impossible, convoluted thing. It could never be made. But that didn’t mean it didn’t have a use. Arthur sat silently for a while, regarding the tea-that-would-fix-Mizu and thinking as hard as he ever had before.

“Mizu, when was the last time you took a day off?” Arthur asked. “Not to visit me, or to do other things. But a full day off, just in your house with your water. Sleeping. Eating. Reading. That sort of thing.”

“Um…” Mizu thought for a moment. “Never, I think.”

“Well, maybe today’s the day. The rest of today,” Arthur asked. “Mayor’s orders.”

Mizu gave Arthur a half smile. “Can you do that?”

“I don’t know. But… I need to talk to some people. About your well. And what comes next. Not as Mizu’s Arthur, but as the Mayor.”

“Oh. Hm.” Arthur felt Mizu’s emotional core get that much more complex.

“Just… I want to help,” Arthur said. “But I don’t think this is a situation Arthur-the-boyfriend can fix. Do you trust me?”

Mizu did. Even without the skill, Arthur knew that whatever else Mizu believed about the situation, she trusted him to do what was right. Maybe it wouldn't’ be exactly what she wanted, but it would what’s best for everyone, somehow.

“Then take a day off. I’ll send people by so you don’t go crazy. But I want you to take a nap if you can. A long one. Work on your house-river, but only a little and only where it’s fun. Does that sound alright?” Arthur asked.

“I… yes,” Mizu said.

“Okay. I’ll get right to work.”

“Doing what?”

“I think it’s best if you don’t know, for now,” Arthur said, keeping his face still. “Trusting me, remember? I’ll handle things. And I promise whatever comes out of it will be as good as I can do. I know that’s not much, but…”

“It’s plenty.” Mizu hugged into Arthur a bit. “Arthur’s best is always plenty. I’ll go start on my nap.”

“I’ll send food later. Lots of it,” Arthur said.

“Good. I’ll like that.” Mizu stood and started walking towards her house. “And Arthur?”

“Yeah?”

“Thank you.”