Chapter 125: Water is Important

Arthur and Mizu spent as much time together as they reasonably could, but it had to end at some point. Fun was fun, but in the Demon World, it always came with an expectation of eventually getting back to work. The fact that the work itself was fun made this much better than it sounded most of the time. The next day was a possible exception, though, and one that they both wanted to face rested.

Mizu explained her plans to Arthur a bit as they sat there. The easy part of the work was laying down new basic move-water-around runes. The only limitation there was majicka production. She could only do so much in a day. But push-the-water-in-this-direction runes were the most basic of the weller enchantments, so she felt confident in handling those.

The real labor would come from clean-up. The ashes of her now burnt-down system had to be shoveled out of the way before she could get into any new work. That meant carefully chipping out any remnants of old runes, which seemed to be a more majicka-based process than a physical one. Anything she left behind might interact with the new system in ways she couldn’t predict, and the last thing Mizu wanted was another snafu.

Her current working thesis was that there had been a mistake somewhere in the past runes, one that gradually weakened the system until the whole thing blew.

That morning, Arthur watched as Mizu emerged from her house wearing the heavy, durable clothes she normally reserved for hard digging, her hair up, tied and tucked away. He moved to intercept her as stealthily as he could with a whole crew of people in tow. Luckily, her eyes were focused on the main well to the exclusion of almost any other sight, and her mind was who-knows-where. Arthur’s crew got up to her before she knew anything was happening.

“Here.” Arthur shoved a tea into her hand. “It’s a little different than usual. More majicka regeneration, less other things.”

“What?” Mizu looked down at her hand uncomprehendingly, then at Arthur’s face. “Why are you here?” She glanced at the entire assembled crew with a similar look of confusion. “Why are you all here?”

“Because we need water, and you need help.” Lily puffed herself up to gigantic proportions, at least relative to her normal size. “I’m glued to you all day. Arthur’s given us all tea already so I’m super ready.”

“Karra and I are going to pry up all the blocks over the pumps and dig them out them,” Arthur said. “Milo and Rhodia are following behind to test the pumps, put in new bricks if needed, and repair everything that broke when it got tossed by the water.”

“Arthur, I can do this by myself,” Mizu said.

“But you won’t,” Onna said, wrapping Mizu up in her arms and putting her scaled chin on top of Mizu’s head. “Because I’m stronger than you and I won’t let you. That’s part of why I’m here. I’ll flick you if you complain about it. And I’ll actually do it. Arthur thought of everything.”

“And then, if there’s time, we are going to take up the channels brick by brick while you etch in your communications stuff,” Arthur said. “If it works like that. Spiky, Leena, does it work like that?”

“Kind of!” Leena said, sunny and happy to be doing something with the crew this early in the day. “We won’t have to take up every brick, but yes, there will be a lot of them between each well.”

“And here!” Lily grabbed the wrist of one of Mizu’s Onna-immobilized arms, flipped her hand, and put a pill in it. “It’s from our alchemy stock. The emergency one. Did you know it’s not all for emergencies? Some of it’s just for hard jobs. And we haven’t used any of it at all. We have tons of extras.”

“It does more than my tea can, Mizu,” Arthur said. “And with all of us helping, it should go a long way towards you getting the water back to where it needs to be. We have ten days of those pills we can spare, according to the schedule.”

“I can’t take them,” Mizu said, tears welling in her eyes.

“She sounds like you, Arthur.” Rhodia rolled her eyes. “You don’t get to have a choice on this, Mizu. We’re here to help you because water, Mizu, is important. If you can argue that water isn’t important, I might convince everyone to change their minds. Is that something you want to do?”

“No,” Mizu said, in a small voice. “Water is important.”

“Then good,” Rhodia said. “Milo, come on. We can clear out whatever wreckage is in the main well with Mizu and then start working down the water lines. You have your little map?”

Milo held up a hastily drawn series of lines on a piece of crumpled paper. “Right here.”

“Great. Everyone know what they are doing? Good. Let’s do it.”

Everyone jumped both-feet-first into the job. And the combined might of everyone represented a whole lot of labor. Having already distributed everyone’s tea, Arthur mainly followed the plan they had outlined. With his own map in tow, he took Karra to the pumps that they had buried not so long ago. She uncovered them, he put a brick in the channel to block the flow and then poured water near the mouth of the pump. If the pump was still good, it would suck the water through, spit out a whole bunch of sediment, and then run clean. If it was bad, it would do other stuff ranging from nothing all the way to making bad noises and seeming kind of dangerous.

When it was anything but the best-case scenario, Arthur would hold the pumps while Karra ran back to Milo’s house, grabbed an armful of backup pumps, and brought them to him for reinstallation. It took hours, but by the time the sun was nearing the high point in the sky, they had exhausted all of the backups, resealed all the fixed locations, and grabbed the last few iffy pumps for Milo to repair.

“Don’t worry about it,” Milo said, working on the last of several damaged sections of road and well covers. “Those pumps are pretty simple to me now. I’ll have most of them fixed by morning. And there’s redundancy in the system. Which pumps did you say weren’t repaired?”

Arthur showed him on the map. Milo took a break as he looked, nodding in approval.

“Good. You did almost the right thing by accident. If you switch this pump to here, it should be enough. Worst-case scenario, a couple of houses will have bad water pressure for a couple of days. No big deal,” Milo said.

Arthur and Karra did that, then rushed back to the plaza to prepare lunch for everyone. On arrival, they found out even that had been pre-empted.

“Nope. You have more important things to do. Shoo.” Skal physically guided Arthur towards his shop. “Make tea. Lots of it. That’s where you can be valuable, right now. I figured you kids would do something like this. The cooks and I have food handled, Arthur.”

“I can cook,” Arthur said.

“Well, you can, I suppose. Not that you should, beyond your drinks and your little snacks.” Skal winked. “I didn’t say nothing before we got other cooks, but back when it was just us, you were getting by on hard effort and the goodwill of others. We have better ways to tackle food.”

“But…”

“You just go smell that fish and look at those sandwiches before you go telling an old man he’s wrong, alright?” Skal laughed. “Just do that, and if you still want to help, that’s fine.”

Arthur walked through the prep area, fully convinced in seconds that the old man was right. The meal-centric cooks had gone all out, preparing enough lunch stuff not only for him and the rest of the water crew but the whole town. Unless he missed his guess, they had also dug deep into their supplies of spices and special ingredients in doing so. It was what he’d expect from a festival day, all lead by Skal and heavily imbued with what looked like an endless amount of seafood.

“You caught all this?” Arthur asked.

“I did. I wasn’t just wasting time all those months, you know. I have a boat. Nets and cages. I can keep this whole town in fish if I need to. I don’t normally need to, but today seemed like the day.” Skal chuckled. “Now make everyone a big tank of tea and then get that girl something special. She probably needs it by now.”

Arthur got to work, making gallons of pepped tea and leaving it in a huge dispenser on his counter, along with the better part of his cups, glasses, and backup cups and glasses. He then hunkered down on a tray of the good stuff, specialized drinks for the water crew with a specific focus on Lily and Mizu, who both had something really important to do.

“Here, Skal.” Arthur hadn’t forgotten his debt to the old-timer. “Just like you like it.”

Skal took his drink from Arthur’s hand without complaint. “Thanks. Now get to that girl. Make her happy, you hear? Or I’ll find an alchemist who can make me young and steal her from you.”

“Think you could?” Arthur asked with a smile.

“Don’t be dumb, boy,” Skal said. “Now get.”

By the time Arthur brought his tray of drinks to the well, it looked like an entirely different place. All the rubble was cleared, and voices were sounding up from the depths, one small and one louder-than-expected Mizu voice trying to keep up.

“Gods, Mizu, leave me alone!” Lily yelled. “I can chip off old runes just as well as you can, and we can fix any mistakes I make with Slapstone dust later. You need to do runes.”

“I can’t do runes for now,” Mizu said. “I’m tapped. I can help.”

“No, you can’t. I’ll be done with this by the time you are untapped. I’m the assistant, Mizu. I don’t tell you how to do runes so you don’t get to tell me what I do. Now sit down on that rock and think about majicka like I told you to. Get what you’re doing next clear in your head.”

Amazingly, Lily’s forceful advice seemed to work. Mizu went silent, letting the sounds of a single chisel and hammer break through to the surface where Arthur could hear them. He waited a minute or so before alerting the two of them to his presence.

“Hey, could you two climb up?” Arthur said. “I have updates. And tea.”

The two of them climbed up from the well, which wasn’t a straight-up-and-down thing. Mizu had designed her wells like a miniature version of the city’s big enclosure, something that used a staircase and eventually widened out to a bigger room. She said they’d never be quite as big as the city’s was, individually. That was the point of the backup wells. Her whole system was a lot less central, which should have made it a lot more robust despite yesterday’s catastrophe.

“There you are,” Mizu said. “Lily was just yelling at me. You should scold her.”

“Don’t you do it, Arthur,” Lily warned. “She’s being like you, trying to do everything at once. I had to make her stop.”

Arthur set down his tray and gave them both their tea. “I heard, actually. And Mizu, she’s right. Everyone else can do parts of this job, but you’re the only person who can do runes. You need to save every bit of energy you can for that. Good job, Lily.”

“Thanks. Although it’s really my skill doing that,” Lily said. “Lately, it’s been much easier to work with for some reason. Like today, it’s giving me a whole bunch of different ideas at once, almost a whole plan to…”

Lily stopped, her eyes went glassy as her knees gave out. Her tea crashed to the ground as Arthur sprung and barely got to her in time to keep her head from hitting the hard stone.

“What’s wrong, Arthur? Is she okay?” Mizu also leapt into action.

“I think so.” Arthur looked Lily over, verifying that her breathing was steady. “Probably more than okay by her standards. I think she’s getting a new skill.”