Chapter 123: Weird Cookies

“See,” Milo said. “I told you she’d know without you telling you. Pay up.”

Arthur flipped Milo a coin. From the fact that Mizu was beaming ear to ear and making a beeline towards them, it was pretty clear that he had lost the wager.

“It’s working.” Mizu grabbed Arthur’s collar and more or less dragged him out of his chair. “It’s working. The water is… well, it’s going around in circles. Good circles, Arthur. Beautiful circles.”

“That’s good?”

“It’s very good.” Mizu pulled Arthur’s head down, stood on her tip-toes, and kissed his forehead. “Thank you very much. I’m almost done with my runes too. I need one more day and it’ll all be working. The runes in the main well will talk to the runes in the minor wells, and the pumps will keep the water moving, and it will all be beautiful.”

“Oh, and then there’s Milo, who didn’t help at all.” Milo put on a faux woe-is-me-face as he sat in his chair. “The beautiful Mizu thanks her boyfriend, who did all the work himself with no help from anyone. It’s amazing he could make those pumps without a lick of metalworking knowledge. Good on him.”

Mizu let go of Arthur and went over to Milo, stooped down, and patted the top of his head. “You haven’t been forgotten. Your contributions are greatly appreciated. Thank you.”

Milo rubbed the top of his head in shock. “Whoa! Don’t do that. Rhodia would kill me if she saw that.”

“She knows I’m fine,” Mizu said.

“Doesn’t matter. Even if you were joking, she’d kill me. She’s getting protective.”

“Sorry, but thank you. This is all working out. When my mom shows up, I’m going to have something to show her. This is great.” Mizu bounced up and down on her toes a bit, genuinely happy again after her brief bout with stress. “I’m going to get back to my runes. But I owe you both.”

Mizu didn’t just walk away, she ran at a fast trot, so eager enough to get back to her runes that walking just wouldn’t do.

“I get the feeling you’re going to get paid back on this debt at a higher rate than I am,” Milo smirked. “Romantically, at least. I’m going to win on class progression though.”

“How has that been going, by the way?” Arthur asked. “I know you’ve done a lot of work for the town, but not all of it has been what you probably needed to move your class along.”

Milo waved away Arthur’s concerns. “I’ve been doing fine. Every bit counts when it’s for something like this. And as soon as the water system is fully working and I get the delivery carts up and running, it’ll blow up.”

“Well, good. I’m glad.” Arthur stood up. “And now I need to go find Lily. I think she’s overworking herself again.”

“Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised. She’s a pretty intense little thing lately. I heard some of the farmers calling her ‘the storm’ the other day. She sweeps in and out like that. I’ve seen her do it,” Milo said with a smile.

“Well, it’s my job to make sure she does other things besides work. Part of my job, anyway.”

Arthur did go and find Lily, who was actually busy in a sense, mostly just following some stampers around outside the city as they laid down the foundation for more roads. As she saw him approaching, she ran over from the dust cloud that followed the stamping crew and slammed into his legs, boisterous and filthy.

“Arthur. The stampers are so fun. There’s not even any ideas to have here and they’re fun,” Lily said. “They just… it’s just big heavy weights, and slamming them into the ground, and making sure things are level, all day, every day. They get bored, so they tell jokes. It’s all they do.”

“And that’s… fun?” Arthur asked.

“It’s incredible. If I wasn’t an assistant, I’d be a stamper. No question.” Lily grinned, stamping her little feet on the dirt to little effect. “And I gained another level. That’s level seven, Arthur. Look.”

Level 7 Expediter

Stats:

STR 5

VIT 10

DEX 6

PER 8

WIS 10

INT 5

Primary Skills: Expert Counsel

Achievements: Filibusterer, Advised Advisor

“You are emphasizing wisdom over perception? I would have thought it was the other way around,” Arthur said.

“Nope. Trying to keep them even. But I like the round numbers better. They’ll be the same next level.” Lily frowned, a frustrated look rolling across her face. “But the system still won’t give me more skills. Like it’s saying that I don’t deserve them.”

“Deserve doesn’t enter into it, Lily. You shouldn’t even have this class yet.” Arthur flicked her very lightly on the forehead. “If you get a skill, you get a skill. If not, don’t force it. I can’t really command you to do things, but I really don’t want you to go against the system on this. I think that would be bad, no matter how it turns out.”

Something in Arthur’s tone caught Lily’s attention, then. She turned her face up at him with a more directed kind of focus than he usually got.

“Why? I mean, besides you being a worrier, why?” Lily asked.

“I’ll tell you, but go ahead and say goodbye to the stampers first. It’s time to head back to the village for the day.”

Lily ran off and yelled something at the stampers, who all stopped, made her laugh with some jokes Arthur couldn’t quite hear, and then sent her on her way. The two of them took advantage of the newly flattened terrain to make their way back to town, and were walking for about half a minute before Arthur got his thoughts in order.

“Okay, so you know I had a different system experience than most. When I got here, I had no idea what I wanted to do, or even what was possible to do,” Arthur said. “I know you weren’t with me for that part, but can you imagine it?”

“I can. I’m guessing you were all over the place over it,” Lily said.

“Something like that. I was trying really, really hard to figure out what to do. And then the system plopped my class in my lap. I wouldn’t say it forced me into making tea, but it pushed me pretty hard in that direction. And I think that worked out pretty well.”

“It did,” Lily said. “Everyone says you’re supposed to make tea. It feels right.”

“It does. And my skills are the same way. The system made me wait for most of them, but when it gave them to me, they were better than what I thought they’d be. You saw some of that. And it wasn’t like, oh, here’s this skill that is very powerful and solves every problem in the world. No, they were better in a way that made me happier.”

“Hmm.” Lily considered that. “So what does that mean?”

“That means is every time I’ve been in a hurry for the wrong reason, the system slowed me down. For my own good. And I’m sort of new to the whole system thing but to the extent I can, I mostly trust it now. You should too. If it wants you to go slow, go slow.”

“But it’s annooooying, Arthur.”

“I get it. I really do. But you do know you’re ahead of the game right? It could make you wait two years and you’d still be.”

“I do. Fine,” Lily said. “I sort of hate you for saying it, though.”

“Yeah, it’s annoying. But I won’t feel like I’m doing a good job if I don’t at least try to tell you stuff like this every once in a while,” Arthur said.

“Fine, deal. But only if you make me cookies. I’m hungry.”

“For cookies? We could get you some food.”

“Nope. Cookies. Experimental ones. Only weird Arthur cookies will do.”

They made their way back towards the town, discussing what ingredients they could fool around with to make the cookies maximally weird without actually making them gross. It took a while to make the journey, especially when they took a break to watch Daisy and Rumble chasing some small woodland creature before giving up, finding a nice tree, and curling up beneath it for a bear-nap.

All that meant Arthur and Lily were back in the town and about halfway to the shop when the wells started exploding.

“Gods! What’s happening, Arthur?” Lily screamed.

One by one, all the wells that Mizu had dug were going full geyser, exploding their caps off with pressurized jets of water which petered out almost as soon as they sprung up. People were dodging a rain of brick and iron plates as they fell. As far as Arthur could tell, it was every well Mizu had dug in the first several weeks, the ones most likely to be hooked up to her new runes.

“I don’t know. But we need to get to Mizu. Now,” Arthur yelled as he pushed Lily to safety.

“Go, then. I’ll follow after.”

Lily would slow him down, and she knew that. She was safe there. Arthur nodded, then took off at a dead sprint towards the town’s primary well, an increasingly large and complex hole in the ground Mizu had contained inside a wooden shed. Recently, she had spent most of her time there, fiddling with the majicka-interacting bits of the well that pulled, purified and circulated water.

I already know it blew up. Arthur had seen a particularly big geyser from across town. I hope she isn’t hurt.

As Arthur approached the well, he saw her, sitting on the ground, hugging her knees, and rocking back and forth. The shed that contained the well was gone, scattered around the area in pieces.

“Mizu!” Arthur rushed up to her fast enough that he lost his footing on the slick rocks and almost collided into her in a slide. He managed to recover into a crouch of sorts as he glided close to her, and put his hands on her shoulders. “Are you okay? Are you hurt? I saw what happened. Are you injured?”

Mizu looked up at Arthur, her eyes filled with tears. “My runes, Arthur. All of them. I tried… I tried to do too much. I thought I could hold it together. They’re gone. All of them.”

Arthur didn’t know a lot about runes, but he knew a lot about big projects. The building of the town was the biggest project he had ever done, on Earth or the demon world, and the knowledge of what it meant to do such a big undertaking had been pounded into him. When Mizu said every rune was gone, she was talking about the work she had been laying down since their first day here. It was a complex web of weller enchantments layered one on top of the other, carefully fit and carved so they’d enhance rather than contradict each other.

He had watched her etching them into channels an inch at a time, connecting the wells to work together. He had seen her exhausted from the rune work more than once, majicka-drained but happy to be working towards a goal.

“Oh, Mizu.” Arthur sat next to Mizu, hugged her in his arms, and then gathered her up into his lap, slotting his head on top of hers as he hugged her into his chest. “I’m so sorry.”

“I can etch them again, but…”

“But you have to start over from scratch,” Arthur finished Mizu’s sentence.

“And my mother is going to be here any time. Any day. I can get the water circulating again, no problem, but it’s going to be… dirty. Literal mud in the water for a while,” Mizu said as her voice caught on the words. “No enchantments. No nothing.”

“It’s okay. We can figure it out,” Arthur said. “We can figure it out and it’s going to be okay. I’ll help, all right?”

“I will too,” Lily said from the side. She arrived with Onna and Karra in tow. “Mizu, I’m your assistant now. For as long as you need.”

Mizu looked up at everyone, then seemed to realize all at once how she must have looked in that moment, soaked and covered in mud. She wiped her eyes, sniffed, and slowly stood up from Arthur’s lap.

“Thank you.” Mizu’s hand dropped down to her belt, where she kept the few tools she used for her rune-work. “I’m going to get started now. The town needs water, at least, and I can…”

“Nope.” Onna stepped forward with surprising speed and removed the tool-pouch from Mizu’s belt before she could react. “Not a chance. Not today. Mizu, it’s break time.”

“But the water!”

“No buts.” Onna crossed her arms. “People can draw water for a day. They’ll live. You’re going to take a break. You can’t work like this. You might hurt yourself.”

“I won’t…”

“You certainly won’t do your best work. This isn’t an option, Mizu. I’m pulling older-sister status here. We’re going to go feed you, and cheer you up, and then you’re going to bed. I’ll let you start at dawn tomorrow. No sooner,” Onna stated.

Mizu’s shoulders slumped as she gave up. When Onna was like this, she was an almost Ella-level authority. Arthur doubted anyone besies Ella or Itela could make her back down if it came to that.

“Fine,” Mizu said. “But Arthur has to make me cookies.”

“Will weird ones do?” Arthur asked. “I sort of already made some promises to Lily.”

Mizu wiped the last tears out of her eyes and smiled weakly. “Weird ones are the only ones I’ll accept.”