Chapter 121: Water Pumps

Arthur decided he wasn’t going to cry. He was going to sob. There was no resisting this. Ella had dropped a mom-nuke on him. He was now what emotional scientists referred to as feelings-rubble.

The only defense against the onslaught of tears that was contributing its tiny shield was a primitive instinct somewhere deep in his programming about crying too much in front of his girlfriend. He knew Mizu wouldn’t care. Hell, she might even like that he was capable of it. But the instinct was strong, and by the time he was done with his third sob he was more or less ready to be composed again.

It was just in time. When he wiped the tears out of his eyes and looked up, Mizu was on her way somewhere else, just walking away at a normal pace, in a normal way. Arthur might have thought she had seen him crying and was leaving so as not to embarrass him, or that someone had called her away. Onna didn’t seem to think it was weird and neither did Milo. They were both still rereading their letters and having fun. There wasn’t much reason to think anything was wrong at all.

Except that something absolutely was. Arthur knew it. He handed his letter off to Milo, who grabbed it with a confused look, and then trotted out of the store until he was side by side with Mizu.

“I don’t have to be here, but I can be. Whatever helps more,” Arthur said.

Mizu looked up at him, almost but not quite frowning, then grabbed his hand.

“This helps more,” Mizu said. “I just can’t be… out right now. Come to my house?”

“Of course,” Arthur said.

Mizu’s house wasn’t a place that Arthur had spent a lot of time visiting. Not that he was against it, but they lived in a place of basically unlimited natural splendor, with an increasing amount of good restaurants and brick-paved streets. Adding to that was how insanely busy they were at all times, and they just spent most of their time together in other places.

Which meant, in the month or so he had gone without seeing it, a lot had changed.

“Is that a river? In your house?” Arthur momentarily forgot his concern for his blue companion as his jaw dropped. “Like, running through your actual house?”

“Oh!” Mizu snapped out of her own distractions for a second, momentarily disposing of them to be appropriately excited about a fun project. “Yes. It’s sort of an experiment. You know I can make the wells pump themselves. So I thought if they could pump water out, they could also pump it in. To keep the water circulating around in a loop. A little evaporates, but that’s okay, since there’s so much water here. And it helps.”

“With what?” Arthur asked.

“With… everything? Water elementals live near water,” Mizu said. “The river was already nice, but now I get to listen to the water flow all night. And it keeps the air moist. Which helps my skin.”

“I thought it seemed nicer lately,” Arthur quickly complimented.

“You say that every time I bring it up.” The half smile Mizu gave Arthur then seemed to burn out the last of the value of the distraction the flowing water seemed to bring her. “So. My problem.”

“Your problem. I’m assuming it has something to do with your letter?” Arthur asked.

“Mm.” She nodded. “It might be a little confusing. It was from my mother.”

“Something was wrong? Someone is sick, or something?”

Mizu shook her head. “No. Everyone is healthy. My dad. My brother. Everyone.”

“Then what?”

Mizu walked over to her counter and got two glasses. Taking some ice from her magical ice-maker, she added a few cubes to each of the glasses, then poured some water from her faucet. Mizu’s house, as Arthur understood, was not on the local water supply. Neither was Arthur’s shop, for that matter. They both served as experimentation grounds for her, running smaller-scale enchantments she couldn’t maintain on a large level just yet.

She handed the glass over to Arthur and motioned towards the plain wooden bench she used as a couch. He sat, sipping from the water as he did. It was a perfect glass of liquid, well beyond the normal experience he expected water could provide without majicka.

“Is this enchanted to be colder?” Arthur asked.

“More refreshing. That’s slightly different.” Mizu sat down by him, leaving a little gap so she could look at his face. “She’s coming to visit.”

“Your mom? That’s great!” Arthur said, then noticed the tension in Mizu’s face and remembered that this was an I-have-a-problem situation. “Isn’t it?”

“It should be. I like my mom. And she’s not a bad person or anything. It’s just…” Mizu’s voice trailed off.

Arthur waited, patiently. It took a few long moments.

“Mom and dad didn’t want me to move to the city. They wanted me to stay home and learn about wells with them. Both of them are wellers. They did all the water for the town where I was born,” Mizu explained.

“They were good?” Arthur asked.

“The best. Certified the best. They win awards from other wellers. And they know the right way to do everything,” Mizu said.

“Is there really only one right way?”

“Mom thinks so.”

“Ah.” Arthur was starting to get it. “And now she’s going to come out here and see everything you’ve done?”

“Yes.” Mizu nodded. “It’s terrible, Arthur. When I was in the city, she visited once, but she saw the things all the wellers in town had done. She gave some critiques and they loved it. It wasn’t about me. But here? I built every channel.”

“I mean, she has to know you’re young, right? You can’t be perfect,” Arthur said.

“That’s not it.” Mizu bobbled her head back and forth a bit, like she was trying to think of how to explain something. “It’s harder than that. Do you know how water pressure works? Not here, but in the city.”

“It looked like the well was just so powerful and directed, it made its own pressure.”

“That’s part of it,” Mizu said, and tilted her head back to consider how to explain everything to a non-weller. “There were also runes carved into the channels that pushed the water faster. And more. Just moving the water itself is a complex system. And to keep the water as it moved was a whole other set of runes. My mom is good at that part of things. She spent her whole life figuring out how to purify the water as it travels, while also making it flow faster. She invented the runes herself. She’s a genius.”

“That sounds hard,” Arthur said.

“It is. And I’m… let me show you.”

Mizu walked over to what looked like an umbrella stand, the kind that was similar to a long, tall bucket that a person on Earth would stick the long umbrellas in. She leafed through the rolled-up documents stored in the stand until she found a particular one and brought it over.

“A water system needs wellers to work. They have to keep it supplied with majicka at all times. The runes amplify the majicka, but there’s a limit to how many of them you can have. Too many and the system falls apart,” Mizu explained as she unrolled the document.

“Like alchemy pills? You can only take so many?” Arthur asked.

“Almost the same. But the logic applies in every city. The channels have all been cut for generations, the well is as old as the town, and the only place you can improve anything big is the runes. But what if you had another class that could do some of the pumping work without runes?” Mizu asked.

“You’d have more room for runes? Those runes do other things?” Arthur said.

“Right. And we have that, here. They can’t do it other places because the system is too established, but here we’ve had Milo from the very beginning.”

“Oh.” Things clicked in Arthur’s mind. “Pumps? He can make pumps?”

Mizu nodded. “Mechanical pumps that last for years and draw their own momentum and a minimal amount of majicka. I’ve been designing the town’s system around them.”

She started pointing out the differences in how the city’s water supply would work if Milo handled the job of actually getting the water where it needed to go. There were dozens of them, little tweaks here and there that would improve the water in different ways. Or at least that seemed to be the plan.

“You know that your well at your shop is better than the city’s water supply,” Mizu explains. “That’s because the water doesn’t have to travel. This plan makes it so that everyone can experience that. Not quite all the way there, but closer.”

“Does it work?” Arthur asked.

“On a small scale? Yes. But we only have a few pumps, going to a few houses. Now my mother is coming and she’s going to see that I’ve thrown away everything she developed. And I don’t think there’s enough time, Arthur,” Mizu said.

“Enough time?”

“To switch everything back. We could leave the pumps in, but I’d have to re-weave all the runes without disrupting the city’s water supply. There’s no time, Arthur. Not unless you keep me in productivity tea the entire time, and I don’t sleep, and…”

“No,” Arthur said. “I don’t usually get to say this, but that’s dumb. Like Arthur-level dumb.”

Mizu froze mid-thought. “What?”

“You aren’t going to re-weave the runes, Mizu. I mean, I can’t stop you, but I’m going to try. Why would you change anything, Mizu? It’s not your mom’s town. It’s not her dream.”

“Because she’s…” Mizu took a deep breath. “She’s nice, okay? She’s a good mom. But she has very strong feelings about how things should be. She says things are going to be a certain way, and that’s how they usually end up.”

“She doesn’t care how you feel?” Arthur asked.

“She does. But sometimes I don’t think she understands how other people work. It’s like she doesn’t understand feelings very well, or something.”

“Doesn’t matter. This is your plan, Mizu. Your big experiment to take. That’s the whole point of these settlements, Mizu. To let young people try new things. You aren’t going to just… wipe all that out because your mom might not get it.”

“Then what do I do?”

“You use your voice. You make her get it. And if she doesn’t, she doesn’t. Do you think she won’t love you over this?”

Mizu sat very still for a while.

“No. She isn’t like that. She might be mad, though,” Mizu said.

“Then let her be mad. I’ll be here to be not-mad, so you can take breaks from everything,” Arthur said.

“Okay.” Mizu sighed. “You aren’t wrong. It would have broken my heart to take out those pumps. They are so cute.”

I’m going to just let calling pumps cute sit for a while. She doesn’t have to explain it now.

“You know, I’m relieved,” Arthur said.

“Yeah? Why?” Mizu asked.

“Because when you started talking about your mom, I thought maybe I was involved. That she wouldn’t like me because I’m an offworlder, or something.”

“Oh, she’s not going to like you,” Mizu said. “But not because you are an offworlder. I doubt she’d like anyone dating her daughter. You should be glad dad isn’t coming.”

“What? Your parents not liking me seems like a bigger deal. Why aren’t you freaking out about that?”

The question seemed to catch Mizu off guard. She sputtered a bit for a moment while she figured it out.

“I… I don’t know. I guess it was because the pumps were something I might change. You aren’t. It wasn’t a decision in the same way,” Mizu said. Arthur smiled as Mizu grabbed his hand and dragged him out of his bench and towards the little brick-lined water channels in her floor. “Now come on. I didn’t get to finish telling you about the water channels.”

Arthur followed her. “We’re doing pretty well, aren’t we? As a couple, I mean.”

Mizu smiled wide, flashing almost all her teeth. “Of course we are. What other way could we be?”