Chapter 120: The Letter

Mizu decided, right then and there, that she would take the rest of the day off too. Not only was she so far ahead of her own work that nobody could really take exception to it, her break would actually allow her to dodge the twin work-management menaces that were Spiky and Leena who had been asking her to rest.

This was, for Arthur, as much like old times as anything could have been. There was Mizu, just sitting around the shop and watching him work while she read and drank tea. Big relationship revelations or not, she was still the same person and their relationship was the same it had always been. They spent time together when they could and missed each other when they couldn’t, but both had managed to be okay with the other person being busy most of the time.

It was odd when perceived by Earth eyes, but Arthur found that most demon world relationships managed the same feat. Milo and Rhodia were together when they were together, and not angsty when they weren’t. Minos and Ella spent months apart at times, and while they weren’t exactly happy about that, they made it work and ran back together like two raindrops on a windowpane as soon as there was a chance.

Of course, the shop didn’t have only Mizu.

It was a long day, with plenty of time for everyone to make an appearance. When Onna showed up before lunch, it was mostly to see Mizu, but it livened up the atmosphere immensely with her complaints about how bad of a boyfriend Chuck was being, judging him to be inadequate purely because he wasn’t there at the moment. She was lively enough about the subject that even passers-by were laughing about it.

Arthur would have felt bad for Chuck if he wasn’t sure that the big demon would have found it funny himself. As much as Onna was saying she was mad at him, she never once said anything even close sounding like she didn’t like him. If anything, she was just picking the least embarrassing form of being a bad boyfriend, which reinforced the idea that Chuck was the exact opposite.

“Arthur, let me do those.” Lily ineffectually hip-checked Arthur, trying to move him away from the sink. “It’s my job.”

“Well, sort of. You finished with your rounds?”

“I did. And I’m hardly helping anymore. I’ve already had all the good ideas my skill can come up with.” Lily was the only person in the entire town who treated her complete exhaustion of helpful thoughts as a negative thing. There was hardly a project that hadn’t benefited from her insight in some way or another and everyone who dropped by the tea shop made sure to mention it.

Lily attributed her suggestions to her skill, but Arthur wasn’t sure about that at all. He was increasingly of the opinion that the girl’s own genius had driven the selection of the skill, and not the other way around. More than that, she was a tiny, feathered hero to almost everyone in town, carrying her own respect and building a name for herself.

And, for some reason, she wanted to do Arthur’s dishes.

“You know I can handle this myself,” Arthur said.

“Oh, sure, kind of. If you want spots on the glasses and soggy boba pearls, sure,” Lily said. “Arthur, I’ve already told you. I became an assistant to assist you with your tea.”

“There’s so much more that you can do!”

“Arthur. Listen.” Lily hopped up on her step stool and cranked Arthur’s head around to make eye contact with her. “I’m fine helping other people with their stuff. It’s fun. I’d like to keep doing it. But I also like helping you in the shop, and I like it more than everything else, and I want to do it more.”

And so Arthur regained his helper, which was great for him if not necessarily the best for her skill development. But it wasn’t as if she was in a rush to get more skills or level up. Now that her vitality had reached the minimum bar recommended by Eito, the urgency of adding stats had faded away. And as hard as it was to define their relationship, it was an important one. If she didn’t have a problem with admitting that she wanted to spend a lot of time with him, he wouldn’t either. Outside of the concerns with her progression, which could wait, it was a pure plus.

“Arthur! I’m setting up shop here.” Milo walked in, carrying a big sack over his shoulder like a casual, avian Santa Claus. “I can either walk around town handing these out, or just wait until word gets out. I’m taking the option where I can eat snacks and save my legs. Are the cookies done yet?”

“Just about. What do you have, again?” Arthur asked.

“Mail!” Milo said. “There’s finally enough roads to have a regular delivery. Onna tossed this at me earlier. She said the postman said it would be a monthly thing from now on.”

“Wow. That’s a big sack. There’s really that many?” Arthur asked.

“Of course. Remember that back in the cities, they get regular updates about what’s going on. Think of all the moms, Arthur, who have been waiting to send their little babies letters to make sure they’re okay.”

Arthur briefly considered his own mother, back on Earth. He couldn’t remember every aspect of his life there in crystal clear detail anymore, but he could remember his parents just fine. They had been good, and he had loved them. As good as Demon World postmen were, he didn’t think they could get a letter that far, even if his mom tried to send it.

Even I’m not enough of a downer to bring that up. Almost everyone I love is here anyway. It’s fine.

Milo hadn’t been wrong. Once people found out that there were letters from home, all thought of keeping to the informal town schedule went out the window as everyone mobbed the plaza. Milo conscripted Arthur to provide everyone with drinks as he set up a line, rooted through the bag to find letters for specific individuals, and handed them out. Finally, the bag was almost completely deflated, and the crowd had thinned out enough that Milo could actually reach in and get his own Ella-and-Minos penned letter.

“Aw, this is nice,” Milo said. “I thought they’d be all worried. Mom’s just saying nice things about what she’s heard. And I have no idea how she fit this many cookies in one box.”

“What has she heard?”

“Almost everything. I get the impression she’s been grilling anyone who makes it out for updates. She knows about all the machines I made you for tea. The local ore quality even. She is a… comprehensive woman.” Milo grimaced a little at the letter as he continued reading. “I sort of feel bad for anyone I told stuff to now.”

“It’s nice, though. Let me read that later.” Arthur stole a cookie from Milo’s box. Even stale, they were ten times better than what he could do and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. “If there’s nothing too personal.”

“Nothing she wouldn’t say in front of you, although that covers a lot.” Milo folded his letter and picked back up the sack, reaching his arm all the way to the bottom and tugging at something. “Although you might not need to. Come on, Arthur. Did you really think our mom wouldn’t write her other son a letter? Lily already has hers. I was just waiting to give you yours until the rush was over.”

He tossed Arthur a letter, and then reached into the bag and withdrew one more envelope. “And there’s something for you, too, Mizu. Although I don’t know who it’s from.”

“You jerk.” Arthur caught his letter.

“Not a jerk. Just doing negative reinforcement until you stop forgetting that people actually like you,” Milo explained with a smile.

Mizu took her letter and regarded it for a second before beginning carefully pry open the envelope. Arthur ripped into his. He was much, much more excited about it than he had thought he would be.

To Arthur, My Son.

You are probably surprised to get this letter. As your friends would say, that’s dumb and you should stop being dumb. I love you. At some point, you landed on my doorstep and then just failed to leave. You probably thought of that as you being kind of rude or something. The truth is that if you had ever tried to leave for any reason other than for the expansion, I wouldn’t have let you go.

I had Milo for a decade and a half. What did I get out of you? A year? It was too short. The only reason I was able to do it was I knew you’d go on to do incredible things. Knowing you, I fully expected that even once you did those incredible things, you either wouldn’t realize they were incredible or wouldn’t remember that they were so great for very long.

So you know what I did? I asked every single person who came out of there what you were up to. And it was weird. “He tamed a Prata!” they said. “He almost got eaten by a Jeremy while carrying a child!” You know. Just normal Tuesday stuff.

But then they’d go on to talk about the town. “Arthur seems to have everything under control,” they’d say. “Arthur makes sure everyone is okay.” And they’d talk about a place that had almost nothing like it had everything. It’s now a place on the map because of you and the group of friends you put together, and what you all have made together.

Oh, you don’t think you put everyone together? Arthur, you always talk about how demons are nicer than humans. Maybe that’s true. It’s possible. But do you know that nobody believes it? The only human anyone has ever met is you, and you are the nicest person anyone knows. Those kids were friends before you showed up, and then somehow you made them a team of friends, and then a family. You gave a girl who had no home, a new loving family. You helped a girl who didn’t talk find her voice.

You make tea, Arthur. That’s not a small thing. But the system doesn’t give skills for no reason, and where anyone else would just have tea that tastes good, you have tea that heals. You have tea that’s so much a part of who you are that it heals people’s bodies and hearts.

And now I hear you are getting back to your shop, finally. That you are going to settle back into a life of what I suspect you think of as just making tea, in a boring and unimportant way. Arthur? Stop being dumb. Being in a shop and making tea is exactly where you should be and what you should be doing. It’s where you will make the biggest impact. You can’t see how? Neither can I. But it’s true, anyway.

The point of all this, Arthur, is that I wasn’t the proudest when I heard you were building a town from nothing or somehow wrestling nature to your own aims. I was the happiest when I heard that you were cooking breakfast, lunch, and dinner for everyone, on top of all your other work. Because that’s Arthur, right? I bet nobody even asked you to cook. And frankly, you aren’t so much better at it than a non-cook. Milo could probably make the same stuff if he put in the effort.

But you saw hungry people and decided to feed them. And that’s Arthur.

I love you and I’ll visit you soon.

P.S. Half those cookies are yours. If I know Milo, he hasn’t told you that yet. Give him hell.