Chapter 119: Arthur the Mayor

Note: Hope you guys love this chapter.

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The Coldbrook morning rush was a little more impersonal than the one Arthur used to handle in his old shop. That felt necessary, even if it was a little disappointing. The current necessities of the town demanded that people rush to their jobs, work as hard as they could, and then get back to the safety of the town before dark. Without a good way to get a town wide network of streetlights up and running, daylight was an expensive resource that couldn’t be wasted.

There were pleasantries, of course. Arthur knew everyone’s name, by virtue of both his official work and just being around when everyone arrived. Everyone knew him as Arthur-the-mayor-and-prata-tamer. For today though, he was simply Arthur-the-teamaster. There were greetings and smiles aplenty, but not much more than that. People had places to be.

That also meant the rush went quicker. People who were just there for pep got pre-brewed tea for just that purpose, courtesy of his latest innovation in that respect.

Maximum Pepped Tea (Governed)

This tea is for those who need an early morning get-up-and-go at the highest level possible. Amplifying something a tea naturally does is one of the easiest tasks for your class to accomplish, and you have an absolutely massive amount of experience doing just that. In a strictly technical sense, an even higher amount of pep-enhancement is possible with the powers you now wield, something that exceeds all reason and wisdom in its strength.

Stemming from that, you have reached your first hard system limit. Separate from the slight/minor/moderate patterns are some bespoke limits that interfere with the normal progression of a drink’s power for various reasons. In this case, you have reached a level that would adequately stimulate any demon who voluntarily consumed this drink to a point where any further effect would step out of the beneficial range and enter the domain of poisons.

Hitting system limitations always comes with a bonus of sorts, and this drink is no exception. While it is governed to a certain high level of stimulation, this limitation is flexible based on the drinker. As a result, anyone who drinks this tea will receive the maximal stimulant effect they need, and no more. Further cups of tea drunk at this limit will “top off” that amount, but not exceed it.

Arthur had perfected the art of the wake-up drink. It wasn’t unique, which he learned after excitedly telling his entire friend group about his not-so-revolutionary accomplishment. It was something you could get in pill form, just not something that everyone wanted all the time. Especially when more complex, customized mixtures were available.

Here, though, the Maximum Pepped Tea was exactly what the town needed. Arthur’s clientele was working harder and longer than they ever had before in building a city that could be used for generations. They cared less about getting a perfectly tailored drink and more about the effects in the drink. When they woke up in the morning, they wanted something to help them with their day, and this was Arthur’s best offer. They accepted it gladly.

At the same time, Arthur took some time to make custom drinks. The official story for how that happened was that Spiky and Leena gave Arthur a perfectly calculated schedule for who got what and when to maximize the gains the city saw.

The reality was that Arthur checked everyone that walked through the door, cheating by letting Empathetic Brewer run wild. It would always tell him some version of a suitable drink for the person, and he always listened when he had the chance, creating flavor combinations that he thought would suit them. But sometimes, even often, Empathetic Brewer would get distracted from all that by some other kind of need. When it did, he followed its lead.

“Oh, hey,” Arthur said. “Huka, right? You do… roads?”

“Right,” the snake said, hardly focusing her eyes as she staggered towards the pepped tea. “On the name, at least. I’m an Infrastructuralist. Roads are… part of it.”

“Well, good news. You are on today’s list.”

The snake perked up a tiny bit at that news. “Really? Why?”

Arthur shrugged noncommittally. “No idea. What are you working on?”

“Sewers. Do you know what goes into those? Anyone can figure out the basics. But if you don’t build them just right, people get sick. There’s a whole science to it.”

“Oh, I thought Mizu was handling that?” Arthur was surprised. Every water-related was Mizu’s domain, which included both wells as well as sewers.

“No, she is. And she’s at a much higher level than me. So her non-specific class capability is almost as good as I can do with mine, even though mine applies much more. I’ve been working myself ragged trying to improve on what she’s built, since it’s the only way I’m going to grow very fast right now, but I’m not making much progress, and the problems that are left are huge, and…”

Arthur held up his hand soothingly. “I got it. It does make sense why you’d need this now. Just give me one second and I’ll get something going for you.”

Most people didn’t need Arthur’s full-force help every single day of their lives. If they did, it probably wouldn’t have done that much for them anyway. His tea was something that gave nudges, not shoves. It could take a few straws off a camel’s back, or a few drops from an overfull cup. But he had found that most people really just needed a nudge most of the time.

Arthur guided his thoughts towards as focused a vision of sudden relief, levelheadedness, and enlightenment as could manage on the fly and got something out of it that would have shocked him at the beginning of his class journey.

Tea of Planning

This tea helps anyone who drinks it with a slight buff to their concentration and clarity of thought, and helps slightly more for anyone who is already working on a plan.

There were more details, of course. But most of those were generic to a whole genre of teas that Arthur thought of as thinking teas. It calmed a little. It cleared the mind a little while relieving stress. And it was a nudge, one that may or may not make all the difference.

In this case, it not only made the difference but made it very quickly. The snake-woman took her drink and positioned herself up at nearby a table. A couple seconds later, she flung a truly crazy amount of papers across the paper in what Arthur took to be an effort to see the entire picture of the sewers at once. She gazed at it with the dull, lifeless eyes of the truly mentally exhausted as she worked on sucking down the boba.

After serving another customer, Arthur saw her face begin to brighten, slightly. He was pulled away for a bit again to check his cookies, and returned to find her actually engaged with the papers, examining and rearranging them with real interest for the first time since she had got there.

She never came back to tell Arthur she had figured out whatever it was she needed to know, but she didn’t have to. He could tell that she was that much closer to the goal with her small smiles and tiny fist pumps. She was feeling the progress again and moving in the right direction.

He knew what that felt like.

On Earth, someone would compliment him or he’d have a minor win of some kind, and it would sustain him for weeks. Once, he had managed to understand about two percent of a Spanish conversation near him and he had lived off that particular triumph for weeks.

Making tea was like that, but all the time. And it wasn’t just about the majicka, stat-enhancing teas either. He was making a difference every time a group of people got together because he had given them a drink. His teas helped every cold person feel a little warmer, every hungry person refuel before their proper meals, and every person who honestly wasn’t going to drink enough water that day get tricked into it with sugar and cream.

“Someone’s looking better.” Mizu sat down on one of Arthur’s new stools. He had seen her coming, and already had a drink ready for her by the time she settled in.

“Did I look that bad?” Demons were pretty up-front about this kind of thing, and Arthur had learned he could trust them to answer a direct question that might have gotten a less-than-honest response on Earth. “I’m not sneezing anymore, but I didn’t think I looked sick or anything.”

“Not sick. Just not… right.”

“That doesn’t sound better.”

“It is. You are a good mayor, to the extent we need one. You helped more than anyone else when we were getting started. And you tamed a Prata, Arthur, one that now guards the town instead of trying to eat it. It was very, very good.” Mizu set down her drink, stood up, leaned over the counter and pressed her forehead against Arthur’s chest. “But it wasn’t you. At least a bit it wasn’t quite you. This is where you are supposed to be. And what you’re supposed to be doing.”

There was so much hidden in that statement that Arthur had a hard time digging it all out.

Mizu had supported him when he was mayor, a role he did well enough, even though he didn’t entirely fit into it. And now, she was happy to see him back in a tea shop, and had probably come by just so she could see it. Which also meant she had missed the tea-version of him, the one who could focus on just making sure that the next cup of tea was as perfect as possible and not the mayor-Arthur who had to juggle dozens of different priorities every day.

And with all that swirling inside her, she had never done a single thing to make him feel bad or to try to keep him from doing things he needed to do for a while. Even if those things weren’t the kinds of things he was supposed to be doing.

And all that made him realize something entirely different about the blue girl leaning very far over his counter to press her head into his chest.

“Hey, Mizu?”

“Yes, Arthur?”

“I love you.”

Arthur felt rather than saw her face flushing different shades of blue, suddenly so hot he could feel it through his apron. As she tensed to run away, he wrapped his arms around her shoulders and held her there.

“No. You just have to be embarrassed.”

“My people did bad war things to your people.”

“They didn’t and I’m almost completely sure that’s not a real one.”

Mizu made a little embarrassed squeak like steam escaping, then finally stopped squirming and trying to escape.

“You aren’t supposed to do that.”

“Tell you things like that?”

“No. Take the lead. I’m supposed to know the things about us first. I always have.”

“Wait, things about us? This applies to both of us?”

“Yes. You love me and I am loved by you.”

“Mizu.”

“Fine.” She snuggled her head just a little tighter to his chest. “I love you too.”