Chapter 56: Warm Memories

Author's Note: We went on a mini-rewrite earlier this weekend. Will add a couple extra chapters to the Patreon to make up for things soon.

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The hard part about festivals was deciding when to leave. There was still plenty of food and fun to have, and once Arthur and Mizu managed to reclaim their winter-offering designated friends, they ran around with them for the next hour. As the crowd gradually worked to decrease the stocks of wine and spirits, things got rowdier and louder. Yet despite that, things somehow never got out of hand. They just became more cheerful, more happy, and more fun.

With all the rides ridden and food eaten, Arthur finally got his cue to leave when he saw Karbo and Itela propping up a very wobbly Eito. They were probably going to deposit the tree-trainer in his own house. Arthur made a mental note to visit Eito the next day with more hangover tea.

Milo and Rhodia set off in the direction of her place, and Arthur began walking Mizu back to the boarding house she lived in. With so many people still at the festival, the walk alternated between an almost eerie quiet and the occasional sounds from groups of other demons walking home, laughing and yelling.

Arthur let go of Mizu’s hand as they reached her house, and only then did the first snow start to fall. Mizu looped her arm through his, and they stood there for five minutes or so, quietly watching the flakes flutter down and settle on the stone streets. As the wind kicked up, Mizu suddenly shivered as the moving air dragged in cold from the surrounding countryside and dropped the temperature several degrees in an instant. Balancing herself with his arm, Mizu stood on her tiptoes and kissed Arthur’s cheek.

“Thank you for finding out about the clothes. And the presents.” She cradled her painting to her chest. “It was perfect.”

Flushing a thousand shades of blue, Mizu retreated inside the building. Arthur floated away towards home, making it a few blocks before the sudden chilliness knocked him out of his reverie. He kicked up his pace and made a beeline for home. The fun was done for the night. It was time to work.

—

Lily was home and sleeping in one of his chairs as he finally made it to his room. Sleep was one of the weirder parts about the demon world. Children didn’t exactly have bedtimes or curfews. Parents would only put them to sleep if there was something that their children had to do the next morning. Otherwise, people slept whenever their got tired. More than once, Arthur had seen some seven or eight-year-old roaming the streets after ten at night, and had to remind himself it was normal here.

When Arthur stepped into the room, Lily stirred awake.

“What? Oh, Arthur,” she said sleepily. “What’s going on?”

Arthur had half a mind to tell her to go to sleep, but he knew that if he didn’t want owl-natured wrath in the morning, it was better to be honest with her. “Experiments. I’m going to make some tea.”

Suddenly, Lily was completely awake. “Yes! Finally. What do you need? The stock of tea?”

“Yes. And milk. Just steal whatever Ella has. We can replace it in the morning.”

“That’s all?”

“And her spice rack.” Arthur said. He had some spices on hand, but not many. Ella had long since given him permission to use anything in the kitchen outside of a few special cabinets for rarer ingredients, and he was going to make full use of that permissiveness now.

“The whole thing? That’s heavy.”

“You need help?”

The little owl swelled with rebellious pride, flapping her arms at her side a few times. “No. I can get it myself. Just stay here.”

Arthur did, setting two of his larger kettles to boil. Between them, the two kettles held more than a gallon of water. He wasn’t sure if he needed that much water, but it was always better to be well-prepared and starting with extra boiled water.

Once Lily came back up the steps with the spice rack, she stepped to the side and shivered.

“Are you making a hot tea?” she asked.

“Exactly. Is there anything that you want?” Arthur asked. One part of his menu that would translate well into the winter months were the hot teas. But without fruits or many boba options, his menu would shrink into preciously few options.

“I think… I actually don’t know. I’ve never had hot boba before.”

“That’s why it’s called experimentation.”

Arthur looked through the spice rank and got to work.

The initial difficulty in doing what he wanted to do was that despite some similarities, most demon-world ingredients were different from the Earth food components he knew. Some things, like eggs and milk, were pretty damn close. They came from different animals, sure, and luckily non-demon ones. But although a couple of ingredients slotted in pretty cleanly to Arthur’s limited pre-existing cooking knowledge, others were much harder. And among all the differences, spices were the worst.

Ella knew every single spice in existence, he was convinced, and exactly how to use them best. Arthur was usually reduced to smelling them to try to get an idea of what they’d taste like, trying to find things that were close enough to cinnamon, nutmeg, or cloves that he could approximate what he wanted.

Come on, little Food Scientist skill, he thought, hopefully. Don’t let me down. I wouldn’t even try this without you.

True to its own helpful history, Food Scientist did what it could. It out-and-out rejected a good portion of the spices out of hand, apparently considering them to be too much of a stretch to work at all. Another portion it seemed to be interested in, but not immediately so. Arthur figured they might be useful for tweaking recipes and set them aside for later.

That left a dozen or so good prospects, things that Food Scientist wanted him to use right now as primary flavors. It was a little weaker on how he should do that, of course.

—

“Ugh. That’s terrible.”

“Really? I didn’t think it was so bad.”

“It tastes like you just boiled a bunch of spices in water. It tastes like… Street dust. From shoes.”

Arthur dialed his attention back in and took another drink. “No, you are right. That tastes like dust.”

“How much longer are we going to keep doing this?”

After a few hours, Arthur found that there was a limit to how much Food Scientist could help him invent new recipes. He knew that people put spices into their teas back on Earth. But he didn’t know which spices, or how much. Food Scientist helped slightly on the first count, but utterly failed on the second. And more importantly, the spices didn’t taste good by themselves. They needed to be measured and combined like a chemistry experiment. One that Arthur was failing badly at.

“Just a few more cups, I’m hoping to make at least six or seven new drinks,” Arthur said as he set another to kettles on the plates to boil.

Lily shivered. “It’s cold.”

“Sorry, I’ll turn up —”

As Arthur looked at his assistant, a thought suddenly occurred to him. Most of his skills were of the passive variety where they’d activate in some subtle way and helped him create a better product. Teashop Brewmaster was like that. Arthur never directly invoked the skill, but he could feel it tugging on his majicka whenever he finished a drink.

On the other hand, Food Scientist was more of an active skill. Most of the time, it laid dormant, and then when Arthur needed its help, it’d jump to the rescue and ping on the right ingredients.

Maybe Emphatic Host is an active skill.

“Lily, lets take a break. do you want something to drink? Not as an experiment. Just something to relax with.”

“Sure.”

“What do you want? We only have the new stuff here.”

Lily considered the question, tilting her head to the side and bringing one feathery arm to her mouth. She tried to answer a couple of times before she gave up.

“I don’t know. Something warm, maybe?”

Lily was never picky, which would probably help here. She liked most foods, maybe because her choices had been pretty restricted during the period she spent taking care of herself on the streets. Something warm was already pretty specific for her. Giving her a good hard look, Arthur could see exactly why. It was chilly in the room, and she had come here after a long night playing in the cold. She had never had a chance to warm up, really.

And all those insights stood out like a sore thumb, accompanied by a chorus of she-might-like-this suggestions in his brain.

Arthur knew that Emphatic Host was in play. When Food Scientist was working, it was like he had a small muse in his ear, pointing him in one direction or another. Emphatic Host was a bit different. It was more like it was telling a story, showing him problems or wants in his little feathered customer, and then helping him imagine his drinks resolving those. It was like getting an injection of insight followed by warm memories of a future where he had served just the right thing.

Arthur’s hands flew across the table. Lily knew she wanted something warm, but Arthur could see she was tired, too, which meant he needed some soothing to go along with the warming she had ordered. That led him to the some peppercorn-like spices. Once there, Food Scientist took over and guided him to a yellow spice it thought would pair well. He crushed both down to fine powder, mixed them, and set them aside.

Like almost all kids, Lily liked sweet drinks. That was easily solved with some sugar syrup, even though he’d probably use fruit as a sweetener in the shop these days.

There was still something missing. Once he added the spices to the drink, he found they were too watered down, like the flavor was getting lost in the mass of liquid. It was sweet and slightly spiced, but nothing quite strong enough to encourage a little owl to nod off to sleep, which was part of what she needed whether she knew it or not.

Arthur went through a couple of jars, smelling spices and looking for the last note of cozy he thought would bring everything together.

Finally, when he was about to give up, Lily pointed at an unlabeled jar that she had brought from Ella’s pantry.

“What about that one?”

He reached for it. It was a brown powder he hadn’t used much yet, a sort of spicy molasses flavor of sorts. It put off an earthy and satisfying scent that filled his nose and almost made him, the supposed adult, the sleepy one. It was perfect.

“This is great,” Lily yawned as she sucked down the warm, sweet drink. “I’ll be so warm when we get back to work.”

She didn’t make it. Before she finished the drink, her little head drooped so fast Arthur had to catch the cup to keep it from shattering as it fell from her little sleepy hands. Carrying her to her room, Arthur tucked her into bed and returned to his work.

He was all business then, measuring, cracking, and combining different spices in a variety of proportions and orders, brute-forcing combinations like he was cracking a safe. Finally, he came up with about six recipes. Of them, four had the unlabeled spice as their primary component.

Things were finally clicking. He imagined his new menu hopefully. Now that things were moving along, he just might get it finished in time.