Chapter 54: Painting

On the way home, Arthur pulled Lily aside and asked for advice. After the whole surprise with seasons, he wanted to make sure that dates in the Demon World were the same thing as Earth ones.

“For starters, today’s a festival day. Think of it as a big party. You don’t prepare anything at all unless you want to run a stand or a game or something. People eat and drink and get into arguments about who won or lost whatever game. And if you want, there’s the offering games. Those are more serious.”

“Offering games?”

“It’s like… Okay, Ella cooks. If she played, she’d play with the other cooks, to see who could make the best food with the same ingredients. And the best one for each thing is the offering for the cold season. So it’s nice. Ella does play, usually.”

“Does Ella ever win?”

Lily screwed up her face, trying to remember. “I think only about half the time.”

This game is probably how they know who’s who around here. Being the best cook in this city, even half of the time, is a pretty big deal. 

“Got it. But you said that’s what it is as a festival. What about when it’s also a…”

“A date?” Lily’s face became animated as she got ready to describe the next bit, which was apparently her favorite. “Then it’s a whole thing. First, you have to wear special clothes. So everyone knows you’re there on a date. Not if you are married, though. Then it’s just normal stuff. Special clothes are for people who are just dating.”

“What makes the clothes special?”

Lily shrugged. “It’s hard to explain. It’s just the clothes you wear for that. A clothing tailor would know.”

I’m supposed to have an special outfit, and the date’s in two hours. Arthur subconsciously started walking faster, almost leaving Lily in his dust before he realized what he was doing to the poor stat-less girl and slowed his pace.

“Is there anything else I should know?”

“Well, mostly it’s just the games. And having fun, I think. But people vote on who is the best couple. And they call them up on stage and give them little flowery things they wear on their arms. And they show the gifts they got each other. Sometimes the gifts aren’t very good, and it’s funny.”

“Oh, man. It’s prom.”

“What? What’s prahm?”

“Prom. It’s sort of a festival dance on Earth for young people. People hire special carriages to go to it and… well, a lot of prom is fuzzy for me. But there, it’s really important.”

“Oh, it’s the same here. People get ready for this for months.”

Mizu had, of course, asked Arthur if he’d like to go to the festival with her. He had said yes, thinking it was just a date and nothing more. And in typical Mizu fashion, that was the end of the conversation. Because the conversation was so short, it was possible that she didn’t care about the festival much at all. But Arthur wasn’t sure. It could have been a lifelong dream of hers and she would have said about the same amount about it. It was just how she was.

“I think I might be dead,” Arthur said. “I’m not ready for this at all. And I’m going to hurt Mizu’s feelings.”

“Well, that’s not necessarily dead. Mizu’s pretty nice, you know. She might forgive you.”

“She might. But imagine she goes home and is sad and Onna finds out.” Arthur had a sudden vision of Mizu’s lizard-demon best friend’s disapproval and shuddered.

“Oh, yeah, I forgot about Onna. Yeah, she’d kill you.”

—

By the time Arthur got home, he was so wrapped up in visions of a crying water elemental and the wrath of her reptilian friend that Ella had to grab his shoulder to snap him out of it as he walked towards his room.

“Eh?” he said, looking up.

“I said, Arthur, that you looked like death. What’s wrong?”

“Oh, sorry. It’s the festival. I didn’t know what it was, and I’m not prepared for it. At all. No gift, no clothes.”

“Gift should be easy enough. Bring her some tea.”

“She had some tea this morning. I can’t just give her something she gets every day.”

“And why not? Gifts from your class are very traditional. Maybe you could make something a little special, but it’s more about checking the box than anything else.”

Arthur felt some momentary relief knowing he had an escape hatch, then lost it as he shook his head.

“No, she deserves better than that. I found her passed out in the shop today, from working on the well, which is already better than it should be. And that’s probably not even her gift. I have to do better than that.”

Ella reached up and mussed his hair. “That does sound like you. And her. I like you two, for the record.”

“So what do I do? There’s no time. I think most stores are probably closed.”

“You don’t buy things for this! The point is that it’s something you made, or had made. Something significant. If it’s not related to your class, then it’s something that’s significant between you and her, something you shared or experienced together.”

Arthur had a momentary thought of remaking the anti-venom tea, before deciding almost immediately that reminding Mizu of her near-death experience was a bad idea. Then, suddenly, the lights of inspiration flickered on. He knew exactly what to do. He just needed the stuff to do it with.

“Ella, do we have paint? And brushes?”

“Figured it out, did you?”

“I did.”

“I don’t. But Milo should. He keeps a few on hand for his work. And I think he’s still out back getting ready, unless Rhodia spirited him off already.”

Arthur hugged Ella a little too hard and ran towards Milo’s shack, bursting through the door like an anthropomorphic pitcher of fruit punch busting through a wall.

“Good gods, Arthur. You scared me.” Milo was working on getting his unruly head feathers to lay down and wearing what Arthur assumed was a suit of festival-correct men’s clothing. It was square near the shoulders and tapered down towards the floor. It looked something like a gradual transition from a military uniform to a Shaolin monk’s fighting clothes. And it was colorful, in a sort of pastel-blue-and-white sort of way. Milo looked about as home in it as teenaged boys looked in tuxedos back on Earth.

Which is to say not at all. Don’t give him crap about it.

“Sorry, in a hurry. I am not ready for this festival at all.”

“Why not? Mizu asked you weeks ago, Arthur.”

“Yes. And nobody told me it was an important thing. At all.”

Milo made an “ohhhh” shape of understanding with his mouth.

“Well, hell. Sorry. I forget you don’t know things sometimes.”

“It’s okay. Everyone did. But I need to make her something. Do you have paint? And brushes?”

“Paint? Sure. Gallons of it. Just white, though. I use it to mark machine pieces so I can tell what’s what. And the brushes are in that can, there. You can wash them out if you need to.”

“I don’t suppose you have a canvas lying around.”

“That I can’t help you with.”

“No problem. Gotta go, big hurry. You look good, though.”

“I don’t. Nobody does in these. Whatever cut they chose for these is for some demon type nobody ever heard of. On the good side, at least I’m not a weasel-demon. Poor guys look like they are walking around in tents when they have to wear them.”

Arthur had no time to argue. He nodded, then carried the paint and brushes up to his room as fast as his legs could carry him.

The first time Arthur had ever seen a blue star flower, it had been with Mizu. In a lot of ways, talking about the flower was the first real conversation he had ever had with her. He spent a lot of time with her over the past few months, and had found that Mizu had a quirk of liking a lot of things.

She liked going on walks, sitting in parks, watching other people work, and improving wells. The problem, such as it was, was that she liked everything almost equally. One of the few exceptions Arthur knew of were these flowers. They were special to her, tied to memories he was now a part of, whether he had meant to be or not.

The second time he saw one of the flowers, it was for Mizu’s anti-venom drink. He wasn’t sure if it pushed the tea over the limit, but it had been an ingredient.

And the third time he saw the flower was when he was out in the woods scavenging for ingredients. He had taken it with him, just on a whim, planning on using it for some purpose or another before finding he didn’t have the heart to actually destroy it to make anything. Instead, he dried it between the pages of a book. Opening the book up now, he found it, flattened and fragile to the touch.

Carefully, Arthur lifted the flower to one of his room’s worktables. Once it was safely transported, he looked around the room for the right kind of tool to complete the next step of his plan before settling on a large, metal spoon he normally used for stirring. Putting the round part of the spoon down on the table near the flower, he rocked it back and forth over the petals with force, grinding the flower against the wooden surface. In seconds, he had a pile of vibrant blue powder.

Mizu had told him various uses of the flower when she introduced him to it. It could be used as an ingredient in food, she said. It could also serve as an ingredient that enhanced a medicine’s effect. But the use Arthur wanted was the last use she had mentioned. It had never seemed important before now, but Mizu had said the flower could also be used for dye.

Pouring out a small amount of the white paint, Arthur mixed in a pinch of the powder, then a pinch more. After several adjustments, he finally got the color right with plenty of powder to spare. Paint wouldn’t be an issue.

Now, he just needed something to paint on. An actual canvas was out, considering he didn’t have one and any store that might sell them was likely to be closed. The closest he could get on short notice was a plank of wood, one about the size of a shoebox lid was trimmed from the boba shop’s wall-hanging menu.

Luckily, they had painted the wood before they had trimmed it, and the piece was already primed with a thick layer of white paint. Arthur wetted one of the brushes, getting the remnant white paint out before dipping the brush into the blue and getting to work.

His first effort was a disaster. Arthur wasn’t hopeless as an artist, but the last real effort at painting he had made was in his teenage years, back on Earth. He tried to draw it head-on, as seen from above, and ended with… a blue star. A flat, ugly, blue star with none of the details that made the flower beautiful. Grabbing a cloth from the table, he tried to wipe out his effort, leaving a thin, blue haze over the center of the board once he cleaned everything he could.

I need to leave some time for this to dry. The next try is probably the last chance I’ll get.

Arthur closed his eyes, visualizing the flower as he had first seen it. But that was wrong in some way he couldn’t explain. Instead, he switched to trying to see it as Mizu had shown it to him, from much nearer to the ground and in a more horizontal angle.

His first try at painting the flower had proven that he didn’t have nearly what it would take to make the flower realistic, so he gave up on that too. Instead, he decided to just try to represent what he remembered about it.

At the end of his last brushstroke, he was left with a blue star flower. It wasn’t photo-realistic. He had missed that standard by a mile. But in a stripped-down, flowing kind of way, he had caught the impression that the flower made on him the first time he saw it, the blue residue of his first failed attempt standing in for the darkness of the forest floor.