Chapter 39: Unsaid Things

The night wore on to the still-dark early hours of the next day before people finally started peeling off. Although Ella had made a literal mountain of food, it was still finite, and Arthur’s friends weren’t the only ones eating it. When the food was finally gone and everyone had calmed down, it was time to say goodbye.

Rhodia peeled off first, promising to come by tomorrow to help Milo design and make the tools for her glassblowing. The combat-classes were next, which surprised Arthur until he learned they had a hunting trip planned the next day. Apparently, they were going to venture through the weaker parts of the dungeon just for fun

Milo said he was laying down for just a minute or two to “let the food settle,” and ended up conked out on the cot he kept in his blacksmith workshop. Lily only outlasted his sleepiness by a few minutes, getting carried up to bed by Ella as soon as her little head drooped down.

And then, eventually, it was just Arthur and Mizu, sitting in the backyard, looking up at the stars. After a bit, Arthur felt a head on his shoulder. He just let it stay there. It didn’t seem to need words.

Finally, after the silence had settled down around them for a while, he spoke up.

“Can I ask you a question?”

“Of course.” Mizu tilted her head up to look at him.

“Your people, the water elementals. Are they as quiet with things like romance as they are with everything else?”

He thought he felt her tense up just the slightest amount at that.

“Much quieter than most. It’s… the sort of thing that’s felt, rather than talked about. Both people know but it goes unsaid.”

“Ah.”

They sat like that for a few more minutes.

Don’t chicken entirely out, Arthur, he thought.

“So, then, this. What we have. It’s the kind of thing that goes unsaid? It’s fine if we both just know it?”

He felt her face get warmer on his shoulder, and could almost imagine the palette of blues washing across it. Moments passed. Finally, he felt her hand slip into his.

“Yes.”

—

Arthur wasn’t sure when she left the bench, but when he woke up, she was gone.

Please, please let this new body not snore. How do you even find out if you snore? It’s not like you can ask someone to watch you sleep. Mizu’s certainly not going to mention it.

“Oh, look who’s waking up,” Ella said, bustling out to the yard. “I have eggs and toast in the kitchen, ready to go.”

“You didn’t have to cook, Ella. You must be tired from yesterday.”

“Oh, not that tired. And I felt I owed you.”

“For what?” Arthur tried and failed to think of a single thing Ella could owe him a debt over. If anything, it was the other way around.

“Oh, just the sight of you and your little friend on that bench, sleeping. It made me feel young again. Milo’s father and me were like that, once.” She opened her beak and actually, really, honest-to-god giggled. “It would have been rude, but I wanted to set up an easel and paint the sight. So cute.”

“I… I… dammit, Ella. I’m not awake enough for this.”

“That’s why I’m doing it now. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. I’d sooner die than embarrass that poor girl.”

“What about me, Ella?!”

“Oh, you? You’re much more fun to embarrass. That’s not my fault. It’s not like I made you this way.”

Arthur sighed with frustration and escaped to the kitchen, where he made himself a sandwich with the toast, eggs, and butter and poured himself a large cup of tea. It was the simplest meal Ella had made, and it was still mind-bendingly delicious. Outside of system shenanigans, Arthur couldn’t see how it was even possible.

“Oh, by the way, Eito stopped by.”

“This early?”

“Oh, gods no. Very, very late last night. Drunk. Being carried home by Karbo, bless him. Given how he looked, I’d guess he won’t be up for several hours. But he said for you to stop by his place later today, to talk about your boba. He seemed to think it was important.”

Arthur decided to put that off as long as possible. By the time he and Ella managed to get on top of the dishes, cookware, and general mess from the night before, Lily and Milo were both up and milling around.

“So are there customs I don’t know for a day off after a wave? Special foods? Special outings?”

“Nothing much,” Milo said. “The point of it is to do what you’d like. Hunters go hunting. Fishers go fishing. That kind of thing. I’m probably going to work just a little with Rhodia today, and then go on a walk. I still feel heavy from all the food.”

“What about you, Lily?” Ella asked. “Anything you’d like to do?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “Nothing really. I think I’ll go back to my place.”

Arthur had been dreading this. As much as he liked Lily, and as far as she’d come, he hadn’t figured out a good way to solve her must-be-independent loop.

“Your… place?” Ella looked horrified, and did an okay-at-best job covering it up. “The hole Arthur told me about?”

“Yeah. I want to make sure no monsters dug into it and messed it up.”

“No. Absolutely not.” Somehow, Ella made this prohibition seem casual. “You live here now. Milo doesn’t use his room anymore. Always out in that shack. You can be there.”

“I don’t want charity. I’m going home.” Lily crossed her arms over her chest and tilted her head back in defiance. “You can’t make me.”

“Oh, I can’t? Watch this.” Ella looked over at Arthur. “Arthur, this little girl is not allowed to help you make a drop of tea until she lives here. Permanently. Not a drop.”

Before Arthur could even consider which side to take in this argument, Lily rendered his decision moot.

“You can’t do that!” she yelled.

“Oh, I can, and I did. You live here now. I will feed you. You will like it. I might even make you pretty little clothes, and you will like those too.”

Lily looked at Arthur, who shrugged helplessly.

“Okay, fine! I’ll live here, but I don’t have too…” Her little voice cut off suddenly as Ella shoved a cookie into her mouth, completely blocking her verbal traffic. She sat there, glaring at Ella, chewing, and possibly planning a coup.

“And Arthur, you’d better be going,” Ella said. “Eito sleeps late, but not that late. He’ll be expecting you.”

—

“Ah, yes, come in,” Eito said. “And try to keep your voice down. I had a… hard night.”

He looked it. His bark was droopy, for lack of a better word.

Eito definitely had a high vitality stat and as evidenced by Arthur’s recent experience, vitality could make a person pretty tough. The amount of alcohol necessary to make the tree-demon look as bad as he did could probably be measured by the barrel.

“Want some pepped tea?” Arthur asked. “That’ll probably help.”

“Yes, pepped. Yesterdays. As stale as a grandfather’s joke,” Eito said. “I couldn’t bring myself to make my own this morning.”

“Well, let me get on that.” Arthur stood and walked to Eito’s kitchen, ignoring the man’s weak non-verbal protest and doing his best to exude an Ella-like authority over all things food. “We can’t get much done with you like that anyway.”

The water was boiling within a few minutes, courtesy of Eito’s top-shelf heating element. In the meantime, Arthur found the demon’s tea, sniffed his milk to make sure it hadn’t soured, and readied the teapot for steeping.

As he poured the water, he did his best to imagine it clearing away un-metabolized toxins from his friend’s bloodstream, imagining images of Eito sighing in relief as his headache gave up, let go, and allowed him to go back to his life. As the tea started to darken, he felt majicka surge out of him towards the tea, invisibly altering it to something new.

Hair of the Dog

This tea takes simple pepped leaves, water, and an ample dose of passive majicka to offer moderate relief to a particular kind of self-inflicted suffering.

It wasn’t the most complex description Arthur had seen, but the “moderate” language was the most powerful effect he had made yet. It was probably due to the simplicity of the goal more than any growth Arthur himself had seen.

“Oh, that’s much better. I can’t believe I tried to stop you.” Eito poured in an ample amount of milk, cooling the tea down enough that he could gulp the cup, then refilled it from the pot. He took another sip, sighed, and Arthur could swear that the man visibly recovered a bit right in front of his eyes. It was hard to tell with a tree. “Did you… do something to this? My stats are the same and I’m not showing a buff, but I suddenly feel…”

“Moderately improved?”

“You could say that. So yes, you did. And therein lies our problem. Not that it’s much of a problem.” He took another sip of tea, sighed again, and set down the cup. “We have no idea where the limits of your class are. What have you made, so far? I mean in terms of effects, not flavors.”

“I mean, not that much. I made a tea to help Lily feel better when she was sick, to work with the medicine she was taking. I didn’t know that there was a possibility that it could have conflicted with the medicine back then. And then the tea I made for the rock-throwers, which gave a buff. And now this.”

“So one status buff and two illnesses, of a sort at least. I think it’s safe to say you could probably make something that treats most illnesses once you’ve leveled that skill. And if you can buff any stat…” Eito did some math in his head. “That makes you useful in an astounding number of situations. I assume you haven’t made anything… detrimental?”

“Like poison? No. Why would I?”

“I’m of the same mind. Please do not encourage your class to make toxic tea. But given what you can make, I think the next big thing to confirm is that the tea truly doesn’t conflict with alchemy at all. It’s possible, however unlikely, that we just got lucky with the previous few brews.”

“Why would the system do that? Let me have a loophole in that way, I mean.”

“Probably because the effects are so weak. You couldn’t replace an alchemist. Their specialization makes whatever they do tens or hundreds of times more powerful. But, like you saw, in a situation where every percent matters, it can have a huge effect.” He slapped his hand down on a stack of papers. “A big enough effect, in fact, that I put together a plan to power level you, last night.”

“While you were drunk?”

“I said it was a plan. Not a readable one. But I looked at it this morning, and the gist of what I wrote was a plan to send you off with Karbo, power-level your stats, and get your tea-making as strong as we could in as short a time as possible. But we aren’t doing that.”

“Why not?”

“It’s risky, with no reward. You might get hurt, and there’s no looming catastrophes to deal with at the moment. For now, you can progress just as you’ve been. It’s not as if your progress has been slow.”

Arthur looked for any flaws in the logic, but there didn’t seem to be any. As much as he’d like to gain all the levels possible, there really wasn’t much of a reason to get hurt if he could get to the same point eventually without all the pain.

“Fine. Then what’s next?”

“I introduce you to a tremendously boring toad who bores you half to death while he tests your powers for the better part of the day.” Eito sipped his tea and sighed again. “Shame, really. Some part of me thinks that sending you to the toad is a betrayal, especially after you made me this.”