Chapter 32: Sourmouth Meltdown

“What in the world happened in here?” Milo said, staring at the thoroughly pulp covered room in awe. “It looks like an orchard exploded.”

“That’s not… Kind of. I’m doing some tea experiments. I’m not sure how it’s working out so far.” Arthur gestured towards the juice combinations he had accumulated on the counter. “Want to try some out? I could use a second opinion on some of them. All of them, I guess.”

“Oh, absolutely. But wait a second while I get mom. She wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

A few seconds later, Ella entered the room, her eyes widening only slightly as she took in the carnage.

“What’s all this? It looks like you lost a fight with a farmer’s market.”

“Har de har. Very funny, everyone.” Arthur picked up a cup and shoved it at Milo, then another and gave it to Ella. “Milo, that’s a sour fruit mix, with sweetberry to make it tolerable. Ella, yours is just a bunch of sweet things. I don’t know the name of everything, yet.”

Milo tried his, his beak somehow puckered against the sour.

“Whew, that’s got a kick.” He took another sip. “Do you have ice?”

“Yeah, here.” Arthur pulled a few cubes out of a bucket and tossed them in the cup. “Try now.”

“Oh, that’s better,” Milo said. “Refreshing even. And with summer coming up…”

“Yeah, that’s my thinking too. How’s yours, Ella?”

“Sweet.” She took another sip of hers, then traded out with Milo. “Not a bad mix of flavors, but too sweet for me.”

“Think I should tone it down?”

“Absolutely not. Some people like the sweet. Especially children.” She took a sip of Milo’s sour mix. “That’s more like it for me. It’s very good. Have you tried mixing it with tea? Or cream?”

“Tea yes, cream no. But there’s some cream over there if you want to try it. Here’s the tea mix for now.”

“Interesting. I think you should offer all of these with tea.”

“I thought about that. But it seems like it would make the menu complex.”

“It doesn’t have to. Just say you can mix and match between the categories.”

“That’s chaos,” Arthur said. “I can’t control the flavors that way.”

Ella took a sip of her now-mixed-with-cream citrus beverage. “Oh, shush. You can’t control all the flavors all the time anyway. People have their little preferences. They like to have their little special requests. Let them. It’s part of the job.”

Arthur tilted his head a bit, accepting that tidbit. “Fine. I guess I can warn them about the grosser combinations.”

“Oh, interesting. What are the gross ones?”

Arthur motioned to a cup on the table filled with purplish-green liquid. “That one is gross. I was trying to do something with one of the purple sweet ones. It didn’t quite work out.”

Milo rushed over to the table, taking a quick slug of the drink and grimacing.

“It tastes like someone tried to sweeten a lawn.”

“Agreed. Most of these were failures, really. It’s just a few that ended up being good.”

Arthur guided Milo and Ella through the rest of his successes, and in most cases they agreed with his impressions of how good they were. Which was a relief, really. After hours of mixing fruits randomly like he was trying to brute-force a keypad combination, it was nice to find out he hadn’t gone completely insane in the process.

“I can help you fine-tune these a bit, if you’d like.” Ella glanced up at the clock on the wall. “I have about an hour before bedtime. Early day tomorrow.”

“That would help a lot.”

“And you’ll get full credit for everything you did yourself, and partial credit for any improvements I helped with. The system’s pretty generous with collaboration.” Ella took another drink of her favorite fruit mixture, now with fruit-flavored boba mixed in, and nodded approvingly. “The only reason you wouldn’t do it is if you think you can improve these much more by yourself.”

“Nope. That’s my limit. At least for now.”

“Then let's get to it.”

“Actually, before that.” Milo had been watching Arthur’s clean-up attempts with interest. “What’s your plans for juicing all of these? I mean at the cart itself.”

Arthur held up his rock, which was still gory with pulp from the fruit crushing that had occurred only shortly before.

“Oh, no. I can improve that for you, Arthur. Just give me an hour.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.” Milo walked out through the door, waving over his shoulder. “Just comp me some drinks later.”

“Deal.”

What followed Milo’s exit was a masterclass courtesy of Ella. Arthur had known she was good at cooking. Very good, in fact. If nothing else, her skills would have assured that. But what he was watching now as she went fruit to fruit sampling flavors and then mixing them didn’t seem to be a function of her skills, or at least not entirely. It was mostly hard-won experience and judgement at work, guiding her to make tiny but perfect adjustments to mixtures Arthur had already created.

“That one? That one doesn’t even have a flavor.” Arthur eyed the cucumber-like vegetable warily. “Why use it?”

“Balance. It adds substance and a subtle savoriness to the mix. Lets you get more out of the ingredients you already have.”

In just an hour, Ella managed to improve Arthur’s recipes to a new level of perfection he couldn’t have reached on his own, on top of helping him create a few others whole-cloth. They even had time to get through a few batches of boba, and Ella confirmed Arthur’s earlier intuition that the simple, single-flavor infusions of the pearls were best to keep things simple. By the time she left for bed, his menu was more or less fleshed out, at least as far as fruit was concerned.

Shortly after Ella left and Arthur finished with his clean-up, Milo was back. In his hand was what could only be described as a slapped-together contraption of a few metal wheels with welded crank handles butted up against each other and suspended over a metal bucket.

“Here, give me one of those juicy ones. The blue ones.” Milo snapped his fingers with his arm reaching out for the fruit, visibly locked in a blacksmith trance of some kind, having lost his ability to focus on anything but his new mechanism for a while. “Now watch. You put the fruit here, and push it down a bit so it will catch. And then you turn the crank, and…”

The fruit rolled in place a bit before getting caught by the rough metal, forced between the two wheels, and pulverized down to pulp and juice, which fell into the bucket.

“Oh, that’s neat. Really neat,” Arthur said, feeding another fruit through the machine and giving it a try himself. It was janky, sure, and it took most of his strength to get it through, but it was much faster than hitting fruit with a rock. “And I can take this?”

“Absolutely not. I’m nowhere near done with this, you weirdo. This is just proof of concept.”

“Well, consider it proved.”

“Yup. And now it looks like Milo’s pulling an all-nighter.”

“You don’t…”

“Have to do that. Yup. Shh. Gotta go do metal things. With metal. Enjoy your oddly sticky juice room. See you in the morning.”

—

“I have to say, I hate all of these fruit drink names. All of them. Every single one.”

Arthur looked up at his new menu and smiled.

Mix and match! All drinks are available with any tea, milk, cream, and any fruit mix.

Classic Teas

Gadarjia (Strong)

Loyat (Mild)

Matcha (Powdered tea)

Over-pepped (Limit 10 per day)

Fruit Teas

Powerberry Sugar Blast (Very sweet berry mixture)

Sourmouth Meltdown (Sour and sweet acidfruit combo)

Ella’s Highbrow Fruit Punch (Sophisticated blend of subtle fruit flavors)

Tropical Splash Refresher (Warm-weather fruit Mix)

Boba Toppings

Standard Boba (chewy)

Sweetberry Boba

Prices:

Tea Drinks: 7 Small

Fruit Tea Drinks: 1 Coin

Over-pepped Tea: 3 Coins

“Yeah, just a touch of Earth naming conventions.”

“They are all so stupid. So very, very dumb.” Milo grimaced. “Why are they working on me? I want them now.”

“Advertising. Just a type of Earth magic you aren’t inoculated to yet.”

“Excuse me.” Arthur’s loyal rabbit-woman customer had appeared at the front of the stand. “May I have a Loyat Sourmouth Meltdown with cream and Sweetberry Boba? My, that’s a lot to say, isn’t it?”

“It’s fun though, right?”

She smiled. “It is.”

Arthur took the fruits required for a drink and walked them over to the contraption Milo had put together. Instead of the hard-to-turn direct drive system, it was now a geared machine, one with several sets of interlocking toothed wheels feeding into their own little juice collection buckets. Because they were separated, Arthur didn’t have to clean up between every drink like he had worried he might.

“Glad to see that pulp catcher is working.” Milo eyed the removable mesh screen below the crushing gears with obvious smith pleasure. Once fruit was fed through the gears, it emerged on the other side as a mass of pulp and juice, the juice draining into the bucket and the pulp getting caught on mesh for collection or to be discarded, as the case may be.

“Oh, right.” Arthur said, making a mental note to add “pulp or no pulp” to the sign that night. “Do you want the fruit pulp mixed into the drink? It makes a bit more filling.”

“Yes, please. Oh, gods, that’s another thing to say. My own little beverage sentence.” The rabbit woman sat down, mouthing her order to herself and apparently reveling in the sound of it.

Arthur mixed the pulp in, passed the drink to the rabbit woman, and smiled when she warmly approved the finished product.

After Milo left for a well-earned post smithing coma, Arthur spent the morning dishing out a whole new variety of drinks to his customers. Eventually, they’d get tired of these variations, and he’d have to make more. But there were plenty of fruits out there, and more than enough possible combinations. There were vegetables and herbs and potential smoothies out there, just waiting to be exploited.

He didn’t know how he’d process those, or keep up with orders once there were thousands of permutations to cover. But he was starting to realize that Milo, despite trying to hide it, might be a genius. The sparrow hadn’t failed him yet, and Arthur was hopeful that whatever he needed to do, Milo would have a mechanical solution for.

And if Arthur got in over his head on flavors, Ella was always there to give him pointers and keep his feet out of the fire.

Despite no effort on his part to make it happen, he had somehow ended up in the perfect town in the perfect country with the absolute ideal friends and family to be successful.

Not only that, but he liked them. He liked them a lot. He searched his mind for a single person, customer or friend, he had met yet who he didn’t like, and came up blank. The academic types were nice. The crafters were kind. Even the jocks were pretty good guys, once you broke them away from hitting each other with clubs long enough to have a conversation.

It’s a beautiful, beautiful place. Arthur dished up another drink to yet another customer, clinking his coins into his cash register and moving onto the next drink. I just hope I can someday become someone who deserves it.