Chapter 31: The Great Juicing

Now that Arthur had some at least mild success with his shop, he had a bigger job ahead of him. He had customers, sure. But a good portion of the interest in his boba was driven by novelty. If he lost the thread on that bit of things, the long-term prospects of his business would suffer.

And that meant variety. It wasn’t just a hunch. The customers had been telling him so.

—

“So there’s the darker tea, the lighter tea… and a dark and light pepped tea. And that’s it, for now?” Pico asked.

“I’m actually working on a new type of tea,” Arthur answered.

“Unpepped?”

“Very slightly pepped. But not so much that you’d notice, Pico.”

The mayor was one of his first customers and still one of his most enthusiastic. If he was looking for more, then others would be too sooner or later. And that meant work. A lot of crazy, brain-hurting research work.

Luckily, some of that work was done for him.

In his last job, the one he had on Earth, calories had played a big part in the coping mechanisms that got him through his days. He had gone through a lot of boba over the years, working his way through the entire menu of the store closest to him. He had some ideas.

After closing up his shop for the day, he took off for what his customers had assured him was the best produce market in town, the one with the freshest product and the most complete selection. He arrived within five or ten minutes, or at least where the directions said to go. Instead of a fruit market, though, he found a large supplier of various kinds of furniture hinges. It was neat in its own way, but not at all what he needed.

A quick search cleared up the confusion. Off to the side of the furniture store, topped by a simple carved wooden sign of a fruit Arthur didn’t recognize, was a cellar straight out of a cartoon, the kind with two doors and handles set up at a shallow diagonal to the ground. He reached down and tested the handles. The doors were both unlocked and easily pulled aside to reveal a stone staircase headed down. And down. Whatever was below the hinge supplier, it was significantly more underground than Arthur expected.

“Close that door behind you!” A female voice called out from below. “You’ll let all the cool out.”

Arthur obeyed, and then turned and trotted down the stairs once the door slammed shut. The space was well lit. Both the stairway and the space beyond were clearly visible, lit by some magical light source Arthur couldn’t spot. He kept himself busy enough looking for it that when he finally took a look at the underground room he had reached, it hit him all at once.

That, Arthur thought, is a substantial amount of fruit.

Where Arthur had expected a few rows of fruit, he found a solid acre of bins, all filled to bursting with greens, reds, yellows and every other shade of botanical color he could think of. Arthur realized, then, that he had made a miscalculation. He had been planning on rounding up some strawberries, apples, and raspberries, plus whatever other fruits he knew well and could mix-and-match to taste. But among the hundreds and hundreds of square yards of fruit, there wasn’t a single one he recognized.

“Daunting, isn’t it?” a large boar-woman said. She kept her head down as she smoothly she sorted and placed fruit from her cart into the bins. “First timers are always like that. Just start and walk until you see something you like. I promise it works out fine.”

“It’s a little harder than that, I’m afraid. I’m not exactly local.”

The woman looked up then, snapping her mouth shut when she caught sight of Arthur.

“Oh, I see. Some kind of… actually, what are you?”

“Human. I’m an offworlder. Most people around here seem to interpret me as some kind of hairless monkey.”

“Or an overgrown piglet. I could see either. Anyway, welcome.” She stood up straight, looped her arms behind her back, popped it, and stepped towards Arthur. “Damn stoop work isn’t as easy as it used to be. My back’s getting old. So you’re saying you don’t know what any of these are? At all?”

“Nope.” Arthur picked up a kind of ridge-skinned green fruit about the size of an orange. “This could be sweet, sour, or packed with meat for all I know. I’ve never seen it.”

“Sour. Very, very sour. That’s not for eating by itself.”

“And this?”

“Much sweeter. Tastes a bit like… actually, just take a bite. It’s okay, I have plenty.”

Arthur toothed into the new fruit, which felt and looked a lot like a large, oval peach. It tasted reasonably similar, too, except with less sweet, firmer flesh and no pit.

“Oh, that’s good. I’ll have to get some of these. What happens to these when you crush them? Do they… pulverize well, I guess?”

“You’re going to have to clarify that a little for me. What are you planning on doing with these fruits?”

Arthur let her in on the whole plan. She had, it turned out, heard about his store, despite somehow missing the bit where it was run by an offworlder. Once she found out she was dealing with the prospect of a regular bulk-purchase customer, her eyes lit up a little brighter as she more or less force-fed him bits and pieces of various fruits to acquaint him with her entire catalog.

“On my world, we had a drink, basically a mix of juices from a sweet berry and a very sour citrus fruit, with sugar added.”

“Is the sugar a must? Or would just counteracting the sour be enough?”

“The latter, I think.”

“Try this, then. Take a small, small bite.”

Arthur took the marble-sized berry from her hand, dutifully only taking a small nibble from it, and immediately glad he had done so.

“Whoa. That’s… a lot. How is it so sweet?”

“Don’t ask me. I just sell them. But when something’s called a sweetberry in a world with a lot of sweet berries, it’s going to be very sweet. People use those for jam. Just one or two will sweeten a whole batch.” She tossed him another berry, this one larger, orange-ish, and with long leaves that curled down the sides almost to the end of the fruit.

“Don’t eat the leaves on that one. Just the flesh. And you take as big of a bite as you want, with that one.”

Arthur obeyed, finding the fruit was a bit like a stronger-flavored blackberry, a bit tart and so juicy it actually squirted some liquid onto the floor as he bit it.

“I figure you either use the sweetberries and something sour, or the tart berries and sugar, or both berries together, depending on what kind of flavor works best.”

Food Scientist practically nodded inside him. It didn’t know which was the best option yet, but Arthur’s skill augmented instincts were telling him he’d be best off if he tried all of the above, letting their performance determine the eventual winner.

By the time he had made his way through even a quarter of the store, Arthur had to beg for mercy and call it quits. He was loaded to the gills with fruit, so full the boar woman actually guided him to a chair, gave him some water, and let him rest for a bit while his stomach made sense of the sudden deluge of produce he had subjected it to.

“Good to see you appreciate it, at least.” The boar-woman eyed him approvingly, then offered him her hand to shake. “I’m Orcina. And I look forward to doing business with you.”

“Arthur, and same.”

“So what’s the next step?”

“I buy some fruit. And then I get to chopping, I guess.”

Orcina was nice enough to loan him a small wagon to carry the fruit home in, one that she said he was welcome to keep so long as he was making regular purchases from the store. Bloated and highly satisfied, Arthur waddled home, dragging the wagon and its heavy contents behind him.

And then the chopping began. As far as Arthur was concerned, there were three ways to go about this project. The first was to make what amounted to a fruit-and-milk concoction, no tea involved in the conventional sense. He knew it was stretching the definitions a little, but he hoped the fact that the skill was boba-specific would let him draw outside the lines a little bit while still benefiting from his system-granted ability to augment the flavor of the drinks.

The second way was to use the juice with tea, and he had some ideas there as well. There were some types of tea in his ever-growing collection that were a bit too acidic or too mild to do well in regular boba. He hoped he could tone down some and spice up others with the fruits he had in tow.

As for the third option, he figured he would probably be able to infuse the pearls themselves with flavor. He had never been much of a fan himself, but the boba shops he had visited on Earth usually had the option of flavored pearls, colored to look like candy and just as sweet. If he could do something similar here, and provided that the pearls were still hardy enough to be stored from one day’s production to the next day’s use, he’d have a bit of flexibility to make some of his new variety in advance, simplifying the work he had to do at the stand.

And he really, really hoped that third option would work. Even when Lily was at the top of her game, Arthur found it hard to keep up with the flow of customers. He could crush fruit for drinks as the customers came in, but he had no idea how to fit that particular sticky, juicy process into his current workflow.

But that’s tomorrow’s problem. I can worry about that then. For now, I need to find some mixtures that work. The rest can be figured out later.

He got to it. At first, he tried to handle the job with knives, dicing various fruits as finely as his inexperienced hands could handle. After several minutes of cut-finger near-misses, he had hardly any fruit to show for it. Giving up, he went out to the yard, grabbed a conveniently-sized rock, and brought it back to his room. After boiling it in clean water, he got back to mashing, gratified to see that his primitive-violence approach worked much better.

It would have to. He had dozens of different types of fruit, all with different flavor profiles and enough possible combinations that even Food Scientist was reeling. He’d have to mix and match, take notes, and use the process of elimination to find what worked and what didn’t.

Arthur was prepared to pull an all-nighter if that’s what it took. He’d bash and pulverize. He’d mangle fruit and extract juice until the demon-world equivalent of roosters crowed if he had to. In the pursuit of beverage, he knew, there was no cost too great, no sacrifice too large. Hoisting his rock aloft, he brought it down onto yet another unfamiliar fruit, freeing its flavors for use.

And so the great juicing began.