Chapter 21: Practice Makes Perfect

After his skill came, everything started happening very fast.

Ella sent a message to Pico, letting him know about Arthur’s class and asking for a day or so more to break it in. And the mayor eagerly agreed. And she did all that, Arthur noted, without breaking a single window.

Arthur’s next day devolved into a mad scramble to put together real boba. So far, he had been preying on the demons’ innocence, presenting them with bread that simulated some part of the drink he was trying to make without quite being the right thing at all. Real boba, in the human world, was chewy. It was clear, at least some of the time, and bouncy like gelatin. The stuff he was making was nothing like that.

From what little he could remember, boba in the human world was made of starch. Flour had starch, but he also remembered things with starch that weren’t flour back on Earth. Without details, he started experimenting. Ella supplied him with everything she could, either dipping into her own seemingly endless stock of ingredients or ordering him new ones. He didn’t know which, but he had long since stopped questioning her generosity. It upset her and he could pay her back later.

He went through over a hundred rapid-fire batches before he stumbled onto something that kind of resembled boba pearls. That wouldn’t have even been possible without his new cooking skill, which went into overdrive with hints as soon as he started a project it recognized as something new and innovative.

“Those look… interesting,” Ella had said, on his second to last batch. And they were. He had figured out a process to make the gelatin, something that was close to how he would have made corn starch and water into an Oobleck semi-solid in school, only with more steps, more heat, and infinitely more trouble. Rolling them by hand had been a whole other thing, taking forever in a way that made him want to spend another week on automation if he had that kind of time.

But he didn’t. By the time he got the pearls looking half-way decent and with only limited taste tests, it was time to stand in front of the mayor and present his progress. With Eito, Karbo, and Ella at his back, he was now watching the mayor work out how to slurp the little pearls from the bottom of the drink, chewing on them as he drank and ate his way through the cup. Halfway through, he looked up, almost surprised to see everyone was still there, watching him drink.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I got distracted. Arthur, the shop is yours.”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that. Ella, you said he’s only level two in his cooking skill?”

“Yes, but he was level zero when he made those. The success pushed him over.”

Pico arched his badger eyebrow area a bit at that news. “Well, even better. Arthur, this is good. There’s novelty, yes, and we don’t have anything like this here. It’s an invention of yours, correct?”

“No, not exactly,” Arthur said. “Call it something I brought from home.”

The mayor waved his hand dismissively. “Nearly the same thing, as far as we’re concerned. There’s potential here, Arthur, and from everything Ella and the others have told me, you’ve worked exceptionally hard to realize some of that potential in a remarkably short amount of time. The stand is yours.”

“Well, thank you,” Arthur said. It was just that easy, it seemed. He was floored by the generosity.

“Well, don’t thank me yet.” The badger pulled a long, handwritten list out of his desk. “There are still some requirements to meet and not a lot of time to meet them. Get these done, and if you still feel gratitude, I’ll take it.”

—

“Four days!” Arthur exclaimed in the safety of his home. “I only have four days to get an entire shop running. And to get customers, real ones, who come in by themselves. Who I don’t know. Who enjoy their drinks. And who pay, with real money, that they earned. It’s impossible.”

As Arthur griped, he was vaguely aware of an odd sort of attention from Milo, who suddenly rose, tackled him off his stool, and crammed a chunk of bread in his dumbstruck mouth before Arthur could summon enough of his reflexes to close it.

“Eat, Arthur. Breath. Good gods, you are high-strung,” Milo said. “Do I have to sit on you for you to calm down? Or can you get yourself under control?”

“It’s four days!” Arthur said. “Nobody could do this all in four days! I’m going to find the mayor and beat him up. He’s cursed me. I’m cursed. Ow!”

Milo was now flicking him in the forehead, using his superior physical stats to hold Arthur down as he did.

“Take a breath, Arthur!” He flicked Arthur in the forehead again. “I can flick all day. A full breath. A real one. Swallow that bread. Calm down.”

It took several more flicks, but eventually Arthur was forced to follow instructions. A minute or so later, he was hungrily consuming an entire loaf of bread with butter as Milo gloated about his superior insights into blood sugar and the mood of non-demon earthlings.

“Calmed down, now?”

“A bit.” Arthur tore off another piece of bread with his teeth, swallowing it almost without chewing. “But it’s still not going to be easy, you know. I wasn’t lying about the four days. I don’t see how I’m going to get it all done by myself.”

“You aren’t by yourself, idiot. You haven’t figured that out, yet?”

Milo laid out his plan, which he and Ella had come up with as Arthur ranted about badgerian unfairness. It was a good plan, and would probably work. Milo had to beat him up for another five minutes before he’d accept it.

Arthur didn’t like the plan, but that wasn’t because it was hard or weird or complex. As Milo put it, Arthur just needed to focus on the parts he could do and let everyone else focus on what they were good at. And, in ways Arthur wasn’t sure he deserved, he had a lot of “everyone else” right at the moment.

Rhodia had already promised to help out with ceramics and was reportedly hard at work already pumping out a dozen or so cups in a few different sizes. She was trying the dual-walled tank they had talked about for cooling tea, and creating another few tubs for milk and cream.

Milo was making dozens of little tools he figured Arthur might need, from funnels to measuring cups to scoops, spoons, and even more refined straws suitable for customer use. Arthur asked about the non-disposability of the drink cups and straws and how those costs might add up, only to get strange looks from both Milo and Rhodia, who explained it was typical for people to either eat or drink their food at the stand, or else return the containers at the next reasonable opportunity to do so.

That wasn’t all. A textile class demon who Arthur had never met before was working to spruce up the cushions on the stools and refresh the awning. Spiky’s librarian skills couldn’t contribute much, but his father was a carpenter who promised to get the stand sanded, re-oiled against weather, and generally fixed over the next couple of days.

And, worst of all, he found out Mizu was helping. Not just helping, he learned, but using her skills to build a pumped well behind his stand, optimizing the water output for beverages. The convenient source of liquid that would save him hours each week.

Arthur had only been slightly surprised to learn that Mizu had the highest level of any of the people in their peer group, and was so advanced in her class that she was already getting work. Real work. She wasn’t just helping to get exposure. This was costing her actual time she could use to get paid. For that, he was willing to brave more forehead-flicking.

“Milo, how long is this going to take her?”

“Days. At least. It’s manual labor, though not as much as you’d think since there was once a well there, a long time ago. She just needs to drill down to it again. And then do her magic on it, or however wellers work.”

“You can’t let her do that!” Arthur said, tearing his hair out. “Whose idea was this?”

“Hers,” Milo said, flexing his flicking finger. “She went to the mayor’s office to propose it, from what I gather. That’s where the pump is coming from. The city is overjoyed to have another source of water, especially one that a weller seems to be particularly attached to maintaining.”

“Great. She had to talk to people for this, too. That must have taken a lot for her. How could you let her do this?”

“Her idea. Her plan. I didn’t have anything to do with it,” he said, calmly inspecting his bird-claw fingernails. “Neither do you, honestly. Just deal with it. Seriously. Have you even considered what it might mean that she’s doing this for you? Or what it would mean if you stopped her halfway through, said you didn’t want it, and told her to go away?”

Arthur hadn’t, and could easily imagine how it might leave him looking like the world's most ungrateful jerk. Eventually, he just had to accept that he had helpful friends who wanted him to do well, even if he couldn’t do much for them just yet.

For his part, Milo and Ella had decided that he had to make boba. Real boba. There was simply no bigger impact he could have than improving the product ahead of opening, and he had tons of room for improvement in both the quality of the pearls and the amount of time it took him to make a single drink.

So, he began ripping off little pieces of dough and rolling them by hand. Milo was working on a tool to help him, but wouldn’t have it done by opening. That meant endless repetition of the process, getting his hands trained up to do the same task again and again. At some point, he’d get so good that he could rely on muscle memory to reach the beautiful round pearl shapes he wanted to provide his customers.

On top of that, he was still only a level two in his class skill. Pushing that forward, even a level, would have a big impact on how well he could make the tea. Going from level zero to two had helped a lot, but there was still a lot of room for improvement. If he could get to level three or even four by the time the shop opened, he’d be that much better off.

So he made dough, mixing the starch with hot water and beating it to an even consistency before making dozens of pearls, then storing the pearls to dry before starting over. At some point, he lost count not only of the number of pearls he had in hand, but also the number of batches. He made pearls, ate, and slept, falling into a sort of production trance broken only occasionally by the embarrassment of knowing his not-at-all-a-girlfriend-yet was doing unpaid work on his behalf, bringing her gift-count to three while he still hadn’t figured out a single nice thing to do for her.

And then, just like that, he was out of time. He went to bed full of the knowledge that tomorrow he’d be a boba stand operator, whether he was ready for it or not.