Demon World Boba Shop: A Cozy Fantasy Novel

Arthur took a look around the town as he ate, and finally started to understand what Talca had been talking about when he said that the town was built to be torn down and rebuilt again and again. It was the most spartan looking town that he had ever seen, mostly half-built wood buildings that seemed slapped together.

There was nothing here that would stand up to a monster wave. But once the people evacuated and the wave passed, they could toss up another handful of buildings again in an afternoon and go back to work.

It also helped him understand why the town stayed small. The miners came here because the mining was so good. But nobody would settle here, or think of it as a long-term home. Sooner or later, they’d top out on what levels the mine could give them and move on, trying to put stakes down somewhere else. They’d have families and lives there, not here.

“Where do you think we should go after this?” Arthur asked. “Just straight up to the pit?”

“No. Miners mine. You want a smelter or a finery. Smelters get the metal out of the ore, and finers purify it. Milo can work with the smelted stuff, but it’s not much more money to get it refined and it’s going to save time,” Talca said.

“Okay. Sounds good.” Arthur turned to the cook, who had been unsubtly listening to the conversation the entire time, looking bored enough that Arthur forgave him immediately for the slight impoliteness of the choice. “Who is our best bet?”

“Hune,” the cook said without a moment of hesitation. “Big building at the end of town, back of the shop. And I mean the back. Outside. If anyone has iron right now, it’s gonna be Hune.”

“You sound like you don’t expect him to.” Arthur tried not to sound worried.

“Honestly? I’m not sure. Lots of wagons in and out of town these past few days. And everyone has been anxious to get rid of their stock before they move on. A good portion of them aren’t coming back. It’s always that way.”

“How long have you been here?” Talca was talking through a mouthful of stew, too anxious to get a real meal in his stomach to wait. “Sounds like at least a couple of cycles.”

“Three. But this is the last one for me. I got the achievements I came to get last cycle, and stayed on this time for my brother. He’s a mass mover. But he’s going to with some stampers after this, getting boulders out of the way of new roads.”

“And you?” Arthur asked.

“Wherever they need stew, I guess. There’s no shortage of work.”

Arthur made the conscious choice to eat faster, even though he knew that his eating speed wouldn’t make much of a difference to whether or not Hune had iron left at this point. After he finished, he sat feeling foolish as Talca ate the rest of his meal at a normal, savoring pace, enjoying it as it deserved to be enjoyed after a long wagon ride to a new place.

The big building at the end of town was further than they had thought. Past the cluster of buildings was one more, a big smoke-stacked warehouse off away from both the mine and the town proper. The main smokestack was quiet and smokeless as they approached, but plenty of heat was issuing from behind the building itself as a very small rabbit woman angrily and expertly cursed at a tall, narrow clay structure.

“And your mother and grandmother and grandmother’s mother as well!” she yelled, kicking at the walls of the giant oven-like apparatus with what looked to be actual, honest-to-god iron-clad boots. The clay burst apart as she did, scattering red-hot coal all over the ground around her feet as the entire structure started to disassemble itself.

“Might want to get back!” the rabbit woman yelled, probably at Arthur and Talca but maybe at herself as well. She took her own advice in either case, kicking backwards into a sort of hopping back-pedal that barely brought her clear of the scattering chunks of molten metal and flaming carbon before they began to hit the ground in earnest. “Damn. That was my best shot, too.”

“At what?” Arthur asked without introducing himself. The rabbit seemed to have jumped entirely past that point. He was now pretty sure he was dealing with Hune, who he had imagined as a man without the cook in the town square actually saying so. “Burning down this building?”

“Making another batch of iron before the wave hits. What you two odd looking out-of-towners are gazing upon is the wreckage of the last working ore furnace in this town.”

“Everything else is broken? All of the melting equipment went down at once?”

“At once? No.” Hune waved her arms in a whip-like motion at the ground, shedding her thick leather gloves and leaving them laying in the dirt as she made her way over to a pail of water and dumped it over her head. It carried off some soot but nowhere near all of it on her face as it did. She was pretty, Arthur thought, at far as rabbit demons went. “Nothing in this town is built to last. It’s not worth it. We build a bunch of equipment at the beginning of a cycle, and let it break down as we go. It’s usually enough to get through. Usually. Was that your wagon pulling up earlier?”

Arthur looked at Talca, who was never not eager to talk about his wagon. Or almost never was. This time, Arthur found the transporter not only reluctant to brag up his vehicle but seemed actually incapable of talking at all. His eyes were wide with shock as he looked at the lagomorphic foundry runner, seemingly having forgotten that anything else existed at all.

“The cursing,” Talca muttered to himself, barely loud enough for Arthur to hear. “I’ve never heard anything like it. It was so thorough.”

With his friend out of commission, Arthur leapt back into what he suspected was going to turn out to be a fruitless conversation.

“That’s us. We were hoping to buy some iron back to our town,” Arthur said.

“Which town? I thought I had all the local ones accounted for, supplies-wise. Everyone did. People have been packing up all week, assuming no more orders were coming in,” Hune asked.

“Coldbrook. It’s about a day and a half from here.”

“That new one, out by the coast? Like hell it is. That’s a three-day trip, easy.”

Arthur looked at Talca, who normally would have basked in the glow of explaining how very good he was at driving wagons and how very strong his best goat-beast friend was at when pulling them. Rather than jump at the opportunity, Talca continued staring at the rabbit. Arthur tried his best to keep up the conversation from this before it got awkward.

“Talca here is pretty good at driving. Probably the best. So we got here a little quicker than most.” Arthur motioned at the wreckage of the furnace, vaguely. “So did you actually get any iron out of that before it blew? You were saying everyone else had quit work, but if you managed to get any bars made, we’d gladly buy them.”

“Nope. I patched that thing up all week with clay just to get a chance at making more. Didn’t work, but at least it kept me from going crazy with boredom,” Hune replied.

“Why not just go home?”

“Because I don’t have one. At least not close enough to get to. I’ve been camp-to-camp for ten years now. I managed to get farther from where I started out than I planned, over that time.” Hune gave a large piece of smoking pottery another kick for good measure as she shook the water out of her fur and walked a bit closer. “And before you ask, there’s no iron for sale in town. I watched the last of the town’s stocks go out yesterday. Unless you wanted raw ore, that is. I could sell you plenty of that.”

“No, that’s fine.” Arthur’s shoulders slumped. “We have plenty of ore, we just can’t refine it fast enough. That’s why we are here.”

“I could give you plans for a furnace if you want. I’ve got a pretty good one somewhere that anyone with a metal-working class can use.”

“We’ve got that too.” Arthur felt like crying, but was trying to stay polite. “Our smith has been working on it as much as he can. A big thing, maybe twice as big as yours was.”

“Damn, how much iron do you need? That should have been plenty to keep ahead of a new settlement.”

“Not ours. We’ve been growing too fast. Milo uses every speck of metal he makes, and runs out constantly. He complains about it.” Arthur sighed. “I guess we just need to go back. Fast. If there’s not going to be any iron, at least I can be there to defend the town.”

“Huh,” Hune grunted. She suddenly walked up to Talca, regarded his stupor for a moment, then stomped with medium force on his foot. Arthur saw one of his smaller future problems disappear as the pain seemed to be just enough to shock Talca back into the real world.

“Ow! Arthur!” Talca shouted, before realizing exactly who he was shouting at. “I mean, hi. Hello. I’m… Talca. We’d like to buy iron.”

“I gathered.” Hune looked at him, very slightly bemused. “But there isn’t any. Which I’ve just explained to your friend here. At length. Now go water your Hing and get ready to go. This… shaved bear demon? Arthur? He’s in a hurry to get home.”

“Oh. Right.” Talca reluctantly tore his eyes away, then just as grudgingly turned to walk towards the wagon. A few steps away, he turned, opened his mouth to say something, then panicked before turning back towards his cart and walking away at a much faster speed.

“Huh. I’ve never seen him like that,” Arthur said, almost laughing. “I’m a human, by the way. From another world.”

“Oh, really? That would explain it.” Hune stooped to the ground and grabbed her gloves, tossing them on a table with a few other tools. “Not him being that way. I think I understand what’s going on there. I mean you looking like a boiled monkey.”

“Some people like it,” Arthur said defensively.

“To each their own. Anyway, give me a few minutes to get my gear and to get that cook to throw together some traveling food, and I’ll be right there.”

“Right where?” Arthur asked.

Hune enunciated each word of the next sentence slowly, like Arthur was dim. “I… will… meet… you… at… the… wagon.”

“I got that part. I don’t get why.”

“Arthur, right?”

“Right.”

“You just explained to me that you come from a settlement that is always out of iron because it doesn’t have a smelter class on site, with an ore deposit rich enough to have supported its growth, and which is at least good enough for you to want to defend it. Did I get all that right?” Hune said, her tone reminding Arthur of an old but feisty aunt.

“You did,” Arthur said meekly.

“And I just explained to you that I am evacuating this camp, which is going to be leveled in the next week or so, and that I have nowhere to go,” Hune explained.

“Oh.” Arthur blinked. “I just… didn’t think you could make a decision like that so quickly. I hadn’t even thought of it.”

“It’s camp life, Arthur. You go where you need to go, when it’s time to go there. This is a gamble, but it sounds like a good one for me to make. Can I have a house when I get to… Coldbrook?”

“A house? Sure. There’s plenty.”

“Then we’re in business. It’s the best kind of deal. Everyone wins.” Hune looked over towards Talca and Littal thoughtfully, biting her own lip a bit as she considered them. “Plus, that transporter just fell in love with me, I think. That’s never happened before. Might be worth checking out.”