“What’s this, again?” A young metal elemental watched the boba pearls suspiciously. “Are these eyeballs?”


    “They’re more like gelatin. Kind of.” Arthur threw some in a glass, tossed some of the tea he had brewed in, doused it with a bit of sweetberry syrup, and iced it before adding cream. “Here. Try it. Tell your friends.”


    The girl elemental took it, shrugged, and drank. Her eyes went wide as she started chewing on the first pearl that made it through her straw. “This is very sweet.”


    “Too much?”


    “Nope. Just enough. Do you really want me to tell people about this? Because I could, but I’m a crier. I can get a line going if you really want one. It costs though.”


    “Oh, no way.” Lily laughed. “Arthur, this is going to be great. You know how I don’t ever really get to flex my normal-assistant skills anymore?”


    “Kind of?”


    “Well, get ready. Because things are about to get a little crazy.” Lily smiled at the girl and nodded. “Is ten coins okay?”


    The crier nodded at Lily, gave Arthur a brief, apologetic smile. “Ten coins is fine. It’s important I get paid, but not really how much.”


    She turned towards the crowd, took a deep, deep breath, then bellowed louder than Arthur had ever heard anyone yell before in his life. Somehow, probably through majicka properties, this didn’t burst his eardrums or blow up his tea glasses at all.


    “An out-of-towner has brought a new drink!” she roared, with a voice Arthur thought probably could have been heard a few miles away. The elemental turned, dropped her voice, and talked to Arthur normally again. “Where did you say you were from again, Teamaster?”


    “Uh… Earth. You haven’t heard of it, probably. I’m an offworlder. That’s where this comes from.”


    “Oh, hell. You should have said so.” The elemental turned to Lily. “Does he have any idea what I’m going to get out of this? I should be paying him.”


    Lily shook her head. “None. He’s really dumb. He’d be fine with it anyway, trust me. Just do it. It will be fun.”


    “The drink itself is an offworld delicacy! This crier can confirm it contains no eyeballs at all! If you want something truly new, get yourself down to the lakeside exterior wall. There’s a catapult party happening, now complete with tea!”


    Mizu grinned as the crowd started milling towards Arthur’s stand as a group.


    “That’s going to be a lot of tea,” Arthur said numbly.


    Lily pulled Arthur’s largest kettles and heating elements out, then began to fill them from Mizu’s well. “And it’s going to be an absolute disaster if we slow down at all. Are you ready to make tea? Like back in the early days?”


    Back in the Early Days, entire afternoons would evaporate as Arthur and Lily worked as fast as they could to keep up with demand. Arthur found that he was actually excited about a return to that. Lily was right. It had been too long.


    Luckily, neither of them had lost a step. They slid back into their well-oiled-teamaking mode without so much as a single hiccup. Arthur handled the vital, fiddly bits of the process while Lily took care of everything else. She moved like a tiny, feathered whirlwind, keeping just enough glasses ready to go at any given time to cover their dishware needs before moving back to filling drinks with ice, perparing boba, and generally expediting every little bit of the behind-the-counter process.


    And somehow, she still found time to work the front-of-counter side of things perfectly, collecting coins, taking special orders, and relaying it all to Arthur in a way he could understand even if the thick of hardcore drink-creation.


    “Don’t you need more majicka? It’s not like you don’t spend it when you make normal tea too,” Lily asked.


    “Nope. It hardly takes any to do this kind of work. The medicinal tea takes so much that I had almost forgotten. I could do this for hours.”


    “Good. Because you might have to.” The line was just getting longer and longer as people who had heard the announcement inside the capital started showing up. “That crier is something else.”


    “I really am. Give me another drink, Arthur. I’ll yell as many times as you want. Free of charge,” the metal elemental said from the side.


    “I thought you needed to get paid to get experience, or something.” Arthur gave another person their drink before turning to make the crier another round of tea. “What happened to that?”


    “This.” The girl’s eyes went glassy for a moment before she kicked Arthur over a status screen. “Read it and feel happy for me, new guy. I got a level off that. I now work for you for free almost any time you need it.”


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    Cry From Beyond the Edge (Achievement)The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.


    You have heralded the coming of an offworlder, assisting a visitor to the Demon World in fulfilling their sacred, self-determined destiny. Using your shattering voice, you have broken down walls between the outsider and his goals, allowing him to reach the mouths and hearts of the populace much faster than he otherwise could.


    The fact that this was to give them tea makes very little difference to the overall quality of this achievement. As a reward for your accomplishment, your skills will receive a medium increase to effectiveness when working to promote the work of an offworlder. You also gain a large experience reward, relative to your current level.


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    “I can pay.” Arthur gestured towards the big bucket where Lily was throwing their coins. It was getting more full by the minute. “It’s really not a problem.”


    “You can, you could, you won’t. There’s only so much I feel comfortable taking from one person, and like I told your friend, I really should have been the one paying you for this. Criers advance by announcing important stuff or weird stuff. I’m not sure there’s anyone weirder than you in the city right now.”


    “Thanks. I think.”


    “Oh, shush, Arthur,” Lily said, popping her owl head up above the chaos. “Like you don’t know you’re weird.”


    “So what do you want your next yell to be about?” The crier looked over the prepared drink components. “I can talk up the boba themselves, the tea, or…. whatever. Doesn’t matter to me.”


    Arthur looked at his stuff as well. There was a lot less of it left than he realized. He barely had enough to clear out the remaining people in line before he would start to run dry on supplies. It wasn’t that he didn’t want the free publicity, but the boba pearls would be impossible to replace without raw materials and a lot of time.


    “No, that’s okay,” Arthur said. “Actually, are you staying for this whole thing? I had something else in mind.”


    —


    “All right, are you ready?” Milo said. “The light is almost perfect for pure terror. It’s bright enough you’ll be able to judge your speed, but dark enough you’ll have a hard time telling where you are going. Ten more minutes should get us there.”


    “I’m ready. And I really have to be the first one to use this?”


    “Well, yeah, Arthur.” Milo smirked. “Even if I cut you slack now, you’d still know you chickened out in front of me. It’s a psychological game, and I’ve got all the cards.”


    “You sort of do. I guess I’m stuck. Unless somehow there was a way to make you make ten thousand half-promises. At once. To the entire city.”


    Lily shook her head. “That’s ridiculous, Arthur. How would you even do that? Milo hasn’t promised anything yet.”


    “This is sounding more and more scripted.” Milo said. “How worried should I be?”


    “True that, Lily. But what if we could make a promise on behalf of Milo? One that he couldn’t walk back on unless he wanted it to look like he was chickening out in front of a zillion people. He would even need to ask me for permission to take my turn. Like it was a favor.”


    “So pretty worried?” Milo winced. “I think I’m pretty worried.”


    The crier picked that moment to get going. If nothing else, she had style.


    “Hear me, capital! Milo Metalsmith, the dove-demon companion of offworlder Arthur Teamaster, is doing something amazing today. Something beyond belief.”


    “That’s your plan? Most people already know about the catapult thing. This won’t draw many more people than we already have,” Milo laughed.


    “Just wait.” Mizu yelled from a dozen feet away as she desperately tried to keep from giggling herself out of her chair. “Just wait. It gets so much better.”


    “That’s right, folks. You’ve probably heard about the catapult already. But there’s a bit you don’t know yet, and it’s this. Milo Metalsmith, bird-demon and gear-slinger extraordinaire, will be attempting to learn to fly tonight! As his mechanical marvel blasts him through the air…”


    “Oh no. How many people are going to show up, Arthur?” Milo had a note of panic in his voice.


    “And as he flaps ineffectively against the unforgiving winds that blow above our fair city…”


    “I mean, there’s only ten minutes or so left, right?” Arthur said. “So probably not literally everyone in the city. Just the close ones.”


    “You can watch him fail!” the crier ended, sacrificing prose for effective messaging in a way Arthur fully approved of. “It will be fun.”


    “It will be fun,” Arthur agreed.


    “Will that do it, Arthur?” the crier yelled, in her normal, non-augmented voice this time. “Oh, yeah, it will. I just got an achievement for some kind of mass persuasion.”


    “Really?”


    “Oh yes,” she cackled and rubbed her hands together. “This has been a good, good day.”


    Milo sighed. “Dammit, Arthur. I have to recalibrate the machine now.”


    “Is that hard? I could still go up first if it’s dangerous.”


    Milo’s shoulders slumped. “No, it’s pretty much just a flick of a switch. And yes, you’ve won. May I please go first, so I don’t shame myself in front of an entire city?”


    “You may,” Arthur said. “Here, I made you some cold-resistance tea. It should help.”


    —


    Ten minutes later, a countdown was rolling along merrily.


    “Five!” the crowd yelled. It had swelled to thousands of spectators, with a gaggle of illuminating devices that would follow Milo in flight. They were packed back from the catapult almost to the wall.


    “This was a mistake. I no longer care about my personal honor. At all. I need out of here,” Milo said.


    “It’s too late. You said so yourself. You can’t get out once you are in the throwing-scoop thing for safety reasons,” Arthur answered.


    “Four!” the crowd called.


    “It’s called a bucket!” Milo screeched.


    “That’s right, I remember now,” Arthur said. “And you are the payload. He’s a payload, Lily.”


    “Three!”


    “Arthur, I’ll do anything. Anything at all. Don’t launch me. I’m frightened. I can’t swim.”


    “He’s lying. Milo, we’ve seen you swim,” Lily said from the side.


    “Two!”


    “I know you have, but I forgot. Or something. Don’t launch me, Arthur.”


    “One!”


    “I’m sorry, buddy.” Arthur put his hand on the lever and smiled. “I just have to see this.”


    He pulled the lever, and the entire apparatus let loose, flinging a screaming bird-man into the sky with a sturdy, satisfying chunk sound.


    “Wow,” Karbo said. “I never thought he’d get that much air. It’s honestly impressive. Launch me, now.”


    “Why?” Lily said. “You can jump that far.”


    “Yeah, maybe,” Karbo said. “But it’s different when someone throws you. Trust me.”


    Karbo was launched next, making a much bigger splash in the center of the lake than Milo had. Arthur watched then sighed. Milo was getting out of the water now, and as much as he had liked the joke, he had a promise to keep. Arthur climbed up into the bucket, trying to keep his trembling to a minimum.


    “You are really going?” Mizu was on her feet now, her hand twitching near the lever. It was pretty clear who would launch him now. “Are you afraid?”


    “Terrified,” Arthur said. “Which means I might as well kill two birds with one stone, while I’m already afraid. Can we have a talk?”