“Okay. This first roll is stuff I got off bushes. Nothing super strong in terms of scavenger-sense, but we’ve sort of figured out it doesn’t work so well for tea anyway. Most of it is stuff I could source a lot of,” Tryce said.


    “Got it.” Arthur hovered his hand over the ingredients. He didn’t need to do it for Food Scientist to kick in, but he found it helped him visualize what was happening a little better. After a few moments, he pulled his hand back. “None of these are tea, I think. Sorry.”


    “No problem.” The next roll opened up to reveal a bunch of roots, most with soil still attached. “Some of these basically say they are alchemy ingredients. But I thought there might be some overlap for you.”


    “I’ll check them out.” Arthur’s hand hovered again, then he shook his head. “Nope. Sorry. They aren’t showing up for me. I wish this was easier for you.”


    “No worries. The harder it is, the more likely it is I’ll get an achievement.” The skunk unrolled one roll of leather, laying it out with a grimace. “Some of this stuff is gross. This roll is for bugs, bark, and bits.”


    “Bits?”


    “Bits of things that come off of other things. Fur caught in bushes. Mold. Stuff like that. Even if something worked for you in this roll, you couldn’t use any of it because something else in the pack might be poisoning the rest of it.”


    “Got it.” Arthur did notice some stuff in the roll that he couldn’t identify but that he nonetheless didn’t want to touch at all. “Actually, this is hitting. This… twig?”


    “Bracken. It’s a small fragment of fern bracken,” Tryce explained.


    “Well, it’s something.” Arthur pushed a bit more majicka into Food Scientist, which gave him a few more details. At this level, investing the strange Demon World energy into his skills could get him a lot of detail. “A clarifier, I think. Which is neat.”


    “What’s it do?”


    “Basically, just makes liquids clearer,” Arthur said as he tried to gauge the effectiveness of the bracken. “It’s a cosmetic thing, but it matters for enjoyment. Can you get me a bunch of this?”


    “How much is a bunch?”


    “A few pounds, a few dozen pounds. It should keep.”


    “Yup. Over time at least.” The skunk began rolling up his leather again. “One hit isn’t bad. Especially considering you’ve been scrounging in those woods for years.”


    “Absolutely. Do you want me to pay you in advance?”


    “Nope. It’s a scavenger rule,” Tryce declined. Arthur knew that, but it was still polite to ask. They loved turning it down. “Coins come after the find. Always. It’s bad luck otherwise.”


    Arthur forced Tryce to stay for a cup of boba, and dumped so much majicka into the movement-enhancing effects of the drink that the scavenger would make the time up on his way out of the city to scrounge for things. Tryce was of a type Arthur was becoming more and more familiar with. They moved fast, looked for levels, and tried to game the system to get them much more than the Goose Sage would have thought wise. None of them thought they were doing something incorrect, or at least thought it out loud.


    But when he could, Arthur tried to anchor them. He’d buy them food, or give them tea, or sometimes just force them to sit down. There was always plenty of work, but the world looked different at every single age. They would only experience youth once, and every time Arthur could, he would slow the fast-moving kids down to enjoy it.


    People filtered in and out of the shop for a few hours, ordering tea, sitting down, reading, or talking with other customers. Nothing exciting happened. He knew almost everyone, of course, and liked them. And they liked him, mostly, or they wouldn’t be there. They did chit-chat and caught up on each other’s lives, but there were no thrills or dangers of note in the air that day.


    Or most days, really. The average rotation of the Demon World brought absolutely nothing that got Arthur’s adrenaline pumping, and no risks that got his heart pounding in his chest.


    And it was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful. He made the same boring teas in the same boring way, talked to the same sometimes-boring people, and just lived. Somewhere along the line, somehow, he had finally managed to attain the default Demon World life. And that life was good. Very good.This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.


    Did he need money? Do a little bit of work, and he was fine. Everything was cheap. Did he need friends? He could literally go up to just about anyone on the street and ask them to be friends and they would say yes enthusiastically. Was he sick? The clerics and doctors had his back.


    And as good as all that was, it was getting even better. Progress was slow, mostly, but every day the demons conquered another kind of catastrophe, cured another kind of sickness, or invented a new convenience. The normal demon life involved being born, finding a job you loved, working at it as much as you liked, spending your off hours with good people, and then continuing on that track until your time was used up.


    It was a good life, of which being boring was an important part. Arthur continued serving majicka-enhanced drinks for another few hours, cleaning up behind the counter as he went so he could leave on a moment’s notice if it came to that. And it did. The last few guests lingered longer than he expected, and by the time Arthur was able to bid them goodbye and get out his own doors, he barely had enough room to enjoy the satisfaction of locking up.


    He moved as fast as he could across the town, past the mouth of the canyon and towards the gates that led to the wild world beyond. Even those were safer than most would think, courtesy of the growing number of prowling, demon-friendly Pratas who guarded the town. Daisy ruled over them like an empress, impressing upon each newly born descendant the importance of leaving Arthur’s people alone.


    And when they got out of line, she was not above bringing in Rumble to even up the scales. At this point, Daisy’s firstborn child was a sleepy storage shed of potential violence. A look was generally enough for him to get his point across to the younger bear-like-monster-folk.


    This was, in a lot of ways, how most of Arthur’s days went. He spent at least a few hours at the shop, he worked for a few hours making Portable Arthur or processing ingredients, and then spent the rest of his day working on a civic project of some kind. He wasn’t the mayor anymore, but Spiky knew Arthur liked having his hand in the running-the-city pot and provided him with plenty of opportunities to help out. And so about a quarter of Arthur’s light workload came from stuff like that.


    But this new task on his plate? Totally different. This was a job Arthur did, not because of where he lived, but because of where he had lived in the past. This wasn’t about being a citizen of Coldbrook. This new burden was being put on his shoulders because he was an immigrant to this place.


    Because he was an offworlder. Because even if they tended to say “of Coldbrook” now, people used to call him Arthur Teamaster, of Earth.


    “Hey, Spiky,” Arthur said, spotting his friend leaning on a tree near the outer gate. “He’s not with you?”


    “No, he left with Talca for a few minutes. To see Littal’s armor.”


    “The joke armor that Milo made for him? Why?”


    “Because we didn’t tell him it was a joke.” Spiky mopped his brow. “I’m very serious, Arthur, when I say that I don’t know why I let him out of my sight this long. He doesn’t have a class yet, and all he wants to do is violence. In his last town, he snuck off far enough to get into their dungeon twice before they could catch him. Unsupervised. Unarmed, except for a dull kitchen knife he found somewhere.”


    “Yikes.”


    “And he isn’t considering anything else at all. Every cleric who meets him, every warrior who assesses him, everyone gets the feeling he’s not supposed to be this way. You’ve never met someone who feels so… off the track, I suppose? It’s off-putting, Arthur.”


    “And that’s where I come in?”


    Spiky motioned towards a bench. “Yes. I hope so, anyway. And it isn’t the sort of thing where we’d usually be so pushy about getting you involved, but…”


    “He’s an offworlder,” Arthur said. “And you don’t know any other offworlders besides me.”


    “Something like that. I don’t really have any advice except to do your best.”


    “Fair enough.” Arthur stood as Talca appeared around the gate, another person in tow. “I’ll give it a shot.”


    The first time Arthur saw Euth, he was shocked at how much alike they were. Every person in Arthur’s life was mostly shaped in a human way, but that was where the similarities stopped. For as long as he had been in the Demon World, Arthur had been getting used to the fact that people came with fur and feathers. Some had claws. A few had bills or beaks. But everyone was something. He thought of them as half-human, but that wasn’t really true. They were demons, and that’s just how they were.


    Euth was different. Euth had skin. A bit darker than Arthur’s, but skin all the same. He didn’t have a beak or claws. Arthur knew in advance that he wasn’t dealing with an Earth human, and that Euth came from a place much different than Arthur’s former home. But still, human was human. This guy was a little shorter, and a little more muscular, but he wasn’t a demon.


    Which was part of the problem.


    “Hey.” Arthur walked up to Euth, who was studying the wall around the city intently and didn’t seem to notice him. “Interesting wall?”


    “It’s a very good wall.” Euth reached out and touched it. “How do you get it all smooth like that?”


    “It’s clad with slapstone,” Arthur said. “It’s a sort of self-healing rock. Karra uses them on the outside of the walls for… Honestly, I don’t know why. But she knows her stuff. There’s a reason.”


    “Probably to make it harder to climb.” Euth ran his hand down the smooth surface of the wall. “That was a problem, back home.”


    “They told me you had demons there, as well.”


    “Kind of. They were more like animals than here. Less like people. And not…”


    “Kind?”


    “Soft,” Euth said. “They weren’t weak like this.”


    “Ah. To be honest, I kind of like them soft. They make better sandwiches that way.”


    “You eat their sandwiches?” Euth looked confused. “Willingly?”


    “I do. They prepare the best sandwiches I’ve had. Come on. You’re hungry after that trip, right? Come on. I’ll get you one.”