Arthur went around the corner to someone else’s food shop, explained to that he was stealing both their kitchen and any spare tea they had around, and brewed a pot of what might have been the worst tea he ever made.


    He would have liked to think the majicka made up for it, but even that was questionable.


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    Tea of Expelling a Child From One’s Body


    Childbirth is painful for a number of reasons, some good, some bad. It is, however, less painful on the Demon World than in other system universes. To some extent, what this tea attempts to do has already been done by the stat-enhanced Demon Body. Most other forms of pain relief are counterproductive, either because they hide warning signs of worse things, or because they replace a known variable with an unknown one.


    The System is allowing this tea to exist exactly once, in the cup you hold in your hands. It is otherwise precluding it from ever being made again. As it stands, the Tea of Expelling a Child From One’s Body will assist in the birthing process a slight amount.


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    More than ever before, Arthur thought he was probably getting some special treatment from the system. He didn’t question it. He just protected the tea as if it was the most important thing ever created until he could get back to the medical building and give it to his wife.


    After that, things went kind of quickly. It turned out Mizu didn’t need much of a jump start to finish off the process. Sooner than Arthur thought possible, he was sitting on the delivery bed next to his wife, holding their brand-new baby son.


    “Thank the gods he’s blue,” Arthur said. “I was worried he’d look like me.”


    “Why? You look fine.”


    “Not like water demon men, though. Be honest. Have you ever seen one that wasn’t all muscly and perfect?”


    “I have not,” Mizu said. “But I wanted him to be pink, anyway.”


    “Pink’s overrated.”


    “Not to me.” Mizu glanced at the tea Arthur made. “You didn’t have to make that for me.”


    “Well, I wanted to,” Arthur said. “So we have a boy.”


    “We do,” Mizu said.


    “It suddenly occurs to me that we have not chosen a name for this baby.”


    “I was thinking Rumble.”


    “You were not.”


    “No.” Mizu smiled, then reached for the baby. “I also forgot. Water demons have a tradition of waiting a few days to name the child. It’s supposed to… reveal what they are like, before the name is chosen.”


    “Is that why your name is water?” Arthur asked.


    “Is that what it means in your language?”


    “In one of the Earth languages, sure. I figured it got translated.”


    “No.” Mizu leaned back against the back of the bed. “It means briar. They thought I’d sit very still, but still be dangerous.”


    “Ah.” Arthur relaxed. “So close yet so wrong, somehow.”


    Arthur was allowed to say for another twenty minutes or so before both Mizu and the doctor insisted he leave to let her sleep for a while. The baby, counter to what Arthur would have expected, was calm and completely not in need of him at that moment.


    He found himself in an extreme post-adrenaline slump. He didn’t feel like he could sit down or sleep himself, but also was more or less just staggering blindly around town. It had been a long day already, somehow, like his own fatigue was going for a speed run record. He wandered around aimlessly until he was finally knocked out of his funk by something he never expected to see.


    “No. You wouldn’t be good for a freehand class.” Lily shook her head at the poor human new arrival, who was peering down helplessly at an abnormally large book. “Freehand classes are about creativity. You aren’t really that person. It doesn’t matter how trained you are. You’d suck at them. I promise.”


    “What if it wasn’t fighting? Just… you know. Moving or something,” Euth tried.


    “Do you want to be a dancer?”


    “No.”


    “Gymnast?”


    “No.”


    “Long-distance sprinter?”


    “That’s a whole class?”


    “Of course. It’s a whole class. It used to be a wartime scout messenger thing. These days, they’re like a delivery courier thing.”


    Something was off about Lily, something that Arthur couldn’t quite place. He sat down on a bench, not so out of view that he could be counted as hiding but not so in-view that either of them would notice him, and shamelessly eavesdropped.If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.


    “Ah. Well not that either,” Euth admitted.


    “It’s not surprising.” Lily’s words were just a little stiff. Like she was choosing each one. “I figure you need something that’s in-between perfection and creativity. Something where you’d make changes, but you’d need to calculate them. There’s calligrapher, but…”


    Lily went on for a while until Arthur finally figured out what was wrong with her. She was flustered. It was easy to miss, but she was uncomfortable around the boy. She seemed like she was choosing every word because she actually was, trying to make sure she didn’t say the wrong thing. It was, by far, the weirdest thing Arthur had ever seen. Lily Expediter, who had once argued the system into submission, was worried about what she sounded like.


    “Back on my old world, there was a class. They’d draw magic into things.” Euth grabbed Lily’s hand, uncurled her finger, and drew a circle on his own palm with it. “Shapes and things, like that. Into objects, again and again, until they had magic in them. That was sort of neat. I asked my dad if I could try it and he said no.”


    Lily stared down at her hand, senseless. Euth looked at her confused for a moment, then back down at the hand, which he promptly dropped.


    “Oh. Sorry,” he said, flushing.


    “No, no. It’s fine. Yes. Rubbing magic into things. There should be something like that.” Lily flipped a few pages. “Here. This is the rune section. I think what you want isn’t exactly available, but some classes like enchanter are…”


    Arthur picked that moment to leave. If some combination of him hurling a teenager through the air and Lily dazzling him with her charm fixed the kid, he’d take it. And if the kid was a little broken, then so was Arthur when he arrived to the Demon World. If Euth’s contract was anything like his, the System was already working behind the scenes to fix things for him.


    And besides, even if there was a problem, Lily was smarter than Arthur. She’d be able to handle it.


    —


    Most Demon World pregnancies went off without much of a hitch, but it was still considered to be a time that deserved some care. The rest of the day and a good part of the next morning were spent under the careful supervision of a doctor. Once Mizu’s stats and Arthur’s best healing teas had several hours to work and the baby was confirmed healthy, they were given permission to leave, provided they reported back the moment anything seemed wrong.


    And, like a sneak, the doctor didn’t tell them they were allowed to leave before he spilled the beans to everyone else. When Arthur and Mizu cleared the doors of the medical center, the entire town was there. They cheered, woke up the baby, took their half-serious scolding from Mizu in good spirits, then parted to let Arthur and Mizu through and towards home.


    The next few days were a bit of a blur. There was a baby now, one that lived in Arthur’s house and foolishly depended on him for protection and sustenance, if somewhat indirectly. He was suddenly even more aware of how incredibly unprepared he was for all this, and told Mizu so.


    “You idiot,” Mizu said. “How are you unprepared? This is your second child. Most people don’t get practice like that.”


    “Second? Oh, Lily. Yeah. I guess.” Arthur blinked. “But still, I haven’t had a baby before. Lily came half-grown. What do I even do? What does he want?”


    “Right now he wants food, and to be warm. And he’s figuring out what else he might want. Your job is just to be around when that happens. Can you handle that?”


    “Yes.” Arthur took the baby and looked down at him. “He’s a pretty good baby. I feel like I owe the old man between worlds more thanks, if I ever see him again.”


    “Doesn’t he have another name besides that? You always call him the old man.”


    “If he did, he never said.” Arthur shrugged. “He might not even be the kind of thing that has a name. But to the extent I ever thought of him as having one, I think I thought of him as Sam.”


    “Oh. That’s nice. Does it mean anything?”


    “Probably. It’s from a very old language on my old world. It’s short for another name, but I don’t like that longer name.”


    “Well, fine then.” Mizu nodded. “Done.”


    “With what?”


    “Thanking the old man.” She leaned over and ran her finger across the baby’s cheek, lightly. “For what it’s worth, I owe him too. Hopefully, this evens the score a bit. Arthur Teamaster, meet Sam. The newest member of our family.”


    —


    After a few days of figuring out mom-feedings, bottles, diapers, and general sleeping arrangements, things calmed down enough for Arthur to feel like he could leave the house a bit more often, mostly for food that Mizu wanted. It was on the first of those trips out that Euth finally found him, catching up to him as he walked through a park on his way to a distant doldur vendor Mizu liked.


    “So… hey,” Euth said. “I wanted to talk to you.”


    “Sure thing. I have time this time, actually. And sorry for last time.”


    “No, I mean, you were having a baby. I’m sorry. Although just so you know, you throw really hard. Maybe keep a lid on that next time.”


    “Oops.” Arthur winced apologetically again. “Anyway, sit. It’s nice out. We can talk here in the park.”


    “I just wanted you to know that everything’s fine. I went and talked to Talca about it, and he sort of dragged me around town, setting me up with things. A house, which I guess is just free here? And a mouse came by and gave me unbreakable kitchen stuff. She said she made it.”


    “Ah. That would be Rhodia. A good friend. She was filling in for me. And, heads up, those cups aren’t exactly unbreakable. They are tough, but you’d need to enchant them for them to withstand a really solid drop.”


    “Yeah, I know.” Euth reached into his pocket. “That’s what I was talking about. All that happened after I got these.”


    Pulling out a small, stiff canvas bag, Euth opened the top to reveal a small set of silver needles. The kind enchanters used.


    “I guess I don’t need all five of these. They told me that I’d figure out which one worked best, and then I’d just use that size from now on. And I’ve been trying to enchant the cups.”


    “That’s incredible, Euth.” Arthur knew just enough about young people from having been one to know he should give as much support and enthusiasm as he could manage right now. Euth nodded appreciatively and smiled as he confirmed Arthur thought all this was a good thing. “Did you manage to successfully enchant anything yet?”


    “Uh… no.” Euth shook his head. “I kind of exploded most of the cups and mugs and things. And I don’t know how to tell that lady. Mouse. Mouse-demon lady.”


    “I’ll handle talking to Rhodia,” Arthur said. “And don’t worry. I think I know what kind of set she gave you, and she has plenty.”


    “Oh, good.” Euth breathed a sigh of relief. “I didn’t want to hurt her feelings. She was really nice.”


    “Let’s walk.” Arthur motioned towards the direction he was going anyway, and they set off. “So how did all this happen? Last I talked to you, you were still dead set on stabbing things.”


    “Kind of you, kind of something else. You told me that thing about… you know, being happy. And I realized it’s true. Like wherever my mom and dad and sisters are. I just hope they are doing well. I don’t want them to have to fight anymore. And I didn’t think about it like that before you told me to.”


    “Well, I’m glad it helped. What was the other thing, out of curiosity.”


    “A girl,” Euth said. “I was not expecting that, for the record.”


    “Because a girl wouldn’t know?”


    Euth gave him a fishy look over that. “No. That’s stupid. Because of… I mean, you should see her. She’s the most beautiful thing, and she saw me reading on a bench, and could tell I didn’t understand, and then she spent hours and hours helping me.”


    Euth went on for a while describing the wonders of Arthur’s owl daughter until Arthur got guilty and let him in on the secret. The cry of dismay Euth let out once he realized what he had done almost, but not quite, convinced Arthur the boy had missed his calling as a crier.