By the time Arthur was done, everyone else was already out in the foyer waiting for him.

“There you are,” Mizu said. “You smell better.”

“It’s the soap. I think it has flowers in it,” Arthur said.

She went up on tiptoes, bent him over a bit, and smelled his hair. “I think it’s blue star. And something else. I really like it.”

“Oh, you love to see it,” Ella said. “Did I ever tell you about the time I caught them on that bench, Itela? Both of them were sitting in my backyard, just smiling in their sleep.”

“That’s very cute. And I’d find it much more cute if I wasn’t starving. Talca, where are we going? Is it far?” Itela stood from her chair, ready to go. “And will they sell me three servings of whatever it is they make? I’m starving.”

Karbo nodded appreciatively at his wife’s words. It looked like he agreed in full.

“They will. And it’s a bit far, but it’s worth it, I promise.” Talca glanced up at a clock on the wall. “Let’s go. I’m not staying in the capital like you folks. Once we’ve eaten, need to pick up my new load and get going.”

Talca was fully hired for the entirety of the trip, but only needed for the coming to and leaving of the capital. In the meantime, there were goods in the capital that weren’t available elsewhere, or would be more expensive. The wagoner had rented a depot on his way about halfway back towards Coldbrook where he’d be dumping things, making frequent back-and-forth trips until he had accumulated as many big-city goods as he could carry before it came time to head back to the frontier.

I’d like to have him here, but I get it. Levels wait for no man.

As they walked through the city, Arthur was stuck by how different it all looked. The section they had started in was older than any other Demon World place he had ever walked through. It had a sense of antiquity, like it was built to an older style with older, richer materials. Then they turned a corner and found themselves in a place that looked almost futuristic by Demon World standards, using entirely different materials and much squarer angles.

“There’s so much metal,” Arthur said. “I’m surprised it doesn’t hurt my eyes.”

“This is what you could have had if you hadn’t leaned into a brick-and-rock motif for Coldbrook,” Milo said. “The whole town could have looked sharp enough to cut you.”

“I think I prefer the way we have it. Not that this isn’t neat, but… how did this actually get built?”

“Part of the town was torn down. I think it was just deemed time to fix the infrastructure beneath it, and the houses weren’t suited for newer amenities.” Mizu looked around, just as awestruck as Arthur by the sheer shininess of it all. “I hadn’t seen these buildings, but I saw the space when it was leveled.”

After the Demon-World-of-the-future section was passed, they found themselves in some kind of warehouse district littered with heavy-duty carts, big beasts of burden, and huge buildings clearly built for storage. Arthur was eagerly waiting to see what section of town they’d go to next when Talca stopped outside of a giant, fragile-looking wood structure and motioned the others towards a staircase gracing the side of it.

“Up, up,” he said. “I want to make sure we catch him before he leaves.”

“This?” Ella asked. “It looks like a stone storage depot. He works out of here?”

“Yup. Uttap doesn’t want people to find her. She says that transporters are easier customers.” Talca grinned. “We are. Always hungry and more life experience. For the kind of food she makes, that matters.”

At the top of the staircase, a weather-beaten door creaked open to reveal a huge room that served as a sort of second-level attic for the shipping space below. In a corner and using about one percent of the space it could have was a shop, manned by a single fox woman who looked up, noticed them, then assumed a distinctly nervous manner as they approached.

“Talca,” she said. “New people?”

“Yeah, sorry, I lost a bet. Don’t worry. You don’t have to explain anything, and nobody will complain. I promise.” Talca nodded.

Uttap screwed up her face in doubt, then tilted her head towards Ella.

“She’s famous.”

It was a statement of fact and a complaint all in one. She said as if that was bad news and Arthur could understand why. If he was suddenly ambushed with the Demon World’s best tea brewer and told to make him boba, he’d have some nerves too.

“She’s nice,” Talca promised. “Ella, you are banned from saying anything at all unless you enjoy the food. Do you agree?”

Ella shrugged. “Sure. Although I’m sure it will be great.”

Stolen content warning: this content belongs on Royal Road. Report any occurrences.

Uttap looked up in confusion. “Why?”

“I can see your setup from here. It’s perfect. Although I don’t quite know for what.”

“Noodles.” Uttap motioned towards the chairs, commanding them to sit with an odd amount of authority from someone who didn’t use words very well. “I make noodles.”

Once they were in the chairs, Talca dropped his voice and started to explain.

“There are no menus here. Uttap is a little different from most people. I delivered something to her house once. That’s how I found out about this place. There was hardly anything in her place besides a bed and boxes of salt. She either goes through a lot of salt, or doesn’t want to run out,” Talca said.

“Or uses special salt,” Ella added. “That’s a thing. Different regions produce different flavors. It’s subtle, but it’s real.”

“Fair enough.”

“What kind of noodles does she make?” Lily asked. “I kind of want meat.”

“Then you’ll get it somewhere else.” Talca shook his head. “They’ll have it at the inn, I’m sure. Uttap makes one thing. Exactly one. She makes noodles with butter, salt, and pepper. No alterations, no orders, no nothing. You sit down and she brings you a bowl.”

“Really?” Arthur pursed his lips. “And that’s enough to stay in business?”

“Well, she doesn’t have much overhead.” Itela looked around. “The rent has to be next to nothing.”

“But how good could it be?” Lily asked. “There are hardly any steps. Where would the majicka go?”

“Hmm.” Ella looked thoughtful. “I think I know. But let's wait for the food. You might be surprised.”

Behind the counter, Uttap was puttering around, pouring water, boiling water, adding noodles, adding salt, and humming to herself. To Arthur’s eyes, all the steps looked fairly conventional.

“She’s not doing anything amazing that I can see,” Arthur said. “Just what I’d do.”

“I think, Arthur,” Ella said, watching with interest as Uttap poured the noodles into a strainer, “that you’re about to get a lesson is specificity. Am I on the right track, Talca?”

“Yup. She doesn’t like to talk. Or do anything, I think, except make these noodles. It’s what makes her happy.” Talca tapped his head with his finger. “She thinks differently than most people. Nothing’s wrong with that, of course. But her whole approach is… Well, there’s a reason I rush here when I get to the capital.”

“And other places too, right?” Karbo asked. “I want to know where those are too.”

“Then win some more bets. Now be quiet until I’m done eating. Here she comes,” Talca hushed.

The cook approached the table, placed a tray with several heaped bowls of noodles down, then fled back to her corner of the shop. She really didn’t seem to like interacting with people much. Talca dug in straight away, while Arthur picked up a pair of chopsticks and studied the bowl, trying to figure out what was going on.

Nothing about it seemed weird, at all. It was a bowl of fairly conventional, wheat-based noodles. It had fairly normal butter melted over it and had been peppered with, as he expected, fairly ordinary pepper. There was a slight feel of majicka enhancement coming off them, but nothing overpowering, and nothing that Food Scientist was giving him many clues about.

Arthur took a bite. It was normal. Almost disappointingly so. Standard in every way. He turned to Talca, only to find his mouth was full, and looked down at his bowl to see it was already halfway empty.

As the noodles hit his stomach, the subtle aftertaste of the bites he had taken hit him in tandem with the best, most powerful feeling of satiation he had ever experienced. He could still eat, but his stomach was rejoicing. This, it said, is food. Put more of it in me.

“Wow,” Ella said. “That’s really something. I couldn’t do this.”

“Really?” Lily said, having cleared out her entire bowl already. “It’s good, but you’re Ella.”

“And Ella cooks a lot of different things,” Minos said. “It’s specificity loss. The more you do, the less you can do at any one thing. This noodle chef wins.”

“Uttap can’t cook anything else,” Talca said. “At least that’s what she says. That’s why there are no options. She says she can’t even grill meat.”

“I believe it.” Arthur rubbed his stomach and smacked his mouth. “Is there any way…”

“Sure,” Talca said. “Uttap, keep them coming. I’ll tell you when to stop.”

For the next hour, they ate. Ella broke away after her third bowl to go ask Uttap questions, which the fox answered as best she could, showing her kitchen setup and trying to explain the way she thought about butter. In the meantime, she kept the bowls flowing. At the end, it was just Karbo and Lily who managed to keep eating longer than the others. Karbo won, but not by much, putting down eight bowls to Lily’s seven-and-a-half. The owl collapsed to the ground, rolling around in a sort of permanently puffed up state, holding her stomach and groaning in satisfaction.

“Lily, you’re going to explode and become a ball of feathers,” Arthur said. “What am I going to do with just feathers?”

Lily laughed before realizing that she was too full to even do that.

“She’ll be fine,” Itela said. “You might have to carry her back to the inn.”

“And you might have to do it now. Uttap, that’s it. No more bowls.” Talca slapped down some large coins on the table, more than enough to cover their meal, and stood. “She doesn’t want us to stick around. Trust me. The best way to thank her is by clearing out.”

Nobody argued. Talca had been right enough about all things Uttap.

—

“I don’t understand,” Arthur said, shifting Lily a bit higher on his back as they made the trek back to the inn. Talca had already said goodbye and left to work various warehouses for goods, promising to check in periodically. “Specificity is one thing, but is it worth it?”

“You had the noodles. You tell me,” Ella said.

“I mean, they were good. Maybe even in an impossible way. But she can’t make anything else, right?” Arthur said. “That feels awfully limiting, kind of like her place.”

“And everyone who eats there will never forget the experience. I guarantee you there’s not a worker within a half-mile of that shop who wouldn’t die to protect her. The woman is a treasure.”

“If that’s the case, why does anyone go general?”

“The class picks the person, the person picks the class,” Ella said. “Think about it however you want. But you make the tea that makes sense to you and will make your customers feel how you think they should feel. Right?”

“Right.”

“She does the same, only on a smaller scale with just her version of noodles. Probably with a little less emphasis on the customer’s thoughts, but she works in a way that makes sense to her. She’s lucky she’s in the capital, I think. There are enough people to keep her going even when the noodles get old for some. They probably rotate out.”

Arthur stopped talking. Whatever explanations might have followed would have been extra because he grasped the real point. Uttap wanted the life she had. It fit her. And the system let her have it.

There wasn’t a more Demon World thing than that.