Somewhere far, far away and yet very close in ways that mattered, the System looked down as a few of her children were making an absolute mess in the kitchen. Their working space was covered in a mix of tapioca-like flour, sugar, and eggs. There was only a single clean surface left to prepare food on.

That didn’t stop them. They were all hunched over in concentration. And they were making mistakes. Even the older, wiser child was letting things slip that she normally wouldn’t, letting her enthusiasm leak through the cooking perfection she had built up over the years.

Her hands would reach for the wrong things. Her eyes would miss slight mistakes in measurements that normally would stand out like a forest fire. She’d drop a plate or a utensil and just let it lay where it had landed, grabbing some other tool that was close enough for her purpose and using that instead.

To others, she might seem like an adult. To the very young, she might even seem to be an elder. But to the system, she was the same as all the thinking inhabitants of this world. A child. One who needed guidance like all the others.

Of course, the younger one was a tornado of wrong in comparison. He’d crack an egg, getting more shell than white into the mix. He’d spill entire bowls, add the wrong ingredients, and forget about things in the oven long enough to convert what should have been dessert bread into clouds of black smoke.

And looking down on all the chaos, the System smiled.

The boy had put more than enough effort into the process to qualify for the skill he wanted. She gave some people skills more quickly and with less work, but they tended to be people who either needed them immediately to survive or folks who couldn’t or wouldn’t get results without the skills.

But this boy? He’d try and try and try. The System had only had a few visitors from other places over the years, but on average, they were shockingly positive influences on her world in their own ways. This particular boy’s path to goodness seemed to be that he’d work at anything that might make a positive difference. He’d pound and pound endlessly at walls as long as there was a promise of something good once they fell, only stopping when someone else made him.

The end result was that for someone who came to her planet with the belief that he hated work, he did a truly shocking amount of it. He’d work himself tired, sore, and stupid if there was a reason. Better yet, he’d enjoy every moment of it without ever realizing that he loved the purity of good work.

For children like that, the System had something better than a free skill to offer. She could give not only the destination but also the journey, letting them steep their eventual prize into a deeper and richer thing, something that connected smoothly to the greater picture of who they were becoming.

The older child helping him was similar, just more set in her ways. And if the System planned to help her too. The boy would probably play a role in that, even though she couldn’t ask him to do so directly.

It didn’t matter. He seemed to have a knack for helping people.

—

“Arthur, if you drop another ball of dough, I’m going to crumple you up and shove you into an oven myself.” Ella scooped the dropped mess off the floor with her bare hands, chucking it into one of the several trash bins they had dragged into the room to help with the process. “You’re supposed to be a seasoned professional now. A veteran. A bearer of learned hands.”

“Something I’d take more seriously if you hadn’t just dropped an entire bowl of spices on the counter,” Arthur said as his hands kept working. “I’d expect a bird of your age...”

“Careful,” Ella warned.

“Of your expertise. I’d expect a demon of your illustrious reputation to be more precise.”

Arthur was, against all odds, the owner of a tea shop now. A boba tea shop, to be precise. And while the long, chaotic road that brought him to that point had taught him a lot of things, including how to make a proper cup of tea, it had been a lot shakier on other things people expected from that kind of shop. Specifically, he didn’t know how to bake. Not really.

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“Actually, you aren’t wrong,” Ella admitted. “There’s only so long a person can work at the same task before they start to slip. I think I’ve probably hit that limit.”

“Really, Ella? Throwing in the towel?”

In addition to being the kind of person who would take in a wet-behind-the-ears human without a second thought, Ella was usually the kind of person who wouldn’t blanche at the thought of a bit of extra cooking. Nine tenths of the time Arthur had spent around her been while she was cooking in some way.

She could do a lot of things besides that, including giving advice that always turned out shockingly accurate. But her primary way of interacting with the world always had and always would be feeding it, and Arthur was a little surprised to find she was giving up already, in just the fourth hour of overtime after a routine training all-nighter.

“Yes.” Ella lifted some bowls and spoons out of the way, then swept her arm across their workspace, sending a load of flour, spices, and sugar careening to the ground. “And so are you.”

“I think if we just went on a little longer, I might get it.”

“You might. But you probably wouldn’t. The system is a little tricky about things like this, Arthur. Some skills are easier to get than others. If this was one of the easy ones, I think you’d have it by now. You’re not going to get it with a few more batches of botched cookies.”

“I thought I was getting better at the cookies.”

“You were. Your failures have gone from horrific lapses of judgment to being much more subtle. Yet botched they remain. Honestly, it’s impressive. Your improvements have kept ahead of the fatigue.” She clapped her hands together. ”The point is, kiddo, that you’re not the kind of person who usually gets the system to move with simple grinding alone. Some people need something else mixed in with the practice to get there.”

“And I’m one of those?”

“Arthur, you are their king. And it looks like a bomb went off in here.” Wincing at the mess, Milo brought the sparrow-demon count in the kitchen from one to two as he walked in, located a mostly clean stool and took a seat. “Your skills all have stories. Always have. Hell, a lot of other people’s skills have stories just from being around you.”

“You should have seen him earlier,” Ella teased. “He used three different kinds of flour for a single batch of cookies. On accident.”

“And that’s a story?”

“It is when it kind of worked.” Ella tossed Milo an only almost-burned cookie. “Try that.”

Milo sunk his teeth into the cookie, which more or less exploded in his mouth.

“Huh.” Milo said through the crumbs. “It’s like it blows up into flavor. Only problem is that its a gross flavor.”

“I didn’t say he got anything else right on that batch. But something about the combination of starches did something here. Arthur, it was a good find.”

“You think so? I’m not sure exploding cookies is something the customers are clamoring for. Look at Milo.” Arthur nodded at his brother, who was trying his hardest to brush the crumbs off his shirt. “He looks like Karbo jumped him through a cafe.”

“Well, maybe it’s not suited for cookie forms. But think about pie crust. That’s thinner. Or crispy dumplings, where the oil will make keep it a bit more flexible. Or…”

“Oh, I’d better leave,” Milo picked up the conversation. “She’s gone.”

“Gone?”

“Yeah. Look at her. She’s in food-idea land. This used to happen a lot, when I was a kid.” Milo waved his hand in front of Ella’s face, who just went on mumbling about cooking methods, glazes, and ratios as before. “I haven’t seen it in a while, now that I think about it. But she’ll be like that for hours. You might as well go to work. Or sleep.”

“Sleep, I think. It’s been a long night.”

—

The system watched as the majicka in Ella swirled and changed, as active as it had been in years. All her cooking skills danced with her in-born intuition for all things having to do with the kitchen, creating new ideas and concepts from thin air and combining them with the library of things she already knew.

Everyone hit bottlenecks, including geniuses of Ella caliber. When it happened to someone who was young, the natural energy of their youth tended to push them through. But when it was someone who had already reached great heights, the motivation was often lacking. And so, the system usually found herself like a cook with a pot of soup that needed stirring, only without a spoon to roil the mix.

In that time of need, the boy did not disappoint.

As Ella turned Arthur’s chaotic inspiration into new culinary wonders in the days to come, some of the potential she generated would be preserved. Eventually, it would find its way to Arthur to speed his own growth instead of circulating through the population as it normally would. It was slightly inefficient, and took much more work than usual, but the System would do it anyway. She had given him the achievement that made it possible to help other people for a reason.

The disruption in the normal way of things was more than worth it, in the System’s opinion. If the boy followed his normal pattern, he’d pay it back tenfold.