《Dreamer's Ten-Tea-Cle Café》Chapter Seventeen - Mango Cake
Advertisement
Chapter Seventeen - Mango Cake
Crossover: Beneath the Dragoneye Moons by Selkie Myth
***
A strange florp occurred, and I was suddenly in a cafe.
Espresso machines gurgled, a slow-roaster ticked - all sounds that I recognized even though I hadn’t heard them in a long time. Was I on Earth?
I looked around to reorientate myself, only now noticing the girl - about my own age - standing a few feet ahead of me with a wince on her face and a white towel around her hand. She was clutching a wound, something I’d seen plenty of times.
Next to her was a girl. A girl with a rather cute pout and a not so cute amount of tentacles slipping out of her dress.
“Hey there. Are you hurt? And is that a coffee machine?”
“Oh? Yeah, that’s a coffee machine. I’m really sorry, I cut myself because I was clumsy, and then Dreamer tried to help but, ah, well, now you’re here. Are you a doctor?”
She glanced down at my clothes, steel armour, skirt, sandals, and seemed to decide that I wasn’t. Maybe she couldn’t see my class? Hers was [Artisan] but it was about as pale as a class could be.
“I’m a healer,” I said.
I glanced at the strange girl with the tentacles. This obviously wasn’t Pallos, so maybe tentacle-girls were the norm here? [Dreamer - The Eater of Gods - She Who Is Pat - The Nightmare]
The title was black.
Not just black, it was a void, letters so dark they seemed to make the idea of colours fade.
A tentacle slid out of nothing, one covered in eyes, and it prodded at the class, the title shifting to the side.
Nope. Nope nope nope. I was going to be clever and pretend that I hadn’t even looked.
“Abigail is hurt. Can you fix her?”
Advertisement
“Please,” the girl I presumed was Abigail said.
“Please.”
“Healing, yes. I can heal, that is something I do,” I said as I rushed closer. It wasn’t often that I was distracted from healing, but then again... whatever Dreamer was felt like a great excuse for a momentary pause.
I touched Abigail’s wrist, careful not to alarm her, and she surrendered her hand to me.
“How are you hurt? The more I know, the better I can heal you.” I asked.
“I was cleaning the bean grinder, and I sliced my thumb, it’s that...” Abigail paused and looked over to a counter where I presumed a bean grinder had been before.
“It hurt you,” the small god-eating tentacle child said.
The healing was easy. Ridiculously easy. My mana didn’t even have time to drop before it was back up to full. Abigail’s cut had been no worse than a bad papercut.
“All healed,” I said as I helped Abigail unwrap her hand from the cloth she’d used to staunch her bleeding.
“Oh, thank you,” Abigail said.
“No problem, it’s what I do. Speaking of which, where am I?”
“This is my and Dreamer’s tea shop. Would you like some tea before Dreamer sends you back? For the road, so to speak? Maybe some pastries?”
“I don’t need payment for such a small bit of healing. Uh, do you usually summon healers whenever you get cut?”
It would be a bit of a pain if they did that every time. What if I had been in the middle of an operation or something when I was yanked over? Urgh, I’d need to make a point of teaching Abigail not to yoink healers willy-nilly.
“No, I thought I was fine, but Dreamer was afraid,” Abigail said. She reached over and Dreamer moved closer so that when Abigail’s hand came down, it landed on her head.
Advertisement
The tentacle girl let out a content little sigh.
“So, you can send me back, right?”
“Yeah,” Dreamer said.
“Cool. In that case, I’d love some tea?”
This was unusual, but I was determined to make the best of it.
Abigail escorted me out of the kitchen and into a dining area that felt more modern than anything I’d seen in a long time. She gestured to a seat at a table and I sat down. It wasn’t too far from the corner, where a girl that could have been the tentacle-girl’s twin was sitting and reading from - to my surprise - an actual paper pamphlet.
“Here’s the menu,” Abigail said as she placed a cardstock menu on the table with a click.
“Thanks,” I said.
My eyes scanned the long list of teas, then zeroed in on the list of deserts.
They had mango cake.
They had whipped cream.
Heck yeah!
I was confused for a moment when my thumb brushed the menu and it moved. It was electronic!
I was probably a little too excited as I clicked on the various options and enjoyed the little beeps and boops the menu made. Eventually though, I tampered down my gluttony and only ordered a slice of cake and some tea.
I sat with rapidly decreasing patience while Abigail puttered away behind the counter and the girl with the pamphlets scribbled away. I had actually lost sight of Dreamer, which I would never admit to anyone with the rangers because losing sight of something like that was just embarrassing.
“So, what’re you making there?” I asked.
“Pamphlets,” the girl replied distractedly.
“That’s neat. What are they about?”
“They’re Not Today pamphlets,” she said.
Her head rose.
“Do you want one?”
Uh. “Sure?”
The paper alone might be interesting to have. A long tentacle slithered over to me and carefully placed a pamphlet over my menu with an amount of care and delicacy that something so obviously made by a child probably didn’t deserve.
The cover had Not Today written on it, in crayon. Under that was a drawing of a one-armed, one-tentacled girl. The drawing’s face had a flat line for a mouth.
I opened it up and scanned through the text.
Today is not the day where you will die.
That means that you still have things to do.
Do the things you’re meant to do.
You still have many days to live.
The next page had a counter on it, the number displayed - in the thousands - was flickering up and down like a digital clock on the fritz, but it was drawn in crayon.
“What’s this part?” I asked, a little nervous.
“How many days until it is today.”
I carefully laid the pamphlet down. “Nice, very, uh, nice.”
“Thank you. I give people pamphlets. It’s my purpose in life. Now I make pamphlets to give to people. That isn’t my purpose, but it makes me happy.”
“Well, we all need hobbies,” I said.
Fortunately, Abigail showed up with a large wedge of cake on a plate, a steaming cup of tea, and a small cardboard box. “I saw you smiling when you saw the cake, and I don’t think it’s very popular, so I put the rest in the box. As an apology for Dreamer’s... Dreamerness.”
I stared at the wedge. It was tall and fat, with the yellowy goodness of mango wedges dripping with some sort of sugary sauce jammed between layers of cake. There was icing. There were crushed almonds on top. There was an unhealthy amount of whipped cream slathered onto the whole thing.
“Apology accepted,” I said.
***
Advertisement
To Break The World
Genesis had become the biggest and most popular vrmmorpg in the world, with a massive part of the world's population playing. But after several years the games quests have started to become repetitive, and the nations have reached a status quo. Not willing to let the game he loves fall to ruin, Matthew Harper has planned to shake things up...
8 129Chronicles of Trial and Error (re-write)
It was supposed to be a simple trip, a throw back to the highschool joys they once had as teens. Brandon was not ready to go into the light just like that. But alas, the light came to them and he could only resign himself to getting dragged along, taking solace in having Tim along for some of the ride.
8 158Supreme Formation Immortal Sovereign
Falling under the Heavenly Tribulation, Ascending Celestial Oalur Kang finds that he's back in the past. Watch him pursue the Heavenly Path of Formations and rise to the peak of the Immortal Path! . . . . . . . . . Hello, this is F-Rank! This is my take on writing cultivation stories. Though I'm sure nobody cares, the intent behind this story was focused on creating a more or less logical cultivation system. I read several stories where the mc transmigrated to a cultivation world (not calling names to avoid unnecessary angst) and was able to completely break the cultivation system and the logic of the world because they had the power of science on their side and were able to think more logically than everybody else. Despite the fact that some characters in those stories were older than the scientific method of thinking and even the human civilization as we know it and the whole society was older than our human race. So I decided to write a story where things about cultivation make sense (as far as a magical world full of super magical people can make sense), so here we are. I don't know if I will be able to fulfil this purpose but I hope that the story will end up enjoyable. Can also be considered a prequel for my other story "Wasn’t my new life in a magical world supposed to be easy?" but has very little overlapping content and can be read as a stand alone story. Also available on Scribble Hub.
8 88Reminiscence
My website: https://putiancom.wordpress.com This is a short story about revenge or something along the lines. (This is my first story ever written so please go ham at criticising my work.) Death. It is a form of punishment or torture. And can be also be a form of salvation. Ultimately, it forms different perspectives depending on the beholder itself and on how the beholder take it as. Life. A point in time where finding your purpose. Purpose, of life itself and experience its flow, either epiphany or hell. Death. It is an end. A point of no return. It also makes the beholder feel free, breaking away from the chain of life. It makes the beholder recollect and reflect when crossing the boundary between life and death. Boundaries. A place where a path will ultimately, be chosen with or without consideration in the decision, free. . . . A place where recounting life, take it as a feeling. The joys and sorrow accumulated, playing back, making the beholder reexperience life. "Reminiscing."
8 150Fragmented Realms
This is neither a fairy tale nor a happy story. This is the story of a man, a man whose sole wish was to achieve the peak of swordsmanship. Alas, fate had other plans for him. Finding himself, in a place where many wouldn’t even dare to so much as set a foot in and with no recollection of himself, he wakes up. His journey will be thorny, his beliefs will be shattered, his screams will be heard and his tears will run dry... Will he prevail through the countless hurdles awaiting him? Or will he end up broken by the end of it? Join Reizel, as he travels through the shattered world of Fragmented Realms and you will find out. ~~~ Author's note: First things first, thank you for reading. I hope you enjoy the story as much as I like writing it. Updates will be weekly for now, so take it slow and feel free to check back once in a while. Feedback is always welcome and so is constructive criticism. I wish you have a great read and I'll see you again later!
8 79Surviving the Dead
A world where the dead go after the living is all he had ever known. Living with the rest of his family in a bunker, the boy is sure they are the last of their kind. But what happens when they come across a woman named Holly? Fourteen-year-old Forest Shepherd was born into the apocalypse. As hard as surviving already was, he also has epilepsy. Will he be able to survive with this condition, or will it one day be the death of him?
8 139