Elara stood there. Inside my shop. Beaming. Radiating misplaced confidence in her secret-keeping abilities and my alleged magical prowess. It was like having a small, relentlessly cheerful sunbeam infiltrate a tomb. Annoying. And potentially flammable, given the state of the dust.
My newly acquired pouch of 'Dragon's Leaf' felt suddenly less promising in my hand. Its potential magic – the magic of basic caffeine stimulation – was being diluted by the sheer, overwhelming power of youthful enthusiasm invading my personal space.
"So," Elara continued, blissfully unaware of the psychic storm clouds gathering behind my impassive expression, "secrets! Magic! Don't worry, Mr. Bob, my lips are sealed!" She made an overly dramatic zipping motion across her mouth.
Primitive communication rituals. Tedious. And generally ineffective. Secrets had a tendency to leak, especially when entrusted to excitable teenagers convinced they were privy to arcane knowledge.
"No secrets," I repeated, the words tasting like ash. Or maybe that was just residual Stonker's Delight coating my palate. "Just junk. And dust."
I desperately needed to brew this tea. The anticipation, combined with the irritation of Elara's presence, was creating a feedback loop of grumpiness that threatened to reach critical mass. If I didn't get some theine into my system soon, I might accidentally optimize the local gravity field out of sheer pique. Messy. Requires filling out incident reports (metaphorical ones, but still annoying).
"Right, right! 'Junk'," Elara winked, clearly interpreting my denial as confirmation. "Like that old spyglass over there! Maybe it sees into other... dimensions?" She pointed a dramatically hopeful finger towards a battered brass telescope missing its eyepiece and coated in something suspiciously like fossilized bird droppings.
"Sees distant disappointment," I muttered, shuffling towards the disaster zone I euphemistically called my 'preparation area' – the vicinity of the grumpy stove and the leaky pump's indoor counterpart, a perpetually damp bucket.
Elara followed, her enthusiasm apparently impervious to my carefully cultivated aura of 'go away'. "Wow! Really? What kind of disappointment?"
I needed to get the stove going. Again. Feed the beast. Appease the minor fire god residing within its rusty shell. All while fending off questions about multidimensional bird-dropping telescopes. Peak retirement experience.
"The usual kind," I grunted, poking at the embers with a bent piece of metal. "Existential. Financial. Occasionally structural."
"Oh." Elara frowned, pondering this. "That sounds... deep."
Everything sounds deep when you're seventeen and haven't yet realized the universe primarily operates on bureaucratic indifference and random chance.
The stove finally, reluctantly, caught. Weak flames began to lick at the kindling. Progress. Now for the water. Did I have any left in the kettle from the Stonker's Delight fiasco? Probably not enough. Did I want to face the complaining pump again? Absolutely not. The perpetually damp bucket contained… water. Ish. Rainwater, mostly. With bits of leaf and the occasional drowned insect.
Close enough. Luxury was relative. Filtering out insect parts seemed like an unnecessary expenditure of energy right now.
I filled the kettle from the bucket, trying to ignore the small flecks of stuff swirling within. Purity was a concept this dimension treated with casual disdain. Why should I be any different?
"Mr. Bob," Elara piped up again, examining a collection of mismatched gears on a shelf, "Old Man Hemlock's sow, Petunia? She's off her feed again. Won't touch her slop. He thinks maybe she's sad because the goblins trampled her favorite wallowing puddle."
Porcine emotional distress. Riveting. Just the topic I wanted to discuss while attempting to brew potentially life-saving tea.
"Pigs are resilient," I offered, placing the kettle on the now slightly less grumpy stove. "Probably find a new puddle. Or develop a taste for existential angst."
Elara giggled. "You say the funniest things, Mr. Bob! But seriously, Widow Meadowsweet gave him some 'Piggy Pick-Me-Up' herbs, but Petunia just sniffed them and walked away."
Predictable. Widow Meadowsweet's herbal expertise clearly extended to disappointing multiple species. Maybe Petunia the Sow had better taste than I did. A humbling thought.
"Maybe Petunia doesn't like weeds," I suggested.
"Widow Meadowsweet says they're 'nature's bounty'!"
"Nature's bounty often includes things that taste terrible," I pointed out. A universal constant I'd verified across multiple galaxies. Including, apparently, Aerthos.
The kettle began to make faint hissing sounds. Anticipation built. Ignoring Elara's continuing monologue about pig psychology and village gossip, I carefully opened the precious pouch of Dragon's Leaf.
The aroma was… subtle. Very subtle. Dusty, yes. But underneath, a faint, dry, almost grassy scent. The ghost of proper tea. Not vibrant. Not fresh. But recognizably tea. Hope, that treacherous bastard, flared again.
"So," Elara was saying, "I thought, since you're so wise and all… what would you suggest for Petunia?"
I measured a small, careful spoonful of the precious leaves into my mug. The tiny, dark, curled fragments looked promising. Far more promising than the swamp-mulch that constituted Stonker's Delight.
"Tell Hemlock," I said distractedly, my focus entirely on the brewing process, "to try… variety."
"Variety?" Elara echoed, latching onto the word like it was a profound mystical utterance.
"Different slop," I clarified, impatience colouring my tone. "Maybe add some… slightly bruised apples. Novelty stimulates appetite. Sometimes." It worked on carnivorous space slugs in Sector 9. Might work on a depressed pig. Low probability, minimal effort suggestion.
"Bruised apples! Variety! Novelty!" Elara gasped, her eyes wide with revelation. "Mr. Bob, that's brilliant! It's not just about the food, is it? It's about… enriching her environment! Breaking the monotony! A metaphor for life!"
Oh, for the love of silent voids. No. It was about getting a depressed pig to eat slightly damaged fruit. Zero metaphorical content intended. Why did primitives insist on searching for deeper meaning in utterly mundane pronouncements? It was exhausting.
The kettle whistled. A proper whistle this time! Not the pathetic sigh of the previous attempt. Hot water! Actually hot! Maybe the stove god was feeling generous today. Or maybe the bucket water contained fewer depressing impurities.
With exaggerated care, I poured the steaming water over the Dragon's Leaf fragments. Watched the water turn a pale amber colour. Not pond scum green. Not muddy brown. Amber. A beautiful, promising, tea-like amber.
The aroma intensified slightly. Still dusty. Still faint. But undeniably tea.
"Wow," Elara breathed, apparently forgetting Petunia's existential crisis for a moment. "That smells… different."
"Hopefully," I muttered.
Now, the agonizing wait. Steeping time. Allowing the delicate flavours (or whatever remained of them after months in a dusty pouch) to infuse. Patience. A virtue I possessed in abundance only when it involved outlasting geological epochs, not waiting for tea.
Elara fidgeted. "So… bruises are okay sometimes? Metaphorically speaking?" she asked, apparently still stuck on the pig advice.
"Sometimes bruises are just bruises," I sighed. "Sometimes apples are just apples. Sometimes pigs are just sad." And sometimes retired cosmic entities just want a decent cup of tea without being dragged into philosophical discussions by proxy via porcine ennui.
The tea looked ready. Or as ready as it was going to get. Lifting the mug, I inhaled deeply. Dust. Faint grassiness. A hint of… something almost floral? Maybe? Or wishful thinking?
Moment of truth. No more distractions. No more pig philosophy. Just me, the mug, and the desperate hope for mediocrity.
I took a sip.
It wasn't celestial ambrosia. It wasn't the soul-restoring nectar brewed by sentient nebulae monks. It wasn't even 'good' by the standards of dimensions that actually prioritized beverage quality.
But… it was tea.
Actual, recognizable tea. Faint, yes. Stale, probably. Dusty, definitely. Overpriced, astronomically so. But the core flavour profile was there. The slight bitterness. The subtle complexity. And most importantly, the unmistakable, beautiful, life-affirming whisper of caffeine.
A wave of profound, grudging relief washed over me. Not joy. Not happiness. Just… the absence of profound disappointment. A baseline state I hadn't realized I'd missed so keenly.
"Is it... good?" Elara asked tentatively, watching my reaction with unnerving intensity.
"It's adequate," I replied, which from me, concerning beverages on Aerthos, was practically a five-star review. I took another, larger sip. Yes. Definitely adequate. Almost… pleasant, in a 'not actively offensive' sort of way.
The faint warmth spread through my borrowed circulatory system. The caffeine began its slow, gentle work on my weary synapses. The world didn't suddenly seem brighter, but the crushing weight of annoyance lessened fractionally. Maybe I wouldn't need to subconsciously recalibrate gravity today after all.
"Adequate," Elara repeated slowly, testing the word. "Right. Because perfection is an illusion, and true wisdom lies in accepting the 'adequate' nature of reality." She nodded sagely, convinced she'd decoded another layer of my grumpy profundity.
I just drank my tea. Arguing required energy I currently preferred to allocate towards absorbing caffeine.
Elara seemed to sense a shift, or perhaps just realized my attention was entirely focused on the mug. "Well," she said, gathering herself, "I should go tell Farmer Hemlock about the bruised apples! Thank you for the guidance, Mr. Bob!"
"Mmm," I responded, noncommittally.
She beamed again, deposited the wilting flower she'd been clutching onto a random pile of scrap metal (because of course she did), and bounced out of the shop, full of misplaced purpose and mangled metaphors.
The door closed. Silence. True silence this time, punctuated only by the gentle crackling of the fire and the sound of me sipping marginally acceptable tea.
Bliss. Fleeting, inadequate, overpriced bliss. But bliss nonetheless.
I savoured the moment. The warmth. The faint caffeine buzz. The absence of enthusiastic teenagers asking for life advice based on pig feed.
Then, a faint scrabbling sound came from behind a pile of discarded pottery in the corner. Followed by a squeak.
Probably just a rat. Or possibly the advance scout for an interdimensional rodent invasion triggered by my earlier probability manipulations.
I took another sip of tea. It was already starting to cool.
The bliss receded, replaced by the familiar low-grade hum of perpetual annoyance.
Adequate tea was a start. But it wasn't going to solve the Borin problem, the Elara problem, the Hemlock problem, the fundamental structural unsoundness of the shop, or the universe's apparent vendetta against my peace and quiet.
Still. Better than Stonker's Delight. Marginally.