We Could Be Sleeping in the Flowers (A Hermitcraft Story)

Chapter Five: The Brewmaster

Cub's potion shop, as it turned out, was not an adorable wooden teapot that somehow smelled of cedar and chamomile despite containing neither of those things. Cub's shop was literally in a flooded basement, accessible only by boat or swimming, and it smelled vaguely of espresso and mildew. Good prices, though.

Cub himself was even harder to find than his shop, so Grian sat in his rowboat for a few minutes and studied the various offerings. All of them were flavored like coffee drinks, which sounded appalling, but again with the unbeatable prices. After sampling potions of night vision and fire resistance, Grian wasn't sure he'd ever need to sleep again.

He was debating whether a speed potion would literally explode his heart when a noise from behind the wall suggested that someone was refilling dispensers. "Hello?" he called out. "Cub, are you in there?"

A moment later, Cub opened a hole in the wall and poked his head out, studying Grian owlishly. "Ah, Grian. hello. Welcome to my coffee bar. Nice hat."

"Cheers," Grian said, toasting him with the unopened speed bottle and ignoring the mention of the hat. It was big and straw and awful, even if it did cover up the telltale bunches of lilacs woven through his hair. "Stress tells me you're the server brewmaster this season. Got anything interesting you're working on?"

"Oh sure, sure. Come on back and have a look," Cub invited. Grian waited for Cub to show him a place to dock the boat, but the scientist just watched him silently with the unnerving flat gaze of someone waiting for an experiment to start. He reminded himself not to take it personally; that was just sort of Cub's way. Eventually he just hopped out of the boat and swam up to the ledge where Cub was standing. "This way."

The "coffeeshop" itself might have looked like a literal hole in the wall, but behind it was an expansive redstone setup complex enough that Grian was instantly lost. Cub was more than happy to point out every detail of the various dispensers that automatically filled the chests and whisked away diamonds from the shop, but none of that was what Grian was interested in.

"What about new potions?" he finally asked after what felt like an hour of incomprehensible redstone talk.

"New potions for what?" Cub asked right back. "I've got a lot of potions." He opened another door and led Grian into another large cave that seemed equally filled with potion stands and barista equipment. "I've got some very promising results on a potion of intangibility, but there's no set duration yet. Could get messy if you firm up in the middle of a wall. And I've been trying to get a pumpkin spice latte-flavored potion, but I'm having problems because pumpkin doesn't do anything. And there's-"

"Do you have any herbicide potions?" Grian blurted out, desperate to cut off the flow of information.

"Herbicide potions?" Cub repeated blankly. "Can't you just use a hoe?"

"No I can't use a hoe on my-" Grian took a deep breath, tried to ignore the tickle in it. "I need one that's ingestible."

"Oh, you want something for your Hanahaki disease!" Cub laughed. "If I could cure that, don't you think that every teenager from here to the Far Lands would be beating down my door?"

Grian's mouth dropped open. "You knew what I was after all this time and you've just been dragging me along through your redstone nonsense?"

Cub shrugged, completely unaffected by Grian's outrage. "You're the one with trouble expressing his feelings, my friend."

The feelings Grian was currently having could only be expressed by punching, but that didn't seem like a productive way to get Cub's help. Instead, Grian used his most stable, most controlled voice, the one that only sounded a little bit like he wanted to chew iron and spit nails. "All I need," he told Cub so, so, so calmly, "is something that lets me stop coughing up flowers while I get this figured out."

"You have to cough them up," Cub told him reasonably. "They can't just stay in there, that's how you get pneumonia."

Grian paused. "I don't even know if that's true or not." It sounded plausible, dammit. "What about something that keeps me from coughing up flowers right in front of... I mean, at times when it would be really inconvenient?"

Cub thought about that one for a minute. "You know you can just say Scar, right?" Grian hid his face in his hands. "Everyone already knows, with the apparent exception of Scar himself. You could just tell him and make a clean sweep of it."

"No I can't!" Grian threw up his arms. "I can't just go up to him and be all "Hey there, Scar, it turns out I don't just like you as a friend, I actually like-you-like-you! In fact, I like you so much that I've taken up the fun new hobby of gardening in my lungs, any thoughts? Bleaurgh!" He mimed what it would probably look like to vomit up a shulker box worth of flowers and figured that Cub would get the idea.

Cub stared at him. "I have no idea why Scar thinks you're so charming," he finally said.

Grian perked up. "He thinks I'm charming?"

"He also eats chorus fruit for fun," Cub pointed out. "I'm skeptical of his taste."

"Well I don't care about your taste," Grian waved that off. The tickle in his throat was getting very hard to ignore, and he figured his time here was limited. "I just need your expertise. Come on, you must have something."

Cub stroked his chin, which would've made him look very wise in the days when he'd had a full gray beard. "There might be something," he finally allowed. "Wait here." He disappeared into the maze of potion stands, which gave Grian a blessed couple of minutes to cough up the cluster of azure bluets that had been troubling his tonsils. He shoved them into a chest, figuring they might end up in somebody's coffee eventually and that would be at least a little funny.

By the time Cub came back Grian was sitting on a chest, flossing petals out of his teeth and wishing he'd at least been left in the room with all the buttons. He hopped up as soon as the brewmaster appeared. "Did you find it?" he demanded.

Cub was carrying a trio of potion bottles, each one an incredibly unappetizing brownish gray color. "Here's what I've got," he told Grian. "Take it just before you're going to talk to Scar, and maybe chase it down with some water. The taste... it could use some workshopping. You're not allergic to phantom membrane or cactus, right?"

"Yeah, it's fine, it's fine," Grian insisted, making grabby motions until Cub passed him the bottles. "So I can just pop one of these and I'll be normal for awhile? Perfect." Tucking them into his inventory, he passed Cub a diamond and reached out to shake his hand. "You're a lifesaver, man! I'm not even mad about the redstone anymore."

Cub returned the shake with a strong grip, but then didn't let go afterwards. "Scar is my best friend," he told Grian very seriously. "He's like a brother to me," and suddenly there was a hint of blue ice in Cub's dark eyes, a faint grayness in his skin that wasn't from the rocks around them. "If you keep screwing this up and make a fool of him, or if you hurt him in any way..." He smiled, and the smile was all teeth, and the teeth were all way too sharp. "Flowers won't be all you're coughing up."

Just like that, Cub let go of his hand and stepped back and everything was totally normal again. Grian blinked and took two quick steps away, shaking himself all over. Had that even happened? "I'm not going to hurt him!" he swore in a voice that was entirely normally-pitched. "I'm just gonna... go." Cub pulled a lever Grian hadn't even seen, and a staircase opened up in the wall. Before Grian even knew what was happening, he was back on the surface by the river, blinking into the brightness of the setting sun and considering his life choices.

Tomorrow. He'd figure all of this out tomorrow.