章 44: When It Rainiers It Pours
Kir paid Urvi a silver strip for a potato sack's worth of beans, mostly on principle.
What followed would forever go down as a haze of memory and madness. Kir experimented on individual beans, extracting them from the coffee berry, then figuring out the exact combination of spells required to safely dry out and remove the mucilage, the hull, and the silverskin... all to get to the raw beans.
It was around dawn of the next day that he finally counted himself successful. The entire project had consumed his focus to the point that he'd ignored his roommate and possibly Stella for all of the day... Not that he could remember.
Now came the moment of truth.
With just a small amount of extracted beans, Kir gently roasted them with a small fire spell, careful not to overdo it as he sought out the rich brown appearance he knew from another life.
Though he'd expended half his mana to do it, after half a day of work and countless failures, he finally had a single shot glass' worth of coffee beans.
Just the smell alone was enough to reinvigorate him, and he stood up, feeling his body creak a bit from all the hours of sitting at his desk, and turned to the door. Curiously, Rainier wasn't in his bed, though the now-messy sheets indicated he had been. A quick sanity check verified that Rainier was not in the shower either.
Thus, bleary-eyed and smelling of roasted fruit, Kir decided to forget about his sexy roommate and make his way to the cafeteria. He kept his precious beans clutched in his palm as he got in the elevator, slightly slouching from his exertions. No one seemed to be awake, the common room was empty, and the first signs of life he saw was when he entered the cafeteria.
A few adults sat scattered about the room. Some appeared to be staff and others appeared to be grad students. Possibly. Kir hadn't looked into whether or not the school even had graduate programs.
He was too tired to remember that much of this world operated on a Master-Apprentice relationship, but not too tired to ask for a massive breakfast consisting of eggs, toast, cloudberry jelly, a small mountain of bacon, and an orange. He tried asking for a carafe and burner but got a negative response on that request and all variations until he finally asked for a kettle of tea and some boiling water.
After paying a ridiculous amount for his first breakfast at the school, Kir took his meal to the nearest table, not caring that the man across from him displaced himself rather than sit with a demonkin.
Kir ignored him. He had coffee to make.
After carefully lifting the beans into the air with magic, Kir crushed them by increasing the pressure around them until they'd turned into a fine powder.
He then pulled up the boiling water from the teapot, gently mixing in the coffee and being extra careful to keep the mulch that was leftover away from the water that went back into the pot.
The filtering was a surprisingly mana-intensive process, one that could have been easily remedied with the right kind of paper, but at this point, he was still experimenting. He was willing to be a bit frivolous with his abundant mana. As soon as he had an appropriately brown-black substance in the pot, he carefully set the coffee grounds down on an empty plate he'd acquired for that purpose.
As the last of the coffee was in the tea kettle, he pulled it close and inhaled through the lid.
It smelled like coffee. Fruity, a hint of earth, a touch of bitter promise...
He absolutely had to taste it...
"Heya roomie!"
Kir jumped in his seat as Rainer slid into the seat across from him.
"Rain... I didn't see you there," Kir stammered a bit.
"You did seem pretty into that thing you were doing. Making ink?" Rainier asked with a big smile on his face.
Rain's hair was matted with sweat and he smelled like he'd just gone on a long run... which wasn't entirely unpleasant. Did all angelkin smell like strawberries when they sweat? Today his halo was clinging to the back of head, like a metal sweatband.
Kir forced his mind back to the present and answered, "No, um, it's a drink. Something to help stay awake."
"Whoa! No kidding? Guess we both have trouble staying awake in class," Rain laughed and dug into his meal, which seemed to be entirely composed of fruits and vegetables.
"Wouldn't know... this is the first time I've ever been to magic school," Kir replied with a smirk.
Kir's memories of his schoolboy days from his previous life were hazy and episodic. He remembered little things like his gym teacher showing him how to tie a knot in a tie. The first girl he ever confessed to and got rejected by. He had better senses about facts and skills he learned from his secondary school days, but the names of the people who'd been there with him were beyond his reach.
"Oh yeah, you're a skip. I forgot," Rain said around a bite that consumed half a carrot.
"That seems a bit of a weird thing to forget... did someone hit you in the head this morning?" Kir joked.
"A few times," Rain said with a smile, "I go sparring with the Knight Academy in the mornings. Helps keep me in shape."
The way his blue eyes drew Kir in... telling him there wasn't an insincere bone in Rain's body...
Kir cleared his throat, "I've, uh, noticed you are quite in shape." He blushed a bit, unaware that his tail was wagging behind him.
As Kir finally poured himself a cup, asking about what sparring with the Knight Academy was like, a trio of girls approached the table.
The leader, a blonde girl with her hair in twin tails, spoke for them.
"Hi Rainier," she said, affecting a bit of shy interest.
"Hey Daisy," he smiled in greeting.
"The girls and I were wondering... well... would you like to come sit with us?"
She was so obviously interested in Rainier it kindof hurt Kir to watch as she swayed herself and tried to look appealing.
"Oh, uh, maybe some other time," Rain said with a sincere but slightly nervous smile, "My roommate and I were talking about training stuff, and I really don't want to be rude..."
"You two? Roommates?" Daisy said, managing to sound sorry for Rainier and disdainful of Kir at the same time. "You're joking."
Rainer tried to answer, "Yep, that's how it-"
"Do you have a problem with me?" Kir asked, interrupting as he stood up. The menace in his voice was enough to set the two girls behind Daisy flinching, but Daisy stood firm.
"You should know who you're speaking to," Daisy sneered. "If I wasn't a third year I'd put you in your place... but as it stands, I was just trying to offer Rain some better company. Now I'm thinking I should have a word with the staff about his housing..."
"Now everyone, let's just calm down..." Rainier raised his hands.
"So why don't you?" Kir challenged. "I've already won one duel against three, and that was just my first day."
"Please... don't compare me to those amateurs. I'd wipe the floor with you in a duel. But alas, challenges can only go sideways and up, not down... Though I suppose that's fortunate for you," she snickered, and the girls behind her followed suit.
"Fine, you want me to challenge you?" Kir snapped back. "I challenge you. You can even bring your little friends if you like." His blood had risen, and Kir felt an itch in his claws at the glare Daisy gave him.
"I accept," Daisy said. "But don't worry about my friends... I'll take you myself. After all, the only thing you seem to be good at is staying in a shield." Her friends giggled. "How about on the hour?" she asked.
"Fine by me," Kir said. That would at least give him enough time to finish breakfast. The world seemed to conspire to stop him from having his own coffee. "See you in the arena."
Daisy turned to Rainier, "My offer is still open, Rain, dearest..."
"I'm good, thanks... and it's Rainier," the angelkin replied, his tone much flatter than before.
They both went back to sitting as the girls departed.
After a moment of awkward silence, they both spoke at the same time.
""Sorry about that...""
Kir tried the coffee.
It was terrible.
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