Reincarnated As The Heroes Guide

Chapter 99: Boba Machine

Kalli was so happy to have her new machine that she didn’t even realize that there were dozens of people in the room watching her set up a snack stand and a life-sized bronze statue of herself behind the counter.

Finally, she turned around and smiled at them.

"Welcome, Heroes, to the Marimgar Hall of Heroes. I will be your Coordinator for the day, please come forward and turn in your quests. You may also approach the counter with the statue for quest turn in, if you don’t need to purchase anything or repay a debt."

The heroes thought that was a bit odd, but when they got to the counter with the statue, their quests completed, and the mystery boxes appeared on the counter in front of them, instead of floating in the air.

That was new.

But very few were headed to the statue counter. Not when Kalli had snacks, and the entire Academy was well known as a junk food restriction zone.

"What did you buy? I see chocolate and snacks, but what is the machine?"

"That, my friends, is bubble tea."

"Bubble tea? Isn’t that too hot to drink if it’s bubbling?" One of the heroes from the Naval group asked.

Kalli laughed and purchased a case of UHT processed milk, which could be kept on the shelf until opened.

"Just wait, give me thirty seconds, and I will blow your mind, oh ye of little culture."

She waited as the machine indicated that it was making ice and brewing the milk tea, then put in a scoop of tapioca pearls. The machine filled the plastic cup, and she realized that she had forgotten to get straws.

One more point gone.

"Here, try this. Nectar of the gods."

The sailor looked dubious about the concoction, with the odd black lumps in the bottom, but the first sip hit his tongue, and his eyes went wide.

"Good, right? It’s a favourite where I come from."

The cup was passed around the group, and Kalli laughed as a few of the heroes nearly choked on the tapioca pearls. That would be an embarrassing moment for her, having to rescue a hero from choking to death at the hands of the Coordinator’s favourite beverage.

"I don’t suppose those snacks are available. They’re not just there because you’re showing off your personal stash, right?" Reggie asked.

"Of course I’m not that cruel. I thought that having some snacks here would give people a reason to hang out and unwind after missions. Everyone is working hard, and they need the downtime. Not everything you eat can always be for the good of your health," Kalli joked.

That brightened the mood, and Kalli began handing out snacks with every quest completion.

She was getting far more points from the mission completions than she was spending on the snacks, and she could see the tension and exhaustion beginning to melt away from the heroes as they got back to a little bit of normalcy for an hour or two.

As the word spread that Kalli was giving out snacks for those turning in missions, the teams got more proactive about heading out.

Only, they had to work for it today.

The combination of early morning raids and continued hunting had caused the Swineherd Demons to retreat from the forest, and nobody wanted to go out to pick a fight in the daylight, when the creatures could follow them home or surround them.

They hadn’t forgotten what happened the first time they met the creatures.

Instead, they had to bide their time and ambush them when they were separated from their comrades. If they were out of sight of the other groups, they were safe enough to attack without risking a chain pull of increasingly large numbers of demons.

However, the real issue of the day was the new arrivals.

Once they were all up for the day, there were close to eight hundred civilians rescued from the convoy to get settled into apartments. The buildings across the street were fairly large, but it was still going to be fairly tight quarters, and there wouldn’t be any spare bedrooms, though they shouldn’t have to blend families to make space.

The ones who had been here longer could explain the system that worked, and Kalli knew that they were going to have to find tradespeople in the crowd to hire, so they could keep everything running, including the buildings.

You couldn’t expect an apartment building to function forever with no maintenance.

But they also hadn’t had any rain in a while, so the stored water was going to be gone soon, and they would be hauling water from the wells at the Academy.

Kalli would set one up near the gate, one of the new ones that didn’t rely upon natural groundwater to keep up the flow.

But that didn’t feed the actual plumbing of the apartments.

If they were going to remain here for years, they would have to make some adaptations to help gather water, and to conserve. However, that was something that she could recruit people to work on, not something that she felt the need to do herself.

[Delegating is the way. If they want all the features of a modern civilization, they can work for them. A bit of maintenance and construction isn’t too much to ask to alter the buildings.

They already have rainwater storage in them, to meet the old environmental standards.]

Kalli laughed to herself at the thought.

Environmental standards? The entire world was gone, replaced with an alien landscape, and they were actually turning out to some of the most valuable modifications that the buildings contained.

Or was that intentional?

She hadn’t looked into the history of those sorts of things on this world, but it might have been something that the leadership already knew about if it was done recently.

They had gotten advance warning of this disaster.

Kalli sighed as she had to buy more snacks for the morning returns. This was going to be a steady expense, she knew. An unavoidable one, now that she had set it up, but an expense.