Chapter 108: The Bear Eats Pancakes

Chapter 108:
The Bear Eats Pancakes

 

SEVERAL DAYS PASSED since I returned to Crimonia.

Milaine and Cliff were busily scrambling to organize…well, everything. They got the cooperation of the adventurers’ guild to slay the monsters near the tunnel and had workers prepping the ground for a path leading to it. They ordered mana gems and hired workers to get them installed. Just the other day, Cliff had even gone to the capital, and he came back looking exhausted. Not my fault, by the way. Anyway, I think it’s karma getting him for naming it the Bear Tunnel. (Really? The Bear Tunnel?)

Whatever, it’d be all right. I was famished, so I headed over to the Bear’s Lounge.

The cartoonified bears were right there to greet me. They’d been the talk of the town recently, and the kids especially loved ’em. Part of that was promotion by Helen from the adventurers’ guild, and Milaine spread word about it too, but the bread itself drew people in with sheer deliciousness.

A flock of customers passed as I inspected the shop, heading in for another taste of Morin’s warm, fresh bread.

Our most recent top seller were pancakes positively swimming in honey, something that Morin and I had cooked up together. In terms of raw ingredients, our pancakes would never beat the ones back in my world, but they were tasty enough.

My goal today…was to eat those pancakes myself.

When I got in, I found tons of tiny bears bustling around the bakery. Those kids in bear uniforms came over the second they noticed me. I gave them head pats and told them to go back to their jobs—if one kid came up, the rest were prone to gathering and slowing everything down to a halt, which got them in trouble with Karin once. Head pats seemed like enough to stave that off—they went back to work, satisfied.

Agh, the kids’ bear tails wagging back and forth as they walked off was so adorable. I mean, I’m a grown-up here, so that kinda cuteness simply didn’t fit me. They looked much better on the kids, and the girls seemed especially good at pulling off that look.

But the clothes were becoming just a little concerning. A little while ago, I’d seen the kids from the shop walking around town in their uniforms. I asked Tiermina about it, and she told me the clothes were so comfortable the kids were just starting to wear them all the time. I even issued directions to get the kids money to buy their own clothes. In the end, though, Tiermina told me it was “good publicity” for the store and that was that.

Of course, they weren’t onesies, but I didn’t want to accidentally make animal cosplays fashionable in this world. I begged Tiermina to make it stop, though I had no idea how things would turn out.

“Everyone loves you, so of course they want to emulate you, Yuna. Just let them,” she told me, but my instincts told me that this was a line I couldn’t let them cross. If I just let it be, I could be patient zero of a bear onesie apocalypse.

 

As I walked around the restaurant looking for a good seat, I saw a familiar face having a meal:

The adventurer Rulina, eating pancakes all on her own. “Yuna, it’s been so long!”

We hadn’t run into each other in a while, partially because I hadn’t gone to the adventurers’ guild lately. “Rulina, don’t you need to work?” I sat down across from her.

“Oh, I just finished a job yesterday, so I’m planning on resting for a while. Are you eating too?”

“I was getting hungry, yeah.” We hailed a girl in a bear costume as she passed by and ordered some pancakes and fries. We were supposed to order at the counter, but there are advantages to owning the place.

“Oh, right, Yuna—can I ask you something?”

“What is it?”

“Does that Bear Tunnel have anything to do with you?”

Oh no. “Wh-Why are you asking me, of all people?”

“There’s the name, for one thing, and the bear statue in front of the tunnel looks a lot like the one in front of this shop.”

“You saw the statue?”

“Like I said, I just got back from a job. I was slaying the monsters near the tunnel.” Oh, this was that whole project Cliff mentioned to clear the monsters out. Guess Rulina was part of that. Of course she would’ve seen the statue. “So…does it have anything to do with you?”

Uhh. Uhh? Hmm. I didn’t want word to spread that I was related to the tunnel, but how could I get out of this?

“You don’t have to tell me,” she added, “but everyone thinks you’re involved.”

Ah man, of course they would—how had I fooled myself into thinking they wouldn’t? The tunnel’s name, the bear statue…the whole thing just screamed Yuna. This was all Cliff’s fault.

Well, there was no other option: I tried the play I talked over with Cliff and Milaine in advance. “Don’t go spreading this around, but I’m the discoverer of the tunnel.” It wasn’t like I could tell anyone I actually dug it.

“A secret tunnel?” Rulina narrowed her eyes at me skeptically. “Discovered this recently, right after you showed up, localized entirely within the town you just so happened to show up in?”

“Yes?” I said, slowly averting my eyes.

“Ha ha! All right, I didn’t mean to get you steamed there. We’ll say you found it.”

What was that supposed to mean? Well, whatever—at least she seemed to be done hounding me about it. We moved onto trivial things, and in the middle of that, the honey-laden pancakes, fries, and drinks came.

“Thank you,” I said to the girl with our food. She smiled happily and went back to work. The fresh pancakes and fries were lined up in front of my eyes, just waiting to be devoured…

“The food here sure is great.” Rulina reached out to grab my fries, and I decided (in my infinite wisdom) to allow this. She figured out that there was something up with the tunnel, so we could just consider this a little bribe: buying silence with fries. And hey, if I ran out of fries, I could just order more.

I got down to annihilating those sweet, sweet honey-topped pancakes, and was in the middle of sugary carb nirvana when Tiermina headed over to us. “Oh, Yuna, you really were here!”

(Was I not supposed to be? I ate another mouthful of pancake.)

“Thank goodness,” said Tiermina. “There was something I wanted to ask you. Do you have a moment?”

“Did something happen?” I asked. Tiermina glanced around. “You can’t talk about it here?”

“It’s not that, not exactly.” She looked a little lost for words.

“Well then, I’ll go to the back. Rulina, you can have my fries in exchange for…” I made a little zip motion across my lips. With that, I left my fries on the table, taking my half-eaten pancakes and drink with me to the back room.

In the break room now, I set the pancakes on the table to get back to eating and waited for Tiermina to start. (So great with a generous helping of honey…) “So, is something wrong?”

“Those pancakes you’re eating may be some of the last we’ll sell.”

I paused in the middle of my second bite. Excuse me?

“The price of honey,” she continued, “has gone up by a lot.”

“But…but why?” I couldn’t even imagine pancakes without honey.

“The reason is simple, Yuna: we can’t get more honey.”

“And why is that?”

“The place local honey is harvested from is…unavailable.”

“Unavailable?”

“Full of monsters,” said Tiermina. I tried to imagine what kind of monster would lurk around beehives, and all I could think of was another bear, a yellow little guy with a hundred-acre hunger for honey. “If the price keeps increasing at this rate, we won’t be able to afford it. That or we’ll have to increase the price of the pancakes and any bread that uses honey.”

“So…you want me to go slay the monsters?”

“Huh? No, I’m talking about the shop. As far as the monster slaying goes, there should be a quest at the adventurers’ guild for that. You own the shop, so you really should think all these things over.”

Right, which is why I thought she told me to slay the monsters so we could get that golden good stuff. I guess she wasn’t, though? Maybe I was getting more impulsive…yeah, if I didn’t pause and deliberate now and then, I’d end up in trouble.

“We have to either temporarily discontinue the products that use honey or raise the prices,” she said.

“Can we really sell our stock if we jack up the price?”

“Maybe not as much as usual, but I think we’d still make sales. Then again, the things that use honey are popular with the kids, so I’d rather not raise the prices.”

“So that’s the situation?”

“Yes. What should we do?”

Basically, we had three options: stop sales, prepare to sell things at a loss, or peg our prices to the cost of honey. “What did Morin have to say about this?”

“She doesn’t like dealing with money; she said she’d leave it up to me.”

I nodded. Yep, very Morin-ish.

“She did say that if we’re not getting any more honey, she’ll have to change the menu, so she’d rather know sooner than later.”

“How’s our current stock?”

“We’ve been making a lot of sales…” said Tiermina thoughtfully. “So…I’d say we have two or three days. It isn’t much time, and I just wish I knew what to do.”

Hmm, not great, but…if it really was just a small loss, I could deal with it. “The pancakes really are that popular?”

“Everything is popular. That’s why I don’t think that our overall sales will decrease if we lose all our products that use honey, even if we’ll have some disappointed customers…and we will, especially the kids.”

Ugh, I really needed to figure out what was up with the honey then. “You think the trade guild knows what’s going on?”

“I doubt it. I asked them the other day, but I haven’t heard a peep yet.”

“Gotcha. Once I finish this,” I said, raising the pancake piece on my fork, “I’ll head over to the trade guild.” Ahh. Good stuff.

“Are you sure?”

“Yeah, I’ve been leaving everything about the shop to you. I’ve got to act like the shop’s owner every once in a while.” Plus, I’d spent more than enough time living that slacker life after coming back from Mileela. If I didn’t work sometimes, what kind of example would that be for the little kids?