Ravensdagger_Dreamers_Ten-Tea-Cle_Café

Dreamer's Ten-Tea-Cle Café

Annotation

Dreamer (and friends) open a little café on one of the quieter streets of Five Peaks. There they meet new friends, serve some tea to strangers, and tear open rifts in reality to solve mundane life problems.

These are the stories of the Ten-Tea-Cle Café!

[A Totally Official crossover between Love Crafted and: Azarinth Healer, Calamitous Bob, Vigor Mortis, Beneath the Dragoneye Moons, and many more!]

Dreamer's Ten-Tea-Cle Café

Prologue — Dreamer’s Ten'tea'cle Café

Chapter One — Rub a Dub Dub

Chapter Two — The Cleanest Bun in the Buniverse

Chapter Three — A Bunny-Girl Did It

Chapter Four — Kitty Cat

Chapter Five — Purrniture Purrchases

Chapter Six — Eating Tea People Place

Chapter Seven — Pretty Pretty Flowers

Chapter Eight — Poor Saps

Chapter Nine — Quiet Opening

Chapter Ten — Forbidden Things and Why You Should do Them

Chapter Eleven — A Simple Plan

Chapter Twelve — Bunch’a Brats

Chapter Thirteen — Big Sister Talk

Chapter Fourteen — Domo Arigato

Chapter Fifteen — Existentialism, More or Less

Chapter Sixteen — God-ssips

Chapter Seventeen — Mango Cake

Chapter Eighteen — Finding Solutions

Chapter Nineteen — The Pursuit of Reason

Chapter Twenty — Magical Girls

Chapter Twenty-One — Secret Pamphlet Making Technique: Long Horizontal Fold!

Chapter Twenty-Two — Close Physical Affection of the Third Kind

Chapter Twenty-Three — About Hugs

Chapter Twenty-Four — Vim and Vigor

Chapter Twenty-Five — Gift-giving Traditions

Chapter Twenty-Six — Late Night Time Travel

Chapter Twenty-Seven — Little Worries

Chapter Twenty-Eight — Numero

Chapter Twenty-Nine — North Hill

Chapter Thirty — Sneaky Scary Tentacles Send Shivers Down Your Mind

Chapter Thirty-One — Plushie Shop!

Chapter Thirty-Two — Shedding Some Light

Chapter Thirty-Three — A Customer-Friendly Experience

Chapter Thirty-Four — Gerard the Very Very Sane Plushie-Maker

Chapter Thirty-Five — A Bit Silly

Chapter Thirty-Six — Back to the Future’s Past

Chapter Thirty-Seven — Cult

Chapter Thirty-Eight — Solstice

Chapter Thirty-Nine — RacerGirl

Chapter Forty — A Visitor

Chapter Forty-One — Death

Chapter Forty-Two — The Inspector

Chapter Forty-Three — The Girl-With-No-Name (AKA Dreamer)

Chapter Forty-Four — GWNN

Dreamer's Ten-Tea-Cle Café

Prologue — Dreamer’s Ten'tea'cle Café

Dreamer’s Ten'tea'cle Café Dreamer—who was currently holding onto both Abigail and Daphne by means of her hand grasping one of Abigail’s and a tentacle around Daphne’s ankle—stared up at the building before her with her mouth agape and her eyes roaming across the old red brickwork.It wasn’t all that impressive to look at. She knew this because she was an expert at human buildings, having eaten several. “I don’t get it,” she admitted.It was just a normal building. The front had a pair of wide and tall windows next to a little door. There was a small fence-like thing around the bottom of the window with rotting plants in it. The door had an awning above it, with a torn-up tarp that used to be red and white but was now water stained and fading.“It needs a little bit of love,” Abigail said.Dreamer’s confusion only grew. Was Abigail going to make love to a building? That seemed very unsanitary, and she knew the things Abigail and Daphne got up to.“What’s it for?” Dreamer asked. If Abigail wanted to be all depraved and stuff, she didn’t care, as long as Abigail remembered that Dreamer was the one Abigail had to love the most.“Do you know what a café is?” Daphne asked. She hooked a lock of her blond hair behind one ear and smiled down at Dreamer, who shook her head. “A café is a shop that sells food.”Dreamer liked the idea so far. “This place doesn’t look like it’s selling any food now,” she said. Just to make sure, she snuck a few tentacles through the walls of this reality, then out the other side into the café. Other than a few mice, there wasn’t anything worth eating.She, of course, speared the mice through and yoinked them screaming and chittering into the void between realities, so she could snack on them later.“So what are we doing here then?” Dreamer asked.Abigail laughed, and Dreamer turned to look up to her. Abigail laughs were precious, so as soon as they were out of the immediate vicinity, she snatched the laugh out of the air and saved it for later. “Daph and I were talking, and the apothecary business… I don’t know if it’s what I want to do forever. This place actually belongs to Daphne’s family, and there’s a whole second floor we can use.”Dreamer caught on. “We’re moving?” she asked.Abigail let go of Dreamer’s hand, then squatted down next to Dreamer, the hem of her skirt brushing against the road. “Maybe. We’ll look around inside first. It might be nice to have a little shop all of our own. I’m a decent baker, you know.”Dreamer nodded. Abigail was! She especially liked it when Abigail baked and she got to help by eating the utensils when they became dirty.She never did understand how burning some things made them grow bigger, and taste better too. Tricksy human magic. “Alright,” Dreamer agreed.“You don’t mind?” Abigail asked.“Mind what?” Dreamer asked.“Moving out, coming to live here instead of living at home?”Dreamer shrugged. She’d lived next to dying stars and within the comforting embrace of black holes. Her homes, as many as they had been over the aeons, never lasted eternally. She was okay with moving on. Though her current home was the nicest. It had an Abigail, but this new home would have an Abigail too, and the same one, no less!Abigail was conveniently portable like that.“Well, let’s check it out,” Daphne said. The three of them walked over to the front, Dreamer recapturing Abigail’s hand when she stood back up and finished brushing off her skirt. Daphne started to fiddle within her skirt, then she pulled out a ring with a bunch of keys linked to it. “It’s one of these,” she said as she tried the lock.Dreamer got bored three keys later and touched the keyhole.Locks were very complex little mechanisms that clever humans came up with to keep nosy people out of their things. All someone had to do was push up a bunch of little levers, then turn the entire mechanism to move back a bolt. Two things that were very easy to do if one had a sufficient number of small tentacles.“Unlocked,” Dreamer said.“Where did you learn to do that?” Daphne asked as she pushed the door open with one hand. It squealed on rusty hinges, and a small bell above clinked pitifully.“You remember that one shop you and Abigail went to without me once?” Dreamer asked as they stepped in. It was very dusty. “The one where you both blushed a lot and where you bought that magic wand you hide in the box behind the picture frame in your office?”Neither Abigail nor Daphne said anything, so Dreamer went on.“When you were in there and I was checking to make sure you were okay, I discovered they had metal underwear with locks on them, so I wanted to see what was in them, but I didn’t want to just eat them because Abigail said I’m not allowed to eat that sort of thing, so I had to figure out the lock.”Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.Dreamer looked back when her arm tugged on Abigail’s. Abigail wasn’t moving anymore, and her face was very red. Daphne’s wasn’t far behind.“Are you both sick, or did I say one of those red-face things again?” Dreamer asked.“N-nevermind that,” Abigail said. “Can you just… forget all about that?”Dreamer considered it, then she shrugged. It wasn’t very important. So she jabbed a tentacle into her mind, grabbed that memory, and flung it away. She blinked a few times. “What now?” she asked.“Well, ah, this looks… cleanable?” Abigail asked as she looked about.The front room of the café was quite long; the rear section rose up three steps to a landing that was split in half by a counter with some racks and tables and shelves behind it. There was a lot of empty space, and a single broken table against one wall with a chair next to it. The air was dusty, with thick dust bunnies floating around and gathering into bigger lumps with the wind slipping in from the open door.Daphne sneezed a very Daphne sort of sneeze, all quiet and lady-like, her little lace handkerchief fluttering about. “We’ll need to clean the place to truly see its potential.”“It doesn’t seem that bad,” Abigail said. “There’s lots of room. We can set out at least four tables here. Maybe more if we really squeeze them in.”“You might want to limit the number of tables. That’ll lower the number of clients that’ll wait around. We don’t want to have more clients in the shop than we can care for at any one time,” Daphne said.“That sounds fair. Can we check the kitchen?” Abigail asked.They climbed up the back, where the counter blocked Dreamer’s view into the kitchen space. Once she slid some tentacles out from under her dress to raise her up, she could see that the part of the counter at the top didn’t have much behind it.“Just room for the till and maybe a few smaller machines,” Abigail muttered. “We can likely have a display here, for cakes and pastries.”“That’s a good idea,” Daphne said. She pointed to a door at the rear. “That’s the kitchen. Unless you feel like vaulting the counter?”Abigail giggled. “I wish. Come on, let’s check it out.”The kitchen door was locked. Daphne wiggled the handle, then let go and turned to Dreamer.Dreamer stared back. “What?”“Could you unlock it?” Daphne asked.Dreamer blinked. “I don’t know how to do that.”“But… you unlocked the front door.”“I did?” Dreamer asked. She couldn’t remember that.Abigail smacked herself in the face. Something she did sometimes. “I told her to forget how to do that,” she said. “Just… use the keys.”“What did I forget?” Dreamer asked. She couldn’t remember ever forgetting anything.“Nevermind,” Abigail said. Then she gave Dreamer celebratory pats, likely to congratulate her on her ability not to forget things.The kitchen was even dustier than the rest of the place, with pots and pans and all sorts of things laying around. There was a big oven at the rear, made of stacked stones with cracked cement between them, and a few stoves that looked like they were powered by some of that magic that humans like Abigail liked using.“Well, this has... potential,” Abigail said as she looked around.“It’s very dirty,” Dreamer pointed out.“It’s a bit dirty,” Abigail agreed. “Should we check out the upstairs?”“That sounds like a good idea,” Daphne said.To get upstairs they first had to go outside, then up a rickety staircase and into a small home on the second floor. It was a nice enough place, though it lacked all the stuff that made home home. None of Abigail’s books, none of Dreamer’s extra dresses. No painting of Abigail and Daphne on the walls. Still, it was a bigger place, if Dreamer didn’t count the extra space she’d shoved into their other home. Two bedrooms, a small kitchen and dining area, a much bigger washroom than they had at home.“You can have your own bedroom,” Abigail said.“But then where will you sleep?” Dreamer asked.Abigail laughed and pulled Dreamer into a side hug. “I like it,” she said. “There’s a nice view of the street, and it’s not too far from Daphne’s place. We just need to clean the tea shop up a bit and it’ll be perfect.”Dreamer nodded. “I can do that,” she said.Abigail eyed her. “Really?”Dreamer was always happy to help Abigail. “Yeah, I’m sure I can find a way to clean the place up.”“Well, I won’t say no to a bit of help,” Abigail said. She grinned down at Dreamer, who decided that she’d help more than just a bit.

* * *

Chapter One — Rub a Dub Dub

Chapter One — Rub a Dub Dub Crossover: Cinnamon Bun by RavensDagger Dreamer was out and about with Abigail. Even after being proclaimed Empress of Everything (by Dreamer), Abigail still insisted on going to school and working hard doing stuff for mortal money. Dreamer didn’t get it, but she wasn’t going to stop Abigail from having her fun.Besides, school was where Abigail had her friends, like Charlotte and Daphne, and Abigail liked learning things.The teachers were all very nice to Abigail ever since Dreamer threatened to consume their planet if anyone bothered her. The Inquisition people with the hats ran about and tried to make sure things worked out so that there was as little planet-eating as possible.Anyway, Dreamer was with Abigail, which didn’t mean that she was only with Abigail.You had to be really weak to only be in one place at a time.Dreamer looked around the café. It was certainly a place. A geographical location....She didn’t know what she was doing there, but she figured that she might as well do something while she was there. After all, Abigail had plans for the place. “She mentioned cleaning it up,” Dreamer muttered.She reached over to one of the tables and swiped a finger across it. It came back covered in grey dust.“Yup, it’s dirty in here,” Dreamer said before sticking her finger in her mouth.She frowned. She couldn’t remember ever actually cleaning anything before. Sometimes Abigail would sniff her and decide that she needed a bath. Did that count?Dreamer looked around the room. It wouldn’t be too hard to fill the entire café with water. Then all she’d need was a lot of soap and a rubber ducky.Did she need more than one rubber ducky? When she took a bath there was only one that Abigail set in the water next to her, but that was one bathtub of water. Were the number of rubber duckies meant to be proportional to the amount of water used?She stared around her. How many rubber duckies in volume was a café anyway?Dreamer rubbed the underside of her chin with a tentacle. Maybe she could ask for help?She blinked her eyes, those on the body that was currently with Abigail and Daphne and Charlotte. The three of them were sitting at the back of one of their classes, murmuring to each other while working on something. “Hey,” she said.All three turned to her. “Yes, Dreamer?” Abigail asked.“How many rubber duckies is a room?”“... What?”Dreamer sighed. “Nevermind.”She’d have to figure it out herself. Or maybe she could ask someone else? Dreamer clapped her tentacles. She had an excellent idea.When Abigail needed help taking over the planet and being accepted to her academy, she summoned Dreamer. Dreamer could do the same thing! It was a simple and elegant solution, and nothing could go wrong with it.She wondered where, exactly, to do the summoning, then shrugged and moved out of the café and up to the second floor. It was probably best to do it in the living room. She wanted to summon something alive, after all.Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.Dreamer didn’t know much about magic, so when it came time to make a summoning circle, she just got some long, ropey tentacles to form a circle on the floor. She stared at it. It was mostly round, which was a good start.“Oh, right,” she muttered. She wanted something for cleaning.She walked around and searched under the sinks, the place which was usually the dirtiest in the house, and where mortals put their cleaning stuff for some unfathomable reason.After grabbing a tentacleful of cleaning stuff she returned to her summoning circle and placed them here and there. Some soap in one lumpy side, a bit of bleach in the other, a moldy sponge nearer to the middle.It didn’t look right.Dreamer huffed and tried to think about what was missing, then it hit her! Magic, Abigail had said, was about balance and symbolism.She wasn’t home, and didn’t feel like going all the way back, so she sent some tentacles searching through the homes in the neighbourhood until she found what she needed.First, she found a rubber ducky. But it wasn’t a ducky so much as a rubber bunny. It was close enough, she figured, and she did steal it from someone's bath. They screamed a lot when her tentacle slithered through their wall and scooped it out of their bath, suds and all.That would represent something clean.For the dirty part, she grabbed a magical item from under someone’s bed. A wand of cure hysteria, something that Abigail once told her not to touch or talk or even think about because it was so dirty.She placed both on opposite ends of her summoning circle while not thinking about it.Now she just needed to actually summon someone!Dreamer knelt down and placed her hands on her summoning circle tentacles. She gave them a comforting squeeze, then tried to think of something appropriately spell-like to say. She wanted someone clean, so... Ah! That was easy. Abigail often sang sing-song ditties while taking baths.“Rub-a-dub-dub,Monster in a tubJa kuka luulet olevasi?Teurastaja, luoja, puhtauden tuojaPurging dirt and nastiness scrub!”Dreamer didn’t have magic, so she yoinked some form out of thin air and poured it into the summoning circle.It wobbled and burbled, magic going wild until Dreamer shoved some of the gurgly bits back down and trimmed off the sharper edges. The world twisted and distorted and wiggled a bit, then, with a soap-bubble pop, someone appeared about a metre off the ground.“Huh?” The person said. Then they said “Ow!” as they landed on the floor with a heavy thump.“Hello!” Dreamer said. She was quite happy that her magic had worked. She could tell that this person was from elsewhere, they still had a tendril connecting them to the place they were from, and also they had bunny ears atop their head, which wasn’t normal for people from this planet, at least as far as Dreamer knew.“Ow,” the person repeated. She shook her head-Dreamer assumed it was a girl because she had a blue skirt on and her top clothes, which were made of metal, had room for chest lumps. “This isn’t the Beaver.”“No, this is the living room,” Dreamer said. “Hi! Do you know how to clean things?”

* * *