Satou's here. Tea party was frequently drawn in shoujo manga that I read in my childhood, but I had never seen it even once in reality. The modern tea party might be the drink bar in the family restaurant.
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The busy days begins the next day after the ball.
While I keep the visits to the workshops as scheduled, I'm also visiting the noble women whom the invitations for tea parties I've accepted.
Of course, I'm not aiming for the the noble girls in their early teens. I wouldn't let Arisa accompany me if that was really the case.
I can sort of feel some petty grudges from that prince, I have a hunch that I'll get involved with him from now on.
Therefore, I'm following Arisa's suggestion to increase my personal connections with the people that are likely to become my allies in preparation for the time when I get entangled in some kind of intricate conspiracy.
I choose not crepes for the tea party, but something that's delicious served cold. I decide to create western style red bean jam rolls by sandwiching fresh cream, coarse and smooth sweet red bean paste with thin pancakes. I announce the bean jam roll to be a new sweets of Muno city. I write the recipe in the letter for baron Muno that I've entrusted to lady Karina. Gelt-san should be able to reproduce what's in the recipe. I've employed merchants to deliver the ingredients that are hard to obtain in Muno city.
Since it's not good to make the same thing every day, Arisa and I write sweets we remember on the memo, trial-make them, and pick ones that look good. Arisa and the others aren't the only ones who sample the food, the previous earl Walgock couple also ask for it, the food are quite popular. I'm a bit worried that Arisa will become plumper since she eats too much of it.
I've thought of taking lady Karina along to the tea parties, but she's training hard with Liza and the others, I can't approach her. I'm thinking of letting lady Karina get some noble friends, but it doesn't seem like it'll go well.
Lady Karina, Liza and the others are training with the help of a military drill instructor, a woman around her thirties, who has been introduced by Toruma. They're probably getting better training than just sparing randomly with wooden swords. I've also been watching them occasionally. Of course I mean the training, not lady Karina's specific parts.
I had gained some things beyond my expectation doing the tea parties like getting permission to visit the workshops that had refused it before, and some rare ingredients the noble women shared.
The workshops visits have been going smoothly too, the only two remaining are the scroll workshop, and the barrier pillar workshop.
I've got silk threads produced by caterpillars the size of a puppy from the visit to the jade silk workshop yesterday. These silk threads reflect green color from the light just like the name suggest, and cloths weaved from them have the same stab-proof performances as iron chain mails.
When I look at the bait of the caterpillar with AR secretly, it seems there's a secret to it. The caterpillars are mainly feed with leaves, but they're also feed with mithril slag--wastes that comes out of mithril refinery. The green parts of the silk might be composed of mithril. Since there are the same kind of caterpillar species living deep in the forest, it might be a good idea to try doing it once.