The rules about undead employees in food service are not super strict. That’s because it hasn’t really come up before, and the staff at the Pale Garden Teashop hope to keep it that way. Nika is a young and misplaced necromancer in training - as gifted in under magic as he is incapable in a social setting - and the newest member of the shop owner’s mismatched little family. Before being found and brought to the strange city of Eldes, he was forbidden from practicing any kind of magic at all, especially necromancy. He’s still adjusting to life surrounded by new adopted siblings with similar gifts and a million new things to learn to survive. Nika is adjusting to a life surrounded by encouragement, to a life that includes a sphinx-run library and teachers with hidden identities, to a life where a pushy insect fanatic can drag him off for an afternoon and his new family would barely bat an eye. Karao, who had found him and invited him into her home, has changed his life for the better, but what sort of person adopts necromancers off the side of the road - and what could they want? And why does she have that many skeleton arms?