The Bartender at the End of the Universe

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

(daily updates) (cover byWeavervale)

Ted is nothing special. In fact, despite his good grades in high school ten years ago, many people would consider Ted a loser. One day, Ted accidentally gets sucked into an isekai portal, but without having died he can't be reincarnated properly! Instead of figuring out a solution the eldritch beings who unwittingly kidnapped him just throw him onto an abandoned space in-between worlds.

This upheaval of his mundane life leads Ted to pursue alcohol to cope only to find out he has a passion for handcrafting fermented drinks others enjoy. Trapped in-between universes, who knows who will drop in next? With his basic formula of water, sugar, and yeast, and his time machine he can craft any alcohol his heart desires. So long as the evil monsters who keep appearing bring ingredients with them. What will happen as this tiny mistake grows and grows as the space in-between feeds on the defeated villains of multiple universes? When will the smiling man's mistresses' plan reveal itself? Who knows, because this is a lighthearted adventure examining life, friendship, what it means to be good, and, of course, what the best drink in the multiverse is.

Primarily a slice-of-life above all else, with a heavy dose of mystery. Feel free to skip the prologue to ignore some darker setup and just get to the fun, slice-of-life, villains meeting at a bar schtick.

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2022
Author: Spencer Havens

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.0/ 5.0
Followers: 422
Views: 341,639

Chapters(305 total)

Reviews

No reviews yet. Be the first to share your thoughts!

Community Reviews(5)

SoiiRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
I am loving the story so far. The interaction between each character is great and I thoroughly enjoyed the pacing of the story. Loving the brewing tips as well. Like any good slice of life, there is an overall mystery coupled with small bursts of curiousity. However, I do hope we can see some bar rebuilding or decoration in the future.
Sea ChangeRoyal Road
★★★★ 4.0
Just what the author says it is on the box: what happens when you chuck various oddly colorful characters from multiple sci-fi and fantasy settings (we all know who they are), transmigrate them out of their original context, and force them to interact just for laughs.
And beer. Don't forget the beer.
The framing tale is a bizarre and mildly accomodating tavern in the middle of the nowhere where everyone ends up and bounces themselves off each other sitcom-style. The author updates nearly every day so there's quite often something new so if you need a little bit of light reading and a laugh or two, stop right in. Or if you wanna see some long-term shenanigans, pop in every week or so.
Style: Wacky hijinks ensue! Quirky situations meet quirky characters, each with their own agenda and temperament. The words and sentences may wander around a bit, but don't worry! They'll get back to ya. :)
Story: This could be a sitcom. Because of this things tend to reset back to status quo, and story progression is 'over the whole season' so we readers might not see what is going on for ten episodes or more. Many storylines that look like they have been dropped will come back and haunt us. Because Rule of Funny.
Grammar: fairly well written, but each character talks in their own distinctive style. Since this is a slice-of-life story and people speak realistically and within their conception 'proper English grammar' is not the focus of this story. Expect puns, and dad jokes!
Character: While Ted is our MC, he is more like the narrator of the framing tale, the straight man, and the pretext for beer. All the other characters add up to a full cast that is well-rounded, and each gets their own special empasis in episodes sometime. Again, like a sitcom. Nevertheless because there are so many characters, we do not see a full well-rounded character set. The small bits may add up over time as this tale is still winding up at ninety chapters.
LeephoyaRoyal Road
★★★ 3.0
Style: The style of this story is okay. Some paragraphs are really long and therefore difficult to read and make me skim past some parts.
Grammar: The grammar is okay. I have seen a few mistakes such as incorrect dialog quotation marks. However they did not interrupt my reading flow a lot.
Story: Now here is where the problems start. The premise of the story is really great but it sadly feels like it does not deliver. There is a try of giving it a mysterious feeling but the moment something bad happens the characters are changing their mood way too fast and it has this light slice of life feeling again. I like the technical details of the slice of life but the feeling of it clashes a lot with what the rest of the story is trying to be.
Character: The characters are lacking something. While they do not feel flat and have their own quirks, they just seem like a bunch of friends in a slice of life and not like strong villains.
Overall: Great idea with a lack in execution. Still an enjoyable average story if you ignore the villainous past the characters are supposed to have and enjoy it as a slice of life.
IpponkillerRoyal Road
★★★ 2.5
The characters are simply to weak for me. Coming into this you know you can´t expect great amounts of action, or worldebuilding, or travelling ... since you know, stuck somewhere between worlds, so this story lives and dies by it´s character interaction.
So, who is the first side character that get´s introduced? Some kind of god king that got overthrown by the heroes and got killed. Interesting how such a character would interact with a modern guy that is just trying to make alchohol right?
I thought so too, but after half a chapter the author just drops the whole god king persona and he now feels just like a stink normal guy. No hints of an all powerfull king or anything, just a normal dude drinking alchohol.
Next character was an assasin ... and he acts just like a stink normal dude that is there to drink.
Third character I just skipped through, but at least that one seemed to have a touch of uniques to it (but then again, he immediatly started drinking with the guys).
Really, this story (up to the point I have read) could be summed up as "A few guys sit together, brew alcohol and drink it" ... and that just isn´t enough.
Because really, the most interesting character ist the chicken.
The ValeRoyal Road
★★ 1.5
I tried. I gave it 12 more chapters past the point where it lost my interest. It got slightly better (and perhaps this improvement continues, I don't know), but ultimately the core of the writing style is, there is no story. The premise is that a bunch of people from different worlds are dropped at some tiny island in the sky with a single tavern for them to call home together.
This could be an exploration of characters, with each one bringing their unique stories and history to the table in a vignette style, or a story of disperate perspectives forced to come to terms over time. There could be murder mystery style intrigue, with suspicion of circumstances and jockeying for information or a more surrealist tale of lost souls. Hell, it could be a Gilligans Isle comedy, at a stretch. Instead we get characters that instantly lose characterisation in favour of becoming the most stereotipically bland "everyman at the bar" type character.
They lack a weight of history - each characters is barely mentioned - and the unique characteristics of each character are basically dismissed other than mode of speech for the purposes of differentiating dialogue, and the mystery of what they all have in common is handled both ham-handedly and lackadaisically in what appears to be an effort to insert some kind of direction or conflict to the over all narrative, but lacks any kind of momentum. Large swathes of filler in between brief paragraphs with the vaguest of implications or threats that go nowhere seem to form the backbone of the core arc thus far.
This story at the point that I have read up to, despite its many tags, is the duldrums of slice of life, and little else. Maybe that changes, but I can't get there - not enough meat on the hook.
Decently well written - good grammar, each character maintains their own style of voice in dialogue and dialogue flows naturally (just the subject matter is generally boring and lacks narrative relevance in many cases). If looking to improve on a