The oven has been acting up. There’s been a strange warmth emanating from it, which is obviously concerning, but I checked and there’s no holes or anything. It’s been like that for a whole week.

I only noticed yesterday that the oven door refuses to open.

No, I don’t just mean “it won’t open”. I mean that every time I try to open it, it tells me to it won’t and says to wait a bit. Grows a little warmer and speaks in its tinny little voice (and you can see the text floating up too, everything magical has captions on Chamkra and I wish other planets had that too), the oven gets annoyed when I insist on opening it and grows ever so slightly hotter. I swear I hear a hiss when that happens too, though it doesn’t burn me. Perhaps it’s trying to be intimidating? No clue where it learned to hiss, though, it’s not physically capable of that… 

“Just wait, it’s a surprise!” it says, and refuses to explain.

“How much longer?” I ask.

“Did you know that there are still some verbs in our language which resemble the verbs they evolved from nearly two thousand years ago?” it says, humming cheerfully.

“Is that related to the ‘surprise’? Is it going to take two thousand years for you to open up the door again?”

“It is related, because it’s really interesting how my surprise would’ve still worked two thousand years ago–”

“They didn’t have magic ovens back then.”

“–linguistically, it would’ve worked in some specific languages. You’ll get it when I actually show you the surprise. And no, it won’t take two thousand years.” 

“Then when?”

Its magic captions depict a little smile.

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“Sorry. Just one more day, okay?”

I sigh. “Alright. Just one more day.”

So then I waited one more day, and there was a great amount of that happy humming when I finally entered the kitchen that afternoon. Wasn’t quite on the same cheery little wavelength as the oven at first, because I was having the worst headache from dealing with the annoying deity whose torso is fused into the hill next to the local school (and the communicator was so uncooperative too!), because he was just making too much noise and can absolutely just use the his gut strings to communicate with the floating island deities in a quieter way, and we know he was yelling at them (by the way I have okay enough understanding of the gods’ language but needed an expert briefly here to understand what the hell this deity was saying and it was just nonsense swearing and the expert was SO uncooperative), and he absolutely had no reason to do it so, so loudly, especially during school hours… but I digress.

The headache stopped when I finally opened the oven door, and pulled out the tray within.

There was a cat in it.

A cat with many many golden leafs for fur. A kitten, actually. Absolutely tiny. A kitty with its four legs all tucked in beneath its body. 

“It’s… she’s loafing. The cat.” I cannot believe that the oven doesn’t actually have facial muscles and larynxes, because it was definitely grinning from ear to ear (and I also can’t believe it doesn’t have ears, but then again it can still sense the vibrations). The laughter, the grinning, it kept cracking up as it tried to speak. “She’s a loaf. Like… like a bread loaf, but a cat loaf instead but… she’s loafing so she’s a loaf and…”

How exactly do I describe oven laughter to someone who’s never heard it… it’s tinny like its regular voice, but on top of human-sounding laughter there’s also this sound like someone is tapping on metal. Rhythmically.

I stared at the cat, a bit perplexed. Not at its existence, of course, I already knew that the oven can manifest things and creatures into existence, but I was perplexed because the cat was perplexed first. 

I blink at her slowly. Sweet little baby stares at me wide-eyed, before finally blinking back.

“Okay,” I tell the oven, “I don’t know why you thought I needed a kitten, but I guess I now have a kitten. I will make arrangements for her comfort immediately, and we can talk about this later.”

And I guess I’ll also have to delay making the new recipe one of the deities gave me… but that’s fine. Keep your priorities in order.

As I walk away with the kitten (her name is Loaf now), the oven continues to hum. Sounds a little more melodic than usual.

“See ya later!”