“Hello Epiprocta,” I say as I step in, kitten in arms.

“Lavan Nacli, yes?” she asks. I nod. “Just call me Epi.”

“Yes Epi. I guess you remembered me from, uh…” There was… an incident, underground.

“In the tunnels, yes.”

“The howling, winding god gut tunnels,” I almost say. Almost, since she must remember it all too well, judging from her grimace.

No one needs to remember it.

“And who’s this?” she asks, wiping the grimace away.

“Oh, the cat! I named her Loaf. My oven materialized her into existence just this afternoon.” I shrug.

She blinks. “Does… does your oven do that often?”

“Occasionally. It was just bugs before though.”

“And are all of them so… can I take a look at the cat a moment?”

“You’re the vet, so sure.”

She examines Ms Loaf and little Loaf is perfectly cooperative, hissing only once or twice.

“That’s bio-gold fur, yeah…” Epi mutters. “Have you told too many people about that oven?”

“No, not really. It’s only slightly weirder than most other appliances anyway. And it’s sort of… connected to the ground?” I shrug again, since the oven is strange, but in the same way everything else is. “Wouldn’t be any use removing it, since you probably can’t. And I don’t want to start up a fuss, it’s a very nice oven, you see. Quite jovial.”

“I see. And how old is the oven?”

“No clue.”

“Can you ask it?”

“I’ve asked questions like that before, actually. It just starts singing quietly.”

“Hm.” She pets Ms Loaf and says, “The kitten seems healthy, though the fur is… uh… strangely reminiscent of animals from the Chamkili era? Instead of the modern era?”

“With the gold plate, right? I noticed, it grows till she sheds it or cleans herself. And it looks brownish-blackish depending on the lighting. That’s why I wanted to ask you if there’s anything I should do different, diet and grooming and such.”

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“And nothing else?” she asks.

“No.”

“Just advice on taking care of the cat?”

“Yeah.”

“Hm.” I don’t know what she’s thinking here.

“I mean, I just have a cat now so… don’t know what you’re implying I should do.”

“Ah, no, you’re good,” she says, laughing a bit nervously. “No laws against it or anything–”

Now I laugh. “Who follows the laws here?” Sure, people bring up the occasional law at the mountain borders, but that’s only in negotiations with the deities.

“Good point, good point,” Epi says, “since there isn’t anything which… well, I would like to ask you more about that oven later, but let’s just get back to the cat.”

“Thank you, yes.”

Ms Loaf walks around Epiprocta’s office as I write down everything I need to know about her diet and grooming and how it differs from a modern cat. Since apparently she’s closer to a cat from 200 years ago, before the old blue moss god died after having spread its body into the landscape.

I suppose Epi still has questions about how and why when it comes to the oven and the cat and why exactly Loaf is so much like a Chamkili era cat, but really she’s just unique. Epi even picks her up a moment to show how her teeth are a little different, a bit more shiny.

“You noticed the gold-looking plating on her coat already, yes? There’s something similar on her teeth, though it doesn’t exactly–” Ms Loaf makes her escape. “–the tooth plating does not shed.” Loaf has found a window and is escaping towards it so I grab her quickly. She can run around when we get home. “Do keep an eye on the changes of teeth sheen, though. There might be a problem if the colour of the sheen changes, or if it gets dull.”

Her food is thankfully fairly similar to a regular cat’s, I just need to add some extra ingredients to it. Apparently Epi has seen other people whose cats are an awful lot like Chamkili era cats. I asked her if those others also materialized from ovens, and… I don’t think she wanted to talk about it. Went oddly quiet.

Oh well. I’m headed home now, with quite a nice useful store of knowledge. And Epi was kind enough to give me some good food to start with. And the oven and cat are the least of my problems, considering the… ugh. Deity negotiations.

I get to stare up and around on my way home. Sometimes the gods grow their limbs up to reach the clouds. Some of them are already fairly close to them, of course, but it seems reaching up takes more effort than growing their bodies out into the ground, spreading out like the roots of a tree. Or sometimes forming structures which look like trees.

Those are very common, actually, sometimes you’ll find a nice looking nima tree and a nice little nima will drop from it, but then you take a bite and get a mouthful of ichor. Bite right into a god, get a taste of the stuff in their veins. The right chemist can figure out how to make regenerative tinctures from it, but you have to store the ichor really carefully for it to be useful.

Anyway… it’ll be too late by the time I get back home, so I’ll just talk to Camellia tomorrow. He’ll know how to handle that one noisy deity, and he knows the god language well enough to understand what that weird long “magic person” compound word meant. Camellia will know quite a lot and he will hopefully be able to set me free from handling the stationary deities. I just want to get to the border negotiations, those gods actually make some sense and don’t have weird random lingo and overly complex politics and– and I nearly hit my head on the door. Fantastic.

Heading inside, I set Ms Loaf free from my arms and give her some food in her bowl for the night. Then I set myself free from thought and wakefulness, and collapse into bed.