Monday Morning, Waffle Cake Diplomacy

Back in Lviv.

After spending most of the weekend near Lutsk chasing what appeared to be a cluster of minor time anomalies (and one very confused tractor that briefly existed three minutes ahead of itself), I decided that Monday required something more civilized: coffee and cake.

I had spent the weekend in Lutsk dealing with what Clovis described as "minor temporal leakage around a major medieval structure."

Translated from Clovis into ordinary language, this meant several people from the fourteenth century had been accidentally visiting Lubart's Castle at sunset. A guard, a woman carrying bread, a boy hauling firewood, and at one point half of a horse had all briefly appeared in modern Lutsk thanks to a particularly annoying Chronolith Fragment hidden in the old masonry.

After two days of castle walls, temporal resonance, moonlight calculations, paperwork, and enough coffee to qualify as a weather system, I decided that Monday required something considerably simpler.

Coffee.

And cake.

So I went to Pani Cake.

The coffee was excellent. The waffle cake was excellent. The second piece of waffle cake was also excellent. Scientific rigor required a third piece for comparison.

Around that point I noticed I was the only customer left.

The manager quietly locked the front door.

Now, in most dimensions, this would be alarming.

In Lviv, after my life so far, it merely suggested something interesting was about to happen.

A minute later, the owner appeared.

Not the manager.

The actual owner.

Pani Cake herself.

A walking, talking cake from an alternate Earth where pastries achieved sentience sometime around the eighteenth century and immediately began opening cafés.

She explained the problem. A small dimensional ripple had appeared inside the refrigeration room. Nothing dangerous. Just annoying. Every cake stored there was slowly becoming tomorrow's cake today and yesterday's cake tomorrow.

As temporal disasters go, it was unusually delicious.

Twenty minutes, a calibration tool, and several strongly worded comments directed at the laws of physics later, the anomaly was gone.

Pani Cake thanked me with a giant waffle cake roughly the size of a carry-on suitcase.

I considered eating it.

Then I remembered I am only one man.

So I carried it back to the Ibis and donated it to the reception staff.

Judging by the reaction, I may now be welcome there forever.

Which is nice.

Much nicer than spending a weekend explaining to Clovis why half a medieval horse appeared three centuries before the invention of proper bureaucracy.