Meow!

"Cool.  Cool.  Are you, like, um.  A person?"

Obviously???

Indignant meow.

And, just in case he's just meowing at everything she says and there's been a whole lot of coincidences, she says, in as similar a tone of voice as she can manage, "Are you, like, not a person?"

Huff. Head on paws, annoyed tail flick.

Cool cool cool cool cool.  Cool.  "Okay.  You can read?"

Mrow!

"Alright.  Hang on a second."

She takes Scrabble down off the shelf and starts setting up the letters on the floor, one of each and then three extra that she designates as 'yes', 'sort of', and 'no'.

These are very interesting little blocks! He's sniffing them but not batting at them.

"Okay, so, I unfortunately don't speak cat as well as I would like, so, now you can, uh, tap on these letters to talk to me.  Hit the Y if you understand?"  She's mindful of not like, encouraging him to do that with her body language or anything.

Very clever human, though this will take a while.

He taps the 'y' with one paw.

Okay yeah she's just gonna operate on the assumption that either he's a person or someone's working very hard to trick her.  Or maybe she's hallucinating - she counts her fingers (yeah, still ten) - but in any case it seems best to play along here.

"So, yeah, just spell out whatever you need to, and then you can use these on the side for shorthand: y for yes, s for sort of, and n for no.  - Actually, wait a sec."  She puts another tile underneath the s.  "And d for if you don't know."  She adjusts the y and n so they make a little diamond.

"This seems tedious but I don't really have any better ideas on short notice; I'll try to ask questions you can answer with these to cut down on that as much as possible.  Unless you had anything pressing you wanted to let me know about?"

He taps the 'n'. 

"Okay!  Um, are you a human that looks like a cat right now?  As opposed to a cat who's for whatever reason sapient."

'N.'

A pause.

'C.'

She nods.  "C?"

"A. T."

"Ah, okay.  Are you magic?"

"S."

"Are you sapient because of magic?"

"D."

"Do you know enough about, hm, how you came to be what you are, that I should keep poking at it?  Or do you think I should move on to something else."

Unimpressed look. That was not a yes or no question, and he doesn't have numbers.

She waits expectantly for a moment.  "What di - oh, whoops, okay, sorry.  I'll try to avoid that.  Uh, just the second one, I guess."

'S.'