"Maybe!" chirps Skon. Uamok scritches his back affectionately, pulls off a small fruitcyst and eats it.

They're very cute. "So, any more questions, or is it time for clothes?"

"Clothes!" says Iss.

Clothes! Some of it is less foldy to put on than they were probably expecting, but some of it is indeed pretty ridiculous. She takes the time to explain more of  the basics of human anatomy, too, while she's at it.

Prince Faadil comes by eventually to ask if Zoi wants to go to the library; Kat shimmies back into her dress before answering the door for him.

Zoi does want to go to the library! Uamok and the rest of her mates go back to their turtle-shell nest.

And so they can go to the library - out through the courtyard again and to the other side of the plaza, down a couple of blocks past more shops, and onto a side street, where they find a large two-story limestone building painted with humans and gnomes holding scrolls. The prince leads Zoi in; just inside the door is a vestibule, cool and dimmer than the palace, with a window cut out of one wall with a woman sitting on the other side. "Hello, your highness," she says.

"Hello. We'll just be browsing the fiction collection today, I think - Zoi?"

"Unless there are other recommendations!" he says.

"I guess we'll take a full pass, then."

    "Very good, your highness. Will you be staying with your guest or should I stamp their hand?"

"Go ahead and stamp him. It's to let them know you've been paid for," he explains, as the clerk inks a small rubber stamp and holds it out.

Zoi holds out his hand.

And the clerk deposits a little picture of a heron on the back of his hand, and they can go in.

The area past the next door is relatively open, for a human space; Uamok would only need to be a little careful to get past the rows of tables without bumping into any of them. A handful of gnomes and humans are scattered among them, reading from books and scrolls by candlelight or the glow of presumably-magical frosted glass spheres set in brass holders. Another clerk sits at a table nearby, ready to sell writing supplies and rent out the magical candles. To the right and behind the seating area are stacks of books, while the room off to the left has another cut-out window and clerk, with rows of scribes visible working behind her.

"Fiction's over there," the prince says, pointing, "but we've also got history and biographies, military history, natural philosophy, philosophy of law and legal history, mathematics, engineering and craftsmanship, ethics, religion, travel and foreign books, and then magic is upstairs."

"Military history is separate from other history?" asks Zoi.

"Mmhmm. It lets them charge less for it that way, so it's like the soldiers get a discount to read about it, and that helps make the army better."

"Oh, that makes sense." Zoi sets about hunting through the fiction.

It's organized by author name and nothing else, which makes this a bit chaotic, but the prince offers to help him look if there's something specific he wants, or point out his favorite authors.

"Do you have written copies of plays, or anything you think would be especially accessible to somebody from another world?"

"We do have plays, hmm - oh, I know, over here - Tylos Ganatanu is a catfolk who wrote some plays about us for his tribe that were very popular here about six or seven years ago, they show what we seem like to them and they're funny, too."

"Catfolk are like that person Katrianne was petting?"

"Mmmhm. They live north of here, where the river comes out of the jungle."

Zoi collects a catfolk play and reads it.

The play follows a catfolk scout who sneaks into a human town every night to observe, then returns home to tell her tribemates about what she saw, getting it wrong in the process. In the first scene the humans prepare dinner in an outdoor oven and eat it, and she reports that they're so hungry they're trying to make meat out of dirt. The next day, she finds them washing clothes in the river, and reports that they tried to hunt, but they only scavenged the skin of an animal and were trying to get it soft enough to eat with their blunt teeth by soaking it. The third day, she finds them weaving baskets, and reports to her worried tribe that the humans should have good luck now, since they've obviously decided to make totems to offer to the gods to ensure a successful hunt. The fourth day, she notices a colony of cats by the humans' granary, and thinks she's finally figured out what the problem is: they're overrun, losing their food supplies to the tiny felines.

Now thoroughly concerned, the catfolk tribe all go to the town to offer the humans help, only to discover that they're fine: bread is not fake meat but real food, clothes keep the sun off their hairless skin while they work in the fields, baskets let them store the grain they harvest, and the cats are not eating the food, but protecting it from mice. The humans invite the catfolk to stay for dinner, sending a few of their number out to hunt, and because the humans have stored food to eat, just a few hunters can bring back enough meat for the whole group, even the catfolk.

The play is also full of puns, which the prince will point out as they read if Zoi doesn't shoo him off for it.

Zoi does not shoo him, but does wonder how the catfolk can know so little about humans if they live near each other.

"That part's not very realistic," the prince agrees. "You could say that it's a tribe that just moved out of the deep jungle, but it's really just a literary device, the other plays mostly follow the same sort of formula and the catfolk characters never figure it out."

"The catfolk I saw was wearing clothes."

"They do when they come here, mostly - some of them don't, and their fur is thick enough to count as clothes anyway. They don't usually bother in their own lands."

"Huh, okay." Next play!