"You absolutely can!  Come on back."

In the back there are cats in cages with beds and toys.  Most of the cats are grouped up but some of them are kept alone; there are little handwritten info cards with little glossy photo printouts for each of them.  Some look up at Cam and the staffer when they walk in; others ignore them.  Also there are a bunch of dogs over there and a room with two birds and a handful of pocket pets over there.

"Feel free to look around; I'll be over here if you have any questions or want to take anybody over to meet them outside of their cage."

"Thanks!"

And when she is slightly out of earshot and might not be quite as confused about Cam meowing extensively: "Hello there everybody, I can talk!"

The staffer smiles to herself but doesn't, apparently, feel the need to comment.

Some of the cats who were ignoring Cam now look at him intently.  Others remain steadfast.

"What the fuck," asks an incongruously small kitten.

"I am a magical creature from another universe with language acquisition powers, and I can talk."

"That's weird.  You're weird."

"Do all the Twolegs talk or just you?"

"What's magic?  What's universe? What's acquisition?"

"Why are you here."

"They all talk, just not your language. Magic is things that, hm, behave in a way you wouldn't expect from looking at them, even looking very very closely. Universe is a whole spatially contiguous place, really really big. Acquisition is getting. I'm here to meet more cats and ask questions!"

"Wait, what's language?  And spatially and contiguous.  - Never mind, I know what spatially is."

"Mom.  Mom.  Mom.  Moooom.  Mom."

"I'm sleeping, darling."

"Come over here, Twoleg, I want to smell you."

"I want to EAT you."

"You're not big enough."

"I'm bigger than you!"

"You still can't eat a whole Twoleg.  It's enormous."

"Fuck off, yes I could."

"Language is the correspondence of sounds to meanings." Cam lets the one who wants to smell him sniff his hand.

Sniff sniff.  "Hmmmmmmm okay fine.  What were your questions."

"What's contiguous!"

"Contiguous is all next to each other. My world isn't contiguous with here because there's no part of it that's next to any part of this one. I'm wondering if I could get you to look at some colors and tell me how well you can see them? And also I want to know if all your parents and grandparents and all the other cats you've met can talk."

"My mom cannot talk because she is SLEEPING.  Show me the colors."

Colors! Are any of these cats colorblind at all.

All of the awake cats who are willing to talk to him have the human range of color vision.

. . . Some of the cats are awake and seem interested in him but aren't using words about it.

"Hey, do those cats talk?"

"They are SO QUIET.  Mom tells me I should be that quiet."

"Sometimes they make noises but I haven't learned any new vocabulary from them, ever."

"What kind of noises?"

"Like 'mrrp?' and 'a!' and 'prrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr'."

"...huh.

All of you who talk, did your parents talk too?"

There's a chorus of yeahs and one "Not mine."

Cam focuses on "not mine" cat. "Can you tell me about your parents?"

"What about 'em?"

"About how they didn't talk? Was that weird for you? How did you learn?"

"Wasn't really.  I just picked it up one day."

"When you were how old?"