"I think it's mostly private.  There's a campground where we go sometimes out thataways," he points out the left side of the door, "but that's not even really in the woods; it's kinda fieldy."

"Ooh, campground, okay." Maybe he will just make a very fancy tent.

"Yeah, Morgan's Farm; it's a nice place.  You might have passed it on the way to the shelter, actually, if you went on any dirt roads instead of sticking to paved ones."

"I stuck to paved ones. It's not an off-road motorcycle particularly."

"Mm.  Well, it's in that general direction."

"Cool." Cam scritches Princess, bids everyone goodbye, and motorcycles away with Cricket in the sidecar to the campground in question.

There are picnic tables and spots for campfires and a box nailed to a tree containing printouts of the rules, all of which are pretty standard campground fare even to extradimensional visitors (or at least this one).  A path leads off towards a cluster of trees far in the distance.  There are not presently any other campers.

Are RVs allowed?

They at least aren't disallowed going by this sheet.

Cool. Cam makes a tiny-house-on-wheels that is probably street legal unless their streets have something weird up. He consults Cricket on cat furniture and installs him on a cat hammock to sleep. And he spends the night in the tiny house eating toasted marshmallows and sausages on sticks while he reads through the astrology book.

The astrology book has some alarming things to say, particularly about New Year's babies.  It seems to take for granted that everyone knows they're a specific type of bad news and instead focuses on how many of them are totally productive, relatively normal members of society who you don't have to be that scared of.  Mostly the dangerous ones cluster with each other and are more overt about the risk of being around them, and you should still avoid those for the most part, Ava claims.  They're a very specific sort of trustworthy: good at coordinating with each other, including in abiding by internal rules which keep them from collectively getting banned from normal society, and are known to keep their word, though they can at times be slippery about exact phrasings.

The winter solstice people seem to have a well-deserved reputation for mad science; the book credits a slightly absurd number of important inventions to them alongside a lesser but not very lesser number of catastrophes.

Spring equinoxers have a reputation for being the most genuinely good out of any of the solquinoxes and are responsible for a lot of social change for the better.  They're known to be very charismatic, eloquent speakers, and are frequently martyred as part of their activism.  Particularly tyrannical rulers throughout history have been known to preemptively order babies born on that day put to death.

(All of the even-numbered entries are as short as Ivy's was, with the ones between those and the solquinoxes varying according to the every-other every-other pattern Jackie described.)

Once he's done with that he will find a not for small children book about stars.

There are lots!  What in particular is he looking for?

What does he get if he looks for case studies, and the history of the understanding of the topic?

Here is a case study on one star cloud which has existed for at least several centuries.  It still gains new members occasionally, though largely from the same birthdays which already make it up.  It has been known to try and help other clouds maintain their separation, and the targets of its aid have usually lasted notably longer than similar clouds without it, though most of them still end up absorbed eventually.  It is composed mostly of rather odd people, though there are a select few even members.

It took humanity collectively a while to find out there was an afterlife at all, and a bit longer out to figure out the birthday thing, and much much longer to understand it in the amount of detail they do now.  There's still disagreement on how it all started, whether people were initially born into individual shapes and the first ones to die created the clusters after the fact, or if the system had always existed and the stars merely exist within that framework.  Lots of people from both groups of belief think the other ones are blasphemous.  The One cloud doesn't give solid answers on that and there's no one left from that time period who isn't a part of it.

Omnilol, crystal healing, homeopathy, and several other forms of magic are widely agreed to be the work of the stars, as there are records of times before they existed, and also the stars were like 'hey we did this' when they announced their release.  They also seem to be responsible for a number of things that don't seem very magic, like materials science and genetic engineering for crops.  The author regards these as obviously superior to their counterparts made by living people.

...before omnilol, how precisely did the stars announce things?

Dreams sent to a very small number of carefully chosen people.

Chosen how?

For being inclined and well-positioned to spread the news and be taken seriously.  It worked varyingly well before the omnilol announcement but they got that one right enough for it to catch on decently quickly.

What is the stars' mechanism of influence over things such as dreams, the existence of drugs, possibly birthdate attractors, and, possibly, in the case of cats, the weather?

He can find an author waxing poetic in one of the prefaces about how stars, being the most natural piece of existence, can of course not only bring nature to heel but dictate its very flow and form; yada yada destiny yada yada weaving the great web which connects us all yada yada the supremacy of nature over man but the eventual incorporation of man into nature.  No coherent descriptions of anything resembling a hard magic system for the stars can be shaken out of his corpus.  (Although the forms of magic accessible by the living are by contrast quite rigid; both crystal healing and homeopathy have strict rules and require quite a bit of precision.)

Have the stars gone into any detail on why they chose crystal healing and homeopathy of all things to implement? Also, influenza: why.

Healing is good and being able to make a lot of a thing from a little of a thing is useful!  Cam can't find anything that explains the resemblance to similar processes that don't work from his homeworld.

Influenza has existed since the start of birthday clustering and so the One has mostly refrained from commenting on it.  A younger cloud at one point suggested that it was better to have scheduled sicknesses than unpredictable ones, with it left implied that influenza's existence cancels out or otherwise avoids other diseases somehow.  But since it's younger and was not in fact there, many people disregard the comment as not being worth much more than what a living person would say.

The disease rates are in fact lower here than Cam's earth at a similar tech level, but it's hard to separate that out from crystal healing and all the other oddities of this world; they don't have good statistics from before lots of confounding factors became things.

Huh. Okay.

What has been said on the absorption process and its voluntariness?

Nothing is explicitly forcing any individual instance of merging.  It's just really easy to fuse accidentally, and gets moreso over time.