"Thanks. I expect to be real busy pretty soon but I appreciate being able to hear from individuals about their perspectives and I still want the power plant tour."

And Cam will let himself out and head for his shuttle to fly back to Chelford.

Jordan is still hanging out in Cam's camper.  "How'd it go?"

"The star is back in a body but she found readjusting to it difficult and says I need to work on my pitch and I agree. There are in fact talking cats in Londinium. Also, I found out you have slavery."

"Yeah, it's not great.  That's - really promising and probably about as good as could realistically be hoped for?"

"Yeah, pretty much. I'm torn because I want to get a move on - I'm not nearly so optimistic that I'll be able to do anything about already-merged stars and they are presumably merging constantly - but I keep finding out new things on a really frequent basis about how this world fundamentally works and that suggests I should hold off on large-scale projects. I have some pending experiments I need to try, can I delegate telling the One and any other largish star clusters to maybe try not to absorb singlets for a few days to you or will your curse get all over it?"

"That I can do."

"Thanks."

Cricket begins attempting to climb Cam, and gets picked up for his trouble.

"Anything else or should I head off to get started on that?"

"I think that's all. Thank you very much."

"I don't think I've ever meant 'No, thank you' more."  He exits with a two-fingered salute.

Cam goes into his camper and reclines his chair and snuggles his cat and drugs himself to sleep because it's faster.

When he next opens his eyes he's dreaming, and knows he's dreaming, and knows the dream isn't an ordinary one.

He's in a patch of forest - no, the same patch of forest that he was summoned to initially, right down to the circular indent he's standing in, but it's unburnt and thriving and the ash at his feet is missing.  Crisp autumn afternoon sunlight dapples through the turning leaves despite the fact that if Cam looks up or far enough through the trees he can see a night sky with stars densely speckling everywhere not obscured by strangely-colored clouds.

"Finally," mews a voice behind him.  "But still a little sooner than I expected."

"Sorry to keep you waiting. What were you expecting?"

There's a teeny kitten - not that much smaller than Mr. Mistoffelees in size but visibly quite a bit younger - sitting on a branch conveniently at Cam's eye level.

"I thought you said you were going to wait for nighttime!  Not that that would have made a difference, obviously."

"It's getting a little late!" He has had a busy day bopping all over the place resurrecting the dead and discovering slavery and the electrical grid running on crystals. "And I wanted to know sooner than later. How can I help you?"

"You already have - immensely, tremendously, boundlessly, extensively!"  The kitten is speaking cat-phoneme-friendly English rather than catspeak.  " - But actually you should tell more people how to resummon you as soon as you can."

"- okay, uh, is Fireheart in danger -"

"No, he just might die soon."

"...that seems like it might constitute danger!"

"When new Clan leaders receive nine lives, they don't end up with ten to lose."

"What's that supposed to mean?"

"It means that something is likely to happen to Bluestar, one way or another, and Fireheart will be given nine lives - or eight, if things go well - and then he'll be able to die nine-or-eight times before fully joining us, not ten-or-nine, because the leadership ceremony kills cats once."  The kitten sighs.  "See this is why I haven't given out prophecies before; I hate it when people are confused by words."

"You seem perfectly able to hold an intelligible conversation, I just had to clarify because I didn't know that about leadership ceremonies! Why are prophecies so generally cryptic?"

"They each have to do more than one thing, sometimes a whole bunch of things.  Like 'Fire alone will save the Clan' was about your circle, but it also had to get Fireheart accepted into ThunderClan so that he could finish it, and for other reasons I guess he's just a good cat to have around - and I think there are myriad more things it was referring to or causing but I don't know what exactly.  That's not my department."