"It's a great big Twolegplace with lots of buildings!"

"Is there FOOD there."

". . . I'm also curious about the food there," admits the kittens' mother, softly.

"There is food there, yes, probably better than what you get here, not that amazing unless someone's making it right then like me or some other people like me, even then maybe not as good as live-caught I'm not sure."

She nods.

"I want to go unless you'll kill me," someone new pipes up.

"I am not going to kill you. The thing I want, here, is for all the talking cats in the world to find places where they will be happy to live; what I don't know is how quickly you all feel I should do this for you guys."

"I think the Twolegs here are going to kill us."

"I don't know if this shelter does that or not. It might. If it turns out that taking you sooner makes the difference there I will take you sooner."

"I am not very happy to live here.  I'm more happy to live anywhere than nowhere, but I would prefer a not-here place."

"Yes but does it matter to you very much how many days that takes?"

"Not really."

"Yes."

"I would like not to have any more of my kits taken away . . ."

Cam starts attempting to take a list down of everybody's urgencies in this regard, which ones want to go together, which ones have anxieties that the shelter staff can presumably resolve.

They pretty much all want to go but some of them aren't in a particular hurry; some of the ones who want to stay together disagree on how quickly they want out; some of them would explicitly prefer NOT to be together.  Some of them want to go but they want to be part of a Twoleg family and they want to meet the Twolegs first.  There are definitely more who would prefer to leave right away than would be reasonable for a normal person to take home at once.

What about three normal people, or five of them?

Mayyyybe?  Probably it's fine at least at this one shelter.

In that case Cam is going to come out and report on the situation to Felicity and Ivy. "- and I'm sure we could patch this with more daeva, but there aren't conveniently already mailing lists for daeva who want more than anything to have a talking cat, for several reasons. So I think we can and perhaps should time-stagger things a bit, spread things out over a few adopters - Princess's folks might be good for a few."

"Whose?"

"'Nother talking cat, her humans know."

"Oh good, so not like a lost future true queen of Britannia or something.  - If the future true queen of Britannia is a talking cat for some reason I don't really want to know about it as long as we're doing things licitlyish."

"Uh, noted."

"Does this place put cats down?"

"- Right, I was gonna say - we don't, or like happen not to, pretty much, but half or so of the shelters around here do."

"Do you offload surplus cats onto other shelters?"

"Yeah, there's a network of all the local ones that pets get shuffled between depending on who has room and how long they're taking to get adopted and stuff."