"Princess, the kittens' mom is still in the shelter, so the plan is we wait a bit so the staffers get less suspicious and then you and Ian go in and make like you've been lonely and want more cat friends and you click really well with their mom."

"Okay," she meows seriously.  "Would you two like to learn how to read?"

" - I already know how," declares the vocal (but not the vocabulary) one.

"You didn't last time I checked!" Cam says. "Have you learned since then?"

"Yes I DID.  I did already."

"Then you'll be able to use Princess's computer, if she lets you!"

"Yes!  Come inside and out of that and see it!"

In they go. The kittens are released.

One of them has to get out a small round of zoomies when let out and the other is a little wary but pretty quickly they're both attentive to Princess's lecture on the glowy rectangle.

"So which one of you is Felicity?  - 'Scuse me, does anyone want a drink or anything."

"I am!  I'll take one of whatever's convenient; I haven't discovered much about my composite taste preferences yet."

"I'm good, thanks.  . . . Composite?"

"Yes, I'm a star cloud.  Or was; who knows whether people will or won't end up calling incarnated ones that still."

"Not all star clouds are rezzable but she was."

"Huh.  So you're like, not anyone?  Or anyone else, I mean - or are you all the same - "

"Actually I'm apparently an October seasonchange despite having more yous and summer solstices in my composition.  About a third of each."

"That's . . . strange . . ."

"From what I know it seems like most star clouds aren't anyone else and would continue to not be anyone else if resurrected, and it's just that for some cosmic reason still unknown to me summerfalls are already a mix of equal parts of those."

"Huh," Ivy repeats.

Jackie appears in the doorway to the kitchen.  "I had some - " her voice breaks; she clears her throat.  "I had some hot spiced cider earlier; the pot probably hasn't cooled down yet."

"That sounds lovely, thank you."

"Helloooo," re-greets Princess, leaving the kittens distracted by the computer.  "I've been working so hard on the machine translation.  Are any other cats as literate as me yet so they can help?"

"Not that I know of! Let me pull an update off what you've got and see how it's going." Yoink. How is it going.

Slowly, without an existing corpus to work from.  It's clearly had several hours put into it, but between pawful typing speed and the audio side of things not being optimized for meowing, the results are pretty paltry.

"I'm going to try replacing your microphone, but the fact is that this is just a lot of work for one kitty and your progress probably won't let anybody else have machine translated conversations with cats very soon." He fiddles with her microphone.