"Well, once she's learned to write you can explain to her how to look both ways before she crosses the street and all the other things that worry you."

"I wouldn't let her out alone if she didn't know how to cross the street, regardless of autonomy concerns.  But the life expectancy of an outdoor cat is something like a sixth of an indoor one and that's already so short for a person, and it's not just cars that make it that way.  It's - I don't know, I just think she might be better off with someone who has - more room to take good care of her, in the way their life is set up.  If she has a way to talk with them."

"Well, maybe you and she can work something out in that department once you've gotten to talking. For all I know she won't be that attached to going out as long as she can have friends over or something."

"That's fair.  - Uh, feel free to leave at any point if I'm keeping you from saving the world; most of me are kind of bad at everything and I'm not but knowing when to stop talking to people who're probably going to save the world isn't one of the things I'm good at."

"Most of - oh, the birthday thing, I'm not really used to that yet - yeah, I need to go back to Chelford at some point, I just wanted to check up on claims of a Londinium population of talking cats and here they are indeed."

"Yeah, all the free New Year's Eve-ers pretty invariably end up useless and miserable unless they're like, born rich or manage to leech off someone?  Do you just - not have anyone to compare yourself to; that seems hard."

"I don't have anyone mystically guaranteed to have the same personality as me, no. - huh, that's a disproportionate number of New Year's Eves I've met, do you have a thing about being near interesting happenings or something?"

"There's a disproportionate amount of us in general?  My parents were going to aim for a New Year's solquinox but chickened out and had me instead; that's common."

"Huh, okay. - what's New Year's Day's shtick, I don't have all these memorized yet."

"They . . . have monetary incentives for people who parent them; they run their own country where anyone who physically gets there can stay, no questions asked; they, uh - is that enough for you to recognize them?"

"I think I read their entry, yeah."

"Yeah, they're.  Yeah."

"It's interestingly coordinated of them. I guess that explains why I have met several Eves. Man, you guys must have such a relatively simplified time of social science research and such."

"Interestingly coordinated is definitely one way to call it.  I was going to say that it's actually really complicated but I guess probably not more so than if literally every individual was basically their own birthday?  Though it'd probably be easier for you guys to separate things that are innate to everyone from cultural influences and stuff."

"We need ridiculously huge sample sizes because there's so much noise, and they're hard to get.

"Lemme give you your own device to talk to me with, Mr. Mistoffelees's is very much paw-shaped." Phone! "The letter thing I mentioned works fine but if you need me faster than 'whenever I check my mail' or if you want an answer back that's what this is for."

"Thank you!  I'll uh, try to use it wisely."

"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?"