"I was one of the very first people-cats, and back then there wasn't anyone doing magic about talking so I died before ever being able to really communicate with anyone and that was terrible!  Another reason person is such a good word is that calling me a talking cat wouldn't even have been accurate while I was alive but I was still a person.  So that's why when I died I decided to make it my project that all cats could talk to each other, but for the first while I still barely knew any words so I focused on using my magic to make it so I can know any word that any catspeak speaker - catspeaker - knows, and that's very robust and a lot more thorough than putting words in living cats' brains, and it works for all my team members too.  It's really good magic not just because it taught me all the words in the first place but because whenever somebody has an idea that they make up a word about then I get that too and then everyone can have it.  Did you notice that cats don't say somebody or anybody or everyone?  Our versions were all cat specific and I think the general versions are almost as beautiful as 'people'.

So we have good magic for putting all of the existing catspeak in cat's brains because we've had time to work on that and there are a lot of kittens and uplifts - uplift is also such a good word! - who need it, but all your words and literacy are new; we'll get faster over time but for now it's pretty much manual.  Manual isn't a beautiful word because it means hands and I don't have any.  I could have some, since this is a dream, but I don't have anything to use them for right now and they'd look weird.  Do you want any cat things since this is a dream?  If you want to smell better or something I can probably do that.  - Smell is also not a beautiful word because it doesn't distinguish between gathering and outputting and it sounds like I meant that you stink when I don't."

"You know what, I'd take a better sense of smell for the purposes of this dream, might be useful for empathizing with the cat experience. So you have all my languages now? I don't know if many of them match as much as Englatin. Which is a charming coinage."

"Thank you.  We haven't found any other matches so far yet but nearly all the people-cats are in places where they mostly just speak Englatin so there might still be some, or a whole lot.  Increased olfactory precision and intensity in three, two, one - "

And then Cam has a bunch more sensory data!  It's far less overwhelming than it would be in the waking world, but it doesn't come with an automatic understanding of how to interpret it.  This bit is clearly the scent of the forest and the fallen leaves around him, recognizable from the weaker version his human nose can pick up; he gets a whole lot of fine detail about the cat in front of him but nothing to connect or compare it to.  If there was another cat here he could definitely tell them apart with his eyes closed, but as it is: yeah, that's a cat.

"- huh, wow, thank you. Circling back: Bluestar insane? Tigerstar evil?"

"I think if I try to tell you too many things about individual Clans you'll wake up."

"How annoying! What if I go right back to sleep? I'm doing it with drugs anyhow."

"I think the StarClanners who wanted to stop me from telling you things would just keep waking you up!  Or prevent this kind of dream in the first place."

"Why do they want to stop you from telling me things??"

"Because they're the wooooorst.  - Obviously not all of them; lots of StarClan cats are on my team or on the one to make medicine more effective.  But some of them just only care at all about their former Clan and wreck anything that would hurt it, even if it's only a little and it would help someone else enough to be worth it.  So be careful about doing that sort of thing in general otherwise you might have a harder time working with the Clans at all."

"...gosh. So that means you can't tell me whether Bluestar is nuts but I guess it does make sense of the range of possible truth values of her assertion that StarClan is at war with ThunderClan."

"Hmmmmm no comment.  Do you want to hear a story?  I'm pretty sure I can tell you true stories that are just facts everyone agrees on that aren't secrets."

"Please do."

" - Actually I'm not going to risk telling you most of the parts that would make it a good story.  But once there was a Clan leader who, for whatever unsayable reasons, left his Clan to finish out his days as a kittypet.  Unlike in cases where a Clan drives out its leader, his successor did still receive lives, though not the full nine, because he retired and - well he didn't go to the Moonstone to surrender all his lives but one but that didn't really matter because he only had one left in the first place.  Anyways his name is Pinestar, and he was the leader before the leader before Bluestar, and also Tigerstar's father.  He's why there's that rule about kittypets in the warrior code."

"...huh. Is Pinestar alive?"

"No."

"Can you and human-stars talk to each other?"

"No.  Somebody might be working on it, I don't know, but we can't right now at least."

"Is being asleep the only way for a living person to talk to you?"

"Well, I can spy, and also give cats words."

"I suppose that's not zero communication. Do you guys in fact send rain and whatnot?"

"Not my department but yes."

"Does anybody from other departments want to talk to me or is it just you?"

"I've got dibs."

"Does that mean they don't get to talk to me or just that they don't until you're done?"

"The second one.  But transferring is inconvenient and I'm one of the least controversial options; other people are more likely to get blocked."