"You're welcome.  See you later!"  And after a few more scritches, Cam wakes up.  Less than a minute has passed since he knocked himself out.

Cam makes Cricket a circle to finish, has him finish it, and leaves it flat on the floor of the camper. And then he explains the "somnolent" thing, and gives Cricket pets and snacks, and then he goes to Princess's house.

Jackie and Princess get the door.  "Hi.  Jordan's not done with the thing you asked him to do yet."

"That's fine, I wanted to talk to Princess."

"Oh, cool."

"It's me I'm here!  Hi."

"Hi Princess! I have a task for you."

"Okay!  What is it?"

"You are the most literate cat, and it would be convenient if machines could do more of the translating! So I'm going to set you up with a machine translation program and you will tell it if its translations between cat and Latin are silly, or if its pronunciation is bad, or whatever." He inserts the software into her computer for her.

"Wow, the most?  I guess that makes sense - sure, I can do that!"

"Thanks! Should be all you need to do from here is read instructions on the screen and do what they say but let me know if you have any issues."

"I will be SO diligent."  She sets to it.

"I don't know what else he's doing now but Jordan said the One didn't agree to not merge with singlets.  It almost never does that anyway though; most individual stars pair off with each other and it's usually clouds that're already pretty big who go for the One.  Except in the case of the winter solquinoxes - something like a third of them join up with it basically immediately upon dying."

"Which ones are those again?"

"Uh, they're sciencey, not evil on purpose but kind of lacking in good sense a lot of the time, and like baths a lot?  - Baths being metonymy for luxurious indulgent things but also a specific stereotype."

"- oh! Cat uplift lady, that's the one."

"Oh?"

"A star told me that the cats were uplifted on purpose on two separate occasions - hereabouts and Londinium - by a winter solquinox who didn't know it worked."

"That - does sound more like one of them than anyone else, if I were going to guess that it was an individual living person."

"Yup. She's not a living person anymore though."

"Oh.  Well I hear that's sometimes a temporary affliction these days.  Plausibly not in her case."

"Speaking of," interjects Jordan, entering the room swayfully and leaning against the wall, "you have a . . . a volunteer, for a star cloud, who wants - to try . . ."

"- from a star cloud?"

"Mmhmm."

"That sounds potentially awkward but I guess if they have specs I can try! Do they want to talk to me direct?"