"Gosh. - why is it little kids shouldn't have omnilol?"

"I think it's technically legal starting at age eight, which is still pretty little.  Uh, for one they're gonna be meeting a bunch of strangers in a way that's hard to supervise or control, and there's not really a way to remove them from the situation before it wears off if things go poorly, and also some of the strangers are - just massive; it's pretty overwhelming even when you're used to it, and if you do too much of it regardless of age you can end up kind of - spacey - "

"Okay. You can't track down specific people and tell the kids to just go find Grandma?"

"Recently-dead people are the main reason it's legal that young, but stars merge up pretty quickly and then things get more complicated."

"Do they explain why merging is appealing?"

"I don't think it is, necessarily?  It doesn't really seem like they have a choice.  'Twinkle' is, you know, the little kid version; she's trying to introduce things without freaking them out too hard.  - Or I mean, plenty of people find appeal in becoming part of a superintelligence and stuff, just, probably most of them would wait longer than a week or a month after dying to start on that given the option."

"...any clues why the clusters that stay one size do that?"

"Incredible force of will?"

"Fair enough. How talkative are the stars? Like, would it be weird if they'd never mentioned to anyone that there are cats up there?"

"It does seem pretty weird, yeah."

"...I guess it's possible cats haven't been people very long. Hey Princess, do you have an idea of how many generations cats have been people? Like, were your great grandparents definitely also people."

"I don't know what you mean by that."

"I'm wondering if cats were just animals for a while, who might, like, communicate some basic things with each other, but not to the point of having politics and a complex language and stuff, and then relatively recently became smarter, or if cats in this world have been very smart for a long time. I guess related questions might be whether any other related species are smarter than the ones where I'm from, or at least as close as other apes are to humans, like African wildcats or something..."

"My mother talked, and I think her mother talked too.  I don't think I would know farther back than that."

"Maybe I should go to a shelter or something and find a really old cat." To Jackie, "Is there a pound or whatever around here? I want to talk to some elderly cats about whether their grandparents talked."

"Probably.  I could check the phone book."

"There are elders in ThunderClan!  And maybe they all would know more since they can see their family all the time, not just when they're kits."

"That's also worth trying!" he tells Princess. "How old do you mean when you say elder?"

"I don't know.  I only know that they have a separate den and aren't warriors anymore and the warriors and apprentices have to catch food for them before they themselves can eat."

"Huh. Well, I can try them too, perhaps."

"You haven't really been paying enough attention to me.  I'm used to when housefolk just talk to each other for a long time without me being able to understand it but I didn't think that would happen today.  I still have all of my questions."

"Sorry, it's pretty hard to juggle conversations where not everybody speaks one language! What were your questions again?"

"The food and the birdfeeder and whether I can visit my family and I still don't know why Jackie is sad.  And is Nicholas coming over?  I love Nicholas.  He gives me the very best treats out of anyone."

"Princess would like to know about the food and the birdfeeder and her family and also what should I tell her about why you're sad? Also she wants to know if Nicholas is coming over."

"Right, uh - I think the only times we switched her food were from kitten to adult food and then while she was pregnant we had her on something else - we can probably buy a new birdfeeder if birds aren't people or she isn't going to kill them?  I think Nicholas probably isn't coming over today, why is she - oh, is it just because she heard his name, okay.  Uh.  I have no idea how to explain my thing to a cat.  I'll ask Ian about a way to visit her family."