"Oh?"

"Give me just a moment to consult; I didn't memorize the phrasing -

'A cluster made of equal counts of summer solquinoxes and the even day before the autumn's crest
is isomorphic to the seasonchange that nests betwixt them
and if you took a cloud made of said seasonchange and mixed them
you'd have something identical to what you'd had before
(the one exception being that it's bigger, greater, more)
and this result can thrive by virtue of its composition
it cancels out the curse of one and gives the other mission
and so in terms of what you're looking for (or weren't but should've been) it seems that' - pardon me - 'Ms. Felicity's the best'."

"Oh, that does sound familiar.

"I suppose if Jackish or whatever they wind up wanting to be called are happy with the arrangement it makes sense, the curse is heinous, it's just... a lot."

"It is.  I wonder why she did it in the middle of a sentence; that seems - well, needlessly hard on you, I would say, though I imagine there was some sort of reason . . ."

"She was doing a bunch of, uh, Nudge shit, it seemed of a piece."

"I'd suspected about as much.  It's unfortunate."

"Well. She is no longer a Nudge. She is a Felicity. I guess. I hope she likes it. This is going to be so fun to explain to Princess and I can't even delegate that part."

"Did you not mean . . . to already do that?  I sat her and Ian down and she's been typing her responses."

"Oh, I was imagining the communication barrier would be a little much for news this weighty but if you've got it that's great. How are they all taking it?"

"Ian's not very surprised, though this wasn't quite what he was expecting.  Princess . . . is taking it much better than I might have expected, but maybe that's just the communication barrier.  We explained that Jackie died, and she typed back a confirmation of understanding without having seen it spelled to my knowledge, but she doesn't seem to care given that there's still going to be someone around to love, even if they'll smell different.  I'm not sure whether she really understands what death is or not."

"She might not, even insofar as she knows what to expect for herself the cat afterlife doesn't merge them."

"How did you learn how to talk to dead cats in dreams, incidentally."

"The dead cats can pull in anyone who's fluent in the language, subject to some dead-cat-politics about it. They don't do it for most cats but I'm special."

"You are indeed.  But they didn't know how many living talking cats there are?"

"They did not. Large numbers did not exist in catspeak till I showed up and started showing off my accumulated technological knowhow with whoppers like 'ten'."

"Oh dear.  And they're not conjurable-for?  I was trying to come up with workarounds while you were asleep but I assume you know much better than I do the shape of your limits . . ."

"I think they're the same species as regular cats but I should try it." Speaking-cats in Ivy's shelter?

Yeah!  There was a non-talking cat with distinct heterochromia which is distinctly missing from Cam's pile.

"...huh. Fancy that." He is going to conjure a tiny glassified form of each living talking cat's heart and weigh them for population numbers.

There are somewhere in the range of 370-380 sapient cats.

"Coming up on four hundred but not there yet," Cam says. What's the proportion of green glass for the Chelford strain and gray for the Londinium?

'Bout 240:135.

"And most of them are here not in Londinium."

"Hm!  Can you tell how many are in shelters?"

"Uh, I could do a scale model of all their locations but it would be fairly inconvenient to narrow things down from there."