Cam relays this.

"Okay.  Is there a way I could talk to my housefolk when you're not here?"

"I could maybe make you a big board with pictures on it and you could touch them with your paw to mean certain things?"

"Yes please."

"What kinds of things should be on it? Jackie, I'm going to make Princess a picture board so she can communicate when I'm not here, any suggestions for what to put on it?"

"Hmmmmmm . . ."

"Probably less on the concrete nouns, since I should be able add those later myself without too much trouble, and more on the abstract concepts?  Like time stuff and some less-charadesable verbs and question words and stuff."

Cam starts a list with the question words. "I have no idea how cats keep time... Princess, how do cats keep time?"

"There's dawn and breakfast and when-Jackie-leaves and when-Ian-and-Jordan-leave and noon and when-Jackie-gets-home and when-Ian-gets-home and when-Jordan-gets-home and my supper and the housefolks' supper and dusk and bedtime and midnight.  And sometimes there are days when they don't leave, or leave at different times, two of them in a row after every six, and sometimes they leave again in the evenings.  I think probably the Clan cats do it differently."

"...hm. Uh, Jackie, Princess can't actually tell time except by dawn and dusk and when people leave and come home, what time words did you have in mind? What verbs?"

"She definitely knows enough to start shouting at us like eight minutes before her s-u-p-p-e-r.  Not that I know how to translate that into anything useful.  Uh, can she do numbers - 'four days from now' - or 'next month', 'last spring', stuff like that?"

Cam adds numbers to the list, and seasons, and a moon, and starts attaching clipart, murmuring explanations to Princess of each proposed item.

Princess understands numbers up through nine and can sort of get the gist of higher ones, even though she's not familiar with them as individual concepts as opposed to 'a lot'.  "Why are there so many squiggles for eight?  That doesn't seem like it should sound like that at all."

"- uh, eight in particular is spelled weird, a lot of spelling in... this language... is pretty unintuitive till you're more used to it. There's a homophone spelled like -" He brings up a popover and writes "ate" in it. "Like that, which is pronounced the same."

"Why is it like that?  That sounds very confusing."

"It is! It takes young humans a while to learn to read. It could be worse, though, Chinese is worse." He dismisses the popover window and resumes clip-arting words.

Over the course of this it becomes clear that Princess is faster than a young human at learning to read.  Much faster.

"Jackie," says Cam after a while, "your cat is becoming literate on a scale of hours, just, uh, so you're aware, we might dispense with the pictures and have her type instead."

"Okay.  Uh.  'Becoming', and not 'already was', you think?"

"That is what it seems like." Cam turns on an introductory English literacy program and then after a moment's thought adjusts his display settings for limited color vision.

"Why did you do that thing just now?"

"This is designed to help people learn to read! If you keep picking it up this fast we don't need to do the picture board at all, you can just write things, I can make you something that'll work with paws. Can you see it all okay?"

"No, there's less colors now."

"...I guess maybe cats here have full color vision." He switches it back.

Princess works her way through the program with relative diligence and without further complaint.