What is the stars' mechanism of influence over things such as dreams, the existence of drugs, possibly birthdate attractors, and, possibly, in the case of cats, the weather?

He can find an author waxing poetic in one of the prefaces about how stars, being the most natural piece of existence, can of course not only bring nature to heel but dictate its very flow and form; yada yada destiny yada yada weaving the great web which connects us all yada yada the supremacy of nature over man but the eventual incorporation of man into nature.  No coherent descriptions of anything resembling a hard magic system for the stars can be shaken out of his corpus.  (Although the forms of magic accessible by the living are by contrast quite rigid; both crystal healing and homeopathy have strict rules and require quite a bit of precision.)

Have the stars gone into any detail on why they chose crystal healing and homeopathy of all things to implement? Also, influenza: why.

Healing is good and being able to make a lot of a thing from a little of a thing is useful!  Cam can't find anything that explains the resemblance to similar processes that don't work from his homeworld.

Influenza has existed since the start of birthday clustering and so the One has mostly refrained from commenting on it.  A younger cloud at one point suggested that it was better to have scheduled sicknesses than unpredictable ones, with it left implied that influenza's existence cancels out or otherwise avoids other diseases somehow.  But since it's younger and was not in fact there, many people disregard the comment as not being worth much more than what a living person would say.

The disease rates are in fact lower here than Cam's earth at a similar tech level, but it's hard to separate that out from crystal healing and all the other oddities of this world; they don't have good statistics from before lots of confounding factors became things.

Huh. Okay.

What has been said on the absorption process and its voluntariness?

Nothing is explicitly forcing any individual instance of merging.  It's just really easy to fuse accidentally, and gets moreso over time.

Any idea why?

It's The Natural Order of Things.

How enlightening.

Where's a fact sheet for omnilol?

Here's one!  It has more specific dosing information, including rows by age and weight and with notes for a couple variants with minor differences between them, and seems to be directed at parents who are letting their kids take omnilol for the first time.  It reminds them to (soberly) stay with their child until the dose has entirely worn off, to have some form of hydration on hand, to start with a low dose, and to not let them take it more than twice in two weeks or eight times in a year (for eight year olds, with increasing safe frequencies as they age; there's a chart).

It and all other sources Cam goes through assume that basically everyone will have tried omnilol at least a few times before adulthood.  One of the variants mentioned claims to be impossible to overdose on and to give a gentler trip than the others; it's recommended for first-timers.

And what in more detail happens on an omnilol trip?

All of the direct descriptions are either reviews of specific variants or directed at children.  But, collected from those: it takes a few minutes to set in and then you start to astral project, which can happen more abruptly or smoothly depending on what exactly you're on.  This manifests as a sensation of leaving your body, though you remain in (somewhat more clumsy than usual) control of it; it's advisable to remain seated or lying down for the duration of your first few times.  It doesn't get rid of sensory input from your body, though the input may change in some way; some people find their senses feel softer or more distant while others say they're about the same as normal and it's just comparatively harder to pay attention to them.

Once you're proprioceptively up in the sky (which is only proprioception; you can't use omnilol to spy on your surrounding landscape), you'll begin to feel the presence of the stars and the other currently-high people.  Aiming for specific people or clouds usually works, at least when they want to be found, and children are advised to aim away from the One unless they're like, terminally ill and nervous about what death is going to be like or something.

From there, you can telepathy people on a scale of exclusively intentionally-sent words and tone to full-on mind-meld, depending on dose and variant.

And eventually it wears off, the telepathy becomes more difficult and lower fidelity, and you sink back into your body.  Some people are immediately fine to go do other things once that happens; others get drowsy or have lingering sensory or emotional effects for a while afterwards.

The next time Cricket wakes up Cam has made himself a gummy of a variety that just does intentionally-sent words, though he doesn't know if it will work; Cricket is advised in tripsitting protocol and Cam takes his dose. It's probably too magic but Cam would expect his crystals and his homeopathy to work, since that seems to be not about the physical structures at work at all, so maybe it'll do what it says.

He remains sober.

Damn. It's pretty late at night, but is there a 24-hour (...or, uh, whatever) drugstore he can hit up?

If he wants to drive half an hour to a bigger town than Chelford.

Yeah, all right. He gives Cricket a phone and hops back aboard his motorcycle to the nearest place that appears to have his chosen strain in stock.

Here it is!  This one's a liquid; it comes with a little plastic measuring cup.  Blueberry flavor.

Blueberry flavor it is. He can cover it with his change from the shelter without having to awkwardly give the cashier a spiel and a stack of videos.

He brings it back to his RV and reminds Cricket about tripsitting protocols and measures carefully and slurps.

And a few minutes later it sure does feel like he's rising out of his body, even though he also is still very much just sitting in his chair.  It's soft.  He can still see the inside of his RV in just as much clarity as before, although it seems markedly less real and present and important than up, up, up . . .

Consciousnesses other than his own twinkle into his awareness.  Who is he looking for?

Cats. Or anybody else who isn't human, actually, but he'll take cats.

Does he mean star clouds made up of lots and lots of former individuals?  Those aren't really very human anymore.  There's some here and over there and there and over that way.

No he means ones that were not previously human.

Your search - 'ones that were not previously human' - did not match any available spirits.  Did you mean: really big star clouds?

(Cam can feel the presence of said really big star clouds.  They're enormous, collections of thousands or millions or in one case tens of billions of souls, all collapsed into a single entity, and complete with all the intelligence and wants and dreams and hopes and hates which that entails.)

Okay, maybe Starclan is a different thing somehow. There are seriously no ex-cats here? Really? He will take whoever died most recently in that case.