"I would like to go, if this involves any inconvenience on your part you haven't already incurred I do not ask this of you."

"I did already tell them all I'd be introducing you."

"In that case lead the way."

"Let's start with RiverClan."  He trots off in about the direction Cam flew in from.

"Slow down a little, I'm not that steady on foot."

"All right."  He sits and waits for Cam to catch up, then continues at a more sedate pace once he does.  "So what did you find that made you think only some cats can talk?"

"Well, I went to the shelter and only some of the cats could talk, and of the ones that could only some of them had parents that could talk, and Cricket in particular remembers becoming able to talk and attributes it to some weird catnip."

"What was it like, not being able to talk?" Fireheart asks Cricket.

"It was not so different. Almost nobody is worth talking to anyway."

"I disagree.  But maybe it's different for rogues."

"Rogues?"

"Cats who don't have a Clan but don't belong to a Twoleg, and aren't loners.  - Do you belong to Cam now?  You don't have a collar."

Cricket considers this question beneath him, apparently.

"In the Twoleg legal framework yes he does, but I have philosophical objections to owning my fellow sapient beings. I could make him a collar if he weren't just riding around my shoulder all the time and it might be necessary."

"Why would it be necessary?  Is it in the Twoleg version of the warrior code?"

"I guess you could frame it that way. Twolegs don't know any cats can talk, except for me and the ones I've told, so they think of cats as similar to, say, dogs, who can't make all their own decisions very well. So cats are supposed to have a twoleg designated to take care of them, and I am Cricket's designated twoleg if any other twolegs ask and they can't just be told he's in charge of himself, but between us he is in charge of himself and merely likes to ride around on my shoulder."

"But how do the collars come into it.  I had some of an idea of what they might be for, but now that I know Twolegs can talk I realize it might be more complicated than I assumed."

"If a cat gets lost the collar has some writing on the tag with the associated twolegs' address so other twolegs can bring the cat home."

"You use so many words which I don't think any cat knows the meaning of.  But I believe I understood most of what you meant anyway."

"Sorry, I can define things as necessary, it's just actually really hard to guess what vocabulary you have and use only that."

"I could try and point out all the things that aren't really cat words, now that we're mostly alone."

"Go right ahead."

"'Writing' and 'address', most recently."

"Writing is symbols that convey meaning, I think I may have explained it before, address is a way of specifying a location."

"So you use them instead of being able to smell well?  If you'd explained that before it wasn't to me."