"Well, where does the information that you 'learn' come from?"

"StarClan."

"...huh. Where do they get it?"

"Well, it's mostly all the same things for all cats I've ever met, so I guess whoever came up with the words originally?  It's unusual that different adults are getting new words so close to each other.  - Which I suppose must mean it's you, mustn't it."

"I guess! At whatever remove."

"You said you gave Princess a word-teaching computer?  Maybe it's from her."

"Could be, though she learned so fast, I think she was getting helped along somehow if that's a thing at all."

"Maybe Twolegs are just slow.  Compared to cats," Fireheart suggests, gently.

"That was in fact my first guess when she got started but then I found out that you can learn words from thin air."

"So did you."

"My thing is different. When I'm summoned, I get the fluency level of my summoner, in this case you. I don't then continue getting new words from nowhere after that event."

"I don't see why that makes a big difference to you."

"Well, you're clearly not doing the thing daeva do and you're clearly not doing the thing nonmagical Twolegs do, so you are doing something that involves you being fed information in real time."

"How can time be not real?  Like dreams?"

"- no, 'in real time' means, like, in prompt response to events, as opposed to the words being already around somewhere and you, say, taking actions to pick them up."

". . . How would you tell the difference?  Is there even a difference between something responding to events and me having to take actions?  Those seem like the same thing, if the actions were specific."

"I... guess there could be things that were ambiguous between the two," Cam allows. "But Tigerstar seemed surprised by some of the words."

"Maybe some of them need more than one action, and interacting with a talking Twoleg is one of them, and we've had all these words all along but no cat could learn them until you got here."

"Maybe it's something like that. Has anybody who hasn't met me turned up with new words?"

"I can ask when I get back to camp.  Which we're nearly at."

"Cool."

"Actually, will you wait here, and I'll bring some cats out?"

"Sure." Cam finds a place to sit.

"Thank you."  He trots off.

Cam receives a message from Jackie's phonelike object before Fireheart returns.

Cam,

It occurred 2 us that maybe the railway cat (who is a cat who lives on a or some trains and gets news coverage sometimes on slow days, and has a name we can't remember) is a person.  Is there a way 2 check that or maybe U should.  Hope things are going well 4 U.

Regards,
Jackie, Ian, and Jordan, and

Love,
Princess