To the cat, in Cat, "He doesn't believe Cat is a real language and I want to prove he's wrong and we're right, so he's going to stand with his back to you and hold up a number of fingers behind his back and I'm going to ask you how many. I recognize that this is a very silly human thing which you have no particular reason to put up with, I will pay you in milk and/or fish."

The cat looks like she is about to object that this is offensive to feline dignity, but is mollified by the suggestion of fish. "All right."

"She agreed," she tells Sal.

Sal arranges himself as stated. He holds up 3 fingers, then 1, then 4, then none at all, pausing between each one to let the cat communicate the number and Inaaya translate the answer.

The cat communicates the answers!

And Inaaya successfully translates them!

The odds of getting all 4 of those right just by guessing are rather low. He did his best to block off ways of cheating. ...It's just that the conclusion is so ridiculous.

He walks a reasonable distance away from the cat. "Tell her that I believe you now, I'm sorry for the inconvenience, and if she likes I can make it up to her by petting her if she comes up to me."

To the cat: "He says that be believes us now, he is very sorry for the affront to your dignity inherent in this experiment, and if want you can go up to him and he'll pet you about it in addition to the fish from me."

"All right," the cat says, and presents herself for petting.

Well, since he first made it so he was the less convenient person to run over to, and Inaaya's clearly on friendlier terms, the fact that this happened anyways is more weak evidence of something.

He pets the cat.

Arcane cryptic nonsense feels a lot more bullshit when it's happening in front of you.

Well, when it's happening in front of you it's not nearly as arcane and cryptic, now is it.

Once the cat has been scritched to her satisfaction Inaaya makes good on her promise of fish, and then says, to Sal, "...so, I... don't make a habit of telling people about this, and I'd really rather not have this conversation with Oscar or William if I can help it."

"Are you sure you're not just psychic?" he blurts out. "Clairvoyance isn't much less fake but at least I've heard of it before. Basically everything you've got here is mysterious knowledge."

"--oh I'm also separately psychic, that's how I knew I should be testing the Dreamlands thing in the first place. Not clairvoyance though. I think it's called psychometry, I can pick up impressions from objects I touch. That's another thing I don't make a habit of telling people. On account of how it sounds incredibly fake and bullshit."

"Okay honestly even in light of that I am putting decent odds on you having clairvoyant dreams that seem like a place. Maybe slightly smaller odds than I'd put on you actually, what, astral projecting to a real place while you're asleep. Both of which are much higher than they were 30 minutes ago. Why are you psychic. What. Am I going to have to start believing half the stuff Nessa Clapper said to me."

"Excellent question! I don't have an answer! I'm looking for one but everywhere in London that claims to have an answer keeps turning out to be a scam, including myself!"

"And honestly I'm just believing what Nessa Clapper said at least for now, insofar as anything she said had information in it which is a big insofar, because she knows I speak Cat and I know people with psychic powers exist and I don't see how she could possibly have known that about me any other way?"

"...I was going to say 'but you didn't have the experience of walking into the room and the stranger who'd asked to meet you immediately blurted out secret information she couldn't possibly have had, so that's less compelling for you,' except actually I think maybe you did? I won't ask about the Violet thing you don't have to tell me."

"...Thank you."

"Hmm. You just said yourself that you're one kind of psychic but not another, right? You're not omniscient. And knowing some things doesn't mean she's not wrong about other things. Just because she's right that you speak Cat doesn't mean she isn't lying or mistaken about the future, or -- whatever the other world stuff was."

"I mean, I have no reason to believe that she's lying, and if someone says a lot of absurd things and all the verifiable ones are true then that's reason to believe that she isn't? It's not conclusive evidence, necessarily, but it's evidence."

"If nothing else if she can predict the stock market by all rights she should be an eccentric rich person somewhere, not holed up in here. From what we were told beforehand I get the impression she's only here because she's choosing to be, and I can't see why she'd choose this if she had much better options."

"Even if that's true, which it might be because I have no idea how stock markets work, it still seems like weaker evidence against than the knowing I speak Cat is evidence for? I'm not treating her as an unquestionable voice of truth, or anything, just-- strong evidence."

"I just think predicting the future sounds much less likely than knowing any of the other stuff. But we're not going to reach conclusions like this anyway. I found out psychic abilities existed during this conversation, I don't know anything about them. Do you suppose William's done talking to that doctor by now?"

"Probably."

That evening, Jing Yi has yet another dream.

He sees some kind of winged thing. His brain has a hard time processing what kind of creature it could even be: it is a little bit like a crow, a little bit like an ant, a little bit like a mole, a little bit like a buzzard, a little bit like a vampire bat, a little bit like a rotting human, and quite a lot like none of those at all. It has webbed feet and membranous wings, and moves gracelessly, like it was born to travel through something else.

It squats down over what he recognizes to be a still-living person. It begins to methodically remove the victim’s insides, sorting them by some system which only makes sense to itself. The thing seems like nothing so much as a child playing, separating their blocks by color then by size, except that the blocks are a person’s still-beating heart. It seems to reach some sort of stopping point, and makes a ghastly scream; he wakes with the sound ringing in his ears.

This is getting ridiculous. It has to be this room, somehow. Initially, in his terrified and sleep-blurred state, he is convinced the room is cursed, but after waking up a bit more, he draws the much more logical conclusion that this building must have a serious carbon monoxide problem.

Why does he keep ending up in places with carbon monoxide.