Prrrrrr.

Yes Lornell has heard they do that.  There can be a few minutes of ear scratching and spine rubbing and holding their hand up for her to rub her face on and then Lornell is going to do whatever the polite thing is to ask a cat to get off you.

It's actually really impolite to do that to a cat. Enoby maybe lives here now.

(If they seriously need her off they can point to a notlap location and she will probably go there.)

Point.

Yeah okay she will hop off the lap and be over there. Then wash a paw like this was all her own plan.

That's a lot more respectful than animals Lorn is used to (as far as ones that are friendly at all), which is a good start.  It's plausible they might just end up liking animals an appropriate amount on their own, if left to it long enough - though, hm, is it common to keep lots of other kinds of vermin, copied from Chirun?

The commonest working animals are dogs (by a long shot, mostly because they are the most emphatically domesticated), then cats, rats, horses, various birds (corvids and parrots being the most common as service animals, though many kinds of birds are kept as decorations in sufficiently elaborately decorated households that don't have butterflies or fish instead), and goats. People also sometimes keep their own chickens, for eggs, though these are not generally trained to do tasks. More rural areas have more megafauna. Some places have relatively new domestication programs underway for things like raccoons but the domestic raccoons are still expensive and not very refined as lineages. Pets that are not especially trainable include assorted rodents, other birds, snakes and lizards, and various inconvenient exotics who may or may not found their own domestication programs.

Cats are fine; rats they already grabbed a little cute-thinkingofness for but they might want more if there are going to be a lot of them; horses Lorn has only ever seen from a great distance but they seem cool; birds are alright; goats are fine.  Dogs . . . Lorn is going to have to meet a local dog, probably.  Clearly they're going to be at least somewhat better, but it's hard to tell if that'll make them appealing or just unobtrusive - not that Lorn really needs them to be appealling instead of unobtrusive, per se . . .

Are there any games or activities more exciting than petting that one can do with cats?  Specifically with Enoby and specifically quiet ones?

You can get cats to chase things. There's a fishing-rod-style toy for Enoby over there.

That seems pretty likely to be less quiet than is ideal for headache-havers!  - Maybe not pretty likely.  Somewhat likely.  Lorn's not going to risk it.

But they will reach down and give Enoby a parting friendly forehead-and-spine scritch if she seems like she'll in fact find that friendly?

Prrt.