"Okay good."  She ticks a checkbox.  "Do other universes do birthdays differently and if so have you by chance already found a plausible correspondence I could write down."

"Our dates of birth have negligible correlation with character traits. I was born on what is in my universe called September thirteenth, though it's in the autumn, there, and I don't know if that's locally plausible for my personality."

"That's so weird!  I'll just put down something even, then."

"If I seem even to you then by all means."

"Oh, not especially, just it's the least suspicious at a glance.  But if you'd had something already it would have been more likely to stand up to any suspicion that ends up existing."

"What are September thirteenths supposed to be like?"

"Uh, so first of all don't go around saying 'thirteenth' for day numbers; nobody does that.  But that'd be . . . the second Fivesday; there was one of those in my grade growing up, nice kid - uh, not odd enough that you have to worry about them too much; she was good at presenting group projects but occasionally slacked off on the prep work, not that I can really complain about that; kinda sporty."

"Well that's not me at all."

"Then don't use your real birthday as your fake birthday I guess!"

"What fake birthday am I being assigned?"

"Triinary twoct-six sound good?"

"It sounds bizarre, because I'm not accustomed to octal, but sure!"

"That's fair, I guess.  How old are you; we can at least get the year sort of right . . ."

"...I am a hundred and seventy two and was born in 1987, I don't think you can do that either. I stopped aging when I was 22?"

" - Yeah, okay, sure.  Uh, you do look around 22 so I'm not going to worry too much about whether our years are different lengths or anything . . ."  Write write.

"They are! Honestly considering how many ways this world is different it's nothing short of miraculous that I can have a conversation with you, since I only got your cats' language by magic."

"Wow.  They're just - the same?"

"Mostly, yeah. The octal thing is different and we call it English not Latin but it's nothing I noticed reading a casual cross-section of assorted encyclopedia articles."

"That's really weird!  When the stars align, I guess.  Anyway, this is done; does Cricket want to say goodbye to anyone on the way back out front?"

Cam asks, and reports back, "He says none of them are worth his time."

"Alrighty then."  Walk walk.  "Could I get the most recent Feranli sales catalog?"

"Voilà."

She picks out a combo model that can handle both magnestrip boxes and flatdisks and does an excited little shoulder-shimmy upon receiving it.  She passes Cam a few coins since probably this isn't the only thing he'll need local currency for and she's still getting a deal.  "Uh, does he have any feedback for me?  Like, if the thing he didn't like about his cage was the size there's not a lot I can do about it, but anything fixable I'd want to know."

Cam asks about this! "...he says the cage is too small, the food was terrible, there's not enough fresh air, he doesn't like how you smell, some of the dogs bark too much, he objects to linoleum, and the vet's hands were cold."

"I'll see what I can do.  Tell him thanks."