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your stare was holdin'

The first thread featuring Astrocracy as a world and the source of most information pertaining to the setting.

Synopsis

Demon Cam is summoned by Fireheart. Over the course of endeavoring to improve the cats' lives, he discovers the differences between his home world and the world he's been summoned to.

Summary

Due to the thread being over 200 pages and still updating, the following summary is a work in progress.

  • Cam is summoned and discovers that he can now speak a language that consists of meowing.
    • He learns that cats can't understand human speech and of the clan/kittypet divide.
    • When consulting a video of a cat from Revelation meowing, he can't understand it. He discovers that one of the local human languages is extremely similar to English.
  • Cam offers to act as a liaison between the clans and the local humans; Fireheart needs to consult with other cats in ThunderClan about this. Cam agrees to wait.
While Fireheart, his summoner, requests permission from his clanmates to introduce Cam to them, Princess shows up to investigate. 
  • She doesn't find it surprising that Cam meows at her, but is surprised that he can say anything more advanced than "hello" and understand her when she speaks.
  • Cam refuses to tell her about any cats he already saw, to her frustration, but agrees to pass on to Cloudpaw and Fireheart that she was looking for them.
  • Fireheart returns with Sandstorm and Cinderpelt. When Cam passes along Princess' message, Fireheart and Sandstorm leave to find her, leaving Cam alone with Cinderpelt.
Cinderpelt has questions for Cam about human lifestyle and habits!
  • He answers her questions the best he can, revealing that he used to be a nonmagical human before he died, that he has demon powers, and that he has medical training that can be applied to said powers.
  • Cinderpelt asks Cam to heal her leg, which was injured in a car accident. He's willing to help, but cautious about anesthetizing her properly. They decide to wait until Fireheart and Sandstorm get back to proceed with the plan.
  • While they wait, Cam tells her about how humans practice medicine and introduces her to germ theory.
Fireheart, Sandstorm, and Princess return, Princess having gotten injured running away from a dog.
  • With Princess' permission, Cam cleans and repairs the cut on her foot. Also with her permission, he pets her, which she enjoys.
  • Cinderpelt asks to be healed next. Sandstorm and Fireheart are suspicious, mostly that Cam might try to demand payment that they wouldn't want to or be able to give. Cam assures them that he just wants to establish positive relations with the clans.
  • In lieu of poppyseeds, Cam wants to use lidocaine as a painkiller. A basement dweller test doesn't uncover any allergic reactions, but a test on Cinderpelt reveals that it doesn't work as a painkiller. She decides to do it very quickly with poppyseeds and a stick to bite on.
  • The operation is a success! Cam burns the basement dweller and injured leg and Cinderpelt goestakes her new leg out for ana experimental run.spin.
With that taken care of, the topic returns to whether Cam should act as a cat/human translator.
    Princess, having many questions for her housefolk, is in favor. Sandstorm is more hesitant about the possibility of alerting the humans to the clans' existence. He proposes that the question be put on hold until the next Gathering, which will be held on the full moon. Princess and Fireheart convince Sandstorm to allow Cam to talk to Princess' housefolk, as long as he doesn't bring up the topic of the clans. Cam agrees, since the situation could easily go wrong if handled poorly. Concerned about the potential personhood of cat prey animals like voles and songbirds, Cam tries to convince the cats to allow him to make them demonic prey. All of the cats are extremely discomfited by this, especially when a plastic-wrapped sample Cam makes ends up tasting unpleasant to all the cats except Princess. Fireheart decides that the stakes are high enough that he'll need to do some cat politics before even introducing Cam. They agree to meet at dawn of the next day and for Cam to make a day's worth of unwrapped prey that Fireheart, Cinderpelt, and Sandstorm can bring back to ThunderClan's camp. Princess and Cam set off to meet Princess' housefolk! En route, Cam hides his wings with a jacket and goes around to the front door so as to not arouse suspicion.
      Jackie gets the door and is skeptical of Cam's claim that he can talk to Princess until he proves it by passing along a request for Princess to scratch Jackie. Princess (very gently) complies, convincing Jackie. She lets Cam in after making a brief phone call. Cam passes along Princess' messages and gives Jackie a brief overview of some of his demonic abilities and traits. Jackie, in the course of apologizing for holding Princess uncomfortably tightly, wonders aloud if that was her thing and explains to a curious Cam that she's a September 01 person. Calendar confusion and clarification ensues. Further facts about the world come to light, including:
        The human language that's extremely similar to Revelation!English is locally called Latin. The Roman Empire is still kicking and has been for 785 years. The world is flat, although there exist conspiracy theories about a spherical Earth. Birthdays are a thing! Not for cats, though. The stars are dead people, and their positions are responsible for things such as geminis and influenza. One can talk to the stars by taking a drug called omnilol. Space shuttles have not been invented. Crystal healing is a thing! It's very complicated and involves birthstones and licensed professionals and sometimes herbs. In addition to the sun and moon, which are always opposite each other, there is a moon-like celestial body known as Polaris that is responsible for the seasons. Cam starts making plans, but before he can get very far, Jacqueline disclaims that she shouldn't provide any guidance or direction more specific than informing Cam of common knowledge lest she inadvertently invoke the summer solstice curse. Jackie and Cam talk a little about the local Jesus, who is thirtyish and a spring equinox and somewhat of a spiritual leader, and also works with a summer solstice named Judas. Jackie very deliberately refuses to have opinions on what, if anything, Cam should do with this information, and decides to cycle back to some of Cam's earlier questions. Cam reads a book aimed at children under eight (the legal age to take omnilol) about how star clouds work and speculates with Jackie and Princess about why the formerly-human stars have never mentioned the sapient cats and about how long cats have been people. Princess, disappointed and annoyed at being ignored, reminds Cam of her questions. He passes them along for Jackie to answer and decides to make a picture board so Princess and Jackie can communicate without relying on Cam as a relay. Princess proves to be very, very quick at picking up written language! Cam switches gears from "set up picture board" to "teach her how to read and type Latin" and in the process of this discovers that sapient cats have human-like color vision. While Princess works on the Latin program, Cam conjures a motorcycle and goes to a nearby animal shelter.
          The receptionist lets him into the back to talk to the cats. The cats are very confused about a lot of things, such as:
            Cam being able to talk! Words like "universe," "acquisition," "language," and so on, though one cat spontaneously understands the word "spatially" shortly after asking what it means. Why Cam is here. Most, but not all, of the cats are able to talk to Cam. They describe the ones that can't as extremely quiet and mention that they've never picked up vocabulary from them. Nearly all the cats who can talk report that their parents could as well, but one mentions that its parents can't talk and that it spontaneously learned to talk one day. None of the cats can read, including one who claims when asked to be able to read everything. A local alt of Cricket exists, who reports becoming able to talk after taking "a very strange catnip trip." Cam asks the receptionist, who introduces herself as Ivy, to let him out. She's curious about the "some cats are people" card Cam made to test cat literacy, and because of this gives him leeway to stay until past closing time. Cam decides to take Cricket home, to Ivy's relief. He doesn't have a standard pamphlet prepared, so he answers her questions instead.
              Ivy confesses that she'd suspected the cats of being people for a while, having picked up that they meowed in clear conversational patterns. She's not sure what to do about it aside from continuing to advocate for their welfare. She takes Cam's weirdness in stride, provided that he demonstrates himself competent to care for Cricket. He makes a lot of items on the shelter's donation list and makes her some movies and a flatdisk player in exchange for some local currency he can use to pay the adoption fee and passes along feedback from Cricket. Cam returns to Jackie's place with Cricket in tow.
                Jackie now has a pair of visitors, Jordan and Ian. Princess has made a fair amount of progress in learning Latin and is able to type with great enthusiasm (if limited vocabulary) about her feelings (Jackie and Ian and Jordan are great!) and desires (she wants to go outside and have treats). Ian and Jordan are all right with this until she requests the kind Nicholas gives her, which they suspect might be drugged. Cam gives her fish instead. Cam and the local humans discuss differences between their worlds. Jordan in particular is fascinated by the concept of vacuum nearly everywhere. Over the course of this conversation it comes out that Cam intends to set up a house in the woods. Princess pipes up to remind him not to build too close to any extant clan territory. Since he can't smell the boundaries and she only knows what ThunderClan's territory smells like, he decides to find an alternate solution. Cam and Cricket set out to a campground that Ian recommends, where Cam makes an RV. There he reads up about the state of the world:
                  He goes through a birthday guide book Ivy recommended him and learns about the autumn, winter, and spring solquinoxes and their reputations. He also learns about even people and people less odd than the solquinoxes. He then looks for information about star clouds not directed at children too young to legally interact with them. He learns a bit about the history of the world, particularly as pertains to humanity discovering things about magic, stars, and birthdays. Not much is known about the underlying mechanisms of these things, since the One is notoriously cagey. Cam decides to try tripping on omnilol, with Cricket as his trip sitter.
                    His first try involves omnilol that he conjures and does not work. Suspecting that omnilol is magical and thus unconjurable, he goes to a drugstore about half an hour away from Chelford and picks up a dose, which works! At first he looks for cats, but does not find any - searching for nonhuman star clouds only yields big clouds that aren't very human in their thought processes anymore. Trying for the most recently dead individual doesn't work because "who died most recently" keeps changing too quickly! He settles on talking to the closest non-cloud who wants to talk to him. The resulting star is someone recently dead. They tell him that being dead is kind of like being high, without being able to go back - scary, but maybe it gets less scary when you're used to it. They plan to stay separate for a few more days to allow everyone who wanted to to say goodbye. They have a hope that a particular ex of theirs will show up before they merge so they can be petty to him. They compare the feeling of staying single to not taking a sip from a glass of water in one's hand - not too hard, if you're paying attention, but increasingly hard over time as one gets "thirstier." Different people or clouds can be likened to different flavors of drinks, based on potential compatibility. One can also talk to parts of clouds, though it wouldn't be like talking to an individual person. The star compares this to the difference between an egg and a crumb from the cookie it's baked into. They're curious and confused about why Cam is on a tiny dose intended for small children as an adult and become concerned when he confesses that not only has he never used omnilol, neither of his parents has either. He urges them to not worry about him or his safety. As Cam's dose starts to wear off, he asks if there are any cats around. The star is unfamiliar with cats but, with Cam's permission, asks the One about it. The One isn't aware of any cat souls, but is aware of a couple hundred new stars (as in the physical representation of a dead person on the shell of the universe) without associated souls. Cam tries to find these but can't before his trip ends. At dawn, Cam and Cricket go out to meet with Fireheart. Cricket is rude to Fireheart, which does not seem to bother him.
                      Fireheart wants to know if Cam found out anything about the personhood of prey. Cam reports that everything he's found has suggested that prey animals are not people, and neither are most cats. He'd still like to be introduced to the clans, even absent a potential moral crisis. Fireheart has a lot of questions about humans! He wants to know about writing, clothes, the purpose of collars on kittypets, cars, and how humans cope with not having a very good sense of smell. Fireheart catches Cam up on some relevant cat politics, such as that RiverClan is going through a period of loss, that one of his friends switched to RiverClan to be with his kits, and that the former deputy of FireClan who now leads ShadowClan betrayed ThunderClan. Cam and Fireheart discuss StarClan briefly - Cam mentions that there doesn't seem to be communication between dead humans and dead cats. Fireheart finds this unsurprising and mentions that he's had prophetic dreams, which he doesn't feel comfortable disclosing at this time. Cam has some questions that Fireheart thinks he should ask an elder, which he may have the opportunity to do so if invited to the next Gathering, between one and two weeks away. These questions include "how long have the clans been a thing" and "where did the warrior code come from." Cam, Fireheart, and Cricket arrive at RiverClan's territory, where Leopardfur greets them. Once it's established that the prey concern is no longer pressing, she wants to know if Cam has any other business.
                        Fireheart asks after Crookedstar's condition and Cam offers to help, though he disclaims that he doesn't know as much about cat medicine as he does about the human kind. Leopardfur asks him to do something about the water, which has been polluted by garbage. Cam proposes setting up a filtration fountain for RiverClan, putting up a "no dumping" sign at the river, and adding new fish to the river. Leopardfur agrees and leads Cam to their camp. Cam places the fountain and some of the RiverClan cats bring Crookedstar out. He's in very poor condition and has pneumonia. Cam does everything he can, but Crookedstar dies. While RiverClan buries Crookedstar, Mistyfoot leads Fireheart, Cam, and Cricket out of RiverClan territory to a spot near where Cam parked his RV.
                          Cam sets up the "no dumping" signs, replenishes the fish, and drags some garbage bags away from the riverbank. Once this is done, Fireheart leads Cam to Fourtrees. On the way there, they talk about indestructibility and the positive impact Cam will have on clan life. Representatives from WindClan arrive to speak with Cam. One of them, Gorsepaw, is very curious about Cricket. The leader, Tallstar, asks if Cam can do anything about the Thunderpath, since drivers frequently hit cats in a way that appears deliberate. Cam offers to make a bridge; Tallstar and Gorsepaw lead him to where he can do so. On the way to do this, Cam talks about why humans do things, such as wanting cats to be kittypets. In turn, the cats explain some of the sentiment behind warrior disdain of kittypets. Cam sets up the bridge, which the cats are pleased by once they test it out.
                            A pair of barn cats, Barley and Ravenpaw, come by to talk. They tell Cam about barn cat life and their histories. Barley mentions that he grew up as a stray until he "woke up." Cam questions him about this, and Cricket causes some friction by chiming in. Firepaw leads Cam back to Fourtrees. On the way there, Firepaw mentions that Ravenpaw left ThunderClan after Tigerclaw tried to kill him. This prompts Cam to take notes on cat politics.