Getting NPCs to interact with creatures

[LummoxJR]

I have three small mods under my belt now and I have an idea for an ambitious-for-me but still small mod: I want to integrate Immersive Interactions - Animated Actions with A Cat's Life in a way that causes NPCs to pet nearby cats as possible idles.

After giving this a lot of thought and a few false starts, the best way I can think of to approach this is: Have a main start-on-game quest with an idle topic, no dialogue, that runs a script. The script should find a nearby cat and start a second quest that handles a scene. In the second quest, the petter and the cat begin a scene. The petter approaches the cat while the cat waits, the petter plays an idle (IdleSearchBody), an appropriate reaction happens from the cat, and the scene ends, ending the 2nd quest with it.

This will involve working with scenes and packages for the first time, but I find what I'm really struggling with is the scripting portion here. How do I search for a cat (Actor with ACLCatRace) within a certain distance of the "speaker"? This appears to be very possible in packages, but it seems to me that I need this information to set the aliases for the scene quest. So I'm all turned around here and could use some advice from modders with a lot more experience.

(I got this two-quest idea from the way Inn-Tegrated NPCs handels the book scene. There's a main idles topic in the main quest, and the book scene has its own separate quest. However, the book scene quest sets its aliases by simply choosing any "Find Matching Reference" in the loaded area. The greeter (first alias) only has conditions that they should have a certain voice type and not be disabled, and the responder has the same conditions with an additional check that they're not the greeter. So I don't know that this concept would work exactly as-is for my cat idea.