It takes her a couple moments to parse that, and then she looks around and listens. "No?"

"I heard from somebody about elves killing whole tribes of kobolds and I would love to know why that happened and how to make sure it doesn't ever happen again."

Nidela snuggles her cat and works at making words come together. "Kobolds steal," she offers eventually. "Stole tree blood" - maple syrup, she's thinking about maple syrup. "Ritual thing. Everybody mad." This is the worst reason ever to kill a bunch of people but she's pretty resigned to the fact.

"Fuck's sake. Okay."

"Fuck's sake, yes. Dunno how to make make sure it doesn't happen." Telling the kobolds not to do that might work, but even if it were somehow possible to get that close to them kobolds don't seem to understand them when they talk; she tried, back in the day.

"Is it only kobolds who they'd randomly murder whole tribes if provoked - do other species need to fear the same thing -"

"Tigerfolk? If kill trees." Tigerfolk aren't inclined to sneak into the village and steal things, so nothing else would come up. "No other people here." If there were there'd be similar problems, though.

"That's not really an acceptable situation."

"Yes. Fuck's sake." What exactly does he think she can do about it? She couldn't even get the animals' problems all fixed, and they mostly believed her about that.

"I'm trying to figure out what I can do about it. If elves can't live with anyone else without committing genocide over ritual offenses then maybe elves need to go live somewhere with no other species."

Shrug. "I help, if..." If he wants her to. If there's anything she even can do. She's not really feeling very confident of her ability to get things done, right now.

"Why not?"

Nidela is confused. Ila chimes in: You're asking her to do something overwhelming. She wants to, but it's still too hard, she shouldn't.

I meant, why is she not feeling confident in her ability to get stuff done, she seems perfectly capable -

Oh. She's upset, that happens when she's upset. Give her like a week, maybe. Lots of things are still too hard for her, though.

Why's she upset?

You reminded her that she can't do all of the things she wants to do.

There's probably more to it than that, but I don't need to know it to help her, and I don't really care.

I might need to know it to help her.

Ila swishes her tail in annoyance. Ask her, then.

"Is there other stuff you've been wanting to do that I can help out with?"

She shrugs. "Help kobolds?" They really did hurt them very badly, and they don't seem to have recovered yet, she hasn't been seeing nearly as many tracks and the thefts are still a fraction of what they were before.

"I'll see what I can do, yeah."

"Thanks."

"For sure. Want to stay in touch? I can come by every once in a while."

That gets a weak grin and a nod.