He joins in.

Pretty.

After a bit of hesitation, one of the kobolds tentatively joins them. When Rána's grin widens, the others do too, one by one.

They like you, she explains. Singing's more of a social thing for kobolds, we don't often sing with people who aren't tribemates or friends.

Awww.

He sings.

They sing. Rána brings the song to an end, and one of the others starts a new one.

He'll happily sing all day.

The kobolds don't have anything like that attention span; the singing trails off after most of an hour.

"If we're staying here for dinner somebody's going to have to go get it," one of them points out a little later.

Make it, too, or is it made and just needing to be fetched?

"There'll be something made, but it'll take a while to get it, they can't teleport too close to the group."

"Mmhmm."

Okay.

They debate who's going to go, and then work out what they'll be getting - each tribe has a few different dishes being prepared, plus various leftovers from lunch. Rána cares less about what she gets than about who's making it - she wants whatever her old tribe's head cook is preparing. (They're one of the ones who switched tribes, and aren't head cook in their new one, but that's still achievable enough.) She recommends a vegetable soup, for Tyelkormo: that tribe's cook does the most amazing things with spices, I'm sure you'll like it.

It is a very tasty soup.

It is, and after dinner there's more singing.

After a while Rána stretches and says "okay, we should head back," and the other kobolds blink at her, surprised. "Maybe next year," she adds.

"...okay," one of them says, while a few of the others look at each other, worriedly.

"It's fine, guys," she addresses the worriers. "I've been too busy for it to bother me, anyway."

"All right." But they don't really seem to think it's all right, whatever it is.

So, like, with Quendi, you trust people will bring things up if they prefer to talk about them, and it's very rude to demand to be let in on things if someone isn't expressing a desire to share. But apparently kobolds think it's appallingly rude not to be aggressively intrusive at people, so - what's going on?

Kobold stuff, I'm not sure you'd want to know.

Not really, but I want you to feel like I'm being appropriately attentive.

She makes a face that's about equal parts amused and grossed out. Thanks, but, skip it for this one.

Okay.

She chuckles and hugs him and the others relax.

"Anything else before we go?"

One of the kobolds asks if there's a way for them to get in touch with her, and she sets that up, and that seems to be it.

So, home they go.

Mmhmm.

Hug. That was really good. Thank you for coming with me.

Any time.

I'm glad you got along okay with them.

They seem nice.

Yeah. There's definitely some cultural differences, but they really are.

It wouldn't make sense for the same things to work for all kinds of people.