Well, aside from their new mage, that is. She's bored, and curious. Making portals to known places is straightforward enough, with the magic she found, but that's far from the limit of what it can do... so one day, she slips away, portals off to a different cave system - one can't be too careful, after all - and experiments.
Temperature roughly the same... gravity roughly the same... air the same, not into stone or underwater or in a volcano or on top of a mountain... but, instead of patterning it after a place she knows, what happens if she only specifies those things, and lets the innate patterns of the spot she's casting on do the rest? Particularly this one part, which seems to specify the world...
She finishes the spell, and hesitates for just a moment before activating it.
Well. Test the theory, then. Would Kiri like some more vocabulary? Let's see... "God, demon, magic, spell, spell-effect... mind, thought, knowledge, know, learn, speak, listen... yes, no, maybe, tiny, big, small. Kiri do of speak of language, kobold do of learn of language - kobold no do of see of mind of Kiri, do of learn of listen."
A few words in Kiri pulls a piece of paper out of her pocket and starts scribbling notes as fast as she can. When the kobold is done speaking: "Kiri know mind -" She steps back, out of range. "Kiri no know mind. ...Kiri no god," she adds, stepping back but just to the very edge so if the kobold flinches it'll take her out of range again.
She dips her head apologetically and gives a 'hold on' gesture, then steps out of mind-reading range to consider what to do next.
This seems to involve considerable debate, but eventually she comes to a conclusion. Instead of stepping back into range, though, she reaches into her belt pouch (moving slowly and watching Kiri for signs of alarm) and pulls out a small piece of flint. "Mage," she says, by way of explanation, as she sets it on the arm of the chair and shuts her eyes to concentrate, still touching it as she does so. After a minute, she picks the rock up again and taps it with a claw, causing it to teleport back to the arm of the chair, then looks to Kiri to see what they think of this.
[[this kobold]: [generally willing to help [respectful/friendly/potentially allied] people [speculation that Kiri falls into this category]]] [consideration]
More vocabulary: "Move," - she doesn't know words for teleportation or portals - "go, take, put... thing, this, that, here, there... cast, break." That's enough to be getting on with, hopefully? (She steps back out of range when she's done speaking.)
Scribble scribble. Kiri's memory is far from perfect. And she doesn't actually have anything she needs moved handy right now. It's still easier to pick up the kobold's vocabulary than to try to teach her Welchin, though. Her head is spinning with possibilities, though. "Move Kiri?" she asks, not having a generic term for "person" and suspecting very much that she already knows "move kobold" is a definite yes.
She nods, "yes, do of move of Kiri - do of spell of thing, Kiri do of go of thing, thing do of move of Kiri of place."
That's kind of hard to disentangle even with the glossary, even if she mentally subtracts all the weird-in-translation "of"s, and she doesn't have enough adjectives or prepositions... "Spell thing here, take thing there, go thing, move here?"
She doesn't need to be in the place the spell aims at when she casts, but she does need to be familiar with it, or the enspelled object has to be brought to the place and activated there. Otherwise, that's right - the enspelled object can be taken anyplace and will always teleport things to the same location.
"Thing move thing?" wonders Kiri. Or does it get left behind, dramatically reducing its value as an emergency bailout...?
The kobold doesn't seem to know offhand whether this is possible - the more straightforward way of moving people is to make them spellbearers, which she's rejecting as an option in this case. She steps back out of range to consider the problem, which involves the same look of distant concentration as when she was casting before, and after a minute of that, she steps back into range with her conclusion: yes, she can cast in a way that allows the object to come along, though it won't be possible to include as many destination triggers on something as small as it will need to be.
But she could get a magic object that could teleport her and itself to several locations! That's pretty cool!
...And she doesn't have the words to ask "what kind of thing". Or "can I activate the thing myself in the various locations or do I need to talk you into coming to Chialto with me". Or "how many people can it bring" or "could someone who didn't know what it was activate it by accident". She can't even ask "is there anything you want done in exchange". Why does she have a word for demon and not want? Hmmmmm.
"Small thing, tiny thing...?"
Anyway, things... clothing is going to be the most reliable, and it needs to be something sturdy so it doesn't break too easily - a belt, perhaps? A leather belt with rivets for the trigger points would be an obvious choice, but anything solid enough to hold a spell and with obvious places to touch will work.
And then she draws dots for the numbers one through ten and names the numbers.
The kobold follows along, mimicking the words easily. The numbers are a little surprising - she's used to a base five system - but she gets the idea anyway, and shares her own words for the first five.
Since they're doing double vocabulary, she goes down the list of words the kobold gave her and translates them all, pairwise. "Spellbearer" and "mage" she leaves untranslated because they mean specific things with no real Welchin equivalent, but "spell" she considers sufficiently generic to render in her own tongue.
Well, mage-cast spells aren't hexes... except when they are; she hasn't thought about how she might cast a hex, and she's not going to now for the sake of making an example, but there's nothing actually stopping her from doing that, which is why unfamiliar mages are so dangerous. But in general, without a malicious or exceptionally thoughtless mage involved, hexes just don't happen; the casting mage gets to specify almost every aspect of how the spell works, and while it may take some thought and creativity to come up with the best approach to solving a problem, or even a decent one, it's not hard to avoid setups that aren't under a spellbearer's control in whatever ways they should be, whether that's by giving the spellbearer that control, or casting on an object instead so that the spell can at least be broken.
...vocabulary, right. The kobold has covered a lot of the relevant words, but 'hex' is missing from Kiri's list, so she supplies it, along with 'control', 'choose', 'want', 'trigger', 'activate', and 'deactivate'.
Ooh, good, "want". Very important word, that. Kiri translates all the words except "hex", then says, "No hex. ...Maybe mind hex." It's a little less specific than "mage" and, well, she can't control that part and it is annoying. "Control fire, choose fire - no choose mind -" well, not directly, she gestures at the space between them, steps away, steps back. "No control Ardelay," she clarifies, "no choose Ardelay, Ardelay activate Ardelay no choose."
...is this something she needs to be worried about happening to her? That could be a problem, especially if her tribe... nope, nope, abort that train of thought - she steps back out of range and takes a moment to collect herself.
"No no no - kobold no Ardelay hex," says Kiri, headshake headshake. She's not sure what the bit about the tribe was about and she's not going to speculate, but the kobold doesn't worry about coming down with a primacy. "Ummmm..." She has no family words at all and no great way to ask for them. Will the kobold even be able to notice family resemblance if she calls down Aleko and Jayce? Would she recognize a family tree if Kiri drew one out? "Kobold kobold, Kiri human. Ardelays humans."
Sigh. Okay. Back into range.
So, kobolds are, well, small Kiri can see; not imposing; not usually mages, either. Not warlike. Tend to get the bad end of it when they get into conflicts with other sorts of people, which does happen; their saving grace is mostly that they're very sneaky, so it's hard for other people to find them to give them trouble in the first place. Sneakiness which she is very carefully not going to go into detail about, obviously.
But, the kobold giving Kiri enough information to find her tribe? Taboo. Very taboo. She's more likely to get away with murder than not end up exiled - more or less a death sentence - if she does that and her tribe finds out, and with very good reason.
So, yes, she's going to be a little twitchy about that topic. And she's going to step back out of range now.
...And the kobold didn't give her a word for "tribe" or "death" so she can't say that Ardelays are a tribe or that there's one at a time passed from person to person on death. Oh well, maybe that's not really the priority. What is?
"There," she says, pointing up at the floors above the library, "four humans." Her brothers, two servants. It is okay if the kobold knows where they are.