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.
Kiri translates all those words as they come up. "Ah -" For this she wants a map. She holds up a hand wait and sweeps off and falls on her face and gets up and continues sweeping off. She comes back with an atlas and opens up to a map of Welce. "Here," she says, pointing at the approximate location of her house. Then she points at Chialto. "Go there, one day, carry food, water. Sleep there, no danger. Put... four Chialto. One here, one here, one here -" She points at several smaller towns. "Humans there go here, speak, 'Kiri, fire, danger', Kiri go there, no fire. Spell do that?"
The kobold peers at the map: here to Chialto looks implausibly far for one day's walk, if she's reading it right, but the notation is strange enough that she could easily not be. Anyway, one day from here to there and then another day to each of the towns is just fine, and enspelling something to go to all four locations won't be a problem at all. Just... how sure is Kiri that the kobold is really going to be safe walking into a strange tribe's camp? Presumably Kiri will be vouching for her, and expects that to be sufficient, but how sure are they that it will be, and how dangerous might it be if they're wrong?
Fuck it, she's resorting to drawing.
She gets some paper and draws a simple carriage and a horse - "One day," she reiterates, drawing the house -> Chialto line again, "carriage, horse," point point. "Go Chialto carriage, humans no know kobold. Human know kobold, choose be of danger, fire."
She steps out of range to cast on her loop of twine again, this time retrieving a simple silver ring, which she proceeds to cast on. Partway through the casting process, she speaks a new word; when she's done, she puts the ring on, and steps back into range.
That word - 'escape', in animalperson; she repeats the sounds carefully in her thoughts - will activate the spell on the ring, no matter who says it; if she's wearing it at the time, it will teleport her back here.
Kiri nods and writes down the word and translates it into Welchin. "No fire," she agrees. "Human choose be of danger, no kobold there."
Hmm. More safety words, while she's thinking about that - "Wait, walk, run, sneak, hide, stay, quiet, listen, watch, come, path, trap, safe, trust, believe, tribemate, friend, enemy."
Aleko or Jayce is going to come get her for dinner eventually and she shouldn't surprise them.
"...Kiri go," she points up, "Kiri come here, friend come here? Kobold wait, trust friend? No danger."
And she comes down with company. He doesn't seem to mind being in her range at all. "Whoa," he says when he sees the kobold.
Apparently Aleko doesn't talk too much when he can just let Kiri read his mind.
She seems otherwise content to wait for the humans to finish their conversation.
"Yes, she does magic. We're working on it. Plan to haul us to Chialto and other cities with network libraries in them soon-ish with a very secret passenger. ...Gooood question. Uh, kobold: kobold food?"
Kobolds are pretty omnivorous; there's not a lot they don't eat. Her usual diet includes all the same general categories as a human's, plus bugs - her world has giant ones - and bones, and seems to be very light on processed food; it's not clear whether she's familiar with bread or not, for example.
Also, she can retrieve food via portal - she wouldn't want to go too long without at least being able to cook what she can get that way, but she wouldn't consider it any particular inconvenience to go a few days without even that.
Sibling hug! And then Aleko leaves Kiri and the kobold alone.
That went well! The kobold is a bit less nervous with Aleko gone, but seems to be generally okay with him.
...hm. Where does Kiri want her to go while they sleep? She can go - well, not home, she's clear on that, but back to her world anyway - but from her perspective that seems like a bit of an unnecessary risk, plus making it harder to coordinate leaving in the morning. On the other hand, she is a strange mage, and it would be entirely reasonable of them to not want to risk getting hexed, so she'll leave if they want her to.
"Stay," advises Kiri. "Come - quiet." And then she motions for the kobold to follow her up and out of the library.
This is a pretty large building. They go up stairs and down a hall and up some more stairs and Kiri shows the kobold a room. "Stay? Kiri go carry food here?"
She's back with a plate of miscellaneous food options for the kobold and one for herself.
The kobold samples everything, and likes most of it, especially the things with more of a mix of flavors. She ends up eating about half of the offered food, and is both satisfied and appreciative.