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.
Dancing! Kobolds totally dance, it's a major inter-tribe activity. She doesn't personally do much of it but she does enjoy watching. She grins and nods, "nice."
"Kobolds dance, especially in large groups that don't hang out together most of the time," Kiri reports. "And yes, Jayce sort of is like a chief, given what kobold chiefs do. Except for deciding where we live, he doesn't do that."
...hm. It occurs to the kobold that if she does need to introduce the Ardelays to her people for some reason, bringing them to the meetup and trying to arrange for Jayce to dance with them would be at least less blatantly suicidal than most options. Still not a good idea, though.
"Yes, let's not put anyone in mortal danger just to see if Jayce dancing with kobolds would make them happy to interact with humans."
"I do not want to take them. I would much rather just have productive and educational interactions with this adventurous one."
"Jayce means that if we went and visited other kobolds and they decided to try to hurt us I could stop them. But I could also just not go near kobolds who might want to try to hurt us in the first place, which is much smarter."
The kobold nods to Kiri, then looks to Jayce: "kobolds run." If anyone would be hurt by the Ardelays being brought to the meetup group, it would be the kobolds - not by Kiri, but by the broader situation of trying to keep themselves safe from the outsiders.
"Jayce, the problem is not that kobolds would attack us, it's that the kobolds would stampede all over each other fleeing and then instead of reconvening later they'd still be hiding, possibly in places that are more defensible than fertile."
"Most kobold mages see magic," including spellbearers, and probably primes as well, "and humans are big." And the safe guess with any non-kobold is that they're dangerous, both in the sense that even if the guess is wrong it's still the safe way to guess, and in the sense that most non-kobolds are dangerous to kobolds, back home.
"She's not a midget kobold. I'm actually quite curious if a magic-seeing person could tell by looking when someone was prime."
Shrug. She's going to try to get the usual complement of tribe-mage spells out of her tribe's mage while she's home; it's pretty likely she'll be able to get that one, if Kiri wants to arrange to try it when she gets back.
She considers the tribe's interpersonal politics some, and concludes that there's a pretty good chance she'll be able to teach Kiri that spell, if they want it - getting her tribe's mage to teach her the spell rather than cast it on her is a little more of a stretch, since she's not technically supposed to be allowed to learn magic, but she expects that to go her way if she brings it to the group.
"Well, I hope it works out. ...There's kobold tribe politics about sharing magic around but she can probably bring me a spell I want," Kiri explains to her brothers.
...sigh. Little close to home, there: of course kobolds have politics, they're people. Hopefully this is just a 'people who talk' thing. Or a 'people who hang around with strangers all the time' thing, maybe, that can't help. Anyway: Kiri, what's the word for 'body language'?
"Body language," says Kiri, "is the phrase you're looking for - I understand that kobolds manage to have politics without talking, but yeah, we don't have any examples of that and it seems like it would be frustrating to manage even simple things that way. Even our examples of non-strangers who interact a lot, like the three of us, involve talking except when it involves mind-reading. ...Occasionally a human is born who can't hear, and then they can't learn Welchin. If they live in a big enough city or their parents know enough, they might be able to learn a sign language, with gestures for words -" Kiri knows a couple gestures, which she illustrates. "But if their parents don't know why their child hasn't learned Welchin, and there are other reasons a kid might not talk for a few years, then they won't be able to learn sign language to talk to their kid, and this is actually really bad for a human mind, not to have any language at all. Sometimes people come to me with complicated mind problems, in case I can fix them - so I've seen that - but I couldn't fix it, although I could tell them why there was a problem and that they had to learn a sign langauge."
Anyway: "Kobolds do body language-ing. We watch, we see people think, feel, want. People watch us, see we see, see we know, see we choose doing things. Do wanted thing, people happy. Do other thing," shrug, "people other thing. Politics."
(Of course it's more complicated than that - in a good-sized group like a kobold tribe there's rarely going to be that kind of consensus about anything beyond the basics. But that's a matter of tradeoffs and making sure that nobody gets the short end of the stick too often; the general principle still holds.)