And here is an aisle of high wooden structures, each laden with rows of tall rectangular objects in ever color, in leather and paper.

She peers through, and, when the place on the other side seems to be deserted, touches a different part of the portal's frame - setting it to close after a minute - before stepping through and examining the leather things more closely.

There are lots of them. If she tips one off the shelf, it opens up on three sides to show marked paper.

The kobold isn't familiar with paper, and spends some time examining it - she's careful not to damage it or make too much noise. After a few minutes, though, she puts the strange object back, and starts looking around the rest of the area.

It's mostly more of the paper things. Rows and rows of shelves and shelves of paper things. And a nook with some chairs and couches around a low table, and over there some desks with oil lanterns on them.

The kobold is very still and very quiet.

[curiosity [person [spellbearer?]] [lights [spelled?] [impressive]] [something else?]], the kobold is thinking, and then [alarm [freezing in place]], as she notices that the person is acting oddly.

The lights stop moving. That was not the intended effect. Sigh.

The person with the firelights looks at her.

Fire-person repeats the greeting, smiling slightly.

Well, that seems like a good sign. The kobold spends another moment gathering her courage, and then steps into view.

"Kiri," she repeats, with a small nod, and then she gestures similarly, "kobold."

Kiri repeats the animalperson greeting and follows it with "kobold".

This gets a grin and a little bow - she's not moving any closer yet, but she's not braced to dive back behind the chair any more at least. And then... she does have to ask... she points to the candleflames, "fire", and then looks back to Kiri, "Kiri do of fire?"

"Kiri do of fire," repeats Kiri, and she reaches into her halo with her bare hand and takes a flame like she's picking a fruit. It dances on her fingertips.

The kobold blinks. [fire [illusion?]] - she steps forward, watching Kiri carefully for objections, and reaches up to see if it's hot as well as bright.

Since she's not planning to actually touch it, just get close, Kiri holds it out.

...None of this comes with words. In particular, Kiri can't claim not to be dangerous. The kobold's monitoring her body language; she is already trying to look nonthreatening, but she tries harder. When the heat of the fire has been observed, she lets it wink out.

...Kiri doesn't have a word for no. She shakes her head, hoping that will work or at least informatively not-work. "Kobold is of mage. Kiri is of... Ardelay," she says.

"Ardelay is of fire..." No word for 'and'. A pause will have to do. "Ardelay is of -" Also no word for mind. She taps her head. The head-shake produced an accurate but low-confidence guess; who knows if this will even be that good.

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.

Kiri waits.

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.

Kiri is very interested.

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?"

"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.

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.

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."

"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."

The kobold finds this somewhat confusing, apparently. "Human Ardelay hex?"

"Kiri hex. One Ardelay hex."

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?

Kiri nods and writes down the word and translates it into Welchin. "No fire," she agrees. "Human choose be of danger, no kobold there."

She's a little wary of this idea, but after a bit of consideration, she nods.

So Kiri goes up.

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.

Yup, that's another human all right. She nods a greeting.

"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?"

That went well! The kobold is a bit less nervous with Aleko gone, but seems to be generally okay with him.

"Sleep, sun, go Chialto? Want?"

"Stay," advises Kiri. "Come - quiet." And then she motions for the kobold to follow her up and out of the library.

The kobold follows, quiet and alert.

Nod.

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.

Kiri eats in this room too and then takes the plates away and comes back. "Sleep now, no now?" she inquires.

She considers: It doesn't feel like night-time yet, to her, but she can probably at least nap; she does want to be fresh for the trip in the morning. She can certainly stay up a while longer if there's more planning to do, though.

Well, there's more things they could talk about, even if the plan for tomorrow's pretty straightforward. "Mage do move. Mage do...?" Anything else? Turning Kiri into a nationwide fire-suppression system isn't nothing but she'd be a little surprised if that were the only trick.

Teleportation is the only thing she can do right now; she's new to being a mage, and teleportation is a new kind of magic, so she's been too busy figuring out interesting things to do with it to learn other sorts of effects yet. There are plenty of things it's useful for, though - gathering without having to worry about carrying things home, especially heavy things like water, exploring without worrying about getting lost or trapped or running out of supplies, pit traps for hunting with that deposit their catch all in one convenient place, of course all sorts of safety spells, and so on. Her favorite one is the mini-portals, like the one she used earlier to get the dried berries; being able to access her tribe's stores from wherever she is is pretty excellent.

Sure, there's no size limit. For a really big thing - like, an entire tree or part of a mountain or something - she might need to put some quartz crystals around it to help her figure out just where the edges were so she could cast on it properly without leaving any bits out or getting any extra stuff, and getting the crystals where she would need them might be a bit of a pain, but if she really needed to she certainly could.

"Hmm - big thing on spell thing, big thing move?" She gestures a platform with one hand, unspecified quantities of trade goods with the other, teleports the second hand to her knee from her palm. Repeats the gesture a few times - this would be most useful if it could get things from Chialto's harbor to the rest of Welce without needing the kobold to help with every load.

"Good," says Kiri, a portal is much more general purpose than a cargo platform anyway. "Go, put belt, put -" Gesture in lieu of word for portal. She supplies 'portal' in Welchin as an afterthought.

"No thing. Put thing." She can have people build stone arches on Ardelay properties throughout the kingdom. She'll make a killing and an economic boon. "...No soon." Stone archways take a non-trivial amount of time to set up.

Ah, okay. How long might that take? She's ... not going to think about her long-term plans, nope, but before she flinches away from that line of thought there is the impression that the season matters and that she might not be able to come back until next year, if it takes long enough for that to be relevant.

"Mmmm..." Time-limited resource, legitimate economic investment. She can make it a rush job and/or call in Alser. She gets the list of numbers and draws/words up to twenty and then goes "ten, twenty, thirty" on up to a hundred. "Maybe twenty, thirty days."

The kobold backs out of range to consider this, and returns after a minute's consideration with a conclusion that that should work all right - she can't stay the whole time, but she should be able to come back after twenty days and stay for ten or fifteen.

Okay, Kiri's gotta go write some letters. She opens the door to this room - "Kiri sleep there," she says, pointing at her door across the hall, "Aleko there," in case the kobold needs this information for some reason, "Jayce there, Jayce know kobold here, safe."

Nod, nod, nod, good to know. "Kobold stay, kobold quiet."

The kobold isn't able to go right to sleep, but does manage it eventually, after a while spent drawing. She'll wake up with the sun, if nobody disturbs her before that, but she's not going to leave the room without an invitation; she can portal herself a snack if she gets hungry while she waits.

After the sun has been up for about half an hour there's a knock on the door. "Kiri," says Kiri, lacking pronouns.

After a moment, the door opens, and there is the kobold, looking reasonably well-rested.

"Good morning," says Kiri, hoping it'll be clear enough from context that this is just a greeting. She offers the kobold a plate of breakfast. There is scrambled egg and fried potatoes and bacon and pancakes with berry compote and a little dish of maple syrup.

"Maple syrup bad?" says Kiri, puzzled.

Kiri removes the maple syrup from the room and eats her pancakes without too.

The kobold appreciates the maple syrup being removed, in a careful not-thinking-about-that sort of way.

Kiri writes down the new words and nods solemnly. "Humans do 'mine'," she mentions, although this was probably obvious.

Yeah, she'd guessed that.

Kiri comes back a bit later. "Go now?" she asks.

She nods, and hops off the bed to follow.

The kobold need not directly interact with any horses. Aleko is attaching the horses to the carriage and it looks like he's going to drive too. Kiri shows the kobold into the carriage. There are curtains, so no one will be able to see that there's a kobold in here.

The kobold sits just within range, but doesn't seem to have much to say, at least to begin with; she's too busy paying attention to the carriage ride itself.

Kiri has lots of things to say, but it's really hard to work with a limited shared vocabulary. Soechin she studied for years before she ever met someone whose Welchin was worse than her Soechin. She pulls out her vocabulary notes, sorts the words into categories, and then adds (marked differently) words she might want to try to add - hm, maybe she could overregularize and communicate the most common Welchin intensifier and softener and then use that for things like "sooner" and "less dangerous"...? (All this notetaking takes a while.)

The kobold will be over here contemplating her string, then, unless and until Kiri tries to get her attention.

...The kobold would probably have thought it at some point if it were dangerous to interrupt string contemplation. "Learn?" Kiri asks.

The kobold refocuses and scoots back into range: Sure, what's up?

The kobold readily picks up both the words and the concepts, and shares the equivalent Animalperson words when she knows them, which is most of the time but not always.

She doesn't know the directly equivalent word, but does share "ask".

Which is also useful: "Ask thing: what. Ask person: who. Ask..." She consults her notes, doesn't actually have 'place' - "here, there: where. Ask what person think, want: why. Ask now, soon, day, night - when. Ask one, two, more, less: how much. Ask..." This one's hard. "...go magic, go horse? How go? Ask, how Kiri find kobold? Kiri find kobold mind." Does that make sense?

Kiri snorts and translates 'place' and 'reason'. More Welchin it is. She probably has a fair fraction of the animalperson words the kobold knows in the first place; it's either not a very complete language or the kobold hasn't heard that much of it, because her memory is really impressive. She reads off a random smattering of words in both animalperson and Welchin, identifies them all as "words", and then distinguishes between the "Welchin words" and "animalperson words" and declares both Welchin and animalperson "languages". Hmmm. Colors. She can do a surprising number of colors with fire, but most of them are uncomfortably warm for most people to be in close quarters with. Her outfit supplies examples of red and orange and white, her shoes are black, her hair is brown... "spring is green"... water is blue, she has a little gold on her person and it is yellow, and... purple will just have to wait, she supposes.

She shares the animalperson terms for 'word' and 'language' and the various colors, including purple, and also 'bright' and 'dark'.

Yup! And here are the animalperson equivalents of those.

This elicits some mental grumbling about how ownership itself is a lie - she accepts this weird cultural thing, but only as a cultural thing, and she doesn't really approve of it - but also the animalperson word for 'lie'; apparently she doesn't know the word for 'own'.

Trade, she's familiar with - apparently she trades with the tigerpeople, sometimes, though her thoughts about the memory she shares about that suggest that the trade itself isn't really the point there, and that there's something more complicated going on. Once she's established that she's got the right idea, though, she shares the word for that, too.

'Any', she picks up with no problem - and here is the animalperson word for that, and 'some' and 'all' - but the concept of money seems to be completely new, and the kobold spends a little while thinking about possible implications of that (the one she's surest of: trade must be really important to humans) before she's ready to continue.

Kiri waits while she thinks it through - it's really interesting watching the entire concept of currency be novel to somebody.

...right. The kobold is intentionally not in the habit of using personal pronouns - apparently they're dangerous for her to use in the context she most often speaks in - but she knows them; here they are. Also 'you', and two variants of 'them', one for 'person of unspecified or irrelevant reproductive status' that can be used to refer to anyone and one for 'person who cannot reproduce' that mostly is used for children and elders; she declines to share the variants that specify reproductive status other than that.

Kiri translates 'you', translates the first 'them' as 'them', and, having no Welchin equivalent for compressing inability to reproduce into a pronoun, asserts that there is no Welchin word for it. ...And now she's curious. "Danger words?"

"Why?"

Absolutely. Most of them wouldn't even be open to the idea of letting them prove otherwise. Not that the kobold plans to try - her tribe puts up with her weirdness now, but only because she's proven that she's not going to put anyone but herself in danger, and that's a fairly fragile understanding; trying to get any of her tribemates involved could easily get her exiled, if her tribe decided they couldn't trust her any more.

"Why no kobold language?"

"...I know."

That's a good enough answer that the kobold doesn't immediately teleport away. She watches Kiri, warily but thoughtfully, for a few long moments instead.

"I know," Kiri repeats. "I know thoughts, you think, you're a person."

Kiri shrugs. She doesn't have a problem with it; this one talks, and even if she stopped talking she thinks, which serves the immediate purposes of communication; and there are no other kobolds around to be inconveniently nonlinguistic, and even if there were they would still be people under the unlanguage barrier - but Kiri can't say most of that. So: shrug.

Sure. More words is fine. Here's the animalperson word for that. And 'hungry', and 'angry', and 'safe', and 'happy'.

Somehow Kiri gets the impression that asserting that the kobold is safe will not have the desired effect. She translates these conditions into Welchin.

Some of these are repeats, but Kiri writes down the new ones, and translates them, and repeats the translations of the old ones in case they've been forgotten.

Kiri identifies what she's been doing as writing. One writes so that one can read. Would the kobold like to learn to read?

"Welchin words are written," Kiri assures her. "Watch -" She writes down this is writing, shows it to the kobold, points at each word, says what they represent, then hands the paper through the little window to Aleko. "Hey, Aleko, read that aloud?"

"This is writing?" says Aleko. "No kidding, what else would it be, origami?"

The kobold is very impressed.

Yes.

She would! And successfully, at that.

And here's a few more to try - Kiri skips around the vocab list, making sure she doesn't throw in any silent letters or digraphs just yet. "Water" is simple, "what", "sky", "walk".

Since Kiri had to make up a spelling in the first place, it's pretty intuitively put together in her notes - just like that, in fact. She points it out.

What a pleased kobold this is.

Well, so long as the times are only when there is a word with this other sound and isn't a word with the two obvious sounds, that shouldn't be too bad. Probably. Hopefully?

That's probably going to take some practice to keep straight, but she's got the basic idea, and draws some little pictograms on the notes to help her work it out again later if she needs to.

And here are some sentences, all written out - Kiri's already been forgetting not to conjugate things kind of a lot, but all written out it's obvious that the various forms of verbs are the same. Except for 'to be', that one's all over the place - Kiri makes a chart of it for the kobold.

Kiri has a book in her bag; she gets it out. "Book," she supplies. "I found you in my library; a library is where people put books."

The kobold nods and mimics these words; she obviously doesn't know their equivalents, if there even are words for those things in animalperson.

Kiri adds the words to her list, and shows the kobold how they're spelled. "You learn fast," she remarks. ...She doesn't have "fast". Well, it's easily gestured. "Fast," she says, moving a hand left to right rapidly, "slow," it slows to a crawl.

"You can hide in the carriage," Kiri assures her. "And then in my house."

Kiri is not totally thrilled about not being invited to receive contagious magic, but she's not going to do nonconsensual mindreading to get it. "We can take the carriage there, you can stay inside, I can get out?"

And in she goes.

"Tomorrow Aleko will go buy me a belt so this house can be put on it. I need a way for someone in this house to ask me to come here if there's a fire, too."

Sure, that makes sense. Where exactly in this house does Kiri want the belt to bring her? Also, she can make a portal from here to the other house - just a little one might be fine for communication purposes; it's not possible to speak through a portal, but someone could pass notes through or pass a bell through and ring it or something - or a bigger one would let someone just walk through.

A bell would be perfect. One bellpull per emergency landing location. Kiri picks a spot in the kierten where she would like to appear, and she obtains a servant-calling bell from a disused room to thread back into the country house.

The kobold examines the specified landing spot, and then asks for more information about the mini-portal when Kiri returns with the bell: she didn't have a chance to examine very many places in the country house, so their options for the other side of the portal right now are the library nook or the room she slept in last night, or she can teleport back to one of those spots and go have a look at a different location if that's safe to do. (Kiri can come, too.)

Kiri would like to teleport back and show her a spot in the house kierten there too, where a bell will be more clearly audible.

Easily enough done. Let's see. Tie a string to the banister here, make sure Kiri is out of range, put a portal to the library in the wall under the stairs, step back into range to explain: untying the string will break this portal; the kobold will do that after Kiri goes through, then teleport herself directly there.

Okay. Through Kiri steps.

And a few seconds later, the kobold joins her.

And Kiri giggles and then shows her the kierten, after making sure no warm person-shaped spots are in the path.

They should at least get Aleko. He will be confused if he is left there all alone.

True. What would Kiri prefer to do? The kobold doesn't care very much one way or the other.

Kiri would prefer to go back to Chialto.

Back to Chialto it is, then. This time the portal lets out in the kierten - the spot the kobold is planning on having the belt put her, if she'd like to tweak that at all.

Hm. The kobold is not actually familiar with the kind of bells-on-ropes setup Kiri is using, but, on examination, it seems straightforward enough; sure.

Kiri makes a shopping list - more bells, more ropes, materials to make little signs that say ring bell for Ardelay prime in case of fire - and then yawns enormously. Bedtime.

Huh, okay. The kobold isn't quite sleepy yet, but, sure, it's getting late.

Kiri shows her a little room. And gives her a few simple books.

This is an entirely acceptable way to handle this discrepancy.

Eventually, the kobold does too. She's awake and ready to go when Kiri comes to check on her in the morning.

"Do kobolds sleep less than humans?" wonders Kiri.

Maybe. The kobold doesn't know enough about humans to know, nor have a very good way to describe how long she was awake after Kiri left last night or how long she's been awake so far this morning, but it's certainly possible.

"Humans sleep about one part of three every day."

The kobold considers this. Kobolds don't do timekeeping, and she's rarely awake for a whole day and night at once, and the lengths of days and nights vary enough over the course of the year to confound her attempts at estimating. One part in three doesn't seem obviously wrong, but it might be closer to one part in four, she's not sure.

Kiri shrugs. Breakfast - Aleko cooks - and then they pile into the carriage to go find good places to put things around the city. Kiri has selected some distantly-spaced places she owns: a library, a post station, a corner of a park with a statue of her great-great-great-grandfather, a theater. In each location Aleko hops off the carriage, and Kiri gets out, and they draw chalk on a part of a surface that would be suitable for a bellpull to appear from via portal for the kobold to see, and Kiri stands in a place it would be appropriate for her to spontaneously materialize in response to a fire-related emergency.

When she wonders that within Kiri's range - well, Kiri has practice not reacting to amusing thoughts too much, but there is the inkling of a sporfle on her face.

The kobold doesn't miss much, when it comes to body language - comes of being a member of a culture where so few people can talk. She's not going to ask as such, but she definitely noticed that reaction, and is a little confused at it.

"Humans happen the same way any person happens," Kiri says.

...That is not what she was curious about. Humans' eggmaking habits are of no interest to her. Ew.

That just makes Kiri laugh aloud. "You wanted to know how we all live so close together?"

Yes.

"Some humans put plant seeds in the ground, many of them, or keep animals, to grow food, and then the food gets moved to the city where most of the humans are. And most cities are near rivers or oceans. We put food and things on boats to move them easily."

"Not everyone in a city knows everyone. A lot of people know me, because I'm the Ardelay prime - the person in my family with magic - and there are only five primes, but most people don't know more than one or two hundred other people. ...It's easier to deal with strangers if you share a language."

"It means the humans can specialize - each gets good at one thing and doesn't have to know how to hunt or forage or trap food - and there are people specializing in almost anything you can think of, all in one place."

That does have the obvious downside of people not knowing how to look after themselves - not that kobolds can go very long without their tribes, but knowing that she can manage on her own for a while when she wants to gives her a kind of freedom that she thinks is quite important.

"Humans can't... go live in the woods or something," agrees Kiri. "But there are places to get privacy."

Well, if it works for them, the kobold isn't going to judge.

"The belt is to move me around when there are fires, but the portals are to move stuff around, so it's easier to get food and other things across Welce."

...That seems risky. The kobold did explain that the spell will break if the portal frame is damaged, right? A bunch of people being dependent on a spell for food in a place that can't support them without it isn't a very good idea without a mage around to re-cast the spell if there's an earthquake or landslide or something.

"It will just make it faster. People in all these places can already get food. And the portals will be made of stone."

"...Does it have to be a kobold apprentice?"

...not strictly speaking, no. Splitting her time between her tribe and her apprentice might cause some problems, though, given that she still intends to be away from the tribe to do diplomacy, too.

Kiri nods. "Well, there are a lot of humans to choose from if you wanted a human apprentice. Although you probably don't want to interview dozens of them. If not me I'd probably suggest Jayce." That would be the other person who lives in Kiri's house who has been named but that the kobold hasn't met in person yet.

"Okay."

More places, and then they have gone all the places (stopping for lunch, which Kiri brings some of into the carriage for the kobold) and returned to the house.

Kiri designates and - with little bottles of colored lacquer Aleko finds somewhere - color-codes the rivets on her belt and indicates how each should correspond to a destination. And here go the bells.

Straightforward enough. And then it is dinnertime.

Kiri indeed does not want crickets, but nuts and dried fruit (after she samples one of each offered kind) are incorporated.

And then there is dinner.

And in the morning they can all get in the carriage again and go to a different town.

The kobold spends most of the ride reading - she can still only read very simple things, but she expects that practicing what she's already been taught will help her more than learning anything new, right now.

The screaming children get the kobold's attention immediately. She peeks out of the carriage, and then in quick succession she yelps, disappears, and is replaced by a very startled human child.

The kobold only distantly notices this. She's trying to put herself between the lady and the remaining kids - maybe not trying very hard, if the kids in question aren't cooperating - and looking like she'd very much like to get the little one away from her.

It will do. The kobold stands, stiffly, steps back out of Kiri's range, and disappears back to the carriage.

"This is - very complicated. Will you let me explain even if I say things that sound like it is time for explanations to stop and running around taking people's children to start?"

It would take something very alarming indeed for that to be the best option, given the kobold doesn't have anyplace to put abused human children.

"Okay, that'll have to do. So. First of all, humans don't lay eggs." ("Egg" has been covered as part of a breakfast vocabulary lesson, but still.) "There is no way to just take someone's egg; it's a baby or it's literally inside someone, nothing in between. Secondly, humans live in large groups, but these groups are not like tribes. Most people in a town don't know each other. The group that is most like a tribe is a family. Usually that's two people who want to have children together, and those children." How's this settling so far?

"I'm getting to that. It's also relevant that humans are mammals - like, um, rabbits, probably tigerpeople - so it's hard to feed a baby unless you are personally that exact baby's mother. Because you'd have to find someone else who was giving milk right then." Sigh. "So, humans don't live in tribes. We live next to people we don't know. Total strangers. I know you are also a total stranger, but the thing about living like that is we need a lot of rules to make sure we can all live together. Rules against child abuse are some of those - but there are rules about how to enforce the rules."

"There are people who give milk for other people's children, but it's considered kind of personal and most people don't want to do it, and there might be something else going on because it's not as easy as you're thinking of it as being. But anyway. You have 'rule' about right, and 'enforce', and - it wouldn't be against any rules for you to tell someone that you don't think they should hit their children. To say it in words. But it is very, very against the rules for you to jump to taking the children away in that situation. There are people whose specialized job it is to know the rules and find out what's happening and put dangerous people somewhere they can't hurt anyone and you are not one of those people. I'm not one of those people. I could do some of it, but only because a lot of people know who I am and like me - if they don't like how I do it, I can't do it any more, I would be breaking rules and no one would let me."

"I agree with you that the kids need to be able to leave whenever they want. But there are many, many people. Some people run places for kids who leave their families to go, but they're usually full and don't have enough people working there and sometimes the kids don't get along with each other. I give money to a shelter in Chialto every year, but there are so many. And there are worse parents than that one - and that is who the shelters have to be for because there is not enough room."

"If you want to help expand that shelter so it can have five cave sections to separate fighting kids or something I will be all for it. There is a lot to do. There is no end to things to do. That is why it is so important to concentrate on the things that are most important and the things that will leave you able to do even more things. That's why I want to move stuff around. I have a lot of money, but the more I have the more I can spend on things like shelters and feeding hungry people and moving people to places where they will get along better with the other people and making sure everyone can learn to read and have somewhere to go in the rain. It's a little important if people in this town can get stuff from Chialto more easily, but mostly it will mean I can do more other stuff."

Pet pet.

"We'll go to the library, I'll write an explanation of who you are and the misunderstanding so people can go there to find out what happened, I'll send those kids some books, and then we'll go straight to the next town even if I have to drive partway to give Aleko a break, I think." Pet pet. "Okay?"

The kobold can do that from the carriage, and then they can be on their way.

Snuggle snuggle zzzz.

"Hey, kobold," murmurs Kiri, hours later, "wake up, we've gotten where we're sleeping for the night."

The kobold wakes quite early, and decides to go off and think a bit. When Kiri wakes up, there's a note on the bedside table reading "portal: if you talk, kobold hears".

Kiri is really charmed by how quickly the kobold has taken to literacy. She changes clothes and sends a room service order down the dumbwaiter; after the food has arrived (enough for all three of them), she says, "Kobold, breakfast."

The kobold appears a few seconds after she's called, still not cheerful, but in a much better mood regardless, and also somewhat snowed-on.

"...Are you cold?"

Hm? Oh, a little; she was in the sun and out of the wind once she found a nice spot, but it is still winter back home.

Now the room is toasty warm. (Until Aleko complains, and then the half of the room the kobold in but only that half is toasty warm.) Breakfast!

And then into the carriage, and to an Ardelay holding in this town.

Kiri takes a lot of notes on all these thoughts about magery. And yes, she would like.

Kiri nods along. It's really sensorily interesting, and less overwhelming when she gets it from the kobold's perspective.

"That would be nice."

Kiri takes notes with her free hand. "I'm very excited to be able to do these myself, even if it takes a lot of practice," she remarks. And then - well, cat's pretty much going to be out of the bag. She teleports to the designated spot.

And then she gets back in the carriage, beaming.

"Yes please."

There may be cuddles: the kobold's mood is improved enough that she doesn't quite feel a need for them, but she also doesn't see any reason not to; they're quite compatible with reading.

Cuddles are indeed compatible with reading! That is a nice thing about them. Pet pet. Kiri supplies definitions as the kobold encounters words she doesn't already know.

And Kiri shows the kobold the correct place for Kiri to teleport here.

"...The horses won't like it," muses Kiri. "But it's a lot faster and I don't know how much the horses won't like it."

The kobold knows very little about horses, certainly not enough to guess whether it would be worth it.

"These are the mellow ones. I bet they'd get over it. I can give them apples when we get home. And it'd save my ass the extra day of driving." (As the kobold has gotten more conversational Aleko has started talking aloud more.)

The kobold is no longer exactly secret, and neither is the teleportation, but Kiri shoos the stablehand anyway just to avoid having the conversation about teleporting horses right away.

Aleko calms the horses down, gives them apples, and then sets about putting them away.

"Want to go install the last few bellpulls and then help me practice magic?" Kiri asks the kobold.

"I can go first to see if anyone from that family is around right now."

That will help; the kobold appreciates it. Hug.

Kiri indicates a good place for bellpulls.

The kobold examines the spot, and then teleports back and gets to work finishing up the bellpull collection.

Kiri follows her. Scritches?

...yes please.

Scritches. "I'm trying to think if there's anything else about humans I should warn you about," she murmurs.

"...I can't tell what you're not thinking about, but - I don't know, I don't want you to be surprised again, but it doesn't seem like you actually want to have a conversation about all the ways humans are sometimes terrible."

"As far as I know no humans have ever eaten any kobolds."