They go past her and continue down the hallway, ignoring that one stairwell. The glance backwards warily after they've passed.

Top of the city, they said. She'll just go looking for stairs leading up.

Besides the one leading up to that apartment courtyard, no other stairs are immediately visible. Out on the street (where that little gang came from), there aren't that many people. Everyone seems tense and most are in groups. One maybe ten-year-old kid is digging through a trash bin alone. All humans.

...This city is tall. A chaotic mess of buildings and bridges soars above. There's a big stairway a ways down the street that goes up for a while.

She heads for the big stairway. They don't have any caralendri here, might not have any non-humans at all. Everything is strange. Everything is dangerous.

A lot of the buildings have people guarding the doors, holding big sticks or knives. Lots of windows are boarded up. One of the groups, two men and two women carrying big rounded sticks and wearing some kind of leather clothes and helmets, start walking along the opposite side of the street, following her. The other groups avoid them after they brandish the bats, chuckling.

She stops to greet them. "Are you the local police?"

"Nope. Police can't handle the lower city anymore, babe. You've got to look out for yourself and your buds. And, y'know, you look like you've got something special going on. Nice ears and all." The speaker tosses her bat into the air and casually catches it. "Could be useful, thing like that. Could be mutually beneficial."

"What exactly do you want from me and my pointy ears?"

"I don't know if you can do anything more than have pointy ears, but folk'll think you can. Even if you don't have anything up your sleeve, with someone who knows the local landscape helping, you could get a ride off this hell-hole."

"Hm." She thinks for a moment about the implications of the local language. Their language doesn't have a word for caralendri, it doesn't have a word for agerah or thwilit or essi, it doesn't have a word for any kind of magic she's familiar with including the one that taught her to speak it. "...I do have something up my sleeve but generally in civilized places it's appropriate to find out what the applicable laws are before you do any magic."

"I don't think breaking the law is a meaningful constraint at this point. What with the slave revolt, clean water shortage, and the fire that's still burning in the garden quarter, the police are pretty distracted."

"With the - I see. In that case I have useful and destructive magic and I like your plan to go somewhere else if there is anywhere better to go."

"Magic. Sure. I'll appreciate a bit of a demo somewhere not in the middle of the street. Most other places are, at least, not actively on fire and thus probably an improvement. We could do a lot of posturing and can-we-trust-her-can-you-trust-me shit but let's skip that and acknowledge mutual benefit. I'm Rachel, that's Tim, John, and Cleo. My brother, cousin, and niece respectively, sticking together for now."

"I'm Lanisal Vesairel, but that name probably doesn't mean anything to you, does it?"

"Nope. Cooper's our family name, except Cleo's Cleo Gardener instead. We're interested in getting all of us through this safe. Some'd be trying to loot and pillage and rape but we just want out. Simple."

Tim asks, "You were from a noble house where you're from or something?"

"Yes, I am, not that it does me any good if I can't get back. So how would we get out of here? Just walk?"

"We need to find an airship that hasn't buggered off yet and get them to take us. We've got some food and jewelry to pay someone. Some of them are still here, hoping to make a profit while things fall apart. Worst case, threats and theft."

"I see. Might as well do that, I don't have a better plan."

"Great. There's a dock I know about two levels up from here, and one three above that a ways around, but first we ought to stop at our place - get you a bit of armor to wear, hear what your 'magic' is, maybe coach you how to act."

Cleo says, "I still don't think the Drucker docks are a good idea. Rumors say the police tried to fight off pirates there and couldn't."

"It's better than waiting around here to get clubbed by a prole or catch cholera or starve to death," argues John.

"It's possible I could fight off pirates. But yes, let's go back to your place and plan this."

"It's five minutes that-a-way." She points the opposite way down the street. "The swagger and confidence is mostly to make people decide not to even try us. We'll be on the lookout for anyone who might attack us anyway."

"That would be easier than killing them, yes."

She'll follow them that-a-way.

They go to an alley and open a hidden door and go into a semi-dark room. Looks like some kind of abandoned, destroyed store. "So, our stash is in here. I'll get it when we're ready to go. What is it that you can do exactly, Lanisal Vesairel?"

"I make things empty. I can make the space where someone's heart is empty if I want someone to die. I can make a hole in the ground to drop someone down. I don't know of any nondestructive uses for it. How about all of you? What do you do?"

"We don't have any really crazy tech or magic like that on us, unfortunately. Just local knowledge and skills. Tim used to be a cop but quit years ago and knows how to do non-lethal takedowns. I was a mechanic, I know enough about ships to tell if one's crew is bullshitting us. John and Cleo are pretty much muscle, as far as escaping the city goes. Rope-making and running a bakery respectively."