A young woman creeps slowly into Iovetra's field of view. She looks around as she goes, clearly wary of a trap.

Unfortunately for her paranoia, the person who set the (friendly!!!!) trap is an untiring vampire who is hanging silently from a perch no human could hold onto for literal hours at a time. In the dark. She's even quieted her eye glow to the reflective sheen that's more appropriate for hunting. So. Does she also look up?

She does not. She walks up to the food without once looking in the direction of Iovetra.

Good.

Okay: from closer than she's managed before, perfectly still from her vantage point above this woman: what is going on with her. Is she sick? Is she malnourished? Does she seem to be recovering from her childbirth well enough? Does anything smell weird about her lifeforce?

She is definitely incredibly malnourished! Eating garbage is... not good for you. Unsurprising. Her lifeforce looks like she has eaten poorly and inconsistently for the past while while pregnant and then had a baby who needs to nurse, which is to say it seems not great. Is there any additional illness in there? ...Maybe? There is definitely something strange, but Iovetra can't easily determine what exactly it is.

Hmmmm. Worse than she'd hoped, but frankly, not as bad as she feared. Iovetra thinks that she likely did overeat after her long period of starvation, and thereby cause herself to throw up. Which is not great, but it's probably the best of some bad options. Well, it might've been the child throwing up instead, but that would have had more of a milk-vomit smell than a proper vomit smell, she thinks. So. Overeating was the likely cause.

She thinks it's safe to stuff this woman with a mild healing potion, though. Something gentle, that won't overstress her already extremely stressed system, and instead help it recover from the period of starvation. She can make one of those, she'd had to for when her master got overzealous about his meals. And... calcium supplements, probably? A cooking pot, to cook in? And more water, one cannot go wrong doing the labor of dragging heavy water for humans that do not have vampiric strength. She can probably throw in a bedroll and blanket or something, she has no idea what this woman's sleeping situation is like, but probably it has room for improvement...

Anyway, Iovetra is not going to come down from her perch to scare this woman. She has gotten what she wanted from this interaction. In fact, she's just going to head straight home, and start putting together a proper care kit.

The next night, the 'trap' has, along with its offering of food:

- One cooking pot
- One set of wooden eating utensils
- Two large (clay) jugs, both filled with (clean) water, at a size that a human could probably manage to carry.
- One bedroll (spider silk and cotton blend)
- Three blankets (cotton)
- A single vial of red liquid, that is magic. (Iovetra added the calcium supplement directly to the healing potion, and is not giving this woman more than one per night, thank you very much. Drinking too many at once is bad, and Iovetra no longer trusts this woman to understand what sensible portioning is.)

Iovetra will creepily watch from her vantage point to see how this night's offering is taken.

She is not at all sensible about proper portioning.

Today's fire catches on the vial and stays there for a moment, before flashing and vanishing.

The woman walks out into the open and calls out... something. Unfortunately, Iovetra continues to not speak this language.

She sure doesn't. Iovetra might be able to sneakily drink from enough of the local population to learn it, but, well, she doesn't want to. If the woman doesn't want to trust the strange being that is feeding her, fine. The cave lady doesn't have to drink the magic healing potion, it'd just make her life better.

She calls out again, them sketches a shape in the air with her finger. Glowing blue-and-green light follows behind it. Does Iovetra wish to do anything before this figure is complete?

Nnnnnno? She doesn't know what it does, if it's a tracking spell of some kind, well, oops, but. For now she'll stay where she is.

The shape finishes! A pulse of fire expands from her fingertips, limning the crags, the cliffs, and Iovetra, who finds the glow painless. It fades from the crags and cliffs. It does not fade from Iovetra.

The woman looks around, and finally thinks to glance upwards. Her quick gasp and widening eyes at the sight of an apparent human clinging motionless to the rock above her head are as communicative as her words were not.

Ah. Well. This was in retrospect predictable.

Upon closer inspection, though: this is not a human. Her face is too perfect, unmarred by blemishes or scars or imperfections. The colors are all off, too, even in this lighting; her skin is too pale, her hair too red in a strange and unnatural sort of way. Her ears are delicately pointed, and her eyes glow with an unnatural teal light. She is hanging from the rock by blood red claws, perched carefully as if she belongs up there and finds staying up no trouble at all.

Iovetra suspects that the least threatening thing she could do is stay right where she is, make an apologetic face, and say, "I'm afraid there's a language barrier."

Not a human.

...not going to eat her or her baby?

Saying something she doesn't understand. Fine. Good enough. She nods to Iovetra, gives a quizzical look, and gestures to the food and supplies.

Okay. This is - good, probably. She's not freaking out and trying to set the vampire on fire, which is genuinely surprising. Iovetra will, she supposes, come down from her perch. (She lands with an unearthly grace, and her clawed fingers return to more normal nails, if the same unnatural blood red as her hair and lips.)

"I'm not sure what question you're asking," she says carefully, but she attempts a reply by motioning that the food and supplies are in fact for this woman. Yes, she is giving these to her, please live safely in that magic cave of yours?

Good enough. She grabs the food and carries it back to —

The stone wall, firm and resolute in being nothing more than any other wall in this maze of nooks and crannies.

Iovetra's eyes stutter and the woman vanishes.

It definitely feels like she must have simply lost track of whoever this is, distracted by some sudden motion nearby. Is that what happened? ...well, no, but there's no reason for Iovetra to know that.

Unpleasant and unnecessary, Iovetra is aware that the rock wall there is made of magic and bullshit. It doesn't need to also rub it in by messing with her eyes and/or mind, and in fact she's a little offended if it did mess with her mind. Don't make her come over there and smash your entire cave system to rubble just to prove that she can. But, sure, fine, she won't look at it when it's doing its bullshit, she guesses.

She'll give the new mother some space. She is getting what she wanted, which is making sure that the two of them are cared for, and also not eating garbage. The vampire returns to her coffin, turning into what looks like smoke, and fading away into the air.

Once she's back home, she'll tend to her garden, and think of other things that someone might need if they were living in a cave. ... Soap. How could she have forgotten soap, she's an idiot. That'll have to be tomorrow night...

The next night:

More food. Also, soap. And another healing potion, though Iovetra isn't entirely sure if the lady of the cave has had the first one. She should be able to tell if she has or not, once she's gotten closer.

Iovetra does not hide herself this time. She'll perch nearby, perfectly visible, writing her observations of the local flora into a book, and carefully sketching images of them onto the pages. In the dark. It is actually much more interesting than waiting in perfect stillness and silence, much as her vampiric instincts lend themselves to this kind of inhuman patience.

Cave lady is sort of expecting Iovetra this time. She still spooks a bit on seeing the vampire, but less so.

The decent food is starting to make inroads on her prior starvation, though the newborn pulls in the other direction. She does seem to have eventually taken the potion? Unless it was marked somehow, this isn't obvious. She seemed incredibly healthy for her situation last time. It will take Iovetra some work to figure out how quickly she naturally heals, especially under the constant exhaustion of tending a newborn.

After recovering from her surprise, she nods to Iovetra, takes the food and soap, and returns to her wall.

The vampire is trying to be as nonthreatening as possible, and mostly is concerned about writing in her book, watching cave lady only out of the corner of her (now openly glowing) eyes. She returns the nod, but otherwise is just hanging out, writing notes to herself, and building trust.

Okay, then this woman can in fact have a second healing potion. But only one per night, vampire's orders. There is clearly some kind of weird magic thing going on with her, possibly related to healing. Whatever it is, it's clear that she's working with a different type of magic than either the vampiric version, or the more indirect alchemic one Iovetra managed when she still had a heartbeat. A human directly doing magic is something she hasn't seen before. (Then again, she didn't get out much. She's not exactly an expert on the abilities of humans.)

Anyway. The mystery of this woman's weird human magic is interesting, and she's curious, but Iovetra's priority is making sure she is properly taken care of. As such: food deliveries and water refills are going to become nightly. More complicated stuff like 'potions' and 'blankets' and 'soap' and the like, that require the assistance of her castle to produce, will be more spaced out. After all, her castle is a fair distance away, even for an untiring vampire. Making the trip literally every night just after sunset is metaphorically, if not literally, tiresome. It would be so much easier to make sure this woman and her child were safe and healthy if Iovetra could just take her back to her castle, but, well. That's not happening anytime soon. Trust must be built up, and newborns need time to become a bit more sturdy for travel. They're very fragile, she remembers.

(Her master had some sort of magical something to directly deposit humans from afar into his dungeon, but, well. He hadn't told her the secrets of how that worked, and Iovetra is hardly going to use a new mother and her child as test subjects to figure it out from first principles.)

Iovetra is content to let things keep on as they are. Though, she will probably stop personally hanging around the care packages, only showing up occasionally to check on the cave lady's health. It's not like they can currently talk. (Iovetra could fix this by draining the local villagers, but as previously mentioned: she does not want to.)