The kobold relaxes, just slightly - mostly meaning that she stops looking like she's going to lunge forward at the first opportunity to grab the little one away from the woman - and thinks.
She doesn't have a lot of experience with abuse and its effects, and what she does have is almost all from her own perspective - she has to keep flinching away from thinking about details, or dragging herself back to thinking about the current situation when she doesn't manage to flinch away quite quick enough to avoid getting distracted by her own history.
Some tigerfolk are really awful.
The kids hiding behind their mom isn't actually proof that nothing's wrong there. Neither is them being afraid of the kobold. The kobold is exquisitely clear on both of those points, having done the equivalent of both of those things herself. The second-littlest one's response suggests that she's right about the older ones being traumatized rather than actually comfortable there. And all these other humans around and none of them reacted? The kids haven't quietly gone and found other parents, or other tribes? This lady has had how many eggs past the first one, and been allowed to hatch them herself? Kiri, you have bigger problems here than things catching on fire sometimes, or not being able to move food around as quickly as you'd like.
...these aren't kobold kids, though. She can't bring them home. Finding one of the more progressive tigerfolk tribes to take them might be a step up, or it might not, and anyway she doesn't actually know where any of those are right now. (She could put the kids in a cave somewhere and bring them food while she looked. She could do that. But it's not a very good idea; going from bad to worse like that would hurt them even if better came afterward, and she doesn't know enough about how even really good tigerfolk would handle the situation to be sure that it would be better.) She is probably limited to local resources in solving this problem, whatever those are. Or whatever they aren't, most likely, but she should at least find out first.
If they leave, will Kiri be able to find these humans again later?
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She doesn't have a lot of experience with abuse and its effects, and what she does have is almost all from her own perspective - she has to keep flinching away from thinking about details, or dragging herself back to thinking about the current situation when she doesn't manage to flinch away quite quick enough to avoid getting distracted by her own history.
Some tigerfolk are really awful.
The kids hiding behind their mom isn't actually proof that nothing's wrong there. Neither is them being afraid of the kobold. The kobold is exquisitely clear on both of those points, having done the equivalent of both of those things herself. The second-littlest one's response suggests that she's right about the older ones being traumatized rather than actually comfortable there. And all these other humans around and none of them reacted? The kids haven't quietly gone and found other parents, or other tribes? This lady has had how many eggs past the first one, and been allowed to hatch them herself? Kiri, you have bigger problems here than things catching on fire sometimes, or not being able to move food around as quickly as you'd like.
...these aren't kobold kids, though. She can't bring them home. Finding one of the more progressive tigerfolk tribes to take them might be a step up, or it might not, and anyway she doesn't actually know where any of those are right now. (She could put the kids in a cave somewhere and bring them food while she looked. She could do that. But it's not a very good idea; going from bad to worse like that would hurt them even if better came afterward, and she doesn't know enough about how even really good tigerfolk would handle the situation to be sure that it would be better.) She is probably limited to local resources in solving this problem, whatever those are. Or whatever they aren't, most likely, but she should at least find out first.
If they leave, will Kiri be able to find these humans again later?