Kieta sat in the protection of a wayward pine, checking over the small bundle of her belongings, all of which still felt oddly foreign to her in this new world. She yearned to find a faerie circle to step into, and to return to the Otherworld where her brothers would be awaiting. Being in this new world rankled her, with all its foreign smells, sounds, and structures. Each time she stepped foot into one of their "cities" her skin would crawl, having never encountered such enclosed spaces in all of her life. The Otherworld, well the part she and her clan inhabited, was only enclosed in the sense of forests and fields. The only structure to speak of was the castle of the Queen and King, but their court was designed as an open structure. Kieta's first, and very brief, experience of a city in Connlaoth had lasted a grand total of a half hour, out of sheer curiosity. She had initially thought that the structures were some weird sort of plants or rocks, but had found instead that they were rather constructed from the corpses of trees and rocks.
She had been in this world for a few months now, and found that she was most comfortable visiting small villages nestled into the valleys and wilderness. Quickly she became known for her talents in traversing wilderness areas others could not, and for being discrete. She would travel from forest to forest, guiding traveling parties or transporting things of importance. Her mastery of the language was faulty at best, and her understanding of how things worked was lacking even more. Somebody had called her "naive" or "innocent" in their odd tongue, and she understood it as an insult. Of course she would come across as such! There were concepts and behaviors of this world that were so alien to her that it would most likely take her years to understand them. Like this odd obsession between "good" and "evil". Certainly there were dark and light fae, but neither was "good" or "evil". It was commonly understood that all creatures had a mix of both, some with tendencies towards one end of the spectrum over the other...
Kieta scowled and brought herself out of her internal criticisms, eyeing the parcel on the earth before her. Two weeks prior, a man had sought her out in the forest, and had requested that she transport this parcel across the wilderness and to a correspondent in Matron's Hallow, and now she sat a half a day's journey away. Shoving the parcel into the bottom of her pack, Kieta shouldered it and her bow and quiver. She took a swig of her water, thrusting her dirk into its sheath at her side, she took off towards Matron's Hallow.
By late afternoon Kieta had made it to the outskirts of what to her seemed a city of monolithic proportions. Taking out the parchment of instructions on where to meet the correspondent, she found her way to a busier intersection of a road, just outside of the city. The man had said that she should encounter a bread seller, who would then fetch the individual responsible for collecting the parcel. This all according to her one rule, that she refused to enter cities. If individuals wanted to do business with her, they would have to arrange it on the outskirts and surrounding forests of cities. Covering her ears with her hair to avoid undue attention, her eyes darted around in search of the bread man. To her keen senses, this intersection was overwhelming... She couldn't seem to focus on one thing at a time, and she found herself overly distracted, unable to separate out the different individuals.
The slightest of tugs, and the loosening of muscles on her back and shoulders... The smell of smoked meats... And then the receding back of an individual running off with her pack and into the city. She watched incredulously, having never encountered a pick-pocket or thief before of this variety, cursing in her own language, and then following it up with a confused, "But that's mine!"
She was at war with herself... She knew she would be in trouble if the recipient did not receive the parcel, and that trouble might somehow make it onto the Otherworld radar. And that would mean an intense time of being hunted, one which might end negatively for her. Cursing again, she righted the bow and quiver and took off after the thief and into the crowd, feeling blind amongst the overwhelming sensory overload, clutching desperately to the clinging scent of smoked meats on the individual.
Ducking through the crowds, she kept up with him until he thought he had lost her. Instead of confronting him in front of the unpredictable crowds, she decided that she would follow him to wherever it was he was going...
She saw the strap of her pack disappear into an alley way, into which she followed stealthily. One thing was certain, was that she was extremely adept at keeping her movements silent. Part of why the people in the realm seemed to use her skills... But as she watched a door slam shut, she realized that dealing with these sorts of structures was foreign to her. Eyeing the side of the building, she searched for footholds, quickly climbing the structure and to a window. Looking inside as best she could, Kieta pried the window open and slid inside. Hearing the footsteps of the man she had been tracking, Kieta took her bow and notched an arrow, aiming it at the stairwell. As the thief topped the steps, the blood drained from her face, noting the other men. Swallowing her doubts, she squared her feet and yelled at him. "Pack is mine. Give it or I shoot!"
The thief looked surprised, as did his companions. "How the fuck...? Lads, this is the target I just stole from!"
One of the other men took a good look at her, smirking, "Well, looks like we might be stealin' more from 'er than that pack. Now, come her sweets, put down that, don't be silly."
Kieta growled low in her throat, not liking the tone of the men, but not liking her odds either... She feigned lowering the bow for a minute, taking the time to note her potential exit points, before shooting off two arrows rapidly, hitting both the thief and one of his accomplices. Running quickly, she side-stepped their arms and snatched up her pack and made for a doorway, ducking in and slamming the door, turning the lock quickly... Of course it was a windowless room! As the men pounded on the door, she looked about in panic, before noticing a small door in the wall... Opening the door, she noticed what looked like a crawlspace. Just as the door to the room burst open, she squeezed herself into the crawl space and instantly found herself plummeting downwards.
The dumbwaiter broke the force of her weight, all the way until she smelled the soil and knew it was bringing her below ground. When she finally hit bottom, she toppled backwards out of the dumbwaiter and onto something soft, thoroughly disoriented...