Not every group of people are created equal. She could hear her older brothers world echo about in her mind while she was staying in a small inn, in a tiny town. One of the reasons he hadn't wanted her to leave in the first place. With a low opinion of strangers and an even lower opinion of humans - no matter the culture - Theun was fully expecting his dear sister to go out in the world and either become assaulted by all manner of undesirables or simply find the vast majority of them either repulsive or upsetting.
Thus far, some of it had been true. But there were terrible people in all creeds, cultures, and races. Their own included. She was not naive or innocent enough to think that just because her family happened to be sweet on one another that such a thing extended to the whole of the Starstriders, and thus only they could be capable of good and the rest of the world be damned. If anything, she found the nuances of terrible-ness quite interesting and looked at it with a detached, sort of clinical fascination. It was with that mindset that she had observed the village's response to her and her Izotz Katua when she arrived.
Niusha knew she was quite foreign. Pearlescent skin that looked like fresh snow, long, stark white hair braided back, and a large cat that reached waist height while on all fours and they had made everyone quite nervous. Even if Thaljia was harnessed, collared, and muzzled. It wasn't like Niusha, for all her slender height, looked like she could hold the animal back if Thaljia wanted to really rampage about the town. Which was one of the very important reasons that the Izotz had to have accepted not only Niusha as part of her family, but had been exposed and used to people long before this. Not that the elf could explain the intricacies of Katua breeding to the people as they scurried away and murmured from behind closed doors and shooed children out of the streets. Nor could she really blame them. The Katua was as tall as some of the shortest of them.
Thankfully, the tavern and innkeep had, though warily, accepted the coin for the room and Niusha had tucked her Thaljia up in the room. The Izotz wouldn't like the confinement, and she couldn't readily keep her there for days at a time, but it would do for the afternoon while she walked around the city and allowed the people to get a little more accustomed to the sight of her. What really helped, though, was that Niusha sounded quite friendly and, to some, very lovely. Her mastery of the trade tongue wasn't as spot on as she'd liked, but she could fiddle her way through it and sing her way through the rest of it. At least by now she could get her message across and, so long as she didn't smile and expose sharp, white teeth, the people of the village proper weren't so frightened of the tall elf in their midst.
It was a simple place she'd come to. Tucked in the woods with personal gardens and no proper roads that ran to it. Niusha liked such private places because it reminded her so much of the towns she'd been taken to growing up, minus all the snow. Quaint little shops, few and far between, served the needs of the town and caught her interest as a child might a new toy. Everything new was a chance to learn and, because the owners were tethered to their shops, were subject to her questions. When they realized Niusha was naught but curious, the tension left their shoulders and they answered readily enough. Rudimentary things like plows and how to hitch to an ox, the various seeds they had stored and how to plant them, what each of the furs were hanging and what they'd come from... All of it was a delight to her that she would have to catalogue later.
It was as she made her way along the outskirts of the town, one of her thick sketchbooks in hand, that commotion caught her attention. Someone causing a fuss in the town. She only happened to notice because the place was generally so quiet, with the play of insects, song-birds, and the whisper of leafs and grass as background. Having someone shouting was certainly out of place. Her lavender and pale sea green gaze tracked the farmer who had been shouting. He seemed to have lost something he was quite mad at and was screaming obscurities to the tall, field grass and lightly forested area nearby. She wasn't too well versed in such things, and he was a fair distance away, so she didn't really know what he was saying.
Curiosity fulfilled, Niusha turned her attention back to the flowers she'd been idly sketching. Field flowers were lovely and grew in all manner of places. Just outside the village, far enough away she no longer drew any manner of attention, she'd knelt near some to sketch some after she'd made some notes about the things she'd found in the general store she'd visited earlier. Given how warm it was, she'd dressed down in one of her cloth shirts that left her arms exposed and a pair of simple, soft leather breeches. Her long white hair had been lazily braided, leaving some of the long strands free to do as they pleased. It kept most of the hair out of her way while she was on such exploring escapades, but she hadn't anticipated needing to do anything of real import, so the braid was loose. Her book, stabilized on her lap, was nearly finished.
She'd need to pick up another soon.