"How big is an ecu? Yes, that will do." She accepts the silver coin.

"Peace and prosperity upon you," are apparently some Abadarian words of parting.

To a Golarionite, the Three Rings is a tavern in the Galtan style but lacking Galtan sensibilities. 

To Weiss, she will find a subdued drinking-house serving mead and wine along with hot tea and coffee, the scents drifting out into the street. It remains open despite the unrest, thanks to its proximity to some of the city's concentrations of guards and enforcers and its own burly bouncer. Enough merchants and tradesfolk have stayed home that they do have trays full of uneaten Varisian sweetbreads and pastries, baked in anticipation of a breakfast rush that never came, and the seven-fingered landlady perks up at the sight of another customer. 

The patrons who are present are of the bolder sort, traders having urgent conversations about how to fill their orders when no ships will dock until the turmoil ends and complaining about what this will do to the price of grain. A few swashbucklers are listening in for opportunities to sell their sword-arms, one of them loudly talking about how he had his rapier silvered in case the wererats make trouble again.

-And also with you. ughhhh no brain whyyyy she thought she had purged all the Christianity.

She will... Hover a bit, just inside the place, feeling awkward. She - does not do cities very much, at home, though much of that is the inherent anxiety and assumptions that people place on kitsunes. Wearing an illusion of someone not too remarkable helps, even if whiskers or a paw sign or weird tattoo always shines through.

...She feels underdressed and embarrassed, ears going flat and tail trying to cover herself near-reflexively until she pushes past it. Clothes selected for literally not caring about cold and maximal comfort while conforming if barely to the notion of modesty exposing more skin than might be usual. And she doesn't know these people, and doesn't know the quiet Social Rules for this place, reading the room or so on.

...She decides to make herself tiny little foxfire earrings and fingernail-adornments, subtly glowing, just to mark herself out as Mysterious instead of Weird.

And get a sweet pastry- If a silver ecu will suffice for that? If not, or the foreign coin is too suspicious, she'll move on without rancor.

Right. Let the fear slip away and play a character. Does it truly matter if she embarrasses herself here in some sort of quiet faux pas? Is worrying about who and how and what to talk about truly what she wants to spend some of her energy on?

She finds a good spot and projects her voice to the room at large.

"Hello, all. I'm Weiss Faron. I'm in the city unexpectedly, and I want to help people. I may well come back here later, but there is trouble afoot now and I have confronted some of it and I intend to go stick my foot in more of it."

Illusion blooms above her head, specifically of her confrontation with the Otyugh (not that she knows the name), with a falsified introduction of her shapechanging mid-leap to start it off and ending with its retreat below some twelve seconds later. She conjures a bit of foxfire and plays with it, dancing in her hands, to help sell the connection.

"I'm not asking for pay or anything right now- If anything, pay me in the chance to help! Perhaps someone here needs an escort, or knows someone who is in trouble or needs rescue, or something like that. I'll leave to look around the city myself in a few minutes, regardless. Thank you, that is all."

The pastries are discounted and the owner is glad to get anything for them before they go stale; an ecu will buy her two.

'Let me help you for free' sounds far too good to be true at first blush to the cynical citizens here, but even Little Cheliax is not without Desnans and Sarenites who are that kind of Good. Weiss' expressiveness is a far cry from a schemer's golem face¹, too.

"If you could calm things down at the harborside, that would go a long way. At the moment nobody wants to unload goods in case they get looted before the sale goes through or their ships catch fire at anchor," one of the merchants says. In case she is Good and not just playing the part for a con, he adds: "If the city goes hungry for want of grain shipments, there'll be far more trouble to come."

That he has a small fortune tied up in one of those shipments is beside the point. 

"How big an area do you think you could cover?" One of his companions asks. If they can only reopen a small part of the docks, that's worse for the city but better for their own profits. 

¹ The expression derives from the Varisian bluffing card game 'Golem', not the magical construct the game is itself named after. 

Yeah, she's not blind, guy.

Still, she'll walk up and talk to that little knot a bit quieter, trying to look serious. (She's still missing tons of context, but something tells her to at least not actively bring it up.)

"So... Keeping the markets open is not unhelpful. The city needs to eat, and going back to normal will help everyone, so in the lack of information on people who need immediate rescue, I think I should do this. How much I could cover depends on what I am protecting against, so, a bit hard to say. How large are the docks as a whole, exactly? I would just ask those present here to, on your own conscience and in the Abadaran style, donate perhaps let's say a tenth of the money you are preserved, thanks to my actions, to the poor and needy or organizations supporting them."

She is not willing to actually kill just to protect goods, probably. As ever, only a sith deals in absolutes. Though... Nobody needs to know that even if they guess. And she can still be deterring.

A Large fox pacing around and staring intently at gathering knots of troublemakers does turn out to be an effective deterrent, especially as word of the unusual sentinel spreads.

Back at the Three Rings, a rat scurries out from the rafters, then transforms back to its true form.

It's amazing what people can get accustomed to, to the point that they no longer even think about it. 

For example: The fact that they share a city with hundreds of fiends, more cunning than the average person, that can see in total darkness and turn invisible or take the form of a rat or raven at will.

In fairness to the residents of Korvosa, although a given imp could easily kill a given resident at no risk to themselves thanks to their hellish resilience and poison sting, they have a natural predator in the form of the house drakes². Usually when a local sees an imp, the imp is getting befuddled and mauled by the friendly little purple dragons, which does tend to diminish the apparent threat. And most of the imps flying free above the city are those whose summoners failed to bind them or later died, without worldly masters and without any way to contact more powerful fiends.

² As for how the native pseudodragons evolved so rapidly into house drakes better-adapted for fighting fiends, the gold dragon Mengkare does have several years unaccounted for between his return to Golarion and the start of his Glorious Endeavor of perfecting humanity, years that line up with those early decades of the Academae. 

The fact remains that no lemure is elevated into an imp without the hierarchy of Hell being ground into its being. Even the unbound imps of Korvosa, lucky enough to find themselves masterless and beyond Hell's immediate reach, remain conditioned to establish a pecking order and seek out more powerful fiends for the comfort of knowing which way the torture and deference should flow.

The upside for Hell is that any imps who are on the Material plane for a purpose can insert themselves at the top of that hierarchy and command a city's worth of underlings without having to coerce them all individually.

Being the familiar of an eighth-circle master helps. 

By the end of the day, the tension in the air remains thick, but the riots have been quelled by the actions of the Hellknights, the Guard, the Sable Company, and a certain recent arrival. 

Several ships are able to dock without disturbances, and a little under ten percent of the income (after tax) is donated by the merchants to the Temple of Sarenrae in the Heights. 

No urgent crises present themselves as night falls. 

.....She's fairly surprised the 10% thing actually worked.

Well.

Hmm.

Back to the coin priests. She does want to get a basic idea of what the fuck is going on and how things work around here.  They seem like people who can be paid to keep her ignorance and weird questions secret. And also, is tired.

(And drop a Sol for that one Clerk Militant since she did actually point her to an opportunity to get people to donate to what seems like a very reputable Light Goddess?)

Highlights of the question session are: What's up with this Academae thing, how come the minidragon could see her even though she was being invisible, what even was it that she fought (Otyugh) and is it a person, and wherever her immediate curiosity turns after that.

Clerk-Militant Jana accepts the Sol with a smile. Confidentiality within the bank is already included in the consultation fees, with a modest extra charge for the advisor not to discuss anything with their colleagues either.

"The Academae is one of the greatest schools of magic on the continent. If you'd arrived here a few weeks ago, you could have seen the Breaching Festival where guests compete to break through the wards, though none have succeeded for centuries."

"House drakes have an innate ability to see invisible creatures, it's said they developed it to better fight the imps of the city. It's like the blindsight of true dragons, I think?"

"Oh, that's an otyugh! Despite appearances they're intelligent, they keep the sewers clear by eating any big blockages or something like that, but they shouldn't be bursting out onto the streets. I don't think they're mistreated? By all accounts they like eating garbage."

Jana is trying not to yawn as the questions continue, not for want of payment or interest but because it's been a long and stressful day for most everyone in the city. 

She has a lot more questions actually. They wander, sleepily, as she gathers up some patchy common knowledge.

And eventually: To the Woods Between rather than try to find an inn room at this hour.

And back out again some time before noon, on the steps of the temple.

When she reappears, a guard is descending the steps of the temple. She startles, then does a double-take.

"Excuse me, are you... Weiss Faron?" Her guess at the pronunciation is not very good. 

Instantly on guard. "Um, yes, actually? Uh, 'Weiss'." There's almost a v sound in there. "What's up?"

"You're not in any trouble." She pats her hands on her thighs, wrist launchers and spells that emanate from the palm making the open-hands gesture of Earth more fraught. "Word of your efforts yesterday has reached the Queen, and she would summon you to Castle Korvosa for your reward."

"...Huh."

A queen, eh? Either someone who is really on top of things, or... Oh, hmm. Korvosa is just the city, not a full on empire like Noten, she thinks. So this is more like a Countess or Marquess from home. That's less intimidating.

But why her? She just showed up yesterday, though she did admittedly make a big splash. Running around in a riot and not even attempting to hide.

Kitsunes aren't a known a quantity here. She never regrets cutting loose and going open, but people are always just a bit... Off, about foxes who might be girls, back home. She's had to smack some people. But here, she might be a druid, or something weirder, and it's perfectly normal noble behavior to try to understand who the magically powerful person in your town is. She always has to demur feasts and such after helping little frontier towns with monsters. 

Can she demur this without causing Problems? A reward, so pretending or actually being nice. It just seems like generally a bad idea to deliberately piss people off, but she doesn't fit in at fancy places.

And now she's pissing herself off over spirals of social expectations and signaling and all the bullshit rules of society and soft and hard ways that those in charge stay in charge and-

She can always just hit da bricks if it sucks too much.

"Suuure. Yes. Good. Upon consideration I'd be delighted."

The guard hides her relief much better than Weiss hid her conflicted reaction, and she leads the way to the castle.

Castle Korvosa dominates the city. Built atop a four-sided sandstone pyramid at a cyclopean scale, the castle itself is made of the same black marble as the Academae. Successive monarchs have made their own additions to the structure, remaining consistent in the neo-Chelaxian³ style and little else. It includes a clocktower and a hippogriff aerie from which the Sable Company marines can be seen flying out of on patrol. 

With the guard escorting her, Weiss is able to ascend up the broad ramp on the West side of the pyramid, through the lines of guards armed with swords and crossbows, and into a public courtyard overshadowed by the castle itself. 

"If you would wait here, please," her escort says, before going to notify one of the servants of their arrival.

³ Doompunk.

The aesthetics are not making her less tense.