... She shouldn't use her real name - 

Actually, double fuck that, Maxwell picked that name in the first place - 

"I'm Lily. Amira is my alchemy teacher. Um... I don't know a word for that either. It sounds like you have a lot of - people you're close to."

She looks away. "... I just have Amira, and she's... not really my friend, exactly. A mentor, maybe."

Kamryn nods.

"There's only five of us. Including me. We've been debating, though, about if we should try to enter the city, to trade and to give our warning face to face and like that, or if we should just move on."

Kamryn pauses in her meandering to offer Lily some raised eyebrows.

"Another local's opinion might help us get off our asses about that..."

"I..."

She pulls her cloak a little closer around her. She doesn't know this girl, and - it's a risk, any time spent with people is a risk - 

But she's a traveler, and she'll be moving on soon, and... she misses talking to people who aren't Amira.

"... I wouldn't mind talking to them."

Kamryn stops orbiting and starts leading, heading eastward into the trees.

"Well, we're camped over this way."

This is probably foolish, but... 

She follows.

The mysterious gorgeous nude wild woman's hips sway, starlight gleaming off the curve of her ass as she leads Lily through the trees. Sounds from the town fade, but they don't go too far before a new light, soft and steady and the blue-white of raw mana, shines between the trees.

Kamryn skips ahead into the small clearing, where...

A suit of armor sits beside the floating manalight, cleaning a battered old sword.

A naked woman, as gorgeous and full-figured as Kamryn, almost identical in fact if not for the green hair and the different shade of skin, sits beside him, her legs spread, as a bluish tentacle pumps slowly into her pussy.

Also, her entire left arm is missing, and in its place are a dozen squirming red tendrils of flesh that glisten in the manalight.

A lavender-skinned cyclops lounges nude on a pile of leaves. A half-dozen more eyes pop open on the ends of glistening dark purple tentacles and swivel to stare at Kamryn and Lily's approach.

And finally, a soft, plush, shiny purple ass twerks up and down over the hips and cock of a human guy, his rigid shaft plunging in and out of a gushing purple pussy and making soft wet lewd sounds. The human guy might match the description of the missing trapper, though it's hard to tell with his hands and feet each bound in the tentacles of a pair of Molester Plants while the female figure that's riding his cock has his face and head completely engulfed in her monstrous slimy multi-flapped maw.

"- okay yeah no goodbye!"

She turns on her heel and runs for it.

At the sudden fleeing, Kamryn spins around with a hey-wait and reaches out on reflex, managing to snag Lily's cloak.

When the cloak comes loose and Lily continues on, uncovered but unimpeded, Kamryn remains behind, lacking a reason to actually chase the girl.

Kamryn glances between the cloak and each of her companions a few times, then at where Lily vanished into the trees.

"I think we scared her."

Fuck, her cloak - 

Well, she's not going back for it. 

She runs for it as fast as she can, which is fairly fast given that she doesn't need to breathe. 

She bolts the door behind her and flops into bed. 

Well. That... puts paid to her night walks. 

How is she going to explain this to Amira...

... for a lack of anything better to do, she goes back to her studies. They're what she was supposed to do in the first place.

And in the morning, Amria drops by. 

"Morning, Isabel."

"... I've decided that I want to be Lily, actually. It's... less the name that Maxwell gave me."

"Alright, Lily. So, how was your night?"

"I... Well, I lost my cloak. There was a... strange girl with no clothes, and a bunch of... tentacled people..."

"She said that she wanted to warn us about something, a "Red Queen"... When I saw one of the tentacled things, uh, I am unsure if they were eating or fucking a guy, I ran away."

She looks away. "Kamryn - the nude girl who was with them - grabbed my cloak as I ran, and I lost it. I think she might have seen that I'm not human."

She looks down at the floor. "... What do we do?"

"... This sounds serious. I can't go to the guards myself, obviously... They could have been luring you in, or they could have something genuinely important to say... Either way we need to know if they saw you without your cloak."

Amira taps her fingers against her other arm. "Let's get you another cloak, and we'll go out to meet them together tomorrow night. I have magic, I can get us out safe if things turn bad... But I want to hear what this strange girl has to say for herself, and make sure she won't say anything about you. The new cloak's coming out of your pay. Next time don't go wandering at night. Are we understood?"

She winces slightly, but comes up with a smile. Of course Amira knows what to do. 

"Yes, Amira."

"Now here are your ledger books. Absolutely do not go outside withour your cloak. I know you know, I just want to remind you because you seem to be having some trouble with caution."

She sighs. "I'll see you in the evening. Be safe."

Lily accepts the ledger books with a slight nod, and settles in with her lap desk once again.

And Amira leaves for market. 

A day passes uneventfully, with the exception of a little girl who turns up at the city wall looking rumpled but cheerful and telling a tale of falling in a ditch and not being able to get out until this naked purple woman-monster with no face heard her yelling and lifted her out. The monster even helped her find her way out of the woods, the little girl claims.