Did something happen?

Sara, who had been, in his prior experience with her, a quite composed lady, no longer gave off such feelings of confidence.
Clearly distressed, she looked up at the far taller man she had run into. “H-hu? Ren? What’re you…?”

“I’m staying in this hotel overnight - a few rooms down, I think - while my residency paperwork is processed by the bureaucracy. Why are you here, though?”

Sara wiped her eyes, trembling somewhat. “I’m, um…” Eyes suddenly determined, she cleared her throat and stood up straighter. “Excuse me. How inappropriate. I was here visiting a family. Unfortunately, our encounter was not, ah, as nice as I had hoped.” 

Ren was impressed. Within a split-second, her composure had been completely restored to what he knew as Sara. ‘Perhaps she truly is as ancient as she implies,’ he thought half-seriously. 
“Sorry to hear.”

Sara began to walk towards the hotel’s exit. “I suppose you’ve already moved your things into your room, hmm?”

“What things?” he asked, chuckling. “I was about to go and check the room out, actually… but…” Ren furrowed his brows. “I did have a few more questions for you, if you don’t mind.”

Sara smiled. “Be my guest. My chauffeur ought to be across the street, however.”

As the two left the hotel, the gas streetlights illuminated that a gentle rain had begun to come down, slowly picking up. Standing under a cover, Sara looked around the area, dumbfounded.

“I thought…” she mumbled to herself, brows furrowed.

Looking himself, Ren too was somewhat confused. “I might be blind but, um, where’s your car?”

Starting to get worked up again, tears began to well up in her eyes once more as well, coinciding with a pick-up in rainfall. “First Maria, and now THIS. What in the gods is even-”

“How far away is your place?” Ren quickly interjected.

“I don’t know, a few streets down? It’s pouring, the chauffeur left me, I don’t have an umbrella, this is really just-”

Looking over, she found that, much like her ride, Ren too had vanished.
“...Perfect.”

While contemplating making a run for it - at the possible cost of ruined clothing and a cold - she flinched at the sound of an umbrella opening as the hotel’s entrance door opened behind her.

“Went as quickly as I could. They had a whole bunch near the front desk, figured they’d let me borrow one. So, where’s this place of yours?”

Surprised at his speed and intensity, she thought for a second.
“We’ll have to take a turn following a few streets, but it really is not too far.”

“Sounds good to me. Let’s move out.”

Sharing the large umbrella between the two of them, he looked down the gas-lit street as horse-drawn wagons and the strange, old cars hurried down it. Rather than going to a parallel world, it felt as though he had gone back in time, perhaps to London or Paris before the Great War.

“So, what was it you were meaning to inquire of me?” Sara asked, regaining Ren’s disordered attention.

“Nothing about Valentia. I think I’ll figure the rest out about it, really. I was wondering, though… why’d you, a noblewoman, pick a bearded, mud-covered, surely insane-looking man up from the middle of the woods?”

“Well, that is certainly one way of putting it!” Sara said, giggling.
“No, I didn’t care about your appearance. Had you been some trap, or otherwise, while I am no master of the arcane I am quite capable of self-defense,” She said, her eyes appearing to almost flash upon mentioning self-defense. “And quite unlike a purely human noblewoman, I’d imagine. You certainly wouldn’t see the Duchess of Anglia walking with a strange man in the rain, either! Perhaps one of my cousins, however. We are quite, ah, hardier.”

Sara looked down towards the ground, stepping over a forming puddle. “The reason I helped you is from a debt I have from my best friend.”

Now looking towards the falling raindrops, she held her hand out and caught one. “She, like yourself, was an outsider. Appearing one day alongside her family in the Northern Forests, they wandered for days, until they, too, found a mountainside roadway.”

As she spoke, her expression became more and more disheartened. “She wasn’t as lucky as you. She - ah, yes, we’ll be taking this left up ahead - her family was refused by travelling passerbys, sometimes even at swordpoint. Until, of course, it wasn’t.” Sadness turned to a hint of anger. “A wandering slave-trader found them waiting in a roadside ditch. As is the fate for many outsiders, her family was sold into slavery, her being no exception.”

Ren began to realize the gravity of his fortune - thus far, at least - as she continued. “She would never see them again, so much as I tried my best to find them. I can only imagine the worst occurred. I would meet her as a houselady and a personal maid and assistant, provided to me by my father. I was a different young woman then; cold, and harsh to our servants. I cared not for commoners at all. She was something else, though; years my junior, in her mid-teens, yet full of warmth and kindness.”

The rain died down somewhat. “I like to think I learned these qualities from her, yet I come nowhere close to her in those regards, even today. Regardless of my own personal shortfalls, we went everywhere together, in times both good and poor.”

Ren jogged his mind; he certainly didn’t recall any maid in the car along with them, nor any mention of one. “If that’s the case, though, why didn’t she come along with you last week?”

As the two approached a street packed with rowhouses, Sara looked forward with a melancholic smile. “She isn’t with us anymore. She left us peacefully in her sleep, nearly four score old, having been with me for nearly as long.”

Ren was silently shocked; ‘How old is she? Was she not joking earlier?!’

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

The two began to slow down as they approached a certain rowhouse; the rain had largely stopped by now.  Sara chuckled to herself; “I haven’t even answered your question, have I? Long before she passed away, she made me promise that I would always help outsiders- however I can.”

“And you’ve kept it.” Ren stated firmly.

She walked up a few steps, now level in height with Ren, in front of the door of her uncle’s abode. “Before you depart, I have one question for you, too.” 

“Hmm?”

Looking back at Ren, her crimson eyes welcoming and graceful, she smiled once more. “Would you like to work under me, as she once did?”