"Actually, I am slightly inclined to side with the absent-minded human female on this one. If I may be so didactic to say that the representative kobold for this town should improve on his rhetoric skills. While using the inclusive term 'brethern' may have been a botched attempt to generalize the varied populace found within his domain, a more appropriate word to use would have been 'townspeople' or 'citizens' for 'brethren in it of itself denotes the exclusivity of the male gender of a similar order or sect. Hence the female members of such society would be left out of the populace entirely, unless of course they identified themselves as male, to which... Regardless my point remains, in a similar case, are we moving the mountains over to a more eastern position? Or are we relocating ourselves to the east while traveling upon the mountain? The case is rather ambiguous as I highly doubt we can move a mountain without a few years of civil engineering and proper construction? Also, technically we cannot possibly surround the safety of the civilians from a number of significant harm factors, I can list about forty-seven cases wherein even with an entourage of elite guards, several S'Augwin high scientists have been unexpected killed upon terrestrial travel. A majority of them involve improper distribution of supplies and other logistics...

All that being said, What exactly does guarding a group of townspeople do to help recover my tablets? Certainly a large mass migration would be uncessary given the average lifespan of kobold and the incidence of human-directed fatalities. Seeing that one or more may have come through here, within the last few days, I wager that most of these citizens are doomed regardless of where we arrive at. De facto I would wager that given the amount of human activity within this localized area, we should almost expect a full adventuring party of humans to have recently trounced the dragon within the stronghold and will be more than pleased to raid the newly established village. Henceforth I project that at least 30% of the population will die should such an encounter occur, and if not, then 40% shall be tithed to the dragon which has yet to be slain and overlooks the stronghold. Or maybe if we do not move, a wandering risk of roughly 50 to 75% of an adventuring party appearing and wiping out 80% of the populace were we are currently after the initial 90% has been culled by the strange dust we observed earlier."

At long last, R'lyeh chipped in his piece.