One Curious Kobold

[lurkingkobold]

It's winter, and all is well with the tribe. Their new magic, an ability to make portals from one place to another, which was found by one of their members during the early-summer trip to meet with the other tribes in the area, let them both build up a decadent food stockpile and move to a much deeper part of the cave system without the worry of being unable to find their way back out. No-one has had to go hungry, and even the fiercest ice storm doesn't reach them; they are as content as kobolds can be.

Well, aside from their new mage, that is. She's bored, and curious. Making portals to known places is straightforward enough, with the magic she found, but that's far from the limit of what it can do... so one day, she slips away, portals off to a different cave system - one can't be too careful, after all - and experiments.

Temperature roughly the same... gravity roughly the same... air the same, not into stone or underwater or in a volcano or on top of a mountain... but, instead of patterning it after a place she knows, what happens if she only specifies those things, and lets the innate patterns of the spot she's casting on do the rest? Particularly this one part, which seems to specify the world...

She finishes the spell, and hesitates for just a moment before activating it.

Comments

[calescent]

Since she's not planning to actually touch it, just get close, Kiri holds it out.

[lurkingkobold]

She pauses for just a moment when Kiri begins moving, but recovers almost immediately, and with a sense of familiarity with that reaction.

[hot] - she makes an appropriately impressed face. [Kiri [maybe fire spellbearer [protection separate?] [very, very good control?]] [maybe illusionist spellbearer] [impressive in either case] [dangerous in either case [especially if they're a mage, be careful of hexes [fire is an awful way to die]]]]

[calescent]

...None of this comes with words. In particular, Kiri can't claim not to be dangerous. The kobold's monitoring her body language; she is already trying to look nonthreatening, but she tries harder. When the heat of the fire has been observed, she lets it wink out.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold flinches only slightly when the fire disappears, and then considers. Kiri does seem friendly, and more interestingly, they do seem to think that the kobold is a person. (Probably; as near as the kobold can tell with so little to go on, anyway.) There are worse things she could spend her time on than making friends; if they are a mage, maybe they'd be willing to swap spells, and if not, well, knowing a friendly fire-or-illusionist spellbearer still can't hurt, if there are troubles again.

The first thing to do, then, is clarify that she is a mage; surprising Kiri with that wouldn't be very polite. First, vocabulary - "Kiri do of fire; Kiri is of spellbearer. Kiri is of mage? Mage do of spellbearer."

[calescent]

...Kiri doesn't have a word for no. She shakes her head, hoping that will work or at least informatively not-work. "Kobold is of mage. Kiri is of... Ardelay," she says.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold peers at Kiri - if that's a bad translation-guess it's a strange one, but what else could it be? Even if Kiri has some sort of mind-reading magic that works at a distance, her anti-magic should be blocking it.

...unless something stranger than that is going on. What does Ardelay mean, anyway?

Let's try to find out. "Ardelay?"

[calescent]

"Ardelay is of fire..." No word for 'and'. A pause will have to do. "Ardelay is of -" Also no word for mind. She taps her head. The head-shake produced an accurate but low-confidence guess; who knows if this will even be that good.

[lurkingkobold]

....... Kiri is probably not actually a god. Gods would be better at language than this, the kobold is pretty sure, if they used it at all. But that certainly sounds like a god's domains, and she wouldn't be surprised if a god's spellbearer could ignore her antimagic.

Well. Test the theory, then. Would Kiri like some more vocabulary? Let's see... "God, demon, magic, spell, spell-effect... mind, thought, knowledge, know, learn, speak, listen... yes, no, maybe, tiny, big, small. Kiri do of speak of language, kobold do of learn of language - kobold no do of see of mind of Kiri, do of learn of listen."

[calescent]

A few words in Kiri pulls a piece of paper out of her pocket and starts scribbling notes as fast as she can. When the kobold is done speaking: "Kiri know mind -" She steps back, out of range. "Kiri no know mind. ...Kiri no god," she adds, stepping back but just to the very edge so if the kobold flinches it'll take her out of range again.

[lurkingkobold]

Huh. Okay. That's certainly something.

She dips her head apologetically and gives a 'hold on' gesture, then steps out of mind-reading range to consider what to do next.

[calescent]

Kiri waits.

[lurkingkobold]

This seems to involve considerable debate, but eventually she comes to a conclusion. Instead of stepping back into range, though, she reaches into her belt pouch (moving slowly and watching Kiri for signs of alarm) and pulls out a small piece of flint. "Mage," she says, by way of explanation, as she sets it on the arm of the chair and shuts her eyes to concentrate, still touching it as she does so. After a minute, she picks the rock up again and taps it with a claw, causing it to teleport back to the arm of the chair, then looks to Kiri to see what they think of this.

[calescent]

Kiri is very interested.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold grins slightly and returns the flint to her pouch, then repeats the concentration process on a short loop of string from the same pouch, producing a tiny portal that she then reaches into and retrieves a handful of dried berries from. She pulls a piece of thread off of the string to break the spell before returning this to her pouch, too, then steps back into mind-reading range.

[[this kobold]: [generally willing to help [respectful/friendly/potentially allied] people [speculation that Kiri falls into this category]]] [consideration]

More vocabulary: "Move," - she doesn't know words for teleportation or portals - "go, take, put... thing, this, that, here, there... cast, break." That's enough to be getting on with, hopefully? (She steps back out of range when she's done speaking.)

[calescent]

Scribble scribble. Kiri's memory is far from perfect. And she doesn't actually have anything she needs moved handy right now. It's still easier to pick up the kobold's vocabulary than to try to teach her Welchin, though. Her head is spinning with possibilities, though. "Move Kiri?" she asks, not having a generic term for "person" and suspecting very much that she already knows "move kobold" is a definite yes.

[lurkingkobold]

She nods, "yes, do of move of Kiri - do of spell of thing, Kiri do of go of thing, thing do of move of Kiri of place."

[calescent]

That's kind of hard to disentangle even with the glossary, even if she mentally subtracts all the weird-in-translation "of"s, and she doesn't have enough adjectives or prepositions... "Spell thing here, take thing there, go thing, move here?"

[lurkingkobold]

Hm. The kobold moves back into range; that does seem to work better, even if moving in and out of it all the time is a bit of a pain. Well, she'll cope.

She doesn't need to be in the place the spell aims at when she casts, but she does need to be familiar with it, or the enspelled object has to be brought to the place and activated there. Otherwise, that's right - the enspelled object can be taken anyplace and will always teleport things to the same location.

[calescent]

"Thing move thing?" wonders Kiri. Or does it get left behind, dramatically reducing its value as an emergency bailout...?

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold doesn't seem to know offhand whether this is possible - the more straightforward way of moving people is to make them spellbearers, which she's rejecting as an option in this case. She steps back out of range to consider the problem, which involves the same look of distant concentration as when she was casting before, and after a minute of that, she steps back into range with her conclusion: yes, she can cast in a way that allows the object to come along, though it won't be possible to include as many destination triggers on something as small as it will need to be.

[calescent]

And Kiri doesn't have "why" to ask why she can't just have a spell on herself personally... or "how many" to ask for exact figures on destination triggers...

But she could get a magic object that could teleport her and itself to several locations! That's pretty cool!

...And she doesn't have the words to ask "what kind of thing". Or "can I activate the thing myself in the various locations or do I need to talk you into coming to Chialto with me". Or "how many people can it bring" or "could someone who didn't know what it was activate it by accident". She can't even ask "is there anything you want done in exchange". Why does she have a word for demon and not want? Hmmmmm.

"Small thing, tiny thing...?"

[lurkingkobold]

Yeah, this is frustrating, they should probably back up and do some more vocabulary-building now that they've established that they have reason to talk - though this would be going a little better if Kiri was also sharing vocabulary, too; the kobold might not have mind magic, but she is pretty good at picking up words anyway. As evidenced by the fact that she can speak at all, which kobolds usually can't.

Anyway, things... clothing is going to be the most reliable, and it needs to be something sturdy so it doesn't break too easily - a belt, perhaps? A leather belt with rivets for the trigger points would be an obvious choice, but anything solid enough to hold a spell and with obvious places to touch will work.

[calescent]

...If the kobold wants to learn Welchin Kiri is only too happy to do that. She tugs on her sleeve - "clothes" - she's not wearing a belt, but the kobold's thinking about them so she gestures around her waist and says "belt".

And then she draws dots for the numbers one through ten and names the numbers.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold follows along, mimicking the words easily. The numbers are a little surprising - she's used to a base five system - but she gets the idea anyway, and shares her own words for the first five.

[calescent]

Which Kiri writes down.

Since they're doing double vocabulary, she goes down the list of words the kobold gave her and translates them all, pairwise. "Spellbearer" and "mage" she leaves untranslated because they mean specific things with no real Welchin equivalent, but "spell" she considers sufficiently generic to render in her own tongue.