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

[lurkingkobold]

What a lot of water that is, and what a nice warm day. The kobold sets the portal to close behind her, and steps through, taking a moment to get her bearings before heading into the cover of the forest.

[pythbox]

The trees and creatures of the forest are strange, but not too strange; this is no familiar species of fruit-bearing tree, but it's recognizably a tree and those are recognizably fruit. That is no familiar species of forest-dwelling rodent, but it is small and furry and in a forest and has little rodent teeth.

Over there is a stone statue of another not-quite-familiar creature, a hoofed animal with a short bristly mane and a long lionlike tail and a single straight horn projecting from its forehead.

[lurkingkobold]

Hmm.

Well, statues mean people, certainly. But this doesn't seem like a very inhabited forest - that rodent didn't seem too worried about someone trying to eat it, and she hasn't seen anything more well-traveled than a scraggly game trail - so maybe whoever made that statue doesn't live here any more.

She'll be careful anyway. She continues into the forest, moving more slowly now.

[pythbox]

Forest forest forest. Small pond. More forest. Some caves over thataway.

No obvious signs of habitation, except for the statues of the hoofed animal that show up every so often, and many of those seem very, very old - one has been half swallowed by a tree growing next to it.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold relaxes somewhat as the forest continues to be apparently uninhabited.

She heads toward the caves, planning to check and see if they'd be suitable for kobold occupation - if this forest is uninhabited, her tribe might want to spend their winters here.

[endragoned]

Everything continues to look apparently uninhabited, including the caves...

...but a few turns into the caves, where it has gone quite dark, there is some sort of large creature curled up on the floor, alive but not moving or breathing.

[lurkingkobold]

She pauses before entering the chamber - it smells odd - but she doesn't hear anything moving inside. Maybe some animal dens here, and is out right now? She'll check back after nightfall, but that's probably not a problem, so she keeps exploring.

The most sensible way through the chamber takes her over a little rise in the middle of it.

A rather... squishy... rise. A warm squishy rise. Um, what?

Perhaps this is a bad idea. She backs off a little way and goes still, waiting to find out if anything else strange is going to happen before she decides what to do next.

[endragoned]

The warm squishy rise doesn't do anything while she's waiting.

[lurkingkobold]

Huh.

This... doesn't make sense. She'd guess that she's stumbled across some animal's food cache, but she doesn't smell any blood, and anyway whatever that is is too warm for that to be plausible. But there's not much else that would be squishy and unresponsive and not breathing in a cave.

She heads back out a little way and sets up a portal back to her experimenting cave, just big enough for a kobold and with a piece of twine strung across it so that the first thing going through will break the spell, then gathers some materials from around the mouth of the cave to make a torch and goes to see what the mystery lump might be.

[endragoned]

The mystery lump is large and red and winged and tailed and clawed.

When the light of her torch reaches his head, he uncurls a bit and inhales and opens his eyes, blinking at her in sleepy bewilderment.

[lurkingkobold]

Um.

Um?

Come on, you have to breathe, that's just not fair.

...also, let's get some cover, here: she snuffs the torch out against the cavern floor and moves a few feet away from where she was... then a few feet more, to get well out of the way of where he might go if he's going to leave the cave.

[endragoned]

The creature makes a quiet confused rumbly sort of noise, and sits up. He's still breathing, at least, now that he's awake.

But he's not going anywhere.

[lurkingkobold]

That's fine, she decides - he doesn't seem hostile, and if that changes, she can just teleport away.

After a little while, she makes a small querying noise.

[endragoned]

He says something in some language or other - not a familiar one. The tone is generally friendly.

[lurkingkobold]

That's about as much as she's going to be able to find out in the dark like this, isn't it. She weighs her options for a moment, then lights the torch again, returning her flint and pyrite to her belt pouch afterward with a practiced one-handed motion.

[endragoned]

He looks at her curiously. Actually, he's already looking at her when she lights the torch.

[lurkingkobold]

She's too busy juggling the torch and fire starting implements to notice what he's doing while she does; by the time she looks up again she's not surprised to find him looking at her.

She sizes him up for a few seconds, then seems to come to a conclusion, and sits on the floor of the cave, apparently unconcerned by his presence and not paying any particular attention to him - not dismissively, but neutrally, as if it doesn't matter to her whether he approaches her or not.

[endragoned]

Hm.

He regards her for another few moments, then picks up a small rock from the floor and holds it briefly and reaches over to put it down nearish the kobold. The small rock is now kobold-shaped, with small floppy ears and a small nose and a small tail.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold blinks, and watches his reaction closely as she goes to pick the rock up.

[endragoned]

He doesn't seem to expect anything interesting to happen when she picks up the rock; and indeed, it remains just a little tiny statue of a kobold.

[lurkingkobold]

She examines it, obviously impressed, then puts it back down and picks another rock for her own demonstration, teleporting it from one hand to the other with a bit of concentration. "Mage," she offers.

[endragoned]

The strange person smiles delightedly.

Then he adopts a more thoughtful demeanour and starts shaping the stone of the floor, drawing a little island in it - very miniaturized and simplified: little stone beaches surrounding a few little stone trees and a single little stone cave raised up out of the floor. He picks up a rock and shapes it into a winged person like himself and bobs it along through the air - its little stone wings flap realistically - and has it glide down to the little island and curl up in the little cave. Then he looks at the kobold, and at the kobold figurine, and blinks inquisitively.

[lurkingkobold]

She watches carefully, and when he's done, she considers for a moment before taking a piece of twine out of her belt pouch and tying it into a loop. She spends a minute concentrating while touching the beach section of the diorama, then picks up the kobold figurine and puts it through the loop and onto the beach, teleporting it a few feet in the process. "Mage," she grins, as she removes her hand from the miniature portal.

[endragoned]

He smiles. "Mage," he echoes.

Hm, hm, what else would be good to know... he makes a few more little figurines like himself, although not all of them have wings, and indicates the group and says, "Endarkened." Then he makes a little group of kobold figurines and nudges them toward the kobold.

[lurkingkobold]

"Kobold," she supplies, setting the torch down carefully and taking the figurines to act out her own little skit with. Here's all the kobolds together, and then the first figurine sets out alone, through the portal again to find a winged Endarkened on the beach. The kobold figurine rejoins its group - either the portal is one way or she's just not bothering to show that part - and then the Endarkened follows. She makes the Endarkened figurine approach two of the new kobold figurines, which she then moves away, making a quiet "aaaaaa!" in demonstration. She looks back to the watching Endarkened and rolls her eyes fondly, shrugging - it's silly, but that's what would happen, so please don't.