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]

"Aleko," Kiri says, pointing at her brother. "...No, I don't think she has a name, or it hasn't occurred to her, but there's only one kobold around so 'the kobold' works at least for now. ...I'm not positive she's a girl but that's my impression, she hasn't been dwelling extensively on her gender."

Apparently Aleko doesn't talk too much when he can just let Kiri read his mind.

[lurkingkobold]

"Aleko," another nod.

She seems otherwise content to wait for the humans to finish their conversation.

[calescent]

"Yes, she does magic. We're working on it. Plan to haul us to Chialto and other cities with network libraries in them soon-ish with a very secret passenger. ...Gooood question. Uh, kobold: kobold food?"

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold steps into mind-reading range again.

Kobolds are pretty omnivorous; there's not a lot they don't eat. Her usual diet includes all the same general categories as a human's, plus bugs - her world has giant ones - and bones, and seems to be very light on processed food; it's not clear whether she's familiar with bread or not, for example.

Also, she can retrieve food via portal - she wouldn't want to go too long without at least being able to cook what she can get that way, but she wouldn't consider it any particular inconvenience to go a few days without even that.

[calescent]

"Okay, she'll eat baaasically whatever, maybe go light on anything that has gotten as processed as 'flour' in its history. And she can go home for groceries if she wants. I think the portal magic is basically free, she acts like it is. Exactly when we go will depend on the rest of this conversation, the vocabulary we've established can do a lot and she steps in range sometimes but it's still pretty hard to get anything complicated expressed precisely. But soon, possibly first thing tomorrow. Yes, thanks."

Sibling hug! And then Aleko leaves Kiri and the kobold alone.

[lurkingkobold]

That went well! The kobold is a bit less nervous with Aleko gone, but seems to be generally okay with him.

[calescent]

"Sleep, sun, go Chialto? Want?"

[lurkingkobold]

Sure, that sounds reasonable. She can stay for a few days.

...hm. Where does Kiri want her to go while they sleep? She can go - well, not home, she's clear on that, but back to her world anyway - but from her perspective that seems like a bit of an unnecessary risk, plus making it harder to coordinate leaving in the morning. On the other hand, she is a strange mage, and it would be entirely reasonable of them to not want to risk getting hexed, so she'll leave if they want her to.

[calescent]

"Stay," advises Kiri. "Come - quiet." And then she motions for the kobold to follow her up and out of the library.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold follows, quiet and alert.

[calescent]

They manage not to run into anyone.

This is a pretty large building. They go up stairs and down a hall and up some more stairs and Kiri shows the kobold a room. "Stay? Kiri go carry food here?"

[lurkingkobold]

Nod.

[calescent]

Kiri closes the door and goes.

She's back with a plate of miscellaneous food options for the kobold and one for herself.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold samples everything, and likes most of it, especially the things with more of a mix of flavors. She ends up eating about half of the offered food, and is both satisfied and appreciative.

[calescent]

Kiri eats in this room too and then takes the plates away and comes back. "Sleep now, no now?" she inquires.

[lurkingkobold]

She considers: It doesn't feel like night-time yet, to her, but she can probably at least nap; she does want to be fresh for the trip in the morning. She can certainly stay up a while longer if there's more planning to do, though.

[calescent]

Well, there's more things they could talk about, even if the plan for tomorrow's pretty straightforward. "Mage do move. Mage do...?" Anything else? Turning Kiri into a nationwide fire-suppression system isn't nothing but she'd be a little surprised if that were the only trick.

[lurkingkobold]

Teleportation is the only thing she can do right now; she's new to being a mage, and teleportation is a new kind of magic, so she's been too busy figuring out interesting things to do with it to learn other sorts of effects yet. There are plenty of things it's useful for, though - gathering without having to worry about carrying things home, especially heavy things like water, exploring without worrying about getting lost or trapped or running out of supplies, pit traps for hunting with that deposit their catch all in one convenient place, of course all sorts of safety spells, and so on. Her favorite one is the mini-portals, like the one she used earlier to get the dried berries; being able to access her tribe's stores from wherever she is is pretty excellent.

[calescent]

Kiri giggles. These are pretty clever applications given the starting context the kobold has to work with. Hmmm...

"Move big things?"

[lurkingkobold]

Sure, there's no size limit. For a really big thing - like, an entire tree or part of a mountain or something - she might need to put some quartz crystals around it to help her figure out just where the edges were so she could cast on it properly without leaving any bits out or getting any extra stuff, and getting the crystals where she would need them might be a bit of a pain, but if she really needed to she certainly could.

[calescent]

"Hmm - big thing on spell thing, big thing move?" She gestures a platform with one hand, unspecified quantities of trade goods with the other, teleports the second hand to her knee from her palm. Repeats the gesture a few times - this would be most useful if it could get things from Chialto's harbor to the rest of Welce without needing the kobold to help with every load.

[lurkingkobold]

She considers. There's a couple ways she can do that, but neither of them is great - she could enspell a platform to drop whatever's loaded onto it through a horizontal portal when the spell is activated, or enspell some sort of large container to generate a portal in the middle that would move anything the portal touches - but only what it does directly touch, so while this would work okay for, say, a stack of logs, it wouldn't work so well for anything not roughly that shape.

Or she can just make a standing portal that people can carry things through; that's what she's been doing, mostly. The pit traps use the 'falling' technique, and the automation is nice, but if you're carrying things to the portal anyway it's about as convenient to carry them through it as to drop them through it, and much less rough on the things.

[calescent]

"Good," says Kiri, a portal is much more general purpose than a cargo platform anyway. "Go, put belt, put -" Gesture in lieu of word for portal. She supplies 'portal' in Welchin as an afterthought.

[lurkingkobold]

Hm.

Do they already have something suitable to cast that kind of portal spell on, here? She'd be kind of surprised. Not that she can't cast it on a wooden doorway or whatever, but if people are going to be carrying lots of heavy loads through it, someone's going to hit the frame hard enough to break it sooner or later, and you definitely don't want that happening when someone's walking through it. Ideally she should be casting on something both sturdy enough to take whatever damage might accidentally happen to it, and wide and tall enough that people walking through it aren't at any real risk of hitting it to begin with.

(Her solution to this back home is to run some rope between two trees, and cast on the ground-trees-rope loop as her portal frame. This is only suitable for temporary portals, but she doesn't want permanent ones there anyway.)

[calescent]

"No thing. Put thing." She can have people build stone arches on Ardelay properties throughout the kingdom. She'll make a killing and an economic boon. "...No soon." Stone archways take a non-trivial amount of time to set up.