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]

"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.

[lurkingkobold]

Ah, okay. How long might that take? She's ... not going to think about her long-term plans, nope, but before she flinches away from that line of thought there is the impression that the season matters and that she might not be able to come back until next year, if it takes long enough for that to be relevant.

[calescent]

"Mmmm..." Time-limited resource, legitimate economic investment. She can make it a rush job and/or call in Alser. She gets the list of numbers and draws/words up to twenty and then goes "ten, twenty, thirty" on up to a hundred. "Maybe twenty, thirty days."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold backs out of range to consider this, and returns after a minute's consideration with a conclusion that that should work all right - she can't stay the whole time, but she should be able to come back after twenty days and stay for ten or fifteen.

[calescent]

[lurkingkobold]

[calescent]

Okay, Kiri's gotta go write some letters. She opens the door to this room - "Kiri sleep there," she says, pointing at her door across the hall, "Aleko there," in case the kobold needs this information for some reason, "Jayce there, Jayce know kobold here, safe."

[lurkingkobold]

Nod, nod, nod, good to know. "Kobold stay, kobold quiet."

[calescent]

"Good."

And Kiri goes to write up orders for stone arches in convenient locations in the towns they intend to visit and write Alser a letter inquiring if she can call on him should any of her contractors fall through and write to employees of Ardelay businesses in all the towns asking them to look for good trustworthy candidates to be on call sitting on tall things and noticing if anything is on fire that shouldn't be "as part of a pilot fire-suppression system". She has the maid-of-all-work run it all into town for the night mail. Then: sleep.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold isn't able to go right to sleep, but does manage it eventually, after a while spent drawing. She'll wake up with the sun, if nobody disturbs her before that, but she's not going to leave the room without an invitation; she can portal herself a snack if she gets hungry while she waits.

[calescent]

After the sun has been up for about half an hour there's a knock on the door. "Kiri," says Kiri, lacking pronouns.

[lurkingkobold]

After a moment, the door opens, and there is the kobold, looking reasonably well-rested.

[calescent]

"Good morning," says Kiri, hoping it'll be clear enough from context that this is just a greeting. She offers the kobold a plate of breakfast. There is scrambled egg and fried potatoes and bacon and pancakes with berry compote and a little dish of maple syrup.

[lurkingkobold]

Tone and context are things, yes. The kobold examines takes the plate and looks it over - food, food, weird food, food... um.

The maple syrup is inexplicably alarming; the kobold sets the plate on the bed and gingerly removes it to the other side of the room where she can pretend it doesn't exist.

[calescent]

"Maple syrup bad?" says Kiri, puzzled.

[lurkingkobold]

Yeah, um. The kobold's world has elves, they are awful, some idiot stole some maple syrup from them once and they killed a whole bunch of kobolds over it. She doesn't want to think about it.

Look at this nice tasty distracting breakfast. So tasty. So distracting.

[calescent]

Kiri removes the maple syrup from the room and eats her pancakes without too.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold appreciates the maple syrup being removed, in a careful not-thinking-about-that sort of way.

[calescent]

Breakfast breakfast.

Kiri doesn't have a word for 'elves', but...

"Kiri go... stop kobold danger? Fire?"

[lurkingkobold]

Hm.

Sigh.

Maybe?

On the one hand, the elves are definitely awful - kobolds' antimagic protects them from the elves' magic traps, but they trap and sell tigerpeople, and it's even less ambiguous that tigerpeople are people than it is that kobolds are. Plus the cannibalism, plus the fact that they'll go after anybody they think is harming trees. On the other - well, they do have fairly valid reasons not to like kobolds: she's still trying to convince her own tribe that the concept of ownership isn't completely perverse and that they should respect other cultures' views on that, with no success to speak of; getting all the local tribes to agree to stop treating 'go take something from the elves' as a grand test of skill is about as likely as plucking the moon out of the sky. Not that the elves wiping out several tribes and terrorizing the rest for years over one bottle of syrup was reasonable, but... there really isn't a simple solution, there. Not one that's fair to everyone involved, at least.

[calescent]

Eugh. That does seem complicated. She'd like to go free some tigerpeople, but has no word for either.

No concept of ownership? Can she cobble together - "Kobolds no... control.. things? No want things no take?"

[lurkingkobold]

She's really not in the right headspace for a vocabulary dump, but she can do some words.

"Elf, tigerperson: take thing, put thing place, say 'mine'. Other person touch thing, person do of yell, maybe do of attack. Kobold take thing, put thing place, no say - kobold no say any - no think 'mine'. Other person touch, kobold quiet. Kobold want thing, no want other person touch, kobold hide thing; other person find thing, other person take thing, kobold quiet; kobold know other person maybe find, maybe take. Kobold hide thing, game, other kobold find thing, other kobold proud. Elf, tigerperson, hide thing, kobold think game - danger, proud; big danger, big proud." Sigh. "Other person want thing, kobold take thing, other person hurt."

[calescent]

Kiri writes down the new words and nods solemnly. "Humans do 'mine'," she mentions, although this was probably obvious.