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 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.

[lurkingkobold]

Yeah, she'd guessed that.

[calescent]

When breakfast is gone Kiri takes it and the little dishes of maple syrup from outside the door away.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold flops back on the bed and stares at the ceiling after Kiri leaves.

The next thing is to go deal with some horses, huh. Why did she agree to that, again?

Because she was bored and wanted an adventure, and fire is an awful way to die. Well, she's not bored now, but fire is still awful; she'll stay, and deal with it, and tonight she'll go home for a bit and hug some friends and feel better. That sounds like a good plan; she can handle that.

By the time Kiri comes back, she's sitting up again and looking a little less morose.

[calescent]

Kiri comes back a bit later. "Go now?" she asks.

[lurkingkobold]

She nods, and hops off the bed to follow.

[calescent]

The kobold need not directly interact with any horses. Aleko is attaching the horses to the carriage and it looks like he's going to drive too. Kiri shows the kobold into the carriage. There are curtains, so no one will be able to see that there's a kobold in here.

[lurkingkobold]

Oh, good. She was definitely not looking forward to that. (Y'know who uses horses, in the kobold's world? Elves. Ugh.)

The carriage is pretty neat, though. She's never seen one before - or anything with wheels, apparently - but she comes up with an accurate guess about what it's for and how it works from context.

[calescent]

"Wheel," Kiri says, pointing at a wheel, when she notices this gap in the kobold's knowledge. And when they are shut up in the carriage with Kiri's luggage and Aleko's and a sack of food for them all, the carriage starts moving.

If the kobold sits diagonally across from Kiri she will be just out of range; the carriage is not otherwise that large in any dimension. Kiri's sitting backward-facing, with one of the curtained windows between her and Aleko, presumably so she can read his mind if necessary.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold sits just within range, but doesn't seem to have much to say, at least to begin with; she's too busy paying attention to the carriage ride itself.

[calescent]

That's all right. Kiri talks to Aleko occasionally, in apparent response to his thoughts; sometimes he laughs, sometimes she does.

The ride is pretty smooth, and if the kobold peeks out past the curtains it's pretty brisk too.

[lurkingkobold]

She does peek out, once; the speed is impressive, but a little disorienting, so she doesn't do it again.

If Kiri doesn't have anything to say, the kobold will eventually scoot out of range and pass the time contemplating a bit of string in that casting-ish way she does.

[calescent]

Kiri has lots of things to say, but it's really hard to work with a limited shared vocabulary. Soechin she studied for years before she ever met someone whose Welchin was worse than her Soechin. She pulls out her vocabulary notes, sorts the words into categories, and then adds (marked differently) words she might want to try to add - hm, maybe she could overregularize and communicate the most common Welchin intensifier and softener and then use that for things like "sooner" and "less dangerous"...? (All this notetaking takes a while.)

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold will be over here contemplating her string, then, unless and until Kiri tries to get her attention.

[calescent]

...The kobold would probably have thought it at some point if it were dangerous to interrupt string contemplation. "Learn?" Kiri asks.