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]

The kobold refocuses and scoots back into range: Sure, what's up?

[calescent]

Well, the easiest demonstration tool to hand is globs of fire. So, Kiri makes a glob of fire. "Fire." Now it is twice as big. "More fire." Now it is very small. "Less fire." She repeats the demo with discrete quantities, although she doesn't insist on the countable/uncountable distinction - Soechin doesn't even have it.

Next: prepositions. Fire in hand, on hand, under hand, next to hand, around hand, etc.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold readily picks up both the words and the concepts, and shares the equivalent Animalperson words when she knows them, which is most of the time but not always.

[calescent]

Scribble scribble.

Okay, question words. ...Maybe "question". "Speak want know: question."

[lurkingkobold]

She doesn't know the directly equivalent word, but does share "ask".

[calescent]

Which is also useful: "Ask thing: what. Ask person: who. Ask..." She consults her notes, doesn't actually have 'place' - "here, there: where. Ask what person think, want: why. Ask now, soon, day, night - when. Ask one, two, more, less: how much. Ask..." This one's hard. "...go magic, go horse? How go? Ask, how Kiri find kobold? Kiri find kobold mind." Does that make sense?

[lurkingkobold]

This sequence is a bit trickier, but she gets it after some thought. In the course of puzzling it out, she shares "place" and "reason".

(This is still much easier, she thinks at one point, than trying to do the mental gymnastics to teach a language she's not herself fluent in to someone she barely knows, with relatively little experience teaching anyone anything. She should probably work out a better way of handling the issue than leaving it to the other person, for future adventures, if she's going to possibly end up interacting with outsiders (which she wasn't expecting to) - but she'll think about that later. For now, focus on the task at hand.)

[calescent]

Kiri snorts and translates 'place' and 'reason'. More Welchin it is. She probably has a fair fraction of the animalperson words the kobold knows in the first place; it's either not a very complete language or the kobold hasn't heard that much of it, because her memory is really impressive. She reads off a random smattering of words in both animalperson and Welchin, identifies them all as "words", and then distinguishes between the "Welchin words" and "animalperson words" and declares both Welchin and animalperson "languages". Hmmm. Colors. She can do a surprising number of colors with fire, but most of them are uncomfortably warm for most people to be in close quarters with. Her outfit supplies examples of red and orange and white, her shoes are black, her hair is brown... "spring is green"... water is blue, she has a little gold on her person and it is yellow, and... purple will just have to wait, she supposes.

[lurkingkobold]

She shares the animalperson terms for 'word' and 'language' and the various colors, including purple, and also 'bright' and 'dark'.

[calescent]

Good, purple didn't have to wait very long.

Hmm.

"People want colors and games but need food and water."

...She doesn't have "if". "If here learn kobold mind, if there, no learn kobold mind." Did that get across the concept...?

[lurkingkobold]

Yup! And here are the animalperson equivalents of those.

[calescent]

Cool! Scribble.

And with "if" she can do all kinds of things like:

"If person speak 'mine', person own thing. ...Unless they're lying, um, 'lie' is, speak 'sun dark! Winter hot!'. Person speak 'mine' no lying, person own thing."

[lurkingkobold]

This elicits some mental grumbling about how ownership itself is a lie - she accepts this weird cultural thing, but only as a cultural thing, and she doesn't really approve of it - but also the animalperson word for 'lie'; apparently she doesn't know the word for 'own'.

[calescent]

Kiri has a whole notebook set aside for animalperson transliterations. In it goes. She does not have the fluency established to want to get into whether ownership is Really Real right now; she's satisfied the kobold is not going to shoplift, anyway.

"If person want thing other person own, person trade - one person own one thing, other person own other thing, trade, one person own other thing other person own one thing."

[lurkingkobold]

Trade, she's familiar with - apparently she trades with the tigerpeople, sometimes, though her thoughts about the memory she shares about that suggest that the trade itself isn't really the point there, and that there's something more complicated going on. Once she's established that she's got the right idea, though, she shares the word for that, too.

[calescent]

Huh. The thoughts about the un-trade-thing are indistinct but if the kobold doesn't want to get into it that's fine.

"If one person have... horse, other person have food, horse person no want food - food person trade money. Money does numbers - one two three four five - trade money any thing." She hasn't established "any"... "Fire be any color -" She cycles through some of the cooler options with a palmful of flames. Does that suffice?

[lurkingkobold]

'Any', she picks up with no problem - and here is the animalperson word for that, and 'some' and 'all' - but the concept of money seems to be completely new, and the kobold spends a little while thinking about possible implications of that (the one she's surest of: trade must be really important to humans) before she's ready to continue.

[calescent]

Kiri waits while she thinks it through - it's really interesting watching the entire concept of currency be novel to somebody.

[lurkingkobold]

What the kobold doesn't think of might be as interesting as what she does. People employing one another, for example, doesn't occur to her at all. Land ownership. Farming, even though she does think of people gathering things specifically to sell. Poverty.

Kiri can get a decent picture of the kobold's native lifestyle this way, too - she comes from a culture of stone age hunter-gatherers, surrounded by people who have enough technology to work metal but who still live quite close to the land. Individual kobolds often have specialties - this one was roughly the equivalent of a physician's assistant or nurse, with a focus on gathering medicinal plants, before she became a mage - but they all know the basics of how to support the tribe, gathering food and cooking and making basic supplies like leather and rope and tools, and they're all expected to contribute to the tribe in that way, with the results of those contributions being held in common by the tribe as a whole.

[calescent]

...The kobold might find Chialto interesting. They didn't really pass through the town nearest Kiri's country house on their way, the kobold never quite got the point of books as far as Kiri noticed and didn't have much of an opinion about the food or the contents of her room, but Chialto is huge and bustling and full of stuff.

"Kiri trade -" This is getting irritating. "Kiri speak 'I': Kiri. Kobold speak 'I': kobold." Yes? Personal pronouns?

[lurkingkobold]

...right. The kobold is intentionally not in the habit of using personal pronouns - apparently they're dangerous for her to use in the context she most often speaks in - but she knows them; here they are. Also 'you', and two variants of 'them', one for 'person of unspecified or irrelevant reproductive status' that can be used to refer to anyone and one for 'person who cannot reproduce' that mostly is used for children and elders; she declines to share the variants that specify reproductive status other than that.

[calescent]

Kiri translates 'you', translates the first 'them' as 'them', and, having no Welchin equivalent for compressing inability to reproduce into a pronoun, asserts that there is no Welchin word for it. ...And now she's curious. "Danger words?"

[lurkingkobold]

Very few kobolds speak; most of the people she talks to are tigerfolk, who are less dangerous than elves, but are still big and strong and relatively aggressive and don't as a general rule believe that kobolds are people. Which is why she goes and talks to them; to try to convince them that they're wrong about that. It's risky work, so she's gotten into the habit of being very, very careful about anything that might possibly offend them, and the implicit claim of personhood involved in using first-person pronouns is one such thing.

She has made a decent amount of progress in improving relations between the species, though, certainly enough for her to consider it worthwhile; even a fair portion of the tigerfolk tribes that she hasn't directly interacted with have switched over to using snare traps that a caught kobold can free themselves from, for example, and while she's not sure this change would hold in the case of another actual famine, an increasing number of tigerfolk appear to have stopped thinking of kobolds as even an emergency backup food source.

[calescent]

"...Good," says Kiri tentatively. "Well. More good."

It's obvious to Kiri the kobold is a person: there is her mind, right there, whirring away, quite brightly. Whether it would have been obvious without that if the kobold didn't talk is not clear, admittedly, although she hopes if she saw some critters manufacturing rope and having roles specialized to the level of "physician's assistant" she would at least be thoroughly nervous about the possibility that anybody might eat one.

[lurkingkobold]

Nod.

The kobold does think it's important and useful, even though it's not properly work (since it doesn't directly contribute to the tribe) and her tribemates consider her willingness to interact with or even be seen by outsiders unsettling.