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]

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.

[calescent]

"Why?"

[lurkingkobold]

Outsiders are dangerous. She personally knows enough about tigerfolk to be around them safely, but most kobolds don't, and she was badly hurt - in a mental/emotional sense that she considers just as much a form of harm as physical injury would be; Kiri gets a brief view of what it's like to believe oneself not to be a person, before the kobold manages to tuck that memory away again - in the process of learning.

Given that understanding, and enough self-awareness and self-care skills to safely put it to use, yes, she can do this thing, but she's very much an exception; for most kobolds, the taboo on being seen makes perfect sense, and seeing her flout that and survive is baffling.

[calescent]

Okay then.

"Tribemates think me danger?"

[lurkingkobold]

Absolutely. Most of them wouldn't even be open to the idea of letting them prove otherwise. Not that the kobold plans to try - her tribe puts up with her weirdness now, but only because she's proven that she's not going to put anyone but herself in danger, and that's a fairly fragile understanding; trying to get any of her tribemates involved could easily get her exiled, if her tribe decided they couldn't trust her any more.

[calescent]

Well, there goes any hope of establishing some kind of society-level relationship with kobolds.

"Why kobolds no speak?"

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold scoots out of mind-reading range.

"Kobold want learn speak, kobold go tigerfolk, hide, listen, maybe learn. Go danger, small maybe learn - three, four kobold go, one kobold learn. Most kobold no go, danger scare."

[calescent]

"Why no kobold language?"

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold's immediate reaction to this is a mixture of offendedness and fear.

"Kobold person," she asserts, braced for action in case this gets a poor response.

[calescent]

"...I know."

[lurkingkobold]

That's a good enough answer that the kobold doesn't immediately teleport away. She watches Kiri, warily but thoughtfully, for a few long moments instead.

[calescent]

"I know," Kiri repeats. "I know thoughts, you think, you're a person."

[lurkingkobold]

Sigh.

Back into range.

That's... not usually the standard she's held to. Usually it's speaking, and usually even with her being able to it's an uphill slog to convince whatever tigerfolk she's dealing with that it's not a trick; 'if kobolds are so smart, why didn't any of the other ones talk' has been the end of that discussion more than once, and she really, really doesn't want to think about how that came to be a thing. (None of those other kobolds are alive now. She's sure of that. She's not going to think about why.)

So - kobolds don't talk; they just don't; that's okay, and if Kiri has a problem with it, this one can go home now.

[calescent]

Kiri shrugs. She doesn't have a problem with it; this one talks, and even if she stopped talking she thinks, which serves the immediate purposes of communication; and there are no other kobolds around to be inconveniently nonlinguistic, and even if there were they would still be people under the unlanguage barrier - but Kiri can't say most of that. So: shrug.