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 is very impressed.

[calescent]

Yay!

"So, kobold want learn read?"

[lurkingkobold]

Yes.

[calescent]

Awesome.

So, Welchin has an alphabet, which are these symbols, and each one makes a sound - Kiri writes out all the symbols in order for the kobold and she can have her own copy, and then she says the sounds that each one might be found making in a typical word.

And "fire" is actually a nice simple word in Welchin. Here it is in letters, all of which make quite predictable sounds: would the kobold like to sound it out?

[lurkingkobold]

She would! And successfully, at that.

[calescent]

And here's a few more to try - Kiri skips around the vocab list, making sure she doesn't throw in any silent letters or digraphs just yet. "Water" is simple, "what", "sky", "walk".

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold is a fairly quick study, at least at this level of complexity.

After a few words, she gets a little ambitious, and tries to construct 'kobold' out of the letters.

[calescent]

Since Kiri had to make up a spelling in the first place, it's pretty intuitively put together in her notes - just like that, in fact. She points it out.

[lurkingkobold]

What a pleased kobold this is.

[calescent]

So cute!

All right, here's some more complicated stuff - these two letters together make this other sound. Sometimes. Kiri gives the kobold an apologetic look about the sometimesness.

[lurkingkobold]

Well, so long as the times are only when there is a word with this other sound and isn't a word with the two obvious sounds, that shouldn't be too bad. Probably. Hopefully?

[calescent]

At least within the scope of this vocabulary they're working with, that is the case! My, what a good memory the kobold has.

Here are three more digraphs, and words which contain them.

[lurkingkobold]

That's probably going to take some practice to keep straight, but she's got the basic idea, and draws some little pictograms on the notes to help her work it out again later if she needs to.

[calescent]

And here are some sentences, all written out - Kiri's already been forgetting not to conjugate things kind of a lot, but all written out it's obvious that the various forms of verbs are the same. Except for 'to be', that one's all over the place - Kiri makes a chart of it for the kobold.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold had noticed the verb forms, actually, but seeing them written out does help. (The sentences are regular enough that she can also think of the collection as something like one of her mnemonic lists, which makes it quite a bit easier.)

'To be' is weird, but it's the words that are irregular, not the spellings, so she shouldn't have too much trouble picking it up if she's dealing with the language enough for it to matter. (Which... she could, huh. She could bring some books home, and be able to read them whenever she wants, rather than having to come back and listen to Kiri to keep her hand in. Amazing.)

[calescent]

Kiri has a book in her bag; she gets it out. "Book," she supplies. "I found you in my library; a library is where people put books."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold nods and mimics these words; she obviously doesn't know their equivalents, if there even are words for those things in animalperson.

[calescent]

Kiri adds the words to her list, and shows the kobold how they're spelled. "You learn fast," she remarks. ...She doesn't have "fast". Well, it's easily gestured. "Fast," she says, moving a hand left to right rapidly, "slow," it slows to a crawl.

[lurkingkobold]

Aww. She does, she knows, but it's nice to have that recognized.

Here's those words. (Her translation of 'fast' is closer in meaning to 'quick', but, good enough.)

[calescent]

And Kiri shows her how they're spelled in Welchin.

Reading lessons and vocabulary additions occupy the rest of the trip to Welce, by which time the sun has set and Kiri is lighting the way for the horses with an overhead fireball and keeping everybody warm against night chill.

"Chialto," Kiri says when they approach the city.

Even at night, it's busy.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold peeks out of the carriage.

The kobold regrets this decision.

Good grief that's a lot of humans.

[calescent]

"You can hide in the carriage," Kiri assures her. "And then in my house."

[lurkingkobold]

That is a much more viable plan than anything else Kiri might ask of her, yes.

Good grief.

[calescent]

It's a lot of humans, talking, shopping, laughing, singing. There are a million smells, varyingly pleasant - spices and food, horse dung and garbage.

"Can you look at some places in Chialto other than my house to put them on the belt?" Kiri asks. "From inside the carriage?"

(She's no longer checking to make sure that every single word she uses is on the list. If she uses one the kobold can't figure out from context, she can go back and explain it with the foundation they have.)

[lurkingkobold]

(The kobold is quite good at figuring out words from context, yes, and only getting better as she figures out the details of Kiri's personal body language.)

She doesn't have to be right on top of the location she's trying to observe, but she has to be pretty close, and more importantly she needs to be out of Kiri's mindreading range while she does it - she's not sure that'd give Kiri her kind of magic, but she's nervous about what would happen if it did.