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]

Hm. The kobold is not actually familiar with the kind of bells-on-ropes setup Kiri is using, but, on examination, it seems straightforward enough; sure.

[calescent]

Kiri makes a shopping list - more bells, more ropes, materials to make little signs that say ring bell for Ardelay prime in case of fire - and then yawns enormously. Bedtime.

[lurkingkobold]

Huh, okay. The kobold isn't quite sleepy yet, but, sure, it's getting late.

[calescent]

Kiri shows her a little room. And gives her a few simple books.

[lurkingkobold]

This is an entirely acceptable way to handle this discrepancy.

[calescent]

Of course.

Kiri goes to bed.

[lurkingkobold]

Eventually, the kobold does too. She's awake and ready to go when Kiri comes to check on her in the morning.

[calescent]

"Do kobolds sleep less than humans?" wonders Kiri.

[lurkingkobold]

Maybe. The kobold doesn't know enough about humans to know, nor have a very good way to describe how long she was awake after Kiri left last night or how long she's been awake so far this morning, but it's certainly possible.

[calescent]

"Humans sleep about one part of three every day."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold considers this. Kobolds don't do timekeeping, and she's rarely awake for a whole day and night at once, and the lengths of days and nights vary enough over the course of the year to confound her attempts at estimating. One part in three doesn't seem obviously wrong, but it might be closer to one part in four, she's not sure.

[calescent]

Kiri shrugs. Breakfast - Aleko cooks - and then they pile into the carriage to go find good places to put things around the city. Kiri has selected some distantly-spaced places she owns: a library, a post station, a corner of a park with a statue of her great-great-great-grandfather, a theater. In each location Aleko hops off the carriage, and Kiri gets out, and they draw chalk on a part of a surface that would be suitable for a bellpull to appear from via portal for the kobold to see, and Kiri stands in a place it would be appropriate for her to spontaneously materialize in response to a fire-related emergency.

[lurkingkobold]

This is sufficient for the kobold's purposes. After the third or fourth one, she starts keeping a knotted-twine 'list' of the places, so she can review them in between stops and make sure she doesn't forget any of them.

There continue to be a ridiculous number of humans, which the kobold finds a little stressful, but between the curtains and her ring and her own ability to teleport, she feels secure enough to manage. (So many humans, though. How do they do it?)

[calescent]

When she wonders that within Kiri's range - well, Kiri has practice not reacting to amusing thoughts too much, but there is the inkling of a sporfle on her face.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold doesn't miss much, when it comes to body language - comes of being a member of a culture where so few people can talk. She's not going to ask as such, but she definitely noticed that reaction, and is a little confused at it.

[calescent]

"Humans happen the same way any person happens," Kiri says.

[lurkingkobold]

...That is not what she was curious about. Humans' eggmaking habits are of no interest to her. Ew.

[calescent]

That just makes Kiri laugh aloud. "You wanted to know how we all live so close together?"

[lurkingkobold]

Yes.

[calescent]

"Some humans put plant seeds in the ground, many of them, or keep animals, to grow food, and then the food gets moved to the city where most of the humans are. And most cities are near rivers or oceans. We put food and things on boats to move them easily."

[lurkingkobold]

That's not... quite the question?

Kobold tribes don't get much bigger than 140 or 150 members; past that it's too hard to keep everyone happy, and people will start switching to other tribes or the tribe will split. 75 to 100 is a much more comfortable number, and clearly many times that number of humans live here; how aren't they all miserable or fighting all the time? How do they even keep track of each other in the first place? The kobold's memory is excellent, and even she has trouble keeping track of more than about 200 people at once.

[calescent]

"Not everyone in a city knows everyone. A lot of people know me, because I'm the Ardelay prime - the person in my family with magic - and there are only five primes, but most people don't know more than one or two hundred other people. ...It's easier to deal with strangers if you share a language."

[lurkingkobold]

Huh.

Kobolds do something a little like that - she's not going to go into detail - but once she's drawn the analogy, it seems like a reasonable enough lifestyle choice.

That's still a kind of ridiculous number of humans, though.

[calescent]

"It means the humans can specialize - each gets good at one thing and doesn't have to know how to hunt or forage or trap food - and there are people specializing in almost anything you can think of, all in one place."

[lurkingkobold]

That does have the obvious downside of people not knowing how to look after themselves - not that kobolds can go very long without their tribes, but knowing that she can manage on her own for a while when she wants to gives her a kind of freedom that she thinks is quite important.