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]

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.

[calescent]

"Humans can't... go live in the woods or something," agrees Kiri. "But there are places to get privacy."

[lurkingkobold]

Well, if it works for them, the kobold isn't going to judge.

[calescent]

"The belt is to move me around when there are fires, but the portals are to move stuff around, so it's easier to get food and other things across Welce."

[lurkingkobold]

...That seems risky. The kobold did explain that the spell will break if the portal frame is damaged, right? A bunch of people being dependent on a spell for food in a place that can't support them without it isn't a very good idea without a mage around to re-cast the spell if there's an earthquake or landslide or something.

[calescent]

"It will just make it faster. People in all these places can already get food. And the portals will be made of stone."

[lurkingkobold]

Okay, good.

She should probably try to come up with a way for Kiri to get in touch with her again, though, just in case. She moves around enough that that might be a bit tricky, but she can probably work something out.

(...and she should take on an apprentice, too. That's going to be weird. And finding someone who wants to learn magery and speaking and who'll be willing to go to other worlds will definitely be tricky. She's got a while to work on it, though; she's still fairly young for a kobold.)

[calescent]

"...Does it have to be a kobold apprentice?"

[lurkingkobold]

...not strictly speaking, no. Splitting her time between her tribe and her apprentice might cause some problems, though, given that she still intends to be away from the tribe to do diplomacy, too.

[calescent]

Kiri nods. "Well, there are a lot of humans to choose from if you wanted a human apprentice. Although you probably don't want to interview dozens of them. If not me I'd probably suggest Jayce." That would be the other person who lives in Kiri's house who has been named but that the kobold hasn't met in person yet.

[lurkingkobold]

Maybe. She hasn't had a chance to see how diplomacy will go with portals in the mix, or how the portals will affect her tribe's yearly habits; she might have more spare time than she's expecting.

It probably makes the most sense to look for an apprentice among the kobolds first, though, and if no likely prospects turn up in the next few years, then start considering off-worlders.

[calescent]

"Okay."

[lurkingkobold]

Cool.

More places?

[calescent]

More places, and then they have gone all the places (stopping for lunch, which Kiri brings some of into the carriage for the kobold) and returned to the house.

[lurkingkobold]

Excellent.

The kobold can probably get all the Chialto portals done before dinnertime, if everything is ready for her at the house - where does Kiri want the portals to the day's places to be put?

[calescent]

Kiri designates and - with little bottles of colored lacquer Aleko finds somewhere - color-codes the rivets on her belt and indicates how each should correspond to a destination. And here go the bells.

[lurkingkobold]

Straightforward enough. And then it is dinnertime.

[calescent]

Kiri cooks this one.

Kiri does not cook in a conventional way.