glowfic | One Curious Kobold

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One Curious Kobold

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.

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"If you start using magic on things that are not yours, I will ask you to leave. I should explain wishes more... A small wish is called 'Favor.' You used one to learn animalspeak. Medium wish is called 'Gift.' I used a Gift to get my magic-sense. A large wish is called a 'Boon'. I used one for my speak-wish and know I know every language."

"Boons are very rare and very powerful, you only get them if you use all your first wishes and ask for more and are judged worthy of one. Oh, if you ask for more wishes and the pool judges you not worthy, it will hurt you. If you touch it while you still have wishes, your wishes will probably disappear."

"I won't use my magic on anything I didn't bring with me or get from my tribe unless you ask me to," the kobold reassures, "and maybe not even then."

She considers the rest of the information. "I might want to come back and try for more wishes someday, even if that's dangerous - there's always the chance of there being another war or famine or something. Do you mind if I make a spell for that? It might be several hands of years before I want to come back, and I'm not going to leave the portal I used to get here active that whole time - I don't think anyone would find it, but the last thing any of us needs is an elf with wishes running around."

"Usually the humans who run this place want to talk to you before you try to get wishes. What's wrong with elves?"

"...I won't be able to bring someone from my tribe to vouch for me," she muses. "I might be able to get someone to come, if there's a bad enough emergency, but only maybe, and you'd only have my Speaking that they were here to do that; nobody else in my tribe talks. But I can talk to some humans, if vouching for myself is enough."

"Elves, well, elves are ethically-incomprehensible and dangerous. Very easily offended, and warlike when they are, among other problems."

"We let everyone try for wishes. We just want to know who exactly is doing it, first. Some humans are also easily offended and warlike. Usually, easily offended and warlike humans do not get as many wishes, and almost always do not get more wishes if they try after using their first wishes."

"...if an elf fire mages wishes to know where my tribe is, we'll all be dead. You might be willing to let an elf get wishes, but I'm not."

Erin hmms. "Even if I said 'no elves are allowed here,' this is not the only wishing pool in the world. But if one person wishes to hide, and another person wishes to find them with the same size of wish, the one who wished to hide wins. Is an elf likely to find this world?"

"I don't think it's very likely, even if the portal is there for a long time. But it will only take me a few minutes to break that portal and cast one that only opens when it hears a password instead."

"Well, you're the one who knows how to do that so you might as well go do it now?"

She nods, and concentrates, and disappears - this time much more neatly, without the flash. After a few minutes Erin's magic-sense shows another, very slightly different portal, and then after another moment, the kobold returns, stepping out of thin air. "Much better."

Erin is cleaning one of the walls with a long brush and a bucket of soapy water. Any soapy water that touches the pool immediately stops being soapy.

"Welcome back. Sorry to have scared you so badly when you first showed up, by the way."

"That was mostly the wishes, actually. I think you probably do have a god, here - kobolds have an anti-magic spell, so other magic can't see us if we don't want it to, but there are stories in my world about gods that say that they can ignore spell effects like that. I wasn't expecting to find a god in a pool, though, the stories usually say that they look like people." She considers briefly, and grins slightly, "they're a nice god, anyway, I think."

"The reason some people think we don't have a god is that if we do, it never talks to people. It just gives them wishes, or doesn't. Though a 'ignoring your magic immunity' does sound rather godlike."

"Something definitely looked at me when I touched the pool," she gives it an assessing look, "and there are certainly people who don't talk. Does your magic tell you what I mean when I say I'm a Speaker?"

"I think it means you can talk, that one of your roles in the tribe is Speaking for them. And it doesn't directly tell me but I can guess from context that at least most of the rest of your tribe doesn't talk. I've never seen people who don't talk before, but I can believe it. If they make decisions, use tools, care about things, they're people. And I'd know you're a person even if you didn't talk, because the wishing pool gave you wishes. It only does that to creatures who are properly people and not just clever beasts."

Nod. "That's more or less right - I'm the only one in my tribe who talks, we have more tribes than Speakers these days. But, anyway, most of the work of Speaking isn't the talking; it's understanding the person you're Speaking for well enough to know what to say... I can't help but wonder if there's a reason I ended up here in particular, when I cast a portal to take me to a random place; that sounds like something a god could do."

Edited 2015-10-21 16:55 (UTC)

"It could be a coincidence. But given the evidence that there is probably a god, yes, that seems like a godlike sort of thing to do. Perhaps it wanted to help you?"

"Maybe. They already have, even if I don't do anything interesting with the rest of the wishes... learning how to teach language might be a good one, too... but, my teleportation magic is new, my tribe is having the best winter in memory because of it; we don't actually need help. And if they did want a Speaker... I'd rather try to find out, at least."

"Er... I should warn you, wishing to talk to the source of wishes tends to be. Well. Confusing, at best."

"Oh?"

"If you try to tell it something, the wish disappears. Wishes disappear without doing anything if you specify your wish badly, sometimes, so it's not clear if this actually accomplishes anything. If you wish to listen to it, you get a half-hour vision-trip that is described as a particularly vivid and memorable dream. These only sometimes contain useful advice or insight. I haven't done it myself."

"And that doesn't ever give the wisher magic? ...sorry to keep asking about that, it's just that... well, I would probably survive being exiled, actually, but I'm almost not sure I'd want to; I really can't take that risk."

"Not that I've ever heard of. You only get a permanent magical effect from a wish if you specifically wish for one. If you did end up exiled, I would try to make you feel welcome here, but I understand. I don't have a tribe, humans don't do tribes generally, but I would guess it would be like getting kicked out of my family. Which would feel really terrible even if it didn't actually hurt me."

Nod, "that's kind of you, anyway." She considers, and then asks, "is there someplace out of the way I can be, while I do the vision-trip? I can go back to my cave if there isn't, but I'm not sure that will work as well."

"We have rooms designed specifically for that, actually. As much as I find the tradition confusing, a fair number of people do it. We may see someone else along the way if I show you, as a warning."

Edited 2015-10-25 04:26 (UTC)

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