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]

"...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.

[lurkingkobold]

Of course she doesn't.

The kobold hangs out and watches, and offers some unusual ingredients from her tribe's stores. (Kiri probably doesn't want the crickets, no matter how interesting the added crunch would be in that one dish, but the nuts and dried fruit might go over a bit better.)

[calescent]

Kiri indeed does not want crickets, but nuts and dried fruit (after she samples one of each offered kind) are incorporated.

[lurkingkobold]

And then there is dinner.

[calescent]

Delicious dinner.

And more language lessons - grammar! Irregular verbs! Punctuation!

And then humans go to bed.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold thinks there should be, like, three or four times that many things, for punctuation; tone matters, and the current setup leaves it woefully under-specified. But she's already sort of planning to make some adjustments, for her own note-taking purposes and also if she teaches anyone else to read, so she'll just fix that too while she's at it.

She's once again not sleepy when Kiri turns in for the night; she reads for a while and then pops back home to check on her tribe - they're fine, though they want her to make a few more portal-buckets so everyone who wants to can help with the water-gathering expedition in the morning - before she's ready to go to bed herself.

[calescent]

And in the morning they can all get in the carriage again and go to a different town.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold spends most of the ride reading - she can still only read very simple things, but she expects that practicing what she's already been taught will help her more than learning anything new, right now.

[calescent]

Makes sense. Kiri doesn't keep a lot of really simple books around on purpose, but she had some, previous generations of Ardelay children having accumulated them in the house and then not seen a reason to bring them along when they grew up and moved out.

The next town has some farms and some wilderness and some more farms between it and Chialto. The road is decent-quality the whole way except for a recently washed-out bit that gives them a jostling as they go over the best-hastily-repaired part. The trip takes eight hours; they pass road-branches to other, nearer towns, but it's the bigger, closely built settlements that really need the fire protection lest an entire market district go up in flames.

And here's the edge of town! Kiri tells Aleko to take them to the library; they wind through the streets. Humans buying things. Humans arguing. Human playing a musical instrument. Humans eating fried dough. Human getting fed up with their screaming children and smacking the eldest of the lot. Humans drawing well-water. Human chalking the day's prices on a slate sign. Human sitting on a roof painting the scene.

[lurkingkobold]

The screaming children get the kobold's attention immediately. She peeks out of the carriage, and then in quick succession she yelps, disappears, and is replaced by a very startled human child.

[calescent]

Kiri shrieks - too much too much so much everything, and it's inside her own head, not down to her own attentional pursuit of warmth, loud bright dizzy hot, she hasn't felt hot in nearly a decade -

It clears, there is a strange child in her range, Kiri stumbles out of the carriage while it's still moving - "'KO, STOP -"

Aleko halts the horses, bewildered.

The lady who hit her kid has picked up her littlest one and is now screaming louder than they ever did at the suddenly appearing kobold.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold only distantly notices this. She's trying to put herself between the lady and the remaining kids - maybe not trying very hard, if the kids in question aren't cooperating - and looking like she'd very much like to get the little one away from her.

[calescent]

The other kids are hiding behind their mom, varying between "crying in fear" and "shoving the kobold away from them".

Kiri picks herself up off the ground. "Ko, can you get the kid ou-" The kid is already getting himself out. "There you go - stand back stand back -" Aleko runs interference. The kid rejoins his family.

"I am," Kiri tells this family, dusting herself off, "so sorry about that. Everybody, the show's over, I'll leave a statement with the Ardelay library later if you want an explanation, go back to whatever you were doing -" This is only moderately effective at clearing bystanders. She turns to the kobold. "That was such a bad idea." Then, more for the family and bystanders' benefit than the kobold's, "They were so surprised and afraid! You can't just move people unexpectedly like that, especially since they can't read your facial expressions and probably think you want to hurt them or something. There are other ways to practice."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold glances toward Kiri when she begins speaking, and takes the one step necessary to bring her into mind-reading range, but doesn't otherwise take her eyes off the woman with the kids.

It is completely unsurprising to the kobold that people think there might be violence here: she is entirely willing to do violence, if that's what it will take stop that from happening again.

No, what she's surprised at is that Kiri seems to be okay with someone hitting a kid.

[calescent]

"You moved the kid into my range," Kiri says. "And you scared him. He is scared of you. We can talk about the rest of it later. Right now those kids are scared of you. They don't know who or what you are, they don't know what you're trying to do, and explaining now, after what you did, would make it worse. We can talk somewhere else later."

Actually, the second-littlest has stopped sniffling and looks kind of intrigued now, but not intrigued enough to stop hiding behind her mom. The others are still scared of the kobold.