glowfic | One Curious Kobold

Straightforward enough. And then it is dinnertime.

Kiri cooks this one.

Kiri does not cook in a conventional way.

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.)

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

And then there is dinner.

Delicious dinner.

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

And then humans go to bed.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

"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.

The kobold relaxes, just slightly - mostly meaning that she stops looking like she's going to lunge forward at the first opportunity to grab the little one away from the woman - and thinks.

She doesn't have a lot of experience with abuse and its effects, and what she does have is almost all from her own perspective - she has to keep flinching away from thinking about details, or dragging herself back to thinking about the current situation when she doesn't manage to flinch away quite quick enough to avoid getting distracted by her own history.

Some tigerfolk are really awful.

The kids hiding behind their mom isn't actually proof that nothing's wrong there. Neither is them being afraid of the kobold. The kobold is exquisitely clear on both of those points, having done the equivalent of both of those things herself. The second-littlest one's response suggests that she's right about the older ones being traumatized rather than actually comfortable there. And all these other humans around and none of them reacted? The kids haven't quietly gone and found other parents, or other tribes? This lady has had how many eggs past the first one, and been allowed to hatch them herself? Kiri, you have bigger problems here than things catching on fire sometimes, or not being able to move food around as quickly as you'd like.

...these aren't kobold kids, though. She can't bring them home. Finding one of the more progressive tigerfolk tribes to take them might be a step up, or it might not, and anyway she doesn't actually know where any of those are right now. (She could put the kids in a cave somewhere and bring them food while she looked. She could do that. But it's not a very good idea; going from bad to worse like that would hurt them even if better came afterward, and she doesn't know enough about how even really good tigerfolk would handle the situation to be sure that it would be better.) She is probably limited to local resources in solving this problem, whatever those are. Or whatever they aren't, most likely, but she should at least find out first.

If they leave, will Kiri be able to find these humans again later?

Kiri sighs. "I'm so sorry about all this," she repeats to the lady. "If you'll give me your name I can send you some books for the kids as an apology."

The lady gives her name. Kiri writes it down. Will that satisfy the kobold?

It will do. The kobold stands, stiffly, steps back out of Kiri's range, and disappears back to the carriage.

Kiri gets back in the carriage too. There's a few too many people on the road for them to drive on. Now it is very cold there; not enough to hurt anybody, but enough to make them not want to stand there in their current outfits. They get out of the way. Aleko drives.

"Where to start," sighs Kiri. "First of all, now everybody who was there has seen you, so that's a little more complicated than I was expecting, and also I think I'm a mage now."

The kobold was already glowering; this doesn't improve her mood.

Being seen was entirely acceptable, in her opinion, to stop an assault.

Kiri being a mage is unfortunate, but so long as they don't try to cast anything it won't hurt them.

That was clearly not just a fluke, so she doesn't expect a good answer to this question, but how is child abuse dealt with here?

"This is - very complicated. Will you let me explain even if I say things that sound like it is time for explanations to stop and running around taking people's children to start?"

It would take something very alarming indeed for that to be the best option, given the kobold doesn't have anyplace to put abused human children.

"Okay, that'll have to do. So. First of all, humans don't lay eggs." ("Egg" has been covered as part of a breakfast vocabulary lesson, but still.) "There is no way to just take someone's egg; it's a baby or it's literally inside someone, nothing in between. Secondly, humans live in large groups, but these groups are not like tribes. Most people in a town don't know each other. The group that is most like a tribe is a family. Usually that's two people who want to have children together, and those children." How's this settling so far?

It is more questionable to take an imprinted hatchling from their parent than to take an egg - particularly in the sense that the hatchling is a person and really ought to have some input into that decision, but won't be meaningfully able to for a few years - but still better than leaving them with someone who will hit them.

The other people in the town not being the kids' tribemates is no excuse whatsoever; the kobold isn't their tribemate, either.

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