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]

"I agree with you that the kids need to be able to leave whenever they want. But there are many, many people. Some people run places for kids who leave their families to go, but they're usually full and don't have enough people working there and sometimes the kids don't get along with each other. I give money to a shelter in Chialto every year, but there are so many. And there are worse parents than that one - and that is who the shelters have to be for because there is not enough room."

[lurkingkobold]

Well.

(Breathe, kobold.)

Well.

What do they need, exactly? Just space? That's an easy fix. People to work there might be a harder one. Food, other supplies, she can probably help with. Moving kids from one place to another so they can find situations they'll do okay in, definitely. She might not be able to fix everything, even with magic, even with more magic than she has now - there are so many humans - but she will do what she can.

[calescent]

"If you want to help expand that shelter so it can have five cave sections to separate fighting kids or something I will be all for it. There is a lot to do. There is no end to things to do. That is why it is so important to concentrate on the things that are most important and the things that will leave you able to do even more things. That's why I want to move stuff around. I have a lot of money, but the more I have the more I can spend on things like shelters and feeding hungry people and moving people to places where they will get along better with the other people and making sure everyone can learn to read and have somewhere to go in the rain. It's a little important if people in this town can get stuff from Chialto more easily, but mostly it will mean I can do more other stuff."

[lurkingkobold]

This is a deeply weird bit of cause and effect, but Kiri seems very sure it will work, and the kobold is willing to take their word for it.

She uncurls slightly, tense and hesitant, then thinks better of it and just teleports across the carriage to snuggle up beside the human.

[calescent]

Pet pet.

[lurkingkobold]

Snuggle. Sigh. Ponder.

[calescent]

"We'll go to the library, I'll write an explanation of who you are and the misunderstanding so people can go there to find out what happened, I'll send those kids some books, and then we'll go straight to the next town even if I have to drive partway to give Aleko a break, I think." Pet pet. "Okay?"

[lurkingkobold]

Yeah.

She's probably going to fall asleep soon - she always does after a bad scare like that - but she can take a look at the library, and she should be fine when she wakes up.

[calescent]

"Okay."

Snuggle.

Here's the library. Kiri extricates herself gently from the kobold to talk to the librarian. They don't have to pick out exact bellpull locations right this second; scoping out the place sufficiently that they can teleport back for a closer look will do.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold can do that from the carriage, and then they can be on their way.

[calescent]

And away from this town to the next they go.

(Scritch scritch.)

[lurkingkobold]

Snuggle snuggle zzzz.

[calescent]

"Hey, kobold," murmurs Kiri, hours later, "wake up, we've gotten where we're sleeping for the night."

[lurkingkobold]

Mrf. Who, what, where? Right, okay.

The kobold follows Kiri, navigating more by sound than by sight out of habit in her sleepiness.

[calescent]

They manage to get to their hotel room from where the carriage is parked without having to explain the kobold to anyone. And then they put the kobold in a bed in Kiri's room; the room has another adjoining and Aleko sleeps there.

Zzz.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold wakes quite early, and decides to go off and think a bit. When Kiri wakes up, there's a note on the bedside table reading "portal: if you talk, kobold hears".

[calescent]

Kiri is really charmed by how quickly the kobold has taken to literacy. She changes clothes and sends a room service order down the dumbwaiter; after the food has arrived (enough for all three of them), she says, "Kobold, breakfast."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold appears a few seconds after she's called, still not cheerful, but in a much better mood regardless, and also somewhat snowed-on.

[calescent]

"...Are you cold?"

[lurkingkobold]

Hm? Oh, a little; she was in the sun and out of the wind once she found a nice spot, but it is still winter back home.

[calescent]

Now the room is toasty warm. (Until Aleko complains, and then the half of the room the kobold in but only that half is toasty warm.) Breakfast!

[lurkingkobold]

Aww.

Breakfast indeed.

[calescent]

And then into the carriage, and to an Ardelay holding in this town.

[lurkingkobold]

On the way, the kobold goes through the basic safety information about being her kind of mage - here's how casting works, here's how to tell when a spell is a miscast, here's how to break a spell, here's the timeframe for needing to break a miscast so it doesn't kill you; once you've cast 25 good spells in a row, no cheating it's safe to assume you won't have miscasts any more, which means you can stop obsessively keeping track of what you've cast on and also that you can cast on people if you want to, you can expect that to take at least a season and probably closer to two, but casting more will make it go faster; here's how to work out what things in the casting-sense correspond to what things in the real world, yes, it's a pain and yes it will take a few hours to figure out the first few times, but you'll get faster with practice. (The kobold got to skip many of the more time-consuming parts of this due to the unusual way she learned her magic; that doesn't seem to be reproducible, sorry.)

When they get there, if Kiri would like, they can stay in the carriage and the kobold will show them what she's doing when she examines the places.

[calescent]

Kiri takes a lot of notes on all these thoughts about magery. And yes, she would like.