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 would be nice."

[lurkingkobold]

She needs to touch Kiri for this - a hand will do - and there goes the sense. Here is Kiri - see how obvious their boundaries are, compared to the carriage? that's true of anything with a mind, even an animal's mind - and here are the bits that are Kiri's conscious thoughts. They're as abstract as anything else the casting sense shows; the kobold has no way of knowing which is what. But if she asks Kiri to think of the trigger they'd prefer to use to teleport here - do that please, you most likely want 'wanting to be at this specific location' - and here's a new, particularly strong thought, which is obviously the one she ought to use for the trigger.

The type of teleportation she wants is from this part of the magic-construct; the thought-trigger slots in here, and here's how you expand it so that thoughts that are similar to the original one also work, so that the spellbearer doesn't need to be in the exact same frame of mind in order to use the spell (but don't expand it too far, or you'll end up hexing them - this much is prudent in this situation, and this much is wise if you're using the general form of what a certain sort of thought looks like and they're going to need to learn to think the right thing, but any more than this and you really should look for a better option instead); this part gets adjusted this way to specify 'Kiri as a whole' - Kiri seems to be quite consistently in the habit of wearing clothes, so those will naturally come too; some of the kobolds in her tribe had trouble with that, but it was only ever the ones who weren't in the habit - and then the location-pattern goes here, and then the whole thing 'folds up' like this - it just won't 'fold' at all, if something is egregiously wrong - and then there is a spell.

[calescent]

Kiri takes notes with her free hand. "I'm very excited to be able to do these myself, even if it takes a lot of practice," she remarks. And then - well, cat's pretty much going to be out of the bag. She teleports to the designated spot.

[lurkingkobold]

[calescent]

And then she gets back in the carriage, beaming.

[lurkingkobold]

Teleportation magic is pretty awesome, isn't it.

The kobold can give Kiri spells to the other locations, now, too, if they'd like.

[calescent]

"Yes please."

[lurkingkobold]

They're fairly straightforward repetitions of the last spell, with only the triggers and locations varying.

(Kiri may notice that wants in general follow a broader theme and wanting to be in particular places follow a narrower one - it would, theoretically, be possible to learn to read someone's mind via the magic-sense, but it would take a lot of effort and the help of a cooperative subject to get any real detail, and wouldn't necessarily generalize beyond them at all.)

It takes a little while to get them all done, but not too long.

[calescent]

...Kiri is a little concerned by the potential of the magic-sense's applicability to mindreading, but it seems obscure enough that she needn't prioritize it.

Okay, to the next town by carriage, then.

[lurkingkobold]

There may be cuddles: the kobold's mood is improved enough that she doesn't quite feel a need for them, but she also doesn't see any reason not to; they're quite compatible with reading.

[calescent]

Cuddles are indeed compatible with reading! That is a nice thing about them. Pet pet. Kiri supplies definitions as the kobold encounters words she doesn't already know.

[lurkingkobold]

Snuggle snuggle. Read read. Twineportal some herbs from her tribe's supplies to spruce up lunch a bit. More reading, more snuggling.

Eventually they get to the next town.

[calescent]

And Kiri shows the kobold the correct place for Kiri to teleport here.

[lurkingkobold]

And Kiri can have another spell.

Once they've been to all the towns, the kobold can teleport the carriage back, if Kiri and Aleko would like to save the travel time. She'll need to go have a look at where it goes, but that's no problem.

[calescent]

"...The horses won't like it," muses Kiri. "But it's a lot faster and I don't know how much the horses won't like it."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold knows very little about horses, certainly not enough to guess whether it would be worth it.

[liakoura]

"These are the mellow ones. I bet they'd get over it. I can give them apples when we get home. And it'd save my ass the extra day of driving." (As the kobold has gotten more conversational Aleko has started talking aloud more.)

[lurkingkobold]

Okay then.

The kobold heads back; Kiri can come along under her own power now.

[calescent]

She can! She doesn't even need the belt, with redundant spellbearer-nesses of all its locations, but she makes sure it comes with her anyway.

...Which fails, because she was paying it too much attention. She goes back whence she came, picks the belt up, puts it on, observes how well it goes with her outfit (Aleko knows his business), and teleports home again. Much better.

[lurkingkobold]

Huh. What an interesting datapoint.

Anyway, onward to the stables.

[calescent]

The kobold is no longer exactly secret, and neither is the teleportation, but Kiri shoos the stablehand anyway just to avoid having the conversation about teleporting horses right away.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold examines the location, lets Kiri know where exactly she intends to put the carriage, and goes back to get it.

A few moments later, there is the carriage, with Aleko and a couple of alarmed horses, and then another moment after that, the kobold.

[liakoura]

Aleko calms the horses down, gives them apples, and then sets about putting them away.

[calescent]

"Want to go install the last few bellpulls and then help me practice magic?" Kiri asks the kobold.

[lurkingkobold]

Sure.

...they're going to need to go back to that one town to figure out where to put its bellpull, huh. The kobold is nervous about it.