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 mean I suppose they literally can't take your word for it that things are all right, but it actually does seem strange to me that they don't think things you indicate are okay are okay."

[lurkingkobold]

They would probably be okay with it if it was just a note. The problem is more - the kobold does so many weird things, takes so many risks that her tribe doesn't approve of - even if those risks don't actually endanger anyone but herself, which she's very careful about - that it's important for her to be careful about what she asks of them in relation to that; it would be easy to cross a line into asking too much, and have the tribe exile her rather than keep putting up with the overall amount of risk they see her as. Reading a note where they can see it probably wouldn't take her over that line, but it would mean that she'd have that much less leeway for next time.

[calescent]

"This... doesn't seem very nice of them. I mean, I understand they can't just talk to you about it, but... I wouldn't want to be in a group that thought of me that way."

[lurkingkobold]

...Ideally, yeah? That's her tribe, though. It's important that they're okay, and more than reasonable for them to worry about being okay, and not want to take risks, and worry about her taking risks with their safety, and push her to be careful. The work that she's doing is worth it anyway, but they don't know that. They might not even agree - the tribe's priority is the tribe, and it's weird that she cares about, what, fire suppression or whatever, for people who aren't even kobolds.

[calescent]

"Kobolds don't usually care about people who aren't kobolds?"

[lurkingkobold]

People who aren't kobolds don't generally recognize kobolds as people, on her world. And caring about people who don't think you're a person? Not safe. Very not safe.

[calescent]

"I'd suggest moving some kobolds to this world, except there's at least ten things wrong with that plan."

[lurkingkobold]

Yeah.

Maybe the kobold will be able to find a world that's empty, and they can all move there.

In the meantime, though - the system works about as well as could be hoped, all things considered; it's really not surprising that she gets some flack for going against it. It's not great, but it's not unreasonable, either.

[calescent]

"Sometimes that's how I feel about human society."

[lurkingkobold]

Heh, yeah.

Hug.

[calescent]

Hug.

After a silence:

"...So, want to help me start practicing my own mage-ing?"

[lurkingkobold]

Sure, she can stay for a while for that.

[calescent]

"What's a good place to start?"

[lurkingkobold]

Portals, definitely: making things that teleport themselves is slightly easier, but having one go missing when a miscast destabilizes would be really bad. Where the portal is to doesn't matter much, though doing a variety of places would be good practice; the triggers are more interesting and more important, though.

[calescent]

"What's the worst thing that will happen when I miscast; should I be doing this outside?"

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold hasn't actually seen a miscast with the teleportation magic, yet - once you have the hang of this kind of magic, you can learn new sorts of spells without having to start over from novice level, and she hasn't taught any other novices teleportation yet. (If Kiri would rather not be the first, she can teach them one of the more traditional learning spells - she thinks magic-detection is the usual one - once she knows it.) But having the portal's target be outside and away from anything important is probably wise, since that's likely to drift.

[calescent]

Out they go.

Kiri takes a piece of paper out of her notebook. "I think first I'll just try making a portal from the top of the paper to the bottom of the paper," she says. "So things can be dropped through it."

[lurkingkobold]

Sounds good.

[calescent]

Right then. She's going to get it wrong the first few times so she doesn't stress about getting it exactly right, just noticing the process as she walks through it - this might get boring, spending hours on spells that will not work, but the first time she doesn't even feel like interrupting the process to go do something else -

Portal?

[lurkingkobold]

Portal!

[calescent]

And Kiri drops a rock through it.

[lurkingkobold]

Thunk!

The kobold, who has been cloud-watching nearby, looks up. Oh! Congratulations!

[calescent]

Kiri moves the paper so the "in" end of the portal (the one which is attached to the actual paper and not the location) is below the "out" end, which is just sort of floating in space. She drops the rock through and soon has a little perpetual motion machine.

[lurkingkobold]

Giggle.

[calescent]

She pulls the paper aside and the rock thunks really hard into the grass. "That could have some interesting applications for, say, fountains, if I ever run out of more practical things to do," she says.

...She does not really like having this piece of paper threatening her life if anything happens to it which doesn't happen to destroy it, though. "Do I have to break it any particular way or can I just burn it?"