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

[characterquarry]

Erin is reading something. (reading is a familiar concept, from her first wish) She glances at the kobold, then goes back to reading. Erin only addresses the kobold when she steps out of the room fully.

[lurkingkobold]

Which she does, grinning slightly.

"I'm fairly sure you do have a god, here. They want a pool put in my world, which I suspect I'll be okay with so long as I get to set up the security around it - I don't think they'll be happy with only kobolds being able to use it, but they didn't say it needs to be available to other kinds of people, and I can change things later to let more kinds of people in if that becomes safe."

[characterquarry]

She looks very curious. But doesn't ask. "If you think so, perhaps it is true. The wishes are a great benefit to people who use them well, and more people with wishes can only be good so long as they are well-chosen."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold nods.

"...you can ask me questions, if you'd like."

[characterquarry]

"Oh, we are very extremely not allowed to ask anyone what they saw in their vision. And if you do tell me, I'm very extremely not allowed to tell anyone else. You can tell me if you want to, though."

[lurkingkobold]

"That sounds like a rule with a story behind it. Okay, though - the rest was mostly... peace, really. The different kinds of people in my world - and yours, I think; I know we have humans in mine but they don't live close to my tribe, and I didn't see any of the other kinds of people from my world that I wouldn't recognize - learning to live together without hurting each other, and to help each other. Which I've been working on already, but it's a hard project; before today I'd've considered seeing the tigerfolk generally acknowledge kobolds as people within my lifetime to be a major accomplishment. Now, well - how are these wishes for longevity, is my next question."

[characterquarry]

"Peace. Yeah, that sounds about right."　She looks away for a moment. "It takes a Boon to preserve you forever, and even then you can still be killed by disease, poison, violence. Gifts will restore youth and give humans perhaps 100 extra years. Favors only preserve you in your current state of health for about ten years. I don't know how well these will map to kobolds."

[lurkingkobold]

Would Erin like a hug? Here is a kobold who might give her one. Either way:

"Doubling the time I have to work on it would certainly help, but I'm not sure it's the best choice - it depends on what I do with the rest of the wishes, I think. The more obvious way to get more done is to find more people who want to work on it... I can get to them on my own, if I know where to aim; do you know if that's something the wishes can do?"

[characterquarry]

"Wishes can find people like that, yes. I found the person I needed to talk to to stop a war through a wish, once."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold nods, and thinks some more. "How are pools made, anyway? I know where the new one is supposed to go, but I don't know what I'll need to do to put it there."