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]

"Jayce, the problem is not that kobolds would attack us, it's that the kobolds would stampede all over each other fleeing and then instead of reconvening later they'd still be hiding, possibly in places that are more defensible than fertile."

[spinnaker]

"Oh. Poor kobolds."

[liakoura]

"We don't look scary, do we? I mean, you can't tell by looking that Kiri's prime."

[lurkingkobold]

"Most kobold mages see magic," including spellbearers, and probably primes as well, "and humans are big." And the safe guess with any non-kobold is that they're dangerous, both in the sense that even if the guess is wrong it's still the safe way to guess, and in the sense that most non-kobolds are dangerous to kobolds, back home.

[liakoura]

"Nah, kobolds are little. Well, you're little, maybe you're a midget kobold."

[calescent]

"She's not a midget kobold. I'm actually quite curious if a magic-seeing person could tell by looking when someone was prime."

[lurkingkobold]

Shrug. She's going to try to get the usual complement of tribe-mage spells out of her tribe's mage while she's home; it's pretty likely she'll be able to get that one, if Kiri wants to arrange to try it when she gets back.

[calescent]

"Yes please."

[lurkingkobold]

Nod.

She considers the tribe's interpersonal politics some, and concludes that there's a pretty good chance she'll be able to teach Kiri that spell, if they want it - getting her tribe's mage to teach her the spell rather than cast it on her is a little more of a stretch, since she's not technically supposed to be allowed to learn magic, but she expects that to go her way if she brings it to the group.

[calescent]

"Well, I hope it works out. ...There's kobold tribe politics about sharing magic around but she can probably bring me a spell I want," Kiri explains to her brothers.

[liakoura]

"How do you even have politics when only one of you knows how to talk?"

[spinnaker]

"...dancing...? Dancing politics."

[lurkingkobold]

...sigh. Little close to home, there: of course kobolds have politics, they're people. Hopefully this is just a 'people who talk' thing. Or a 'people who hang around with strangers all the time' thing, maybe, that can't help. Anyway: Kiri, what's the word for 'body language'?

[calescent]

"Body language," says Kiri, "is the phrase you're looking for - I understand that kobolds manage to have politics without talking, but yeah, we don't have any examples of that and it seems like it would be frustrating to manage even simple things that way. Even our examples of non-strangers who interact a lot, like the three of us, involve talking except when it involves mind-reading. ...Occasionally a human is born who can't hear, and then they can't learn Welchin. If they live in a big enough city or their parents know enough, they might be able to learn a sign language, with gestures for words -" Kiri knows a couple gestures, which she illustrates. "But if their parents don't know why their child hasn't learned Welchin, and there are other reasons a kid might not talk for a few years, then they won't be able to learn sign language to talk to their kid, and this is actually really bad for a human mind, not to have any language at all. Sometimes people come to me with complicated mind problems, in case I can fix them - so I've seen that - but I couldn't fix it, although I could tell them why there was a problem and that they had to learn a sign langauge."

[lurkingkobold]

Huh. Humans are really un-observant, then. Not noticing that someone can't hear, wow.

Anyway: "Kobolds do body language-ing. We watch, we see people think, feel, want. People watch us, see we see, see we know, see we choose doing things. Do wanted thing, people happy. Do other thing," shrug, "people other thing. Politics."

(Of course it's more complicated than that - in a good-sized group like a kobold tribe there's rarely going to be that kind of consensus about anything beyond the basics. But that's a matter of tradeoffs and making sure that nobody gets the short end of the stick too often; the general principle still holds.)

[calescent]

"Human babies don't do almost anything for almost a year after they're born, and might have all different kinds of reactions to sounds. Also, if they can't hear well, they might not be able to learn Welchin but still jump if there's a loud storm or something."

[liakoura]

"That seems really... I dunno, collectivist? Constantly paying attention to what everybody else looks like they want, and making sure like you look like you want the right things, and, like, you can't even whisper, if you just want one other person to know, you'd have to drag them off somewhere I guess and body language at them? Or ask questions, if you're confused? Are kobolds all just really really good at body language? Sometimes humans suck at it."

[spinnaker]

"I mean, if we couldn't talk for a week - or read, I guess they probably don't read either, I was thinking if we all had sore throats but it'd have to be more than that - and Kiri couldn't read minds for that week we'd probably manage to eat and wander around the house and... get really bored, but probably not want to kill each other or accidentally do things we don't like? We could probably even go shopping if we could still count out money and point at things and trust the shopkeepers to make change right when we couldn't read the prices? But we couldn't get any real work done. And we'd only do that well because we have a lot of good habits that we could talk about before."

[calescent]

"Human siblings who run a prime family benefit from language differently than kobolds, what a concept."

[liakoura]

"For just a week it wouldn't be that boring. I mean, Kiri might go insane, but not of boredom. She can play with fire and I can draw and you can dance."

[spinnaker]

"Maybe if it wasn't clear we could draw blessing coins to communicate. That's not really language, right?"

[lurkingkobold]

"Kobolds don't do blessing coins - probably only this world. Use things, sometimes, for communicating. And kobolds don't do trade."

[liakoura]

"Uh..."

[calescent]

"Less specialization. Much less. And they have to self-motivate a lot - this also because they don't have a concept of property and can't rely on keeping anything they aren't actually holding right then, and the whole tribe would fall apart if they only ever swiped stuff from each other and never gathered or made anything. But, yes, also less material variety and abundance. Less inequality too though - everybody sort of hovers around something you'd probably categorize as 'at least they're not starving' most of the time."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold takes a minute to work these words out; she gets most of them, eventually, and nods. "Tribe is happy, usually - if trouble, no, other time yes."