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]

"Oh, you gave them a view, that's sweet. Yes, it would be really great if I could bring passengers."

[liakoura]

"Everybody okay?"

[calescent]

"Some burns, which I can only make more comfortable, and some smoke inhalation, which I can't do anything about. Nobody's dead."

[lurkingkobold]

Sounds pretty good, all told. (And she's almost done breaking twineportals. Hopefully real scrying is more user-friendly.)

[calescent]

"Thank you so much for helping me with the magic," Kiri says to the kobold. "That fire could have spread really far before anyone could put it out with water."

[lurkingkobold]

Here is a very pleased kobold. ^.^

[calescent]

Scritches!

[lurkingkobold]

Ooo. ^.^

[spinnaker]

"Cuuuuuute."

[lurkingkobold]

Isn't she just?

[calescent]

Sooooo cute.

The last bits of dinner are eaten or rejected as the case may be, the dishes are cleared away, the brothers disperse.

"Do you want me to explain any complicated things right now or do you have other plans for the evening?"

[lurkingkobold]

Explaining the inequality thing can probably wait 'till she comes back unless there's some obvious thing she might want to do about it in the meantime. Other than that... she can give Kiri the 'teleport with passengers' spell set tonight, there's no reason to wait. (Enspelling Aleko and Jayce could happen, too, but the kobold doesn't know them well enough to feel comfortable making the judgement call on whether that's a good idea.)

[calescent]

"I would love to be able to bring passengers. Aleko and Jayce don't need it as much; I'd trust them with it but I don't feel the need to explain it at length."

[lurkingkobold]

They should probably go get comfy, then, since this is going to take a little while - the kobold will need to re-cast all the location spells. Would Kiri like to do it as 'only the person holding a particular one of their hands', 'only people touching them', or 'people touching Kiri, and people touching them, and so on', or something else? They'll still be able to use the existing spell set to teleport just themselves, and the kobold can add more sets to give them the other options later, but there's probably not time for all three of those tonight.

[calescent]

"If it worked on people who were touching people who were touching me I could move people who don't want me to read their minds, which would be good."

[lurkingkobold]

Good point.

She'll get started, then. Hmm - this might be tricky, is Kiri going to be able to think about wanting to teleport-with-passengers to places without triggering her existing spells? (It depends on how Kiri was thinking about wanting to teleport to the places the first time.)

[calescent]

"I think I can keep that separated."

[lurkingkobold]

Oh, good. It'd be possible to work around that, but kind of tricky.

The whole set takes a little over half an hour, once the kobold settles in to do it; she can do another one this evening, if Kiri would like one.

[calescent]

"Hmm. Is there any way to make it so I can add locations to the spell I'm spellbearing? Probably not, but if there were..."

[lurkingkobold]

Nope. Once Kiri is ready to cast on people, they can cast on themselves, though.

[calescent]

"Oh well. Can you make a portal on an object which I can hear through so I can tell whenever bells are ringing?"

[lurkingkobold]

Yeah, good idea.

[calescent]

Kiri goes and gets a bracelet with a flat disk part that seems suitable for casting the portal on.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold spends a little while experimenting to see where the best place is for the portal's outlet side before casting the final spell, and ends up casting two tiny portals on the flat part rather than one larger one, to best hear all the bells.

[calescent]

"And now no matter where I am," says Kiri, putting the bracelet on, "I can always nip into the kierten and see where I need to go put out a fire."