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]

"Sorry, Aleko. The kobold has named herself Koso, which is basically short for 'weird example', like an extraordinary blessing or that fellow at the fish place who swears he's coru and looks more torz than you and Patience put together? And she has agreed to have a name because otherwise it'll be confusing when there's a little tiny kobold around her a lot. We think the little tiny kobold might pick up Welchin just from being around it a lot."

[liakoura]

"Okay. What about the baby?"

[lurkingkobold]

Shrug. "Will choose for self. Or, if problem, choose then."

[calescent]

"How old do you think they'll have to be to pick something?"

[lurkingkobold]

Well, she hasn't seen a little kobold speak before, but in general they definitely have opinions on things by two or three years old, so around then? They might change their mind a couple times but that seems better than somebody picking for them.

[calescent]

"Humans are usually named as soon as we're born," Kiri says. "But if they're two or three when they pick something we can probably get by calling them 'the baby' for that long."

[lurkingkobold]

She makes a face at the bit about naming newborns, but offers "If problem - other language word for baby is 'imen'."

[calescent]

"That sounds kind of namelike."

[liakoura]

"Hey, Imen," says Aleko to the egg. "Can I pat the egg, is that okay?"

[lurkingkobold]

She nods. "Gentle - if noise, stop."

[liakoura]

Pat, pat.

[lurkingkobold]

...peep!

[liakoura]

That was a noise. No more pat.

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold giggles. "Hatch soon, some days."

[calescent]

"What is kobold imprinting like? Humans basically don't do that."

[lurkingkobold]

It's not really like anything, by itself. It's just that whoever is right there when a baby kobold hatches is their parent, according to them, and they'll be very upset if they can't be with that person regularly - usually they don't want to be away from them at all for the first season or so. And every once in a while an egg will hatch without someone right there, and that causes some problems if the hatchling imprints on something that's not a person.

[liakoura]

"I wonder if it's gonna be a girl or a boy. Imen sounds like could be either, that's convenient."

[lurkingkobold]

...that is relevant to exactly nothing.

[calescent]

"Human names, like so many human things, often divide like that, and speculating about an unborn baby's gender and picking names to go with whatever result is a frequent pastime. Your name and 'Imen' both fall somewhere in the middle."

[lurkingkobold]

...sigh.

In animalperson, one only ever acknowledges the relevant anatomy when it's, y'know, relevant. Which is never in the first fifteen or so years of someone's life, and not very often at all after that.

[calescent]

"If it helps we're almost never thinking about how people are shaped. There's social stuff on top of that. Which is admittedly still irrelevant for small children, but we're accustomed to knowing which social category people are in."

[lurkingkobold]

That is less disturbing, yes. Still weird, though. 'Social category'?

[calescent]

"It affects things like deciding who to couple with before physical shape is important, and other, small things - you might have noticed Jayce and Aleko wear clothes more like each other than like me - and which jobs, especially in families, people are most likely to want to do. There's exceptions to all of it, but they're useful guesses, sort of like the five elemental personalities - I guess I haven't explained those either, have I - well, that's a separate matter. ...And people feel like the categories mean things. I knew a person once who didn't feel like one or the other, and he let me read him, so I could tell. He felt importantly differently about it than Aleko or Jayce."

[lurkingkobold]

...yup, definitely weird. Kobolds don't do that.

[calescent]

"I noticed. But humans do, and human kids usually have a working understanding of 'gender' sooner than they figure out 'property', so Imen might pick it up."