lurkingkobold: (Magic)
lurkingkobold ([personal profile] lurkingkobold) wrote in [community profile] glowfic2015-10-14 05:23 pm

One Curious Kobold

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.
liakoura: (d ~ flexibility)

[personal profile] liakoura 2015-11-02 08:57 pm (UTC)(link)
That was a noise. No more pat.
calescent: (f ~ clarity)

[personal profile] calescent 2015-11-02 09:01 pm (UTC)(link)
"What is kobold imprinting like? Humans basically don't do that."
liakoura: (e ~ earth)

[personal profile] liakoura 2015-11-02 09:19 pm (UTC)(link)
"I wonder if it's gonna be a girl or a boy. Imen sounds like could be either, that's convenient."
calescent: (f ~ clarity)

[personal profile] calescent 2015-11-02 09:25 pm (UTC)(link)
"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."
calescent: (g ~ imagination)

[personal profile] calescent 2015-11-02 09:32 pm (UTC)(link)
"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."
calescent: (f ~ clarity)

[personal profile] calescent 2015-11-02 09:42 pm (UTC)(link)
"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."
Edited 2015-11-02 21:46 (UTC)
calescent: (h ~ certainty)

[personal profile] calescent 2015-11-02 09:52 pm (UTC)(link)
"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."
calescent: (g ~ imagination)

[personal profile] calescent 2015-11-02 09:58 pm (UTC)(link)
"I'm not sure why we do it, but it's very hard to stop when everyone's doing the same thing. A lot of human stuff is like that, really. I can't, say, wear anything that doesn't say something about my gender, even if it's 'look how hard I'm trying not to have a gender' - and if I do that I'm sacrificing important opportunities to use my clothes to say 'I am rich and important and paying attention to all the things that matter to people around me'. Which is important to say for other reasons, but is only ever said in gender-based ways."
calescent: (f ~ clarity)

[personal profile] calescent 2015-11-02 10:06 pm (UTC)(link)
"It's a little more obvious on human babies, but yeah, sure."
calescent: (Default)

[personal profile] calescent 2015-11-02 10:10 pm (UTC)(link)
"They're done!"
calescent: (d ~ serenity)

[personal profile] calescent 2015-11-02 10:14 pm (UTC)(link)
"I can take us to them. I've been popping in and out to make it less interesting to watch. If the egg definitely won't hatch today you can bring it."
calescent: (Default)

[personal profile] calescent 2015-11-02 10:26 pm (UTC)(link)
"That'll do. Just hold it on the other side of you from me." Kiri extends her hand.

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