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]

And then she is back. One of her employees is talking to a person passing by in a carriage, explaining the contents of the sign. Kiri tells the employee that she'll be back for another circuit after dinnertime to clarify any particularly frequently asked questions on the signage and adjust the price if the volume is higher or lower than she'd like. Then she extends her hand to the kobold.

[lurkingkobold]

And then they are back home.

So, what else has Kiri been up to?

[calescent]

Magic practice! There's a paper that apparently hasn't started acting up yet sitting on the kitchen table, glowing when Kiri gets near it.

[lurkingkobold]

Good!

The kobold suspects it's still early to be expecting any, but has Kiri had any good spells yet?

[calescent]

"Not yet, unless this is one."

[lurkingkobold]

Nod.

It could be a while, still - there's a fair amount of variance in how long it takes people to start casting good spells, and she's never paid enough attention to notice what might affect that. As far as she knows, everyone who keeps at it gets it eventually, though - the longest she's seen it take for someone to get their twenty-five was that one person who didn't have a mage in their tribe and was too nervous about it to be willing to cast unsupervised, who took two summers to learn from another tribe's mage rather than practicing on their own; usually it takes just the one summer, and the others all practiced on their own after the tribes split back up and were proper mages by the next time she saw them.

[calescent]

"Well, I'm practicing a lot. I'm not experimenting very much yet, but I'm practicing. Experimenting is trying new things to see what happens."

[lurkingkobold]

Ah.

Experimenting is probably not important - it could help Kiri learn faster, maybe, but plenty of the mages back home don't do anything besides the usual set of spells. (Usually it's the cautious, nervous types who go in for magic among kobolds - the kind of defense-at-a-distance that kobolds use magic for suits that personality type better than most; Koso is definitely a kosoen of a mage. Some of the usual sort do get a little creative, trying to eke a little more defense out of the knowledge available, but most of them are as cautious about trying new magic as they are about everything else.)

[calescent]

"I definitely plan to experiment later, when I am sure that a runaway spell won't kill me."

[lurkingkobold]

The kobold is not surprised, and looks forward to seeing what Kiri comes up with.

[calescent]

"It'll be fun!"

[lurkingkobold]

Yup!

Hmmm.

There were other things she wanted to do on this trip, but she'd like to settle in a little first if she's going to be here for a while. Is there anything else interesting going on today?

[calescent]

"Nothing planned."

[lurkingkobold]

Hmm.

Well, okay. One of the things the kobold had to decide, before she got the egg, was whether to trust Kiri with knowing about their tribe, since the little one will almost certainly slip up on that eventually. Her conclusion was yes, obviously - she's still a little flinchy about the idea, and won't be sharing anything too sensitive herself, but she believes that Kiri wouldn't misuse that information even if there wasn't the 'it will result in a friend getting exiled' reason not to. Point being, if Kiri has any questions, she's willing to answer them.

[calescent]

"I'm curious," she says, "but I'm not sure where to start asking things. Hmm - how long do eggs stay eggs before they hatch?"

[lurkingkobold]

Around... sixty-five or seventy-five days, maybe? They're laid a little while into winter, usually right around the time it starts really getting cold, and hatch just before spring.

[calescent]

"With all the eggs being picked up by whoever wants them I wonder - do you keep track of who's related beyond that or are families entirely about who takes whose egg?"

[lurkingkobold]

Individuals who've laid eggs often keep track of the eggs and resulting kids even if they aren't raising them themselves, and that extra attention means it's a little more likely for the kid to pick that adult to adopt if they don't get along with their first parent, but there's nothing formal in most cases. The exception is chiefs' eggs - chiefs very rarely raise children at all, but it's traditional for them to leave the tribe to one of their descendants when they retire, so there's some extra attention and rules about that.

(Her egg is not a chief's egg - her tribe's chief didn't have an egg, this year, but even if they had she wouldn't've taken it, even if it was the only option. She herself being chief's-kin and a speaker was enough of a fiasco; intentionally interfering with the succession like that is a political morass she has no interest whatsoever in wading into.)

[calescent]

"We have rules a little like that. The country is ruled by a king and his family can't intermarry with primes too closely. ...Marrying is forming a couple that you plan to stick with forever and telling everybody you know."

[lurkingkobold]

Huh.

Kobolds don't have any rules about who can partner with who, but it is a different situation here.

[calescent]

"Married people usually share all their stuff. The rule is to keep the king from getting too much stuff."

[lurkingkobold]

...very different, yes. That wouldn't come up at all among kobolds except in the case of someone changing tribes for a partnership, and even then someone taking a bunch of stuff to their new tribe would hardly make a difference in the face of the usual sorts of stuff-reallocation that happen at meetups.

[calescent]

"And it keeps things equal between the primes, at least mostly, because usually none of us are close family with the king and that means he doesn't listen to us different amounts for that reason. It's more complicated than that, but that's the idea."

[lurkingkobold]

Mmhmm.

Kobolds are pretty good about that sort of thing - part of it is that chief's kin are specifically raised to be fair and not play favorites, and part of it is that a chief being blatantly unfair to someone is liable to get the whole tribe upset with them (and kobold chiefs are definitely not exempt from being punished, in that sort of case or in general), and part of it is that if there's a more subtle problem, the affected person can almost always find a different tribe to move to at the next meetup.

[calescent]

"How often do kobolds change tribes?"