Once upon a time, and a very good time it was.

[lurkingkobold]

Magic.

It is kind of amazing. One might even say magical.

What is the kobold going to do with her new magic? Not sleep in, certainly.

How about... yes. Gate. She can gate to any place or any person she knows. The latter... probably not such a good idea, and certainly not without letting someone know where she's going, but the former, that has some potential. She's always been curious, and prone to exploring; she knows some really nice places.

If she hurries, she might get to watch the sun rise, even with the time difference.

---

A few hours and two sunrises later, it's nearly time to expect Miles for breakfast. She's prepared a bit of a spread - boiled eggs, muffins, bacon, hash browns, and she's got a batch of batter ready for pancakes when he shows up.

Comments

[thisvorlunatic]

And there is Miles.

"Good morning," he says. The grumpy mood of yesterday's lunchtime seems to have been successfully banished.

[lurkingkobold]

"Good morning!"

...wait, what?

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles, distracted by breakfast, does not immediately notice anything odd.

[lurkingkobold]

"Pancakes? I have... okay this is definitely strange."

[thisvorlunatic]

"...whoa," says Miles. "You seem to have suddenly acquired standard English grammar."

[lurkingkobold]

"...yeah. What the hell." She considers for a moment, "I'm not complaining, I guess? It doesn't seem to have hurt anything - I didn't even notice until just now, and I've been up for a while."

[thisvorlunatic]

"I admit I'm confused about why now - I'm assuming you didn't give yourself a permanent comprehend language, or you wouldn't be so surprised about it."

[lurkingkobold]

"Comprehend language doesn't even do this, I thought? But, no, I haven't tried permanency yet. I did sleep with it on, though, and I had some kind of strange dreams, maybe that has something to do with it."

[thisvorlunatic]

"It doesn't do this for most people, but most people who cast it have a starting point of fluency in at least one language, so maybe it decided you needed some kind of special tutoring...?"

[lurkingkobold]

"Maybe," she shrugs, "the dreams were a little bit like that, from what I remember."

[thisvorlunatic]

Miles nod/shrugs, satisfied with this reasonable explanation.

[lurkingkobold]

This gets a little grin. "Anyway, blueberries in your pancakes? And I brought some nuts from my world this morning, for the muffins; I left a couple out if you want to see what they are first."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Sure, blueberries." He inspects the nuts. "Oh, pecans, I like pecans."

[lurkingkobold]

There are, therefore, blueberry pancakes, and breakfast is served. The kobold takes jam, with hers; Miles may have syrup on his.

[thisvorlunatic]

No one shall go to war over Miles's breakfast today.

[lurkingkobold]

Today or any day, one hopes.

After a while, the kobold takes a little break from eating to poke at the set of sticks arranged in a vase as a centerpiece, checking each one to see that its invisibility spell is still behaving as intended. "All good. Surprising - it usually takes a few dozen tries for a new mage to get one spell to go half a day without showing up as a miscast, never mind five spells in a row."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Do people normally learn magic from strange objects in caves? Maybe that's part of it."

[lurkingkobold]

"Yeah, that's my guess too. Usually people learn from other mages - I can teach you, actually, once I know I can cast on people safely."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Oh, fun."

[lurkingkobold]

Grin. "Yes."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Is the mage-to-mage teaching method going to end up inferior to the strange cave object, though?"

[lurkingkobold]

She considers, and takes a moment to do something similar to casting with her hands, then concludes, "Probably, yeah. It's like... there's a tunnel, and the spell is too big to go through all at once, sort of. I can teach it in pieces, that's no problem, but I'm not sure you'll be able to put the whole thing back together even if I manage to teach you all the parts. I don't think I can cast it all at once, either, but I can come closer to that than to teaching it all at once."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Interesting. I wonder where this strange cave object came from, and whether there might be more of it."

[lurkingkobold]

Shrug. "I'd guess there are others? It didn't teach me all the magic there is, just this one thing, so if this is where magic usually comes from on my world there have to have been more. They must be rare, though - if it was normal to find something this useful in strange caves, even occasionally, kobolds would do more looking."

[thisvorlunatic]

"Makes sense," nods Miles.