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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.
lurkingkobold
calescent
"I got it, Jayce. We all three have the same parents, and Aleko and I are the same age, and Jayce is younger," Kiri translates. "Sister and brother are words for having the same parents depending on, uh - sort of like -" She dips into the, not so much gendered, sexed, pronouns in animalperson.
lurkingkobold
The kobold gets about as far as 'why would you have a word for that, ew' before shutting down that train of thought. Okay, siblings, right.
calescent
"...It's, uh, I could try to explain but you might want to just file it as 'weird human thing'. Although if you use the wrong word for someone they might not like it."
spinnaker
"I... don't understand. Why is - uh, should we not say 'she' for the kobold, you've been saying 'she' -? Why are you making that face, kobold?"
lurkingkobold
...right. Stop making the face.
This is really not a dinner topic. Or an interspecies one. Can we stop talking about it now?
This is really not a dinner topic. Or an interspecies one. Can we stop talking about it now?
calescent
"The kobold is too freaked out by weird human concepts to talk," says Kiri. "Or register opinions on whether we're continuing to call her 'she' - and, Aleko, I think 'it' would have unrelated problems of its own, don't, please - sorry, kobold." Scritches.
lurkingkobold
Scritches make many things better, including this.
(Ugh. Weird humans and their weirdness. Why would you even... ugh. Not going to think about that any more. What was the other thing?)
(Ugh. Weird humans and their weirdness. Why would you even... ugh. Not going to think about that any more. What was the other thing?)
calescent
"Business management is - I have things set up that do stuff for people and bring in money, like the libraries, and this gets very complicated if the things are big or there are lots of them, and Jayce helps with that. And dancing is moving around for fun. I cannot demonstrate because I'd fall over; Jayce, do you want to illustrate the concept of dance?"
lurkingkobold
So business management is sort of like being a chief? Or like that part of being a chief, anyway, which makes sense to do as its own job if there's a lot of it; its definitely complicated.
Dancing! Kobolds totally dance, it's a major inter-tribe activity. She doesn't personally do much of it but she does enjoy watching. She grins and nods, "nice."
Dancing! Kobolds totally dance, it's a major inter-tribe activity. She doesn't personally do much of it but she does enjoy watching. She grins and nods, "nice."
calescent
"Kobolds dance, especially in large groups that don't hang out together most of the time," Kiri reports. "And yes, Jayce sort of is like a chief, given what kobold chiefs do. Except for deciding where we live, he doesn't do that."
lurkingkobold
Nod.
...hm. It occurs to the kobold that if she does need to introduce the Ardelays to her people for some reason, bringing them to the meetup and trying to arrange for Jayce to dance with them would be at least less blatantly suicidal than most options. Still not a good idea, though.
...hm. It occurs to the kobold that if she does need to introduce the Ardelays to her people for some reason, bringing them to the meetup and trying to arrange for Jayce to dance with them would be at least less blatantly suicidal than most options. Still not a good idea, though.
calescent
"Yes, let's not put anyone in mortal danger just to see if Jayce dancing with kobolds would make them happy to interact with humans."
calescent
"I do not want to take them. I would much rather just have productive and educational interactions with this adventurous one."
calescent
"Jayce means that if we went and visited other kobolds and they decided to try to hurt us I could stop them. But I could also just not go near kobolds who might want to try to hurt us in the first place, which is much smarter."
lurkingkobold
The kobold nods to Kiri, then looks to Jayce: "kobolds run." If anyone would be hurt by the Ardelays being brought to the meetup group, it would be the kobolds - not by Kiri, but by the broader situation of trying to keep themselves safe from the outsiders.
calescent
"Jayce, the problem is not that kobolds would attack us, it's that the kobolds would stampede all over each other fleeing and then instead of reconvening later they'd still be hiding, possibly in places that are more defensible than fertile."