This post's authors have general content warnings that might apply to the current post.
View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
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
"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."
lurkingkobold
"Most kobold mages see magic," including spellbearers, and probably primes as well, "and humans are big." And the safe guess with any non-kobold is that they're dangerous, both in the sense that even if the guess is wrong it's still the safe way to guess, and in the sense that most non-kobolds are dangerous to kobolds, back home.
calescent
"She's not a midget kobold. I'm actually quite curious if a magic-seeing person could tell by looking when someone was prime."
lurkingkobold
Shrug. She's going to try to get the usual complement of tribe-mage spells out of her tribe's mage while she's home; it's pretty likely she'll be able to get that one, if Kiri wants to arrange to try it when she gets back.
lurkingkobold
Nod.
She considers the tribe's interpersonal politics some, and concludes that there's a pretty good chance she'll be able to teach Kiri that spell, if they want it - getting her tribe's mage to teach her the spell rather than cast it on her is a little more of a stretch, since she's not technically supposed to be allowed to learn magic, but she expects that to go her way if she brings it to the group.
She considers the tribe's interpersonal politics some, and concludes that there's a pretty good chance she'll be able to teach Kiri that spell, if they want it - getting her tribe's mage to teach her the spell rather than cast it on her is a little more of a stretch, since she's not technically supposed to be allowed to learn magic, but she expects that to go her way if she brings it to the group.
calescent
"Well, I hope it works out. ...There's kobold tribe politics about sharing magic around but she can probably bring me a spell I want," Kiri explains to her brothers.