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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.
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lurkingkobold
calescent
"We'll go to the library, I'll write an explanation of who you are and the misunderstanding so people can go there to find out what happened, I'll send those kids some books, and then we'll go straight to the next town even if I have to drive partway to give Aleko a break, I think." Pet pet. "Okay?"
lurkingkobold
Yeah.
She's probably going to fall asleep soon - she always does after a bad scare like that - but she can take a look at the library, and she should be fine when she wakes up.
She's probably going to fall asleep soon - she always does after a bad scare like that - but she can take a look at the library, and she should be fine when she wakes up.
calescent
"Okay."
Snuggle.
Here's the library. Kiri extricates herself gently from the kobold to talk to the librarian. They don't have to pick out exact bellpull locations right this second; scoping out the place sufficiently that they can teleport back for a closer look will do.
Snuggle.
Here's the library. Kiri extricates herself gently from the kobold to talk to the librarian. They don't have to pick out exact bellpull locations right this second; scoping out the place sufficiently that they can teleport back for a closer look will do.
calescent
And away from this town to the next they go.
(Scritch scritch.)
(Scritch scritch.)
calescent
"Hey, kobold," murmurs Kiri, hours later, "wake up, we've gotten where we're sleeping for the night."
lurkingkobold
Mrf. Who, what, where? Right, okay.
The kobold follows Kiri, navigating more by sound than by sight out of habit in her sleepiness.
The kobold follows Kiri, navigating more by sound than by sight out of habit in her sleepiness.
calescent
They manage to get to their hotel room from where the carriage is parked without having to explain the kobold to anyone. And then they put the kobold in a bed in Kiri's room; the room has another adjoining and Aleko sleeps there.
Zzz.
Zzz.
lurkingkobold
The kobold wakes quite early, and decides to go off and think a bit. When Kiri wakes up, there's a note on the bedside table reading "portal: if you talk, kobold hears".
calescent
Kiri is really charmed by how quickly the kobold has taken to literacy. She changes clothes and sends a room service order down the dumbwaiter; after the food has arrived (enough for all three of them), she says, "Kobold, breakfast."
lurkingkobold
The kobold appears a few seconds after she's called, still not cheerful, but in a much better mood regardless, and also somewhat snowed-on.
lurkingkobold
Hm? Oh, a little; she was in the sun and out of the wind once she found a nice spot, but it is still winter back home.
calescent
Now the room is toasty warm. (Until Aleko complains, and then the half of the room the kobold in but only that half is toasty warm.) Breakfast!
calescent
And then into the carriage, and to an Ardelay holding in this town.
lurkingkobold
On the way, the kobold goes through the basic safety information about being her kind of mage - here's how casting works, here's how to tell when a spell is a miscast, here's how to break a spell, here's the timeframe for needing to break a miscast so it doesn't kill you; once you've cast 25 good spells in a row, no cheating it's safe to assume you won't have miscasts any more, which means you can stop obsessively keeping track of what you've cast on and also that you can cast on people if you want to, you can expect that to take at least a season and probably closer to two, but casting more will make it go faster; here's how to work out what things in the casting-sense correspond to what things in the real world, yes, it's a pain and yes it will take a few hours to figure out the first few times, but you'll get faster with practice. (The kobold got to skip many of the more time-consuming parts of this due to the unusual way she learned her magic; that doesn't seem to be reproducible, sorry.)
When they get there, if Kiri would like, they can stay in the carriage and the kobold will show them what she's doing when she examines the places.
When they get there, if Kiri would like, they can stay in the carriage and the kobold will show them what she's doing when she examines the places.
calescent
Kiri takes a lot of notes on all these thoughts about magery. And yes, she would like.
lurkingkobold
One of the quirks of this sort of magic, as it turns out, is that it isn't limited to being cast on whole objects, or single objects - she could teleport just a branch off of a tree, for example, or a bowl and the water in it as one unit, just as easily as she could teleport an already-separated branch or an empty bowl. (People and animals are an exception to this; she could teleport someone's limb off, but she'd have to make a special effort to do it.) The first step to that is to extend the casting-sense through the things she might cast on, which gives her lots of information about them, including their locations, which is the thing she needs here.
So, here she goes -- here's the bit of the carriage bench she's sitting on, and here's the floor, and the mechanisms underneath, along the axle to the wheel, down into the ground, spread out a little so as not to lose her bearings, and this way and here and up and up and there's the chalk, it feels like this, and there's the bits of casting-sense that are the location of it. She examines that for a few moments to commit it to memory, then lets the entire sense fade from perception.
So, here she goes -- here's the bit of the carriage bench she's sitting on, and here's the floor, and the mechanisms underneath, along the axle to the wheel, down into the ground, spread out a little so as not to lose her bearings, and this way and here and up and up and there's the chalk, it feels like this, and there's the bits of casting-sense that are the location of it. She examines that for a few moments to commit it to memory, then lets the entire sense fade from perception.
calescent
Kiri nods along. It's really sensorily interesting, and less overwhelming when she gets it from the kobold's perspective.
lurkingkobold
The kobold's intuition about what various aspects of the sense mean certainly makes it less overwhelming, yes.
Now that she's not avoiding casting within Kiri's range, she can just cast the teleportation spells directly on them if they'd like. She can show them how to do a spell with thought-based triggers that way, too.
Now that she's not avoiding casting within Kiri's range, she can just cast the teleportation spells directly on them if they'd like. She can show them how to do a spell with thought-based triggers that way, too.
lurkingkobold
She needs to touch Kiri for this - a hand will do - and there goes the sense. Here is Kiri - see how obvious their boundaries are, compared to the carriage? that's true of anything with a mind, even an animal's mind - and here are the bits that are Kiri's conscious thoughts. They're as abstract as anything else the casting sense shows; the kobold has no way of knowing which is what. But if she asks Kiri to think of the trigger they'd prefer to use to teleport here - do that please, you most likely want 'wanting to be at this specific location' - and here's a new, particularly strong thought, which is obviously the one she ought to use for the trigger.
The type of teleportation she wants is from this part of the magic-construct; the thought-trigger slots in here, and here's how you expand it so that thoughts that are similar to the original one also work, so that the spellbearer doesn't need to be in the exact same frame of mind in order to use the spell (but don't expand it too far, or you'll end up hexing them - this much is prudent in this situation, and this much is wise if you're using the general form of what a certain sort of thought looks like and they're going to need to learn to think the right thing, but any more than this and you really should look for a better option instead); this part gets adjusted this way to specify 'Kiri as a whole' - Kiri seems to be quite consistently in the habit of wearing clothes, so those will naturally come too; some of the kobolds in her tribe had trouble with that, but it was only ever the ones who weren't in the habit - and then the location-pattern goes here, and then the whole thing 'folds up' like this - it just won't 'fold' at all, if something is egregiously wrong - and then there is a spell.
The type of teleportation she wants is from this part of the magic-construct; the thought-trigger slots in here, and here's how you expand it so that thoughts that are similar to the original one also work, so that the spellbearer doesn't need to be in the exact same frame of mind in order to use the spell (but don't expand it too far, or you'll end up hexing them - this much is prudent in this situation, and this much is wise if you're using the general form of what a certain sort of thought looks like and they're going to need to learn to think the right thing, but any more than this and you really should look for a better option instead); this part gets adjusted this way to specify 'Kiri as a whole' - Kiri seems to be quite consistently in the habit of wearing clothes, so those will naturally come too; some of the kobolds in her tribe had trouble with that, but it was only ever the ones who weren't in the habit - and then the location-pattern goes here, and then the whole thing 'folds up' like this - it just won't 'fold' at all, if something is egregiously wrong - and then there is a spell.
calescent
Kiri takes notes with her free hand. "I'm very excited to be able to do these myself, even if it takes a lot of practice," she remarks. And then - well, cat's pretty much going to be out of the bag. She teleports to the designated spot.