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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
lurkingkobold
The kobold examines the spot, and then teleports back and gets to work finishing up the bellpull collection.
calescent
Scritches. "I'm trying to think if there's anything else about humans I should warn you about," she murmurs.
lurkingkobold
There's... a couple other things, that would be really bad if they were true, yeah. She doesn't want to think about the details, but it'd probably be pretty obvious that those were things the kobold would find upsetting? So if Kiri needs to actually think of it, those are probably not issues here.
(Most kobolds would find the ownership thing just as unsettling, too, but she's used to that one at least. Ugh, dealing with cultural differences is hard.)
(Most kobolds would find the ownership thing just as unsettling, too, but she's used to that one at least. Ugh, dealing with cultural differences is hard.)
calescent
"...I can't tell what you're not thinking about, but - I don't know, I don't want you to be surprised again, but it doesn't seem like you actually want to have a conversation about all the ways humans are sometimes terrible."
lurkingkobold
Yeah.
Not that she can't put up with it, probably? She puts up with the tigerfolk, and they certainly have their issues. But it took her a while to be able to live with that (cringe, sigh - yeah, 'that' is 'they captured and ate a bunch of kobolds'; thought about from this particular angle it just makes her very sad, though, there were mitigating circumstances)... she expects to be able to live with this, too, so long as it's being worked on, just, it's going to take a while.
Not that she can't put up with it, probably? She puts up with the tigerfolk, and they certainly have their issues. But it took her a while to be able to live with that (cringe, sigh - yeah, 'that' is 'they captured and ate a bunch of kobolds'; thought about from this particular angle it just makes her very sad, though, there were mitigating circumstances)... she expects to be able to live with this, too, so long as it's being worked on, just, it's going to take a while.
calescent
"As far as I know no humans have ever eaten any kobolds."
lurkingkobold
The kobold is darkly amused: Probably not, given this world doesn't seem to have kobolds. But if they're not in the habit of eating other kinds of people at all - or each other, but she expects that they wouldn't be willing to live so close to strangers if that was the case - that does help, yes.
calescent
"I think humans are the only kind of person in this world. I couldn't swear that no one makes a habit of eating other humans but I've never actually heard of it happening anywhere."
calescent
...Kiri decides this is not the moment to mention that she doesn't see a particular point to caring about whether already-dead people happen to get eaten. It is a minor philosophical quibble at best, and it's not like she wants to eat anyone.
Scritches.
Scritches.
lurkingkobold
Scritches are such a good.
The kobold mulls some more, then eventually remembers that she ought to be getting back to her tribe soon. She would kind of like to go see if that shelter Kiri mentioned wants any spells first, though.
The kobold mulls some more, then eventually remembers that she ought to be getting back to her tribe soon. She would kind of like to go see if that shelter Kiri mentioned wants any spells first, though.
calescent
"I can write them a letter so they can have some time to think about it," Kiri suggests.
lurkingkobold
Sure, that works.
The kobold would like to know about it even if some of the things they want seems like things she can't do; she hasn't really explored the limits of her teleportation magic very much yet, and she can learn other kinds of magic from her tribe's other mage.
The kobold would like to know about it even if some of the things they want seems like things she can't do; she hasn't really explored the limits of her teleportation magic very much yet, and she can learn other kinds of magic from her tribe's other mage.
calescent
"I'll encourage them to be creative - what else can your world's magic do?"
lurkingkobold
She's not really sure of all the details - none of the other kobold mages she knows talk, and she hasn't talked to the tigerfolk much about magic (not that she'd likely have the opportunity to learn from them anyway) - but she can learn scrying and magic-detection and poison-detection, and whatever the antimagic spell does (though that obviously doesn't work on Kiri's mindreading and might not work on other local magic either), and maybe a few other things, and the tigerfolk know some of those and a spell for either massively improved strength or touch-range telekenesis, she's not sure which, and the elves also know fire magic and electricity magic and pushing magic and... maybe some kind of animal magic, that was the going theory, but they can't actually do much more with their animals than she's seen Kiri and Aleko do with theirs and that doesn't seem to be magic, so maybe not... and some kind of tree-sense and tree-shaping.
Also, the kobold can make portals to random worlds, and apparently at least some of those have other kinds of magic; she might be able to find other worlds with different magic that they can learn.
Also, the kobold can make portals to random worlds, and apparently at least some of those have other kinds of magic; she might be able to find other worlds with different magic that they can learn.
calescent
"The other local magic is like mine... I wonder if your antimagic spell stops blessings from working. We could try it. What's the - 'pushing' magic - like? ...And if you want to learn to train animals nonmagically you could learn here."
lurkingkobold
The use of pushing-magic that the kobold is familiar with is a kind of trap; a large circle of leather or heavy cloth that pushes whoever steps on it toward the center of the circle. The kobolds' antimagic takes the danger out of them (and they're actually kind of fun to play on if you know you can just walk away any time you like), but they're very effective against wildlife and tigerfolk.
...blessings?
...blessings?
calescent
"Blessings are - I can show you." She starts heading for the chapel. "There are forty-three kinds. They mean different things, like 'creativity' or 'wealth' or 'time'. If you have them in a bowl together, and pick without looking, you'll get the right ones. It's not a very powerful magic, but it's interesting."
calescent
"Some of the things they mean are hard to define. Whenever a human in this country is born their parents go to a temple and pick out three blessings for the baby; mine are power, intelligence, and clarity. The power one is how we knew before it happened that I would be the Ardelay prime, but it can mean things besides magic power too. Intelligence is - learning fast, thinking of things. Clarity is sort of - not being confused or distracted."
lurkingkobold
Huh. That's... kind of creepy, actually, to do to someone without their consent, but okay.