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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
Oh, good. It'd be possible to work around that, but kind of tricky.
The whole set takes a little over half an hour, once the kobold settles in to do it; she can do another one this evening, if Kiri would like one.
The whole set takes a little over half an hour, once the kobold settles in to do it; she can do another one this evening, if Kiri would like one.
calescent
"Hmm. Is there any way to make it so I can add locations to the spell I'm spellbearing? Probably not, but if there were..."
lurkingkobold
Nope. Once Kiri is ready to cast on people, they can cast on themselves, though.
calescent
"Oh well. Can you make a portal on an object which I can hear through so I can tell whenever bells are ringing?"
calescent
Kiri goes and gets a bracelet with a flat disk part that seems suitable for casting the portal on.
lurkingkobold
The kobold spends a little while experimenting to see where the best place is for the portal's outlet side before casting the final spell, and ends up casting two tiny portals on the flat part rather than one larger one, to best hear all the bells.
calescent
"And now no matter where I am," says Kiri, putting the bracelet on, "I can always nip into the kierten and see where I need to go put out a fire."
lurkingkobold
Yup!
(The kobold could really use something like this herself, for back home. Probably not with bells - getting those ethically sourced would be hard - but she can probably figure something similar out, anyway.)
(The kobold could really use something like this herself, for back home. Probably not with bells - getting those ethically sourced would be hard - but she can probably figure something similar out, anyway.)
lurkingkobold
Yes, yes it would, thanks.
Hmmm. She should probably set the bells up in her experimenting cave, so they don't get repurposed by someone who doesn't realize what they're for. Given that, it should be okay for her to set one up for Kiri to be able to call for her - her tribemates might wonder what's going on with that, but mages are allowed to be a little mysterious, and she can set some of the bells up to other things like traps to make it less obvious that there's a person involved.
Hmmm. She should probably set the bells up in her experimenting cave, so they don't get repurposed by someone who doesn't realize what they're for. Given that, it should be okay for her to set one up for Kiri to be able to call for her - her tribemates might wonder what's going on with that, but mages are allowed to be a little mysterious, and she can set some of the bells up to other things like traps to make it less obvious that there's a person involved.
calescent
"I'll just teleport to Chialto and buy some bells, shall I?"
calescent
So Kiri grabs Aleko for keeping crowds away, and teleports to Chialto, and back to the house with a whole box of little bells, which she presents to the kobold.
lurkingkobold
When Kiri gets back, the kobold is just finishing up putting a little portal to her cave on a leather bracer. She grins appreciatively at the bells - where would Kiri like her to put a bellpull?
calescent
Kiri would like her bellpull on some moderately portable object that she doesn't need in its portalless state. She finds something, eventually - there are a lot of arguably useless things in this house, accumulated over many primacies.
lurkingkobold
And lo, there was a bellpull. The kobold pops over to her cave for a minute to finish setting it up, then returns to test it - excellent, that will work nicely.
lurkingkobold
And the kobold goes back to her tribe for the evening. In fact, she'll spend the night - by the time she's done setting up a second bell and showing the bellpull system to everyone who's curious, it's fairly late. She's back at Kiri's house in the morning, though, for one more day of spellcasting help.
calescent
Kiri offers her breakfast, and then: "Did you get the learning spell while you were gone?"
lurkingkobold
She didn't, but she's pretty sure she'll have it by the time she comes back to cast the big portals - her tribe's mage is a nervous sort and wants to see how the rest of the tribe reacts to this new bell thing first.
calescent
"Okay. No hurry on the big portals, though. The stone arches aren't done yet anyway." She could get Alser to help but she's not in that much of a hurry. And doesn't want to split the money if she doesn't have to; she likes Alser, and Patience, but she has plans, damn it.
lurkingkobold
Okay. She's not certain what her schedule is going to look like around that time, but with her new bracer there's at least a little more leeway with things - even in the worst case scenario she probably won't have to leave Kiri waiting more than a couple days, now, and it's not very likely that her chief will make the tribe walk (which would make it tough for her to get back in touch with them, if they moved on while she was gone, so she might need to stay with them in that case) when teleporting is an option.
Breakfast! Spellcasting?
Breakfast! Spellcasting?
calescent
Spellcasting! Kiri turning pieces of paper into portals and then setting the pieces of paper on fire.
lurkingkobold
The kobold hangs out nearby, reading and intermittently thinking about bellpull-friendly trap designs.