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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
Kiri has nothing to add, having never really thought about trap design before, but she scritches the kobold and makes portals until lunch, and then they have lunch, and then she scritches the kobold and makes more portals.
lurkingkobold
More scritching, more portals, more reading. The kobold is actually getting pretty decent at the reading, all things considered. And then after a while it is dinnertime.
calescent
At which time they have dinner! They are not interrupted this time with a fire bell. Aleko shows off some drawings. Jayce eats fast and leaves early to meet a friend in town.
Portals! Offering the kobold more difficult books and defining words in them as she stumbles thereupon!
Portals! Offering the kobold more difficult books and defining words in them as she stumbles thereupon!
lurkingkobold
Reading! More reading! Hesitant bell sound from the kobold's bracer! She should probably go see what that's about.
lurkingkobold
Off she goes, then.
She's gone for a while, and comes back grinning. The magic-seeing spell, which is also the training spell: she has it.
She's gone for a while, and comes back grinning. The magic-seeing spell, which is also the training spell: she has it.
lurkingkobold
Sure, here. It works like this: here's the bit where it detects magic, and here's the bit where that's used as a trigger for making light - very dim and in front of your eyes, for magic vision, or brighter and emitting from a rock or whatever if you're training with it. (And the magic detection can be used to trigger other things and other things can trigger the lights, too.)
calescent
Nice. Once she's seen all its moving parts, she casts it on a piece of paper.
lurkingkobold
Yup, that is definitely a glowing piece of paper.
Hmmm... it would be hard to make secret messages that way - hard to get enough detail on where the light is and isn't - but not impossible.
Hmmm... it would be hard to make secret messages that way - hard to get enough detail on where the light is and isn't - but not impossible.
calescent
Well... it does seem to be able to tell that Kiri herself is magic.
She can burn words into paper. Can she chill words into magic paper?
She can burn words into paper. Can she chill words into magic paper?
lurkingkobold
Maybe! The local magic is different enough from the kobold's native sort that she wouldn't be very surprised either way.
calescent
Kiri tries it: invisibly drops the temperature of thin lines on the paper to spell her name.
calescent
Kiri grins. When she stops affecting the temperature the lines disappear.
lurkingkobold
Awesome. That should be much safer to practice with than the teleportation spell.
It's traditional, it turns out, to cast one's own magic vision spell when one is done training and ready to be considered a mage, and there are fairly good reasons for that - if you're not willing to cast on yourself you shouldn't be casting on anyone else, and casting on other people is a significant part of a kobold mage's job - but Kiri being Kiri, the kobold is willing to let them skip that if they want the spell now.
It's traditional, it turns out, to cast one's own magic vision spell when one is done training and ready to be considered a mage, and there are fairly good reasons for that - if you're not willing to cast on yourself you shouldn't be casting on anyone else, and casting on other people is a significant part of a kobold mage's job - but Kiri being Kiri, the kobold is willing to let them skip that if they want the spell now.
calescent
"That would be great," says Kiri, igniting her paper. "Especially since it detects primes' magic."
lurkingkobold
Sure thing. There's some options for brightness and types of display that they need to do a little bit of trial and error with - 'turn off after two minutes and don't turn back on again' is a useful trigger - and there's a question of whether Kiri wants the obvious 'want to see magic to start seeing magic, want to stop to stop' trigger or something else for the final version, but in fairly short order the spell is done.
calescent
Kiri does indeed consider wanting to start and stop to be the most reasonable possible triggers for starting and stopping. And now she can see magic! She plays with some fire and watches the magic light follow it.
calescent
And then she plays with pure heat and cold and watches that. Fun. (It gets a little windy, as temperature affects air pressure; her hair fluffles in the breeze.)
Let's make more magic-seeing paper with different variants and compare them all against each other! ...In the morning! When she is not yawning so much.
Let's make more magic-seeing paper with different variants and compare them all against each other! ...In the morning! When she is not yawning so much.
lurkingkobold
Humans and their sleep needs, yes.
The kobold should head home - the new bellpull helps for emergencies, but she still needs to be part of her tribe if she wants to keep being part of her tribe - but Kiri can call her if they need her, and she'll be back in... eight, now?... days to check on the portal frames.
The kobold should head home - the new bellpull helps for emergencies, but she still needs to be part of her tribe if she wants to keep being part of her tribe - but Kiri can call her if they need her, and she'll be back in... eight, now?... days to check on the portal frames.
calescent
"I probably won't need you, but you are welcome to hang around, I like you."
lurkingkobold
Aww. The feeling is pretty mutual, actually. The kobold is kind of flinchy, underneath everything else, about the idea of being separated from her tribe for too long or endangering her ability to go back to them, but she might come hang out sometimes, when it won't interfere with that.