Kobold Life

Chapter 7: A New Life

We spent a long while trying to make a good name for the Leosel. The two of us enjoyed the process of bouncing ideas off one another, but ultimately, we had some demands. I was not allowed to make it a reference to my world, and she was not allowed to make it a plant. Then in the next round of names, I was not allowed to use a pun on cat, and she was not allowed to name it after the green of its fur. Eventually, we settled on a name that was nothing plant, nor color, reference nor pun. Rose suggested the name Opal during one of our exchanges, having decided to use minerals for names since I was a kobold and should have some love for gems. While I had turned down the suggestion of Peridot and Esmeralda purely on the principle that she tried to sneak green names back into the pool, I couldn't seem to find a reason to reject Opal. Looking at the Leosel it just seemed right somehow.
We finally agreed on the name, and its new owner seemed to approve as well. It took a few days for each of us to get used to the new names, and for me to recognize that the sound meant to call my attention instead of someone else's, but by the end of them, both of us seemed settled in.

Those few days were not as bad as I had expected them to be. Whether it was Rose's magic and medicine, or just the natural healing of this body, I was mostly restored by the end of the second day I had stayed with her. Opal had recovered at a similar rate and was understandably stir-crazy after having been stuck inside for days. The wound on her shoulder was scarring over and would likely leave a bald patch. I on the other hand was grateful to see fresh scales already emerging around each of the teeth marks she had left when trying to bite my head off. Still, I was not without a scar of my own, my tail had a large streak of white flesh where it had been split that the surrounding scales did little to cover. I thought it ironic since Rose had told me kobolds could regrow their entire tail if it was cut off, but apparently fixing relatively lesser damage was not a perfected process. Still, I was not willing to cut off the entire thing just to repair some cosmetic damage, even though Opal tried to convince Rose, and by extension me otherwise. She hadn't been joking when she said she had gotten a taste of me, and while I was thankful that she was civilized enough to not outright attack me, I didn't want to tempt fate by letting her have a second taste.

Our meals instead consisted of the magically produced berries, as Rose claimed she didn't want to leave us long enough to scavenge while we were still recovering. The berries tasted like pure sugar, and I knew that she appreciated them as much as I did, but after how big a point she made on the precious nature of the Aetherium she had, we knew we wouldn't be able to justify using them outside of emergency circumstances for much longer. The same went for the spell she had used to let us communicate so freely up until this point. She spoke some celestial thankfully since that was apparently what English had turned into in this world but was skilled in Common. Common unfortunately sounded like complete gibberish to me, she tried to start teaching it to me, but despite being an honors student back in my world, I was utterly terrible at the new language. Opal on the other hand was physically incapable of it, still, she didn't have much to say that couldn't be interpreted well enough by the tone of her mewling. Somehow that felt easier to understand than the sophisticated Common tongue.

Days turned into weeks, but rather than being bedridden, both Opal and I joined Rose in her daily routines. She scouted the surrounding areas for any large predators, other than Opal, as well as any indications of human or orc activity in the area. Rose seemed to have a similar distaste for the orcs as she did for humans, though less spiteful as if they were a pest rather than a scourge. Apparently, they had much the same habits as humans, waging war and rapidly reproducing until they passed a limit of what their environment could support, they were stronger, larger, and some could even wield magic, but they were not a calculating species. They had not moved past a tribal stage. They were certainly deadly, but they lacked the kind of organization and tactics to make them a world-conquering threat like she seemed to think the humans were. In fact, when I had told her of the small group which had attacked the human city at the jungle's edge, she agreed that it was the largest group she had ever seen split from their camp whose members didn't try to kill each other before reaching the town. The previous record was only four.