Chương 18: Kobold Nature

The group descended to the third row from the bottom. Tessa and Goldheart took a spot in the middle of the row, while Wes sat directly beside Tessa and Mark settled next to Wes. Skarl immediately claimed the spot beside Mark, seemingly ecstatic at the chance to sit near his new friend, while Torvax took the aisle seat. Goldheart's tail resumed its enthusiastic wag now that everyone had settled down and stopped saying sad things.

As soon as he had sat down Skarl began tapping his claws against the stone tabletop in a rapid, irregular rhythm. Skarl's eyes moved constantly, touching each corner of the room, the doors, the raven, the other students, and back again in a circuit that never quite completed before it restarted. He also fidgeted in his seat from the time he sat down, just never quite seeming to find a comfortable position. In contrast beside him, Torvax sat with his broad tail draped behind him and both hands flat on the desk.

His eyes stared down at the center platform as if the professor was already present. Mark quickly learned that being a kobold in an amphitheater designed for humans and other citizen species was not ideal. First he had to hoist himself onto the wooden bench. Once seated, his eyes barely cleared the stone tabletop. After several undignified adjustments, he tucked his legs beneath him and gained enough height to see without immediate discomfort.

Only after settling a few seconds later did he notice his right claws tapping out a restless rhythm remarkably similar to Skarl's. He caught that hand with his left and held it still. While Mark was busy arranging his inconveniently short body, Torvax reached past Skarl and wedged his bag between the two kobolds. He waited until they both noticed it before explaining.

"I know how talkative kobolds can be when seated together, and you both are already squirming. This is an important class, and you two cannot distract everyone else. Both of you stay on your own side of my bag, and please keep quiet." Wonderful. I'm being treated like an elementary school kid who can't be trusted to sit quietly beside a friend. This is humiliating. His tail must have sensed his frustration with the bag.

Mark had turned to Wes, giving him a look to warn him never to try anything similar, when his tail whipped around and knocked Torvax's bag onto the floor. The sound was only a soft thump, but in the quiet room it landed with all the subtlety of a cymbal crash. A few students and the raven glanced over to find the source of the sound.

"Sorry," Mark muttered to Torvax as he retrieved the bag. Torvax responded by giving Mark a bit of a glare clearly thinking there had been some intentionality to it.

"Don't worry," Wes said beside him.

"You'll get used to having a tail eventually."

"Tail issues normal for young kobolds," Skarl said to Mark in Draconic.

"Once Skarl knocked over entire shelf of healer's sorted copper collection. Hundreds of pieces went everywhere. Healer angry." As Mark settled back down, he noticed carvings in the wooden bench. The entire surface of this particular bench was covered in carvings, layers upon layers of anxious student graffiti spanning what might have been decades or even centuries. He glanced sideways at Skarl, who was now picking at a splinter on the bench edge while swinging his legs underneath the table.

In contrast, Torvax kept his eyes fixed on the center platform. Focusing back on the bench, Mark saw someone had carved "MAGIC IS A LIE" in large letters between him and Wes with what must have been significant force. Below it, in smaller script, was "Venwick was wrong." It was almost reassuring to Mark to see that student graffiti was still a thing despite the difference in worlds.

He definitely agreed that Venwick was wrong, given he was the creator of the ritual Wes used that caused Mark to be in his current predicament. Mark was enjoying this graffiti. As he leaned over looking at what was directly in front of him he saw some words on the side of the wooden bench written upside down which was only visible if someone was looking from Mark's current perspective while sitting on the bench. It was in large crude letters with several misspellings, "Maestr meene too Grunk Gobln. Y?"

This novel's true home is a different platform. Support the author by finding it there. Mark had never carved graffiti into a desk in his life as he'd always thought of it as juvenile, but he found himself tempted to claw out a remark next to Grunk's about how familiars should be treated much better. However, he knew defacing school property before his evaluation today and before going up in front of the board would likely not be a good idea. The rebellion would have to wait.

In front of Grunk's message on the top side of the bench there were mjltiple other messages but one word in one of the grafitti marks caught Mark's attention, raven. Mark maneuvered his legs sol he could see the entire message.

"The raven knows what you did." Mark's tail went very still as a chill ran down his spine. He looked toward the center platform, where the raven sat on its ornate stand, perfectly motionless, but continuing to stare at students. The bird was only sitting there. However, between the unease it had given him since they walked in and the message someone had been frightened enough to carve, Mark had a bit of fear towards this raven. His heart rate ticked up. What did the raven know?

He strongly suspected the bird was Professor Thornwhistle's familiar, but would that alone be enough to make a student carve a warning into a bench? Is it just watching us before class so that it can report back to Thornwhistle? His tongue flicked in the general direction of the bird. Hmm… it's a female, but I can't sense any emotions directly from her. Mark's hand slipped into his pouch and found the copper coin. The moment his fingers touched it, a small knot of tension in his chest loosened.

The fact that it helped bothered Mark almost as much as needing it in the first place. Mark tried to frame the coin in his mind as a harmless comfort object, no different in principle from a lucky rabbit's foot or the smooth white rock that Wes kept fidgeting with. That was a much more acceptable interpretation than admitting he was rapidly adapting to life as an anxious lizard who needed to be soothed by shiny trinkets. Skarl's eyes dropped to Mark's pouch.

He again spoke to him in Draconic, "You have treasure already?" Mark spoke and it came out in the strange guttural language of the dragons. Evidently Mark just had to want to speak to Skarl in Draconic and it just got translated. Pretty handy to know. However, it did dawn on Mark despite intending to say "It's just a copper coin. I found it this morning and it comforts me," when it was translated to Draconic, Mark only spoke three long words.

"Is kobold nature," Skarl said, as if this settled everything. Mark knew Skarl meant it kindly, but kobold nature was comforting only if you believed you should be a kobold. It wasn't something nice to hear if you woke up with human memories inside a kobold body and had a growing list of instincts that apparently came standard. Skarl's fidgeting, the constant shifting, the inability to sit still unless something urgent demanded it. If Mark had seen these traits in a human, it could have been lots of things.

ADHD was one option, but also it could be due to the trauma that Skarl had gone through as well, but what confused Mark was he was dealing through a lot of the same symptoms now that he never had before in his human memories. That's what led Mark to think that perhaps another hypothesis may explain what was going on. Kobolds were small, weak, and spent most of their history being eaten or controlled by creatures much larger than them.

Hypervigilance and difficulty sitting still in low-stimulation environments may be ingrained traits of the species due to a nervous system that had been selected, generation after generation, to notice everything and be ready to react. That internal restlessness he had felt since waking in this body, and the hypervigilance he exhibited was as Skarl would say, kobold nature. To Mark however it was yet another reminder that this was not the body he had grown up inside.

Torvax's people in contrast had presumably spent that same period at the top of the food chain, and hence were calm and able to sit in class without them being forced to fidget and looking for some possible threat. Clearly this was all just speculation until Mark met more kobolds, a sample size of one natural kobold and one construct who remembers being a human was definitely not appropriately powered. However it was something he had in his mind now of a possible explanation for how Skarl and him were acting. Well…

insight does help some.