It occurs to me that our three main kobolds fit rather nicely into the standard fantasy triad. Fire's security training ironically makes them the Thief, due to how kobolds have worked ever since Tucker. Star's cybernetics, which allow them to effortlessly lift things that would be troublesome for the other two working together, is the Fighter. Wave, our first-person narrator and designated warp crystal user, is the Mage (and explicitly being an inborn talent means that dumping INT and WIS hasn't crippled her in that regard as much as it could've).

This is no sea dog, foolish fisher. This is an old dog.

Oh. Oh, this is interesting. And makes a great deal of sense. Traps, burrowing, rapid maturation... though the whole "laying eggs" thing raises some questions.

As for Harmony, it really isn't clear if this is a coincidence or something more sinister. The telephone game and listener bias are playing merry havoc on the evidence.

Of course there are otyughs. Though I hadn't expected them to be SMS-capable.

I imagined petting the little dragon in my mindscape, to reward the warp crystal for saving my life, but it had something in its teeth. I didn’t get a good look at it before it furtively swallowed.

Oh dear. That can't be good. Though it might explain the text messages.

This is definitely getting interesting. We'll see where it goes from here, aside from the Alpha's bedchambers.

Hah! That's a D&D monster! Rad

All of us (including the kids) would have preferred to let them stay virtual, but they needed to eat and excrete and that was when we discovered that we hadn’t brought a toilet. The obvious solution was to take them into the cockpit one at a time, cover their fur in oil so they wouldn’t get too cold, and then let them pee into the ocean a few meters away from the crawler.

How is that obvious? Why not print a plastic tub or bucket to pee in?

Of course it made the cargo area even more miserable since now it not only smelled like pee but also had seawater splashing all over everyone and everything.

Technically, a certain portion of fresh seawater is pee anyway, so...

I grimaced. “I was thinking ‘Pain’ and ‘Suffering’.” Fire and Star gave me a look. “What? If they’re anything like Ash they’ll love names like that.”

They may well love the names, depending on how much of their personality is inherited, but I'd not give children starter names like that, especially if I wanted them to grow up as part of a collective.

Pity the kobolds didn't ask if ponies or other people connected by Harmony could use it for direct information transfer. In some ways, the kobolds are closer to a hivemind than the ponies are, because they're in near-constant contact via text, at least. Harmony can't even do file transfers! SO INEFFICIENT.