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When Kammie was twelve common years old she started winning the tournaments for her age group. The bronze dragonborn had always placed or done well. However, realising she wanted to be a paladin gave her the drive to not only beat her personal bests, but to take the gold from whoever the previous champions had been. Becoming a Drok paladin was her sole focus, and she gave it her optimistic all.
Nobody from Three Bells Farms had ever really gone the paladin route. Most everyone at the Drok commune did ranger work or were some flavour of monk or cleric. So, Kammie got to make it up a little as she went. She knew knights used swords, so she built a workout plan that took sword fighting into account. She knew that knights were honourable, so she tried to be true to her word and helpful for the sake of helping others. Both things were easy to do at Three Bells; a bustling, happy and self-sufficient farm full of a rich mix of people who found the best way to settle disagreements was with some sort of athletic contest.
The Drow priest who was the most patient about answering questions and looking things up for Kammie had warned her that things were different out in the world. She knew it’d be more difficult to be a paladin once she left Three Bells, but what Kammie hadn’t expected was for it to be so weird.
“Oh, no, no, you DON’T. Spit that out right now!” Kammie ran across the sand to the blue dragon wyrmling who had an unidentifiable something in their mouth. Reluctantly, the wyrmling opened their mouth, dropping a spitty mass at Kammie’s feet. She kicked it over, sighing. “I think we’ve talked about eating carrion, Blue.” She scrubbed more loose sand onto the half-decayed seagull corpse. “We don’t know why it’s dead, so we don’t know if it’s safe to eat.” She looked up at the wyrmling, who was now sitting primly as if this wasn’t the third time this week they’d had this conversation.
The situation had already been overwhelming when the Drok were reborn but, by that point Kammie had still felt like she was keeping a pretty solid handle on things. Sure, the entire island city’s corrupt government had been overthrown and their wealth distributed. Yes, Kammie the orphan now had an aunt and seven cousins. Okay, she now lived on a beachside resort you got to through a weird doorway on top of a club, might also be part of a gang of neat witch folks, was work acquaintances with a giant lava dragon, had a sword that turned into different elements, and was hearing her god’s voices inside her head on a far too regular basis. All fine.
Kammie had carefully set everything aside to go through at her leisure. Her plan was to thoughtfully process whatever emotions she hadn’t had time to go through when things were happening. And then the Drok hatched.
Something she hadn’t expected to do as a paladin was toilet train her gods. Kammie guessed whatever godly knowledge they had would take a while to catch up eventually, but the first few days wrangling three infant dragons was almost as challenging as stealing a despot’s treasury had been. When an ancient silver dragon had appeared from the sea, bringing all her children with her, Kammie was ready to take it in stride, especially when it turned out they were there to help.
Standing before the blue wyrmling, Kammie sighed and scanned the beach. “Do you know where Auntie Parcy is?” The dragon gave an exaggerated shrug before rolling over playfully, knocking into Kammie’s legs. She rolled her eyes, “you know pretty soon we won’t be able to wrestle anymore because you’ll be well out of my weight class, right?”
“ Of course. So we should now.”
Kammie laughed. “Okay, best out of three.” She looked down at the sand. “But not here, because I do not want to get pinned on top of that dead bird.”
_____
Until Kammie was twelve common years old, someone else had won every tournament for her age group. She could never remember who, it didn’t seem to matter once she was the one winning. Sometimes the absence of a name scratched at the back of her mind, but it was easy to ignore.
Slouching in a beach chair, staring at the ocean, Three Bells Farms was the furthest thing from her mind. Enjoying the sun and relative peace of knowing the Drok children were busy with Parcy, Kammie idly wondered what Concierge, the three-armed chef of the hotel, was planning for dinner. She didn’t know half of the names of the things he made, but she was always happy to help him taste-test new recipes.
With an almost physical jolt of something falling into place, Kammie remembered . The person who had always won gold for her age group was a triton named Oddehen. They were her best friend and, in the ultimate Drok way, her best competitor. She sat up suddenly, the flimsy chair almost folding around her. Why had she forgotten? More upsettingly, why had she suddenly remembered?
Kammie kept being startled by new childhood memories that hadn’t been there a week ago, but slotted in perfectly as though they’d never left. Here was Oddehen’s favourite food that Kammie thought was gross and always traded them for. During her morning pushups, she remembered the first time her personal best was better than Oddehen’s. She remembered the swimming hole—something she’d fully forgotten was even at Three Bells because every memory she had there was with Oddehen.
It only took two days of stopping dead in the middle of a task, blank-eyed with a new memory, before Kammie sent her aunt a crystal message about it. Jo made her come to visit that afternoon, sitting Kammie at a table in the expansive kitchen of the converted apartment building that housed the sprawling family Kammie was still getting used to. With professional thoroughness, Jo began applying various spells and potions, trying to diagnose the problem. Watching Jo dangle a pendulum over a complicated diagram, Kammie groaned angrily.
Jo glanced up at Kammie, “new memory?”
“No. Worse. I just thought ‘oh I can’t wait to tell Oddehen I have a family now and for everyone to meet them.’ Only I have no idea where they are .” Kammie let out a wordless growl and slid down in the chair. “UGH, I want to run like three miles.”
With a practised flick of her wrist, Jo snapped the pendulum up into her palm. Sighing, she dropped it into a pocket and turned back to the counter, mixing something new.
“What’s that one do?”
“This one is tea.” Jo turned a small hourglass to time the steep and joined Kammie at the kitchen table. She reached out and put her hand on Kammie’s. “Honey, I’m sorry, I do not know what is going on, but Drok will see us through.”
Kammie thought about the wyrmlings cheerfully causing havoc on the beach and laughed. “Yes, Drok will see us through.”
_____
And Drok had. A week or so later, when Kammie was running an errand for Concierge in the bodega across the street from the club—which Kammie had only been in once but technically lived in, since the portal to the hotel was on the roof—when the wall in the back of the shop opened up to let the incubus who worked there through to some strange alley that was definitely not in Icy Icy. That itself wasn’t too strange for Kammie at this point, but on the other side of this unexpected doorway was Oddehen. Five years older, but obviously Oddehen. There were others too, a small and tired looking bird, a big cat with partially healed mange who looked a lot like someone she’d met recently, and a very fancy looking half-elf lady. They were busy talking to the incubus and didn’t matter to her, only Oddehen did.
After a moment of panicked surprise and staring, Kammie’s brain kicked in and she dug her sending compact out, holding it up. Just before the door closed, she reached through the door, tapping her compact against Oddehen’s to trade contacts. They got their arms out of the closing doorway just in time.
Kammie was stopped from too much contemplation by the siamese tabaxi Fireball, who was standing next to her, his arms filled with one of every hot sauce the bodega had.
“Shit, mang.” He tilted his head up to keep green-tinted glasses from sliding down his nose. “Wonder where that goes?”
Putting away her sending compact, Kammie took the bottles from Fireball. “I dunno, but I’m glad we know it’s there.”
Fireball nodded thoughtfully and paid at the counter. Kammie was quiet while she sorted through her thoughts but, as they made their way up the fire escape to the roof of the club, she finally asked the tabaxi the thing that was bothering her the most.
“Do you think they’re still taller than me?”