The applause she'd expected never came. Instead the crowd began to disperse.

"What? What's wrong with that for a name?" she asked.

"The Baby Dragon Inn?" Kallid said, a distasteful expression on his face. "Sounds... maybe a little... I don't know, maybe too kid-friendly?"

Sigmundurr was shaking his head too.

Before the crowd had dispersed completely, she amended herself. "Or... something! We might change that!"

"Don't worry about it, Kreet," said a stranger. "It's a fine thing you've done. If you want to call it the Baby Dragon, you go right ahead."

"Doesn't exactly inspire ya to wanna go leave the family and drink the night away though, does it?" said the old woman beside him.

A middle-aged man took Kreet's hand unexpectedly and patted it. "Doesn't matter what it's called, Kreet. If the shitter works, you'll be the most popular place in the district!"

She looked back at Kallid, who shrugged.

"Well that didn't go as I'd imagined," she admitted. "Oh well. Come on, let's go get some clothes on and get the lavatories working before they come back."

Fortunately the toilets weren't in too bad shape. Since they'd all stopped working so long ago the rooms had been closed and the actual pipes leading out were easily cleared the rest of the way with some water. In fact, most of the hour following was devoted to filling all the buckets they could find with water from the rain barrels for flushing.

As the night wore on, the wonder of the working toilets spread through the area. Their's weren't the only ones that started working that night. Some of their neighbors were able to clear out their blockages as well, and word spread rapidly. The kobolds had truly done it! Thankfully the Baby Dragon wasn't overrun with customers using their toilets, but the place did see more customers than it had in months.

A group who obviously knew each other came in and sat at one of the tables. Kreet had her apron tied around her and summoned her long-disused wench attitude.

"Can I get you anything?" she asked as sweetly as she could.

That set the group laughing.

"Yeah, I'll have some of your finest whiskey. Can't get such clean water around anywhere else!" one said.

"We're going to change all that. Honest!" she assured them.

"Oh, bring us whatever you've got," said another. "We'll have fun with it."

By the end of the evening, while the place hadn't exactly been overflowing, at least they had gotten a lot of people to drop in to visit the toilets. More importantly, Kreet thought, they'd gotten a lot of people used to seeing kobolds in a positive light.

"In hindsight," Kreet said that night to Kallid and Sigmundurr, "it would have been better to not announce everything till we'd gotten the whole place re-done."

"And maybe considered the name a little longer?" Kallid said timidly.

"Oh, I know I messed that up. I should have asked you guys first."

Sigmudurr spoke up. "Yeah, you should have. But it's not that bad."

Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

Kallid nodded, "It's really not. But... you could have asked us first."

Kreet's eyes narrowed. "Kallid! Are we having our first marital fight?"

Fortunately Kallid understood her mock attitude. "I think we are!"

"Oh-oh. Maybe I'll take a walk around the block," Sigumundurr said, recognizing he had suddenly become one person too many in the small room.

"For about an hour, if you don't mind?" Kreet nodded as Sigmundurr rose and walked to the door. "I have to teach my husband who's the boss around here!"

"And I've got to show her who's the man of the family!" Kallid said, scrunching up his snout in fake-anger.

"Yeah, yeah," Sigmundurr said. "I get it already. And then you get to have makeup sex. I'll be back in an hour."

"Close the door on your way out please!" Kreet called, and turned out the lamp.

In fact, an hour was overly optimistic, but it did give the two kobolds plenty of time to talk privately in the dark afterwards.

"We did a good thing today, didn't we Kally?" Kreet whispered while tracing her lover's outlines with a finger."

"I think so. But oh that was nasty! I wonder if we'll get in trouble though? I mean, with whoever built that wall."

"Probably," Kreet said, climbing on top of Kallid and straddling him. "But we've got the neighborhood on our side now anyway."

"Not exactly an army," Kallid said, a worried look on his face.

"Oh Kallid, we can't be scared of everything. Sometimes you just have to do what's right and take the consequences."

"I know. But I do worry a little. You're getting bigger down here. Rounder," he said, making circles on her abdomen.

"Yeah. I really wish I'd studied Ka'Plo's books longer. I hate to ask, but what do you know about our eggs? I've been around humans so long. At least you grew up in the company of other kobolds. I really don't know anything about what to expect!"

"I was from the oldest batch in my clutch before I was taken away, so I do recall a little of my younger brothers and sisters hatching. As best I recall, mother lay the eggs a week or two before they were hatched."

"Did she, like, lay beside them for warmth or anything?"

"I don't recall honestly, but I don't think so. I mean, she stayed with them a lot, but I don't think they needed her to be right there all the time."

"And after they hatched?"

"Oh, that I remember! They crawled all over her all the time. She used to laugh with them so much. We had to build a little pen for them, they had so much energy. And they ate like you wouldn't believe!"

Kallid's eyes had drifted off, and Kreet lay down across his chest, finding his tail and tangling it with her own.

"I never asked you about your family. What happened to them?"

"No idea. I was taken away from them by the Drow. Far away and too young to remember where I came from. But it wasn't terrible. It was routine and both me and my brother knew it would happen. We were told from our youngest age that we would be taken away, so we marched right off to training camp like the dutiful sons we were."

"But you miss them..."

Kallid's eyes turned to hers. "Of course I do. But there's nothing I can do about it. I don't know where they were, let alone where they are. If they're even still alive. Old kobolds are usually abandoned by the Drow when they've outlived their purpose. Abandoned kobolds either band together or die in the Underdark. But... as long as I don't know, I can still hope."

"Hope. That's a dangerous thing for kobolds."

"I know," he said, smiling at her. "But I have hope here."

"Me too," she said, and rolled off him to face the ceiling. She turned her gaze to the window and the stars beyond.

She felt Kallid lay his head on her lap and for a moment thought he might be thinking of sex again, but instead he just gazed at her belly from underneath, rubbing it lightly. It hadn't swelled so much that she couldn't see him below it yet, but it would. The rubbing felt good.

"What was your mother's name?" she asked.

She felt him shudder then, and felt a wetness that had nothing to do with sex beneath her belly.

"I don't remember," he cried quietly.

She held him and stroked his head.

"Pretty bad, huh?" he laughed through his tears. "I don't remember her name. I knew it when I was a kid, but mostly I just knew her as my Mother."

"Not so bad, Kally. Not so bad."

They stayed like that for a good while, a breeze blowing through the window and the random sounds of the human city around them. Kreet felt good. Sad, but good. The sadness would never go away completely, but what was done was done. In her were the seeds of a new generation of kobolds. A generation that, just maybe, would remember their parents' names.

They heard the stairs creak then and Sigmundurr spoke quietly through the door. Kallid quickly climbed up beside Kreet and they pulled the sheet over them.

"Are you two decent in there?"

"Come on in Sig," Kreet called and the door opened.

"Smells like lizard sex in here," he laughed.

"Sig! You're not supposed to say that!"

"First thing we do," Kallid said, his eyes narrowing, "is get another room working!"