That first night at Tav's camp, you learn three things.

First: Gale cooks. Not heats-rations-over-fire cooks — actually cooks, with herbs he grows in a pouch enchanted to maintain soil moisture (he explains this unprompted; nobody asked), and a spice collection that he guards more jealously than his spellbook. The stew he produces tastes like something a real kitchen made. You eat two bowls and consider stealing the recipe.

Second: Lae'zel sleeps with her greatsword across her chest and wakes up swinging if anyone comes within arm's reach. You learn this because the cub toddles too close and nearly loses a whisker. Mama catches the cub by the scruff and deposits it back in the nest with a look that says I am surrounded by amateurs.

Third: Astarion doesn't sleep. He sits at the edge of camp, sharpening a blade he doesn't need to sharpen, watching the perimeter with the patient, unblinking attention of someone for whom darkness is a native environment. Once, you catch his eyes on you instead of the tree line. He looks away too fast.

You file it under suspicious. You're wrong about why — but right that it matters.

---

You wake up the next morning in a tent you don't remember entering, wearing a blanket you don't remember being covered with, with an owlbear cub sleeping on your face.

"Mrph," you say into a mouthful of feathers.

The cub chirps, rolls off your face, and waddles toward the tent flap with the unsteady determination of a creature whose legs haven't quite figured out the concept of coordination.

You follow it.

The camp is alive with morning. Gale is cooking — actually cooking, not heating rations, but preparing something that involves a pan and herbs and the kind of focused attention he probably gives to arcane theorems. The smell is unreasonably good. Tav is checking gear. Lae'zel is doing something to her greatsword that might be maintenance or might be a meditation ritual or might be both.

Shadowheart sits apart, her back against a tree, watching everything and nothing with the practiced disinterest of someone who has turned detachment into an art form. Her eyes flick to you when you emerge. Assess. Categorize. Dismiss.

Not dismiss-as-worthless. Dismiss-as-not-yet-relevant. There's a difference, and you notice it.

Mama is where you last saw her — curled around the supply crates, one eye open. The cub waddles to her and climbs up her flank with the graceless enthusiasm of a toddler scaling a mountain.

Karlach finds you before you find breakfast.

"Hey! You're up! You slept for like fourteen hours, which, honestly? Valid. I'd sleep for a week if this stupid engine would let me." She taps her sternum — and you hear it. A low, rhythmic thrum, like a heartbeat made of fire and metal. "Infernal engine. Long story. Basically: I can't touch people. Or, I can, but they catch fire. Which is — you know." Her grin flickers for just a moment. "Less fun than it sounds."

She says it lightly. The way people say things that aren't light at all when they've had enough practice.

You process this information. Your brain — your stupid, broken, sometimes-weaponized brain — runs the numbers in approximately one second:

Kinetic Dispersion. Your telekinetic field unconsciously disperses extreme thermal energy away from your skin. You touched a campfire once and felt "warm." You held a heated knife and felt "cozy."

You sprint at Karlach.

Not a measured approach. Not a cautious test. A full, lunging, arms-wide sprint that covers the ten feet between you before anyone can react.

Everyone screams.

Tav drops the gear they're inspecting. Gale spins from the cooking fire, one hand raised, a ward already forming. Shadowheart's hand goes to her mace. Lae'zel doesn't move, but her eyes narrow — which, for Lae'zel, is equivalent to everyone else's screaming.

Astarion, leaning against a tree at the camp's edge, goes very still.

You hit Karlach at full speed and wrap your arms around her midsection.

Nothing happens.

Or rather: something happens, but it's not what everyone expected. The infernal heat radiating from Karlach's body — heat that would blister skin, ignite cloth, cause third-degree burns on contact — hits your kinetic field and disperses. The thermal energy scatters outward in a halo of warm air that ruffles your hair and makes the closest campfire gutters.

You feel warm. Not burning-warm. hearthstone-wrapped-in-wool-on-a-cold-night warm. Feverish, maybe. Your skin tingles where it touches hers. But there is no fire. No blistering. No smoke.

"Huh," you say, face pressed against Karlach's sternum, voice muffled by leather armor. "You're not burning me. You just feel like a really warm hearthstone."

Karlach doesn't move. For two full seconds, the most physically powerful person in this camp stands perfectly still, arms at her sides, because she has forgotten how arms work.

Then her face — her broad, bright, battle-scarred face — splits into a grin that starts at her mouth and travels upward until it reaches her eyes, which are shining. Wet. Overflowing.

She lifts you off the ground.

She lifts you off the ground and spins, and you are pinwheeling through the air in the arms of a six-foot-two tiefling barbarian who is laughing and crying simultaneously, and the sound she makes is not a word, not a sentence, but a pure, vocal expression of something she hasn't felt in years.

"You're not burning! Tav! LOOK! She's not burning! I'm hugging someone! I'M HUGGING SOMEONE!"

Tav looks. Tav's expression goes through several stages — alarm, confusion, cautious hope, and finally a slow, spreading warmth that they try and fail to hide behind composure.

Gale, still holding the cooking pan in one hand, lowers his half-formed ward with the other. "That is thermodynamically impossible."

Astarion detaches from his tree. Walks over. Pokes your cheek with one cool fingertip — testing, clinical, as if checking whether you're an illusion.

"Not only are you immune to mind control," he says, and there's a note in his voice that isn't quite sarcasm and isn't quite wonder and isn't quite calculation, "but you are also apparently flame-retardant." He catalogues you with a slow smile. "My dear, you are a thoroughly useful collection of anomalies."

He's positioning. You won't realize this until later — won't understand that the smile is the Cazador-trained lure at work, that "useful" is the word that matters, that his proximity in the coming days will be strategic before it becomes anything else. Right now, you just think he's annoying.

"If I'm going to die of my own incompetence," you say, still suspended in Karlach's arms, "it's not going to be because of a hot tiefling. I set the rules here."

Karlach sets you down. Doesn't let go. Her hands stay on your shoulders, her engine thrumming against your kinetic field, her eyes wet and bright and shining with something fierce and unguarded that makes your chest tight.

"You're staying," she says. Not a question. A fact.

"I literally just said I would."

"Yeah, but now I'm making sure." She squeezes your shoulders — gently, for her, which is still hard enough to test your skeletal integrity. "Nobody gets rid of Mama K's new favorite person."

From behind her bedroll, Shadowheart's voice, dry as bone: "She's been here less than a day and she's already got a nickname."

"Everyone gets a nickname! You're Shaddy. Gale is Books. Tav is Boss. Lae'zel is —"

"If you finish that sentence," Lae'zel says, "I will remove your tongue."

"— is Lae'zel," Karlach finishes smoothly. "Because some people are perfect as they are."

Lae'zel makes a sound — halfway between a scoff and an acknowledgment — that might be the Githyanki equivalent of being flattered.

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