Overworked

Context: This is Karla, my character from a D&D campaign I'm running with a couple of friends. The campaign includes bladder mechanics because of course it does. At one point in the campaign, we were staying at an inn owned by a party member's parents. That particular party member got to stay for free, of course, since that's already where she normally lives anyways, but everyone else had to work as payment for their rooms. Everyone had their own shift of a couple of hours assigned to them, and the owners didn't allow any breaks while on the clock - and when they did have some time to themselves, the inn was very popular and what few bathrooms it had were nearly constantly occupied when things got busy. One set of bathrooms was upstairs, and the other downstairs, and the stairs down were on the opposite side of the room from the stairs up; going between the upper levels and the basement would require passing by the bar to get to the other staircase.

Karla, who has a habit of waiting until the last second anyways, was out running errands before her shift started, and got back to the inn just in time to not be late. And though she was able to convince the owner to let her take a quick break first, when she went upstairs to try the bathrooms she found them occupied; when she went downstairs in an attempt to get to the basement, she was stopped and sent right to work on the assumption that she must have already used the bathroom.

Towards the end of her shift, the same thing happened again, though now with a much heavier burden; she managed to convince the owner to let her take a break early, but when she went downstairs she found the bathroom again fully occupied. She was stopped on her way back up, of course, though this time by a party member, who talked the owner into believing Karla was just trying to shirk her duties, thus forcing her to go right back to work again.

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This really did happen in the campaign as described, if anyone was wondering. I did, for once, skip big chunks of time in between the core points while recounting it, but this is how it went down in-game. I even went back and checked the chatlogs on Roll20 to confirm how many drinks she was carrying at this particular moment.

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Karla is a drakeling, a now-mythical ancient Toravonic race created by the equally-mythical dragons of Vinumur. They are soldiers by design, warriors built to do naught else but carry out the will of the dragons in their fight to subjugate humanity... when no errors are made in their creation. Being a perfected drakeling, Karla is a human who took on a flawless draconic form when the work of the biological engineers was completed, but it seems they failed to sufficiently alter her mind; she thinks for herself, and exercises her own free will, as do other drakelings of both perfect and imperfect form. In Karla's time, increasingly-many drakelings liberated themselves from the dragons, often to then go back and use the dragons' own technology against them.

To this day nobody knows why the number of escaping drakelings grew as it did. The procedure was perfect. Miraxi, his name forever unknown to humanity, had made sure of that. He was a perfectionist, and would never tolerate a flaw in his system, his life's work and greatest masterpiece. So, then, how could it have become more flawed over time...?

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Also, I gotta start using a different tag than "sketches" for these.

And yes I did turn a fun little image post into a loredump. I genuinely didn't intend to drop some new Toravon lore, but it's staying in anyways because that sort of dedication to worldbuilding is just my thing. It's a big part of why I try to hold my work to such high standards.