Kicharchu picks out their name when they're - well actually they have no idea. They are hatched, they survive, they pick a name. They fall in with a crowd of other kobolds, because a lone one is easy to pick off; their crowd's strategy is going up to the surface and stealing things at night. Mostly food. They take with a very light touch, and sometimes a couple of them go up early to eavesdrop, the ones who've picked up enough of the human language that they can learn things that way. If you pick your targets carefully enough they'll blame the thefts on the other humans! Kicharchu is the one who has the idea that for practice they could talk like humans amongst themselves. Koboldish is fragmented into countless fractal microdialects, since they don't do parenting and they don't live very long. Each one speaks the average of what the five other kobolds they spend the most time around speak. Their little band could just make that "Taldane", or in practice, "lots of Taldane loanwords, opaque cargo-culted phrases and sentences, and swearing".

So anyway, Kicharchu knows Taldane, more or less, and knows that if they swipe food from this house the humans will blame the underfed slaves, and if they take it from that one the wife will cover it up so her husband doesn't blame her, and that the nursemaid this old man hired to see him through his old age might be too lawful to embezzle for herself but certainly doesn't care enough to draw attention to it when the pantry's bare right after she bought groceries, and so on. A little here and a little there and the rats in the sewers and the mushrooms in the caves and their band does quite well, leaves probably a hundred eggs scattered around. (Kicharchu never lays any eggs personally but doesn't know why; some people just don't.)

One day there is a great and terrible shaking, and then there is less to steal, but also plenty of dead bodies, which are also good eating. Kicharchu heard a legend once about a kobold being hunted for taking all of a dead body so they adopt a policy of cutting off a leg at a time from any they run across - easier to carry anyway.

When the new dead bodies stop coming at such a clip, things are a bit leaner. They start eating eggs they don't remember laying on the assumption they are somebody else's, and risk stealing a little more blatantly, and spend longer staking out possible targets from chimneys and empty water barrels and underneath storm grates and places like that. And that is how Kicharchu learns that the humans are attempting a Great Work of Everybody Talking About Everything and they will pay people to be Everybody.

Their band doesn't want them to leave - Kicharchu is far and away the smartest of the bunch and it comes in handy - but they leave anyway and march right up to the Great Work of Everybody Talking About Everything and demands to be an Everybody.