Everybody sure does talk about everything.  Kicharchu's Chelish gets much better with practice, even though there aren't that many days when he can snag a Share Language.  He visits his troop a couple of times when they have the day off, and starts trying to lay groundwork for a kobold edition of the Great Work.

No one takes kobolds seriously, and why should they?  The kobolds, understood together, aren't... understandable together; there's no queen or even a halfway competent warlord holding them that way, and they don't talk to each other systematically enough to have come up with something like a Great Work on their own.  Maybe other kobolds somewhere have these advantages but not the ones who live between the humans of Westcrown and the drow below.  Individual kobolds are somewhere between pests and particularly expendable neighbors.  No one calls the Watch over a dead kobold; Kicharchu certainly wouldn't, both because it wouldn't work and because the typical other kobold is not actually important to him at all.
Kicharchu doesn't exactly have class consciousness.  If he could just move in to Westcrown like anyone else, maybe he'd do that, and to hell with the rest of his species.  He might be able to, if he got a big sun hat and made out like he was reincarnated... but he thinks he'd be caught at it, he thinks that even if his accent goes away eventually there'd be tells in what he knows and doesn't know.  He remains confused about, among other things, religions and gods, how people get between cities and countries, high-circle magic, the concept of parenting, and math.

So Kicharchu has, not class consciousness, but class opportunism.  Why should it be a kobold who rallies all the other kobolds into making something of their collective selves?  Why, because a kobold is - not trustworthy, no, they've none of them been inculcated with the habit of cultivating such a virtue or looking for it in others.  But neither is a fellow kobold an outright predator.  A member of an outsider race who goes among kobolds and tries to organize them is potentially useful to some of those kobolds, sure, but their underlying motives aren't going to be about usefulness to kobolds: that is not something that they have a selfish interest in, and if they had an altruistic interest instead (Kicharchu has learned about altruistic interests), then they could point it anywhere, and most anywheres aren't the sewers, so you never see the altruists down there.

A fellow kobold (even a reincarnated one, though Kicharchu doesn't see any of those stepping up to the role), who goes among kobolds as his first port of call, is not doing something he could be doing anywhere, and that makes the relationship less of an adversarial one.  A kobold among kobolds is saying: I'm not a kobold on purpose, and neither are you.  Here we both are, kobolds anyway, and I might be looking to rip you off, but I cannot have found you only by looking for the most vulnerable target in reach unless there is a considerable coincidence: I found you because we are both kobolds.  You can't trust me, but neither must you assume we are already enemies just because I said hello.
Anyway, the first issue is that kobolds don't talk to each other enough.  There is, sort of, a kobold language, but it has such fragmentary familects that no one is having a fluent conversation with anyone from another troop.  Kicharchu's idea of just all coordinating on speaking Chelish instead would have worked great if any thirty other troops had had the same idea, but they did not.

So Kicharchu starts scavenger hunts.  He's got all this money, and math still confuses him when it gets any more complicated than how many of which coin for a flanksteak, but he can at least extend that limited skill to things other than flanksteak.  He goes and talks to a lot of different troops and gives them all a snack, for free, to show that he has enough food to give away foolishly to back up the claim that there's more where that came from, and then gives them a hint about where he's hidden more, and who else he gave hints to.  He doesn't especially care if they go beat up the other troop for its secrets or cooperate on it peacefully; every time a troop has to communicate, adversarially or otherwise, with another, they get that little bit of practice with each other's way of using words.  His hiding spots for his snacks get found, some faster than others, and the first time he goes to dispense a hint and finds a troop forty kobolds strong, he knows it's working.  That's a big troop.  That would be a sizable voting bloc.  Snacks for the big troop and their triumph of organization!

When the convention ends, Kicharchu's income is cut off, which might have spelled the end of the civilization-building project; but he's managed to talk to some humans who want silk.  Drow have silk.  Kobolds almost never want it because kobolds basically do not manufacture things for themselves; even bolts of finished fabric, let alone the raw stuff the upstairs folks want to hand off to the Fabricator wizards, would find use among kobolds mostly as nesting material and maybe a fray-edged tied-on cape, because so few of them know how to sew.  The ones who wear clothes wear stolen halfling clothes, and "the ones who wear clothes" isn't many of them; they're cold-blooded and they have internal genitalia and no one is a pair of pants away from respecting them and every risk you take to get ahold of a dress or a shirt is a risk you could have spent on dinner instead.  But Kicharchu has big troops with significant collective carrying capacity who know him as a rich eccentric, now, and he can bring those big troops down with raw grain - food, but annoying enough food that it's not too tempting for less-than-starving kobolds to steal, whereas the drow will want it desperately - and go up with raw silk.  He pays them in food and himself in money and goes back to do it all over again.  They can make fewer trips for the same pay if they make more friends!  Think about it!

The troops get bigger and - it's not in Kicharchu's control, any more.  He's not the only kobold who can talk to the surfacers; he's not the only person who can notice the benefits of coordinating in bigger bands; and he's not particularly well positioned to intervene when the bands go to war and it turns out to be qualitatively different from little troops scuffling with each other.

The good news is that when the dust settles - Kicharchu spends this period of time firmly upstairs, renting a room in the dim basement of a halfling boarding house with his savings - the kobolds can mostly talk to each other.  The bad news is that they have war hero leaders who've emerged from the clash and they don't especially want to cut Kicharchu in on any of their activities or profits.  Nor do they particularly want to have a Great Work.  Just because everyone can talk about everything doesn't mean that they will.

The kobolds can be understood together, now, and Kicharchu is not inside of the understanding.

He keeps up the merchant shtick; he's lost his privileged access to the silk trade but there is still some advantage to having more practice with Chelish and more contacts among humans and halflings and more comfort with moving among them, and he can buy things at discounts and with timing that not just anyone can, or, at least, that not just anyone does.  It's not the Great Work but it's a living even if you account for shrinkage and all the spending on security to limit shrinkage.   And he never actually told anyone - well, not too many people - well, he didn't put it in the newspaper, that he wanted to have a kobold convention, so it's not so embarrassing.

It would have been a really Great Work, though.