Plato de Camarones was born to Otto de Camarones, an adventurer and debt collector of Amnian extraction and Teiuc de Camarones, an Azuposi woman with whom Otto absconded during his time as a trader/pirate in Maztica. After returning to Faerun, Otto made for Waterdeep where he kept Teiuc in essentially a state of slavery while he worked as a debt collector. Teiuc died while giving birth to Plato, who also died during the birthing process. Otto arranged for Itzli, a local Maztican priest of Masauwu the Skeleton Man (an Azuposi god) to raise the child —both from the dead and through childhood—in exchange for cancelling Itzli’s debts. Itzli, like all Azuposi, did not believe in an afterlife and saw the gods as creatures with whom to bargain rather than impress or appease. He also moonlighted as a priest of Jergal because, as Itzli said, “eh, close enough.” As a result, Plato’s religious upbringing was anything but normal. Two of Itzli’s closest adventuring friends, Ihsan, a shifty Zakharan rogue, and the huge, laconic Chultan sorcerer by the name of Abassi were frequently present around the musty temple of Jergal and helped raise Plato, encouraging her studies of sorcery and gambling. Otto died when she was a teenager, after coming to the temple and trying to take her back home. Just after he came in screaming her name, threatening violence if Itzli did not give her back to him, he slipped on a lone shrimp that was mysteriously underfoot, hit his head on the flagstone floor, and died instantly.
For her part, Plato was deeply scarred by her mother’s death and Itzli’s raising ritual. Itzli had some strange and unknown glowing artifact in the trunk of his caravan wagon, and when he exposed Plato to it, something went wrong as he flooded her tiny body with positive energy. As a result she was gifted with oracular abilities. This is also why she doesn’t cast cure spells, the excessive positive energy makes her uncomfortable and she worries that she might have a finite amount of positive energy in her body and that if she uses it all up, something unspeakable will become of her. While, the more negative energy she uses, the more positive energy she has in her. Eventually, she imagines, she will turn into pure positive energy and float away. This seems to her to be a much better alternative than death, which the Azuposi teach is the end of existence.
As an worshipper of Masauwu who also honors Jergal, Plato has no problems with creating undead as long as they work for positive reasons. She finds Jergal a bit too stuffy and formal, and as a result breaks rules that she could never do were she a cleric of Jergal, but she likes the idea that everything dies eventually and it’s her job to make sure that everybody gets their chance, most especially the undead. She’s convinced, perhaps wrongly, that she can make negative energy into a positive force (this also feeds into her theories about expending all of the negative energy in her).
She also believes that there are many coincidences that cannot be sufficiently explained. Such as when she was growing up, any time someone thought “plato” or “camarones” or “plato de camarones” someone would find a shrimp – Otto’s unfortunate death was not the only time that a mysterious shrimp changed the course of her life. She calls this a “chain of causality” and is convinced that the world works through the interaction of millions of these chains.
Now, she sets forth to go and make the world a better place.
