The steady hiss of light rain masked my footsteps as I followed Tizzie Drake northward. I wasn't a sneak savant like Aldo, but I knew a bit about how to operate on the streets… and I emphasize a bit.

I'd been introduced to the microcosm of Floria's streets by Nat and Zev, who were pretty tame by street rat standards. They mostly restricted their activities to River's Run and their idea of a 'scam' was to be hard-working and reliable enough that merchants would pay you for your work. Yeah.

Other Scamps weren't so scrupulous. Some made it as far down as the Canal Canton and got up to who-knows-what in that morass of hovels and reeking canals. And Oltzen, Tizzie, and company made their tollos engaging in petty crime and actual scams, usually street games with the local apprentices. I knew they had a little 'hide-out' a little deeper into Rivers Run, though I'd never knowingly been within a block of it. I assumed that's where Tizzie was going. Walking in the rain in the gloom of night was wet, cold, and miserable, but at least its gentle hush provided good cover. Tizzie wasn't a complete fool - she looked over her shoulder at least a dozen times as she went… but it was always the right shoulder, and I was always able to stay unspotted in her periphery by stopping in my shoes. She made her way north and toward the Largotto, and I remained unseen. As I crept along, I imagined myself in a Silvia Valia novel…

Silvia Valia, gentlewoman thief, crept through the shadows, ten paces behind the evil duke's dastardly capo. A creature of the shadows, her lithe form was utterly unseen as night descended upon the city.

The sun had set and the market was closed. A handful of merchants and craftspeople puttered about, doing clerical tasks or sitting down for a drink after a long day. Waxen canvas flapped in the wind, throwing off loops of water as rain pattered down. A few last hauls of crates made their way up from the river in the light of oil lanterns and the occasional glowglobe. And, huddling against the cool wind, water soaking through to my scalp and dripping down my hair, I followed Tizzie as she headed north.

The River's Run canton is generally less crowded than central Floria - it sits at the northern end of the city along the western bank, trailing up several kilometers until petering out into traveler's inns, stables, and glimsilk greenhouses past the city proper. At its southern extent and near the banks of the Largotto, though, the River's Run is a dense press of petty merchants, specialty markets, and middle-class housing. Tidy redstone buildings squat upon the hilly banks of the Largotto and peer out, envious eyes cast toward the gilded houses of the Merchant's Quarter along the opposite eastern bank.

The miscreant continued into the night, indifferent to the rain, stalking into the crime-ridden warrens of the city's river district, and Silvia pursued. Her hand traced along the cool steel of Belladonna, her enchanted dagger, once purloined from the vaulted crypt of Queen Esmarelde. The gentlewoman thief was no stranger to the night and its dangers.

Aldo had hooked me up with a wood-handled folding knife - I'd given him a tollo for it, even though he swore it hadn't cost that much. It probably hadn't cost him anything. He'd almost certainly stolen it.

I followed after Tizzie, into the press of small streetside shops, open-air carts, and dense rowhouses. She wandered under the glow of enchanted streetlamps and the drizzle of cool Frostfall rain, and I followed her. My toes squished in my shoes - not my ten tollo shoes, thank Asuna. Those were still in the Scamp Hall… and I hoped that Mailyn and Aldo looked after my stuff, because otherwise somebody would try to nick them after Tizzie and company broke my lock and scattered half my things across the bunk room.

I would get another lock. An enchanted one. One that shocked, just like Mr. Rook's. And I would make them pay for stealing from me, one way or another.

Back at Rook's, before Floria, before I was enrolled at the Collegium, a guard named Rodjarvo had imparted a valuable lesson: always have a way to shiv the other guy. Reverend Nuches, a man of the cloth, had advised me to clobber my adversaries in the nose if they didn't see reason. I'd been taking abuse from Tizzie and her friends, hoping in vain that they would grow bored or tired of bothering me, and I hadn't been successful in the least. If anything, they were escalating. It was time for another approach. That's what I told myself as I crept through the streets twenty minutes behind Tizzie.

Silvia cursed the dastardly Tetrad of Terror for forcing her to descend to the tactics of a mere sneak-thief, but needs must. Tizzie 'the Dragon' was perhaps the evil duke's most brutal lieutenant, but soon enough she would reveal the Tetrad's weakness and Silvia would be there to exploit it.

She looked over her shoulder again, but I kept myself in the shadows. Even if she was looking right at me, she wouldn't see. We passed closed shops, their edifices rising from the cobblestones like great dark cliffs as the rain hissed down and cool wind blew south from the Kerebel Mountains inland. I reached into the pocket of my trousers reassured myself with the leather-wrapped grip of my little folding knife - every Scamp learned early on that it was best to carry a knife and to know how to use it. I couldn't fight with a knife, but I was pretty clear on which end to poke into somebody. I wasn't going to stab Tizzie, not unless she instigated serious violence first… but with Tizzie, that was entirely possible. I was glad to have a weapon. My fingers ran along the glossy wood of the handle and the fuzzy leather of the folded grip that prevented from stabbing myself in the thigh whenever I sat down. Tizzie took a big, obvious look around and ducked into an alleyway. Jackpot.

I peeked around the corner - it was a covered alleyway, protected by the awnings of the two adjacent buildings and sloped such that water would stream down the center of the alley, eroding a little drainage runnel down the middle, but keep the edges clear. The place had the sour reek of days-old garbage, but so did just about everything two blocks from the North Largotto Docks. The alley would have been a perfect spot to hole up for the night, even if the Tetrad of Terror didn't have some little grotto scoped out, which I thought they probably did.

My suspicions were confirmed when I heard a wooden hatch door shut. I couldn't see where it was exactly, but now I knew where Tizzie was staying. I glanced around to make sure a third party hadn't followed me. The occasional carriage splashed by and pedestrians hurried along, some of them with parapluies, but they were sparse. The upstairs lights of the shops and row houses were still aglow - Floria never truly sleeps, and it's barely drowsy at half first watch, but after the shops shutter for the night, River's Run has little traffic beyond people going to and from the 'three T's': taverns, temples, and trysts.

Jackpot! With the location of the Tetrad's secret stash of ill-gotten goods uncovered, Silvia had but to spring her trap. But, as with all good things, she would have to wait - she didn't dare go against the evil duke and his minions yet. Not without her own allies. For now, she would go to ground and wait until the opportune moment arose…

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I found a restaurant with a covered porch and scaled the wrought iron fence into the area, studiously ignoring the 'Customer's Only!' [sic] sign. Cold, tired, and dejected - but finally out of the rain - I sat down and had myself a good cry before fashioning myself a makeshift wind barrier by repositioning two little tables set on their sides. I huddled up under a damp tablecloth, hiding myself inside a temporary lean-to up against the restaurant wall, and I did memory exercises until I was too drowsy for them to be useful and I drifted into a fitful slumber.

Wood shifted. The cool concrete of the patio vibrated. Sunlight flashed across my face.

"Get your bony ass out of my restaurant!" a man screamed at me. A boot pressed painfully into my side - luckily not a full-strength kick.

"Sorry! Sorry!" I yelped, jerking awake and scrambling to my feet. It wasn't even seven o'clock yet, but some restaurants along the River's Run opened early to cater to the local merchants. Apparently I'd picked such an establishment to sleep at. "Do you, um… can I have breakfast? I'll work for it," I said hopefully. Since I wasn't in the Scamp Hall, I wouldn't be allowed back in to claim my meal for the day, and neither could I attend classes. I was on my own until my friends emerged after noon.

The man's bushy mustache quivered. "What? No, you can't have breakfast! I should call the guards!" My eyes must have flared in panic, because he amended his stance: "I won't, though, if you leave now."

"Sorry, sir. I'm leaving," I said. The last thing I needed was attention from the River Market Council guards.

Unlike many major cities, Floria doesn't have a centralized policing force - it's up to the Collegium Master who oversees each canton to decide how to enforce Nurass's peace. Most, in turn, outsource that burden to the guilds, businesses, and other monied interests of the area. River's Run was policed by a patchwork of guard forces, with the temple guards of the Bannered Temple, the Market Council guards, and the Waterside Watch patrolling overlapping sections in the southern part of the canton. If the marketplace guards made me a persona non grata, then somebody would post a description in the guard house at the north end of the market, and the guards would eject me from the market area whenever they spotted me. Since this was where I made my messenger girl lucre six days a week, I couldn’t afford to be caught. Dejected, I paced westward across the market.

"Ask for breakfast at the temple," the restauranteur called after me - I suppose he wasn't completely heartless.

For a Scamp who occasionally finds herself outdoors for the night, it's crucial to understand the city as night transitions to morning. One of the available services is 'homily breakfast', wherein the poor folk of the city can partake of a simple, early-morning meal, usually a piece of bread and a bowl of broth… if they'll acquiesce to listening to the 'warm-up' sermon given by the priest. The draft sermons can be rough around the edges… I suppose that's why they give them. Homily breakfast is given by both Avatarine sects, primarily targeting young and presumably-impressionable orphans, though adults are permitted the same small meal if space allows. The homily breakfast is a bigger deal in other large cities, which have greater populations of orphans with no home or guild, but Floria has just enough that the Bannered Temple has kept the practice up. Usually, the Church of the New Circle and the Church of the Avatar alternate days.

I arrived at the temple just as the sun was rising. In the cool morning, as the mist receded out to sea, the temple loomed over the riverside neighborhoods and the sun rose behind it, wreathing the gleaming white chapel and its seven minarets in a corona of morning light. I joined a queue of, presumably, orphans along the white marble steps leading up to the temple. My clothes were plenty shabby, but I was probably the least shabby of the lot… but nobody objected to my presence, and the orphans looked like they knew what they were doing. I nudged the boy in front of me to confirm that I was in the right spot.

"Excuse me, is this where we get food?" I asked.

The boy, about two years older than me, rolled his eyes. "After we listen to bloody homily, yeah."

"My ma says I got to come here to pinch picos," a nearby girl said with a frown. Her shift was even rattier than my dress had been before I'd stayed up nights mended it. I suppose outsourcing a child's breakfast to the church is one way to save money. As the saying goes: mind your picos and your talents shall earn themselves.

After a few minutes of awkward waiting, in which no less than ten orphans tried to butt in line to great protest (and, very nearly, a fistfight), a tired-looking deacon unlocked the door, shot us an annoyed look, and waved us into the temple, whereupon we lined up along the pews.

"Don't sit anywhere," the deacon instructed us. "Proper folks are coming in later, and they don't need your lice."

For the record, I've never had lice - they aren't much of a problem in Floria on account of all the alchemists and apothecaries. However, chemical burns from experimental louse treatments are much more common than in other cities. Fortunately, students of the Collegium have access to the salves and powders the Sneaks mix for their alchemistry classes, which are disseminated for free and usually work. They rarely cause worse than minor skin discoloration or spontaneous hair growth since they're checked by Greycloaks.

"And then, um… did not St. Lethis say unto them that dispute… repute is the fruit of virtue, not gold? For the paradise of the just is gilded in plagues… plaques of virtue, not gold nor ember," Vice Reverend Limina droned.

The poor souls at homily breakfast were subject to a rambling, thirty-five minute sermon from Reverend Nuches's understudy, the Vice Reverend. Liminia didn't have anything close to Nuches's charisma or fluidity, but perhaps that was because it was a draft sermon rather than a polished one for the tithe-paying parishioners. Nuches sat in the ornate clerical throne behind Liminia, nodding whenever he approved of how his protégé delivered the homily… there was more frowning than nodding, frankly. The homily was rough. Eventually, the eight o'clock bell rang, meaning the proper faithful of the city would be lining up soon for the real article, and we were saved from suffering through more flubbed salvific analogies.

"I think that's enough," Nuches said. "Thank you all for attending! Line up in the west vestibule… that's to your left… once again, that's this side… for food. Deacon Moro, if you would?"

Nuches spotted me, his dark and woolly eyebrows rising in recognition, and he intercepted me just as I got out of line with a wooden bowl of broth and a chunk of rye bread the size of my fist. It was barely adequate for breakfast and far less than what I was used to eating in the Scamp Hall.

"Alvixia… you slept outside," Nuches stated - it wasn't a question. My hair was probably a mess, since I was reliant on having a mirror to fashion my usual braids.

I nodded. "Yeah…"

Reverend Nuches touched his lip. "It looks like you got dinged. More trouble with bullies?"

I touched my own lip in the same spot, feeling the puffy scab from where Tizzie had knocked a loose tooth out and nearly decked me flat. I bit into the rye bread, chewing with the good side of my mouth. "Tizzie did it. And she stole my books. I know where her hideout is. I'm going to get her back…"

The reverend nodded. "I understand why you feel that way. But, if I might make a suggestion? Why don't you try giving her a gift? Something small. Something she might like. People have a hard time being mean to folks who give them something."

I was pretty sure that wouldn't work. I could have given Tizzie the Step Palace itself and she'd snarl that I thought she wasn't good enough to have the Veridian Isles. But the reverend's earnest, dark-eyed gaze would not brook overtures to violence. I swallowed a lump of hard-crusted rye and gave him an ambivalent shrug. "I'll try."

"Good. If I'm right, it just might work. Have a good day, all right?"

"I'll try."

And I really did try… but I suppose I've never been the best at playing nice, and the Tetrad of Terror didn't play nice at all…