He'd come to the market armed with things to trade, this time. Were they things he'd scrounged up? Yeah. But scrounging was the way anyone else made their living around here. Better that Erik learn that early... in his mind, at least. The boy moved carefully through the market, his shoulders hunched as he did. There was too much hustle, here. Too much bustle. It was too noisy, and there were too many bodies. The smells of the market, the sounds... Erik detests it.
At least one good thing had come out of the day. He'd walked up to a vendor with a basket of kittens and traded several large fistfulls of porcupine quills (plucked from a carcass that he'd found in the woods) for a little red and silver tabby. She was a fluffy kitten, sturdy, with a dense coat, and nice to pet. There was little consideration for how his family would react to him coming home with a pet, though Erik doubted anyone would mind... other than maybe Otis. Erik still had some stuff to trade away-- a handful of scrounged deer teeth, the remainder of the porcupine quills, and the four large front teeth from the same porcupine carcass.
He'd been rather concerned with making sure his new companion was keeping up. Concerned, distracted, call it what you would. That was to say, Erik wasn't really paying attention to where he was going. He didn't see her, honest. Erik tripped, be it on the girl or a strategically placed hole nearby, and landed with a deep oof. "Furfucksake," he grumbled, voice gravelly. Sprawling for a moment before slowly dragging himself back to his feet, trying to make sense of... whatever that was. Already looking for the things he'd dropped to sweep back into the bag he'd borrowed from Fuji, unaware of his surroundings for the most part.
