Jade stumbled in covered in mud. She grinned as she tracked it across the hard floor, which a moment earlier had quite literally been so clean one could eat off it without much worry. People stared at the girl, who plop-plop-plopped across the floor. Good. Let them stare. She had learned a long time ago that making it obvious you don't mind drawing attention is a good way to avoid suspicion. It's a common myth that the suspicious will act suspicious, and only true of the ones who are more or less harmless anyway. It's far better, if you have something to hide, to make a spectacle of yourself. Once people get over your oddity, they discount you as harmless.
This is what she was counting on as she sat down at the bar and dropped onto it a few coins encrusted in dirt.
"What will this get me?" she asked. "Food, not booze." She affected a forlorn sigh, and mumbled just loud enough she knew the bartender could hear, "I'm so hungry..." She knew the payment wasn't enough, but thought she looked pitiful enough to get by on sympathy. She'd devised a system recently in which she wove a piece of cloth through her coin pouch in such a way that it didn't jingle when she walked, an important detail to remember when pretending to be entirely broke. Not that she was far from being broke, admittedly; she had to make her money stretch.
The bartender watched her bright green eyes light up at the roll and piece of mutton he placed in front of her, and smiled, feeling good about the kindness he'd done this poor girl. She'd had honey on bread only recently, but was craving meat, and besides, she'd made the bartender happy. Surely this counted as a good deed.
It as with this thought in her mind and a bit of roll in her mouth that she noticed the woman to her left. She couldn't help drawing a comparison to herself. Pale skin, dark hair. Around the same height and build. Those eyes, though. Were she not used to concealing her emotions, she would have immediately looked away from their intensity.
As things were, however, she gave no outward sign of being startled, and instead merely nodded and, roll still in her mouth, casually mumbled something that vaguely sounded like a, "how do you do?"
