The Longest Day

[Jocelyn Ivey]

Jocelyn walked carefully through the ruins, her faded red dress stirring the dirt along the ground as she moved. She nestled a small basket in her arms. Her pouch bounced as she stepped and the soft jingle of coins could be heard. She looked down at her wares: a few carrots, a couple slightly bruised apples, several potatoes, and a handful of rabbit pelts. She sighed as she surveyed her meager offerings.

"If this keeps up, I won't have enough to feed Dex this week," she mused aloud.

She didn't necessarily enjoy coming to the Shanty Town market. It was a cesspool, to put it politely, and she felt very uncomfortable among the crowds of people. She shuffled past some rather rough-looking older humans, doing her best to keep from brushing elbows. Jocelyn's eyes darted from side to side as she noticed some rather strange peddlers and ever stranger wares; a jar with a pickled infant pig, a sprig of twisted, bloody thorns that seems to claw at passersby, a bottle of bubbling, smoking, sulfuric fluid that appeared to be trying to escape from its container.

Jocelyn found a nice, relatively clean, slab of mossy marble. She reached into her basket and brought out an old, tattered and dusty blanket. She spread it out and began displaying the contents of her basket.

I hope this goes quickly so I can head home. I still need to catch something for dinner, she thought as her growling stomach interjected. She smoothed out any wrinkles in her blanket and began to watch the crowd as they passed through the market.