Since I'm not really expecting you to roll skills in these little pre-game adventures, it is fine to get started before your character sheet is ready.

Ricka enters the temple to Athena, an almost nondescript building some 100 yards downhill from the huge temple to Zeus, and she wonders for a bit what the Parthenon, the temple to Athena in Athens, looks like.  A lot bigger than this, I'm guessing.  She slips through the door in the back into the priests quarters, nodding to a semi-dozing priest as if she expected him and he should expect her.  She didn't really believe it when Whyneks told her about the technique, but here it is, working like a charm.

She moves into the toilet facilities, one of the few places in upper Altis that smells as bad as all of The Dregs smells, and latches the door.  Standing up on the back of the commode, she can just barely reach the top of the rafter where the drop is.  She pulls down the note and frowns at the bite marks on it -- a mouse, or maybe even a rat.  Under the deacon's tutelage she is getting much better at reading, but it still takes her a few minutes to work out what it says.

This message was last edited by the GM at 03:13, Wed 16 Mar 2022.

...well that's...  not great.

Ricka frowns at the substance of the note for rather a longer moment after she'd finished frowning over its decipherment.  She didn't know of any snitches other than herself either.  Her thoughts began to turn to whether she could manage to set up one of  her less-favorite "colleagues" to take the fall.

Hopping down to the floor, she sets the note face-down on a tile that was dark with she dared not contemplate what, ground it into the stone with her shoe a few times to scrape and smudge whatever of the writing could be scraped and smudged, and then down into the commode it went.  If anybody wanted to chase it down there, more power to them.

She's got a long day ahead of her though, Vinefinger had been in one of his moods all week, and there was whispered rumor among the other kids that any of his crew who failed to report back that evening with a satisfactory amount of spoils was going to be spending the night on the street.  Not that the den that he packed his minions into was particularly opulent, of course, but it was by any measure better than a night out in the rain.

Back out of the temple she goes, not needing to nod to the now fully-dozing priest.  She doesn't really care whose temple she's in, on her way out she whispers a brief plea to the only god she'd ever heard of who was relevant to her life: light feet light fingers, she sends to Hermes, friend of thieves.

As she makes her way towards the market square she'd been staking out yesterday she tucks her hair up into her cap:  being unusual in appearance in any way at all was a Very Bad Idea in her line of work, and leaving her hair down would basically amount to wearing a bright red flag on her head.  Not good.  For the thousandth time she indulged in a moment's wistful contemplation of the lifestyles of the rich and powerful, the sort of people who'd be welcomed into the sort of salons where, Ricka had heard in wide-eyed rapturous awe, women could dye their hair.  Luxury.

She laces her fingers together, flexes them backwards a bit, crackcrackcrack say her knuckles.  Time to go to work.

Ricka approaches the market through her usual route, taking the alley between South Road and Trellsen Street.  The alley has, as usual, an assortment of trash and, down the west edge, the slow sludge of numerous chamber pots emptied through the day.  She likes this approach for the early hours, because it is right where chai man and the beignet maker have their shops, and people are eager for their morning beverage and snack.  They are jostling in line and paying less attention to their pockets.

However, as she approaches the last block before the market, she feels a tingle, a little warning bell in her head that she's learned never to ignore.  Someone is getting ready to strike her.  She could continue a few more steps and confront whoever it is, back away slowly, or turn and run.