**'Thanks for your patronage, enjoy your dungeoneering!'** Business was pretty good in Tolbana, with a steady stream of players looking for reagents in preparation for the Floor Dungeon; unfortunately Pyotr wasn't the only entrepreneur in the area and competition had driven her prices down by a third. She had still made a healthy profit, almost enough to invest in another job lot of trade goods or hire an escort to grind some decent leather. Tapping a fork against her now empty plate as she considered her choices, Pyotr was caught off guard by a small voice on the other end of the table. She paused for a long moment before replying, struck by how young the girl was. Scary thought that kids like that had gotten mixed up in this crazy stuff, but it made a kind of ironic sense too. What could a kid possibly want more than the world's first proper VRMMORPG on the day of release? _The poor girl must have been terrified..._

**'Yes, obviously. Pyotr Gubbins; has a certain ring to it, no?'** _Wait, no... Gubbins Pyotr._ It took a moment to mentally correct herself; with the use of usernames to identify people as opposed to real names, Sword Art Online had a way of making you forget which way around yours went. It probably didn't help that she hadn't used hers online for years... **'Joking, joking. Gubbins means... well, it means bits and bobs. Stuff you sell, like... this.'** A sly smirk crossing her features, Pyotr tossed an apple at the girl, one of the many things she had had out to sell. **'On the house. So... do you have any, uh... friends around here? Are they still asleep?'** A part of her prayed that the girl had companions, but another, more cynical part suggested that a lot of people might take advantage of a little kid in this situation. Besides, even if they were benign it took a special kind of moron to bring a child into a life or death situation; she belonged back in the Town of Beginnings or at least somewhere safer than the front lines.