Haunted Wood no one likes a beggar slightly overdressed

He’d never really had a rhyme or reason for the directions he’d wandered off in. Starting off from Oklahoma, it had been north, into the plains, largely because it started to feel a little too hot and muggy when he wandered in the opposite direction. Then it’d been wandering towards the hazy outline of distant, towering mountains… then going through those mountains and catching sight of what he would eventually learn was the distant sea as he headed through them. Then it was a quest to see that. He figured that’s what life for him would be—a series of hooks and leads acting as make-shift stepping stones across this great checkered land. It suited him just fine. Sometimes having an aim was a little too restricting.
 
The rest of it was just acting as a tourist. One of the big reasons he was deciding to linger in the Teekon Wilds as long as he already had was that of interest verging on morbid fascination: with a place as ravished as this by plague and pestilence, he’s curious to see what happens. It’d be another fine leaf of a tale in the book of his life, one that he could wheel out to impress before he disappeared into the night as he tended to do. It truly was widespread, also; no matter how far he ventured, it seemed barely any green had been left on any of the trees or on the ground underfoot. It did not bode well.
 
He cants his head slightly at her reply. It’s strange; he can’t seem to think of any reason why someone would want to go around looking wounded all the time. Wasn’t safe. Any hunter would know that the wounded were the ones picked off first—though maybe she invited that kind of thing. Cash wasn’t one to underestimate anyone, since it was usually something directed towards him. No one would think that a skinny, smooth-talking loner would be much of a fighter, but he had to be in order to have gotten this far.
 
She seems peaceable though. All the better. He’s gotten a little tired of petty physical disputes.
 
“Fashionable?” He seemed amused by it. He’d never really gotten that before—to most pack folk, loners looked dirty and unkempt, though there just weren’t enough hours in the day to groom all of what the road tossed at you back off. “Don’t know about that, but I’ll thank you for it.”
 
A pause in which he studies her with a scrutinizing eye; suddenly it’s a puzzle to be solved. “Not blood, though. Doesn’t smell like it.” He takes a moment to sniff the air, looking down as if in thought. He looks up a second later, eyes bright like he’d found what he was looking for. “Aw, but it’ll be too bad if you make yourself up like that with sap or berries. It’ll be tough to keep that up now…”