Happenstance [hyperfitched, minieclover]

It was unusually rainy in District Ten. The entire atmosphere in the district was gloomy. The sky was grey and every hour or so another wave of rain would pour through the district as if on a timer. It never lasted more than thirty minutes, but it made it extremely hard to get any real work done outside. Kellen and his brother were supposed to clean out the entirety of the sheep pen today for this month's inspection in two days. He'd been sloping around in the mud and rain for three hours now and his brother was no where to be seen. Frankly, it was pissing him off. After another five minutes of attempting to shift through what was mud and what was feces, Kellen threw his shovel into the dirt and stormed inside his empty house.

It took him only a few seconds to strip to his bare in the kitchen; there was no way he was bringing the dirt into his room. His spare set of clothes was waiting on his bed for him: black boxers, dark blue jeans, and a navy blue t-shirt. He'd taken the precaution of laying them out just in case he needed them after he had gotten a good look at the sky this morning. Unfortunately, he only owned one pair of shoes, so after he threw on his clean clothes he had to run back to the kitchen to put the wet, muddy shoes on his bare feet. There was no reason to waste a clean pair of socks when he was just putting on dirty shoes. Kellen tied his hair back into a small pony tail and left out the front door.

Last week, one of the store owners in the square was telling him about a new shipment of technology that was coming in that was supposedly going to help cut slaughter times in half. The man said it was predicted to be the biggest selling item of the year in the district. They were also getting in a new kind of feed for the animals that was supposed to help enrich the taste of the meat. Kellen figured it couldn't hurt to go to the square and check out the prices of some of the new product since there wasn't much else he could do around the house anyway. The walk to the square was a good ten minutes from his house, during which he accidentally stepped in no less than three puddles. If his shoes were even remotely clean before he left, they most certainly were not now. You could barely see his shoes under all the dirt that was drying to their surface. The bottoms of his pants were now stiff and muddy as well. Most of District Ten was dirt roads and grass, with the exceptional gravel: there weren't many way to avoid the dirt on the way in.

Kellen arrived in the square just as another onslaught of rain began. It started light at first, he had barely even noticed that it was raining. But it came down harder has he entered in the middle of the square. It was busier than he expected it to be on a rainy day, but he supposed there wasn't much else that could be done. Today it was each to identify which social class every person fit into. The rich were carrying umbrellas and the poor covered their heads with whatever clothing they had in an attempt to shelter themselves from the weather. Kellen could see the people like him too; the ones who knew that the biggest danger was in getting wet, and that had already happened. He pushed through a couple of people to try to squeeze in and look at the items in some of the outside booths. They always had items for cheaper than the real stores because they were knockoffs or returns or damaged. "Excuse me." Kellen pushed someone out of the way, not paying attention to which direction they went.

The booth owner seemed a little overwhelmed by all the prospective costumers and wasn't sure where to focus her attention. Kellen made eye contact with her for a brief moment and felt her eyes take in his whole appearance before skipping over him to speak to the man next him who was dressed a little wealthier. He couldn't blame her; money was important in the districts. Something slammed into the back of his neck. He grunted and reached up to touch it. It was wet and gritty and he didn't identify it in enough time before it slid down the back of his shirt: mud. "What the hell?" He spun around, eyes passing over everyone, searching for the source. There were two boys giggling at another booth and pointing at him, but their hands didn't have any mud on them. There was a girl standing to his left, but he couldn't see her hands because they were behind his back. "Who threw that?" He was getting angry, but no one else was looking his way.

Out of suspects, he turned to the girl, "Hey. Did you see who threw that?"

OOC: I feel like that was a little bit of a rough start for me, sorry!