Christa "Little Miss Streetwise"

Christa is 12 years old, 4'9" tall, very skinny (73 lbs.), with straggly black hair and green eyes. She is tanned, and very wiry. She wears ragamuffin clothes, suited to her life as an orphan in the Old City. However, Christa has one big advantage: boots of speed. She will never say how she found these, but they enable her to elude any street ruffian or Watchman trying to catch her. She sleeps in a variety of shanty shacks, secret hide-aways, and dark places in the River, Thieves', and Slum Quarters.

In addition to her thieving skills (usually used to victimize drunks), Christa has four further advantages which give her a head start. First, she can easily appear as a boy or a girl, since she is tomboyish in looks, and can pass unrecognized quite often. Second, she is wily and smart, and highly attentive to detail: she has a near photographic memory. Third, she knows the cheapest places to get virtually anything. Fourth, her bare-faced cheek and lack of embarrassment, coupled with her natural charm, make it difficult ever to take offense at her.

Christa knows lots of people in the Old City, and is most easily found hanging around the Green Dragon Inn (location R2), where Ricard Damaris (see Chapter 6) shoos her away after giving her a little hot food and perhaps a copper coin-he has a soft spot for her but doesn't want her influencing his daughter. She hangs around to pick the pockets of people coming outside, usually when it is dusk.

Christa can be an amusing and useful contact for the PCs, since she can tell them where to find almost anyone or anything- in exchange for a few coppers or some hot food. She will take a shine to a kindly PC who realizes her mental abilities, or a thief who teaches her a little skill. A mean trick is to pick on a charismatic male PC and have Christa fall in love with him, which will lead to her following him about and being intensely jealous of and spiteful to any female associate or fellow adventurer.

AC 7/5 (Dex 17; boots of speed MV 12: NM; hp 4; THAC0 20; #AT 1; Dmg 1d4 (dagger) or 1 (fist Str 9, Dex 17, Con 11, Int 13, Wis 15, Cha 16; SA pick pockets 30%, hide in shadows 35%; AL N (CN).

Magical item: boots of speed.