The sky is dark but the air and the plants are awake, so our young protagonist know that the sun will come up in a couple of hours. Time to get up. He needed food and to get food he would either have to g dumpster diving or he would need to get money. To be perfectly honest dumpster diving had lost its charm after a week. He throws the cover off of himself and pushes the flaps of the box he is resting in open and crawls out. He rests on his knees and arches his back with his hands on his lower back, popping it. Multiple audible sounds can be heard as he does so and he groans.
"I'm going to have to get more pillows," He says to himself. "These old ones have gone flat." As of late, he has only had enough money to get food, so by 'get' a couple more pillows he means 'steal'. He stretches some more to get all the kinks out of his body. He has been sleeping in the biggest box he could find, which was admittedly not very big causing him to have to curl around himself a little more than foxes naturally could. Not to mention he had to sleep in his bulky trousers and cloak to keep warm at night in the winter. And he had to be very still lest he is discovered by a nosy knight and shipped off to the nearest orphanage. After his stretching, he lets out a relaxing breath and gets to his feet. He casually walks from the alley and shoves his hands in his pockets while humming a casual tune. He walks down the dirty street being sure to avoid the particularly big piles of nasty unnamable crap. The street cleaner wouldn't be up for another half hour or so. This is one of the reasons why respectable people never wake up before dawn. Dirty Joe always had the mess of the night cleaned up before then. And if he didn't parents would let their kids harass him for the day. It usually includes rock throwing.
Our protagonist walks to the edge of the town and into the wood to his secret hiding place. Well, it's not so much of a hiding place as to a place where people dare not go. About a hundred years ago it was rumored to be haunted with no real proof so parents told their children not to go there, the children listened to their parents and never investigate and then they grow up and warn their children not to go and then their children's children grow up and warn their children of a danger that has never been. The fox looks around before crouching on the ground in a supposedly random spot before unsheathing his claws to dig into the earth.
After a few minutes, he pulls out a box with a plastic bag wrapped around it and inspects the content inside.
"Still there," he says, "Of course."
He brushes the dirt off of his hands and drags his foot across the ground to replace the dirt back into the hole from which it came. He starts his casual whistling again as he walks back into town, using the strap on the box to carry it with one hand. He has plenty of jobs to do before dawn that doesn't pay that much. Most of them are dirty jobs. Like collect smutty romance novels and sell them secretly to embarrass perverted men (mostly) or sell intel about one business rival to another. Or even cleaning a poor old lady's back yeard after her annoying nephew had a loud booze-filled party. Stuff like that.
The towns little helper.
Nicholas Wilde.