"She's inside," Jerod Thorse a raw recruit into the TCTF's field division, said, clicking off his radio.
"Good work, Thorse," Captain Jeremy Hawsen nodded.
Korowin's general store was a pretty good place to go if you didn't want to be found, since most of the people shopping there tended to ignore you if you weren't actively threatening them. The two TCTF agents were dressed in civilian clothes, so as to avoid making a scene in the store and most likely losing the girl they were pursuing.
The only thing that either of them knew about her was that she was about eight or nine years old and that she had purple hair and green eyes. While having purple hair wasn't very common in Neo-Tokyo, it wasn't entirely unheard of either.
Judging by the way the shop owner had described her, this kid wasn't someone who could afford any kind of hair dye or things like that. So the coloring was most likely natural. Once they were inside the store, Jerod and Jeremy both started looking around.
Both men knew that it was important for them to appear to be just another pair of everyday shoppers, so they were careful about how often they looked at the other people shopping. One of those people was walking over to where Jerod was standing, pretending to look at cooking utensils.
"Did you see that little girl who just came in?" the old woman asked him.
"Huh?" Thorse responded, confused. "What about her?"
"She comes here every so-often, looks around without buying anything, and just walks back out again." The old woman looked sad. "I really think she doesn't have anyone in the world. I've tried to get her to come home with me, so she'd at least have some kind of family. But every time I try to approach her, she runs off."
"What does she look like?" Thorse asked, thinking that this kid might be the one he and the Captain had been sent out to look for.
"She's a sweet looking little girl," the old woman said, sounding wistful. "She has short, kind of messy purple hair, and she also has the prettiest green eyes I've seen in some time."
Thorse nodded, that was almost the exact description of the kid that he and Hawsen had been looking for. The old woman shook her head sadly, walking away. Thorse knew that using his radio would be too conspicuous, so Thorse started heading for the stacks of neatly folded blankets.