Veni, vidi, vici [Jessica]

It was the words carried on the wind that brought the young man to the streets of Florence, the world was moving and Italy was becoming a rising center for painters, scholars, and those with a mind for more fanciful thoughts and feelings. Getting there had been relatively easy, it was making a name for himself that was proving to be a challenge. Mido had always been one for flights of strange fancy, and were he living in a less archaic time, his surreal paintings may have found an easier audience. But so far no one seemed interested in his strange and sometimes unsettling pieces.

But he still needed to eat, and he was a man who refused manual labor as a means of earning coin for his pocket, so he turned to the skills that he did have. His name carried no weight in the world, and so the pay he earned for his portraits was barely enough to put a roof over his head, much less to eat by. He didn't paint the most luxurious picture, dressed in rather tatty old paint-stained clothes, but he was still a somewhat exotic face among these people, his striking height helped. People stopped to ask him about where he came from just as much as they asked to be painted, and he was gaining speed and skill, it was a fair trade off despite the painful growl in his stomach from several missed meals.

He was thankful for the warm sun as he stood at his easel, as he had been for nearly three hours now. His feet were killing him and so was his back from stooping down, but he only needed a little more to afford a small meal at the little bakery nearby, who's smell wfting to him on the breeze was setting his stomach growling mighty loud.