"Conan, ma'am," he answered shakily, catching sight of her weapon. It was a common enough sight in Emillion to bear arms, and he—child of two Fighter families—was more than used to the idea. Still, his imagination ran free. What was he to a woman scorned, armed only with a dagger? From this vantage, she was especially intimidating. And he had just provoked her with clumsiness, his preferred "weapon" of a slingshot left in his mother's custody.
A glance to the dogs' reactions calmed him. Not moving from his new home on the ground, the boy looked from the pair to the woman and back again. His fingers twitched with a desire to scratch the larger behind the ears but thought better of it.
"I was playing, uh, hide-and-seek with younger siblings." Even to him, this sounded like a poor excuse to go running headfirst into strangers. "Also, tag," he explained. "We mixed the two games together. It's more fun this w—usually, when I'm not running into things."