"Okay, one of these should work."

Mhinasukambre withdraws with a trio a low-quality but not-rusted-through locks strung through her fingers.

"Let's find somewhere well lit, it'll help if you can see the tumblers your first couple of times. You got a preference for nearer or farther from other folk?"

"Farther."

Mhinasukambre sends her to fetch some kindling, then they start a fire together at the outskirts of camp.

"Alright, so, have you ever seen the mechanism inside one of these before?" She holds up the three locks.

Nope.

She pulls out an expensive looking dagger, which seems heavier in her hand than an item of its size ought to be, and starts whittling away at one of the metal boxes.

The iron casing around the locking mechanism peels apart like wood shavings. She whistles a merry tune as she turns it over carefully in her hand, making sure not to damage the tumbler in the process of exposing it to the night air.

"Here." When she's done, she holds it out so the light from the fire glints off its innards. "Take a close look."

She does, turning it this way and that to get a feel for how the pieces go together and how, if at all, gravity plays into it.

Mhinasukambre gives a quite adequate introductory lesson on lockpicking.

She's enthusiastic, but very clumsy.

Mhinasukambre's patient.

"Sometimes, if you want to do something that you don't have ideal attributes for, you've got to come at it from a different direction than most people do?"

"When I was younger, I wanted to be a soldier, but I was too weak to even hold a sword properly. I spent a while puzzling it over, considered my strengths instead of my deficits, and approached things by another angle..."

She moves her arm quickly, and the air beside her (the side further away from the person she's talking to, naturally) erupts into a brief storm of glittering blade strokes.

"It took a lot of years to get the hang of it, doing it my way. But once I did, I could take people off guard." She lowers her arm. There's no sign of the blade she held a moment before. "Whether you pick the lock, or bust the lock, or squeeze through a window? There's always a way through if you look for it."

"Mmhm." She's got some experience with that, yep. (It'd still be easier if she could actually manage this, but, well. Not today, at least.)

"I'm pretty sure Emi's free tonight. She'll be out waiting for you by now, if'n that's the case?"

She starts packing her lockpick kit back up.

"Mmhmm." She'll keep the lock, if that's all right.

It's quite alright!

Be careful of the sharp edges, though?

"Mmhmm."

She tucks it into her bundle and off she goes. She has a pretty good guess of where Emi will be.

She doesn't find Emi where she expects to.

But she does find a scrawny desert fox that Emi'd been training this past week.

The fox eyes her expectantly. It looks very much on edge, but not due to her presence: it's eaten food from her hand enough times to recognize her scent.

Huh.

She stashes her bundle and tries to get the fox to approach her.

The fox hops towards her once, then turns and dashes off.

It stops after a few bounds, though, and peers over its shoulder as though to check if she's following.

Yep, here she comes.

The fox winds its way out into the dark, its path purposeful and its pace expedient.

It gets harder to keep track of the energetic critter as they get further from the campfires--it seems to vanish whenever it stops moving, but when it bounds forward again her eyes can still track it through the gloom.

And then, abruptly, the fox is not the only landmark she has to navigate by.

Cries of pain.

Emi's.

From somewhere up ahead in the dark.

Oh no.

She can't go back for help - she can't tell them anything - but maybe there's something she can do anyway.

She continues onward, slower now as she puts some effort into stealth.

The cries die down, but the girl can still hear Em sobbing on the ground somewhere ahead. She can also hear the sound of scraping gravel. Like someone pinned under something, trying to claw their way free?

These lands are dangerous. Emi herself had said that, hadn't she? What's she doing all the way out here, alone..?

She'll worry about that later. The question for now is, what's going on, and can she make it stop?

As she creeps closer, she can see that Emi isn't alone.

Koshnak's out here too. She didn't hear him before, because his quiet grunts of effort can hardly be heard over Emi's intermittent cries, but at this distance his hulking outline is obvious.

He's on his knees in the gravel, bent over halfway with his fingers splayed out on the ground in front of him. He's rocking back and forth, a steady rhythm like riding a horse.