A third of the world is covered by the howling maelstrom that was born a century ago. It is not ordinarily a place you'd find people surviving, but sometimes things appear in it. Strange things - otherworldly things - brought into the mist of a howling storm of cloudy dust and wind that blows in whichever direction it wants.
"Eefa, I think I can get your hair clean, can you move your head over here so I can reach?"
She's got one hand combing through Eefa's hair, leaving a trail of clean strands behind, pausing to pick at all the tangles,
and another hand steadying herself on the cage, picking the lock with her touch-telekinesis,
noise muffled with a lullaby.
She has! She stopped moving even a little bit when she heard it and is only taking shallow quiet breaths.
Well at least she's not jumping the gun. Detangle, detangle. Glancing at the guard to see if he's any good at his job.
Okay. She gets Eefa's hair in to a loosely tolerable state where she wouldn't call Mental Health Nuisance on parents who let their kid walk around in public like that, and then she concludes her lullaby and gets under the blanket. If Eefa makes a break for it she's ready to create a distraction.
"Hours on a mule?"
Eefa heard them saying they'd stop there during the afternoon the next day.
Well, the mules move at a walking pace, you can't sustain much more than that even if you have four legs. Can Pelape walk that far... hm.
Does the guard have a gun. Do any of them have guns, actually.
She's not really confident in her touch telekinesis making her bulletproof.
Also this keeps... happening? And she's increasingly unsure that it's a dream.
And they put a baby in a cage full of her own shit, so.
Fuck them.
She plans out all her movements in her head. She stares at the nearest pistol trying to derive how it probably works.
Reaches out to just barely touch it with the tip of a fingernail and slide it with perfect smoothness into her hand.
And then she can shift around, oh so slowly and causally, like she's just having trouble getting comfy in the wagon, and -
"Silence," she says, holding it to the guard's head.
"I'd love it if everybody could still be alive in the morning. Unload your gun."