[OOC: OK, new topic, but I'll leave the old one open a bit longer for any parting shots...]
Conversation flagged for a time as Sister Rose negotiated what was a not-very-good road back to the main one, giving her, and the others, some time to think.
I thought that being-watched sensation would ebb out once we got away from the ruins of Leonish. The girl must have been from there, and was living off the land. I bet that if we inquired among the farmers of the area, we'd find that there's been some minor pilferage going on. The land is fertile enough that they probably haven't worried about it ... but what did she do during the winters? I'm not sure I really want to know. And there's the fact that she looks like somebody from the Millenarian eugenics project...
The thing was, though, the sense of being watched wasn't going away. It was almost as though the girl was tagging along beside them unseen. Rose took the chance of glancing away from the road a few times, hoping to see a glimpse of jeans out in the woods, but she never saw anything more than flashes of ill-defined movement out of the corner of her eye ... maybe.
It was with some relief that she turned the wagon back onto the wider main road ... but the sensation still hadn't gone away, although it did weaken as the forest pulled back away from the road. Well, in any event, there was something else to think about now. A cloud cap was forming over the higher mountains at the southern end of the range, where they were heading. There was nothing out of the ordinary about that -- mountains made their own weather -- but Rose winced; if they hadn't spent so much time checking out the Leonish site, and the girl, they might have made it to the pass before the inevitable afternoon thunderstorms broke. Now it was going to be touch and go, at the minimum.
"Looks like rain," she commented to whoever might be listening, and indeed, the first roll of distant thunder applied an exclamation point to her observation.