She hurried to take another step forward and flinched as a twig broke underfoot.  The smallest of whimpers escaped through her lips.

When the enemy soldiers had found her in the cellar, dragged her into a group with the nine other children of her village, she’d known that her parents were already dead or dying.

😥

As the soldiers had marched them through the village and into the woods, she’d stared hard at the ground, tears streaming down her cheeks, unwilling to look at the blood, the bodies, that littered her hometown.  People who she had seen every day of her life.

Rest in peace.

Also, a thing I probably should’ve mentioned a couple posts ago: There is the possibility of Hana’s people being Kurdish, but it seems odd for me that she wouldn’t be fluent in Turkish then, unless her part of Kurdistan overlaps with a different country than Turkey.

She had been hidden in the cellar beside her house.  She had heard the screams and gunfire.  Too much gunfire, considering how few working guns the men and women of her village had.

😦

…maybe the A-Team showed up.

Guns and bullets were too expensive when you lived off your garden and what you could hunt, and a trip to the nearest city to buy such things was dangerous.  What they had were the leftovers, the handful of weapons taken off enemies by the guerilla fighters and left behind or traded in barter when they passed through the village for supplies and medical care.

Makes sense. At least it’s better than nothing.

Those who had the guns lacked the skill or training to use them.  The fighters were supposed to defend them against people like this, stop them from getting this far.

Evidently, they failed.

<Walk!> the soldier barked in Turkish.  He jammed his gun between her shoulderblades, hard. 

…

I have a feeling we’re getting curveballed.

He was twice as tall as her, far stronger than her, so there could be no fighting or resisting even if he wasn’t armed.  She stumbled forward into the shrubbery and trees, and branches scraped against her forearms and face.

So is this a Turkish soldier in the U.S., or is “she” in Turkey? Or something in-between?

One foot in front of the other, Hana told herself.

Hana. Nice name. Have we heard it before in this story? I don’t think so.

Her feet were like lead weights as she trudged forward.  The needles on the trees and shrubbery scraped against her skin.  Even the twigs were coarse, almost thorny, catching on her dress and socks, biting through the cloth to scrape her skin and stab at her shoeless feet.

This doesn’t sound like what I’d imagine Turkey to be like, but I’ve never actually been there, so what do I know.

Well, I do know trees with needles are more typically found in colder climates. Y’know, like the one I live it.

<Faster!> the soldier threatened.  He said something else, longer and more complicated, but Hana’s Turkish wasn’t good enough to make it out.

She’s at least somewhat competent in Turkish, but not fluent. Turkish ancestry but raised in the U.S., maybe?

She looked over her shoulder and saw the man back the way she’d come.  He made his meaning explicitly clear by waving his gun toward the other children, who were corralled in the midst of a half dozen other soldiers.  If she didn’t move faster, someone else would pay for it.

…damn.

Besides the obvious meaning here – that there are at least seven of these soldiers and at least three victims, including Hana (probably more) – “other children” tells me that Hana views herself as a child too.

Seven years had given her village false confidence, let them believe that they were far enough away, secluded enough in the valley and forest, that they could escape the worst fighting of the ongoing war.  That illusion had been shattered just hours ago.

Ahh. Well, we’re definitely not in the U.S., then. I feel like Taylor would’ve mentioned it if there were an ongoing war in the U.S.

I’m going to guess the Turks are on one side of the war. But where is this village, and who’s on the other side?

I’m not going to assume the world’s conflicts since the 1980′s have remained the same as on Earth-Aleph, by the way.

…huh. Now that I think about it, Parahumans started showing up during the late stages of the Cold War, assuming history is otherwise approximately the same between the universes. I wonder if it caused an incident, due to one of the sides thinking the first parahumans were experiments meant to be weaponized by the other side. If I recall correctly, Scion was at least implied to show up in American waters or saving Americans – I’m curious about Russia’s reaction to that.