There may be a number of jokes in this larger story.
“What the devil is that thing looking for?” asked Jimmy, one eye screwed shut while the other looked through the spyglass. His tone was more resigned than confused. Jimmy probably had already guessed what the answer was.
Mike gave it to him anyway. “It’s looking for us, of course,” he said while using his own spyglass. The two of them were on the second level of the half-buried ruin, carefully poking their spyglasses through the canopy of vines that camouflaged their resting spot.
This gave them an excellent look at the mudnado. It had poured in about twenty minutes after the last wagon had been secured; Mike was pretty sure that it was tracking them, in the same way that a feral chupacabra would track a sheep herd. Right now the mudnado was only about fifteen feet tall and lazily spinning, but Mike knew damned well it could hit twenty five feet’s worth of dervish-spinning death at the first sign of trouble. And it wasn’t showing any signs of leaving, either.
Jimmy had clearly reached the same conclusion there, too. “If it was a beast,” he sighed as he collapsed the spyglass, “we could expect it to wander off for different prey. But it is a water spirit, and there is plenty of water here. It will not ‘starve’ any time soon.”
“Yup. And it’s not hunting us for food anyway,” agreed Mike. “It’s hunting us because it’s mean.” He collapsed his spyglass, too. “Suggestions, Jimmy?”
“Besides blowing it up, Miguel?” asked Jimmy.
“Jimmy, if I had enough kisses to do that the sergeants would be detailing a throwing party right now.” Hand grenades were a newish thing, imported down from Greater Hershey now that the Dominion’s ban on magical gunpowder was no longer quite so unyielding. Mike had no idea why they were called ‘kisses,’ and wouldn’t have cared about the mystery even if it had been pointed out to him.