"...exiled for piracy, one assumes?"

A shrug. "I have not encountered many of them in my travels, I don't know where they tend to congregate, and the few I did run into were not very friendly either."

"Well. I'm not sure if satisfying our curiosity is worth dealing with pirates - I've really had enough of them for a lifetime."

And if anyone asks about that, he's happy to extend into one of his stories of dealing with pirates.

Taharqi has a kind of... look... in his eyes, when Tintin tells his stories.

It's definitely not an unappreciative look.

Tintin notices this! He grins, continuing to describe a risky bit of gunplay.

Tintin's actually painfully attractive, it's kind of unfair. He continues being painfully attractive for the rest of the long walking day, regardless of whether he was right about getting desperately horny for being naked (he wasn't, to Taharqi's mix between disappointment and feelings of vindication).

And eventually it gets dark enough that Taharqi declares they should probably stop for the night.

Tintin helps set up camp.

"Should I go out hunting?" he asks Taharqi. "I've got more rations in my pack, but I'd like to keep them for if we get into combat and I need a few thousand calories in a few hours."

"That would be smart. I suppose I would be more hindrance than help if I came with?"

"No, not at all. I'm not used to tracking animals, and I'm only guessing but if you've survived in this place for long then I'd think you'd have a better grasp than I."

    "He's a Kushite," says Raziya, looking up from where she's found a seat and is stretching and massaging her legs. "I've heard they are born on horseback and left behind and only the ones that find meat and bring it back to their parents' house are allowed to live."

"I am pretty sure at least one of those things is not true," Taharqi says, but he's smiling.

"Then you can do everything difficult, and I shall hang behind and shoot dumb animals. An efficient allocation of talent."

"What do you shoot them... with... exactly?" Taharqi asks, checking that his bow is in fine condition.

Tintin removes his pistol from the magnetic holster on his backpack and starts checking it over in turn. "A very, very small piece of metal fired at a significant fraction of the speed of light. Strictly speaking the main reason I have this weapon is to counter people's kinetic barriers, but believe me, it kills things too."

"'Speed of light' and 'kinetic barriers'," he says, raising an eyebrow.

"Oh, have I not explained lightspeed? It's - when you think of things as being instant, they almost never are. There's a tiny, tiny gap in between the light of a candle leaving that candle and hitting the rock a few feet away. The sun is so far away from us that it takes eight minutes for the sunlight to reach us. The speed of light is, literally, the fastest anything can ever go - without the Mass Effect messing with it, of course. And kinetic barriers are a bit of technology that causes fast-moving projectiles like arrows or the bullets from my gun to stop moving instead of striking and killing the person the barrier is on, and also interfere with biotic powers. But they can only block so much before needing to recharge, and so if you're like me and you do your best work without barriers getting in the way, you can just shoot them a couple of times to overload their barriers and then do whatever unpleasant thing it is you're planning."

"And so that probably just completely beats whatever... non-technological barriers there are. Like an animal's skin." He reattaches his bow to his back, shaking his head.

"Skin, yes. If something has an inch-thick metallic shell I'd be better served by a biotic detonation."

"Don't think I know of any animals with one of those," he says with a crooked smile, "but I will warn you if I ever do. Shall we?"

"Yes, let's."

Tintin keeps his pistol low, pointed away from his compatriots, and walks a bit behind Taharqi. 

The light is low but not entirely gone, and anyway Taharqi soon finds a trail. "Some predator, probably, not trying to hide at all," he says in a low voice. "Big?" The broken branches of trees and little imperfections of shrubbery would indicate something that reaches about shoulder height on him.

Which is to say, a few inches taller than Tintin. "Excellent."

Taharqi keeps following and soon finds the creature that created those tracks: an enormous boar, surrounded by a couple of less enormous but still pretty large other specimens. The biggest one is indeed nearly as tall as Taharqi—on all fours.

Meat for days.

He puts a finger to his lips then points at it and looks at Tintin's gun then face.

Tintin raises the gun, his arm perfectly steady, and pulls the trigger.

There's a dim flash of blue light, a loud crack, and a sizable hole in the boar's head.

The other two boars screech in surprise, locate the new threat and...

...charge. Rather than running away. Welcome to the Exiled Lands.

Well that's unfortunate for everyone involved.

Tintin gestures, and a pair of Throw fields materialize and streak into their faces. He isn't expecting that to do much more than stagger them; that's what the pistol is for. Crack. Crack.