"Excuse me for a moment?"

Tintin goes over to apply medi-gel, provide a water bottle, and -

He slaps his forehead. "Raziya, you must be terribly hungry. I've got some meat in my pack, I'll set it to roasting." He removes the snake meat from his pack, salts it lightly, then uproots a scrubby bush and turns it into a small, very smoky cookfire while the other guy gets his bearings.

The other guy goes through similar motions to Raziya's, also looking and sounding extremely groggy and hungover. The feral dude sticks his head out from behind the rock again to watch what the new sound is, and after determining it is not a threat he returns to his hiding spot.

Other guy's first words might be a bit surprising, though: "Of fucking course they have mind control drugs."

"Mind control drugs?" Tintin asks. "That's concerning. I'm concerned. Would you like to elaborate."

He raises a hand in a "please wait a moment" gesture and starts drinking from the water bottle.

Tintin will certainly accept this.

"My name is Valentin Saint-Martin, by the way," he mentions as the man drinks. "I am very foreign, and deciding what to do now that I'm stuck here."

The man finally lowers the bottle and says, "Thank you. I am Taharqi, not at all foreign, and very grateful for the rescue." He looks up at Tintin as he offers the bottle back, then blinks when he notices Raziya there. She raises a hand in greeting and he nods. "Mind control drugs, the werehyenas have some ritual and the drugs are meant to turn you into their... thralls. —fuck I bet the Darfari have some, too. Fuck."

"Then - then I'm very glad I rescued you. Can the ones who have already been turned be saved somehow?"

Tintin makes a mental note to be less careful about killing the hyena-people, and more careful about hurting their human pets.

"I don't know, hopefully we wait it out and they flush it all out over time? If that doesn't work we can kill them and hope when they get back they are alright—"

    "Come back?" asks Raziya.

"—right, I don't really know why it works for me, do I..."

    "What are you talking about?"

"Sorry, ugh, my head is still fuzzy." He slumps forward to rest his head on his hands.

"Are you saying that - you've come back from the dead?"

"A couple of times, yeah." He lifts his left hand—no, left wrist, the gem glows a bit as he moves around. "Pretty sure it's the bracelet. I can do it, my housemate can do it, I have never met anyone else who can."

    "You have a house? Here?" asks Raziya in wonder.

"Yeah, Sendhei and I built it."

    "—your housemate is called Sendhei? Stygian? What did he get exiled for?"

"Unlawful unsupervised fornication."

    "What a coincidence."

"So this is less of a religious belief, more of an actual magical power," Tintin clarifies. "I am very far from home."

He takes a moment to rotate the snake meat, and removes his third, penultimate bottle of water to leave in the sand by the madman's hiding-rock.

"Definitely actual magical power, I don't think any of the gods had anything to do with it."

    "Set might have—"

"Set is an asshole who does not care about any of us. Not that that matters, if any gods have their eyes on these blighted lands it will be the likes of Yog." Raziya shivers at that name. "What did you mean by coincidence?"

    "I was a concubine of the Stygian pharaoh," she says, "and I was exiled for having sex with one of his dancers, a man named Sendhei, unlawfully and unsupervisedly."

"The Stygian pharaoh should jump into a pit of scorpions," Taharqi opines.

"That is quite a coincidence. And I fully agree. Some crimes should be punished; adultery is not one of them."

"The problem was not the adultery, it was doing it while he wasn't around. Any of his concubines can only have sex with other people with his consent which usually only happened when he was watching."

"Equally charming," Tintin opines. "-should we perhaps reconvene at Taharqi's house? If you'll have us," he asks Taharqi.

"Of course." He looks at the wall, then up north at the highlands. "It's about five to six days to the south by horse, if we are where we think we are.."

    "You knew about this place before?"

"Yeah, I was actually captured by the werehyenas on my way back south from hereabouts. I told my horse to get back on her own when I noticed we were pretty surrounded, so hopefully she's still alive."

(The feral dude shows up again for a second just to grab his water before hiding behind the rock once more.)

"...should we bring our feral friend?" Tintin asks. "He's likely to be fairly high-maintenance, but he might be useful in our studies of the... mind control drug."

"Do you have some extra horses hidden somewhere or are we going to have to actually walk back? Walking our feral friend back might be harder than just knocking him out and tying him up, depending on just how feral he is."

"I do not have a horse," Tintin says. "If I had a spare eezo core I could make a very light motorcycle out of the omni-gel in my pack; unfortunately, I don't, so we will probably have to walk. That being the case, I suppose we'll have to leave him behind. We can raid their camp at some point if we want indoctrinated subjects."

He starts deconstructing his chair and pouring it back into the omni-gel canister.

"You sure said very many words, there," says Taharqi, raising an eyebrow and grinning slightly. "If he is acting like a werehyena's thrall, we might be able to actually just convince him to come with us."

"Omni-gel is something I can make things out of, like chairs; an eezo core is a power source; a motorcycle is a self-propelled vehicle. If you think it's a good idea, I'm happy to try."

He pours the last of the chair into the canister, re-seals it, and starts decompiling the blanket he put over Taharqi and Raziya. Halfway through, he removes the snake meat from the fire. "Giant snake meat, anyone?"

    "Meat," says Raziya, her head snapping so fast towards it you can almost hear her neck crack.

"Give me a few pieces? Small ones, I want to give them to our feral friend."

"Of course." Tintin fabs three plates and two forks, and doles out snake meat. Moderate portions for himself and Raziya, several small pieces for Taharqi.

He has a bite. Unexciting, but not half bad; it flakes like fish, with the more solid flavor of white meat. He wonders idly if there are lemon trees in this desert. Probably not, right? Probably not.

Taharqi grabs them and walks over to the boulder, slowly, crouching low. Feral Friend sticks his head out once again and yips when he sees the other man so close, then starts growling. "I'm a friend," he says, in a low voice, not making eye contact with the man, looking somewhere between the ground and the man's chest. "I have food. I think you can understand me, yeah? They can still talk. So you can probably still talk, too." He stops walking then slowly holds out his hands to show the man the meat, then once again slowly lowers them and places a single piece on the ground. He withdraws his hands but does not back off, and stays where he is, not looking at the man and not moving.

Tintin observes this process.