Feral Friend starts growling at the back of his throat as he looks between the food and Taharqi, but Taharqi does not move or raise his eyes. He takes a step towards the meat, still growling, and yips when Taharqi says, "It's okay. Focus on the food. You can understand me. I know you don't think I'm in your pack, but we are the closest thing you have to a pack right now. You gotta stick with us to survive." The man had stopped growling after a few words, and now he whines a bit and takes another step towards Taharqi. "I am going to take a step back, and I am going to place more food here," he announces slowly. "I will place food all the way over to where we are, but you can run away whenever you want. You shouldn't, though. I know you are confused, but we are not the ones you should be afraid of. You will be fine." And with that he starts taking some very soft, very slow, very small steps back, creating a trail of food, and the other man just keeps watching.

Once Taharqi is far enough, he crawls over to the first morsel of meat, takes it, and eats it, watching Taharqi intently all the while. Taharqi still does not stand back up, or look at the man, and just waits patiently.

(Raziya is absolutely ignoring anything going on over there to focus on her food.)

"You're very good at this - talking-down - thing," Tintin says agreeably.

He doesn't turn to look over his shoulder at Valentin or acknowledge him verbally, but he does smile at the ground.

    The man takes another step towards the next morsel of food, grabs it, sniffs it, and eats it. His brows furrow in concentration while he chews, and after he swallows he opens his mouth and says, "Ho... Ho........ Horan. Ho. Ran."

"Ho... ran," Taharqi repeats. "Is that your name? Horan?"

    He still looks like he's having a lot of trouble concentrating, but he nods. "Ho... ran. Ee... Y..." He whines and shuts his eyes and then moans in a much more humanlike sounds. "Horan," he says one more time.

Raziya looked up at them when Horan spoke, and is now watching, too.

Tintin nods slowly. Does it hurt him to speak, or to think, he wonders.

"I am going to eat, now," says Taharqi, "but I will leave this food here for you. We have more. We have plenty for all of us. You can get your pieces of meat here, and take them with you, or you can join us. It is up to you." Horan looks at the meat when Taharqi speaks, and then Taharqi puts the rest of the meat on the ground, takes a few steps back, then sits and turns around so that his back is to Horan. He releases a breath, then turns up to look at Valentin and grin, now that his teeth are no longer visible to the Feral Friend.

Tintin smiles back, though since he's more visible to Horan he refrains from showing teeth. "Good show," he murmurs.

"Thank you," he murmurs back.

    "Where'd you learn that?" Raziya asks with her mouth full.

"Here and there," he replies, vaguely enough. "He can understand us, the other thralls of the Dogs of the Desert can, too. But whatever they gave us... made us more like hyenas. Or, made him more like a hyena, it failed to work for us. I wonder why."

Horan himself seems to be having trouble actually understanding the murmured conversation—too many words, too low a volume, too confusing—but he's making progress towards them and grabbing the meat trail Taharqi left for him.

"I interrupted the ritual in the middle," Tintin mentions. "It's possible they had already injected him with something else, before I arrived, and were waiting on the two of you for... some reason."

"—a ritual. Right. The drug itself only opens us up, that's... the drug itself does not control us, it just keeps us pliant so that Jhebbal Sag can get in."

    The mention of that name makes Horan snap up to look at Taharqi's back with a whine and makes Raziya breathe in so quickly she nearly chokes on her food. She starts coughing, her eyes filling with tears, but she's still looking at him. "I—that name—" she says in between breaths.

"It's their god," Taharqi explains. "I think. I... did not know him, before."

Tintin looks dubious, though somewhat disturbed by the paired reaction. "I have never encountered a real god," he says. "Do you have... some evidence of these gods, other than the word of their priests? And, um, drug-induced hallucinations."

Now Raziya and Taharqi look at Tintin with bemused looks on their faces. "You mean... other than the miracles at their altars? I have heard that sufficiently pious people can summon avatars of their gods but not actually seen one, per se."

"What form do these miracles take? - to be clear, I do have some evidence that the laws of reality as I know them are not the same as I have always imagined, so I'm not dismissing these gods out of hand in the same way I would be had I not teleported across the galaxy a few hours ago. I am simply an empiricist."

"You seem to be from rather farther away than I thought," Taharqi says, frowning.

    "You've never seen any miracles?" asks Raziya. "Are you a follower of Crom?"

"I am from farther away than anyone you have ever met or could ever meet," Tintin says with a little bow. "If you could walk on air, you could walk without stopping for longer than the world has existed and not get halfway to the place where I stood twelve hours ago. I have no idea who Crom is. All of the gods I have ever heard of were either made up by someone to give themselves power over the people who believed them, or, in one case, aliens with powers that the people who worshipped them didn't understand."

"—I have never heard that word before and I somehow understood it," says Taharqi. "'Aliens'."

"-huh. That's... not my translation software..."

He fiddles with his right wrist, which glows orange for a moment, and says "Can you still understand me?"

"Yes," says Taharqi, and Raziya nods.

"Very strange. I suppose I can save some of the battery power that would otherwise be spent on translation; now it will last a few hundred more years after my death."

Horan is now close enough to them that he can look around Taharqi at the rest of their food. He is not the cleanest of eaters, but he looks downright ravenously at it. Taharqi continues to studiously ignore him.

"Anyway, I am pretty sure the gods are not made up. I believe Set's most basic miracle is turning branches into snakes, all you need is a shrine to him, branches, and some blood."

"That does sound difficult to fake," Tintin concedes. "Alright. And I suppose I will have offended this hyena god terribly by stealing his sacrifices, and he will now be out for my blood?"

"I have never heard of gods personally going after anyone."

    "There's stories, though," says Raziya. "Curses, and chosen people going after those who have angered the gods."

"I think his chosen people will be after me anyway, I did fling them across their own arena. And threaten to break their legs."

    "Not chosen," Horan says, and when both Taharqi and Raziya look at him he flinches and takes a step back.

"If those hyena people weren't his chosen, who is?"

Horan shakes his head and looks down at the ground without saying anything more.