"It's okay," Tintin says. "Sorry. You're doing very well."

Horan looks suspicious at that but decides to finally join their little not-quite-a-circle.

"With all this magic of yours," says Taharqi, "I am sure some werehyenas will not pose any problems."

"It's not magic," Tintin says absently. "But yes, you're quite right, I'm just - worried that the other shoe might drop."

"You are the only one of us here wearing shoes." Or pretty much anything else, for that matter.

    "Worried that what?" asks Raziya between bites.

"I had noticed that," Tintin admits. "I can make you some shoes, if you like. Ah, it's a saying - worried that things will turn out to be worse than I had realized, somehow."

"If we are planning on walking all the way to my house, shoes will be a good idea, yes." Taharqi gets some more meat to offer to Horan, who has been staring suspiciously at all of it, and he gratefully scarfs it all down.

Shoes it is, then. They're more like sandals than enclosed shoes or boots: enough to protect their feet from the hot sand and rocks, without imprisoning their virgin feet and inevitably blistering. They're cushioned. The material might feel a little bit suspicious, to people who've never encountered plastics.

"Anything else? Hat or parasol for the sun? A sword, maybe?"

"You can make a sword of this material?" asks Taharqi, while Raziya puts her sandals on and Horan stares at his suspiciously. "And it actually cuts things?"

"I would be making the sword out of metal," Tintin clarifies. "I could actually make a plastic sword, it just wouldn't hold an edge very well. Better than a stick, but let's go with what works."

"And would this sword be useful at all with your arsenal of not-magic?"

"It's rarely a bad idea to have more people in the party who can fight. I can, actually, be overwhelmed. Potentially even by magic I know nothing about."

"If you can make a battle axe and maybe some good arrows and a bow plus the necessary bits to attach those to my person I am skilled in using them."

    "I can't fight. I can at most survive long enough to run," says Raziya, not sounding particularly regretful.

Horan has figured the sandals out and put them on, but he does not look happy about wearing them. Then again, he might just be generally unhappy.

"An axe! I can do that. Bow and arrows... let me see what I can do, it's not something I've got a design for but it shouldn't be impossible..."

The axe ends up having a sturdy plastic haft and a razor-sharp metal head. The bow is entirely plastic, as are the arrows, which taper to a narrow point. Each weapon has a little magnet that will stick it to a harness that Tintin also compiles for Taharqi, as does the little quiver for the arrows. "Can you give the bow a try and see how it handles? I can do a certain amount of adjustment, and if it turns out I just have no idea what goes into a good bow then I'll just decompile it and we'll stick with the axe."

Taharqi gets up and accepts the bow and one of the arrows. He balances both in his hands, then finds some tree in the distance and shoots at it. His eyebrows raise in surprise when he almost hits it.

"Make the string thicker and the bow itself heavier and less flexible but otherwise this is perfect. Your nonmagic material is way hardier than I would have expected."

"Excellent!"

Tintin decompiles the bow and compiles another, making the requested adjustments, then hands it over.

And with this one he hits the tree dead on. "...I might want to keep this after we get to my house."

"You're welcome to it, if it's an improvement. I can't make you fifty like it, but I doubt you need fifty like it."

"It's—not a strict improvement, over the one I have back home, but it's sideways. This one's longer," he elaborates, smoothly nocking another arrow and shooting while barely looking and hitting another tree twice as far away as the first one. "I haven't really made any longbows, here, haven't needed them, but since this one is free..." He shrugs, and smiles, before putting the bow back down and grabbing the axe to weigh it in his hands. Horen looks at it with more alarm than he did at the bow, but when Taharqi takes a few steps away for some practice swings the feral man returns to his food.

Tintin watches the practice swings appreciatively.

"Is nudity the standard here?" he thinks to ask. "The hyena cult wasn't, and I thought they'd stripped you to sacrifice, but..."

    "I wasn't unclothed before this," says Raziya, "but if my pelts and jewellery were not destroyed by them they probably still have it."

"I am not sure I understand in what sense you mean," says Taharqi, humming thoughtfully as he looks at his axe and changes his grip slightly before some more swings.

"My native culture wears clothing almost all the time. Nudity is reserved for bathing and sex. And clothing has to cover the genitals and breasts."

    "'Has to'? By... law or something?" asks Raziya.

Taharqi nods to himself and returns to their circle where she has finished eating and Horan seems to be mostly just lazily picking at his meat, now. "I think Nordheimers tend to wear a lot pretty often? I do not believe there are any laws about it, though."

"Yes, there's laws about how much you have to wear in public."

Tintin collects plates and forks to decompile.

This gets a fairly strong reaction out of Raziya, at least compared to her more recently-usual calm and complacency. "Wait, actually? What for?" she asks, sounding fairly outraged.

"Um. So, it turns out that when you only remove your clothing for sexual purposes for a thousand years, a strong association develops between nudity and sex, and public nudity becomes seen as - perverse? And unrelatedly, we have very strong norms about not letting children see any sexuality stronger than kissing. And public spaces have children in them."

He shrugs. "Honestly it's really much more of a codified cultural norm than anything anyone put thought into. I do think it's a bit stupid."