"Didn't you say you also bathe nude? And what about when it's very warm?"

"We bathe nude, but privately - remember I mentioned running water, the convenient water inside your home? We have private bathrooms for that. And the culture that originated this norm is from an area where it never got as warm as it does here, or I don't think it would have caught on before we had clothes like these -" he gestures at his suit "- which are comfortable in just about any temperature."

    "I don't like it," she grumbles.

"It does sound odd," Taharqi agrees. "This thing you are wearing is comfortable?" he asks, looking at Valentin and then directly at his crotch. It's not a sexual look—merely one of curiosity and confusion. "I thought it would be some not-magic armour of sorts but it doesn't look comfortable."

Tintin blushes slightly. "It's quite comfortable, yes - the inside is much softer than the outside, and it maintains a stable temperature. It's also armored, but I don't need a lot of plating - my barriers are pretty durable."

"Not-magic ones?" Taharqi guesses, looking up at Valentin's face again.

"How'd you guess."

"Just a hunch." He walks back over to their little camp and grabs the harnesses Tintin has made for his new weapons and puts them on.

The harness is just as comfortable as the sandals. The weapons snap onto it and hold firm, but if he pulls on them, they come off easily into his hand.

(Tintin is trying not to look at Taharqi's sensitive regions, which was easier before Taharqi looked at his and made it relevant.)

Taharqi's sensitive regions are very extensive and he makes no effort to contain or conceal them.

(In fact, unless Tintin is imagining things, he may be... showing off a bit, as he tries the harnesses on and figures them out.)

"So, shall we?"

Horan looks up from where he was crouched and not doing much of anything and furrows his brows.

(Tintin is probably imagining things. It's entirely likely that Taharqi just naturally moves... like that. Or maybe he's hitting on Raziya, that's much more plausible.)

"Yes, let's."

So they can gather up what little there is to gather and, with only a little bit of grumbling from Raziya and a little bit of gentle prodding from Taharqi in Horan's direction to ensure everything is fine and he is perfectly free to leave if he wants but Taharqi really thinks it is in his best interests to go with, they can start on their way.

Taharqi looks around, then at the wall, then at the sun, and then starts leading them east, where the vague silhouette of the ruins of enormous bridges can be made out in the distance.

Tintin is capable of walking great distances without complaint. He'll see what the walking atmosphere is like before dominating the conversation, how about.

"So why don't you tell us more about where you are from?" Taharqi suggests after they have found their stride. "Or if you have more questions about—I suppose I cannot speak for Horan and Raziya, but I would be happy to tell you anything about here that you would want to know."

"Ah, that's a hard choice - I'm a journalist, so I want to tell stories, but it's probably more urgent to find out about the society I find myself in here... What If I tell a quick story and then you give me... hmm, a geopolitical rundown? And then another story perhaps. So we're not spending all our time boring each other to death."

"We have many days of walking ahead of us, so that sounds fine by me."

    "I am curious about your... not-magic," admits Raziya, using the expression Taharqi coined as if it's a foreign word.

"Well, I can tell you more about that instead of telling you about my adventures on Ilium or Omega. So, not-magic - really, you're rolling a few concepts into one there. The first is technology, like clockwork or alchemy, but much more complicated. That's what this -" he flares his omni-tool "- is all about, is technology. That's what allows me to make things out of glass or metal or omni-gel. It's not magic because - well, you couldn't actually do the same thing with a forge or an alchemist's glassware, but it's mostly the same basic principles behind it: it's taking pieces of something, putting them together in certain ways, and then firing them solid. I'll probably need more metal at some point if I'm going to be doing a lot of that, I used up most of mine making Taharqi's battleaxe. I'm mostly good on omni-gel, it's very dense, and that's good because I've got no idea how I'd make more on this planet. -any questions before I move on?"

"'Planet'."

"Ah, excellent question. You know the stars, in the sky at night? Those are actually other suns, so far away that we can barely see them. There are so many of them, just in our own region of the universe, that you have probably not invented numbers that can count them. And many of them have their own planets, like Earth but different, within their orbits. And some of those planets can support life! And many of them do!"

"That sounds like magic," opines Raziya. "Going to, uh, other places like here? That aren't here."

"And yet it is not! The spaceship that I traveled in moved in - well, okay, it didn't move in the same way as one of the ships you know, it had a mass effect core and it could fly at several times the speed of light - don't ask, it's two millennia worth of physics and we really don't have time - but the movement itself is the same kind of movement as taking a ship from Stygia to Cimmeria. - I assume there's a sea route between Stygia and Cimmeria, if there isn't feel free to imagine countries with coastlines."

"Stygia does not have a coastline but you can take a boat down the river to the sea and then travel to Cimmeria."

    "Have you been there?"

"No, but I studied the maps. Before I was exiled."

    "Who were you?"

"I was leading a revolution in the Kingdom of Kush against the Chagas. But maybe I should leave the explanation of all of that to when Valentin ends his storytime."

Horan looks entirely bored by this conversation.

"Alright, where was I - so, making things is technology, but the way we travel between planets is a mix of that and the next thing I was going to bring up, the Mass Effect. How to explain it... essentially, there's a kind of rock that, if you put electricity through it, it changes how the world works around it. You can use it to generate energy and use that energy in technology, or to make things go faster than should be physically possible, or to make things lighter or heavier than they actually are. I have no chance of convincing you the Mass Effect isn't magic, do I. Trying to explain it without a twenty-second-century physics education halfway makes me think it is."

"At this point I am not entirely sure the distinctions you are making between what you call technology and what you call magic would make sense to me," says Taharqi, and Raziya nods.

"Magic is something that does not follow the laws of physics - something that can't be explained using the rules that we have found to govern the universe. Gravity, momentum, the speed of light. The Mass Effect bends the laws of physics, but - in a way that can be accounted for, you've put energy into a multiplier and you're getting more back. And it makes other rules make sense, rules that didn't make sense before we knew about the Mass Effect. But - teleporting a hundred thousand light years? Turning a stick into a snake?" He grapples with this for a moment. "It simply doesn't fit. You can't make it make sense."

He sighs. "Which doesn't mean that it doesn't happen; witness my being here. But it means something's different about this world from the one I'm used to. And that thing is what I'm calling magic."

"This translation magic is a trip," says Raziya. "'Momentum'," she repeats, in French, as clearly they don't have a word for it in whatever language they were originally speaking. "'Physics'. We don't have these words."