Taharqi laughs. "I think pharaohs have been high priests for as long as they have been around but I am not sure of this."

"Seems plausible. Anyway, what else do I want to know - hmm, you wanted to overthrow the Chagas and bring power back to the Gallahs - Stygia is ruled by a despotic pharaoh - I imagine most places are not notably better than this, you mentioned Cimmeria and Shem and Darfar but if one of those is a politically stable utopia I'll be surprised."

"They are not. Darfar is also south of Stygia, to the east of Kush, while Shem and Cimmeria are both to the north of the Styx—if I am correct in where we are Shem should be to the west and south of here, while Cimmeria should be to the west and north. Darfar as a whole is... probably not an extremely nice place. They worship the Outer God, Yog, who is also called a demon even by the other gods, and he is the bloodthirstiest and most violent of them. At least of the gods I know of. He demands frequent human sacrifices, and commands cannibalistic rites in his honour." Raziya makes a queasy face, but does not seem surprised or like this is news. "I believe the country itself is more... civilised... than that would imply, but the local Darfari tribes are very often entirely taken to worship of Yog."

"...well, that's not good. What about Shem and Cimmeria, do you know any fun facts about them?"

"Shem used to be part of the Stygian Empire in ages past, but now they are a country only in name—they are mostly made up of loosely allied city-states or tribes. The eastern groups are usually more nomadic, but not entirely, and they tend to rotate around the rivers and oases of their lands. They have gotten pretty rich since the fall of the Empire because they border many different countries and serve as a trade hub of sorts for them all. They also have lots of mercenaries, out of necessity to protect their merchants, but it does give them a... reputation."

    "Where did you even learn all of that, I barely know the names of the countries around Stygia," wonders Raziya.

"Chagan upbringing," explains Taharqi, "plus the rebellion later required a lot of knowledge of the region. Many powers are interested in what will come out of these civil wars in Kush."

    "Even Cimmeria?"

"No, and thus why I know less about it than the other countries around here." He looks at Tintin. "Cimmeria is pretty far, relatively speaking, and I was surprised to find Cimmerians around here. I am pretty certain they do not border the Exiled Lands. Their reputation is of being strong warriors and fiercely nationalistic, and the few Cimmerians I have met reinforce this notion, but I do not know much more than that."

"Good to know... so far Shem sounds like the least, uh, objectionable of the local nations."

"I like Kush," Taharqi says, shrugging.

"I'm sure it will be lovely once you have deposed the oppressive tyrants."

"That's the plan."

"Hmm... I had promised you all a story after the geopolitics, hadn't I? What would you like to hear about?"

"Well you only told us about your technology, there's still, like... everything else."

"So there is!"

Tintin launches into a story about an adventure he had alongside a starship captain (and occasional mercenary) of his acquaintance, Captain Haddock. Haddock had been contracted to smuggle goods into Citadel Space (the civilized portion of the galaxy) from the Terminus Systems (a lawless wasteland). It turned out, halfway through the mission, that the goods in question were illegal for good reason - barrels of a neurodegenerative drug, "red sand", commonly used by slavers to control their chattel. So, instead of making the delivery, they decided to entrap the buyers and the sellers and turn them in to the authorities, in the process breaking up a slaving ring.

The story is well constructed and well told. Tintin wrote it up for publication a long time ago, but he's told it more than once since then.

Taharqi and (occasionally) Raziya have questions about many of the concepts he references, and clearly don't really understand the distance scales involved, but they find it very interesting nonetheless.

Horan gets bored and just sort of scampers around.

"...and that was the Incident of the Red Desert," Tintin finishes. "One of my earlier adventures - I was only eighteen years old, just out of the army and still looking for a place in the world."

...he is a very small person.

"How old are you now?"

"Twenty-three. I have had an implausible number of adventures since."

"It does sound implausible," Taharqi agrees, eyeing Tintin. And unlike the last time his eyes paused around Tintin's... "package", so to speak, now it is definitely sexual. "I have lost track of the date," he says, casually, in a complete mismatch between tone of voice and the way his eyes are wandering, "but I think I have been in exile for five or six years now, so that would make me around twenty-six, maybe twenty-seven."

    Raziya's eyes go between Taharqi's eyes and Tintin's body and she snorts. "I think I'm twenty-five," she says.

        "Thirty-one," says Horan's rough voice, which makes both Taharqi's and Raziya's eyes snap to him. He only flinches a little at the sudden attention but doesn't lose his stride. Nor does he elaborate, though.

The way Taharqi is looking at him is significantly less plausibly deniable than his earlier comments! Tintin does not entirely know what to do with this. He's somewhat reminded of his almost-relationship with Chang, how the other boy had tried everything short of leaping on him and ripping his clothes off and he'd been too repressed to realize he'd meant it.

He's pretty sure he's not that repressed anymore. He thinks.

"How much longer are we going to march?" he asks instead of engaging with any of this. "Not trying to wheedle, just - set my expectations. Nightfall?"

"That would be my naive guess, yes," he says, eyes returning to Tintin with a bit less lusty intent than just now. "Unless we need to stop earlier for some reason, we will make better time the less often we do that."

"Of course. I'm looking forward to seeing your home, I wouldn't want to delay us getting there."

    "So... how long do you think we need to walk to get there?" asks Raziya, sounding a bit tentative and a bit like she is dreading the answer to that question.

"If we keep this pace and walk for most of the day, I think we will take about..." He pauses to think, then looks at the ruins in the distance and does some quick maths in his head. "About four days to reach the aqueduct passage and cross the wall to the river, and then another eight to ten downriver from there."

   Raziya whimpers when she hears that.

Tintin winces a bit as well.

"If I had any resources at all... I don't suppose there are oil fields near here."

"...oil fields?"

"Land where, when you dig into the sand, oil appears - often in a geyser. If I had a significant amount of oil, I might be able to make a primitive automobile or a motorcycle. It's one of the more accessible sources of fuel, without access to Element Zero."

"I don't think I have ever heard of that."