“Mhmm. I’ve switched my assessment to ‘trap,’ sorry for the detour and thank you for humoring me.”

Back inside she goes.

Vernon… is actually now less convinced.

“You’d know better than we would, pal. What is this, a butchery site for cannibals?”

"Hmm, I don't think they were cannibals? Oh, oh, I remember now, they called themselves the 'Bad Lads Gang'. Or was it 'Badlands Gang'? One of those.

"Anyway, uh, suppose you could maybe help a guy out?" His arms are tied to his body by a tight length of rope but he sort of comically gestures at his feet with his head.

“It’s Bad Lads.” Which is who he expected to be responsible, but that now makes this make less sense. “But they usually only string up the dead or dying, so I’m real confused about your whole deal.”

"I'm very good at playing dead," he says, nodding sagely. "Very, very good."

“You look plenty alive to me. With… is that arm lost tech? Does it do some kind of stasis and then healing thing or something?”

"Oh! It must." He waves a bit with it.

“Hey, coppertop! Can you tell me if his arm or something does some kind of regen-thing-or-something?”

Out comes the redhead, who is wearing way too much white for a person wandering a desert to plausibly manage to keep clean.

“I haven’t heard of anything like that, uh, ever? Regeneration of a human body is absurdly complicated and requires a whole expensive med tech lab to pull off. That looks like it’s just a prosthetic, though… I haven’t seen anything of its kind before, that looks custom?”

“Would it make more sense for it to hold and give its host a replacement blood supply?”

“…. I’m not a doctor, but, uh, no??? It’s clearly articulated and connected with his nervous system, where would an absurdly large blood supply even fit.”

"Ohh, I think I've heard of tech that stores things in little extra spaces? I'm not sure how it works, exactly, but it's based on how plants work! I think."

“Holding open a gateway to the higher dimension plants derive their matter creation abilities from would take an absurd amount of power to sustain, not to mention that’s like, the worst thing to use that for, if we had access to it by means besides plants themselves we’d just make new plants like our dumb wasteful ancestors did…”

“English, please.”

“That’s some absolute bullshit that explains nothing and in fact makes more questions.”

“I was clear on that already, thank you.”

"I don't really know how it works... An old friend of mine gave it to me years ago when I lost my arm in an accident."

“This old friend of yours still around to answer questions?”

"Yeah, but he doesn't live in a city. He feels like people would misuse his work and try to disadvantage others using it. I can get to where he is, though."

“…. Can you talk your friend into at least disseminating the specs for your arm, because while obviously the kind you’ve got is far too expensive for the casual consumer to ever afford, I really feel like having a better idea of how to integrate cybernetics with the human nervous system would be on net better for the world at large.”

“…. Ehhh.”

“What.”

“There have been some rumors of a psycho who,” he waves vaguely, “does a lot of human experimentation to crack the code for immortality or whatever. Add cybernetics to the mix and I think we’re maybe ninety percent of the way to having a super soldier project of some kind.”

”That would be so wasteful and stupid though!”

"That's part of why my friend doesn't really like being public about his work," Z agrees. "But he is working on things to help people at large."

Something about that makes him sound... very bittersweet.