"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."

"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."