"You're lucky," she tells him with a little smile. "Some of us have to make do with whatever scrap metal we can find. My first was a hook on a tin cup."

It's a tease, not a guilt trip. The power of a god would probably vaporize a tin cup right off the end of his stump if he had one.

She makes no effort to hide that she's studying both arm and residual limb as he removes it. There is no horror or pity in her gaze, just the calm acceptance that life comes with loss. She may also be checking for calluses on the stump or eyeing the surgical wound. "I bought a kind of a...sock thing, for mine," she says as he sets the prosthesis aside. "For the stump, I mean. A compression sock. Fits up to the shoulder, feels like an all-over massage. You might want to get one some time. I don't know if you get phantom pain, but it helps."

Her stump is older, and she's done a good job of keeping it from getting badly callused, but there are a couple spots on the end where the prosthesis rubs. "And aloe gel to keep the skin from cracking," she adds. "Although it's not so dry here, you ought to be better off than where I am."

The question makes her pause and hum thoughtfully, looking up at the sky with slate-green eyes narrowed against the sun. She tells a lot of versions of this story. Pups ask all the time, and it's better to give them a bullshit adventure tale than the real story. And when adults ask, she usually concludes they don't need to know. Thor is different, though.

"When I was a child," she says, "I lived in a Green Place with my mothers, and our clan, and our sister clans. We were good at keeping outsiders away, but...things happen. Raiders broke through our defenses when I was thirteen, and they took me, and my mother, and a few others. Abducted. Stolen."

"It was a slave raid. Looking for breeders. Our land was healthy, and so were we." She shakes her head. "Anyway. They dragged us across the desert in the back of a truck that was open to air and sun, hot and dry and thirsty. There were other girls there, too. Not sure where they'd gotten them all from. On the second day, another road gang attacked the caravan and in the melee the truck we were in got wrecked and went end over end. It was horrible, bodies flying through the air into the sand--"

"I got pinned in the wreckage by my arm. The truck was burning, but I saw my mother on the sand a few yards away and I thought if I could just get to her--" She gestures with the shortened arm. "I honestly don't remember how I yanked myself loose, or what was left of the arm after I did, but I got away from the fire. The War Boys who'd attacked the caravan saw it all and I guess I impressed them. They put a tourniquet on me and made sure to get me to the infirmary as soon as we made it back to the Citadel."

"It was too late for my mother." She looks down at the grass in front of her, reaches out a fingertip to run across the leaf of a little weed there. "But they cut off the pieces of my arm that weren't viable, sewed it up, even gave me a little blood. I bit every last one of them that got close, until I passed out. I still have the warning tattoo on my back, actually."

"It takes luck and strength to survive a serious wound in the Wasteland. I've had more than my share of both."