[January 3, Lost Era 1002, Great Desert.
Storm.
I didn't actually understand what Scrap meant by a storm. The Beastfolk captain I encountered in the Great Desert had a name that matched the appearance of his pickup truck, while the young Beastfolk boys had no names yet.
"Of course you earn your own name. I got mine by collecting the most scrap, but they haven't fucking accomplished anything yet!"
This made me realize that these Beastfolk-at least the tribe Scrap belonged to-had one obvious difference from Shivana's tribe.
They had no traditions.
Things like the Crackhowl Tribe's pursuit of strength, or the Lone Wolf Tribe's transformation through immersing their entire bodies in pools of Drow poison-
This left the eastern and western Beastfolk similar in appearance but utterly different inside. For instance, alongside their savagery, they were more pragmatic, less concerned with grudges between tribes, and more driven by the instinct to "survive."
I thought this might have resulted from the Empire and the Alliance's different ways of handling the Beastfolk.
Knowing that the Beastfolk were a race that grew stronger against stronger opponents and expressed their "creativity through imagination," Eve had simply used the protection of an aether force field to make the Great Wall a solid barrier, keeping them isolated and restricting their climb up the technology tree to the age of cold weapons.
This made tribes like Crackhowl focus more on honing their bodies and spirits, giving rise to their various tribal traditions.
The Tyron Empire's continual development of wondrous machinery, meanwhile, had sparked the Beastfolk's fantasies about magitech, making the exploitation of existing resources their lifelong pursuit.
Unfortunately, their soybean-sized brains couldn't systematically categorize everything they had, leaving them without specific names for anything. You could often only work out which word they meant from their