Oh? How so?

Oh. Heh. Kobolds make kind of bad neighbors, because we don't do ownership, and most kobolds don't understand that other people do, either, and like the challenge of trying to get hidden or guarded things. I don't, I know better, but if I'd brought some fancy thing back to my tribe and been excited about it, they'd assume I was showing off, not trying to tell them where they could get the same thing too.

Not even a concept of 'there's a place where I took these from'?

I could probably get that across but they'd be confused at why I was trying to, it's not usually a social activity like that.

That's interesting. By Cuivienen we had very communal concepts of property but 'there's more where this came from' would still be eminently comprehensible.

If there was a famine and I'd found a new food source, yeah, or something like that. But fancy new things are almost always just extra, not anything we need, so there's kind of an expectation that the person who found it isn't going to want to share the information, they're going to want to keep it to themselves to get as much status out of it as they can. There's some grey areas - we don't have metalworking at all and metal knives are really useful, so if someone finds a source of them they might share that, though it'd usually be with a few close friends rather than with the whole tribe - but I'd expect better luck waiting for someone to decide to follow me rather than convincing anyone, and I'd expect them to be very skittish about it when they did.

Makes sense. But they wouldn't be considered yours, other people could try stealing them from you?

Whatever I brought back to the tribe wouldn't be mine, it'd go into the tribe's stores - we play a hiding-and-finding game among ourselves, too, and a lot of the things used in that were originally taken from people outside the tribe. But I'd still get ... credit, standing in the eyes of the tribe, reputation... for bringing in something nice or useful or hard to get, if I was inclined to do that kind of thing and did it.

Without the idea of ownership kobolds don't have the idea of theft, either; taking something literally out of someone's hands or off their person is pretty rude, but anything short of that isn't going to bother anyone; trying to keep things for yourself will, though.

Yeah, sounds like another cultural difference. We get credit and standing in the eyes of the tribe for generosity, choosing to give things to people, and if anyone could take things then you couldn't think of a gift that was very suited to a friend and then make it for them and then give it to them.

We actually do manage something like that - not for standing in the tribe, but for personal relationship building, you figure out what the person likes and make a point of making sure it's available for them. Other people in the tribe get to have it too, but if you've figured out someone's favorite things and they're paying attention to you at all - and we live in small enough groups that it's pretty likely they will be - they'll notice sooner or later.

So maybe the difference has to do with group size, then. Or at least some of the difference.

Yeah, definitely. Kobold tribes don't get bigger than about a hundred fifty people - usually closer to a hundred - since with a tribe that size people start having too much trouble knowing their tribemates well enough to understand them or work with them, and the tribe ends up splitting.

I knew everyone in my tribe well enough to understand and work with them, before the Enemy tampered. 

She blinks. Very impressive.

I think I cared about it a lot. 

Yeah, you'd have to, how many thousands of people? Most of the people I've seen in my life are Eldar, now, you know.

Wow. It was about three hundred thousand but some stayed behind and many have died.

She nods. For me, there were seventeen tribes, and then I'd met another few hundred tigerfolk - around three or four thousand people altogether, counting absolutely everyone I'd ever even had a chance to see.

Most people probably only know a few thousand people. It was just really important to me to know them all and I had lots of time.

Yeah. She wants to hug him again. D'you think you're going to want to pick that up again? After we've killed the Enemy? Or before; I don't know enough to know whether it'd be worth the effort now.

I think so. It's sort of lucky that the thing I'm best at isn't very useful to the Enemy; I shouldn't do strategy or logistics or engineering, but delegating people isn't something that'll help him...

Mmhmm. And with the magic that's going to be pretty important, unless your siblings come up with a really good way of keeping mages in line.

I trust all of my people with magic, to never cast it on anyone unwillingly and so forth, and I trust Nolofinwe to pick the trustworthy ones among his people.

Hexes aren't the only scary part of having mages around. They're the most dangerous one, but really every spell needs to be thought through, it's just that with a spell that isn't on a person you can break it once you realize something's wrong - it doesn't take malice for someone to be dangerous, it's possible to hurt people by mistake, too.

Yeah. We'll make sure the people who are doing it are very careful. Lots of things in metalworking or glassblowing or mining are dangerous if you're not careful, too.