Eater

The people of the Before Time made machines so complicated that they began to resemble living organisms, and when the Prometheus Virus broke free and rampaged across the world, man's amazing machines died and mutated like mankind and all the animals did too. Some of the things that resulted from Kingdom Come aren't animals, but behave sort of like them. Eaters are a good example.

The sages say that Eaters are descended from construction machines or things the Ancients made to reclaim materials they wanted recycled. They're a whole class of beasts that feed on things like sand and metal and salt and dirt, and digest their feed into other forms of matter. Glass bugs, for example, eat sand and old organic scraps (bones and the like) and secrete different types of glass with remarkable properties. Some glass bugs make very hard, or very flexible, or very clear glass - and the properties of each can be influenced by adjusting the feed the bugs get. Some communities domesticate glass bugs to provide materials for their own use, but wild colonies of glass bugs, left to themselves, will scour broad stretches of wasteland of desireable materials to build huge glistening hives of glassy rods and fibers.

Most Eaters ignore organic life unless they're harmed in some way, but others are dangerous - there's no telling when a placid-looking Eater will get a hankering for the calcium in your bones or the iron in your blood and come hunting you. Ruined urbs are frequently haunts of dangerous Eaters, and these mutated quasi-machines are a threat for which all pickers keep a sharp lookout.

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