Inzalu
The technologically driven Inzalu culture is currently Pele's dominant power. They are gung-ho about bringing their enlightenment to the uncivilized masses... often by any means necessary.
Culture
Food and Beverage
The Inzalu are known throughout their continent for one particular drink... a drink that gives them energy and focus beyond human ken.
Coffee.
Coffee began indigenous to the Inzalu homeland, but it has since spread to be cultivated all across Pele, so that different areas are known for particular tastes or roasting styles... but it is a commonly accepted wisdom that there is no coffee as rich as beans grown in the Inzalu Highlands. The coffee trade is a large player in the continent's economy... when the Highlands have a bad year, everyone has a bad year, and not just from lack of caffeine!
A couple other common drinks:
- Beer - brewed in the Uota region for thousands of years, they've made it into an art form (on top of functionality). Brewers in the Uotan area have banded together to form hereditary guilds, passing down the secrets from parents the children. Brewers are established, respected members of the community.
- Firewater - Small-operation brews known to be particularly strong. Essentially, moonshine.
- Buttermilk - A most common drink in the savannahs, where pastoral practices make cattle as common as flies. Adding spices and flavoring like cinnamon or ginger can make it a treat for special occasions, especially when kept cold in ice boxes on hot days.
- Coconut milk - Most common around the rainforest.
Literature
The Inzalu are fond of speculative fiction. Culturally, they put a lot of value in imagination and curiosity, which in turn breeds stories along the lines of Victorian era monster fiction (ala Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde). Something that has really caught the collective imagination of the nation is magic... they know that an empire of wizards and other strange workings exists across the East Ocean, but they have very little idea how it works or how true it is ("magic" on their continent is obviously just superstition, and the Magic Mineral that powers their tech, Spectrite, is science, not magic!). This leads to stories of strange and bizarre magic, usually with the underlying themes of the danger behind trying to control such forces.
These stories are usually distributed in serial format through magazines and similar publications. There are also illustrated serials which are essentially black-and-white comic books, though those are "meant" for children and youth.
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