  We investigate the behavior of stringy motives under Galois quasi-\'etale
covers. We prove them to descend under such covers in a sense defined via their
Poincar\'e realizations. Further, we show such descent to be strict in the
presence of ramification. As a corollary, we reduce the problem regarding the
finiteness of the \'etale fundamental group of KLT singularities to a DCC
property for their stringy motives. We verify such DCC property for surfaces in
arbitrary characteristic. As an application, we give a characteristic-free
proof for the finiteness of the \'etale fundamental group of log terminal
surface singularities, which was unknown in equal characteristics $2$ and $3$
and in mixed characteristics.
