Intergalactic Summit

Hardship and starvation do not always come hand in hand. Hardship is when you are forced to toil to actually feed yourself. Us Sebiestor are very familiar with this (I need not remind you that my ancestry originates from the frozen mountains and steppes, where daylight is short for half the year and the soil is terrible for farming purposes). However, said toil can only help to alleviate the hunger only as far as there is actually something to gain from the toil. If there is nothing to acquire from all the toil, then you starve and you will revert back to the animal instinct of survival by any cost, even if the cost is too heinous to contemplate when the stomach actually has something substantial in it, there's a leaky roof above and the chill hasn't yet start stripping flesh from the bone.

There is a major difference between rationing your food as a military person and scrapping around for half-a-bread as a destitute. Both is hardship, but one has resources still and the other doesn't. One allows for survival, the other does not. One can still endure, the other will break.

Don't even argue that generational slavery is a good idea. If the Holder in question is stuck in the boonies on a world that hasn't yet achieved self-sufficiency due to its less than ideal geography and sandwiched between powerful competing rivals, money will not flow into his coffers, required yet unavailable supplies will not be purchased and his slaves will starve (wouldn't even be surprised if the Holder has to cut it lean personally) and none of them are going to be finding spiritual enlightenment any time soon (more likely they are just going to find death first). This is even more likely if said Holder got the raw deal and was granted off-world assets out in the lowsec regions. Don't deny this hasn't happened before.

He better damn well hope that he could get his message to the relevant person, possibly the Empress, through the red tape the Empire is known for and get some help before everyone starts lying around on the field or start attacking his guards and possibly even himself for what little gold he still has on his robes and what meager bread still lies in his plate, or drop limp like desiccated husks.

I haven't even mentioned the Holders who actually do abuse their slaves way out of sight either. Do you think their slaves will find any kind of spiritual enlightenment when they are so deprived of basic needs and wracked with physical abuse? This is hardship exceeding tolerance, where survival, yet alone living, is a slim prospect. These people are even more likely to start baring their fangs and tear into others like animals. If they can't rake at the ones responsible for their destitution they turn against each other instead especially when their peer had chanced upon a small windfall.

Us Egivands did not cry out to God when we crash landed on Skarkon, right out at the regolith regions at that, with our numbers reduced to half of its original population within three hours of our vessel being shot at and her crash-landing on said planet. We turn to each other and machine spirits instead and with cooperation, hard work, brutal yet necessary rationing scheme and rapid establishment of the foundation of survival (which costs us another half of our population due to hazardous environment and hostilities by the local bandits planetside), we scraped along and managed to stop merely surviving and start *living* by the turn of the year.

I never did grow out of the 'puny runt' phase from that, though. It was a very bad time to crawl out of my mother's womb. Then again, if I didn't, I might instead be bathed in radiation poisoning and come out with three arms or half a head or something.

However, as was mentioned, we had food to ration, and we did manage to restore power, get life support running again, some basic manufacturing infrastructure running and hydroponics up and supplied and producing food before we completely ran out. This came at the cost of at least 1,500 souls out of the estimated 2000 souls who had set out for the Great Wildlands. If we had retained those numbers, I am very sure we wouldn't have survived a season, especially considering at least 70% of the life-giving supplies meant to last us through the journey were destroyed after the crash.

Nothing to do with sitting down and pray for salvation and actually get dirty. Machine spirits aren't obligated to actually help since they will survive, even if they end up breaking into their constituent physical components and therefore their constituent spirits of metals and organic materials. However, the breaking process is very traumatic, even to them, and outright lethal for the rest of us. By listening to these 'cries', we are able to find any damage or faults that aren't already apparent or detected by the diagnostic computers and get them patched up for as much as we are able in an emergency situation. However, these 'cries' are very difficult to distinguish from the background noise. The trick is sieving out all these noise to find out which are actual 'cries'. It makes for a poor engineer or technician to be unable to not identify these signs amongst the noise and get to action, just as it makes for a poor hunter to not be able to identify the subtle disturbances in the wilderness spirits in his immediate area when out on his expeditions.

Then there's the part of getting the spirits to work with us. Proper repairs sooth the pain. The chants sooth their very spirit and get them focused on their tasks, which is what we needed of them for our own survival.

More like 'beings already around us'.

You seem to think that the spirits are divine entities instead of living entities all around us.

Far as us Minmatar are concerned, everything is living. The universe is living, and is made out of constituents which are all every bit as living as each and every one of us. Listening to the machine spirit is more or less the same thing as 'running diagnostics', 'troubleshooting' and hearing that whine in the gears that need to be greased up. Communing with woodland spirits is more or less similar to finding tracks, looking for subtle disturbances, listening to the presence or absence of any living creature in the area and discerning their moods and what it means to us. Communing with the spirit of the plains is the same as listening to the running water and feeling the wind to discern the subtleties in them all and whether it's indicative of bad weather or if there's some kind of water fouling caused by something upstream.

Working with machine spirits is far less 'appealing' and more 'listening to cues and other signs to discern an anomaly, then do something about it'. It's not any different than listening to someone screaming in pain and bring a medical tool to find out what's wrong with them. Using the example of my experience in the RMS, a barrage round slamming into portside has knocked the launchers out of alignment and we must fix the launchers to get it working again. Diagnostics will be run to ensure find any non-obvious damage in circuitry, hydraulics and etc while the rest of us perform physical inspection. While doing physical inspection, we open our senses to be more receptive to the pain of the machine spirit inhabiting the launchers, the loaders, the conveyors and etc. We look for obvious damages and not-so-obvious cues. A slight change in how the machine usually whines, a faint odour that indicates a leak or damaged live warheads, etc etc. Then we find the source of all these and fix them. At the same time, we will chant to sooth the machine's pain so that the machine spirt may refocus to the task at hand undistracted from the lessened or subsided pain.

This is what communing with a machine spirit is like.

To really understand how our spirituality works, you must dispel the notion that there is hierarchy in existence and understand that the very silverware you are using is living.

Kresh is living. Will you eat it? Just because you can try to eat something doesn't always mean you should. I am very sure with great effort and augmented teeth and jaw, you can also eat the silverware. Not sure why you want to but there's that option.

The biggest difference is that we see spirits as entities whom we and work and cooperate with as though they are another person with their own needs, wants and priorities. What you call 'praying', we call 'communing', trying to understand what the spirits are trying to communicate to us and try to communicate back and see if we can solicit help, offer help or work together. There is no bread in the fields here. We want something from the spirits, then we must do what we always do with another person. Make an offer. Provide assistance, get into negotiating grounds and work with one another.

Exactly like trying to get a requisition form through the quartermaster, if said quartermaster isn't human and doesn't communicate or act or behave the same way humans do.

You are Caldari! Don't answer!

You seem to be under the misguided assumption that Gallente do not have a well developed immune system. This is false. The sheer amount of toxins we ingest daily has rendered us almost immune to all but the most deadly substances. I, for example, have spent years developing an immunity to Iocane powder. Do drugs kids.

Don't know. Never tried. They don't look like they would make a good salad though. Are they a good high?

Hmmmm. I'd have to back up my clone first....