Intergalactic Summit

Actually, just the opposite: the Amarr don't give a damn about anyone else's mythology.

I'll be remembering in the Gariushi Lounge at the Ishukone HQ in Malkalen tonight. If anyone cares to join me, contact me.

Peace.

Fear, always the fear.

They know there is a door, they know you can cross it, but they are afraid to do it, so they spend their time in a perpetual figment because an illusion is preferable to whatever is behind that door.

As long as this illusion is safe, the defense mechanisms are quite simple. Once a real threat show up however, that´s when we see it´s full power.....

What a beautiful sight.

Well, yes, quite. That's my point.

If you are Amarr, and say you studied Comparative Folklore at university, you might as well be saying that you went to the School of Hard Knocks, and the University of Life, in terms of the amount of academic prestige such a qualification holds.

Really, the only people who study comparative folklore, would be certain members of the Inquisitorial divisions of the Theology Council, so that they can determine things like the exact kind of blasphemy that someone should be charged with.

It is more of desperation than arrogance.
Arrogance come from overestimation, desperation come from lack of choice. You can not build "your utopia" if there is a raw material shortage, incursions are targeting exactly that to my knowledge - raw materials for True Slaves creation.
So it's not a question of want but a question of necessity or need, peace or far away is not an option there.

Well, as pretty much every notion of 'God' comes from Humanity anyway...

Every quality every God we ever invented holds, came ultimately from us. Every virtue and flaw, every intent - good or bad - and every little thing to aspire to or reject came from a human mind. So in the end, humanity certainly does qualify for the position. We inhabit every single characteristic of the Gods we've invented by virtue of inventing them in the first place.

As ****** up as our species is, the other side of the coin is that we are - to our current knowledge - unique in the galaxy in that respect. We have through inventing these Gods proven ourselves capable of that state of divinity, even if we've never successfully done it.

Yet.

I keep all of my cats in one room, until a member of staff decides they're too cute and takes one home. Then I have to get more.

Haha. Maybe you will have to provide the details in person one day then.

The mythology back home has it that when someone dies violently (suicide counts), they have the option of placing a what's called 'a death curse'. This curse goes against a person, not necessarily the one who caused their death, but someone the dying person has unfinished business with. It's supposed to taint the target's Fate and influence their Luck so that no matter how hard the cursed person tries to stay on their true path, things keep on going wrong for them. It can be countered by finding out who did the cursing and setting right the unfinished business, whatever it was.

Hypothesis: emergency cloning counts as death for death-cursing purposes. Please discuss.

Allright...

Let us assume this is a real 'curse' and not a self-fulfilling prophecy caused by the target hearing about it, believing it and attributing all the random setbacks of their lives to the curse. As in, it'd work if no one but the one uttering the curse knowing it happened. This being a death curse, we'll also assume it requires the one uttering it to die in order to work.

So, what kind of mechanics can achieve such an effect? I can't think of any that we have a scientific understanding of (yet at least) so that leaves us with the option of spirituality and mysticism. I am not too familiar with Rhiannon beliefs in this regard, so in my ignorance I'll just have to start doing guesswork based on entirely generalized 'woo' principles common to most such things.

a) Spirit of the deceased influences the target.
b) Spirits of the place of death enacts the will of the deceased.
- Possibly merely acts as messengers?
c) There are beliefs that we carry spiritual energies within us, as of yet not measurable or proven so...
- Upon death, these energies are no longer required for spiritual sustenance and can be directed elsewhere.
d) Upon death, we briefly exist both in the world of the living and the dead.
- Being a brief link between these worlds may bestow the brief ability for one to affect the other.
- The vitality of the living combined with the unmitigated access to the ancestors may confer far greater spiritual command.

And so on and so forth. On subjects like these, imagination is really the only limit to what we can conjure up in regards to how these things may or may not work, since nothing has been demonstrably true or false yet. We can work with these few assumptions for now and see where that gets us.

Option A seems to be a single shot weapon. One death, one curse, spirit's busy until business has been taken care of. There's also the problem of 'does the spirit actually release upon clone death or is it part of the infomorph' etc, and of course it has the implication of there being no more spirit in the subsequent iterations of your infomorph if that is how it does work.

Option B would again work, but also goes against everything I've ever been taught about how to deal with the spirits of both the land, ancestors and more. Now, a death curse would probably be prompted by unfinished business or trauma sufficient enough to justify such things, but the moral and ethical ground gets shaky if this becomes a repeated offense. Still, so far that's as close as we get to a working serial death curse option.

Option C is... doable, within the framework of this hypothesis, but it raises the question of where/what these unspecified - and frankly probably non-existent - energies reside. Are they part of the spirit, the body, the infomorph, what? If it's just another material energy source contained in the body itself, it'd probably be replaced by cloning just like the body itself, but if it is tied to other things like the infomorph, spirit and so on the death curse probably wouldn't even fire once in a clone death.

Option D is a bit of occultism I don't have any ties to at all. Even the most fervent of our clan does not believe in an afterlife as such. Our spirits of ancestors are merely echoes and impacts that person had on the world in life, which we can access and take comfort in through our arts. However, let's assume it is a thing. Full unmitigated access to the afterlife, with the vitality and fury of the living, could potentially have enormous potential for occult skullduggery like a death curse and theoretically this should work just fine time and time again through clone death. However, this is so far outside my wheelhouse that I'm basically inventing this on the spot with nothing at all to base it on, even as far as pure beliefs go.

We could go on here for ages with more and more options for how it'd work, but for now let's give someone else a chance. My conclusion is, emergency cloning potentially counts for death-cursing purposes. No, death curses aren't actually a thing, as far as I'm concerned, since we have so many known effects (self-fulfilling prophecies etc) that'd achieve the exact same thing under the conditions required for anyone at all to know that a death curse was even uttered.

... this was fun though.