part 7.5 Eldar - The other side
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Week 1
Spent a day at the Eldar side of embassy waiting for a ship. The Eldar don't seem to have an office in the way the IoM does, instead they conduct their internal business with informal talk and consensus decisions. This appears to indicate a more cohesive and equal society (in terms of status) than the IoM.

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The Eldar cruiser has arrived to transfer me to one of their larger fleets where they have said that they live in. It is interesting that they mention their permanent spaceborne nature as a sort of exile. Apparently, our assessment that the Eldar's independence of planets is a sign of maturity is too quick.

The Eldar are spacebound out of necessity, not because they want to be that way. Perhaps they might appreciate Orbital construction plans.

I am currently in a guest room on the cruiser under heavy guard. The Eldar will soon transition through their teleportation gate to the system their fleet is currently in and they appear to want to keep the process a secret. As per our agreement, I will not deploy any scanners and my companion has agreed to limit its effectors for the duration.

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We have arrived. The transition through the teleportation gate has taken nearly 20 hours, which is far longer than we have noted. I suspect from this that the teleportation gate is not a Warp-based galactic range displacer like we initially imagined, but more like some method of extremely fast FTL.

This method of travel between gates is still much faster than our own hyperspace drives. Given how far we would have moved, it appears that the 'leisurely' pace the cruiser used is roughly 150 kilolights. The Eldar have said that they could indeed go much faster.

The fleet looks impressive on paper, consisting of over a hundred ships with nearly half of them military ships. Yet, the fleet is hobbled by the need to protect vulnerable support ships that are harvesting resources from the system. The Eldar have said that this is a major mining fleet, with the majority of their population residing on Craftworlds, which are gigantic ships the size of planetoids.

Week 2
Life with the Eldar is peaceful, mostly. The Eldar are not subject to the social combat that normally plagues IoM, instead the pecking order of their society appears to be competence at their chosen Path.

As I am an outsider, I am not subject to their devotion to a Path although I am still going to try blending into their society. I will be working as part of a trainee craftsmen programme aimed at teaching and applying mining techniques. I am obviously unqualified for their Paths involving Warp abilities; construction and military are also off-limits due to the sensitivity of that information.

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It is interesting that their formal education appears to be focused on self-improvement along the Paths. Instead of mass-education like the IoM, the Eldar rely on a sort of apprenticeship-like process (with multiple teachers for every student). I surmise that this is only possible due to their extremely low birthrate and extremely long natural lives.

One of the first formal teachings seems to be focused on observational techniques and thinking skills. This is quite interesting material, my companion is obviously recording this. Perhaps we might incorporate some formal instruction in those techniques too.

This is 90% pure speculation on the Eldar's society, since most of it doesn't exist.