A Draft of Ricardo Malfi's Sermon for the Intaki

A disclaimer: heavy EVE content ahead.  If you don't get it, chalk it up to being from space and move on.


Recently, I have found myself talking with one of the Intaki.  She is not their voice, just as I am not the Fraction's voice or even the voice of la raza, my own people, but her voice is of that world, as is her history, her life's work, and her soul.  We have talked of many things, of family and tradition, paintings and rose gardens and gravestones, but the thing that is most striking about her and about all the Intaki people is their sense of loss.  And so it is to you, the Intaki people and especially my dearest Intaki friend, that I dedicate this sermon.  Ahm kamai tah.

You, Intaki people, have forged a community away from home, lost and wandering along the cold, black, breathless fields of space.  You have wandered far, but your minds and your hearts are tied to a tropical mountain range, a green ball spinning through the meteor-showers of countless battlefield wrecks; Intaki of the wide deserts, jewel of worlds, prize of fleets.  You, my friends, roam the stars, seeking to fill the hole in your hearts that is the shape of your home, looking to hear the tongue of your grandfathers amongst the babel of the spacefarers.  You claim you are alone, with a home that has become a trophy, with a faith that earns you scorn, with a voice that is never heard, never responded to, though it cries out with all the anger and all the passion of an abandoned child, "hear us!", and I say to you, ahm kamai tah.

I say to you that you are not alone.  All of us are a part of the same diaspora, all from a different world, all calling out to be heard wherever we fly.  From the Amarr patriot whose God has cast his soul away for the sin of seeking the clone's immortality to the Caldari pilot who roams among the asteroids under a sun his grandfather never dreamed of, we are all apart from our homes.  We all cry out into the uncaring emptiness that is our medium and our tomb, and we pray that our people who we left behind will not forget us, for we cannot forget them.  What we do forget is that we are all the same people, my friends and my adversaries, immigrants and natives, slaves and slavers, rulers and ruled.  We have become one nation, the nation of capsuleers, with a hundred thousand histories, with a hundred thousand homelands, with no culture and no connection but the stars we call home; and in our pods, in the voices of angels and in a hundred thousand tongues, "hear us!".  And so I say to you, my friends, te amo, I love you, ahm kamai tah.

God bless you all, and fly free.