>>5428
>The object had a surface which felt like glazed ceramics and was covered with eyes
Some things I can share now that I've had time to gather my thoughts a bit. These are ETs travelling in deep space and living off mining planets which are market for destruction. They are a kind of garbage collectors in our way of understanding it. But they work in cooperation with maintenance deities and what they do is a "divine art". Mining seen from the ET perspective, including the federation, is the highest form of chemistry. They do not see any distinction between inner alchemy/spirit alchemy and mining/chemistry. Blowing up rocks to gather ore, which is refined into metals, is to transform "ore spirit" into "iron spirit", "copper spirit" and so on. Materials are aware and conscious, they are able to communicate with "material spirits" using technological telepathy. Because all materials are alive, they do not look at if there are humanoids on the planet they are mining. In those cases where a planet was marked as "to be destroyed", the "ore spirits" are of higher awareness than the humanoid population, so they just blow the place up and extract the ore to refine "metal spirits".

They live in huge ships which seem cast in one single piece, everything, including furniture, seem to be part of the same structure. It's made from something resembling volcanic rock, but it's soft and somewhat warm to the touch, despite being the same material used for the shell of the ship. The sleep directly on the floor. The ship consists of "caves" and tunnels on the inside with a "hangar" in the middle. The large space didn't seem to be used for anything.

Their education system consisted only of showing letters along with a vocal recording of each sound. Then 5 words were shown along with their reading. After this was shown images of different concepts along with the written word and the wording being read. Only one page was shown of each type, after this the student was asked to read words off the same screen, and the education was considered finished. It took only 3 minutes. They seem to have an ability to instantly apply things explained like this, with no training after the rules were explained.

This was the only education needed, and they were then sent to work on the ship.