Sparri

The Sparri were a cultural and ethnic group integrated into Union. Their culture and heritage was native to the planet Sparr, but the Sparri diaspora was greater in number than their homeworld's population as of the late 47th century u onwards, and could be found in nearly every region of known space.
  Sparri societies were organized into a large number of clans each ruled by a single chief - a social unit that was recognized and given a degree of political autonomy by Union. Traditionally, disputes were handled "in-house" via a local domstol (a semi-sacred grievance-hearing process of great historical significance) or by a council of elders at Ynn, but these authorities were often disregarded, especially by younger Sparri.
  Sparri society proved to be remarkably pre-adapted to interstellar growth upon their integration into Union. The incredibly harsh environment of their homeworld made their society more than resilient enough to endure any given off-world environment with little difficulty once they had grown accustomed to it. This self-taught hardiness historically contributed to the success of Sparri society's expansion throughout the Orion Arm, as did the significance of the concept of the civilizational exodus within their cultural consciousness.
  Sparri culture venerated storytelling traditions, particularly those told of exceptional individuals, and conflated moral virtue with adventurousness and feats of personal strength (literal or figurative). The Sparri placed greater value upon deaths that occurred in battle and/or far away from the individual's home. This led to a stereotype of fearlessness in battle and prowess in close-quarters combat that made the Sparri popular as mercenaries, especially among los Voladores, though the increasing multiculturalism of the Sparri diaspora made the mercenary lifestyle progressively more rare among them.
  One major visual indicator of a culturally Sparri individual was their practice of full-body tattoo work. These tattoos included clan and family affiliation as a default, but expanded and covered a larger area as the individual's personal history and major life events were symbolically represented in additional tattoos, which could be extensive enough that particularly old and experienced Sparri warriors and shamans could potentially have tattoos on every available surface of skin.
  Historically, Sparri religion (sometimes classified as "Ynnervanism") was centered on their primary and most present deity Ynneval. After Ynneval's destruction at the hands of the initial Union colonial forces, however, Sparri religion faced several internal reforms as it reconciled itself with the technological level and understanding of machinery of the rest of the galaxy.
  Sparri religion was animistic in nature and centered on machine-spirits, with a clerical class of technoshamans (identifiable by the circuit-diagram designs incorporated into their tattoos or the cabling and transistors that they wore as jewelry) occupying the highest position in Sparri society. Technoshamans were traditionally trained in theological practices in the halls of Ynneval's centers of worship, and possessed intimate knowledge of many forms of technology and their operations. This gave them, among other secondary roles, considerable aptitude for becoming mech pilots.
  Post-reform Ynnervanism was split into two primary camps, with one identifying NHPs as a prominent and readily-visible form of machine spirits, worthy of veneration, and another that considered NHPs to be a separate type of being not divine in nature. Comp/cons, by contrast, were much more widely acknowledged to simply be machines and not spirits. The majority of technoshamans were aware of the nature and history of NHPs, but believed that their enigmatic origins were indeed evidence of their supernatural status. This eventually progressed to the point that a subset of Sparri priests began to venerate MONIST-1 as the progenitorial and thus supreme NHP.