The "gunsmith's society" is an occult ritual organization within the clan-ship society of the Navigators, specializing in military leadership, mutual aid, and mediation across the lines of the three Navigator "assemblies".
Behavior
Gunsmiths have an inverse set of virtues when compared to mainline Navigators - where they are invasive, obsessed with equal treatment and insult, expected to react with high emotion, and aim for decisiveness in action and thought, gunsmiths are instead expected to keep the secrets of their order, accept the hierarchy of masters and journeymen, remain calm, and forsake immediate action to instead consider all angles.
This makes them, in the eyes of their neighbors, frightening - difficult to predict, difficult to understand. Additionally, members of the society are the only Navigators with the permission to ignore demands of their Imperious tyrants.
Social Function
Members of the society have a monopoly on the authorized production of Navigator airguns. Manufacture of these weapons is not hidden, nor even particularly difficult - any Navigator ship-tender has the necessary understanding of pressurized systems - but it is socially prevented. Navigators behave in a saga-like way (i.e. they go flying off the handle for basically no reason all the time) - do you trust them with guns? Really?
The society, with its more restrained social expectation, keeps these weapons to themselves, and to those Select and Imperious they can trust to keep them turned away from each other for use in war and against machines.
As a group they theoretically have no political desires beyond mediation - in practice, individual gunsmiths tend to stand in opposition to the twin cultural shifts of Legalism (who seek the development of writing, sedentary agriculture, and other ideas taken from the local Oases) and the Golden Sphere Revelation (which believes in an alternate eschatology than mainline Navigators).
Mythological Basis
One of the secrets revealed during initiation into the gunsmith's society is the secret of heredity. Members of the society are not, in fact, descended of Parva Weightless (the mythohistorical first Navigator) - but instead children of Saveriu, a hunter and minor character in conventional tellings that the gunsmiths expand into the warrior-philosopher-king of Parva's home pre-Navigator culture. As members of the society are not children of Parva, they are thus not Navigators, permitting them to act as the society demands.
This was written for G L Å U G U S T 2 0 2 5 - prompt 1:2 "He Wields A Gun", maximum word count 500
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