Editing Nomaien (section)

== Culture ==
Their sense of humor is very odd and seems morbid to off-worlders. What they think of as funny is often not something anyone else finds humorous.

Nomaie is a desert world with little in the way of bodies of water, so they don’t know how to swim.
They have a name for themselves that isn’t used off world. They find the term Nomaien crude but useable.

Personal space is highly valued. Nomaiens have very sensitive skin and skin-to-skin contact makes them very vulnerable. It affects them the way that drugs affect other species. It can be addictive. This evolved as a survival mechanism that allowed mothers to identify their children (or vice versa), which is very useful in the natural dark of the night or in the artificial dark of a sandstorm when the winds howl making vocal and visual communication impossible.

A related survival trait is a nearly mystical sense of direction. While they’re on their home world, they can tell exactly where they are, but once they leave its surface, even going up to one of the moons, they lose this ability. No one is entirely sure why.

As far as men go, it’s considered inappropriate to discuss women when in the company of women. It’s rude for them to look a woman in the eyes unless they’re related.

Nomaien women never wear their hair loose except when they’re being very intimate with another person.

They don’t have any stigma against crazy people.

An offer of sharing food is tantamount to offering to share one’s bed.

They take life debts very seriously. Saving another person’s life on [[Nomaie]] incurs a life debt that can be discharged in a couple of different ways, but the most common is repayment in kind, saving their savior’s life, though they can also meet a requirement set by the savior if payment in kind isn’t possible. This requirement must be worth a life and cannot be something frivolous such as asking for a drink to be brought. The saved person does technically belong to the person who saved them and that person can ask the saved to do virtually anything. While indebted, the saved cannot physically harm their savior, though they are allowed to defend themselves if the savior tries to seriously hurt them. A person under a life debt is not permitted to marry, hold official positions, bear or produce offspring, or really do much of anything until the debt is discharged. The only exception is if they marry or produce offspring with the one who holds their life debt, though this is rare.