I fucking love the Dwemer in #ElderScrolls lore. in a world where no other race has any concept of empiricism or justified belief (everyone is just making shit up and stating it confidently and killing anyone who dares to disagree) the Dwemer respect fucking nothing and no one and demand everything be proven in repeatable experiments

there’s a story where a Dwemer proves that Azura isn’t actually all-knowing to her fucking face. she curses him and he dies that night but he dies happy because he proved that she’s a liar and it’s incredible (it’s called Azura and the Box)

unfortunately a lot of the writing about Dwemer falls into anti-empiricism/anti-science tropes (like the whole “wiped out because of their hubris” type stuff, and also “science means no morals”) but I like to retcon that in my head. which is pretty easy to do since almost all information about the Dwemer that’s accessible in the games comes from multiple ages later, and is generally written/translated by an unreliable source