Wuppies [ENG]

Wuppies are small spirits belonging to the Lemures family and characterized by their appearance of small floating octopuses, with two delicate antennae positioned on the top of their heads.

Due to their fragile nature, wuppies are unable to manifest themselves in the real world; instead, they manifest themselves exclusively as shadows on the background of walls, giving life to sinuous and fascinating shapes that can easily fool the human eye.

 

Appearance

Wuppies are spirits of rather small dimensions, with a head diameter of about ten centimeters when adults. In the spirit world, wuppies have a fully black body, with two round luminous eyes, a pair of semi-rigid antennae above the head and ten tentacles that emerge from the lower part of the body.

They move by "swimming" in the air as if it were water. They are specialists in camouflage, becoming transparent in an instant, or completely black to blend in with the shadows. When in groups, wuppies communicate through body movements, so that they appear to dance around each other, spinning and spreading their tentacles like the hems of a small skirt, as well as rising and falling in wave-like patterns.

Wuppies are so weak that they are unable to manifest themselves in the material world, at least not with a physical body, but only as shadows on surfaces. It is possible, however, to see their natural appearance, even from the material world, when they are in correspondence with mirrors.

Life cycle

Wuppies paralarvae look extremely similar to adults, only much smaller in size. Their diet and lifestyle are also identical to those of adults.

The growth of baby wuppies is isometric from the start (the proportions are preserved, only the size changes). The oldest wuppies, those over seventy/eighty years of age, begin to lose the very dark color of their surface, which fades to brick red; their maximum lifespan is unknown and for this very reason: the elderly are much more visible than the young and more easily preyed upon.

Wuppies are at the base of the food chain in many ecto-biomes.

Reproduction

Wuppi reproduction occurs throughout the year, but normally only at extremely slow rates. When resources increase, however, wuppies undergo what is commonly called a "reproductive festival", in which all the specimens gather to feast and take advantage of the opportunity to court each other.

Courtships take the form of ritual dances, in which all the specimens make identical movements, which only seem chaotic to an external eye, but are divided into two categories: those that move clockwise and those that move counterclockwise. When a wuppi is unable to repeat the moves in rhythm, it is excluded from the festival. Those that manage to dance for a good period of time will then practice temporary fusion, the main mode of propagation of lemures, and create a new paralarva every time the fusion ends, giving up a small part of their body mass, which will be combined with that of the other specimen.

Although each fusion results in a single paralarva, wuppies are exceptionally prolific, "mating" up to twenty times in a row, in a day in which they have fed to satiety. Depending on the availability of energy, food and shelter, wuppi can continue a reproductive festival even for seven or eight days in a row, giving birth to thousands and thousands of paralarvae perfectly suited to survival, which in turn will be able to reproduce within a few weeks from birth.

Habitat

Wuppi are rather common spirits, often present in correspondence with anthropic environments.

They are found in hundreds, or even thousands, in the phantomhives where powerful feudal lords reside, especially those who have an affinity for heat.

Wuppis cannot stand the cold, so it is impossible to find them in the Arctic Circles, while they are much more common in tropical and subtropical areas. In cold geographical areas, they tend to gather around fireplaces, while they are not accustomed to staying near electric heaters, much preferring open flames. Like almost all "domestic" spirits, they are not at risk of extinction, being strongly linked to human activity and/or that of greater spirits.

Diet

Wuppis are scavengers and opportunists, who are content with little: they clean up the remains of other spirits' meals, eat decomposing souls, and are even able to convert heat into energy for their small bodies, absorbing it effectively thanks to their entirely black livery.

They are not capable of killing even the smallest spirits, having no predatory skills, and if their main source of nourishment moves, they do it too, following it and creating the so-called "swarming cloaks", that is, very compact groups of wuppies that act as a sort of "shadow" (often perfectly tracing the original one) of the more powerful spirits from which they depend.

Trivia

• The wuppi was the first spirit of the lemures group to be described and studied in detail.

• It is thought that the brick red color of the older wuppi is actually an evolutionary strategy to hide more effectively around fireplaces. The gradual disappearance of fireplaces, in favor of other types of house heating, has made this evolutionary strategy obsolete and even dangerous to them.