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.

Sockeater

Sock eaters (Nigris sublecto) are small to medium-sized spirits belonging to the Lemures group. They are synanthropic spirits, very common inside the homes of humans living in North America.

Etymology

The scientific name of this creature, Nigris sublecto, refers to their habit of hiding in dark and narrow places, such as under beds. The common name of the creature, sock eaters, refers to the fact that they often steal human socks to make a nest, consisting of a pile of soft objects (of which, of course, socks are the favorites) to hide under. Contrary to what was thought in older times, sock eaters do not feed on socks, nor any other article of clothing.

Appearance

Once they reach adulthood, sock eaters are between forty-five centimeters and two meters long. They have a long, tapered, serpentine body, and a halo of tentacles extending from their necks are more or less the length of their bodies, giving the impression that the creature is composed only of a small head and a tangle of long tentacles.

Their skin color is entirely black. Belonging to the Nigris family, scientists debate whether the tentacles are actually tails, like those that make up the fake tentacles of their smaller cousins, the wuppi, and so far research seems to point in that direction: not having a skeletal system, and their anatomy being extremely different from that of animals in the physical world, it is not implausible that the multiple tails have "climbed up" their body, over years of evolution, reaching the neck.

Sock eaters do not have visible eyes, these being always protected by a layer of skin, and are very short-sighted: basically they only use their eyes to detect light sources and the movement of large objects, from which they tend to run away. Their head, with very rounded contours, is slightly flattened and characterized by a wide mouth, full of sharp and triangular teeth. On the top of the head, two small semi-rigid antennae emerge, with which they can perceive changes in the electromagnetic field and communicate with each other.

Unlike most other lemurs of the Nigris family, sock eaters love to manifest themselves in the material world: they are in fact able to metabolize the life force, and later, when their bodies have fully materialized and adapted, the proteins they take from their small prey.

When a sock eater is fully materialized, it becomes very dense and heavy for its size, weighing up to forty-five kilos in exceptional cases. Behavior Sock eaters are solitary spirits, who hide in attics, old garages, rarely used bedrooms and sometimes in laundries or in the shaft of disused elevators. They are normally very shy, but it is possible for a human to domesticate them and even train them, due to their high intelligence. The mechanism is simple: guided only by their instinct, sock eaters will willingly accept small actions, to obey certain commands, in exchange for delicious morsels of food.

However, you must be very careful: even if a sock eater has become accustomed to the presence of a human, it does not mean that it will accept anyone in its territory, and if it is forced against its will to interact with other people it does not know, without having an escape route, it can attack and seriously injure even an adult human, thanks to its sharp teeth and the prodigious strength of its tentacles.

Reproduction always occurs in the spiritual world, as newborns are too weak to manifest themselves in the physical world; the young will migrate to their new home only once they have become capable of assuming pseudo-material forms.

Habitat

Wherever there are old closed rooms and insects that can be captured, there will be sock eaters. Contrary to what many so-called "paranormal hunters" believe, the main spirits that inhabit abandoned asylums are not those of the humans who died there, but sock eaters, who make their lairs under piles of garbage that they accumulate over years of residence.

Sock eaters love humid environments, full of decaying material, which attract many small animals, but they are happy with dry and clean rooms, if they can find other ways to get food.

Diet

As already mentioned, the diet of sock eaters consists mainly of small animals of the physical world. The younger specimens feed on ants, dipteran larvae and cockroaches, the older ones capture, thanks to their tentacles that they extend outside the nest like traps, rats and other occasional visitors to abandoned places. Domesticated sock eaters have generally more varied and balanced diet, resulting in better health.

Conservation

Sock Eaters are not currently in danger of extinction and will not be as long as places such as abandoned buildings or old attics exist.

Trivia

• In the past, some sock eaters have attacked and killed humans while they were sleeping, then slowly devoured them. It is not known what exactly triggered this anomalous behavior, but in any case nothing like this has happened since 1980, despite the fact that the number of sock eaters in the world has not decreased.
• No child has ever been killed by a sock eater.
• Many magic users voluntarily attract and host sock eaters in their homes, using them as a natural remedy for cockroach or rat infestations. A single adult sock eater can catch and eat up to seventy cockroaches in a day!