Teachers

"This article contains spoilers for those who wish to play the Wruwara tabletop game.""The Teachers" is a name used by the Wruwara to refer to the ancient race that lived long before the Wruwara. They are largely unknown except through Wruwara and Almeraj tales, and the study of their technology by the Naja. The Teachers do not exist today. Their effect on the planet and the species that inhabit it is all that remains.

Description
The Wruwara legends describe the Teachers as beings made of metal, but many modern Wruwara believe they wore suits of armor that covered their bodies from head to toe. Ancient drawings of them depicted them as having two legs and two arms, so it is largely assumed that they were bipedal and humanoid.

Society
Wruwara claim they were a great civilization of beings that hated and feared nature and sought to overcome the need for it with their technology.

One thing is for certain: they actively sought to expand the planet into metal and stone cities, and they actively destroyed natural life in abundance. "Spoilers beyond this point."The only living animals on the Teacher planet were caged and kept for research or entertainment. Massive zoos with artificial environments were created to house the beasts they though of as inferior or insentient. Their cities reached the skies, covered the seas, and stretched all across the world, both above and below the surface. Because they fought back nature and plants for so many generations, nature itself had grown and evolved to overcome even the greatest obstacles they set before it.

Great turret systems were created and stationed all around that targeted plant material, doing what they could to destroy the rapidly growing and evolving seedlings. Enzymes were sprayed across the streets and builds to prevent plant growth from breaking their designed mold. These beings had polluted the world with their machines so much and for so long, all of them had to wear environmental protection suits to breath, to eat, and to sleep. Their reproduction was artificial, and embryos were developed in tubes so that once they could be born, they could immediately be encased in a protective cocoon that would become their suit as they aged.

Everything they made was synthetic, everything they ate was synthetic, and everything they did was synthetic. They knew no love and affection, and never knew the feeling of anything on their skin but their environmental suits. All they cared for was the advancement of society and the production of technology. Offspring were sent for education as soon as their movements were no longer struggling, and once their education was complete, they were sent to employment education facilities so they could be classified into their careers by their intellectual aptitude.

It wasn't until one fateful day that a single Teacher discovered something unique. This Teacher had been a member of the environmental hazard control, a career dedicated to eradicating any plant life that would be seen trying to grow. They were removing a capacitor from a turret when they found a small creature curled up inside the maintenance hatch, trying to keep warm in their synthetic, emaciated environment. The creature was part animal, part plant, and part mineral. It was a miraculous creation of all of the elements combined into one being, and to the Teacher, it was monstrous and disgusting. The planet had found a way to survive by merging all it's resources.

The greatest Teacher scientists studied it for months with no conclusive research, before they began torturing it. Its screams cried out through all the cities and it was like nothing the Teachers had ever heard before. It was the cry of the planet, finally loud enough for them to hear.

Something in the universe shook. The world between worlds, between life and death, between here and beyond, began to scream in unison with the creature. The Umbra as the Wruwara call it, where the river of souls flows, was shaking and quivering with fear and pain. Everything heard the call. Everything, even the World Eaters.

The World Eaters
The World Eaters are massive primordial creatures, older than anything in the known multiverse- possibly older than the known multiverse itself. They live in the star dust as dried, coral-like rocks. In this form they are impervious to all things. One could be locked into a star and never burn up. However, in this form, they are also harmless and unable to function. Once they reach the atmosphere of a planet with suitable resources for them to consume, they devour everything they can, plant and animal, leaving behind nothing but a rock with no atmosphere left. It is then, in this form, that they are vulnerable. They come alive like a coral reef soaked with water, and their bodies become soft, gelatinous, and flexible.

Great, long tentacles unravel from their bodies, and they become like giant, swirling, writhing masses of pure hunger. Nothing is friend or foe to them. All is food. World Eaters even sometimes eat their own kind. However, these great, massive beings aren't the only fearful thing to behold when they come. From their skin, parasites that lay dormant when their bodies are rocky, will fall. Monsters that look like animal or plant, but always with those same writhing bodies and curling tentacles. Their skin, oozes with noxious materials that corrode and decay all things it touches- slowly, yes, but always surely.

Nothing can escape the destruction they create- nothing. Except Lunalah did.

The Escape
The Teachers saw the signs of the World Eaters coming, but it was too late. They could not save their whole civilization. They took everything they could and boarded great ships, doing what they could to rely on their technology to save them. For a time it did, but without the metals they so carelessly underestimated, or the plants they needed data from for their food synthesizers, or even the animals they maimed and created into slaves, they could not continue to survive.

They looked for many generations for a suitable home world, but could find none. Nothing in their galaxy was capable of sustaining them. They wept a great cry like that of the creature they mistakenly tortured out of selfish pride and ignorant greed. The Teachers went back. So few were they at that time, but they thought that if they were all to die, they would die on the rock that they destroyed. It wasn't the World Eaters that consumed their planet, it was them. The World Eaters simply scraped up the crumbs.

When the armadas reached Lunalah again, they were all in uncontrollable disbelieve that they were almost maddened by the sight of it. The whole planet had flourished all over again in their absence. The torture they caused on the planet had made it into a mighty force to behold and somehow- some how -it had all regrown even after the World Eaters attacked.

The Return of the Teachers
They landed in the great fungal forest now known to the Wruwara as the Teacher's Footprints, and began their research right away. To their dismay, nothing they found was suitable for them to use. They didn't know anything about ancient horticulture or husbandry, and the creatures that inhabited the planet were all monstrous and ferocious. They needed to find a creature like the one they had found before their world was consumed. It had everything. It was the perfect being with all the genetics they could ever need to synthesize what they needed.

For a time, they lived in this paradise that would be their undoing, until one surprising day. A great, dark-furred beast stumbled upon one of their ships, overgrown by the jungles in a matter of months. It loomed in the doorway of their cargo bay and watched them with eyes of both predator and prey. It had horns, almost woody, and teeth almost stony. It was the creature they had sought after- it was the being they had tortured.

But how could it be? How could it have survived? Either this was the same creature or it was created again by Lunalah. It was their only hope, however, before they could come to an agreement, it was gone, never to be seen again for many moons.

The Wruwara
When they found the creature again after scouring searches and losses of many tracking parties, they came upon a settlement of them. There were many, large and small, quadruped and biped. It seemed they could change between something monstrous and humanoid to something equally monstrous, but more like an animal. These were the early, twin-formed protoWruwara.

They did everything they could to pay homage to the creature, but it was full of sorrow and rage. All of the creatures of its kind knew nothing but sorrow and rage. Its kind came and went, never making a sound and never accepting the Teacher gifts. They would always stand on the coral formations and stare, or loom from the fungal canopy and watch.

The Teachers, furious and frustrated, began capturing them secretly, always doing what they could to stay out of the watchful eyes of the largest one that always studied them. They secretly tortured them and ran experiments on them, against their will. Their rage and sorrow increased and pulsed into something like a demon inside them both, creature and Teacher.

It became tense between the two races, and the creatures began hunting and killing the Teachers they found trying to steal their kind. A historical, instinctual feud began. Though the Teachers were afraid of the creatures for their ferocity, the creatures were afraid of the Teachers for their great technological weapons.

The Child and the Mother
One day, one of the creatures found a lost Teacher offspring, left behind out of fear by it's parents. They were too afraid to go back into the jungle for the little one, and left it. The creature that found it kept it safe and helped it grow. It grew much faster than the creature, or possibly the creature grew much more slowly than the Little Teacher. It wasn't long before the little Teacher's cocoon suit began to change into shape to fit it's newly growing body.

The creature cared so much for the little offspring, and it was the first time the creature or any of its kind had ever known such a powerful sensation. It was great. It was the greatest of the three strongest emotions: Sorrow, Rage, and finally, Love. The creature began to shift. It's paws became hands and it's body stood straight instead of stooping or walking on all fours. This was the first Wruwara to become a Natrulus and the first Wruwara to know true, unconditional love despite all pains and all anger.

This Little Teacher took the Loving Wruwara hand in hand back to the Teacher's Footprints. They tried to bring peace to the races, but tragedy struck. The Teachers became desperate and in their last final push to overcome their inevitable demise in the jungles that were so toxic to them. Great relics were placed all around the world in hopes that they could defend against the World Eaters, and they pumped as much knowledge as they could into all of the Wruwara in hopes of keeping themselves alive long after their death. Soon the Teachers would be gone, and so they killed all the Wruwara who refused to change or refused their knowledge.

It is said here in the story that the Little Teacher grew into a Great Teacher in the struggles that came, and one day before that Teacher passed, they removed their suit to become one in death with the jungles of Lunalah. That Loving Wruwara, now old and gray, was told to be the only Wruwara to have ever seen a Teacher's face- their true face: The face of true love and selflessness. In their passing, a great sword was given to the Wruwara that became the closest thing to a mother any Teacher had ever known.

The Future of Lunalah
Now the signs the Teachers taught the Wruwara are coming true, the plants are shifting, the stars are disappearing, and most of all, the parasites that had laid dormant on the World Eaters are waking up from their dark places in the ground. There is a choice the Wruwara must make. Can they reunite with their three great emotions, their three great forms, their six great tribes, and fight together to save their world again, or will they be consumed by the ghosts of their past, doomed to die?

Many generations have passed since the last Teacher walked Lunalah, and most of the tribes have forgotten about their Teachings entirely, forgetting that the ancient relics to stop the World Eaters even existed. Most Wruwara have an instinctual fear of advanced technology and run from the places these relics would be. For that matter, what do the spirits have to say about the Teachers? What does Lunalah have to say? What if the World Eaters consuming the planet isn't a bad thing, and it can be a new start, finally cleansing everything the Teachers tried to bring back?

That's for you to decide as a warrior of Lunalah.