Predaters

''Page's a work in progress. But this information is up to date as of June 2019. '''Also, Please. Until I say otherwise, everything here is a MAJOR SPOILER. Please see the Home Page for more information on that.'

A Predater is defined as "An Intelligent, Humanoid Ethraksha-Based-Organism who's creation predates the 2nd Calamity.

Even more dangerous than the Region Tyrants, if you encounter one you should run immediately. Expect to be chased down and eaten, however.

Rarity
Predaters are incredibly rare on Arcerra. There are none that roam freely across the continent. The few that still exist are either being hosted or have been sealed inside of a Living Weapon.

Appearance
Predaters get their Programming from the environment and the Humans they've absorbed. They all have an eerily vague humanoid shape, but beyond that, appearances vary greatly depending on what has been absorbed by the individual.

Intelligence
Due to the way Ethraksha struggles to consistently absorb all the information contained within living matter, a Predater must mix and match the Programming from at least 50 absorbed humans to attain the level of intelligence that they currently display.

As well as this, Predaters have the same level of self-awareness and "cognitive" functionality as Humans, as well as a physical form that eerily resembles the countless human lives that they've ended.

Personality/Behaviour
Most Predaters are unfeeling demons with no sense of morality.

Ethraksha can also absorb thoughts and emotions. This is why Predaters end up becoming living embodiments of fear, anger, despair and hopelessness: nobody who's been killed by one died a peaceful death.

Memories
The memories of Predaters are stored throughout their entire bodies, just like any form of Ethraksha programming. They also retain small pieces of the memories of the humans that they've absorbed. This is usually how Predaters know where to find more humans to kill.

Power
Predaters will never have access to Magic Systems. The L.U.C.Y Gene that grants it deactivates when it's been absorbed by another mass of Ethraksha.

However, Predaters can control and use the Ethraksha the make up their being.

What a Predater absorbs affects what abilities they have and how they work.

Using their powers permanently removes Ethraksha from the Predater's form, and it has to be reattained.

Heavy Magic usage can erase a Predater's memories.

The Enlightened
A long time ago the leader of the Predaters, The Original, figured out that Ethraksha Programming exists and how it works. He decided to share parts of this knowledge with his brethren, allowing them to:
 * Ignore Programming Staling.
 * Pick and choose what Programming to take/exclude from the things that they absorb.
 * Shift their Programming into a small area of their body. Useful for avoiding attacks.
 * Willingly change their forms, an ability granted by the above ability.
 * "Eject" Ethraksha from Pallobalt.

These "Enlightened" Predaters can bypass memory erasure by shifting their Programming away from the piece of their body that they want to use to attack, but will still lose Ethraksha.

Hosting
Predaters can live symbiotically with other living things. They replace parts of the living thing's body with themselves, and in return give them powers. basically.

Becoming the Host of a Predater is nearly always a ' permanent process. '

The Predater can either:
 * 1) Absorb the Host in their entirety: The Predater then relinquishes control of its own body and lets the host do all the work. This gives the host all the power the Predater had, but they're technically dead. This way, the Host will eventually be lost in the swarm of all the other Programming in the Predater's body and it will regain control. (This method is mostly just a trick to make people willingly be absorbed.)
 * 2) Only replace select parts. This gives the host less power, but it's MUCH safer since they aren't dead.

Predaters actually can attach themselves without absorbing anything. Such is the case with "I don't have a character like this yet."

Brief History
The story of the Predaters happens takes up the entirety of Era II.

I will be as Brief as possible.
 * 1) Birth of the Original.
 * 2) Development of the Original
 * 3) Creation of the Predater colony.
 * 4) Human Absorption and philosophy about the world around them.
 * 5) Birth of Crimson.
 * 6) Crimson's experiments and Enlightenment.
 * 7) Predater-Human Alliance and Crimson's exile.
 * 8) Crimson's rampage.
 * 9) Beginning of the war.
 * 10) End of the War.
 * 11) Aestithikodex is found by The Original.
 * 12) The Original Enlightenment.
 * 13) Two weeks before the massacre.
 * 14) The Massacre.
 * 15) The Faux Paradise installation (Important)
 * 16) Original Prohibits other Predater from disturbing the Faux Paradise. Those who disagree have their Enlightenment stripped away and are exiled, to be killed if they approach the Faux Paradise.
 * 17) The Original begins to contemplate and regret his decisions.
 * 18) A human escapes the Faux Paradise.
 * 19) That same human singlehandedly either kills nearly every Predater or seals them in a Living Weapon. Survivors  The ones that survive become the Queens of Divine Blessings.
 * 20) The Original gives the human a choice. They chose to let humanity suffer once more.
 * 21) The Original destroys the Faux Paradise, and is killed by the human shortly after.
 * 22) Cndnnzoa and Gurass go on a rampage and eradicate Humanity.
 * 23) L.U.C.Y intervenes and the 2nd Calamity goes underway.
 * 24) Cdnnzoa and Gurass square up to L.U.C.Y. Nearly killed. Escape and establish the Druids of Origin in preparation.

Full History
The Predaters started off as a small collective of EBOs that resided within the northern area of Arcerra, the area that would become known as the United Archipelagic Sky-islands. All of them are composed of several dozen

Several hundred years were spent pondering the meaning of existence, the human condition, the non-human dilemma, and other various philosophical topics. The Predaters settled with "consume humans to evolve and become superior" as their answer to life.

So they started doing that. A LOT of Humans died. What made it even scarier was that the Predaters more or less took the appearance of the ones that they absorb and kill. So Humanity didn't really like that. The small cities in the Wind Region at the time tried to fight back, but Predaters are literally invincible; they got fucked big time.

Eventually word spread of the "Man-Eating Demons of the North" or some shit and the entire Continent decided to wage war on the Ethraksha. But what made it different this time was that some bright lad figured out that Ethraksha is Absorbed by Pallobalt, which Humans could then touch without being harmed.

Humans didn't really like that so they began to fight back. Got Fucked big time.

Then some bright spark figured out you can absorb Ethraksha with Pallobalt. Proceed to wipe out 90% of the Predater population by sealing them in Living Weapons. Scared the shit out of them at first, since a lot of them got split up into several different weapons and mixed with other Predaters, effectively corrupting their programming for good. They're Dead as far as anyone's concerned.

But humans stopped doing this since if you absorb an entire Predater in one weapon you'll make a powerful weapon. That was a big fuck up since Predaters could just break out and carry on killing.

But they could always return to doing what they did first. So the Original struck a "deal": the 30 or so Predaters left will stop killing and absorbing humans, just leave them alone.

The humans Agreed. Peace at last, kind of.

Still grieving the loss of its friends of hundreds of years, the Original found the Aestithikodex a few months later, absorbed it and became a truly intelligent and fully sentient being, and finding out the truth of the world before the first Calamity.

It can't handle it. Such a beautiful planet with a history so rich it takes up a million-page book...destroyed by human greed. Fucking disgusting. The Orginal is glad Origin hit when it did. It will NOT let Humanity destroy Arcerra like it did Earth.

Its rage and grief are hard to contain. It can't keep all of this information within itself, it'll go crazy, corrupt it's own programming. It removes a majority of the Aestithikodex's information from itself and stores the Programmed Ethraksha containing all of Earth's history within a Pallobalt Orb. It then removes all memories it has of ever finding the Aesitihikodex.

It keeps it's disdain for humanity, however. So the Original basically says fuck fake peace we're killing all of them. The Original and the Predaters left went around injecting living weapons containing whole predaters with a message telling how to break out, and how they're gonna kill all of humanity in a week's time.

That time came around and nobody could react fast enough to do anything. Arcerra's population went from 3 billion to 100million. They didn't even take any Programming from them, they just killed them. Every living weapon broke out, and there were no more.

Death is instant relief. Can't have that. The Original had a new plan. Make Humanity suffer. It tells everyone else to lay low for a couple of years.

I don't think there needs to be a wall. Yeah as far as I can see there's only a wall so the Original and co. can accurately kill half of Arcerra's population and get away with lying about it. That can happen without the need for a wall.

No need for a wall.

Faux Paradise Installation
The Original lied and called himself Silva, the vastly intelligent (crazy and dead) Eidolon who was responsible for many of Era I's events.

It said that he has returned from death to save humanity from the man-eating monsters, which is funny because it WAS the one who did that. Everyone believed him, thinking Silva has returned to save humanity. (This part of the story is in Elementalist44's bible. Nobody learns the truth, EVER.)

He then helps humanity recover from the tragedy, except he forces them to regress into a semi-medieval lifestyle, where people are easiest to manipulate using religion.

He stages a few attacks from the Predaters, which he "saves humanity" from to get them used to the idea of disaster befalling them. The main one includes having a Predater "curse humanity for all eternity", something that "Silva" reveres into a blessing halfway through. Except this was just an excuse to enact the hardest part of his plan.

The Original figured that if you give humanity everything they could ever want, they'd go crazy: The Original decides that this is the best way to make humanity suffer, by trapping them in an installed Faux Paradise. Giving them everything, but leaving them nothing at the same time. He uses Tomahtra, which he found around the same time he found the Aestithikodex, to enact this curse.
 * Survival, Understanding, Purpose in life, Avoidance of displeasure, assured continuation of the species. Take those basic instinctual necessities away then all that's left for a human is to satisfy it's materialistic greed. No other purpose other than to collect things that don't have much value to any other living thing.
 * If this the case, then The Original shall take away humanities desires. Not by making them incapable of wanting such things, but by giving them all that they could ever want. Immortality and Invincibility* makes over half of humanity's instincts useless.
 * The only thing they truly have left if their free will, but what's the use in wanting, when there's nothing to want? When everything has been done? When every book has been read and when every song has been sung? When there is literally nothing to do? What becometh of humanity then? They go fucking nuts and just want to die, but they can't because they cannot die or be killed. It's heaven for a few thousand years, then it's hell for the rest of eternity.

What makes the Faux Paradise WORSE is that it acts like a hyberbolic time chamber. 100,000 years in there is a day in reality.

He leaves Humanity in there for 100 years.

He then uses Tomahtra to turn all nine regions into unique paradises for nature; thriving with exotic animals and that used to be extinct (from before the 1st calamity), and he even created a few of his own enhanced versions of these creatures. All of this is specifically tailored to kick Humanity off the top of the food chain.

This would be the end of the good half of Extinction Event.

Now the bad stuff. For these past 100 years, The Original is beginning to regret what he's done to humanity, contemplating whether he's become what he sought to destroy. To make matters worse, The Original's plan to make humanity suffer succeeded far beyond his expectations. The Faux Paradise has literally become hell, the absolute evil.

I have no idea how, but we're going to have one of the Faux Paradise's most dangerous denizens, a delusional shell of a human who figured out how to Program Ethraksha, escape the Faux Paradise. He brutally slaughters everything that stands in his way, animals and Predaters alike. In his mind, and the viewers, it's all a light hearted adventure akin to something you'd find on a childrens TV show or a video game.

The Original was undoubtedly aware of this.

At first, He orders all Predaters not to attack it. But after it kills several Predaters unprovoked, He changes his mind and allows all of his kin to attack on sight. More die. Cdnnzoa and Gurass try to eliminate him but do not succeed. They confront The Original, imploring him to do something about this Himself. He does not and tells both of them to fuck off. The Human finally comes face to face with the Original Predater. After 100 years of thinking that the Faux Paradise Installation was a horrible mistake, the Original gives the Human a choice that will decide whether he was right or wrong in his retrospection:


 * 1) Keep the Faux Paradise as it is, and leave humanity to it's eternal search for a reason to keep existing.
 * 2) Dismantle the Faux Paradise, and return humanity to it's mortal struggle.

The Human chooses the latter, and The Orginal obliges. But, after seeing the result of his actions and the ghoulish nature of the Humans who have been confined in the Faux Paradise for so long, The Original remembers why he hated humanity in the first place, and immediately forgets the past 100 years he's spent trying to forgive them.

Then the human and The Original fight. The former is then killed after a spectacular fight. Gurass and Cdnnzoa become stricken with grief and rage. They kill every last living thing on Arcerra and turn it into a barren wasteland. L.U.C.Y intervenes and resets everything back to before the two Predaters went berserk. Then they try to fight L.U.C.Y and they lose. Then they run off and go into hiding. They eventually found the Druids of Origin.

Living Weapons
Further Elaborating on what was previously mentioned...

...in another page lol.

Predaters absorbed into Pallobalt basically kinda creates a weapon.

List of Predaters
All the ones I've made so far.

The Original

Bubon

Crimson

Goolzengoast

Gurass

Cnidnnzoa

Medium

B.B Vanter

Mal

CIX CIX

Big things, but small

Small things, but big.

Tbh the other ones can be made as we go along. There needs to be like, 30 or something. 19 left.

Trivia

 * The name will be mispronounced as "Predators" by silly people.
 * It's literally "Predate" and "Predator" mixed together. Not hard.
 * They Predate the Arkin, who most people think are the pinnacle of EBOs.
 * They're literally at the top of any food chain they're included in.