Editing Nobledark Imperium Xenos (section)

=== The Proto-Orks and the Krork ===

<div class="toccolours mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" style="100%">'''''The First WAAAGH!'''''

The creation of the Orks should have been a war crime. Even by the standards of the Old Ones and the Necrontyr, it was clear that someone had crossed the line. In the case of the Eldar, Hrud, and the other species uplifted into shock troops and cannon fodder by the Old Ones, all the Old Ones did is genetically enhance what was already there, teach them how to make gods, and give them space age technology. The Orks were almost completely overhauled from the ground up. Of course, this was during the late stages of the War in Heaven, when both Necrontyr and Old One were rapidly abandoning any pretense at a moral high ground in order to get better weapons to kill the other side.

<div class="mw-collapsible-content">

Snotlings are thought to be the closest thing to the original proto-ork species. The proto-orks were little over two feet tall, with some odd individuals making it to three, living in peaceful little proto-ork villages. They had a life span of 10 to 12 years baring illness or injury but usually averaging at 8 to 10 due to their environment. Omnivorous and to some degree toxin resistant. They were not the cleverest of creatures but were smart enough to build mud and wood houses and wood and stone tools. They could make fire and used it for cooking and the deterrence of predators, of which they had many. They had not discovered metal by the time the Old Ones found them. They were capable of violence against each other in a halfhearted, tribal brawl sort of way. Usually they fought to win rather than kill. Despite their many predators they were still possessed of a strange sort of child-like innocence. Nowhere was in-built knowledge of war or genetically inscribed mad-genius, the had not even writing, and even spoken language was crude and half made of gestures. They mostly [[Nobledark_Imperium_Notable_People#Rainbow Serpent|worshipped warp spirits]], for this was back in the day when the warp wasn’t entirely full of daemons. The proto-orks reproduced asexually through spores, but it was more reliable to chop off a finger or toe or ear and plant it in the soft mud near the river. However, when they did die, they would often release a cloud of spores as a last-ditch effort at reproduction, similar to some Earth species. It was this ability that made them of interest when the Old Ones came. And touched them where no species was meant to be touched.

As a point of comparison, imagine what the world would be like if the Old Ones did to humans what they did to the proto-Orks. Beings like baseline humanity would be nearly extinct, whereas the dominant representative of humanity is [[Orks|nearly quintuple the height of the average human and looks like it fell off the tree of life and hit every atavistic branch on the way down. What passes for "human" looks like a gorilla crossed with an ogryn, with fangs as thick as your forearm.]] Other varieties of “human” are [[Gretchin|creatures the size of polar bears, but lanky and cruel and built like a ‘’Velociraptor’’]]. All of them have seemingly leapt in intellect from the human standard, possessed of a [[Mork|bestial cunning]] [[Old Ones|alloyed with terrible knowledge]] and only concerned with survival in a horrible world they're intent on making. [[Snotling|What few members of baseline humanity remain have regressed even further in intelligence to little better than animals.]] To make matters worse, these things primarily feed on [[Squig|creatures that look like demented combinations of human fetuses and infants as designed by Hieronymous Bosch]]. The Old Ones have taken your species and turned it into a viral ecosystem, good for nothing more than spreading. Every living thing you see around you is derived from humans in some way, [[Dogscape|a landscape made of human flesh]].

After the first batch of Krork were created it was the end for the proto-orks. The moment the first new spore touched the mud it was just a matter of time, you can't coexist with orks. Some isolated pockets held on for a few centuries but their day was done. That said, when the Krork first entered galactic history, their behavior was markedly different from the initial gene-wrought weapons that killed and ate their predecessors, [[Nobledark_Imperium_Writing#The Last Casualties of the War in Heaven|enough so that the eldar actually remember the Krork fondly]]. Although the Krork still thrived on war as much as their 41st millennium counterparts, they were much more intelligent and disciplined and were capable of realizing their allies didn’t enjoy war like they did and were capable of modifying their behavior accordingly. The Old Ones did not take kindly to team killing, and they had the psychic might to enforce their opinions, even on the greatest psychic species they had designed. However, just because a species is pleasant for a given time doesn't mean they will remain that way, or that they didn't have their own bloody secrets in their past. The eldar had no idea of what the Old Ones did, or the Krork's bloody early history, they liked the Krork but they would have been horrified to find out exactly how they had been made.

When the Old Ones died and the Enslavers took over the galaxy, every Old One-uplifted race had to survive in their own way. The Eldar hid in the Webway. The Hrud combined their entropy fields into a singularity that paused time from their perspective until the danger had passed. The Krork, on the other hand, died to the last fighting against the Enslavers across the galaxy, with the species renewing itself in a following generation from the spores left over when they died. This is what turned the Krork into the Orks, and emphasizes a particular problem with the Old Ones' methods. While the Orks retained all of their genetically encoded knowledge [[Mekboy|such as everything the Old Ones thought they needed to wage war on a galactic scale]], anything culturally transmitted (like, say, “allies don’t WAAAGH! as hard as we do, treat them like panzees”) gets lost. The Orks retained all of the Krork’s [[Intelligence|knowledge]], but none of their [[wisdom]], and even the Gorkamorka of the new generation of Brain Boyz was kindled anew by the giants. The Eldar were overjoyed to find another old ally that had survived the War in Heaven, only to find their allies now…different. So began the Eldar-Ork Brain Boy wars that rocked the galaxy in countless cycles over eons, before the Fall of the Eldar.

</div>
</div>