Naalu Collective

When it comes to the Naalu Collective, many truths are unconfirmed, especially regarding their history. When put to the question, the Naalu Collective’s Druaa ambassadors commonly reply that as a species of telepaths, they are always significantly more interested in the present.

Not that many beings are eager to engage a Druaa in conversation. Apart from knowing that one’s every thought is being read like an open book, many species evolved on planets with snakes or snakelike predators and have an instinctive fear of them. The Collective likes to use this to their advantage by emphasizing the more unsettling and serpentine nature of their movements and speech patterns. Finally, none of this is helped by the fact that most Druaa are more than four meters long from tail to crest.

But more than that, the Naalu possess technology and weapons known to have the ability to redirect, manipulate, or damage the neuron impulses guiding the brains of all major known species. Possibly as a result, no diplomatic mission with the Collective has ever been deemed a success.

The Naalu, when informed of this, are always surprised. To their mind, everything went absolutely perfectly.

The Naalu are ancient. When the Collective first made themselves known during the Twilight Wars, their crystalline fleets dramatically appeared near key systems demanding audience with the major players. Stellar cartographers and historians were shocked to discover that their home system, Mallac, had somehow managed to evade being cataloged for millennia despite being surrounded by worlds whose recorded history predated even that of the Lazax Empire. That region of space has long been rumored haunted; crews traveling there have been found adrift in deep space with no memory of how they got there, and entire ships have been lost without trace. That the Naalu are responsible is an obvious conjecture, though they stridently deny it—and strange occurrences coincidentally seem to befall off-worlders who ask too many questions.

An easy hypothesis is that the Naalu have been colluding with the Yssaril Guild of Spies, as there is no record of Yssaril ships or crews having ever suffered space amnesia or ship loss in the region, and many of the scientists most vociferously proposing this theory have turned up dead under mysterious circumstances. If true, this explains how a seemingly isolated civilization claiming no prior contact with the rest of the galaxy managed to develop premium civilian and military technology rivaling, and in some cases surpassing, the galaxy’s cutting edge. As the Naalu are a species of psychics, their ability to rapidly form consensus and prevent internal conflicts from spiraling into war was probably a major factor in their incredibly rapid development.

The Naalu Collective Today

The Naalu’s insignia represents the spiked eye of the Neffish, a radiant, crystalline creature that glides through the seas of their home planet of Druaa; stalking lesser prey, it attacks with its claws. Representing deadly grace and perilous beauty, the Neffish is an incredibly aggressive and dangerous predator, pacified only by constant telepathic control. Collective ship designs are all Neffish-inspired, scintillating and shimmering hulls glittering in the starlight. In battle, the Naalu use their telepathy to constrict their enemies in elegant traps, their gleaming crystal fighter squadrons coiling effortlessly in and out of the line of fire before striking their deadly blows. Combat against the Naalu is futile unless in overwhelming force, and even then to invite their wrath is ill-advised.

Few outsiders visit the Mallac system, even fewer Druaa itself, a breathtakingly beautiful world with flowered steppes, violet mountains, and glowing forests. The oceans teem with swimming Druaa, and the air is filled with melodic arias, thousands of haunting voices hissing in the kind of unison only a species of telepaths can truly achieve. Most Druaa never speak unless they make contact with off-worlders, communicating their emotions and intentions purely through their minds. Even then, many Druaa tend to “mistakenly” respond to an off-worlder’s thoughts as if they’d been spoken aloud, just to remind everyone that nothing is secret to the Collective. The Naalu, it must be said, always love having the upper hand.

Their leader, Q’uesh Sish, is a tall, red-scaled Druaa who has ruled the Collective for over a decade from her palace in the shining crystal city of Eershin. She prefers to receive visitors in front of her Neffish, a massive carving shaped after the beloved sea creature. All visitors are informed that the Neffish is made from a rare radium crystal that allows Q’uesh Sish to see the minds of other beings, no matter how far away they are.

Before leaving, off-worlders are treated to virtuoso performances by thousands of Druaa’s finest singers while feasting upon the greatest delicacies the planet has to offer, including mountainous river fish, roast Maalukian rodents, and deep-sea monstrosities the Naalu hunt alongside their Neffish. A banquet attended by Q’uesh Sish has thousands of courses—and apparently, she never has to eat the same meal twice.

The pristine beauty of Druaa is maintained by off-worlding all industry to the other habitable planet in the system: pungent, mudflat-strewn Maaluk, which visitors are forbidden from setting foot on. In addition, the enslaved Miashan, a winged species deeply susceptible to the Naalu’s telepathic capabilities, perform all manual labor on Maaluk. All the Naalu’s various industries are housed here: iron extraction, jewel mining, underground gas siphoning, metal refinement, and thousands upon thousands of rodent farms. Raw materials are shipped either to the shipyards in orbit around Druaa’s two moons—upon which legions of Naalu soldiers muster and train—or to Druaa itself, where they are stored in massive underground warehouses and distributed to the cities by Miashan towing airborne gliders.

The truth is that there is more to Maaluk than the Naalu want outsiders to know. Xenobiological analysis of the Miashan and the Druaa suggest the Miashan are more likely to have evolved on planet Druaa, and the Druaa's physiology is more likely to have developed on Maaluk. However, this issue should never be posed to Naalu ambassadors unless one wishes to cause deep offense. The Naalu often hint that further pursuit of the matter will result in one’s brains draining out of one’s nasal cavities.

But the information had to come from somewhere, and it is true that not all Druaa identify with the Collective. Whispers abound of defectors who have somehow hidden their true intentions from the rest of the Collective, but where these defectors are, and why they seem so intent on spreading the truth about Maaluk, is currently unknown.

Goals of the Naalu Collective

The Collective works to shroud its intentions in mystery and obfuscation, but its members do seem to care about those Druaa who leave their society, if the rumors of Collective hunt teams and assassinations are to be believed. Beyond this, the Collective has dispatched representatives to nearly every major civilization and has cheerfully contributed more than its fair share of agents to the ranks of the Keleres. These individuals tend to bend over backward to cooperate with their new colleagues, although this is not so difficult for a species with such flexible spines.

Given this information, most of the Great Civilizations have a theory. The Naalu’s intentions may be opaque, but as they continue to dispatch envoys while simultaneously positioning their fleets around key systems, the Collective have made it clear that they are interested not just in the present, but in the future as well. All of it.