fishesoutofwater | Test Dive #1

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test dive

Test Dive #1

PREMISE & NAVIGATION ✦ RULES ✦ MOD CONTACT
TAKEN ✦ RESERVES ✦ APPLICATIONS ✦ HIATUS & DROPS
FAQ ✦ BASE ✦ BIOMES ✦ URSULA ✦ URSULA CONTACT

TEST DIVE MEME

For information about the animals and locations, be sure to check out the BIOME and BASE pages!

A1: Go Fish
You! Yes, you! Your friendly neighbourhood AI has a task she would like to encourage YOU to do! After all, you can’t forget the most important fact: you’re here to make the planet habitable. Which means cataloguing, capturing and studying potential threats to anyone’s life. That includes a swarm of Stalkers that have been hanging around the waters awfully near the base, which presents a perfect research opportunity! At least, URSULA seems to think so.

Don’t go in willy-nilly waving your knife around, though. URSULA doesn’t want you to bring in tonight’s Sashimi Surprise™, she wants you to bring in a Stalker that’s still kicking. Which means you have to capture a live one. So hold back your crazy power or trigger-happy instincts!

How will you take one in alive without ending up dead yourself? You could go in the brute-force way, slamming its jaws shut and bagging it, though it’s pretty strong itself… or you could be a bit more cunning, taming it with bait or giving it shiny metal salvage to play with before luring it into a tank to bring it into the base. You might want to get a helping hand with this task, since it’s not exactly an easy one-man job.

A2: Go With Fish
So, now you’ve got a live and very disgruntled Stalker on your hands! Hopefully, said hands don’t have to be amputated (it’s okay if they have to though, URSULA will fix it. Try not to watch the nanites go). What do you do with it? You could keep it as a pet and observe its growth! You could dissect it and study its anatomy! Or you could… eat it. (After going through all the effort to bring it in alive?!)

B: The Abysmal Sea
You’re stranded.

One of the planet’s troublesome signal-interfering pulses has just made your communication devices 100% nonfunctional. No matter how you try to call URSULA for help, she isn’t able to respond. The database strapped to your wrist is just a useless chunk of metal now, leaving you without a useful library of knowledge to survive off. If you were driving any underwater vehicle prior to this point, it’s broken down. And unless you’re a mechanic, it’ll be pretty hard to get it jumpstarted again.

Don’t fret! The communication systems always come online eventually, so if you stay put, it’ll boot back up and give you directions straight back to base so you can finally get home. But can you really afford to stay put? The sunlight’s slowly streaming out of the sky, leaving the waters darker and darker with each passing second. Soon, you won’t be able to see five feet in front of you, and the only warning you’ll get of any approaching threat is through sound, if they even make any.

You have a few choices: take a daring risk and try swimming back to base, but on the off-chance you don’t remember the directions correctly from before you were cut off, you’re going to get even more lost, in the darkness of the night no less. Or, you could huddle in, with any friends if they were unfortunate enough to be with you, and start focusing on getting warm. Because spending the night out here in the vast oceans with the entire world against you is becoming a very, very real possibility.

C: It’s dangerous to go alone. Take them!
URSULA’s technology is breathtaking. With enough materials, she could make practically anything: weapons, vehicles, all those human comforts and entertainments she forgot to build... or perhaps she could expand the base to give everyone even more leg room. But there’s a catch: you need to get those materials to her in the first place, and scavenging can be a monumental task.

The planet Iniidae has a plethora of materials to provide, but you’ve got to go find them first. Some are easy enough to get, by plucking off the ground or breaking a rock. But some are a bit more challenging, such as Crash Powder, seeing that the Crash defending it will literally explode in your face if you get too close. And then there’s materials such as Blood Oil, only harvestable within the Blood Kelp Caves several hundred meters underwater in the pitch-black darkness… remember, you have to gather resources with your two bare hands. No such thing as driving around and conveniently collecting them within the somewhat-relative safety of an armored vehicle.

Since it’s so dangerous to go alone, URSULA will encourage you all to leave the base in pairs or groups if you’re going to try collecting some of the more precarious materials to harvest. She has heard that most lifeforms find being reconstituted from nanites traumatic, so try not to die in front of each other!

D: Hide and Seek Help
URSULA knows that everyone needs downtime, and no one can go salvaging or gathering specimens all the time. So what do you do for fun on an alien ocean planet when the AI who made your base forgot to make any kind of entertainment room?

Why, play hide-and-seek, of course! There’s a lot of places to hide away from others, and it’s challenging to find anyone. (Sometimes, too challenging to find them… ever… but that’s not the point.) The area around the base and submarine is relatively safe, so anyone can hide away in a coral structure or a cave, and telepathy makes it easy to taunt your seekers without revealing where you are.

Of course, you may encounter a Bone Shark or even a stray Stalker, and you won’t have time to get away or even scream as it attacks you, but hey. What other way to make hide-and-seek more thrilling than to turn it into hide-and-hope-you-get-found-as-you-shout-for-help-to-anyone-who-can-hear-your-telepathy?

E: Toilet Humor
Really, it was bound to happen eventually. Someone's in the bathroom observatory, doing their 'business', and someone is trying very hard to catch a fish for dinner outside. Your eyes meet. Someone has literally been caught with their pants down.

And in that moment your telepathy goes a little wonky, because it's good to have open communication about this incident.

F: The Caverns of Dream
The ocean calls you. Of course, it's much easier to dismiss it as nightmares. You'll probably think that's all it is after you have them. Flashes of screaming sea creatures writhing in agony, pleading for help, but these creatures can't ask for help, can they? Something huge, beyond the scope of imagination, moves in the ocean of your dreams and calls out to you to go deeper into the darkness. It pleads and begs but not with a voice you can hear or words you can understand.

You wake up in a sweat with the unrelenting desire to take a swim, even though it's late and everyone is asleep. Or maybe someone else just had the same nightmare as you? Are you willing to take a swim and try to understand the dream?

BASED ON CODE BY TESSISAMESS AND SUPERSUITS

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

She turned her breathing apparatus around in her hand, having trekked into one of the observatories when jolted out of sleep. The compulsion that had come with waking was as unsettling in its own ways as the fragmented memories she retained of the pleading, begging chaos of whatever dreams had plagued her. Whatever was trying to reach out was doing a poor job of communication.

Then again, what does it say about me that I assume something is trying to reach out? She kept the question private, still learning how to navigate between projected telepathy and her own thought processes. She looked up and outside, watching the strange press of sea life in its bioluminescence dart past. Twinkling stars in the wrong kind of atmosphere.

"Do you ever get the slightest bit curious what it looks like on the surface?" She turned her head to address whomever might have been moving toward or away from the same observatory she stood in, soft music filling the lulls of silence around them.

Chances were she was one sea-hatch away from looking to find out herself. Responding to things she didn't understand wasn't always the best plan, but Ellana wasn't content waiting to see what this world would bring. She had too much to get back to, regardless of having set down the official mantle of Inquisitor.

[ Two things, one of them a problem: Ellana has a large fish somehow contained in a distorted bubble of water. It took many failed attempts and recalculations on how to cast a barrier that could contain, but she has one working, ergo the Stalker.

The problem is that in order to keep that fish, she has to keep her concentration focused on the barrier itself, which is both a strain and a drain. It also means her attempts at swimming have reverted to "stay in place" with a bicycling motion of her legs and her truncated left arm, which ended at the elbow joint, moving in a counterbalance to keep her upright. Her right arm is held out in front of her, palm open, aimed straight at the Stalker. ]

Would you say you're a decent swimmer?

[ She hears the mental taunt, giving a small shake of her head as she pulls herself up short and gives a cursory look around. Broadcasting on a general channel to whoever was in the region, she asks: ]

Who are you expecting to have come find you, again?

"The surface...?" Peridot squints at her new companion. She doesn't sleep - never sleeps. She doesn't really understand it or the need that most of the people here seem to have for the activity. It seems incredibly inefficient to her. Why would you want to be effectively switched off for one-third of the day?

Her eyes dart down to the empty sleeve and her brow furrows. Weird.

"It's probably nothing but water. What's interesting about that?"

Everything. Anything. More importantly, the surface wasn't underwater, and as disturbing as being at sea and not on a ship was for her in a more general sense, it'd hardly be the only time she'd seen an immense expanse of seemingly unending water. Granted, not in anything close to the same circumstances, and she'd never been in open ocean before, but that was neither here nor there.

Peridot garners a pause and a blink as Ellana considers the person standing before her. All in shades of green, more or less humanoid, on the small side. She opts not to go straight for the what are you, considering being overtly rude when they live in tight quarters isn't the best plan of action. She'd prefer to keep a tenable living situation. She'd also prefer finding something to properly clip up the empty portion of her wetsuit sleeve, but one can't have everything all at once. She'll make do.

"The fact it exists? We can be amazed at the utter nonsense of the constellations topside. We could probably even invent a few of our own and name them, if no one else has gotten around to it yet."

She doubts anyone has gotten around to naming constellations, but it was theoretically something interesting to do. Moreso, it meant reacting to an impetus in a way she chose. Hence constellations. Why not. She's been dragged out of bed to stranger calls than that of this foreign sea.

Stargazing. For no real purpose. The last time she'd encountered that had been the fusion - no, Garnet. Garnet had been stargazing, just because. Peridot frowns and swallows the snide remark she'd been about to make about stargazing being a waste of time. She rolls her shoulders in a shrug, neck craned back slightly so she can maintain eye contact with her new companion.

"While examining the stars might give us a decent idea of where we are in relation to our home planets, I doubt that naming them is a worthwhile activity. They're just stars. They have their own planets - what's so special about them?"

She only gives Ellana a brief moment to answer that, because she has another question that she needs answered. She picks up the empty sleeve of the wetsuit and examines it, brow arching curiously, "What's wrong with you? You're missing an entire arm."

Ellana quirks up her own eyebrows in response to Peridot picking at her sleeve. "Ah..." How direct of her new companion. Again, more than anything else, it reminds her of certain other companions... or the directness of a child. "Direct, aren't you? Not to mention given to exaggeration. There's a good half an arm left in that sleeve, thank you."

As if to make that point, she moves her elbow back, pulling on the wetsuit material so that it pulls on Peridot's hand in turn. "Though with that out of the way, we might as well introduce ourselves. You can call me Ellana. And you are..."

"Peridot," Peridot replies perfunctorily. She's still eyeing the half-empty sleeve with a bit of confusion. Why did Ellana tolerate that? There had to be a reason.

"Why don't you just... fix it?" She waves a hand, as if that single gesture could illustrate the concept, "Isn't it irritating only having one functional limb?"

"Fix it?" She's mildly amused, wondering what Peridot appeared to believe people were capable of doing. Certainly some healers could repair physical damage, and under duress or in great need she could theoretically do the same, but reconstructing something out of nothing? One could even argue this was the end result of a certain kind of healing, much like less magical means of healing employed methods of cutting away infected, dying flesh to allow the healthy flesh to heal, but...

Those were thoughts for a different time, and not ones owed to her present companion. "I've considered the use of different prosthesis, but it's been a bit of a set-back since arriving on the bottom of the sea. Either way, weren't we discussing swimming? Up, toward the sky." She gestured with her breathing apparatus overhead, the clear ceiling of the observatory showcasing the darkness that eventually engulfed their "sky."

Peridot doesn't really get how the human body heals. She's never really seen any of them injured and Steven isn't exactly the best baseline, since he's part gem. So when Ellana seems mildly amused at the idea of just fixing it, it makes Peridot a little frustrated. Why are humans dumb? Sure, they don't work like gems, but they have to be able to fix themselves when they break. Don't they?

"You know... get another one? Or whatever it is humans do when they get hurt?" She sounds like she's explaining the concept to a small child. Which is a bit strange, because she's not exactly looking down at Ellana (well, not in the physical sense). She shakes her head.

"Why would I want to go swimming, anyway? Or go up? It's wasted effort. We've got a job to do down here, remember?"

Peridot earns another quizzical look. "The same things elves do, I suppose. Hope to survive the injury, then heal up best as they can." She wasn't sure what Peridot meant about getting another one past what she'd already said about prosthesis. "Unless you're suggesting people should grow extra limbs in the event of losing their original ones."

Being unfamiliar with sea stars (something that may or may not persist here, depending on the variety of this world's oceans), the closest related example she can come up with is a lizard losing and regrowing a tail. Which never came back in perfectly, and as far as she knew, lizards were even designed to take those kinds of losses.

"A job down here that includes exploring, doesn't it? Which would mean being aware of what lies up as much as what lies in any direction of the compass. We're closer to flying than walking in an environment like this. Not looking up seems like a poor plan in the long run." Especially if that meant being unaware of what might be overhead to come down, or what was normal overhead versus abnormal enough to want to note.

Or if the strange compulsion would lessen once she was out in the water, or instead grow stronger.

Wait a minute. Peridot squints up at Ellana, as if she's just sprouted a econd head or something, "...why can't you just replace it? How do humans heal, anyway?"

She brushes right past the "elf" qualifier because she's never heard it before, so it's probably not that important. Probably just a weird human signifier. Like how they aren't all "Stevens". She works her jaw for a moment. Well - that does make sense. Peridot blows out a sigh and folds her arms, reluctantly nodding in agreement.

"I suppose you're correct. Maybe seeing the surface would help us better understand what our task entails. But do you really want to go swimming now? Everyone else is in the middle of their sleep cycle."

Again, the insistence on saying human. Ellana presses her lips together, tempted to frown, but falling into a more neutral expression as she watches Peridot work through her own suggestion. It's logical. Flawed, in many ways, but logical enough to present an option to move forward.

Moving felt more productive than holding still right now. There wasn't anyplace to get to outside of the goals they set for themselves; no other countries, no dry land she was aware of, but being trapped underwater had quickly lost its novelty. Trapped is trapped. She's not overfond of this.

"It's also when we'll be able to see the stars. If we study those, we'll be able to find any better fixed points for navigation purposes, won't we? There's the compass we all have in our knives," she says, thinking that's what it was, "But if we lose those, it'd be good to have other means of navigating where we are. The ah... mind speaking doesn't help so much with the direction problems." She holds out her hand, shrugging. "It's worth a try, isn't it? Maybe we can run some kind of line from the base to the surface, too, and get a buoy up as a marker in the next few days."

"Most of our navigation is underwater," Peridot points out, "Star navigation won't exactly be useful when we're trying to move around down here."

Despite acquiescing to the potential usefulness of a surface trip, Peridot isn't necessarily convinced of the urgency. It can probably wait until they've dealt with more pressing matters. Like, uh, something else. She's not sure what their primary objective is just yet, but she's sure it will be more important than a trip to the surface. Besides, she has other objections. She glances out of the observatory window and frowns.

"Do you even know how deep we are? We don't know how long the trip will take."

Obviously they're not that deep or the pressure would be killing off all the humans. Well, in theory.

"It can probably wait."

But does it have to be?

"You have been outside during the daylight, haven't you? I can't image we'd be seeing light if we were too far down." More to a point, they're dealing in three dimensions of movement. It's nothing like flying, and all too much like drowning, and in fact, she's generally not pleased with this situation. Dealing with having her own world foundations shaken up was enough. She has to admit part of her simply doesn't want to deal with building a completely different set of foundations here, but how will any of them do completely unmoored?

Not to mention so alien to each other.

"One of the best ways to learn is through doing. I'm fond of that school of thought myself. How long will it take? How deep are we? Why don't we all simply float to the surface anyway?" She pauses, looking to Peridot. "How well can you see in the dark?"

the inquisitor (ellana lavellan) | dragon age (post-trespasser)

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aaaaaaaaaaaa

are you screaming already goodness

yes

excellent

... er

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