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fishesoutofwater2016-02-13 02:56 pm
subnauticmods) wrote in fishesoutofwater2016-02-13 02:56 pm
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Test Dive #1
   ≡U.R.S.U.L.A. NAVIGATION |
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PREMISE & NAVIGATION ✦ RULES ✦ MOD 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?
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?
no subject
She looks back down at Teddy. ]
I'm sorry, play fish what?
[ It's not too hard to read the way she holds herself, as if ready to leap into action (or in this case, run back to get some distance) should the need manifest. She's tense, and her good arm, the one that doesn't end at the elbow, curls into a loose fist at her side as she lets it drop down. ]
You're a dog. Or you look like a dog. Are you a dog?
[ Or are you a demon? Forgive the narrowing of her eyes and the repetitive questions, Teddy, it's the context she comes out of that leaves her with uncomfortable suspicions.
... Maybe he's a spirit? Of... playful............ness. (One might hope.) ]
no subject
Fish Tag. Ursula wants a fish, but they are faster. We could work together.
[It was just lucky for him his collar didn't reflect tone the way a human voice normally did. It was generally a single, even tone as IEGP had seen no reason to modify it for sarcasm or emotional filters. Sometimes that was a benefit. Other times, it was a nuisance.]
I am a dog. [He barked twice for emphasis, the sound loud in their close quarters base.] Teddy. I am a good dog. [For the moment he would keep the tone-lacking sarcasm about pretending a human was giving him his voice from somewhere else to himself.]
no subject
Ellana breathes in, makes herself breath out long and slow. She doesn't do more than meet Teddy's eyes in passing. Sure, Cullen's new furry friend is about the most dog she's been around lately, but there are few canines she feels like inviting into vying for dominance without reason.
... Particularly if they talk. Who knows if any of those logics even apply, but there are enough challenges already on their plate. He's a dog, or a creature in the appearance of a dog. (She's not checking to see if he's truly a he or not at the moment; she'll assume from the voice.) She's no particularly gifted fisher, down one arm, and as out of her element as he is out of his. Really, who came up with this underwater nonsense, and how have none of them accidentally drowned themselves yet? ]
Is that something you should say for yourself, or something you've already heard?
[ She's jesting, for the most part. If it's Teddy sincerely calling himself a good dog, then... well then. ]
Either way, I... suppose it's nice to meet you, Teddy. You can call me Ellana. If you have any grand ideas for chasing the fish the way we want them swimming, I'm all ears.
[ She offers a small, close lipped smile, gesturing toward an ear with her hand. ]
no subject
Something I earned. [He wore 'Good Boy' like a soldier wore an earned rank.]
Bait. [Normally this was the last suggestion he would use, but in this case, he couldn't face the fish head on. His weapons were decommissioned thanks to the suit and breather. He wouldn't be able to use his mouth or claws. Only his problem solving skills and hopefully, some luck.]
Get the stalker to chase me to a bay door or a tank. With luck they are not smart enough to understand a trap. You shut the fish in when I swim out.
[He shook his fur out with a glance out a nearby window, uncomfortable and tense. If it failed he didn't have any ideas. He had not experienced them up close yet, thankfully, but they seemed slower swimmers than the smaller fish in what he had seen of them.]
no subject
Or they could find someone more physically imposing and rope them into assisting. Such as it was, they were the only two left in this section of the base, and the dog does have a point about what needs to get done. ]
I may want to see how fast you swim before agreeing to that.
[ One way or another. Maybe at that point they could get additional assistance... or she could see what kind of pushing she manages between spirit force and the rest. Hard to say; nothing felt quite the same about her connection to the Fade here. ]
Even if we don't manage to lure one close to the — what were you calling it? The bay door? Once one's in my line of sight, I should be able to hit it hard enough to make it dizzy. Then we can see about dragging it back in.
[ Then again, do they have enough kelp yet to braid into any worthwhile harnesses? Hmm, that and netting... ]
no subject
[The thrill of a challenge had him excited again, in spite of the uncertainty of their success and his dislike of the aquatic environment he was forced to navigate on this mission.
But the strange, pointy eared human-like creature had good additions to his rough solution.]
Things move slower in the water. But if we do some practice swings first you can judge. Depending on how far, I can drag it back. I can hold my breath. My jaws are strong. Ursula said alive, it did not say the creature had to be unharmed.
no subject
[ A pause. ]
For you, or any fish we catch out in that sea.
[ Regardless, this is now a "we." Someone, somewhere, is proud of her working with a dog (pending that dog is not, in fact, demon possessed. Then it's more foolishness.). ]
Which shoes are those? [ Turning, she sights the flippers, having no real equivalent to call them, looking speculatively between them and her canine companion. Nothing else matches "flat" and "long" or "shoes" in the immediate area, and for someone who is walking around barefoot at the moment, the dog's not referring to anything she's wearing. ] You want to have duck feet? I suppose I can see how that would work... well, let's have at it, then. We'll fit you with these long shoes, see where we are after some practice, and then bag ourselves a large, aggressive fish for our disembodied host.
[ Thus with her one good arm, she'll carefully walk to where the flippers are hanging, keeping her body turned so that she doesn't leave Teddy directly behind her at any point. She's taking a gamble, but not that much of one, undeserved. Holding one of the smaller ones down to about his level, she crouches, quirking up her eyebrows. ]
Is this of a size?