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

[Colette...may or may not be able to see this kid swimming awkwardly nearby, but she should be able to at least hear him on a telepathy band. How handy! He's keeping an eye on the fish in case it gets aggressive, but he also sounds genuinely curious.]

Are you . . . trying to communicate with it? Is it sending any kind of answer back at all?

[Being turned into an angel has not heightened much of her spiritual sensitivity, and aside from that she's still (mostly) human. (Mostly it's funnier if she can't see him.) In any case, as soon as she hears the disembodied voice she gasps and spins around, trying to locate the source. The only thing in the area is the Stalker, though, so she can't help but hone in on that.]

Is it working? It's working! I knew you had it in you, Fishy!

[Oh, dear. He really ought to just . . . stand on a table and yell inside the Base, one of these days; figure out all at once who can see him normally and who can't.]

No. I'm...I'm definitely not the fish!

[Please don't be swimming towards it, Colette.]

[She was swimming towards the Stalker, but after hearing that she spins around more--she must have missed him!]

Oh, I didn't see you!

[But she still doesn't see him after floundering around for the space of a few heartbeats. She even goes so far as to peek around some tall bits of coral, just to make sure.]

Are we playing hide-and-seek?

This...isn't a good place to play that, I think.

[Even if it's probably the safest place to try, in this alien ocean. His sigh comes through the mindlink, loud and clear.]

I'm not hiding, I'm just...invisible, weird as that sounds. Here, hold on, I'll kick up some sand so you know where I am.

[He'll knock up a cloud of it with the butt of his staff. To Colette it'll look like it just sprayed up out of nowhere, or got thrown up by some burrowing fauna, but at least it's something she can get a visual fix on.]

[Her confusion clears as soon as she sees the puff of sand swirl upward and she swims closer to it, eyes roving around the general area.]

--I see it! That helps a lot. It must be a lot of work being invisible, huh.

--Huh?

[No one's ever expressed that sentiment to him before, and he sounds a little flustered by it. He'll concentrate on sending up another burst of sand, so she can keep getting a bead on him.]

It's not too bad. Might be an easier job here if I were invisible to the fish, too, but...that's the way it is.

[Her eyes follow the sand up and settle on a point a foot or so above her head. Either she thinks he's pretty tall or just thinks he's swimming higher up.]

Only fish can see you?

[There's only one reason fish can see someone but humans can't!]

I see! You must be a fish spirit!

[He'll crack a smile despite himself...though even if she could see him, it's hidden under his breathing mask, anyway.]

Water seraph, actually. My name's Mikleo.

[She is fairly convinced that a water seraph is just another name for a fish spirit, but water seraph does sound a little cooler.]

It's nice to meet you, Mikleo. Or is is nice to hear you? You're here, so it's definitely a meeting even if I can't see you. I'm Colette. Are you from Iniidae? Everybody I've met arrived here just like I did.

['Fish spirit Mikleo' feels like something he has to gently nip in the bud. He's got nothing against a human making an understandable mistake, but ff it ever got back to Edna, he'd be getting 'Fishleo' and the like poured into his ears for the foreseeable future. No, thank you.]

I'm a new arrival, just like you. I've no idea how I wound up here, actually . . . the last I remember, I was exploring a place that wasn't anywhere near the ocean. Then I . . .

[Fell in a hole, but no one needs to know that.]

. . .got into a bit of an accident. When I woke up, I was in the base.

[Nodding at his story, understanding; it sounds more or less like what happened to her and the few other people she's talked to. At least he didn't fall into a hole like she did!]

It sounds like it was the same for everybody. But I thought there could be other people around who live here, and we just haven't met them yet. If they're invisible like you, do you think you would be able to see them?

[COLETTE PLEASE

She brings up a good point though.]

It's hard to say, isn't it? All I can tell you is that I haven't met anyone so far who didn't come in to the base originally. We haven't ranged that far out from it, though, so it might be we just haven't found where they live.

That's right! This world must be really big, and we're just in a little part of it. The farther out we go, the bigger chance there is of meeting people.

[She says it with such conviction that you might be tempted to believe her. But it's hard for her to believe there's no one else on the whole planet, and they could just be invisible like Mikleo.]

Maybe they'll come this way eventually and we can meet them.

[...hah...that'll be something, all right.]

Hope they're friendly, if that happens.

Oh. Speaking of friendly, did that fish ever answer you?

[At least it hasn't taken an unpleasant interest in them while they're chatting near the sea bed.]

[She seems to have forgotten about the fish entirely until he mentioned it, and then she looks back in the direction it's swimming to check that it's still there. She still has a mission to carry out for URSULA, after all!]

Huh? Oh, no, it didn't respond at all. I don't speak fish, so maybe it just didn't understand me. I think it's friendly, though! It didn't attack me.

Hmmm. I can't speak fish either, but I wonder if there's a way of convincing it to come with us anyway -- bringing it in without a fight.

Like asking nicely?

[And then she remembers that the Stalker probably can't understand them, which would make that idea difficult to achieve.]

Or maybe bribing it with food. It really likes food, you can tell.

[Musing...]

That's true. Usually when I see them, I see them going for food. Perhaps if we offer some of the smaller fish around?

[Nodding!!!]

We could put some small fish in a big tank and let it swim right in! It might be too smart for that, but if it's really hungry it might try anyways.

I think we'd have to lure it a little too, to get its attention to the tank. But it's a sound idea.

[A lot safer, too. He certainly hasn't been looking forward to fish wrestling.]

Though it means we won't be able to do it this trip out. But maybe we could figure out how to catch some of the smaller fish?

[Colette could wrestle a fish, she would just feel bad about it. Luring it sounds much more appealing to her, especially if they just want to get the Stalker into a tank to study it or keep it as a pet.]

To prepare for later we'd have to get a big tank too. But since we're already out here, I agree that the little fish come first. The Stalkers like the colorful ones!

Do you mean the Rabbitrays? We shouldn't have too much trouble finding some; they're all over.

[Catching them might be another matter, though. But he has a few ideas!]

Is that what they're called?

[Someone hasn't taken a close look at her database yet, beyond the basics.]

I saw a whole bunch of them by some of the archways earlier.

Well, they're the most colourful ones I've seen, so...lead the way?

[He's had a look through the database (it's fascinating), but he doesn't totally have his bearings on underwater locations yet.]

A1

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