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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 |
_
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?
Mikleo | Tales of Zestiria
[Well, this is something Mikleo can try to do. It’s still unnerving how all the ocean life seems able to see him -- especially when it’s something as big as a Stalker -- but at least nothing he’s come across down here so far has looked or acted particularly doglike. Yet.
He’s still not the best at swimming, and Edna would probably make fun of his clumsy approach if she saw it, but at least he doesn’t need to go right up close, or get too rough. Killing non-hellions for no reason? He doesn’t particularly want to. Bringing them in live for study? It’s similar enough to cataloging artifacts in ruins to work for him, though those are usually less...bitey.
Speaking of bitey, he’s within range for a spell now! The incantation comes out as a stream of bubbles, but the result’s satisfactory: a globe of ice that forms out of nowhere, timed just right to freeze the Stalker’s jaws shut.
It’s a good start, but he’s not as fast with the followup as he’d like to be, and the Stalker’s going for him before he can fire off another spell to disable its movement. Uh-oh, he broadcasts loudly, getting his staff up (slow, this is too slow!) to block it. A little help here, please!]
F
[...ugh, this is what he gets for trying sleep here, while he doesn't have a vessel. Maybe that strange oceanic force isn’t the same as malevolence, but it’s disquieting, all right. His head’s heavy.
He’ll stow his mattress, and suit up to head into the water, but he’ll stop just short of actually leaving the base. Someone else who woke up might stumble on him there at the exit, hesitating and pinching the bridge of his nose. Water seraph or no water seraph, the ocean seems even more vast and strange than usual right now, and he doesn't want to just follow that compulsion into it blindly.]
Damn it . . .
((Please note that Mikleo may not be visible to all characters! I’ve put up a handy interaction guide here for people’s reference.))
F! hopefully this works!
She thought after that nightmare, she could just take a quick peek outside and come back in. But there's someone already there. At least, they look mostly like a person. Milla rubs her eyes a few times to see if it's the sleep in them making him look blurry but it's just not working.]
Wha-- Hey, how are you doing that? [Is it the darkness maybe? Milla leans in and squints.] Don't mess with me!
no subject
[He's surprised someone else woke up, and sounds a little snappy for it, but he cuts that off quickly, turning toward her with a frown. It's still strange, the different ways people have been able to perceive him since he landed here; if nothing else, it distracts him from the dream's call somewhat.]
. . . wait, sorry. What are you seeing?
no subject
What kind of question is that? I'm seeing you, aren't I? It's just that you're doing some weird trick or those fish messed with my head because you look... blurry.
[Actually now that she's said it out loud, it sounds so stupid. But that can't really be helped. Everything else looks normal so it isn't her eyes. It's just him.]
no subject
Humans can't usually see me at all. You must have fairly strong resonance, if I just seem blurry to you.
. . . sorry for startling you, though; I know it's rather late.
no subject
It's all right. [She answers the apology automatically while her mind turns over what he said.] ...I didn't used to be human. I'm glad I'm not totally cut-off after all. But you know, that just means I better watch you to make sure you don't go diving into the water like an idiot.
no subject
[--used to? The rest of the question almost gets away from him (you can go from something else to human? he's never heard of that before), but the second part makes him puff up a little. Figuratively.]
--I'm not going in there. I certainly hope you aren't either.
no subject
Like she's going to admit that though.]
It just looked like you were since you're standing around here.
no subject
I just wasn't thinking clearly for a minute, all right? Just, when I woke up, it felt...
[Ugh, this sounds stupid.]
...it felt like the ocean was calling.
no subject
[It does sound stupid but there's no pointing denying she had the same feeling. The ocean didn't bother her more than it probably bothered any regular person but at night like this and after a nightmare like that?
She folds her arms across her chest, letting her fingers gently hug herself.]
You think there's something out there? Something that isn't dumb as a fish? You know, some kinda creature?
no subject
[He grimaces. He doesn't have much experience with the ocean even back home in Glenwood; he doesn't feel particularly qualified to comment on one on a whole different world.]
Did you pass anyone else awake on your way here? If multiple people are hearing it, feeling the urge -- that's alarming.
a1 c:
oh no...
[ Friend. Obviously, a nice hangout involving magic tricks is what's going on here! Or maybe it was nice until Napstablook showed up. They're so unobtrusive even spiritually and in their thoughts that Mikleo might not have noticed them right away, but here is a sheet ghost floating right above them both like a jellyfish... while starting to cry obvious tears in the ocean? With no goggles to fill? Somehow?
They're pretty clearly magic of some kind, the other hint being that they fall all over the Stalker and stun it. The ghost may or may not have any idea what they are doing. ]
no subject
Focus, Mikleo! He'll take the opportunity to fire off that second spell, and get the Stalker bound up in a second ring of ice while it's stunned. He keeps his staff up afterward as he paddles clumsily backward to get a better look, just in case he has to defend from Napstablook too. But he's also sending a polite thought at Napstablook, to be sure:]
Thanks for the assist.
no subject
you're welcome...?
[ Always one to respond to politeness, at least this is momentarily distracting them from making more tears. ]
also, um
was the freezing supposed to happen
no subject
[. . .lowers his staff after a moment; it looks like it's option a (fellow planetside researcher) after all, and not option b (terrifying new native fauna.) Thank goodness.]
no subject
we can pretend it never happened... okay?
[ They wouldn't take any attacks personally. Even so, they do appear to relax slightly when the staff goes down. Magic often can harm the incorporeal where nothing else does. ]
uhh... this is none of my business so feel free not to answer... but do you think they'll be all right?
the fish
no subject
[Privately, he won't pretend the screwup never happened, either. He clearly has to get much, much better at functioning and fighting underwater.]
As for the fish, I'm melting the ice as soon as I get it in a tank. If what you did doesn't have a lingering effect, it will be fine. I was just restraining it, not trying to hurt it.
I'm Mikleo, by the way.
no subject
oh, right... napstablook. i was just crying because i wasn't sure what else to do... pathetic, i know...
and i'm rambling again...
no subject
...That was dumb, Mikleo, you have a mask on. Takes his hand away.]
It was nothing, Napstablook. We're well met.
Look, why don't we head back inside for now? I've got to get the fish into a tank for observation, anyway.
no subject
oh... being "well met" is nice
i'm meeting you well too if you don't mind... mikleo?
[ All this formal and dapper talk. ]
yeah... you're still working... and they should probably be thawing...
no subject
[Time to heave this half-frozen fish up and start maneuvering it back towards the base...at least everything is lighter underwater.]
no subject
[ I'm a ghost and what is weight? If they concentrate hard enough while swimming in their jellifish-like way, though, they can become just tangible enough to help nudge it a little bit. ]
no subject
The ice around the fish's jaws starts to thaw pretty quickly once it's secured in there; Mikleo leans against his locker and removes his mask and goggles, catching his breath. Hopefully Napstablook drifted inside with him...]
Whew. That was definitely something.
A
Yet, this girl's not one to outright doubt the existence of this kind of nonsense. Without further ado she throws a shiny pebble at the Stalker, and then another, hoping to get its attention at the very least. Stalkers like shiny things, right? ]
Hey! Cut it out!
Re: A
Thanks, but be careful...! I'll try to disable it; just don't let it get too close to you!