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subnauticmods ([personal profile] subnauticmods) wrote in [community profile] fishesoutofwater2016-02-13 02:56 pm
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Test Dive #1








≡U.R.S.U.L.A. NAVIGATION
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


tentaculled: (tentaconsider)

f

[personal profile] tentaculled 2016-02-14 06:37 am (UTC)(link)
[ who would be surprised to see a nine-foot tall tentacle monster in a graduation gown standing in the observatory?? don't be weird, Cardia.

Sensei, naturally, hears her coming - he doesn't survive all those assassination attempts for nothing - and turns halfway to look at her, tentacles crossed over his chest idly, face the same wide grin as always. ]


Well, good evening, young lady. [ kind and polite, as always. ] It's a bit embarrassing, but to tell you the truth, having all this water above me makes me nervous.
discardia: (Dem hips?)

[personal profile] discardia 2016-02-14 07:53 pm (UTC)(link)
[ ... What... no, what is he? He seems so cheerful? But he has a lot of legs?? Truthfully, he looks like a lot of the marine life, but here he is-- ]

You don't like swimming?
tentaculled: (tentacline)

[personal profile] tentaculled 2016-02-14 08:21 pm (UTC)(link)
[ no, clearly, this ikemen is far too handsome to be part of the marine life here....... he's on another level!! ]

My body isn't built for the water. Hmm... Perhaps the simplest way of describing it would be to call it an allergic reaction? [ he'll turn into a big bloaty blob if he gets a single crack in his wetsuit. Of course, he's sure he can avoid something like that happening, but it doesn't make him any less nervous. In any case, he's not a huge fan of talking about himself, so he's quick to change the subject. ]

What about you? It's awfully late for someone your age to still be up and about.
discardia: Don't question it (Dramatic windblown... post-train jump)

[personal profile] discardia 2016-02-15 11:02 pm (UTC)(link)
I had a hard time staying asleep. I guess the dream stuck with me, even after I woke up.

[ ... But she's looking more sympathetic for him than distressed about her own situation, because having a water allergy while living underwater? That seems a little cruel. ]
tentaculled: (tentaconverse)

[personal profile] tentaculled 2016-02-16 07:52 am (UTC)(link)
[ so kind, Cardia. It is cruel, and he has many regrets about this, which have been added to his already extremely long list of life regrets. Such is life for a kind tentacled Sensei. ]

The dream? Did you perhaps have a nightmare?
discardia: (All proper ladies must shank)

[personal profile] discardia 2016-02-16 04:46 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't know if it was a nightmare... but I felt like the ocean was calling for me. I didn't know oceans could do that.

[ They can't??? ]
tentaculled: (tenteacles)

[personal profile] tentaculled 2016-02-25 04:35 am (UTC)(link)
Calling for you...? Hmm... How unusual.

[ guess who hasn't slept... this guy. ]

Well, I wouldn't worry. It probably doesn't mean anything. The water is probably colder at night, though, so I wouldn't go for a midnight swim if I were you.