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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


octoroom: (pic#10009172)

[personal profile] octoroom 2016-02-14 07:28 am (UTC)(link)
My master is a witch of the sea. So that's not a type of magic I've heard of before now.

[Yeah... he doesn't know much about earth-related magic. Or that much about rocks or materials of earth altogether. They venture out of the kingdom to the islands on occasion, sure, but they've always preferred living underwater.]
infusion: (I'm quite unsure)

[personal profile] infusion 2016-02-14 07:31 am (UTC)(link)
Well, if you're an octopus and you're mostly around in the sea... Yeah, I'd understand if you haven't heard of it. No shame in that!

But yeah. Point is, seems like we're all just a mish mash of different people and creatures. Could be a good and bad thing at the same time...


[Her thoughts seem to trail off at that point because she's distracted with other thoughts; home, her cafe, her golem, her brother...]
octoroom: (pic#10009097)

[personal profile] octoroom 2016-02-14 02:51 pm (UTC)(link)
[Fukami looks to her briefly as she trails off, sinking down a little deeper in the water. They're not too far from the base now-- though it's probably hard to tell, but to him it's clear.]

...

[He's quiet, like he's leaving her to her thoughts.]
infusion: (pic#9205819)

[personal profile] infusion 2016-02-15 04:37 am (UTC)(link)
Whoops! Wait up!

[Iona needs to get accustomed to all this deep sea diving. Her right arm, being heavier, feels more resistant against the water.]

We almost there yet? I can't even tell!
octoroom: (pic#10009093)

[personal profile] octoroom 2016-02-15 01:54 pm (UTC)(link)
[Fukami slows briefly, a tentacle coiling around the jut of a nearby outcropping of rock and coral. He floats there, watching her for a moment, observing how she swims.]

If we go down from here, we will find the base.

[In fact, he gestures with another tentacle so she'll look-- maybe there, down in the darkness, is a faint glimmer of light.]
infusion: (You make me feel like music)

[personal profile] infusion 2016-02-16 08:17 pm (UTC)(link)
[THUMBS UP TO FUKAMI]

You. You're amazing! Great job!
octoroom: (pic#10006780)

[personal profile] octoroom 2016-02-16 09:15 pm (UTC)(link)
[What. What is that. What is this. What are compliments. HE JUST NODS in a thanks(???). Downward they go, Iona!]

In the morning, you should come out and familiarise yourself more with the landmarks. [Then less chance of getting lost in case of, you know, crazy things happening.]
infusion: (Default)

[personal profile] infusion 2016-02-16 10:40 pm (UTC)(link)
[Sinking down, down, down... Also, yes, she's someone who piles on the compliments and uplifts people where they belong. It's just part of her nature.]

So, like a morning swim? I don't know if I want to handle that much water in the morning...
octoroom: (pic#10009097)

[personal profile] octoroom 2016-02-17 12:43 pm (UTC)(link)
You'll already be underwater.

[Sleeping underwater, breathing underwater, eating underwater... It's the underwater fate. Except they're in a base that's locked so that you people who can't breathe underwater can, uh, survive.]
infusion: (Default)

[personal profile] infusion 2016-02-18 10:21 pm (UTC)(link)
With a roof over my head, yeah?

[See, even she points it out.]

Buuuut if we're going to be gathering, studying, and collecting, I can make mental notes in the meanwhile.
octoroom: (pic#10006748)

[personal profile] octoroom 2016-02-21 02:50 pm (UTC)(link)
Yes. That would be best.

...I wouldn't advise starting now.


[Fukami doesn't know that he'd like to hear her mental notes. It's gotten too dark around them to take really good ones about their surroundings anyway.]