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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?
Ibtisam | Star Wars: X-wing
B] Which helps out here in the dark. Ibtisam knows where the base is - even without the signal, she feels and tastes the currents and can navigate reasonably well. She did grow up on a world like this. But swimming out through open waters in these conditions seems uncomfortably like being out in open space. Besides, at home that would be a target too tempting for krakana to ignore.
"Most of the wildlife is bioluminescent. If we keep our lights off, we won't signal where we are to anything."
D] So this is a splendid idea! With her fishlike Mon Calamari silhouette and mottled coloration Ibtisam would be harder to spot from a distant and knows it. "Do you want me to take a handicap?"
B
"Stupid piece of primitive junk-" Ibtisam's companion is busy trying to get the vessel to re-power itself. It's probably a futile attempt, but the short, uh, green woman has levered the main panel off so she can futz with the wiring and electronics underneath. Try as she might, Peridot can't seem to get any sort of reaction out of the submersible. At least they're not sinking. She frowns and swings her head around so she can stare up at her fishy companion.
"They're also much faster than we are while we're underwater. Or at least faster than me."
The lack of oxygen is less a problem, since gems don't really need to breath.
"That might be a slight problem if they find us."
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Ibtisam can breathe the water and wears a wetsuit with openings on the sides to assist with that. She keeps a rebreather on hand anyway, in case she has to exert herself; Mon Calamari are better at breathing air.
"Just a little one. I wouldn't leave you behind! If we move, we disturb the water. That's a signal to predators too. The worst thing to do would be to move out along the seafloor. We'd stand out against the lights."
She knows a little about the submarine and how to handle various issues, but Peridot knows far more. If she can't get it working again, Ibtisam has no chance. "We could stay here a while. This ship's more than stalkers will tackle."
Of course there are a lot of bigger fish out there.
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She glances out of the viewport - it is starting to look very dark out there and she shudders, "If it's all the same to you, I'd prefer to simply wait it out in here. You can leave if you want."
She totally doesn't care. Really.
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Anyway, operating the hatch would create a sound that would travel and alert anything particularly close to them. Better to seem like a random chunk of debris. "This was a twelve-hour night cycle, wasn't it?"
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She frowns, "I might be able to get this thing started when it gets lighter. I'd rather not go crawling around on the hull right now, though. What kind of idiot gave us equipment that fails as soon as there's some sort of weird energy pulse, anyway? Sounds like typical humans..."
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"Oh, no. I've spent years on human bases and ships. They're much better designed than this!" At least, Rebel and Imperial humans. But Rebels usually have other species pitching in, and Imperials standardize everything and throw credits at problems. Things have to go quite extravagantly wrong to fail this thoroughly. "Still, I've got to stick up for my people. Cala engineering is the best in the galaxy."
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Peridot sounds less than believing when it comes to human engineering (or lack thereof). She scowls at Ibtisam and folds her arms.
"I've never heard of your... people. You're a... Cala? Is that what you called yourself?"
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"Mon Calamari. My homeworld is much like this one." Oh, there are countless differences, starting with the more alkaline ocean, but she's aware that to someone who does not live in the ocean all seas are very similar. "Everything we build just looks and works better. It takes longer, but it's worth it."
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"Anyway, it's not about adaption! It's about functioning at all!"
She hits the control panel for emphasis, "Gem technology wouldn't fail like this!"
Well, maybe it would.
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D
"NO!! No way! I am GOING to find you. Ngaaaah, it's just that I accidentally keep checking the same huge rock over and over!"
She does, yeah. At least when all is said and done she's going to know this area really well.
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"Just let me know if you start getting tired! I could do this all day."
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"Oh, ALL DAY, huh? That's easy enough to say for somebody who's just been hiding in one place the whole time, while I've been…!"
. . . Wait.
"Mm. Just, out of curiosity… heh. You… haven't been moving, have you? Y'know, like changing spots in the middle of the round?"
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"Well, a bone shark did start getting curious, so maybe I got out of its way. I don't think it's much fun, needing to be rescued!"
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Undyne is floating there almost smack in the middle of shallows, peering around.
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She waves, then ducks down. Undyne's got the same eye arrangement as Quarren, small eyes set close together. Or small eye. Ibtisam's not sure how wide her field of view is. "Anyway, I think 'chase' might be more fun than 'hide'."
screams externally. Also B
"That should keep us from becoming something's dinner, at least. I have to admit, I'm glad that I was with you of all the people to get paired with." He gives a wry, tired grin and sits up. He stretches his legs in anticipation as he looks towards the airlock, considering being adrift on the ocean currents, then shivers.
"...Open water swimming still feels too much like floating EVA to me. Think you can get us back to base?"
[ I actual made a squealing noise when I saw Ibtisam. I usually play Wedge somewhere around Wraith Squadron/Iron Fist. Occasionally as late as Starfighters of Adumar. ]
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"I feel the same, not that I haven't made friends," she tells him, and offers a webbed hand. Her own technical expertise would serve better with Cala engineering, honestly, it makes a more intuitive sense than this.
"We've both spent too long EVA over Endor, Captain." She'd been shot down and had spent twelve hours in the void before someone found her. It had taken months of recovery to get her fit to fly again. "But I'm confident I know the way. They don't tend to use floodlamps, but the water takes on a certain taste near the base."
[Heh, awesome! I was hoping there might be a castmate on this meme.]
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"I remember it all too well." Sitting in his pressure suit, hand jammed between the crystals of an out-of-date probe in the attempt to keep the damned thing from exploding. Not a pleasant memory, certainly.
"If you're confident that you can get us back, then I'm happy to be on your wing."
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"Me too. Now, there are enough glowing creatures out there that we don't want to be silhouetted against them, so it's a bad idea to stay too close to the bottom." Not to mention there are those bone shark creatures that hide under a layer of sand. "I think the moons are high enough to cast our shadows if we stay too near the surface."
Ibtisam pauses. Therapy after the incident helped ease her agoraphobia. It helps too that she's not alone. Still, she's not happy to be about to be in the open currents in the dark. "It'll be safer to travel more in the middle."
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"I'm not in a hurry to be anything's dinner tonight." He tugs on the flippers he's been provided with, then takes a step towards the air lock, wriggling into the tight space that will let them out into the drifting currents of the open sea. Pressing himself against the wall to make room for Ibtisam, he gestures for her to join him.
"Well, let's get to it."
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"Yessir." She has to stand on Wedge's flippers to fit in the airlock. They're both small people, but it's really only designed for one person at a time. This isn't comfortable. The inner door seals, and after a moment the pressure in the tiny chamber changes and water starts to fill it. It's still tropical, but the water now is cool enough to need a moment to get used to the temperature.
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"Good luck." He pops the rebreather into place, checks his goggles, then ducks his head into the rising water, the better to get used to the temperature. A moment later, the status light over the door clicks over to green and he shoves the outer hatch open, spilling the pair of them into open water. He pauses for a moment, looking towards Ibtisam for guidance on which way to go next.
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This ocean doesn't taste of home. No one who couldn't breathe water would really be able to appreciate the difference. Still, she can work the muscles that went unused in most Rebel space to let it roll down her throat and pump it through her gills, out through the openings in her sides. It feels strange, a little uncomfortable, but it will pass. Ibtisam reorients herself underwater, the fins on her lower legs flaring and fluttering.
Out here it's brighter than inside the blacked-out sub. Much of the life out here glows, whether or not it's stationary. Swimmers alone or in schools curve and dart around at some distance. Faded diffuse glows are spaced oddly in the depths below, and there is a faint, ever-moving shimmer in the water's surface above. It is dark, but lively about it.
"I hope we'll be able to salvage the sub," she transmits. A lingering fear that someone could listen in aside, she likes the 'telepathy'. It's clear in a way Rebel comm systems aren't. Like those there is no sense about where other speakers are, which she knows throws some people.
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"I don't see why we couldn't. I just hope the tides don't take it." Wedge is used to the impersonal feel of a comm system, but the odd way of 'speaking' via telepathy is still new to him and it's taking some adjusting. He gives a kick of his feet, a few bubbles drifting from his rebreather as he floats a little higher in the water.
"Which way are we going?"
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