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fishesoutofwater2016-04-14 11:53 pm
subnauticmods) wrote in fishesoutofwater2016-04-14 11:53 pm
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TEST DIVE #2
   ≡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!
A: There’s a Storm on the Horizon
A brainstorm. On advice about the ingenuity of multi person parties, and from admitted lack of understanding of many needs of organics, URSULA has selected you and a partner (or partners) to go to one of the observatories with food, beds, and recording devices to have a jam session for ideas about missions.
You are not to leave the room until you have some good ones. So get cracking! Start suggesting to one another what the base needs to do.
Or get horribly, horribly sidetracked and possibly a little crazy at being locked up together with the ocean staring at you. Judging.
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: Almost, but not quite, Entirely Unlike Tea
The droids, URSULA promises, will do their best to make anything you want. Go on! Ask them anything! She’s excited. This seems like a great way to test out their capacities.
Of course, you need to be very careful what you wish for. Maybe you ask for Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and they do their best but only know so much, giving you a book with some… creative changes. Maybe you ask for a puzzle box, but you weren’t specific enough and things went awry.
Maybe you made the mistake of asking for tea..
No matter what, you were given something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what you asked for. Now what do you do with it?
E: CREATURE FEATURES (possible body horror)
As more data is collected on the creatures of the deep, DNA can also be gathered to allow URSULA to research how to integrate it into her crew members in useful and hopefully unintrusive ways, unless of course permission is given first for more obvious or exhausting additions.
Well, that's the idea, anyway.
Unfortunately, something malfunctioned while URSULA was researching. Her incomplete serum was injected into you through your devices while you slept (or maybe you were knocked unconscious by the sudden change to your body). Now maybe you have the temperament of a Stalker or the thirst of a Bleeder or Gasopod pods on your back that trigger when you're startled. How this genetic malfunction works and what it is can be up to you but while URSULA assures you it's only temporary, you're stuck like this for now.
Have fun?
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!
A: There’s a Storm on the Horizon
A brainstorm. On advice about the ingenuity of multi person parties, and from admitted lack of understanding of many needs of organics, URSULA has selected you and a partner (or partners) to go to one of the observatories with food, beds, and recording devices to have a jam session for ideas about missions.
You are not to leave the room until you have some good ones. So get cracking! Start suggesting to one another what the base needs to do.
Or get horribly, horribly sidetracked and possibly a little crazy at being locked up together with the ocean staring at you. Judging.
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: Almost, but not quite, Entirely Unlike Tea
The droids, URSULA promises, will do their best to make anything you want. Go on! Ask them anything! She’s excited. This seems like a great way to test out their capacities.
Of course, you need to be very careful what you wish for. Maybe you ask for Hamlet by William Shakespeare, and they do their best but only know so much, giving you a book with some… creative changes. Maybe you ask for a puzzle box, but you weren’t specific enough and things went awry.
Maybe you made the mistake of asking for tea..
No matter what, you were given something that was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike what you asked for. Now what do you do with it?
E: CREATURE FEATURES (possible body horror)
As more data is collected on the creatures of the deep, DNA can also be gathered to allow URSULA to research how to integrate it into her crew members in useful and hopefully unintrusive ways, unless of course permission is given first for more obvious or exhausting additions.
Well, that's the idea, anyway.
Unfortunately, something malfunctioned while URSULA was researching. Her incomplete serum was injected into you through your devices while you slept (or maybe you were knocked unconscious by the sudden change to your body). Now maybe you have the temperament of a Stalker or the thirst of a Bleeder or Gasopod pods on your back that trigger when you're startled. How this genetic malfunction works and what it is can be up to you but while URSULA assures you it's only temporary, you're stuck like this for now.
Have fun?
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?
no subject
Programs? Is... that like a pamphlet? [A little apologetic.] All of this is really... different from home. Metal houses! Underwater! No one would have thought of that.
no subject
Definitely like jello.
He lowers it to look at her.]
What's the most advanced technology you're familiar with from home?
no subject
Hmm... Well, we use magic for a lot of things. So I'm not sure about the equivalent to this. I mean, I supposed, with a lot of metal and mages and rune work, we could have a metal house underwater like this, too.
Oh but the Qunari have explosives and looking glasses to make up for, well, how they treat magic.
no subject
You can think of a program as sort of like a series of runes that end up producing a spirit. Instead of using runes, a program uses electronic impulses. There's a physical and computational division here, but the really important part is that the runes are giving out a series of commands that make something happen. URSULA's at an advanced state where her program probably lets her adapt to new things. The code is set out so that she can be flexible and write new things into her memory, which would be is a record that she can access through her program. URSULA might even be able to alter her own program. She is nonetheless based on a series of explicit and direct commands, and her tendency to fall into the parameters of those rules marks her as more likely to be an AI than a spirit.
no subject
Oh! So, like a golem, but without a body? Or is this whole place her body?
no subject
All computer programs have a body in the sense that the data has to have a physical location to exist. Some programs are capable of replicating themselves, so they're less bound to their physical starting point. I don't know if URSULA is bound to this base or if she has another starting point. Either way, her programming seems to give her control over the entire base.
no subject
I guess we should be nice to her, a little like a spirit of the hearth. [Not that she planned to be rude to URSULA unless it really, really called for it.]
You know so much about these things. Is this normal for you?
no subject
He elects to go with] The technology from my time is a lot closer to this than what you're describing. From my experience with AIs, the best thing to do is treat them like people. In the only sense that matters, they are.
no subject
no subject
Which is because really only AR was sentient enough to count as as a consciousness on URSULA's level, and AR pissed him off constantly, so. But still!]
She's pretty cool. She might need a little more of an education on what brainstorming actually is, but she's trying.
no subject
no subject
It counts. It's just a little weird to lock two organics up until they come up with ideas. It's just borderline Hal 9000, if Hal were well-meaning and slightly socially adjusted.
[Even his limited human experiences tell him this is odd.]
no subject
no subject
He turns the jelly over, then cuts it equally in half. He holds a plate out to Merrill. One half for her, one for him.]
9000 is his serial number. I would say that calling Hal 'bad' would be reducing a complex situation to its most basic structure. Hal was programmed for specific purposes, but contradictions in his programming led to malfunctions. This, combined with a direct threat to survival, led to Hal doing what he felt was necessary to eliminate the contradiction and ensure his own survival. You may call him an antagonist, and even dangerous and immoral, given the death he caused. I would call him condemned by creators and users that didn't show him the responsible caretaking any emerging consciousness needed.
[Without expressing anything much in voice or looks, he eats a bit of the jelly.]
no subject
...Creators can't be blamed for everything but I understand. We make our own decisions, based on our... programming, in a sense. We do what we think is best. Sometimes against how we were raised, though. Based on what you've told me, I imagine these AIs more like children, doing their best but still remembering their parents' words.
no subject
no subject
no subject
no subject
URSULA seems happy, though. I guess she might be programmed that way, too, but she feels happy to me.
no subject
[Talking to things! It's almost like Dirk is learning his lesson about not deciding things for others.]
no subject
[Merrill, despite everything she's seen, wants to hope for the best. But she knows that's idealistic of her. She saw what the Templars did. Even now she's doing her best to protect people from them, whatever the cost.]
...It'd be nice, if everyone could be happy with everyone else. I know that's not true. But this is somewhere new. Maybe there's hope.
no subject
[He gives her a thumbs up.]
no subject
no subject
Uh.]
Yeah.
It's important to keep trying.
[....
He eats more jelly.]
no subject
Do you have eyes?
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