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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
Oh, gathering is something we do all the time. We travel a lot around Kirkwall and there's so many resources to pick up everywhere. You'd be surprised. [She certainly was after living in Lowtown for a while to discover that plants grew even there in the alleys.
Though thinking on that, she scratches the back of her head.]
I've never gathered anything underwater before... There's... clams and fish, things like that? And... bigger fish. [Okay she can talk your ear off about Dalish rites but she can't about what's in the ocean.] My clan never really went close enough to the ocean.
no subject
... She certainly hopes Varric doesn't need to be lowering both chains into the harbour anytime soon. Focusing on her companion once more, she gives a small, sympathetic nod. ]
I don't think many spend a great deal of time by the ocean. Aside from crossing the Waking Sea when necessary.
[ Particularly relevant to recent history in Thedas, but that's a matter of complicated timeline arrangement. She's not sure where this woman falls in the timeline of Thedas that Ellana knows. Ahead? Behind? Similar in time? ]
Though if you don't mind me asking, which clan are you from?
no subject
Though admittedly, she isn't sure this is the best topic but she'll do her best. She decided to move on. And this is part of it.]
Oh! I'm from the Sabrae clan. Though I was originally from the Alerion clan. I think they still might be around Nevarra? I went to the Sabrae after the Arlathvenn. They needed a First and the Alerion already had a few with magic, so! It all... worked out. [For a time. That's enough for now.] And you're... a city elf, aren't you? Not that there's anything wrong with that! I've been living with them for years now.
no subject
[ Said with a small dismissive wave of her hand. There's an ache behind that statement, for the life that once she'd thought she'd live. It's an old ache now, growing older by the day. There were things she could no longer do, and a person she could no longer be, after having been Inquisitor. She wonders how much of that Solas had predicted. Sets aside the wondering, because it serves no point right now.
Meanwhile, Ellana is staring at Merrill, expression taking a turn for the thoughtful. Not for the mechanics of what she's talking about — trading those with magical ability to another clan less blessed (particularly from those too well blessed) with magic isn't uncommon. But... ]
The Sabrae clan which stayed around Sundermount for years.
[ And Merrill, an elf from that clan that's lived amoung the city elves. Not that Varric needs to necessarily be taken at his word, or his book at their truths (look, she's read what he's written, she can admit that much with ease), it still points toward... ]
You wouldn't happen to be Merrill, would you?
[ Derailed from talking about the joys of being elfy into the joys of being, well. Known. ]
no subject
Still, despite her initial moment of panic, she nods quickly. If there's something she's ever truly been good at, it's standing her ground.]
Yes, I'm Merrill. I'm... well, I can imagine what you've heard and it is true. I do understand if that... changes anything.
no subject
She gives a small shake of her head. ]
I can't imagine it does. The weight of any mistakes either one of us has made isn't meant to be measured against the next, only learned from. For all our sakes. [ A brief pause, and then: ] Aneth ara, Merrill. I'm Ellana.
no subject
Ma serannas! I understand too well. It's nice to meet you, Ellana. Oh, I mean, we've already met but... [Oh. That actually does remind her though.] Or, well, you knew me first! I'm sorry, did we meet before? I'd hate it if I forgot meeting you.
no subject
Things have changed, and she's needed to make herself change to survive. Their people have always been better at that than they remember to credit themselves. ]
Ah, no, I don't believe we've ever met face to face. I'm a friend of a friend — Varric Tethras, as it is. I met him in 9:41 Dragon, near Haven.
no subject
[Wait. There was something wrong in that sentence.]
...Sorry, did you say 9:41? That's... well, wrong. Unless I missed something, things are a mess right now so I might have overlooked some things, but it should be 9:38 Dragon. I don't think I would miss the year.
no subject
I doubt you've missed anything. I'm from... oh, 9:44 Dragon, last I checked. We're dealing with time travel on top of world traveling here.
[ This usually ends in tears. ]
Though on the subject of missions, I'm starting to think finding a means of fermentation might be increasingly more important. You know, for morale.
no subject
But time travel? I... [She's really thinking about this now. Not because she wants to use it, oh no, she's trying not to mess around too much these days, thank you, but mostly to figure out how possible it is.] ...I suppose... well, it would take an incredibly powerful mage, or a group of them, and the spot would have to be one where the Veil is rather thin. Though even then I'm not sure how possible it would be, if at all. But... I usually think with enough power and the right conditions, anything might be doable. Including that. Though I'm not sure that would be... wise. There's too many unknowns and I've never even read anything about it being attempted, let alone done.
[Oh. She's rambling a bit.]
Well, what I mean is even if it's possible I wouldn't suggest it to anyone.
no subject
She hopes that the reality they're creating now doesn't have more sad endings than middling to happy ones. ]
As it turns out, I agree. Time travel is absolutely not recommended.
[ Though she... shrugs after this declaration. ]
It's just as possible that we're from the same kind of world, only two different versions, at two different times. In which case we're only traveling through space, not time.
no subject
...You know, I think that fermentation idea might be needed. Shortly, even.
no subject
[ Unfortunately, her friends would be a help, but that in and of itself might not entirely be helpful. So as it stands, Ellana slaps the palm of her hand against her thigh to clap, looking a little amused. ]
Then we agree. Ursula, we have our mission! Collecting plantlife and determining which has the hopefully pleasant side effect of causing mild intoxication when fermented. If you'd be so kind as to assist us, I can guarantee it's an activity most every person enjoys some part of the time.
[ This is a noble mission that might make them sound like lushes, but truly, where there is no alcohol, there's no commiserating with alcohol at how much nonsense is going on when one looks into it. And that's a terrible thing. ]
no subject
[Though she notices URSULA hasn't replied. Maybe they need to think up more games to play while drunk?]
Hmm, oh and the apple game! That one was so tricky. Do you know how hard it is to bite into a rolling apple even if you haven't had anything to drink? But it's really funny to to watch people chase after it.
[She looks up at the ceiling, since apparently that's where URSULA is.]
...Don't you like these games, Ursula? I think they'll help a lot. Stress relief.
no subject
And organics perform much better when they relieve stress.
[ She nods her head in an exaggerated, slow fashion. Ursula is... hit and miss in what she understands of people's emotions, from what Ellana has found, but that means figuring out how to communicate and what cues Ursula uses for her interpretations.
Mostly so they don't end up with the equivalent of Compassion murdering because it was, in effect, the most immediately compassionate course of action. ]
It also enhances a particular kind of bonding between people of all ages, and is excellent for celebrations. You are planning on holding a few of those when we've made significant progress, aren't you? Or defeated some great, big... swimming... sharp toothed creature of some sort. Even larger than the ones we've run into so far!
[ Has she sold their mission yet to URSULA.
... The AI remains silent. For the moment. ]