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subnauticmods ([personal profile] subnauticmods) wrote in [community profile] fishesoutofwater2016-04-14 11:53 pm
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TEST DIVE #2








≡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!

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?


BASED ON CODE BY TESSISAMESS AND SUPERSUITS


maserannas: (smile | leaders would be borne of you)

[personal profile] maserannas 2016-04-16 03:34 am (UTC)(link)
Mm, good point. Cooking lessons can wait until we figure out how to keep a fire going up on one of the sandbars.

[ No more explosions (literal or otherwise) necessary in a sealed underwater base. The Aurora losing stability had been bad enough, and that was from a decent distance. ]

The kelps are easier. Not half bad if you dry them out flat and leave some of the sea salt on for flavour. Which does come around to an ongoing necessity, mission wise: supply procurement. Are you familiar with that sort of thing?
chataclysmic: (pic#10086995)

[personal profile] chataclysmic 2016-04-16 07:18 am (UTC)(link)
[He draws his knees up to his chest and curls his arms around them, nodding with a smile.]

Cooking lessons later, then. And-- In theory! Not in practice, but I'm usually a pretty fast learner.
maserannas: (chat | somebody new?)

[personal profile] maserannas 2016-04-16 09:15 pm (UTC)(link)
[ That earns him a quick half-smile. ]

That'll serve you well. Being a fast learner means picking up what you need to know and being able to turn around and use it on your own. Second question — how are you with swimming?
chataclysmic: (pic#9915576)

[personal profile] chataclysmic 2016-04-17 08:10 am (UTC)(link)
[A nod, and he braces his hands on his knees, pressing them down and then letting them bounce back up about three inches back and forth in a seemingly nervous inability to sit still.]

Definitely not Olympics material, but I'm a Fencer so I've got strong legs.
maserannas: (dubious | you think you've heard it all)

[personal profile] maserannas 2016-04-17 09:26 pm (UTC)(link)
[ Fencer? Not a familiar word, again, but she takes it as meaning something training intensive. Probably? Much like how Olympics doesn't mean anything to her. Must be some legendary figure where he's from. ]

Ah... I'm not sure what you mean by being a fencer, but if you can swim, and are willing to learn what to harvest around here that doesn't try to kill you first, then we can do a run out to the Grassy Plateaus for more raw materials to expand the base.

[ Glancing up at... nothing in particular, but addressing Ursula now: ]

Which would suffice as a "mission" plan, correct, Ursula? Because entrapping people to make them think usually doesn't go as planned, for the record.
chataclysmic: (pic#9935477)

[personal profile] chataclysmic 2016-04-18 06:14 am (UTC)(link)
[He makes a startlingly catlike face of startled curiosity, pursing his lips nearly into the shape of a sideways 3, and waves a hand dismissively.]

Sorry, I forget that a lot of stuff isn't standard between worlds. Fencing is a sport based around swordsmanship, and it means I can hopefully swim well enough for a materials run.

[He follows her line of sight to nothing and blinks, glancing from her to where she'd looked and back a few times.]

You can just talk to ...her? That way?
maserannas: (smile | leaders would be borne of you)

[personal profile] maserannas 2016-04-19 12:41 am (UTC)(link)
[ What is: sport. Hunting for sport is a waste of time and a very "noble" thing to do; having sport is something different, as is making sport. Perhaps it's a word for general activity, in this case. It'd make more sense: what other sports might be out there is a topic she leaves undelved into for now. ]

Who, Ursula?

[ Which yes, is what she suspects he's asking about. She gives him a small shrug, gesturing all around them. ]

In the base, she's everywhere, and nowhere. If you need to talk with her, or to try and catch her attention, sometimes talking at things is a good way of getting her attention.
chataclysmic: (pic#10019355)

[personal profile] chataclysmic 2016-04-19 10:50 am (UTC)(link)
[He is so completely in over his head, thinking he could explain these things. To her inquiry, at least, he nods, and then continues to nod thoughtfully at the concept of talking at things to get the attention of the sentient base.]

Definitely kind of weird.
maserannas: (Default)

[personal profile] maserannas 2016-04-19 04:52 pm (UTC)(link)

More or less strange than speaking mind to mind?

[ It might be normal for him, when she thinks about it, but choosing to keep her mouth closed and use the mind to mind speech was seeing if it did feel normal to him while likewise seeing how quick he was to adapt. Out in the water, mind-speech is what makes coordination and contact much easier than it would be otherwise. While she prefers avoiding it when she has air to speak with, it serves a purpose, time to time. ]

chataclysmic: (pic#9935485)

gently takes a week to get back to tags i'm sorry ghdfnjh

[personal profile] chataclysmic 2016-04-24 06:58 am (UTC)(link)
[He might honestly never get used to the telepathy thing. He jolts at her voice emanating in his head without her lips having moved, but recovers quickly enough with a startled chuckle, creasing his eyebrows to concentrate on speaking in thought as opposed to verbally.]

...Less, but not by much.
maserannas: (smile | leaders would be borne of you)

you're all good!

[personal profile] maserannas 2016-04-24 06:47 pm (UTC)(link)
[ She smiles, or at least makes the effort to start a smile, quirking her lips up at the corners. He adapts quickly; she'll give him that. ]

It gets easier to speak that way when you're out there, swimming. Which should be enough of a plan to get going, even if Ursula is being quiet on the subject. Base expansions need raw materials. We can practice swimming and mental speech while familiarising with the area and marking locations for mining and collecting ore and similar resources.

[ Ursula... that's a good mission plan, please let them out??? ]