TEST DIVE #2

[subnauticmods]

≡U.R.S.U.L.A. NAVIGATION

_ PREMISE & NAVIGATION ✦ RULES ✦ MOD CONTACT TAKEN ✦ RESERVES ✦ APPLICATIONS ✦ HIATUS & DROPS FAQ ✦ BASE ✦ BIOMES ✦ URSULA ✦ URSULA 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?

BASED ON CODE BY TESSISAMESS AND SUPERSUITS

Comments

Kay Faraday | Ace Attorney

[yatagarasu]

A: GAME ON

[Kay puts a finger to her temple, pouts, and squints at everyone in the room from where she is sitting cross-legged on one of the beds. She is silent until this point before speaking up in a voice too serious for someone as happy and peppy as she normally is.]

Your mission, should you choose to accept it...

[Then she jumps up on the bed. Don't worry, she's not wearing any footwear. Just her pink knee socks.]

...is to play a game! It gets kinda boring down here, so why not? Now let's think of games we could play...

C: /POINTS AT FISH, POINTS AT YOU

[Kay found a flock of Rabbitrays. They're swarming around her, investigating the giant key thrust through her ponytail, and swimming toward her outstretched hands. You'd think she's just playing around instead of gathering those Rabbitrays up - that is, until she glances in your general direction and discreetly points you, and then to them.

Thank goodness for telepathy.]

Psssst! Now's your chance! Grab them!

[She's trying to pet them, sort of. Luring them into a false sense of security. Better be careful or they'll bolt at the first sign of Something Is Not Right.]

D: THAT'S HOW THEY ROLL

[Kay decided to test out the droids by starting small, with something that she thinks is difficult to mess up.

Now she's holding up...what looks like a cylinder made entirely of real Swiss cheese.]

Wait, I asked for a Swiss roll, not a...Swiss...cheese...roll. [She facepalms, then shrugs and waves the cheese about.] I guess now we can have grilled cheese sandwiches?

[restorer]

If I were a nastier person, I'd ask to trade with you.

[hiro has a bowl of what appears to be strawberry ice cream. maybe a bit redder than your average strawberry ice cream, but ... hey, it's a dessert, right? notably, there is exactly one small spoonful taken out of it; the rest is pristine.]

You should be happy you got something useful! [there's actual, genuine enthusiasm in his voice, like yes, this is a totally good thing you should be happy about. after all, getting something good from these guys is an exercise.]

[yatagarasu]

[Kay peers at Hiro's "strawberry ice cream", squinting at it, sniffing...

...and then making a face. She didn't expect that, she expected strawberry, or raspberry, or something along those lines.]

Oooookay, I think I'll keep my cheese. But I'll share it with everyone else!

C

[kidslovewhales]

[Jotaro drifts carefully through the water towards them, taking care not to disturb the currents too much. You wouldn't think a guy as large as him could be stealthy, but he moves through the water with a surprising amount of grace; a marine biologist by trade, he has experience working with fish. That is, until he gets to within a meter or so of the school of Rabbitrays.]

Star Platinum!

[Calling out his Stand's name, he summons it into being beside him. It, a muscular warrior with brightly colored skin, punches out at the rabbitrays through the water, grabbing each of them with its incredibly strong and precise hands, netting the whole school in one go.]

[Well...that was the plan, anyway. But actually, the sudden disturbance in the water spooked them and they swam away, leaving him with only one. And what's more, Kay can't actually see his Stand, so it just looks like he shouted something ridiculous and scared all the fish but one away.]

Damn. They're faster than I thought.

[He takes the remaining ray in hand.]

Got one at least.

[yatagarasu]

[Kay is also startled; she could hear that attack name - was it an attack name? A magic spell? - loud and clear in her head and it's just as deafening as if he had said it verbally.

But before she could try and stop them, the Rabbitrays suddenly scatter and swim away. Strange...did they have telepathy too? Could they hear what Jotaro had said? Kay's shoulders slump and she paddles over to him and the remaining fish, a bit dejected. Their hunt hadn't gone as planned.]

Better than nothing. What was that you said?

[kidslovewhales]

Nothing important.

[It's not so much that his Stand is a secret so much as that it's a real pain to explain.]

Let's get a better look at you. You're an interesting specimen, aren't you?

[He's talking to the ray, holding it up in front of him and inspecting it.]

Too quick for simple musculature to explain. Some sort of water jets, maybe?

[Yeah, he's just musing about this fish out loud. Or telepathically. You get the idea.]

D

[tentaculled]

I'd be careful with that. The last time someone tried to have the droid make cheese, the results were... not gouda, to say the least...!!

[ he seems deadly serious, even with that horrible pun in there. As serious as one can seem when they're a big grinning mass of tentacles, anyway. ]

Please consider that there are no mammals of any kind nearby that could make cheese...

AHHHHH KOROSENSEI I was actually hoping you'd tag meeee

[yatagarasu]

[Kay's arms fall limply to her sides. Thanks for the reality check, Korosensei. But she can't help but giggle at the inserted pun. The big grinning mass of tentacles seems harmless enough anyway, if he was going to be making cheese puns.

She stares at the cheese. Admittedly she had not thought much about how the droid would make one of these if there was no way a cow, or a goat, could survive in these conditions.]

That's...a good point. So, should I leave it provolone?

[WHAT HAVE YOU STARTED, SIR.]

eheheheh i'll do my best to live up to the hype

[tentaculled]

[ well, theoretically, a goat, cow, or whatever probably could survive in the base. But there aren't any. Which means the droid is either making cheese out of random cheeselike fish parts or mysterious robot milk, in sensei's mind, and he's not sure which one is more alarming. ]

Oh! Yes! Leave it provolone! Good job, young lady. [ you get extra credit for your creative pun. ] But in all seriousness, the droid's cheese made the entire base stink to high heaven. At least, the cheese is what it was blamed on...

[ sorry adrien ]

c

[parodeity]

[ Yeah, okay. Dave immediately reacts without even questioning why the hell this is a thing they're doing, since he figures there might be some sort of reason behind it. And if not, she asked and he generally tries to work with the people he's stuck on underwater mission whatever with.

It's a little hard to flashstep underwater, but Dave has more or less figured out how to manage by this point in time.

He only has two arms, though, so he's only getting two before the rest bolt after he appears in their midst. ]

Two enough?

[yatagarasu]

[Kay gives him a thumbs up. It's a little hard to tell behind the breathing apparatus and the goggles but she's beaming.]

Yeah, thanks! I heard they taste good.

[Besides, who could say no to food? Starving underwater must be a terrible way to go.]

[parodeity]

Uhhhh. Am I going to have to kill them for you.

[ Because, like. He WILL, but holy shit how could you do this to him on their first meeting, Kay. ]

a!

[discardia]

... I don't think I know very many games that don't require gambling.

[ Cardia's had a very interesting education. ]

[yatagarasu]

Wait, what?!

[She sits straight up and leans in Cardia's general direction.]

There's tons of games out there that aren't gambling! Board games, Hide and Seek, I Spy, Tag, Twenty Questions...

[discardia]

I... Spy? Twenty Questions?

[ ????? ]

c

[splinten]

[...This is not how fishing works.

Dirk stares blankly, his glasses even murkier in the dark water.]

Do you want to tell me why you're not going to grab them yourself?

[He's just saying. It is probably easier for the girl literally petting them than the kid floating a short distance away.]

[yatagarasu]

If I make any sudden movements, they'll split! I'm getting them to lower their guard.

[Because she's being the distraction, that's why. She's doing her best to look all calm and nice and totally gentle and TOTALLY NOT HAVING ANY ULTERIOR MOTIVES.]

[splinten]

[...]

Whatever.

[Sure, he'll grab the weird rabbitrays. He flashsteps over and grabs a trio by the tails. He'd knock them unconscious but maybe she doesn't want that, so—

—yeah, he just stores them in his sylladex. Poof. There are now three fish in his inventory.]

Are those enough?

d

[grimdeity]

Technically, they did as they were asked. Perhaps you need to be more specific in your request? They are very literal beings, I believe. Their ability to use context clues and tailor their output to their users is, frankly, lacking.

[ Rose herself asked for a sweetened ice tea. It went as well as expected, really. ]

Try asking for sponge cake rolled with whipped cream.

[yatagarasu]

"Lacking" is an understatement.

[She pauses. Rose has a point.]

I should add a flavor. I'm thinking of chocolate.

slides in... D

[lamortespoir]

[ Sanson looks up from his cup of 'earl grey tea', which is... grey.

It tastes like tea, though. ]

Do you like grilled cheese sandwiches?

[yatagarasu]

[Kay nods.]

Absolutely! The simple, yet perfect sandwich! Anyone can learn to make one!

[lamortespoir]

[ You're talking to the guy who has probably only eaten fancy French food from the 18th century. ]

Can you make one?

D

[etherlight]

Grilled cheese sandwiches! Boy, that reminds me. I'm getting hungry.

Aren't you hungry too? Let's put those cheese rolls to use!

[SHE'S STARVING...Rorona frowns and looks at the ground while being all sulky about it.]

[yatagarasu]

Hang on...

[Kay examines the roll of cheese, sniffing it, pinching it...then she looks up with a smile.]

Okay, I'm sure this is real cheese! I wonder if anyone has any bread to go with it...