fishesoutofwater | TEST DIVE #2

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test dive

TEST DIVE #2

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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's nothing.

[Frankly, he hasn't had a lot of reason to use the god tier outfit lately, so... happy dining, robofox.]

Do you mind if I take the fox?

[ he gives the fox a look before shrugging. ]

I have no idea what I would even do with it, it's all yours.

[ neil really does not have that many shoes to give away to the thing in case it somehow loses dirk's. why does a robot fox even want to eat shoes, anyway? it's a mystery. ]

Thanks.

[Dirk reaches over, He picks up the fox.

And then he captchas it right into his hammerspace inventory. ('Robot Vulpine' rhymes with 'Kelp vine' and goes on the Robots row.)]

Sorry about the droids. I've been working on reprogramming them so they can at least learn from their mistakes, but it's taking time.

[ it's... going to take him a couple of seconds to answer, because making clothes appear and disappear into thin air is one thing, but. that was an entire robot fox. ]

Wha-- yeah. You're good with robotics? That's, uh, cool.

[ almost as cool as making a robot fox disappear????? ]

I wouldn't say that. Robots are just more advanced when I'm from. [He's just automatically assuming Neil is from the past because most people are, and that's what he used to.] I know enough that I should be able to get them closer to functional.

[But it fits perfectly in infinite space? Don't be silly. This is easy nonsense.]

What were you trying to get it to deliver?

[ he is, indeed, from the past in dirk's perspective.

at the question, though he fidgets. ]

I was kind of joking with it, and it wouldn't make any sense without context, so I'm not surprised that it just gave me a fox.

[ neil that doesn't answer anything. ]

[No, Neil, that doesn't. Not even a little bit.]

Cool. Well, if you have any feedback, I can try to add the experience into the memories I'm building for them.

[Otherwise, you can remain cagey about your foxes. He respects that right to caginess.

...Like, he kinda wants to know because he's actually a bit nosy and dislikes not having information. But he does understand that maybe it's something Neil doesn't want to talk about. And you cannot just nose about into other people's business.]

[ to be honest, even if it was something neil had no problems with talking about, he's just very bad at sharing in general. if you asked him about the weather his default answer will just be "i'm fine."

still. ]

I play for a college team, and we're called the Foxes.

[ he hopes that dirk gets the implication there because he has no desire to flat out admit he asked the droids for his team. that's too... needy. ]

[Oh.

Yes, he gets it. He remembers days staring at the sendificator, forehead against the edge of the box. All of his friends miles and centuries away, and the best thing he can do is give them bits and pieces, and wait.]

What sport?

[Dirk doesn't know sports well whoops.]

It's Exy.

[ he already knows that dirk isn't going to know what it is. no one here knows, which is a special kind of torture for neil because his life quite literally revolves around it back home. ]

It's sort of like lacrosse, only better?

[Dirk does not often miss having his auto-responder permanently affixed to his face, but this is one of those moments. The know-it-all walking encyclopedia would definitely be helpful as one question flashes across his brain.

What the fuck is a lacrosse.]

If you want to explain it, you're going to have to clarify further than that. I've never even heard of lacrosse.

You can safely assume what my era makes up for in robotics, we lack in sports.

[Because there are literally no humans left alive to play the sports.

But hey! At least he knows about basketball from his Bro's movies! (Nope.)]

[ okay, so this is the hard part, because neil can literally talk all day about exy. like, to the point where his own teammates want him to get a new hobby. ]

Okay, basically you're trying to get the ball into your opponent's goal, like most sports. I'm a striker, which means I'm one of the people who try to actively score goals. It's pretty violent!

[ he sounds so happy about that. ]

[Neil, that's too happy about violence

...is something Dirk, who really wishes he could have been trained in combat by his Bro, completely fails to think.

Unfortunately, Dirk is like a sponge for knowledge. And honestly? He has very little else to do right now. There's modifying the Droids, but that's pretty much it.

And so:]

What are the different positions?

[ he looks slightly surprised at the question, but shakes himself out of it. ]

There's two strikes who play on the field at any given time. A goalie, who... goals, obviously. Then there's two backliners, which are defensive positions. They help protect the goal. And the dealer can help with either offense or defense, so they just go where they're needed.

We have the best striker and goalie in the league. [ well... there's drama surrounding that, but. why would neil voluntarily air out his team's very dirty laundry. ]

I'm going to assume that warrants congratulations. [Are leagues small? Are there different sized leagues? He wouldn't know, but it sounds like a brag, so why not.]

Do you bounce the ball? [Yup. Definitely doesn't know lacrosse.]

No-- well. You can bounce it off the wall? But that's usually when you run out of steps.

[ he's just overcomplicating this explanation at this point. ] You run with the ball in the racquet, and you pass it to your teammates' racquets. You can only run with the ball for a certain amount of steps so you either have to pass the ball to someone, or you do the wall thing.

[He literally cannot visualize this.

But lord how he is trying.]

I'm not seeing the avenue for serious violence here.

[He is very naive.]

[ if they had a whiteboard and markers he would be drawing a diagram. ]

The other team really doesn't want you to score?

[ he tries to think of an example that happened. ] One of my teammates had a pretty bad hand injury he was recovering from. One of our opponents kept deliberately aiming for that hand during a game.

[Oh, Dirk sees. (He doesn't.) It's a sport that emphasizes finding any advantage you can get over your opponent. Seems reasonable to him.]

I'm surprised to hear there were such brutal rules around in your era.

[Yeah never watched hockey either. He thought the 20th/21st centuries were way less brutal.]

[ honestly, most of it is just the other teams being a bag of dicks and wanting to break your bones for no reason whatsoever. ]

People take sports very seriously, so it's a very win at all costs mentality. Or something they're just jerks and likes hurting others.

Okay, but you yourself sounded pretty excited about the violent part.

[Like. HE'S JUST SAYING? He didn't miss that.

He just didn't think it was particularly strange, except juxtaposing it against this.]

[ he opens his mouth, then closes it, thinking over his answer before saying something dumb. ]

It's not that I want to go out there just to hurt them. I just... really enjoy the competitiveness of it? If someone comes at me, five times bigger than me with the intent to rip my head off, I want to beat them? I want to outplay them, and outsmart them, and send them falling to the ground.

It makes you feel alive.

[Ah.]

I get that.

[Competitiveness? Fuck yes. There's a reason he set all of his battle bots to 'kill mode.' What's the point of training if it isn't pushing you to the edge?]

You may have to pick up a new sport here. Unless the playing field is smaller than I'd expect, it will take us a long time to get the resources for that kind of space.

It would probably take a long time just to get enough people and teach them to play. I'm starting to think I'm the only person who's heard of it here.

[ which is awful and neil can rant about how awful that is but he won't subject dirk to that sort of torture. ]

I'm not even sure if I'd even like other sports.

[Neil is a gracious and kindly man who truly understands the meaning of mercy.

Not that Dirk "here's a dissertation" deserves that mercy.]

You'll probably want some kind of hobby. Being in the middle of the ocean with little access to anything external and a lot of free time tends to breed them.

[So many hobbies, Neil. He had to come up with so many hobbies.]

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