THE AURORA was once a sight to see. An impressive mining ship, home to many, it could travel across great interstellar distances while providing all the comforts necessary to those within. Its star-sailing days are over now, as it now is a terrible wreckage, with salvage and dangers for those who come near.
It’s also exactly where the new crew members just showed up. URSULA will be immediately sending the on-base crew towards the Aurora, while those who have just arrived have some time to explore. The Aurora, however, isn’t the safest place to be. There are some large creatures in the water, and they may not be friendly towards the crew…
Below is a timeline of events as they unfold, with some further information!
1000: THE AURORA
While the new crew may have arrived anywhere throughout the ship, many will have found themselves in the common rooms, surrounded by the comforts of those who once lived here. Those who choose to wander further may find many rooms throughout, often in varying states of decay. While there are smaller predators on the Aurora and the danger of a wrecked vessel, an unsettling peace pervades the crashed ship. For now, they are safe.
1030: THE BASE
At 10:30 in the morning, URSULA reaches out to all crew members with an urgent message:
”All crew members please report in immediately! Life signs detected on the Aurora! Please stop all other activities and begin rescue mission. Gather any supplies you need, use the vehicles and help any survivors you find. Devices are near the entrance to track life signals once you're on the Aurora. If they're safe, please remember we need to salvage what we can from the Aurora as well. The supplies will benefit any survivors as well.”
Get cracking, crew! Base and Biome have information on what kind of weapons and defenses your fellow crew have had.
1100: THE AURORA
Thanks to the transportation they had built, the base’s crew is able to arrive in record time. They can help seek out their new crew members, take the opportunity to explore more of the Aurora, or just sulk in the transporter. URSULA reminds everyone that salvaging is a key part of their mission, and they should gather what they can before returning to base.
1200: THE AURORA
The crew however only gets an hour to enjoy itself (?) in the wreckage. At noon, URSULA broadcasts to all present, new and old:
”Attention! Dire warning! Reaper Leviathans! According to what I've salvaged of my database, they're apex predators from the westernmost region of the ocean. One signal coming from the west, two others coming out of the Void from deep below the ship!”
The crew may try to evacuate, but it is probably better to prepare for battle or hiding instead. They won’t get enough time to get out of the way before…
1210: THE AURORA
The Reapers are here. Peering out one of the Aurora's entrances will reveal that they are already circling around the vessel, as if they realize something is inside. One even beaches, its entire, 160 foot body soaring through the air before slamming down into the water. It almost feels like a warning. A threat.
URSULA urges the crew to stay inside where it is safe, but if anyone does insist on charging forward, she advises them to split into teams and take on as many Reapers at once as possible to avoid any group being teamed-up on by multiple Leviathans.
NOTE: To fight a Reaper Leviathan, comment under the REAPER FIGHT THREAD comment below! We ask that you work in teams of two or three for the battle to keep threads organized and minimize the number of fight threads the mods will need to work through. Be mindful that these are extremely fierce, dangerous, fast, giant apex predators, and they are very likely to do damage against those who fight them! By tagging in, you are agreeing to put your characters at risk of injury from the Reapers. As URSULA advised, those who don't want to get hurt should hold back and wait.
1300: EVACUATION
Things are looking grim. While the crew's teams make a good fight of it, these Reapers are durable, and they just keep coming back for more. It seems they're on a mission, to stop the crew, no matter how battered they become.
That's when the bellowing starts. Coming from everywhere, a song like that of the cavalry that disorients the Reapers as a large pod of Reefbacks swim in. Several put themselves between the ship and the Reapers, allowing anyone on aboard to safely get into the transports and into the water.
Others begin to fight. The use the concentrated power of their songs to knock back attacks from the front, powerfully lashing their tentacles like whips to crack against the Reapers. In battle they're surprisingly agile, able to spin around in a moment's notice to alternate between confusing and attacking the Reapers.
But any crew members watching can see the toll it takes on the Reefbacks. One Reefback in particular chooses to guide the crew back to the base by swimming along aside them. Thick, dark blood trails in the water behind it but it beats off any curious smaller predators like Stalkers. But its shell is cracked, its 'face' smashed in, and it gets no further than the Kelp Forest before it settles into a dense patch of creepvines for a final rest. It sends out a final cry that somehow feels like a wish for the crew to keep going on to the base, away from the continuing battle.
The rest of the pod manages to drive the Reapers back, though they too have their casualties. Still, the Aurora and the crew are safe for now.
Perhaps that was their only wish.
Direct any questions and plotting to the OOC post and have fun!
Then let's look for them! [Feferi hurries over to help him out. Or make more of a mess. Mostly just to make more of a mess.] There have to be at least a few.
I don't know about that. I mean, we humans love our aquatic hoofbeasts, but the My Little Pony seahorse line was never as popular as the pegasus or alicorn. That said, they were definitely best sequence in Rescue at Midnight Castle. It added a truly surreal quality that really disturbed the sense of each pony having a singular identity, rather than being a color-patterned framework repeated over different forms for the sake of toy sales. You could really feel the intrusion of market forces in that moment.
[As he gives his critique of this early 1980s cinematic production, he also is digging around in the toybox. He's looking for a seahorse, but also a clam. He remembers they were sold in clams sometimes.
From her appearance, he is reasonably confident she's a highblood. In fact, he's pretty sure that she looks a lot like a younger version of the Condesce? That might be the familiarity.
[Feferi considers this well-thought-out critique of the My Little Pony franchise and delivers her response:] You're a huge dork! [And she laughs, of course, though it doesn't sound mean-spirited.] I bet you'll be great at finding all kinds of hoofbeasts!
[A compliment! Maybe...? She digs around in the toy boy with him, though her quest for seahorses is often sidetracked by a need to examine anything that seems interesting.]
[But still cute! Feferi leans in a little to look at it.] It's all so small! Look at the tiny pink human! We should keep it. [This is truly the sort of thing the base will need.
Clams are great for storage! [They are such useful bivalves. With the sign of a seahorse having at least once lived in this box, Feferi tries to focus more, digging deeper.] Then this is a rescue mission! [She flings a couple of wooden building blocks over her shoulder, where they bounce against the wall.]
[He cannot imagine this girl ever turning into the sort of person who so brutally massacred the entire human race. This isn't like the thing with that dead dream mini-Condesce.
He digs around and—wait—wait.
There it is. A little ratty from use, definitely in need of a good combing, but it is a toy seahorse. Just what the not-Empress ordered.
He holds it up.]
Before I entrust you with this fine watery steed, I need to know your name. Can't go about giving out aquatic hoofbeasts irresponsibly.
[Feferi's eyes light up, and she reaches for it--but then nods very seriously when he asks for her name. He raises a very good point about aquatic hoofbeast care!] I'm Feferi Peixes! Don't worry, I'm great at taking care of aquatic hoofbeasts! What's your name?
You've met trolls before? [But he's not one of the four humans she knows about! And she's pretty sure those were the only ones left. She looks at him a little closer, even as she pets the seahorse's poor scraggly mane.] You look kind of like one of the humans I saw once, actually! More than most humans look alike.
Round glasses, fucking wicked sense of humour? He's family. [If she's a troll who has met a human, she's probably a player. So he actually could explain the actual relation and it might make sense to her. ...But he doesn't want to be ectobiology is not his thing and who even wants to talk about that. Not him. Not to a troll he just met.]
Do you have a guess about who you might look like?
That depends, since I bet some humans would say I looked like all sorts of trolls I didn't look like at all! [Feferi says in spite of implying most humans look alike maybe five seconds ago. But, a little more seriously and uncertainly, she asks--] You're not talking about my ancestor, are you?
If my understanding of troll society is correct, and by your 'ancestor' you're referring to the Batterwitch herself, Her Imperial Condescension of fucking up everyone's shit, then yeah.
I mean her.
[It isn't like he's angry with Feferi. That would just be stupid, and frankly unfair. It would be like someone thinking Dirk is great just because Bro was a hero.
But even with the Condesce dead, there's a special, ice cold line of pure loathing that he reserves just for her, and his voice carries that.]
[She can taste the animosity, and it's something she understands and is confused about at the same time. Certainly, the Empress is worthy of loathing, but why would he have any connection with her?] I mean her. I was the heiress until the planet blew up and I died. [She breezes over that with far more ease than she does with the conversation topic at hand.] Before everything happened, I was going to fight her for her spot! Eventually.
[He holds his tongue for a moment. Feferi is a dead troll. She does not need to hear the sorts of things he could say about the ancestor she was supposed to one day replace. He can tell already that she already knows what the Batterwitch is like.
He makes himself lean back against the toybox.]
Then I guess I know your ancestor, and now you know the ancestor of the human that looks like me.
[Keeping reeling it in, Strider. (Wrong time for fish puns.) Feferi does not seem like a bad person. You do not need to bring up any of this to her. The Condesce is dead, Earth is gone, it's all over.
Okay. He's good.]
I'll move on from ectobiological blood relations and on to the equally inappropriate topic of death. Although given our circumstances, I don't think the subject is the same sort of off-limits as it would be to others. I was under the impression that the dead continued on in dream bubbles, and I'm pretty sure this isn't one.
I woke up here after I died. [Feferi shrugs; she hadn't given it much thought, though maybe that was a little strange. There had just been so much to do right away, and then she'd gotten lost and gone--somewhere. The memories were very fuzzy.] I don't think everybody here's dead, though! Are you?
Not unless someone seriously messed up when we opened the Ultimate Reward door. Which I'm not discounting given how badly pretty much everything else in our session has managed to go. [He's still pretty sure he's alive, though. He feels alive? He doesn't feel ghostlike. Maybe he wouldn't know, but he feels like he would.]
That does sometimes happen when you try to open that door! [Ultimate Unlucky Reward door. Dirk's session must have gone sort of well, though, if he got to the door. Were other humans playing that well in other sessions? But he knows about the Condesce... It's all kind of confusing!] I guess it's just something weird that's happening here, though! You're probubbly not dead!
[Probubbly why are quirks a thing. Why. Dirk regrets everything. He doesn't give it any reaction, but know that on the inside, he loathes this cruel world.
The situation is a bit more important, and somehow it feels like it makes more sense to talk to a fellow player of the game.]
Okay, so I'm probably not dead, and this might not be the universe we made. Is there anything you know about where we are?
Yes! This planet's called Iniidae, and we're all working for URSULA at the base to help study it and make it so people can live on it. URSULA's an AI, by the way. [Feferi lifts up her wrist, where her portable database sits just above her bracelets. She turns it on. It opens up to the creature database, but she shows its general state to Dirk.] We all have one of these that we can use to talk to her and learn about stuff once someone figures it out!
And wait until you see the base, it's really great and totally underwater, even if it's dry inside. [So cool! Feferi can accept the dry life in the name of how many species here seem to have trouble breathing in the water on their own.]
[Okay, AI, base, cool communicator wrist he's going to want to hook up to his glasses, and—
Oh for fuck's sake is he never going to escape the ocean. FEFERI. FEFERI DON'T BE SO HAPPY DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR ANCESTOR HAS PUT HIM THROUGH ON OCEAN-RELATED BULLSHIT. He kinda just... rubs his forehead a bit.]
Okay, I guess I can work with that. How deadly is the sealife? Anything more dangerous than what would have been found on Alternia?
Some of it's a little dangerous, but a lot of it's fine! [Fine by Feferi's standards, anyway.] Once you get a database you'll be able to look up everything we've learned about the animals here so far, but I wouldn't stick your hands in anything's mouth before you know!
[...Also.] You know what sort of creatures we have on Alternia?
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subnautica2016-05-01 12:35 am
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Yes. Yes it is. Yes, it is a troll.
He squints a little. She seems kinda familiar? But... no. He's definitely never seen that face before. Strange.
Dirk shakes off the deja vu and answers the troll.]
Sorry, not yet. There could be a few in the toybox.
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[As he gives his critique of this early 1980s cinematic production, he also is digging around in the toybox. He's looking for a seahorse, but also a clam. He remembers they were sold in clams sometimes.
From her appearance, he is reasonably confident she's a highblood. In fact, he's pretty sure that she looks a lot like a younger version of the Condesce? That might be the familiarity.
He doesn't know how to ask this yet.]
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[A compliment! Maybe...? She digs around in the toy boy with him, though her quest for seahorses is often sidetracked by a need to examine anything that seems interesting.]
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He looks at her from behind his glasses.]
I don't see the correlation between that and horse-finding.
[A clam! He opens it.
Misfire.]
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Feferi grabs a clam next! Nope.]
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Seriously? Another clam.]
Why the fuck did we put so many things in clams?
[The next one he finds is a pony clam! But it's empty and only has the hair brush.]
False alarm. But this is evidence that there's the corresponding seahorse somewhere around here, assuming it wasn't totally lost.
[The greatest search of the age.]
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He digs around and—wait—wait.
There it is. A little ratty from use, definitely in need of a good combing, but it is a toy seahorse. Just what the not-Empress ordered.
He holds it up.]
Before I entrust you with this fine watery steed, I need to know your name. Can't go about giving out aquatic hoofbeasts irresponsibly.
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[He can now bestow the rescued horse upon her.]
You know, you bear a pretty striking resemblance to someone who has been pretty important in my life.
[Is one way to phrase his relationship with the Batterwitch.]
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Do you have a guess about who you might look like?
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I mean her.
[It isn't like he's angry with Feferi. That would just be stupid, and frankly unfair. It would be like someone thinking Dirk is great just because Bro was a hero.
But even with the Condesce dead, there's a special, ice cold line of pure loathing that he reserves just for her, and his voice carries that.]
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He makes himself lean back against the toybox.]
Then I guess I know your ancestor, and now you know the ancestor of the human that looks like me.
[Keeping reeling it in, Strider. (Wrong time for fish puns.) Feferi does not seem like a bad person. You do not need to bring up any of this to her. The Condesce is dead, Earth is gone, it's all over.
Okay. He's good.]
I'll move on from ectobiological blood relations and on to the equally inappropriate topic of death. Although given our circumstances, I don't think the subject is the same sort of off-limits as it would be to others. I was under the impression that the dead continued on in dream bubbles, and I'm pretty sure this isn't one.
[So why is she here?]
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The situation is a bit more important, and somehow it feels like it makes more sense to talk to a fellow player of the game.]
Okay, so I'm probably not dead, and this might not be the universe we made. Is there anything you know about where we are?
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And wait until you see the base, it's really great and totally underwater, even if it's dry inside. [So cool! Feferi can accept the dry life in the name of how many species here seem to have trouble breathing in the water on their own.]
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Oh for fuck's sake is he never going to escape the ocean. FEFERI. FEFERI DON'T BE SO HAPPY DON'T YOU KNOW WHAT YOUR ANCESTOR HAS PUT HIM THROUGH ON OCEAN-RELATED BULLSHIT. He kinda just... rubs his forehead a bit.]
Okay, I guess I can work with that. How deadly is the sealife? Anything more dangerous than what would have been found on Alternia?
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[...Also.] You know what sort of creatures we have on Alternia?
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Yup.
[Drop the other shoe. He is ready.]
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