SEPTEMBER EVENT: WE'RE ON ISLAND TIME BABY

[sailmods]

on the 16th, starting at 6AM and continuing until 10PM, Friday herself will be driving the ship’s tender back and forth between the ship and the excursion, making the trip about once every 30 minutes. those who board the tender will find that they are knocked out for the journey, but will wake up still on the tender, wearing whatever it was they’d been wearing before getting on, and with no side effects.

the destination is a tropical island, with white sandy beaches and turquoise water. the island is rather large, with dense tropical foliage inside the barrier of sand, but passengers will find it difficult to get more than a mile inland. not because of the trees or bushes, but because the villagers intervene around that point, and politely but firmly return them to the beach.

yeah, there’s a village. wood and frond huts built in a clearing just past the sands, populated by about twenty beings that appear to be some kind of bipedal salamander. if they have a verbal language, they aren’t telling it to you, and mainly communicate through gesture. there is a sort of vendor nearest to the beach, sitting on a blanket that holds a variety of exotic fruits, trinkets, and cool shells that they will exchange for literally whatever you bring from the ship. they are also trading bottles of a dark-red, citrusy rum; they also either have difficulty judging or don’t care about human drinking ages, and anyone who isn’t clearly a child will have no problem getting some.

the jungle is teeming with a wide variety of tropical flora and fauna. the plant life is whatever would normally be found in a tropical Earth location, while the wildlife is limited to what can be found on this island and in the jungles of Sumeru. why? because I feel like it. my fleeting whims decide every aspect of this game and i ain't stopping now..

the surrounding ocean extends out about five nautical miles before reaching what could most accurately be called The End of the Map: the water ends very suddenly, followed by the sky, and beyond it is an endless black void that makes your brain twitch the more you stare at it. if you try to enter it, you will die, and it will hurt the entire time you are dying.

there doesn’t seem to be any restriction on magic, except for one rather major one: anyone with the ability to fly will find that they are suddenly unable to. whether magical (i.e. Venti), biological (i.e. Phil’s wings), or mechanical (i.e. MB’s drones) in nature, anyone attempting to take flight will find it impossible to get any lift. just barely over the horizon, something gleams as it points to the sky.

Comments

[saltwaterlungs]

Darcy saw the... robot thing coming, so she doesn't do anything silly like fall out of the tree. She does however startle a little at the way they talk, expecting something more like Max. Darcy half-waves back.

"Uh. A lot of shit. The beach mostly. I think I saw a turtle earlier."

Upnods, "I don't think we've... met? 'm Darcy. Are you a robot, or is that like, offensive like with Max and Rin?"

[configuration_birdwatcher]

This is the kind of excellent reconnaissance they would expect from such a good vantage point. Now they know there's a turtle. (Also, that is one incongruously cold human, now that they're looking at the data from their thermal sensors as well as audiovisual.)

// I'm an omnic. They're not going to deny being a robot, it's technically accurate if overly broad, but they don't want to encourage humans to refer to them by a term that covers both omnics and roombas. It's demeaning. (They aren't sure if that's why Rin/SecUnit objects to the word. It could be that it considers it inaccurate, since it's not fully inorganic.)

// Call me Bastion. Or E54. They don't have a preference, it's two different ways of shortening their model name, but the second option is mostly there for completeness since humans usually pick the first.

[saltwaterlungs]

"Oh, yeah, so like Max."

She even wrote down that specific word when Max told her. Sarcastically, but still physically.

"Bastion," she nods, "are you... from Max's world, or is that just a word that gets used in a lot of worlds that I don't know about?"

[configuration_birdwatcher]

Bastion nods. // Different model, era and probably manufacturer, but we're both omnics.

// Same world. It's a genericised trademark, so only worlds where Omnica Corporation existed would use it.

[saltwaterlungs]

"Huh, neat."

Darcy folds her arms and gives the beach another scan.

"Are you seeing anything like... do you have better eyesight than a human or is it just kind of the same?"

[configuration_birdwatcher]

// I can zoom, but in visible light my ability to resolve images is otherwise equivalent. I also detect infrared. It's not integrated directly into their visible light vision, so no shrimp colors.

[saltwaterlungs]

"Probably means you can't see other animals or anything then."

Darcy didn't usually see many animals at the best of times back home, this was a weird, rare experience for her. Not one she was super enthusiastic about, but something to break the monotony.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

// I think we can see the same amount of animals. Especially when it comes to reptiles and amphibians hiding in the underbrush and not giving off enough body heat to be easily detected that way.

// It's a welcome change from the ship. I've never even seen a bug on board.

[saltwaterlungs]

"Mm. The Captain is bad at making living shit. You should've seen his attempt to make trees. It looked like it was out of a video game or something. The whole thing was just weird. There's apparently not even any germs or anything on-board."

A flicker of movement in the tree above her catches her attention, and Darcy pauses for a moment, staying very still. It's... a bird. Darcy cannot distinguish birds. It might be... a parrot? Maybe? The most exotic bird Darcy's used to back home are pigeons.

Regardless, she silently points up at it to indicate it to Bastion.

[configuration_birdwatcher]

There were a few trees around the diner, but what with having never been to a desert before their strange shapes or textures didn't stand out as wrong to Bastion at the time, the way misshapen temperate vegetation would have. // No germs? How do they not spread from the passengers?

Never mind that, there's a bird! Bastion cranes their neck forward and zooms in as far as they can. It's a striking creature, teal, white and amber with markings in every colour of the rainbow and a big red fruit-eater's bill like a toucan. They don't recognise the family, let alone the species, though they wish they did, humming to themself as they analyse the feed. It should be easy to identify, with the large pink casque on its head and the wide curly tail... which they watch uncurl and wrap itself around the branch as the bird settles into its perch.

// I don't think that bird's from Earth.

[saltwaterlungs]

"Captain's too lazy to keep them alive when they touch the ship I think. Or maybe there's nothing to eat."

Darcy keeps her voice low as to not scare off the bird. At least Bastion clarified that the bird probably wasn't from earth, because she would've had no fucking clue.

"It's beautiful. It looks kind of like... a toucan? I think?"

[configuration_birdwatcher]

From what Bastion knows about microorganisms, Darcy's first theory was probably right. The bird cocks its head curiously and repeats the end of her sentence in a higher-pitched, creakier voice. "Nothing to eat."

// It's very colourful, they say, admiringly. // It probably eats fruit and lives in trees like a toucan.