#cause you can honk piteously in the forest for hours and no one will come to save you

[pigeon-butch]

making up a rain world and sky cotl collab season for a target audience of literally just me.

The season would start with you entering a new area and the violence karma symbol flashing on your screen before dropping you into a tunnel, where you are then hunted by skyified lizards while the rain incoming sound effects play with increasing urgency. You flee until you find the opening to a shelter and make it safely inside, finding a slugpup curled up on the ground in the center who wakes up and squeaks at you when you approach. This slugpup then becomes the season guide and after turning in the first quest two murals appears on the shelter wall, one illustrating the slugpup getting separated from its family survivor-style and another showing the two of you meeting with the companionship karma symbol overlaid on top.

Completing this would unlock the main area of the zone, a large semi-industrial area in the ancient forest that was an old mining facility before falling into disrepair. The zone would be designed with a significant amount of verticality and populated primarily by lizards and squidcadas with patches of worm grass to look out for that resemble darkness plants. It would exist in cycles, with periodic rains causing the wildlife to flee and forcing skykids to find shelter for a minute or so before adventuring back out.

The next quest would have you pick up the slugpup and carry it outside to find food which would require dodging squidcadas to make your way up a pipe and find a bunch of blue fruit hanging from the ceiling. Upon reaching it, the skykid would try to explode the fruit with their candle, upsetting the slugpup. You would have to toss the slugpup up to the ceiling so it could grab the fruits, and the two of you would make your way to the next shelter where upon finishing the quest a new mural of you both with your bounty of fruits appears alongside the gluttony karma symbol.

By the start of the next quest, the slugpup would have grown a bit bigger and its squeaks would be slightly deeper. You would carry it back outside to find more food, but come across nothing and have to travel further into the zone. Upon spotting a cluster of blue fruit, you would be attacked by a lizard and forced into a chase sequence that would deposit you both in a small glade with a darkness crab. The crab would attack you and you would do a big honk to knock it over, upon which the slugpup would jump out of your arms and go eat the crab. Upon reaching the next den, a mural of you and the slugpup surrounded by lizards and crabs would appear with the survival karma symbol.

When you come back to the den for the next quest, the slugpup would be a fully grown slugcat and too big to be carried, meaning that you now lead it around by the hand. Heading outside causes it to indicate a route with a number of threats such as lizards and worm grass. Once you make it through you find a clearing with the slugcat home tree in the center. Investigating it together you find evidence that slugcats used to live there but no sign of life, leading to the slugcat going quiet. When you make it back to a shelter, no mural appears, and the rain gets stronger outside.

For the final quest, the still-silent slugcat would indicate a direction towards the most dangerous part of the zone, and the two of you would head that way together. It would be comparable to the eden run, with plenty of dangers that incentivized traveling in groups. The final stretch would lead you to a cave entrance being guarded by a massive centipede that would have to be avoided in order to make it through. Inside, you would go down a long tunnel lined with mural forms of the remaining karma symbols before making it to a glowing underground lake where the final karma symbol flashes on your screen as you pass a broken guardian. The slugcat would then let go of your hand, squeak once, and go into the lake, disappearing into a ball of light similar to when you revive spirits. The cave would go dark after this, but if you waited a few minutes the water would gradually begin to glow again and reflect against an enormous new mural on the wall depicting the ascension ending of rain world with the slugcat reuniting with the rest of its kind.

To try and match some of the elements of both games, the dangerous fauna you encounter throughout the zone would appear more like unlit skykids than darkness creatures, trying to indicate that they're animals surviving in their own way that you just don't have the means to connect with rather than evil monsters. Ideally basically every rain world creature would make it in but realistically that wouldn't happen so I stuck with just a handful. The zone would be designed to make you feel very small compared to other areas in the game, with oversized structures and large predators to somewhat mimic the small prey animal experience of rain world, and would have a varied weather system with frequent downfalls alternating between long calm periods. Seasonal spirits would be echoes who would talk to the player about their various views on the cycle and mortality while selling cosmetics that imply what they used to look like as ancients. Also sky cotl crossover in rain world would be an arena filled with dark crabs that you get dropped into as gourmand while the doom soundtrack starts playing.