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the-shadows-request-candy-corn · 5 months ago

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Incredibly long backstory for a warper Subnautica OC for Artfight

The first time they meet, the mammal has the bacteria in their system, but it has yet to establish an infection. The self-warping quarantine enforcer unit, Q-4014, its creators referred to it as, observed the alien creature. The collective was aware of the arrival of another vessel; the species that had arrived was weak and vulnerable, and within a matter of hours, eight of the nine surviving lifeforms had perished. This alien, presumably the last survivor, looks lost until they notice the agent. The survivor cautiously approaches with a primitive scanning device. It offers a live fish, a peeper, to the warper. It is unclear what the mammal's intentions are. The warper ignores it in favor of examining the strange squishy mammal thing. It should kill them. But it would be lying to itself if it denied curiosity in the alien's behavior. When the warper doesn't react and the fish swims off, the alien tries giving them a dead and salty peeper, which confuses the agent further. The two watch each other before they leave to attend other duties.

The next few times they meet, the survivor approaches without fear. Undoubtedly this is because of the infection altering their mental state, and it is the warper's responsibility to stop the spread and end its victims' suffering. The survivor flees from the warper's attack but continues to come back, more and more cautious each time. They finally learn their lesson one day when they approach in an armored metal contraption and Q-4014 drags them out and viciously attacks them. The warper doesn't see them again for a long time.

When they finally meet again, the survivor is clean from the infection. They swim as close as they dare, fear rolling off of it in waves, but it approaches the warper and carefully release another peeper, this one carrying a glittering golden enzyme. The warper feels like they should recognize this enzyme... their creators once coveted this substance more than life itself, before they left. The warper and its strange acquaintance seem to view this as a declaration of peace of some sort.

Warper gets bored and anxious about patrolling the same spot over and over again, and is now developing sapience and having the beginnings of an existential crisis now that 1,000 years of hard work and killing are over but their creators still don't come back. That mammal (and an oddly familiar squidlike creature)keeps bothering them though, coming by at least every few days to catch and release fish, collect samples, get their round metal contraption back from that one stalker, or just to eat lunch. Then the mammal starts making weird noises at it and bringing 'gifts'; a small garden of plants and coral whose color resembles the warper's, a slightly damaged and definitely stolen translator that once belonged to the creators, one of those "cuddlefish" things that are just too darn good at mimicking warper signals what are they and where did they come from?!? The strange meetings are a welcome change from the stress and monotony that has been ruling their life lately, and the new cuddlefish's attempts to communicate provide a beneficial distraction from the ever-growing loneliness of waiting for the creators' return. These routine visit go on for a long enough period of time that when the mammal goes a full week without visiting, the warper tracks down the first cuddlefish's location and makes a very awkward house call on the mildly injured survivor when they slither into their lair. The translator stolen from the lava castle only works one way and the survivor seems to have minimal understanding of warper communication, but makes attempts to let the warper know when they are about to make migrations to distant areas of the crater. During these excursions, the warper looks after the cuddlefish so the two of them can play together safely.

After a couple of years, the warper starts to think of the survivor and the cuddlefish less as "subjects" and more as "schoolmates", or maybe something more. Warpers weren't designed with any social intelligence in mind, aside from cooperative hunting and disease control tactics, but they also weren't meant to be active for this long. This has allowed Q-4014 and some of the others to start developing personalities. Many of the other warpers have abandoned their post and the hope of the creators coming back in favor of wandering. A few have taken to observing the strange new leviathans that emit the miraculous enzyme or Q-4014's disaster of a mammal with no self preservation skills that always seems to cheat death, and one slightly damaged warper has gone on the warpath with the deep grand reef crabsquids near the old mammal ruins after an event involving previously mentioned disaster mammal, a large metal vehicle, and Q-4014. Some of the other warper units, particularly two near the Quarantine Enforcement Platform and one in the dunes, find themselves somewhat invested in keeping the mammal from getting trapped in wrecks or ganged up on by biters. Yet another warper ends up becoming the cuddlefishsitter when Q-4014- "Quarantine", as the mammal has started calling them- starts joining the mammal on their deathwish adventures. The mammal is strange, and even Quarantine can't fathom most of their actions or ramblings even with the translator, but they bring enzyme to large infected fauna in biomes too shallow for the emperors, eat the smaller infected fauna, repopulate and replant areas damaged by radiation, and it turns out their primitive repair device also works on warpers who've just been body slammed into sand dunes by reapers, so all the warpers are tolerant of the survivor's (and by extension the weirdly familiar black-and-white squidthings') presence.

Then Survivor starts getting sick. They are developing swollen lumps, like the ones from the kharaa, but these are bilaterally symmetrical and not green. They have trouble keeping down prey and tire and bruise easily. Sometimes they struggle to breathe even out of the water, to the point that they rarely remove their strange breathing apparatus. Quarantine can find no trace of the kharaa in them, but their programming is going haywire at Survivor's unknown illness.

(What neither of them know is that the nuclear fallout from the Aurora's reactor had more of a lasting effect than predicted. The survivor had, on occasion, ventured into the radiation zone before they could make a radiation suit, whether out of necessity to run away from aggressive fauna or from overwhelming curiosity. Alterra was not the most concerned with OSHA-compliant hazard training, and so while the Survivor did have some idea that it was bad for their health to expose themself to radiation for long periods of time, they had little to no understanding of the long-term consequences. Even after fabricating a radiation suit, they were still exposed to small doses of radiation from ingesting irradiated fish, using contaminated materials from the Aurora, and from small tears in the suit caused by the bleeders in the reactor room. Even now, they were still coming in contact with environmental contamination from trying to regrow the crash zone's natural ecosystems. Over the past eight years, radiation-induced leukemia had slowly been taking over the survivor's body.)

Quarantine is able to override the urge to cull Survivor's as they notice the disease isn't contagious. Survivor is rarely able to make it down to the grand reef anymore, so Quarantine, being octopus-like and capable of some terrestrial locomotion, begins patrolling Survivor's territory and then living in their metal lair. The same abilities the warpers were equipped with for identifying and culling kharaa victims now allows Quarantine to monitor Survivor's declining health. Quarantine starts performing tasks that the survivor is no longer capable of, strange rituals like moving pieces of specific coral and plants to metal boxes in other specific biomes, scavenging and destroying scrap metal, collecting fauna from specific locations and selectively breeding them a strict number of times only to let them all go in a completely different area, and keeping records of it all. All seemingly pointless, but these rituals are of significance to their mammalian schoolmate, so they continue them. The barren reefs and the sickly fish populations of the irradiated zones seem to be getting stronger, and the nearly extinct sea crowns are sprouting up everywhere.

Quarantine tries to provide enrichment to their schoolmate. By day, Quarantine brings them whatever salvaged oddities they find and provides them with new samples to study. On nights when Survivor is too restless to fall asleep, Quarantine helps them climb to the top of the old life pod so they can look at the sky and babble about invisible connections between groups of stars. Quarantine patiently listens to their make-believe myths about the nonexistent creatures they see in those star clusters: Avia, an ancient apex predator of the skies and sea, who became the clever and social skyray after discovering agriculture and sowing the seeds of the first floating island; the peeper leviathan twins, who challenged each other to a competition of brains and numbers versus size and brawn that stills wages on to this day in the form of the reaper leviathans and the peeper lineages; Emparentis' unbroken spirit and undying love for their children; and the thousand-year vigil of the guardian warrior known as "Q" (that last story always made them stop to think). Sometimes there were good days, where the small school of cuddlefish, warper, and mammal use a small handheld device to record badly timed images of themselves and have magical experiences spelunking in reginald hatching grounds, where Quarantine let Survivor use them as a "sea glide" after forgetting to bring spare power sources. Sometimes there were bad days, where Survivor's failing circulation left them too cold and weak to get out of bed. Then all Quarantine could do was let Survivor nestle against them and offer the excess heat produced by their internal mechanical processes. Eventually, the bad days started to outnumber the good.

One restless night, while Quarantine and Survivor are stargazing, they see a new star. When it starts moving, they realize it's a spacecraft in orbit around the planet. Although it's still far away, they can see that it's getting bigger as it approaches the horizon. A few hours later, Survivor faintly picks up a far-off frequency that they recognize as radio communication from an entity known as "Alterra". It's miles and miles away, far too great a distance for it to pick up a signal from Survivor's equipment, but this means that this "Alterra" has landed. Survivor knows that this means 4546B and its biosphere are no longer safe from Alterra's exploitation, and laments ever turning off the Quarantine Enforcement Platform. Quarantine does not understand this; all they know is that their schoolmate is distressed and will not look at the sky anymore.

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GOOD ENDING

Quarantine is contemplating the moral implications of ending Survivor's suffering when they sense two foreign presences approaching the Safe Shallows. Quarantine warps to their location and finds one of their long-overdue creators and another mammalian alien. Quarantine refuses to let either of them pass, not knowing what their intentions are. The situation is made even worse when the creator reports that Q-4014's task is complete and attempts to command them to power down. Quarantine is well aware that the creator has the authority to make the warper do what they want and the physical ability to force shutdown, but they refuse to back down. The mammal recognizes that Quarantine isn't malfunctioning, but is instead reacting to what they perceive as a threat. She gets the creator to stand down and convinces the warper that she is not a threat or an agent of the "Alterra" entity that Survivor fears so much. Quarantine recognizes that the mammal is the same species as Survivor and therefore may be better equipped to handle their condition. They take a risk and bring her to Survivor. She tells Quarantine that she can help Survivor, but they would have to come with her to her lair where she and the creator have access to better medical technology. Survivor and Quarantine relent, and the mammal explains why they are here.

The mammal's name is "Robin", and the creator is "Al-an". They had planned to flee the planet, but had found evidence of Survivor tampering with the creator race's technology and had assumed there was a correlation between it and the eradication of the kharaa. They had come to investigate and found the wreckage of a massive Alterran spacecraft. While Al-an investigated the data stored in the facilities, Robin had done some exploring. Despite the crash, the effects it should've had on the environment were lessened than what would be expected, and there was evidence of half-completed artificial reef construction in the crash zone. Her PDA picked up on a single functioning beacon and, much to Al-an's reluctance, the two of them approached its source and were found by Quarantine.

Survivor is slowly recovering with their help, and everyone has a lot to unpack with each other(Quarantine and Al-an especially), but everything is resolved in the end. Robin learns about everything that happened with the Aurora, the sea emperors, and the kharaa. Quarantine comes to terms with the fact that many of Al-an and the Architects' decisions regarding the warpers, control of the kharaa, and abandonment of the planet were done without malice and with good intentions overall. Survivor is upset that Al-an and his peers' actions or lack thereof greatly extended the pandemic and the sea emperor's suffering, but thinks the Architects made the right decision in making the Quarantine Enforcement Platform and absolves him of blame for the destruction of the Aurora. Survivor is even grateful that it was because of Al-an's actions that they were able to live free from Alterra in the first place. Al-an learns and accepts that the Self-Warping-Quarantine-Enforcement Units have developed their own autonomy in his race's absence and are no longer tools or weapons. He offers to modify Quarantine's software to prevent them from being shut down unwillingly from outside forces, which Quarantine allows on the condition that they are granted the ability to initiate self-shutdown by choice.

Eventually Survivor makes a full recovery and Quarantine's upgrade is completed. The two of them are granted authority of the crater-Sector Zero warp gate, Robin's base, and two curious creatures known as trivalves(Robin was originally going to leave them in the care of another mammal named "Marguerit", but she thinks they'll like Survivor and Quarantine a little better). Survivor lives the rest of their life with Quarantine as vibrantly and chaotically as they once did.

Centuries pass. Alan and Robin explore the universe, Robin having gained a biomechanical vessel of her own to upload herself into in order to keep researching. They remember Survivor and Quarantine one day, and decide to pay 4546B a visit. With access to the Architect technology and an enthusiasm for knowledge that rivaled Robin's own, they had assumed Survivor would have also made the transition into indefinite biomechanical existence. They first check the crater base, only to discover that the site has become entirely engulfed in a massive reef teeming with countless new species of flora and fauna. When they arrive at the base in Sector Zero, Robin finds Quarantine waiting for them with Survivor's PDA next to a gigantic two-story aquarium. Robin opens it and finds decades of ecological research pertaining to every biome of the crater, Sector Zero, and even part of the dead zone along with a recording explaining Survivor's decision to die with dignity and enter the nutrient cycle of the planet's ecosystem. Quarantine disappears and is later found powered down permanently back in the crater, peacefully curled up in the Safe Shallows super-reef.

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(...Back to the main timeline)

Survivor seems to have lost the will to live after the entity known as "Alterra" was seen in orbit. Quarantine can't do much more than maintain the lair and try to coax Survivor into taking care of themself. But eventually, Survivor rallies the spite and willpower to give a final "F-ck you" to the universe. If they're going down, it's going to be on THEIR terms. THEY made their own choices that led them here, THEY were here before Alterra, and THIS is their home. And, well, if they can't stay here much longer, there's one part of it they haven't really gotten to explore yet...

Quarantine helps Survivor to fabricate as many med kits, decoys, batteries, and spare oxygen tanks as they can pack into Survivor's metal vehicles. When everything is ready, Survivor takes a massive dose of primitive medicines and the two of them set out for the crater's edge. Survivor tells them they are going to load one of their vehicles into the other, go as deep as possible into the dead zone in the large vessel, take the smaller one even further until they reach the bottom, and then race back to the surface, where Quarantine will be waiting to get them away from the angry ghost leviathans. Quarantine knows Survivor doesn't plan on making it back. The ghosts are faster and stronger than they are, and not even Quarantine's creators ever tried to reach the bottom of the dead zone. But if Survivor's dying wish is to be uncontrollably reckless and pursue one final adventure, they'll be there for their schoolmate.

Hours after disappearing into the void, Survivor comes racing back to the crater's edge on their seaglide being pursued by three angry ghost leviathans. Quarantine reaches an excited Survivor as they try to catch their breath. They warp the two of them to safety, but then realizes that Survivor was badly injured and had died mid-warp.

Quarantine and their kind are no strangers to death. For over 1,000 years, the Self-Warping Quarantine Enforcer Units have been the deathless grim reapers of 4546B, culling and ending the suffering of the countless infected. Having finally experienced death on the other side of the scythe, however, Quarantine does not handle this well. Their primary directive as quarantine enforcer was fulfilled years ago, and now with Survivor gone, they don't know what to do with themself. No matter where they go, reminders of Survivor's existence are everywhere. In a fit of grief and frustration, they tear up the outdoor grow beds and collapse to mourn in the wreckage. The cuddlefish babble to them and ask them questions they cannot answer, and when they give no response the cuddlefish settle next to Quarantine and try to comfort them. It is weeks later when Quarantine notices that the scattered pieces of coral and plants have sprouted new growth and the roots in the damaged plots are regrowing as well. Not knowing what else to do, Quarantine finally gets up and tends to the garden.

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"Bad"/Bittersweet Endings A & B

Quarantine has been caring for the creatures within the old lair and the rapidly expanding garden for years after Survivor's passing. There has been no sign of this "Alterra" thus far, although it's suspected that they're still somewhere on the planet. Then one day, a warper at the edge of the crater reports the presence of new mammalian entities and vehicles bearing a familiar logo. Alterra has arrived.

The remaining warpers stationed closest to Alterra keep the collective updated as it pushes further and further into the crater. Then a distress call goes out from somewhere near the grand reef before abruptly cutting out. The line goes silent but not dead. The warpers know that they have been discovered and one of their own has been captured.

Quarantine knows it's only a matter of time before Alterra finds the safe shallows, and then the overgrown ruins of Survivor's lair, and then all of the descendants of the creatures Survivor raised from eggs, including the cuddlefish. They begin to break down from stress, having moments where they black out and hallucinate Survivor talking to them about the old oceans of a planet called Earth and singing its ancient songs. Quarantine finds themself more reluctant to wake up each time it happens.

To protect the animals, Quarantine starts moving them through the warp gate to the late emperor's aquarium. They're leading the last group of stalkers when a reaper leviathan catches Quarantine in the soft underside with a mandible and damages their internal electrical components. Quarantine struggles to herd the stalkers to the warp gate before the leviathan catches up and destroys it just as the last stalker passes safely. Quarantine makes it back to the overgrown lair before having a breakdown. As they black out and begin to hallucinate once more, Quarantine hopes that they don't wake up again...

When Quarantine finally comes to, they are repaired and a creator looms over them. Creator is decades late and has only now returned to keep Quarantine alive against their will. Quarantine pitches a fit against Creator until an alien mammal calms them down.

The Creator and alien, Al-an and Robin respectively, returned to 4546B to destroy the leftover architect technology before Alterra could find a way to abuse it. They had a confusing encounter with a Self-Warping Quarantine Enforcer Unit near the Quarantine Enforcement Platform, who had witnessed Quarantine being attacked and told Al-an that two of the grand reef agents had been compromised. One had already been incapacitated by Alterra and needed to have self-destruct initiated remotely, but the other relocated to the safe shallows. The warper requested that Quarantine not be terminated and indicated the location of the overgrown lair. Al-an did not see the point in repairing a machine that no longer served a purpose, but did so at Robin's urging when she noticed Quarantine was clutching a PDA. Al-an discovered old scarring and imperfectly healed injuries on Quarantine and suspected that they had been primitively repaired by another entity in the past. Robin managed to salvage some of the data from the old PDA and found notes and photos of a similar looking warper. They put two and two together and come to the conclusion that there was some kind of bond between Quarantine and the previous inhabitant of the ruined base.

Quarantine and Al-an do not get along. Quarantine feels used and abandoned by the Architects, and Al-an already has the guilt of inadvertently leading to the release of the kharaa on his conscience without having to deal with the implications of the warpers gaining sentience.

Without Survivor around to smooth things out, Robin is stuck as the sole mediator for the psychic-blast-screaming matches between two advanced biomechanical entities with varying levels of passively suicidal ideation. Eventually, Al-an acknowledges the autonomy of the warpers as a race of their own and the responsibility the Architects had in creating them. Al-an offers for Quarantine to come with them to escape from Alterra, but it will mean leaving behind 4546B, the biosphere that Survivor became a part of, and the warper collective.

The only difference between endings A and B is in ending A, Quarantine decides to stay to protect the crater's ecosystem and Al-an programs a voluntary self-destruction protocol into the remaining warpers to keep them from being captured; in ending B, Quarantine decides to come with Al-an and Robin to explore the stars.

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TRUE ENDING

Years pass. Quarantine continues to care diligently for the coral garden, now a small reef. It took some trial and error to prevent inbreeding, but the current flora and nonmotile fauna now have a healthy amount of genetic diversity.

Decades pass. Organisms who succumbed to the kharaa centuries ago are re-evolving into their old niches, creatures that were long thought extinct are stirring in eggs buried deep in the sand after waiting for their proper hatching conditions to return. The creatures descended from the ones Survivor once hatched have become so numerous that the old lair has been intentionally flooded and the glass tanks broken to allow them space to roam freely. Quarantine teaches them how to fend for themselves in the wild.

Centuries pass. The bulk of the crashzone wreckage washes away from hundreds of years of being beaten by waves and aggressive megafauna. Biodiversity skyrockets, producing not only new species but countless subspecies and strains and even color variations. The same aggressive fauna whose fearful ancestors would have attempted to kill quarantine enforcer units on sight are now docile and take comfort in the presence of one of the last remaining warpers, recognizing that they are neither threat nor prey.

Millennia pass. All of the warpers have broken down from the passage of time, save one. This last warper knows they have a mission. They don't remember where this mission came from, or why they are fulfilling it, or even what they are anymore. But they know that carrying out this mission is more important than any other they could have ever had, and it is theirs alone. The cuddlefish have formed a small but healthy population, so they are not lonely. Their small pod whistles and babbles stories of their adventures to the warper as it watches over the watery Eden, a massive reef that spans the entirety of the safe shallows and part of the crash zone. One day the cuddlefish bring them a cracked tablet of metal and glass. It bears the image of the warper and two cuddlefish, alongside a strange mammalian creature. The warper is intrigued; they have no memory of seeing others of their kind, no any mammals. They keep the tablet and carry it around in their tentacles from that day on.

Transgovs rise and fall. Alterra becomes the stuff of history books. While humans are exploring an uncharted galaxy, an ocean world with extraordinary bioscan results is discovered. A small team of biologists touch down to study what their data shows to be the area of highest biodiversity. During their exploration, they find countless new species of flora and fauna of all kinds. One particular specimen captures their attention, a docile purple squidlike creature flanked by smaller black and white cephalopods.

The creature, likely ancient from the wear and tear visible on its leathery mantle, stops and regards them. It almost looks like it has a moment of recognition. It approaches and unfurls its tentacles, offering an old broken PDA. The biologists are amazed to see that before it broke, the screen froze on a photo. The photo depicts the strange creature, two of its smaller companions, and a smiling human.

News of this discovery shakes the xenobiological and historical communities. Eventually word reaches Al-an and Robin, who has accepted integration with biomechanical parts to allow her to continue studying the universe with Al-an. The two of them travel to 4546B to investigate the warper. Al-an remarks that although the self-warping quarantine enforcer units were intended to function as long as was needed to control the kharaa, they were never created with the intention of lasting this long, especially this long past the plague's eradication. The warper responds when to Al-an's attempts to communicate, but has little of its original functions or programming left and doesn't recognize Al-an or anything relating to the Architects.

The warper drifts off a little bit to help a young stalker remove some sharp metal from its mouth and Al-an explains to Robin what the self-warping quarantine enforcer units were.

When the Architects realized they may never be able to hatch the baby emperors, they resorted to cutting one out of their egg. The fetus perished, but samples were collected of its tissues. Attempts to clone the emperor were promising, but ultimately resulted in sterile specimens with none of the intestinal microorganisms responsible for production of the enzyme. The enzyme-producing microbes could not last long outside of a living emperor's body and were unable to be transplanted into the clones or cultured in a lab, and the clones died of dysbiosis and malnutrition. Hoping to gain more insight on the emperor's biology and lifecycle, cloning was attempted again, this time with gene splicing from other creatures less dependent on intestinal microbes for digestion. This was incredibly risky, as there was not enough time to fully sequence the emperor genome beforehand. The risk only somewhat paid off; a viable organism was created, but instead of a hardier emperor baby, it was a cuddlefish. The cuddlefish showed high social intelligence and problem solving skills, which showed promise as a potential tool to control the kharaa threat. Continued rigorous genetic engineering resulted in the creatures that would be disassembled and reconstructed with artificial enhancements to create the Self Warping Quarantine Enforcer Units. These units were never meant to be a long term solution, but were deployed and abandoned after the kharaa breached containment and the Architects had to flee their vessels.

Robin asks Al-an how long ago the quarantine began, and the warper stops. Hearing that word said aloud by a human tongue brings back all the memories they forgot long ago. They retreat to a cave that was once the home of their closest friend before it flooded and was engulfed in coral. They nestle in the soft sand and realize for the first time how truly exhausted they'd been these past thousands of years.

One of the Creators enters with a friendly mammalian creature. The mammal is so much like their old friend that their heart aches. The warper- Quarantine, they remember their name now- looks up to the creator and asks for permission to finally shut down. The creator tells them that they have fulfilled their mission and they can rest now.

Warpers have no concept of an afterlife. It is hard to conceive the idea of life after death when you were never meant to be aware of the finer philosophical implications of being alive. But if "death" is where Survivor has gone off to, Quarantine thinks to themself, they will not have much time to rest. Survivor has been waiting for them, and those alien mammals hate staying still. Death, perhaps, will be a new adventure.

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