An unexpected problem

 [Originally written September 29 2020]

I began my session by teaching Boromir the rest of his verbs and a few nouns. Then it was time to take him down to the tunnel to learn adjectives, with Arwen along for the ride. I got her down the lift first. Erika, however, had other ideas, and intercepted it at the second stop! I was able to send Boromir back down, but Erika needed to be coaxed over to the teleporter so I could send her home. By that point, Arwen had wandered over to the other teleporter – you know, the one I couldn’t get Norns to go to when I actually wanted them to?

After I got them both to the computer and trained them to my satisfaction, I brought them back up to the incubator room. Before they could get off, though, Erika decided to cause yet more trouble! She and Arwen giggled over the prank while Boromir just wanted to get away from it all.

Once I had them contained, I made my rounds. Tom seems to be getting around better in adulthood – he still has that limping gait, but it appears to be more effective at moving him around now, at least.

Damien was off on an adventure, but he was a bit bored. As happy as he was with the ball I brought him, he didn’t think it was enough, and found his way down to the Shee labs and the hidden music room!

I did a double take when I found Edmund in the volcano, teetering back and forth on the tip of the ledge, but quickly swooped in to lead him back home. No harm done!

Everyone else seemed to be doing alright, so I returned to the incubator room to break up a slap fight – mostly it was Beth hitting the others. Some things never change! 

I was quite surprised to see Boromir, who sported a drastically new look to mark his graduation from infancy. This also heralded the beginning of a rite of passage for him and Arwen, so I exported Erika and Beth temporarily to make my life easier, and sent over the submarine! Boromir seemed thrilled to be traveling and enjoyed his first glimpse of the underwater world, but Arwen looked rather bored. Get used to it, girl… this is your new home!

See, Boromir and Arwen are Mernorns! Back when I discovered the series through Creatures Playstation, I did some googling to look things up, and that’s how I discovered the main PC series. One of the things I encountered was Wafuru’s site, and I remember wishing I could have Mernorns in my game. By the time I got Creatures 2, though, for whatever reason, I didn’t download them. I’ve always kind of wanted to have Mernorns but never got around to it until now!

More specifically, these two are AquaShee’s Atlantic Mernorns, with a couple tweaks (I switched their sprites back to standard Mernorns, as the Atlantic Mernorn genome actually uses a mix of Emerald and Mernorn sprites); I left the coloration genes alone though, so I have no idea whether they’ll look like normal red and blue Mernorns or something else entirely! This genome means that they can actually swim with the right COB injected, but it also means they’re technically amphibious from birth, so they don’t have to make the migration from land to sea during a specific window of time when they can breathe both air and water. I decided to let them live on land at first anyway, and teach them their vocabulary there. Hopefully, their offspring can live their entire lives underwater, and learn most of their words from their parents (or from the laptop).

When the young Mernorns arrived in the volcano, however, I got quite a shock! Damien was down there! I briefly left the youngsters alone to shepherd him out into the swamp, during which time Boromir decided to dive off the cliff into the volcano himself! Meanwhile, I was getting notifications that a Norn had low ATP somewhere; Edmund had fallen into the water. I darted over there, dragged him out, gave him his injections, and immediately left him as soon as he was back on his feet.

I continued trying to get Damien out of the volcano, and slammed the door behind him. By this point, Arwen had also taken up cliff-diving, so I had to get both Mernorns back onto the elevator and pull them back up to the airlock level. I started leading them into said airlock, and Arwen was happy to follow, but Boromir preferred to leap off the cliff again. With a sigh, I locked Arwen in the chamber and went to retrieve the other Mernorn a second time. Eventually, I managed to wrangle them both into the airlock, where I checked them for heavy metals. They had only a trace amount in their systems so I figured they’d be fine. 

I gave Boromir a berry with some EDTA in it just to be sure, since he had the higher dose of heavy metals, then reimported the girls at the incubator, but then got a notification that someone had low ATP. Damien had collapsed just outside the door to the volcano, and had to be revived. I checked on his health as well, but while his organs were all in bad shape, none were dead, so I gave him an injection and sent him on his way. What an adventure he’s been on! But how did he get there? He must have fallen into one of the ponds and used the Neptune’s Undertow portals, because one of them is inside the freaking volcano! That makes sense if you’re using the flooded volcano cob, but I’m not! I can’t very well release the Mernorns into the seas with portals that lead to the volcano about, so it looks like I’m diving into C2 COBbling sooner than expected!