Here comes chaos!

 [Originally written September 14 2020]

I returned to my Creatures 2 world fully intending to bring in the element I hinted at last time, but my Norns decided to make things interesting all of a sudden. I managed to use a launcher to get Carlos out of the lift, where, as of last time, he was stuck. Soon after, he collapsed with stars around his head! His ATP and energy were critically low – perhaps that was why he was stuck, because when I hit him with a dual injection of liquid food and difibrillant (which I marked as dotted lines on the graph), he was up and walking around again. He made his way over to the Calendar Tree to keep Sauron company. I hoped he’d be able to care for himself after this. 

At least Damien had settled into a stable life at the base of the waterfall. Meanwhile, I found that Derek had gotten himself stuck in the boat over the light ocean. I’d like to have words with whoever designed that mover, as it’s nearly impossible to click the lever to move it when a Norn is on board. I kept accidentally tickling Derek trying to get him back to shore. Naturally he was quite hungry on arrival at the docks, so I gave him a tomato and went to tend to an egg.

Wait, what? Yes, there was an unexpected egg in the incubator room. Aaron had snuck back in without me noticing, and somehow I completely missed the resultant pregnancy until I saw the egg. I had forgotten to turn on the infobar that would have alerted me and I had the observation kit scaled such that both girls were off the page. I managed to wrangle Aaron away from the females and teleport him back to the treehouse. I was then briefly called away by a low ATP notification; Carlos had collapsed again. I came back to find Beth up atop the desert tree with an impish expression on her face. Thankfully all the teleporters have a “back to the incubator” button, so I was able to contain her fairly quickly. 

I didn’t get to rest, though, because Carlos was down for the count again. This time he’d collapsed in a boat with Edmund apparently having attempted Norn CPR on him while Sauron looked on. I extracted him from the boat and took over with the injections again, only for Carlos to immediately jump into the ocean and collapse again. Unfortunately, the repeated collapses took their toll and I was unable to save him.

Of course, that didn’t mean my work was done yet. Oh, no. These Norns weren’t going to let me take a break. I can’t fully blame them, though. I think part of the problem here is that these are C1 Norns who were never really brought up to speed on the changes to the world in C2. They know what food is and that they should eat it when hungry. They don’t know what “fruit” or “root” or “flower” is, let alone what to do with it. I’m just thankful that apparently pushing food still counts as eating it despite the verb split (or that alternatively my Norns were clever enough to eventually try eating when instructed to push the fruit or whatever).

Noting that Derek was starving, I brought him some honey, just in time for him to collapse. I did my injection routine and tried to coax him into eating. Instead he flung himself into the ocean. I took advantage of the fact that you can pick Norns up if they’re in the water and moved him all the way over to the tantris bush where food was plentiful and he was far from the sea. Meanwhile, Sauron took after his predecessor and developed an obsession with chasing the clouds. It must be a Grendel thing.

Having finally escaped the chaos I took the time to hatch the egg. In keeping with both the mundane names of the existing Norns and the theme of my new world, I welcomed little Tom to the world. Beth seemed thrilled and dove right into teaching her baby all about this wonderful new world – beginning with her favorite past-time of pulling things. 

I promptly set to work teaching Tom his words, which had the added benefit of bringing Erika and Beth up to speed on new C2 vocabulary. I left them to it to revive Derek, who had apparently decided to continue his path as some sort of meditative guru – apparently his latest thing was fasting. Having reintroduced him to the concept of eating, I returned to Tom and finished teaching him his verbs. He was still awfully small, but I wanted to also teach him the rest of his words and get him away from the females – last thing I needed was for him to grow up and produce another egg while I was off dealing with some other crisis. He evidently found the lesson extremely tiring! Meanwhile, Derek had fallen into the goldfish pond and needed to be rescued, so I left Tom to his nap.

I got another notification of a collapsed Norn, this time Aaron. He was all the way down in the swamp! I revived him and got him to eat a bit, but he simply collapsed again. We repeated this routine once or twice before I looked deeper into the problem. My heart sank when I realized it was a hopeless battle – his stomach organ was dead, so he could no longer digest food. There was nothing left for me to do but give him some attention and make his dying moments comfortable. At least Smeagol the Ettin was there to keep him company, much to his bafflement. What’s Ettins, precious?

Aaron passed on with a smile on his face not long after. Meanwhile, Damien had found his way down to the Shee statue, which scared the ever-loving daylights out of him! Well, that’s what you get for poking around in his treasure, Damien! At least you have good manners for a thief. 

Finally, Tom woke from his nap and I began leading him out into the world. I couldn’t tell if he’d grown larger or not; thanks to the way the resolution is set up on the NUC running Creatures 2, everything looks a good deal bigger on my screen than it actually is, throwing my sense of scale way off. I did, however, find it odd that he was still crawling at this age, but gave it no further thought until I’d gotten him successfully across the bridge. 

Sauron, despite his villainous name, came out to greet the little Norn and offer the newcomer his own favorite snack… an ant. It was only here that I realized that Tom had in fact grown and should not be crawling. Actually, he wasn’t crawling. I got a good look at his gait and I can only describe it as a “skateboard gait” – he keeps one leg straight down, and pushes himself along with the other. He made it to the dock, where he seemed to get stuck (possibly due to the level ground). 

Stranger still, I could find no explanation for this! He has only one mutation compared to his parents (who could both walk just fine), and that mutation is an instinct regarding weeds – nothing to do with walking. Looking through the pose genes, it looks like he’s using the limping gait, which should be triggered by injury. But I checked the injury chemical and Tom is perfectly fine. I have no idea what’s causing this, nor how to help this poor disabled Norn besides bringing food and toys to him. At least Edmund and Sauron are there to keep him company.