Lysol and limps

[Originally written August 3 2020]

The first thing I did on login was to make an attempt to deal with Ursula’s problem by moving her to an area where she’d potentially be able to navigate a bit, and provided her with all she needed – food, a couple gadgets to smack around, a toy that could be operated in one place, and a nice view of the beach. 

It kept her entertained for a time, but in hindsight leaving her in an area where I expected she could walk wasn’t the brightest move. In my defense, it’s a slow day working from home and I’m playing in between conference calls and answering emails.

Then I went to check on the main Grendel populations, once again to be met with a chorus of sneezes. 

I began battling the plague once more, starting by quarantining infected individuals until they were healthy again. This appeared to be working, and I was eventually satisfied that I had eliminated the disease from the female population, so I went to check on Ursula quickly before going to deal with the males.

Despite her limited mobility, she’d apparently decided she’d had enough of the beach and gone on a day trip to the Jungle. For a Grendel with a severe limp, she sure got around fast! Granted, I had put her in a sloped area so she could move, which naturally allowed her to move out. And of course, even if her normal walk cycle was screwed up, she has other gaits that work just fine. I moved her and her accommodations to the Learning Room, after checking to make sure she didn’t pick up any sicknesses in the Jungle, and took a quick look at the other females on the way back out.

I then discovered that Maria and Katherine had the same pose mutation. For Maria this was unsurprising, given that she was Ursula’s daughter. Katherine, though, is Ursula’s… uh, half-sister/niece? It sure is a good thing inbreeding doesn’t negatively affect creatures in this game – and I am aware of the irony given the context of that statement. That being said, with genes being either/or in Creatures, mutations are just as likely to pass on in unrelated pairs as they are in related ones – the only exception being if a related pair have both inherited the same mutation, bumping the chance of passing it on from 50% to 100%. But that wasn’t the case here.

I verified that Sebastian, Gertrude, and Romeo didn’t have the mutation, but Beatrice did – and I already know that Caliban has no genetic anomalies aside from my intentional edits. So the inbreeding wasn’t to blame for this; RNG just had it in for Beatrice’s descendents. How I failed to notice the mutation in Beatrice or Cordelia is quite another question.

Anyway, with this new information I decided it was silly to try to give Ursula a special environment – three out of four females had this mutation, and had been getting along well enough for me to not notice, so I put her back in the Woodland and went to attempt to conquer the sickness in the male population. Paris and Richard were still chilling in the bottom level of the Meso, though the latter was now quite a bit larger than the former. Meanwhile, up top, Sebastian and Laertes seemed to have the worst of the infection, so I repeated my isolate-and-treat procedure.

After returning them to the Meso, I went to check on the females again – only to be greeted with more sneezing! Unable to hand out tiny masks and ask the Grendels to stand at least six feet apart, I declared war on the bacteria and put my hoverdoc into high gear. I methodically doused every inch of Woodland with pink fog until the entire dang Shee Ark smelled like disinfectant, then went back over it with yellow fog to make sure I hadn’t missed anything. Satisfied with the result, I repeated the procedure in the Meso, and wiped the infection out there too. If only it were so simple in real life…

Dang right there are no bacteria found!