Another Time || Day 2: Of Carrot Beetles and Discovery

 

After managing to successfully convince Darla and Benny to eat some food - or, at least, teaching them the word "food" and dangling it in front of them until they decided to eat it - I realized that the food sources around the nursery were starting to look a little thin!

Sure enough, the Albian Carrot Beetle that I had been just expecting to be there, as it was in C12DS... was in fact, not present. So, after digging around in the Object Injector for a little bit, I discovered the Carrot Beetle's .COB file! Easy enough, right?

Upon injecting it, though, I was brought quite a bit to the right of the nursery. In fact, it seemed that for some reason, the game had decided to put the Albian Carrot Beetle in the caves. As I grabbed it and moved to bring it back to the nursery, though, I noticed something moving...

My first thought was "uh-oh", and my second was "Already?!", as if I'm not a huge slowpoke. In reality, I was actually already 40+ minutes into the game, and Darla was already an adolescent!

Admittedly, I wasn't sure what to do about the Grendel, so I decided to leave him be for now and return to the nursery (but not before saving the caves as a "favorite place" - thanks, tips of the day!). I returned to my task of bothering Darla and Benny into eating properly, but it wasn't long before someone inevitably wandered off... and had their first encounter.

The confrontation was pretty short-lived. Though the Grendel seemed just as curious about Benny as Benny was about the Grendel, it didn't take long until the Grendel started hitting Benny, causing him to flee. As it turns out, these Norns have a small advantage over the Norns I'm used to.

They knew how to run!

While I did indeed notice "run" among the verbs that were taught by the computer, I didn't put a whole lot of thought into it at the time. It turns out that "run" is incredibly useful. It didn't take until my second or third encounter with the Grendel for me to teach them what a Grendel is, but "run grendel" is perhaps one of the most useful commands I've ever been able to give a Norn.

Time continued marching on, but even with the Grendel at bay for now, I was having trouble managing my Norns' needs. Getting them to eat was one thing (and with no verb for "eat", yelling "food" at them repeatedly seems to do the trick), but getting them to rest was another.

The "sleep" command didn't seem to be doing them much good, and even when they did decide they were going to sleep, they'd say "sleep" while continuing to go about doing normal things. To make matters worse, Benny in particular was getting increasingly distracted. After picking up a tiny, hardly-grown carrot and trying to "look" at it, he proceeded to rapidly spin in circles, swinging the tiny carrot wildly around while ignoring any and all efforts to get him to stop. He was ignoring his needs, wouldn't listen to any commands, and I couldn't get the carrot away from him!

As it turned out, this was unfortunately where I would see my first death in Creatures 1. I'm fairly certain he starved to death. I'm not entirely sure what was preventing him from eating - either he was trying to eat the tiny carrot and couldn't, or he was refusing to drop it and get normal food for some reason, or... I'm not sure what.

I have to admit, I think I may have a bit of a better understanding towards why people "back in the day" had stronger feelings towards their Norns. Creatures 1 really encourages (really, requires) you to be very hands-on and invested in your Norns, and I can't say I wasn't a little genuinely sad to see Benny go! But alas, such things happen, and each mistake I've made so far has been a learning experience...

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