ustuck fantroll planning thread [closed rp]

to non-ustuck folks:
so my friend group (the aforementioned ustuck) has been wanting to try our hands at roleplaying for a while, so we're finally doing it. it's closed to just us for the foreseeable both because we've been planning around our particular characters and because we're all n00bs and want to figure our shit out together. we figured kintsugi was a good forum environment for our rp, but if holding a closed rp here is inappropriate, just let us know and we can go elsewhere.

if anyone outside our group has suggestions for us though, especially given that we are all n00bs, feel free to bring that up here in the planning thread. or pm one of us, i guess, if that's more comfortable for you.

to ustuck:
told you i'd get to this eventually. XP i'm gonna have this intro post first, then a post summarizing worldbuilding stuff we'd agreed on, then one for the plot stuff we'd decided on before, then a post opening talking about logistics (posting order, scheduling, etc), and then character info posts for Astroh and Thayge. i figure we can mix character posts and logistics/plot/other planning discussion from there on out.

 

WORLDBUILDING
(lemme know if i've misremembered something, forgotten something worth mentioning, or if you think something needs changed)

-setting is alternia as seen in canon, no game

-kids get allowances based on bloodcaste
-everyone gets the same basic schoolfeeding, but some additional educational feeds are restricted by caste
-some resources are gated by caste (access to tech or parts and so forth)
-sometimes trolls will form patronage relationships with higher caste trolls to get resources through them

-big brother surveillance a la the soviet union, ie alternia is too huge and diffuse for the troll govt to really crack down on every slip, but if you run around shouting obvious rebellion you'll get in trouble
-there is a troll darknet for trading/selling resources, including outright illegal shit, shit that's legal but you might not want the govt to know you're getting into, and shit that you can't get at your caste level, as well as for secret communications away from the empire's eyes

-ascension is a thing, i forget what age we decided on (@Re Allyssa @ingloriousHeist either of you remember?) but every sweep trolls of age are taken to space to begin their adult lives, which includes getting assigned to whatever jobs/training
-it is possible, though difficult to dodge ascension. as this is relevant to one of my trolls, i'll go ahead and unilaterally fill in a few details which i can change if we need - i figure the droids sent to round everyone up have the registry on hand and will make an effort to track down everyone who's supposed to go up that sweep, but only in the span of that ascension. if you dodge your ascension and avoid notice after that, you're probably fine.
-low caste draft dodgers are made examples of. high caste ones are punished but moved to space and given assignments as usual anyway, though probably shitty ones because again, punishment.
-there are ways for psionic trolls to mask their powers (or try to, a lot of the drug cocktails available on the blackmarket are pure snake oil). these are mostly hella dangerous to the troll's health and generally don't work very well, or very long if they are effective.
-adults are considered terrifying

-kids have developed their own economy on-planet

-we draw a distinction between the signlessist and sufferist branches of the cult of the signless sufferer, that distinction being signlessists are about true hemoequality whereas sufferists are about lowblood supremacy/revenge against high bloods
-there are secret groups of both on planet, sometimes including ascension dodgers who stayed behind

-auspisticeship involves three people with specified middle vs side leaves


that's all i can think of right now. i'm sure i've forgotten stuff we wanted to keep track of, i can edit later tho.

 

PLOT

this first ...story? thread? chapter? idk piece goes as follows:
-thayge discovered a black market lusus/lusus parts ring on his turf. for strictly business reasons he wants them run off, so he goes to kezria to get a group together to clean it up for him, since she's good at getting shit done even if she has no interest in helping him (he has dirt on her of old, hence their business relationship). he also provides some of his people (keeler and M's troll)
-kezria gets astroh, iglora, and maybe the others besides lukasz together (i know trilli's fantroll is coming in later, do we have any idea when/where? and how do keeler and M's trolls know the group? i got so caught up in how astroh and lukasz know each other my brain dumped any other connections that were discussed, oops)
-lukasz's lusus is stolen by the ring and he ends up joining the party to save her
-later on, once the ring has realized someone is trying to shut them down, manage to kidnap thayge's lusus. now that it's personal thayge joins the party.
-ultimately they take down the ring, but discover it was actually a front for a sufferist group trying to breed more dangerous lusii for lowbloods (they sold resulting lusii they didn't want to keep in their breeding stock either whole or for parts).
-this draws the party into a greater conspiracy which will form the second story we do. we haven't planned past this yet, bc of course not, we really don't need to get ahead of ourselves just yet. :P

edit: fixed lukasz's lusus' pronoun and added in that thayge provides some of his own people, thanks sonia and re

 

LOGISTICS

posting order as proposed/remembered by Luke:
Lukasz -> Kezria -> Thayge -> Iglora -> Keeler -> M's troll
dunno where astroh comes in, but since she's def in the original group kezria gets together prolly somewhere in the thayge "let me tell you about the [strike]avengers[/strike] run out these upstarts initiative" meeting scene
and we'll eventually have to figure out where Trilli comes into this

when do we want to schedule fantrolling? i forget what the proposed frequency was, like one night weekly? i don't have my real person schedule yet but i'm flexible for the time being, though not available 6:30-8 or 9 while i'm still home (which is the case for the foreseeable).

 

i'm a little out of steam now, so i'll post my character intros later. feel free to start discussing stuff and posting your intros whenever.

 

What Ri said is about what I remember. My schedule is open pretty much at all times, although I tend to try to go to bed before 2ish, I'm also not required to be anywhere so I can adjust my sleeping schedule to fit whatever times we decide on. Also for what it's worth, my character picture is on my busted computer so I would have to start all over on that if you want it. :/

 

yeah, going back to my astroh tumblr she was 8 sweeps there, so 10 sounds right for ascension


for more info on my schedule, i tend to get up 9am-ish and go to bed midnightish, but i'm flexible (at least for now, that'll change once work starts and i have to commence being a Real Adult)

 

Iglora's ancestor def dodged ascension, through I'm assuming that this had more to do with everyone assuming, with good reason, that she was like, super dead.

I don't get home until after 6 most week days, so probably won't be fantrolling until 7. Tuesdays, Thursdays, and the weekend are best.


Also, Iglora's account on here is @Iglora Henist, for future reference. Idc which account you tag name you use in planning threads, though.

 

So for scheduling, I would probably only really be free on the weekends. Fridays after 6 or so are fine, Sunday I can't do anything until after 3, and Saturdays are wide open. Ideally I would not want to do fantrolling late on Saturday night, but I could if that's what ends up being most convenient for everyone else.

 

intro time!

name: Astroh Dynnam
gender: none with left girl
sex: female
romantic/sexual orienation: allorom/asexual
blood color: yellow
symbol: the SCP field code for "guns are no good", which looks sort of like a 7 with a superscript x
age: 8 sweeps i think is what we wanted to go with for the kids?
lusus: Colliemom
abilities: helm-quality psionics, which include the ability to control combustion. she has engineering expertise as well, in particular with electric stuff and vehicles. (i've dropped the explosives thing, or at least the crazy enthusiasm for them as that really didn't mesh with the terrified, underground person she turns into)
affiliations: member of the Sufferist cult
typing quirk: has sor7* of weird cadence to her speech. for example, drops subjec7*s of sen7*ences, some7*imes also preposi7*ions/ar7*icles. o7*herwise obeys grammar rules. replaces "t" wi7*h nearest analog of her symbol (ie "7*").
quadrants: she might have a creepy older moirail in her sufferist group? otherwise none.
physical appearance: very short (5'-ish). her horns match her symbol with the right horn turning sharply into a 7 shape; the left used to end with four prongs sticking out in an "x", but it got broken when she was a kid (she broke it off deliberately in a desperate and badly-informed attempt to get rid of her psionics, and stopped at the one because of the pain). it's either just a broken stub now. shoulder-length straight black hair. her clothing choices emphasize practicality, and tend to end up being fairly androgynous-looking.
strife specibus: probably taserkind/cattleprodkind primarily, with fistkind as a backup. maybe pistolkind/riflekind too if she's been through training with Sufferist freedom fighters/terrorists.
Hive Location: out in the woods nearish to a town, near Kezria et al

description: very smart, delights in her tech skills as well as derives a fair bit of comfort from those technical abilities, fairly anxious, strong sense of fairness, has a temper, under all the fear and anger she's full of wide-eyed wonder at science and tech and the whole wide world there is to explore (If fear of the Empire weren't a factor, she'd be content to explore the universe, working odd engineering jobs to pay her way to new star systems.), very little regard for rules no matter whose they are (though with some exceptions for those very close to her, if they impress upon her "no really this is important to me that you follow this"), socially awkward

Backstory: (yall don't need anywhere near this much stuff, or even any backstory if you don't feel it's necessary. i just generated all this to work out the connections with lukasz)

Started off life as a cute, curious little nerd baby. Quickly found she was most interested in her science/math/engineering schoolfeeds. Quickly got into tinkering. At about 4 sweeps this tinkering finally ran into the wall of certain supplies and knowledge only being open to highblood accesses, which rankled Astroh who has a reasonably strong sense of fairness (not to mention getting in the way of her explorations).

In her pursuit of supplies, she ventured onto the troll darknet (possibly with Kezria’s help?). She was able to get what she wanted, if not always easily then at least at all, from these sources. She also found other like-minded, usually lowblooded online friends. She joined fora for such illicit engineering as she was doing.

She also talked psionics with people, especially as she’d always had some trouble controlling her combustion powers. That same sweep, in a chatroom for such discussion, an older (not adult, just older) troll barged in to rant at all the little babies delighting in their powers about how they’d be brutalized when turned into spaceship batteries. Astroh didn’t really believe him, but she had nothing concrete to argue against him, and the seeds of doubt were planted.

Half a sweep or a sweep later, she was looking for texts on spaceship engineering. She found a starship engine textbook that someone had kept hoarded from their ancestor’s library before one of the great information purges and later uploaded to the darknet for educational purposes. It went into gruesome, clinical, dehumanizing (...detrollizing?) detail about what they do to helmstrolls. Now she believed that one guy, and already thoroughly pissed off at the unfairness of supply and information access, feelings stirred further by association with the dissidents that would tend to hang around on the darknet, she turned against the Empire entirely. The fear of becoming a helmstroll also sank deep, deep into her.

Astroh began researching how to get rid of her psionics, or mask them, or anything to avoid this fate. She misguidedly tried to break off her own horns upon reading someone’s poorly-researched article about how horns are the conduits of psionics and psychic abilities. She broke off one but the pain was too much and she stopped. She then found out it wouldn’t have helped anyway. She did a lot of stupid shit over the next couple sweeps, messing with drug cocktails, running up debt to hackers trying to get her data expunged from the imperial databases, etc. She researched conscription-dodging, and from there found not just other scared trolls but also underground radical groups. Eventually, at 6 sweeps, she found the Sufferists who proceeded to radicalize her.

At the time of the RP, she is set on that path but still making up her mind where exactly she wants to go with it. She wants to fuck up the empire, but her fear of helming makes her reticent to join any active stuff. She’s leaning towards conscription-dodging upon ascension and living off with some secret group. (Possible connection with Thayge’s gang there, or a want that Thayge can pull on in-story.)

 

I stressed a lot about this and then I remembered most of you know it all anyway so I don't need to worry. Let me know if you want me to elaborate on stuff or whatever.

Name: Keeler Altair

Life Goal: Become a helmstroll in the Imperial Fleet, preferably on as good a ship as possible. (Pipe dream is the Empress' battleship but knows the improbability of ever being noticed for that.)

Pronouns: She/her/hers

Gender: If you asked, the answer you'd probably get is that ships are female, so so is she.

Blood Color: Gold blooded

Symbol: See profile image, it's one of the alchemical symbols for gold flipped: a circle with a point and two curlicues coming out of the circle on either side, and a dot in the middle

Age: Same as the rest of you, which sounds like we're doing 8 sweeps

Lusus: Sheep lusus

Abilities: Psionics and an affinity for designing/building/programming things. Also chemistry.

Typing Quirk: A relat1vely s1mple subst1tut10n qu1rk, merely replaces the letter "i" w1th "1" and the letter "o" w1th "0". N0t-s0-stealth puns sh0uld als0 bee expected.

Quadrants: None

Physical Appearance: Horns are in the shape of old-fashioned tv antennae, with the left having prongs coming out of it and the right splitting and coming back together at the end in a diamond shape. Both have hooks drilled into them so as to have a convenient place to put things when working on a project. (The pain was excruciating, but she has very little patience for her physical body and its limits, so she pushed through it.) Wears the same shirt, pants, and jacket every day to cut down on the amount of time spent thinking about her fleshsuit.

Fetch Modus: Battleship modus

Strife Specibus: Screwdriverkind, also has psionics.

Hive Location: A remote desert, which is extremely useful for when things go a bit haywire

Backstory: Keeler was raised with empire propaganda and has definitely internalized almost all of it, although the story of the helmstrolls are the only thing she's really passionate about. The parts she's less enthusiastically accepting of she still follows, because a) it's what she's been taught is right and b) she's afraid that if she doesn't, she'll be disqualified from getting to be a spaceship.

Most of her activities revolve around preparing to be a helmstroll. She works on designing and building rigs and learning as much as she can about all the types of technology used on ships. She also tries to develop and strengthen her psionic powers as much as she can. Usually that means making up different batches of mind honey, trying to make more and more potent kinds, and she raises her own bees for that purpose. On the one hand, her psionics have gotten quite strong. On the other, she's developed a bit of an addiction to the stuff.

To fund herself, she makes honey for Thayge to sell on the black market in exchange for other ingredients and parts for her various projects. She doesn't interact with other trolls very often, in person or online, so she doesn't actually have a lot of friends besides her lusus. If she were being perfectly honest with herself, she'd probably have to say that the troll she knows best is Thayge and that's not saying a lot.

 

Name: Lukasz Fehrre

Gender: Male

Blood color: Lukasz presents hemoanonymously, so I'd like to keep this off the forums to start with. It's going to end up revealed really early in the actual rp, though, and probably won't be hard to guess anyways. The color he uses for typing is a light shade of gray.

Symbol: Sort of a spider-y diamond shape.

Trolltag: sibilantZygaenid

Age: Same as the others, so 8 sweeps, then.

Lusus: A large, carnivorous butterfly lusus called Bugmom.

Abilities: Yarn-based crafts. Swaddling self in cocoon made of blankets and social anxiety. Eye for interior design. Butterfly sense. It's like spider sense, but only works on pointy objects and anytime he might have to talk to people.

Affiliations: Affiliations require actual social skills.

Typing quirk: Hisszzesz szibilant conszonantsz. All insztanczesz of "s", "z", and szome "c"sz get another "z" added to the end. "sh" alszo getsz thisz treatment, even though it really technically szhouldn't. Grammer isz otherwisze fine.

Quadrants: Ha no.

Physical appearance: Lanky, though his baggy clothes means that's usually hard to notice. His horns are long and skinny like insect antennae, and they split down the middle halfway up. His hair is very short and kind of curly, except for one long braid down the back. His favorite piece of clothing is a large gray-and-black-striped hoodie, which he swaddles himself in like a bug every time he has to venture out of the hive. He's got a minor case of overbite that he's a bit sensitive about and a tired sort of look in his eyes from oversleeping all the time.

Strife specibus: Lukasz uses the Macekind strife specibus. He technically also has Filekind (as in, nail files). He doesn't use it often.

Modus: Cocoon modus. Using the cocoon modus generates a physical cocoon-shaped 'captchacoon' that stores one or more items. If the items are not retrieved within a certain timeframe, the captchacoon will hatch. Allowing this to happen is ill-advised.

Hive: Lukasz lives in a rundown communal hive stem in the middle of the same troll town Kezria operates from.

Description: Kind of a huge dork. Lukasz is hopeless at a lot of things, which he is fully aware of but acts like he doesn't care about. He's got some issues with his caste, which in the past has led to some bad decisions he'd rather not talk about. He likes to think he's in a much better place nowadays, and if he's wrong his lusus has instructions to tackle him before the sneakbeasts in his thinkpan can cause too much damage. So that's under control, he thinks. Perhaps due to this bundle of dorkiness and issues, Lukasz is something of a hivebody, much preferring to spend his time cuddled in his respiteblock watching movies over socializing with other trolls. His biggest flaw/strength is his impulsivity. When he feels something needs to be done, he tends to fixate on the a single, usually quite extreme, solution to the exclusion of all else. It's not until the need has passed that he can look back and make rational judgments. This behavior does not *always* serve to screw him over, but...it's not the best life strategy, for sure.

Backstory: For now, I want to keep Lukasz's full backstory close to the vest. I do have it mapped out, but I think if I'm going to reveal it, it might be in more of a short-story form. That said, I will put in how Lukasz and Astroh met because they do know each other at the start of the rp.

How Lukasz Met Astroh: Lukasz first got into contact with Astroh through an internet help forum on a thread he'd made looking for instructions on how to completely move one's hive and also maybe make it so drones or other trolls couldn't find you after you moved. This was not the troll darknet, mind you. This was the regular, imperially-monitored troll internet. After headdesking about a million times at this poor dork's absolute lack of survival instinct, Astroh decided to teach Lukasz how to properly stealth so he didn't get culled when he inevitably fucked something up, eventually becoming something like a darknet-senpai to the kid. Though they never shared any personal details with each other like name or blood color, their similar paranoid instincts and dissatisfactions with their caste roles led to them not cutting ties once Lukasz was done with the move. On Lukasz's part, he knows better than to assume Astroh is his friend, but she is nonetheless the only troll he actually interacts with on a semi-regular basis.

 

i don't remember if signlessists are pacifists either. i think you'd wanted them to be pacifists following how boat trolls does it? i'm cool either way.

"Wait I forgot did he give her stuff in return or protection?"
yes? i think we'd discussed just protection before, but thinking about thayge, initially [in-universe] it probably would have been "if you're doing black market business in my territory you're working for me or you're not working" with the inherent protection being part of an org like that includes (them protecting their own). but as it goes on i can see him offering stuff if that makes the best business sense for the circumstance. as a business practice, he wants his people to work with him as willingly as he can reasonably get/be as loyal as possible for his own protection. which is interesting, bc he has zero loyalty when push comes to shove, lol.

 

So I don't know how attached we ultimately are to the "Signlessists are pacifists" idea, but I wouldn't really find it surprising if the concept of 'pacifism' on Alternia was a bit different from pacifism on Earth. This is a planet where the word for friend is exactly the same as the word for enemy, after all, not to mention full of dangerous lusii, drones, and hordes of the ravenous undead. Even if we do accept that Signlessists meet our standards of pacifism, they might well be fine with self-defense against rampaging fauna, at least.

 

Yeah I feel like on Insect Baby Hell Planet saying "what if I didn't just murder people" is gonna be a pretty profound philosophical statement.

 

Name: Iglora Henist

Handle: insidiousHuldra (IH)

Gender: Female

Blood color: Blue: #192669

Symbol: Symplified Lyre

Age: 8 sweeps

Lusus: Incubusdad

Strife Specibus: Fistkind; Staffkind; 2xknifekind

Fetch Modus: Metaphor Modus; in which the user must make a metaphor about the item they wish to remove from or interact with in their sylladex

Typing quirk: Perfect grammar and spelling, even if the sentences can sometimes get rather long or scholarly in nature; replaces the letter B with 6s, 6ut is willing to drop her quirk in the favor of anonymity.

Appearance: Tall. Long, straight black hair. Horns are ridiculous curling things with a protrusion each. One horn has a protrusion that points almost straight up; the other has a protrusion that follows the curl of her horn. Wears dark-wash jeans, a black shirt with her symbol, white shoes, and glasses with a computer interface. Carries a small, worn leather notebook and has a variety of pens stashed about her person. Has been known to wear a dark red scarf as a belt.

Quadrants: Moirail: Kezria Maalme (A 7362E)

Personality: Frequently sullen, rather territorial, largely because of the frequent intrusion of other trolls into her hive. Tsundere as hell, in that she cares very deeply about a minimal amount of people but doesn't feel comfortable expressing affection. Territoriality can also be expressed through her interactions with "her" people, at least as far as keeping them out of harm's way and happy. Is frequently uncomfortable being around other trolls of a lower caste, because of her very real fear that Incubusdad will come along and decide to enthrall them. Has a healthy fascination with propaganda, persuasion, and the rhetoric of such things. Cares less about the content of such messages than about the techniques they use and their effectiveness.

Backstory: Lives with her lusus in a sprawling two story hive in the wilderness, in an area that can't be easily stumbled upon by strangers. Despite this, her hive is always home to one or two strange trolls whom Incubusdad has enthralled and is feeding off of. . Iglora tolerates their existence for a period of time, but as the enthralled trolls start to waste away and while getting increasingly possessive over her lusus, they get grabby or violent towards her, and she generally winds up killing them. Corpse disposal is troublesome and gross, and she's running out of metaphors for "troll corpse."

Incubusdad, generally being troll-shaped, is capable of communicating in Ancient Alternian (Latin). Though not the best parent, he made sure that Iglora was able to fight and knew all about her ancestor, whom Incubusdad was immensely proud of and whom Iglora was probably not going to measure up to.

Iglora lives mostly on the second floor of her hive, leaving the ground floor to her lusus and his thralls. However, there is a secret passage in the basement that contains all of the forbidden, heretical books she has collected over the years, as well as a computer with as untraceable an internet connection as she could obtain. This secret room is one of her favorites, because it is a physical record of how the Empire's propaganda techniques have changed over the years, as well as seeing opinions and histories the Empire has not permitted to exist. This also means that Iglora is wary of Sufferists and Signlessists, because she knows quite thoroughly how the Empire deals with such movements.

Iglora doesn't have many friends outside of Kezria; those acquaintances she does have are all of a higher caste, because those are the types of trolls Incubusdad cannot glamour or enthrall and thus take away from her. Kezria is a mysterious exception to this rule, as Incubusdad's earlier attempts to enthrall her failed, and he now doesn't bother wasting the energy.

Profile subject to update as I think of more things, probably. Wooooo