Boat Trolls planning thread! (full of spoilers, non-players enter at your own risk)

also yeah it's extremely cute, i feel like this bel never really had actual buddies to carelessly doof around with, while this erskin grew up with a dozen rambunctious cousins but has gotten used to solitude. so it's nice they can hang out and be super silly.

 

ok i need to sleep but before i go i was thinking about that discworld vampire/cop au while doing the dishes and how cute it was and what if th big dramatic arc for that universe was cloris reanimates and comes to ankh-morpork for new victims, and bel is the guy put on the case, and erskin is basically uncooperative as hell because he doesn't want to be linked by either the cops or the local black ribboners to cloris at all in any way, or catch her attention (and get entranced again) by teaming up with anyone who's actively tracking her down. meanwhile bel knows erskin knows way more about his case of mystery murders than he's trying to let on and keeps coming by to hassle(/flirt with) him.

also possible: cloris knows where erskin is, and erskin knows she knows, and she knows he really likes jethro, and he knows she knows, and there are a lot of unspoken but pointedly implied conditionals to erskin's silence. so erskin is basically an attractively neurotic ball of dread, snark, and bats.

also they should have a swordfight. i don't think erskin and bel have actually had a sword fight in any universe so far and that is really a shame.

 

dude i just realized a big issue, maybe the issue, with born-wolf child education. if they grow up as puppies, they don't just gestate in a third the time as human children, they'd also zip through infancy and childhood so much faster, even if werewolf puppies don't grow to adolescence in a single year like regular wolves. plus, wolf pups are born deaf as well as blind, while there's some evidence that human babies start learning language in the womb. but still, they could have the same basic capacity for learning as human-born siblings, but their critical periods for abstract reasoning, language acquisition, and social tolerance, would all pass by in a matter of weeks or months— and there's only so much you can teach in a day, especially to a kid who wants twelve hours of sleep and six hours of play. so they'd still be relying heavily on more wolfish instincts and learning processes.

wolf-born children would be learning as near-adolescents what human-born children would be learning as toddlers, and that makes a big difference in how fluent and comfortable you are with a lot of subjects. it could turn a human highschool education into the equivalent of a phd for a wolf-born kid: not beyond the reach of the dedicated, but something most would not want to bother with. so the 'graduation' grade is set at fifth grade, which is maybe a college diploma that half or even two-thirds of wolf-born can manage.

so basically, pancho and bel could raise smart academic kids from puppies, but they'd be racing the clock, and every aspect of rearing them, from feeding to playtime to discipline, would have to be calculated to pack in as much cognitive exercise as possible.

 

http://www.wolf.org/wolf-info/basic-wolf-info/biology-and-behavior/pup-development/
http://www.texx-wolf-tails.com/growinguppup.htm
look at this. if werewolf puppies did grow up at the same rate wolves did, and could be coaxed to change each month, they'd age roughly a human year for every month as a puppy, for a year. that would be really really disturbing for human-born parents.

 

comparing someone's pee to fresh water would be very insulting to a species that uses it to define territory and establish dominance, just saying

also for more WEREWOLF SCIENCE it turns out bel gets his coloration not just from dogs in ancient times but from a more recent canadian ancestor. i honestly didn't know that black wolves were a) common and b) common only in north america, but i guess c) russian families would think an all-black coloration was badass even if it came at the expense of a shy-about-humans temperament.

http://newsroom.ucla.edu/releases/biologists-solve-mystery-about-80301
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/february11/med-wolf-021109.html

 

yeah, though we could certainly say werewolf pups grow to maturity more slowly than wolves and have a longer and more human period of learning, plus pancho and bel would contribute serious smarts. but: yeah. it's definitely hard to imagine how a werewolf with an exclusionary period of a week or more would be able to manage medical school.

 

yeah! they'd certainly be encouraged to spend way more time growing up human than with more wolfish parents, who would probably see it as more optional.

 

i too think it would be completely adorable. also imagine pancho explaining this to her mom. she joined a paramilitary werewolf commune and had quadruplets. good job pancho.

also imagine they're like halfway over the bering strait in march and pancho sighs heavily and goes 'so... should we... should we talk about babies' and erskin is like I KNEW IT. I TOLD YOU. DIDN'T I TELL YOU!!! at bel.

(and bel is like don't fucking look at me you're the one who keeps naming our future grandchildren)

 

okay also consider them denning up in chernobyl. and pancho and bel being like 'ok this is... not ideal' and erskin is like ARE YOU KIDDING LOOK HOW BIG THE BOAR ARE.

 

a thing to consider: tiny burrito puppies getting packed into a shoebox with a towel for transport. pancho very carefully carrying the shoebox.