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

poor guy! i wonder if being renamed will help him shake it, or if he'll have to go to sigmah and have anti-chucklevoodoos applied.

 

enjoy your trauma barnacle, bel!

anyway bel's managed his... not really delusions, but conceptual framework, so he'll be more willing to leave the dark. but the compulsion probably needs psychic surgery to excize.

 

maybe they find a big park block and bel is kind of confuse because, yknow, carrier ships don't generally come with those? that he knows of? anyway i gotta sleep soon

 

heh, i wrote that happening even before i read your comment :D

yeah i gotta sleep too. sweet dreams!

 

erskin is gonna be SO MAD bel gave him a heart attack just to play frog quest for a day

 

interesting economics thought of the day: gemstones aren't too rare on earth, yet, because they occur naturally at decent rates. gems also occur in meteors and asteroids. without doing too much research offhand it seems like there are tons of gems in space, enough that nearly any kind of gemstone, even huge rare flawless ones, wouldn't be particularly difficult to get bags of, and that's not even factoring in chewing through the crusts of other planets.

so for trolls in space, pretty much all jewelry is costume jewelry. it's the look and manufacture that makes it impressive, not the material. seadwellers might wear gemstones to point out that they're strong enough to crunch glass jewels by accident, but that effect is a little negated by wearing gold, too. more likely just the ostentatious, glittery impracticality of the jewelry sends the I'm More Important Than You signal, just like long hair and intricate, obfuscating wordplay.

meanwhile, alternia is tapped the fuck out. probably all the gems and precious metals it ever had have long since been dug up, and just circulate in kiddie economies endlessly, trickling slowly up to space as one kid or another brings a handful of their stash with them, and maybe dropping down from space in the occasional meteor. so it's worthwhile for kids like vriska and eridan to be using gold and gems as value tokens: on planet, they're a finite resource, as well as looking bling as hell.

anyway in summary, the quest frogs spit out big fucking chunks of gemstone as rewards that reads as basically monopoly money to most fleet adults, who would use them as such, just for games, but would probably startle and astonish young bel, who's still plugged in to the kiddie economy. like the frog's level one reward is going to be a something that bel's Historical Reinactment League would consider the final prize for an entire sweep's campaign.

like, the sunslammer chews through literal tons of asteroids for nickle-iron, copper, and water: it's actually disappointing when they get gemstones instead. they chop them up and throw them in a crate for game tokens. bel could probably go home with enough gems to completely crash alternia's economy.

 

also it still makes me smile to think of competent, mature, big mom friend bel being treated like a lil babby, and how indignant he might get. i mean i love him, but it sure is fun to pull his tail.

 

there's no point in Frog Quest if you don't actually quest!

 

oh no i just realized young bel knows about sunslammer galley and twitch's otter lusus! but he wouldn't have any idea if otter dad would survive twice, and anyway it's a moot point, neither of them can ever go back and get him. BUMMER.

edit: young bel probably knows the source of a lot more of erskin's early misadventures than commander kadros does. they happened a lot more recently to young erskin, and erskin doesn't like talking about old trauma in any way that can't be laughed off or minimized in nearly every universe... that being said, this older erskin definitely doesn't have his fear of psionics, anymore. he definitely got plenty of exposure therapy while rehabilitating helmsmen. and probably snuggling arguus a whole lot. and lainey's been good for him.

this bit from the archives is pretty funny and relevant right now, though.

(edit: i'm collating more classic adventure stuff from tumblr and i definitely forgot how much of erskin's reasonable learned fear of psionics was turned into an unreasoning panic trigger by cloris's mindfuckery. he actually got a lot more twitchy and fearful about jethro's psionics the more she gave him nightmares, because she dragged all his bad experiences with psionics up to the very front of his mind and probably started cross-linking them until they turned into serious trauma. so that's cool, thanks a lot, cloris.)

 

SORRY I JUST KEEP SPAMMING UP THIS THREAD but i have a lot of ideas. what if after watching young erskin make bad vampire decisions for a day or two, displaced commander kadros just picks the kid up and flies off to camp out at jethro's place, with jethro, for a while? it's isolated and probably a nicer vacation spot than Space Colorado.

additional thought: commander kadros has to walk beside jethro's prowler. he does not fit inside.

 

i would love to see adult bel's reaction to young, free galley, but idk if luka would want to play that, and i can't even imagine being able to play it right. but i bet it'd be cute as hell. also totally heartbreaking. also possibly young galley would want to climb grownup bel like a sexy cliff.

 

anyway with the frog, the game is to encourage trolls to go on a scavenger hunt and run around the park. i think game animals are a good way of making the most of limited space, in space, as well as making parks more fun for adults.

so, with the frog, there will always be the items any one frog requests within its network of like, wirelessly connected game frogs. i figure all the frogs know what's in their own territory, and hop around recording items, so you can scatter a bunch of frogs across one park and they'll share the info with each other to coordinate quests and difficulty levels. it wouldn't be fun if one frog only know what was around its pond, or named some generic pre-programmed items that happened not to actually be in the park at all. or told you to collect something rare while another frog told someone else to get that thing too.

also the frogs work kind of like the stat bats or critical whale we see used in games in the comic... some kind of crazy semi-digital semi-magical intradimensional hologrammish biotech that human science can't even come close to figuring out. they're real live animals, but also game systems.

 

btw i meant for this to be a fun opportunity for bel to explore the park/ship, but if you want to skip it we can!

 

it's cool, he just took some persuading because he's a stuffy stickbutt :D

 

im not gonna make you do Park Adventure forever, i just thought it'd be cool if bel got a huge-ass chunk of gemstone before erskin descended. or maybe we could say he played for an hour or so and then napped or got a snack or something? idk how long he's been gone, but erskin's probably gonna be asleep for at least 6 hours.

then again, erskin could have briefly woken up, realized bel left, and stormed off EXTREMELY CRANKY and sleep deprived to go spank some sense into the little jerk.

 

let's have him and lycaon be winners and smug, that will infuriate erskin even more :D

btw, totally unrelated, but did i ever manage to give you money for my pokemon commission?

 

shit i think seebs did? he sent me like a chunk of money awhile back. i'm just really slow and forgetful, sorry!

 

it ok! i can like text you pics of my cat to remind you or something :D :D

 

i never mind cat pics!