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

i'm honestly not sure i'm up for even playing just bel much more tonight. sorry, my brain's been so tired for so long.

 

well, it's always really nice to play with you when you manage. i hope you manage to get some proper sleep at some point!

 

bluuuh i slept a LOT actually, like 16 hours, had v weird fever dreams. star wars + boat trolls space navy combobob. something about how troll psionics are the same as force users, and the alternian empire encountered jedi and sith philosophy and went LOL YOINK and basically appropriated both in the casually ignorant manner of hipster girls in war bonnets. and this made them absurdly powerful and emperor hux was bringing all manner of military force to bear on it but the trolls didn't care? at all? and in the midst of this bel was somehow in charge of hux's wardrobe and then this turned into me and seebs shopping for coats and i ended up getting a red faux-fur pimp coat that made me look, according to an admiring salesclerk, like "fat macklemore". bel was upset because he was supposed to deliver this coat to the emperor.

tl;dr: sleep get, thank fuck, but it didn't fix the thing.

 

it seems to me like the big difference is that commander bel never met galley as an adolescent, so his dissatisfaction with the empire never really coalesced into anything actionable? so he just kept being a straightforward, if very intelligent, military guy.

 

that's p much exactly it.

 

how did those two posts get reversed? that's so weird.

 

i meant to edit it to have more so i deleted it, so you wouldn't reply to the unfinished post! but you were already replying. so i just reposted it.

 

poor bel is probably too tired for SUDDENLY REVOLUTION but sometimes inspiration just strikes??? sorry guys.

 

aaaaaaa so cool

 

i figure if erskin doesn't come in, you can put off or skip the pancho bits, whichever. or erskin could come in and they could keep having awkward, emotionally fraught bro times.

 

hmm, the pancho bits sound really narratively important, but i'm having increasing trouble making words happen. how about i leave off for the night, and decide tomorrow.

 

sounds like a plan! im always up for helping/brainstorming/whatever, you know.

 

:)

 

I JUST REALIZED WE CAN PROBABLY ARRANGE THAT ERSKIN/BEL/GALLEY THREESOME WE'VE BEEN MEANING TO GET AROUND TO.

like when bel is finally swapped back, he'll be in the helmsblock, and of course erskin is going to be there to see if it works, or at least hovering worriedly outside. when bel's successfully swapped back they will all be incredibly relieved and probably make out a whole lot.

also, poor adult bel can hope or even deduce that back on the sunslammer his partners are figuring out how to get him back, but he'd have no way to know how long that would take or if they could even do it. i wouldn't blame him for being incredibly fucking stressed out about it that whole week.

 

new thought: young erskin can dreamwalk, and take people with him. what if he takes adult bel with him to go find his own older alt self and get some answers? but then, older erskin is cauterized from the collective unconscious, so young erskin might just only be able to find young bel. with older bel in tow. it would be REALLY interesting to me to see the two bels interact and/or try to lecture each other. while young erskin sits there with popcorn and a provoking grin.

 

random thought: what if young erskin starts taking responsibility of grownup bel once he realizes that grownup bel is severely misplaced and will be killed by freaked out kids if discovered. and older bel is just like 'this is normal, if much cuter than usual' when young erskin starts pacing around and trying to plan out what to do and how to keep bel safe and then looking incredibly exasperated when bel does not cooperated with being kept safe.

also, erskin is by nature genuinely good at subterfuge? i didn't actually mean for that to happen but it just kind of evolved. the younger erskin has been a lot cagier and more intense about keeping galley's secret than bel, who has so far told basically everyone he's ever met about his awesome ex-helmsman boyfriend, and half the reason things got so bad between erskin and bel was that erskin couldn't wrap his mind around the notion that bel wouldn't be as intelligent and paranoid about keeping galley safe as erskin would be. to erskin it made perfect sense that if your boyfriend was an ex-helmsman who could get you all culled— or murdered by opportunists that wanted to take possession of the ex-helmsman— you'd kill any enemies who found out. and you'd kill ex-boyfriends who knew too much. why would you let someone loose with that kind of power over you and everyone you love? young erskin also has a hard time with the concept of 'trusting people'. i think he still does not understand the extent to which bel is bad at information security and is going to have a heart attack when he figures it out. that's actually somewhere he could really start to bloom, if he actually sits down and tries to take charge of project Get Galley A Future. like right now he has just learned that bel's plans for the future are 'die young'. when he works out all the implications for that he's gonna be SO INDIGNANT that BEL is the guy telling ERSKIN to think ahead.

it's interesting to me that bel is the really fatalistic one with actual combat experience, but erskin's the paranoid one who's always trying to figure out where the next fight's coming from? it's kind of like, maybe, young bel, because of his combat experience, and his support system, thinks that combat happens in strictly delineated times and places, by mutual agreement, and he's safe the rest of the time. and erskin expects bad shit to go down at any time from any direction.

edit: come to think of it i think it's that bel expects to either win, lose but have a support system to heal him, or die and be free of fighting. and erskin just expects that win or lose he's going to have to patch himself back together and it's going to massively suck, plus he really absolutely doesn't want to die. he was always more confident about fighting animals than trolls, and cloris has since shattered what little confidence he had left in himself about pretty much everything.

anyway older erskin is definitely used to working on a couple different levels and keeping a lot of secrets and figuring out who needs to be told how much and when. i think he's kept older bel completely away from all the helmsman stuff he's up to. bel's really smart and can think of really good, clever spy schemes for other people to do, but the less he knows about how the operations are going, the less he can forget who's not supposed to know about them.

this got long and i forgot what it was about. whoops.

 

oh yeah it was: young bel coming back and seeing young erskin start to echo his hot older competent self once he's actually put in charge of a project that plays to his strengths—creativity, subterfuge, protectiveness. his strengths that young bel has just spent a week observing in the captain. that would be really fun to play, and probably hot for bel to watch.

like. i think even with as damaged as young erskin is. if young bel just said, hey erskin, remember when you wanted to save galley from us? how would you actually do that? then bel would get some pretty good results. if he set erskin up to work with pancho, he'd get great results.

 

hmmm could make sense! i was thinking i could just write bel’s arrival from erskin’s pov... how about i cap off the old thread and you make a new one? where older bel has Arrived