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

also i am definitely too sleepy to write very well anymore— i'll have to pick this up tomorrow, sorry!

 

ok yknow what, erskin is really making me think of one of my favorite bits of myth right now:

goddamn i love watership down. erskin's a great deal more simple and kind than el-ahrairah— who in the nature of gods is selfish, boastful, and often cruel— but he's very much got that rabbity mindset, playful and joyful in and among the fear, and boldly heroic in his own way.

if they catch you, they will kill you. but first they must catch you.

 

ok now i can't stop thinking about bel having some kinda cool subversive spacehive set-up like a wayhive or a makespace and erskin dropping by with a dirty scarf over his fins and red eyeshadow and a big grin and teasing him all night.

'what's cheap around here? i'm a humble traveler.'

'water is free.'

'i'll have a water, then. with a spoonful of salt.'

'salt, huh?'

'it's very good for the teeth.'

bel gives him a pint glass of vodka. with a spoonful of salt.

 

hell yes. where would you like to start? at the first meeting or some later situation?

 

sure! but i think you'd have to start, then, since it'd be bel who's being introduced to this whole nutso world. i kinda want to downgrade his ship to a 200-man compliment? just to cut down on the hideous logistics involved in getting erskin anywhere near anything like a couple thousand trolls, let alone managing them. but idk the original specs of the sunslammer. would it be possible for the ship to have been trimmed down, or might erskin be running the ship on a skeleton crew?

...hm, i kinda like the idea of a skeleton crew. 200 utter reject freaks rattling around in a ship meant to hold 2,000, working weird hours, doing three jobs at once.

 

maximum compliment 2,000, reccommended compliment 1,000, compliment necessary to keep ship operational 200. (bel will be #200. someone died recently.)

carrier, mostly cargo space for fighter ships, does docking and repair as well as warp transport to get smaller ships where they need to be faster than their combat-specialized helmsmen can manage. galley's rated at fast and powerful but also temperamental, so he gets a job that requires a lot of oomph and absolutely no creativity. cooperative helmsmen would be put into active fighters, where a certain measure of autonomy and independent maneuvering in the heat of combat would be a help. galley's a captain killer but one of very few with his speed/mass ratio, so he gets some slack in terms of being culled but no slack in terms of getting his brain fried to a submissive crisp.

the crews of the docked fighters tend to outnumber erskin's, but erskin tends to outrank their captains. this produces an uneasy stasis and a thriving black market of drugs, contraband media, fighting, and flings. erskin's crew is losers, criminals, political embarrassments, and antisocial maniacs. erskin takes pride of the place at fitting all four categories. rumors are variously that he's a drug lord, a mafia boss, an escort manager, one of the condesce's vanishingly rare male heirs, a drooling idiot puppeted around by opportunistic staff, actually just a rustblood with good makeup, a ghost, an alien saboteur, and/or completely made up.

erskin's ship's nickname is probably something like the rough ride and may or may not be notorious as a career- and life- ending assignment to crew for, but a damn fun weekend to dock at.

 

at least a sweep, probably three. we could put him at twelve sweeps of age, going on thirteen, and bel could be thirteen-and-a-bit.

 

since i have lainey and arguus reasonably filled out, i'm gonna toss erskin into a slapdash red triangle with 'em. lainey and erskin have a cheerfully casual matespritship. lainey and arguus have a cuddly pink friends-since-forever moirallegiance. erskin and arguus have a rachaii style patron/client relationship because i wanna write that kind of romance and it suits them. like the ideal of a knight and his page— they support one another in very different but equally beneficial ways.

arguus has sort of the blackrom version of shy-girl-in-the-back-of-the-class crush on galley. nearly everything about galley repulses him— his situation, his disloyalty and ingratitude, his unrelenting anger, his loudness and rudeness, the sabotage he wreaks whenever he can— but arguus is much too timid to actually be able to engage with him, let alone stand up to him.

lainey sees galley as weather, and erskin of course thinks he's great fun.

 

DUDE I JUST THOUGHT. what if! erskin and bel decide to see if they can mess with his brain via dreams, but stumble on aengus instead??? and have some kind of interaction there. also, possibly, get advised to try and find erskin's ancestor's paperweight skull. i dunno! it could be neat.

 

if bel ever talks about her to erskin, erskin would let him know he could requisition her— but this is a dead-end posting, so they should think it over.