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

haha ok tho like i am just imagining:

jethro: ok bro hi great to see you how's it going, why does the captain look like that
bel: what, hot?
jethro: y—no. like what's with his face?
bel: idk, he got bit by monsters probably
jethro: and the rest of him?
bel: also monsters?
jethro: and the knife scars
bel: monsters with knives, i don't know!
jethro: and the stunted growth? did monsters do that?
bel: oh, no, he spent like five years catching lizards in the middle of hyperdeath desert because a shark ate his lusus so he tried to get our queen horrorterror to adopt him and she banished him from being anywhere near any coastlines ever apparently, also that's what's up with his leg, the shark ate that too, and then he had his surgeries sabotaged by an angry and embarrassed admiralty, among other assassination attempts like assigning him here in the first place and just hoping galley would blow him up, which didn't work because erskin's an obnoxiously charming and good-natured cinnamon bun who just wants to build parks and respect lowbloods and sing disney princess songs all fucking day.
jethro: ....
bel: do you need to sit down
jethro: i need to sit down.

 

rp-ing or me drawing a comic...?

 

i wanna know if it's possible to stick erskin into that shipwreck AU where bel crashes the sunslammer into the swamp planet and gets his brain fried to save galley

 

huh! like salvage operations, or like a spy assignment...? some AU where erskin actually had his shit together enough to be a spy could be interesting, though god knows i wouldn't know how to write that!

maybe it's a situation of like 'the sunslammer went down on this little nominally-colonized nowhere planet, go figure out if the crew faked the crash and the locals are harboring an insurrection'

 

that or erskin is already down with insurrectionists and is investigating the crash for his side, in hopes of finding a rebel crew already set up and likely to join up with The Cause

and then there's just a bristlingly hostile lowblood and a nervy screwloose ex-officer who's gotten his brain slagged, both of whom probably want to kill him in the face a lot.

 

in another AU direction entirely, if we ever get tired of werewoofs maybe we should play that western AU. it would probably be more structured and plotty tho because like... there's less to just make the fuck up in an actual historical period rather than sci fi or present-day urban fantasy

BUT SIGH i am still very fond of the idea of sheriff bel being like 'this man has come to town specifically to ruin my life' and erskin being like 'I FOUND A RATTLESNAKE. IT'S IN THIS BOX. DO YOU WANT TO SEE!!!'

 

haha yeah especially in the western au, it's like all that cranked to a million? erskin is genuinely perky and chipper and flighty and obnoxiously good-natured because nothing bad has ever really happened to him, and probably won't. he just gets to wander all over the fucking desert drawing pictures of spiders and mailing them back to some royal fucking college of people who somehow care about spiders to get printed up so occassionaly a stagecoach can show up and give him money and awards and more glass cases to stick the fucking spiders into

like

they're not even cool spiders THEY'RE JUST THE REGULAR SPIDERS YOU GET OUT HERE. bel could write to the fucking royal college of sucking erskin's dick and be like 'YES, HELLO, WE HAVE SPIDERS, CAN I HAVE A THOUSAND POUNDS TOO, I COULD EVEN MENTION THE SCORPION I SAT ON YESTERDAY' but nooooo, they had to send erskin to go have a fucking look. and sit in the dirt like a little kid. a kid in bespoke trousers. with a little sketchbook. to draw the spiders. really handsomely, because he also uses some kind of absurd soap with lavender in it, and his hair smells nice when he sits in the sun.

TO DRAW SPIDERS.

edit: at some point bel finds a copy of Notable Flora And Fauna Of (insert state here) stuffed into his bookshelf between all his history and philosophy books and the frontspiece dedicates the book to him and he has to sit down

 

finally thought of what to put as the next bit in the space navy au, so hopefully they're set up and can do... medical... stuff.....?? idk, i kinda miss jethro, does he not attend sigmah's surgeries? whatever bits of that you want to skip we can switch to erskin's perspective, he doesn't know what the hell is going on so it'd be easy to summarize.

anyway pls dont feel pressured to suddenly go work on that thread now, take care of your sniffly-ass self for as long as you need.

 

for your consideration: an AU where Erskin's an Orphaner and has come to take down Eagledad

 

haha yeah that wouldn't go well.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: bel is still a planetary marine, erskin is a threshecutioner come to check on how they're all doing, but is actually for real an insurrectionist secret agent come to scout for potential converts, and he and bel have a lot of really interesting conversations in his tent. also some junk-to-junk conversations.

 

couple thoughts:

-we have too many AUs but the planetary marine AU where Bel's again on his home turf with all his friends and subordinates and Erskin is the outsider still sounds fun to me. As is the idea that Bel is like OH NO A GRENADE and Erskin is like 'right!' and hops on it and Bel is like OH NO MY FEELINGS but Erskin is fine. Grenades do not work on seadwellers. He probably just sits up with his hair all frazzled, laughing.

-On the subject of other cute things in the Werewolf AU, if we can think of any excuses, I'd like to play through a little more of Alex dealing with Erskin and Bel being woofs. IDK, Alex is just very cute. And woof Erskin is probably a very weird, cute, strange thing to deal with, living in your house, chewing your pillows, fetching your newspapers, biting your son's tail when he's not expecting it. What if after a few days, when they drove up to the park, it was because Bel himself was starting to notice it was starting to be more of a conscious effort to stay human? Like he could stay human the whole week up till the day of the full moon, but it was because he was increasingly focused on doing so, and this time he realizes like he doesn't have to do that, or be scared of it or resentful or anything.

-should Aud and I patch the contents of the google doc of Lu's space navy au adventures into that thread? or just link to it in a post. not sure which would look better.