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

I also just like the idea of bel strutting around smugly in front of all the dicks who said hed never land a real kismesis

Maybe doing a little possessive hatemaking when erskin manages to smoothly and smilingly piss off an entire war chamber.

 

Yesssss also erskin deliberately playing up his favorite 'piss off' angle of, 'i am an illiterate bush-humping eccentric with gunpowder for brain matter-- but i am still effortlessly and thoughtlessly and confidently more important than you.'

I also like the idea of bel seeing him turn this on a roomful of blues and being like son of a dick. Erskin's played him too, once or twice.

 

(Erskin keeps addressing an olive aide instead of their blue general. 'Sorry, old thing' he says to the butthurt highblood. 'All you middle castes sort of blur together a bit, don't you know. And anyway this fine fellow certainly knows his noughts from his crosses...')

 

yes absolutely. and bel even just brings erskin along to the meeting because a) to show off, and b) to get everyone to write erskin off as a legitimate threat. it turns out also to c) personally piss off every seadweller captain there. what a nice evening.

eta: what if erskin cheerfully and crushingly replies with 'sorry, old bean, i didn't quite get your drift' to every seadweller who's laying on the tough talk and fishpuns. 'do you think you could clarify?' he asks gormlessly.

it is, of course, a blatant insult to demand a highblood speak clearly. a stressfully impenetrable argot is the right of royalty. accessible vernacular— the common mode— is for trolls to address their superiors. but— erskin does outrank everyone there.

("You heard me," a pissy seadweller snaps at him and Erskin just grins and spreads his hands in friendly helplessness.

"Well, yes, but it went in one fin and out the other, you know how it goes. Why don't you give saying what you mean a shot?")

 

so, all of cloris's bites are taped over with some real nice-looking expensive skintone bandaging, but the new girl's is definitely on display and the bite radius is definitely noticeably different. erskin's probably pale and unsteady in addition to high as fuck, but she didn't take enough to seriously hurt him. probably took more than if she was going to let him walk off on his own, because she knew she'd be dumping him and his vulnerable wobbliness on some established quadrantmates.

 

she probably has a number of burner phones with her number programmed into the contacts that she can pass out to kids she likes. i don't really know enough about her yet! it's probably a cheap, basic smartphone.

she'll want to play nice with the moirail and kismesis (from a safe distance), but if she's given too much shit she'll just shrug and move on. she's interested in a casual drop-by arrangement, not being a full-on part of his life.

also bel coming back strikes me as fun, if you're up for it.

 

I think jethro has been remarkably patient and understanding till now! Its fine.

 

black diamonds 2: this again!

i am pretty sure hair-combing and purry cuddling is explicit full-frontal pale makeouts, but erskin's going to be too peaceful to be properly pitch for at least a little while, so, have fun with bel and jethro dealing with that.

 

I'd certainly enjoy a summary if you want to sketch it out! BTW, only a small number of the kids at the party, maybe five or six, were actually rainbowdrinkers, the rest were just dumb hangers-on like Erskin.

also what do you think should Erskin be doing now, anyway? i don't know.

 

hhhuagh, that's an awful picture, oh my gosh.

i'm trying to be all hamfisted about this and end up being like, a captain planet lesson about Why Not To Do Drugs! but it's still like, fuckin around with psychic bad times on an alien planet, so, uh, i don't feel like i have to map to heroin addiction exactly.

i'm operating more off of vampire tropes than drug tropes at this point? and the whole, 'call' thing, where the victims of vampires are just dreamily like 'yeah everything is fine you guys' as they tragically lose themselves to this fucked up parasitical monster is kind of a staple trope. also i mean, just the general horrendous creepiness of Twilight, where the girl is like 'yes this is definitely romantic as hell' while getting isolated from friends and family by hot vampires and then killed and turned into a hot vampire. i also just generally like fucking around with mind control tropes and the struggle to preserve an identity, i guess.

anyway i was writing that basically cloris just took erskin's issues and flipped them from a phobia to a kink? he's got this screaming, reactive, phobic terror of being consumed, and also a lot of shame and anger over how he can't just get over it and be as fearless as he was when he was very young and had not yet experienced firsthand the actual horror of trolls or monsters trying to chew him up. but of course you can't be as 'over' something as you were before that something even happened, but he wasn't really ready to accept that.

so then cloris showed up and hooked into him pretty easily that when he surrendered his survival instinct to her, and let her use him, it felt great and he didn't have to be scared or worried about this huge central problem. and obviously in each successive dream head-fuck cloris escalated matters— both the gruesomeness of the damage he sustained under her claws and the sexualized pleasure of the reward— until he was thoroughly primed to actually want her to fuck him up.

it's like... he's not looking to die, he's looking to stop being scared (of death), because he's so tired of that fear ruining his life. which, ironically, is killing him.

anyway whatever vampire venom thing is going on, Lu kicked the habit fine. i think it's more addictive like coffee than like heroin, though obviously it depends on the user and the set of reasons for using. erskin tried a number of different things to try and cope with the withdrawl, but then met up with aurora and was like 'ok phew'.

that being said, i definitely want aurora to have properly fixed the marks cloris left on him. cloris is the kind of asshole to really encourage dependency, while aurora is like 'lol nope' about having anyone hanging off her. she's able to recognize that erskin's been dropped flat from a pretty intense arrangement and will go for whoever presents themselves— he went, very easily, for her. hence her warning to jethro that he'd be likely to fall prey to pretty much anyone.

still, for his part, erskin's been showing some determined flashes of self-preservation. he leans on bel and the idea of bel for strength and protection, and he's insistent now about sticking by jethro's side, for his own shitty unsocialized value of 'sticking'. so from his point of view he's going about things very safely and reasonably and with a lot of forethought.

anyway im glad you told me it was wigging you out, i don't want this to be unpleasant or creepy for you, sorry!!

 

hhhuagh, that's an awful picture, oh my gosh.

i'm trying NOT to be all clumsy and glurgy about this and end up being like, a captain planet lesson about Why Not To Do Drugs! but it's still like, fuckin around with psychic bad times on an alien planet, so, uh, i don't feel like i have to map to heroin addiction exactly.

i'm operating more off of vampire tropes than drug tropes at this point? and the whole, 'call' thing, where the victims of vampires are just dreamily like 'yeah everything is fine you guys' as they tragically lose themselves to this fucked up parasitical monster is kind of a staple trope. also i mean, just the general horrendous creepiness of Twilight, where the girl is like 'yes this is definitely romantic as hell' while getting isolated from friends and family by hot vampires and then killed and turned into a hot vampire. i also just generally like fucking around with mind control tropes and the struggle to preserve an identity, i guess.

anyway i was writing that basically cloris just took erskin's issues and flipped them from a phobia to a kink? he's got this screaming, reactive, phobic terror of being consumed, and also a lot of shame and anger over how he can't just get over it and be as fearless as he was when he was very young and had not yet experienced firsthand the actual horror of trolls or monsters trying to chew him up. but of course you can't be as 'over' something as you were before that something even happened, but he wasn't really ready to accept that.

so then cloris showed up and hooked into him pretty easily that when he surrendered his survival instinct to her, and let her use him, it felt great and he didn't have to be scared or worried about this huge central problem. and obviously in each successive dream head-fuck cloris escalated matters— both the gruesomeness of the damage he sustained under her claws and the sexualized pleasure of the reward— until he was thoroughly primed to actually want her to fuck him up.

it's like... he's not looking to die, he's looking to stop being scared (of death), because he's so tired of that fear ruining his life. which, ironically, is killing him.

anyway whatever vampire venom thing is going on, Lu kicked the habit fine. i think it's more addictive like coffee than like heroin, though obviously it depends on the user and the set of reasons for using. erskin tried a number of different things to try and cope with the withdrawl, but then met up with aurora and was like 'ok phew'.

that being said, i definitely want aurora to have properly fixed the marks cloris left on him. cloris is the kind of asshole to really encourage dependency, while aurora is like 'lol nope' about having anyone hanging off her. she's able to recognize that erskin's been dropped flat from a pretty intense arrangement and will go for whoever presents themselves— he went, very easily, for her. hence her warning to jethro that he'd be likely to fall prey to pretty much anyone.

still, for his part, erskin's been showing some determined flashes of self-preservation. he leans on bel and the idea of bel for strength and protection, and he's insistent now about sticking by jethro's side, for his own shitty unsocialized value of 'sticking'. so from his point of view he's going about things very safely and reasonably and with a lot of forethought.

anyway im glad you told me it was wigging you out, i don't want this to be unpleasant or creepy for you, sorry!!