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

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. it looks idiotic to actual reasonable people who have a regular concept of 'safe', though. this is a kid who's idea of a good time used to be 'walk up a mountain and punch whatever monster you find at the top', so, yeah.

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

 

hmmmmm they've got to persuade him to stay put, though, or he will feel trapped and run off on them. he can be led but not contained, i guess? hence his whole sneaky-spy route out of the hotel, he just needed to reassure himself that he couldn't be kept imprisoned if he didn't want to be. that's why he didn't ask jethro to go outside— whether jethro was likely to say yes or no didn't matter, the fact that erskin would have had to ask mattered.

erskin did suggest going back home (with jethro) and doing his schoolfeeds, and would be very amenable to jethro bringing that back up again to really sell him on it. i thought you and i were holding off on sending them back to the island while luka and aud still haven't caught galley and lu up anywhere near where the boys are, so, we've had to kinda keep doing other stuff besides getting erskin somewhere he can actually deal with his shit. also, aurora is set up to be good for him in that she's going to be remote and businesslike, but also genuinely decent to him. i think having him roll with a much more mature class of bloodsucker would actually be neat to tie into the plot where he kind of wants to pick up a jade minder's duties.

also about your lost people, i'm really sorry, dude. that sucks. erskin's definitely going to get better, though, i'm really looking forward to him romping around fixing up his castle with jethro and even lainey+arguss, and maybe teaching arguss to sail his little windsurfer boat, and meeting pinkie, and stuff like that. also, campaigns! that's going to be kickass.

p.s i think i am snooze for tonight.

 

suggestion: erskin eventually gets shuffled off to heinrich the troll vampire dad, who takes care of promising seadweller bite-junkies and probably has a fat wallet modus full of photos and letters from his old wards who are all off conquering the galaxy and commanding armadas and stuff but still make sure to send a nice card every 12th perigee.

he is like a thousand and twenty sweeps and likes dadly woodworking projects as well as 'fresh air', 'building character', and 'financial responsibility' and probably makes erskin play a lot of golf (bleh), do a lot of accountancy (BLEH), and spend a lot of mornings fly fishing (yay).

jethro and bel are horrified at how much they actually like this guy.

ETA: later they are horrified by how many godawful puns heinrich and erskin can produce when left in a room together

 

That would be a great sidequest for bel, yeah! Like if he goes back to the nice vampires and asks for advice, they could look at one another and be like 'well, i think heinrich's latest flew the coop a few sweeps back, didn't she, so he might be in the mood for another project'

Im gonna say the five nice vamps are all about 60-200 and their area of interest is meticulously assembled tapestries woven and embroidered from weird fibers like spiderweb and yeti sheddings. They've relocated to the desert this decade to experiment with cactus fiber and because last project involved mole ranching and they all got tired of the damp.

 

Sure go for it! I can probably play the nice vamps.

 

The nice vamps will want bel to sit down and drink tea and have a nap tho

 

so ok what if the 'monstrous and unnatural ancient creature warped by the crushing weight of centuries' thing, for trolls, is that old rainbowdrinkers mellow out and become unnervingly benevolent? their horns dull, they remove themselves from the endless tumultuous scrabble for quadrants (and with quadrants), and it takes ever-more exceptional circumstances to spark anger or violence in them. they're untrollish and they put most passionate, confrontational living trolls really on edge.

'classic' troll vampires are literally all sunshine and rainbows and butterflies and flowers and cute little baa-beasts. brrrr!

of course, bel is probably not as over his goth phase as he thinks he is, so there's that.

 

ok i gotta snooze! feel free to think up how bel might be persuaded to stay for a nap.

also i'm pretty sure someone at some point is gonna try to bum a pint off him, or suggest a trade for something or other. i dunno if he'd go for it, or for what he'd go for, or if he'd just get huffy or grossed out and scram. whatever's more interesting for you.

 

wah i am legit stumped for a response i'm sorry! ;__;