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

sorry about that delay, btw, i fell asleep.

 

i can't hardly remember, mostly coordinating a lot of networking on the downlow. his brilliant idea was the 'blackbox hub' which was a kind of virtual server that facilitated secure communications between people who didn't want their contact information retained by a server, kind of thing. it handled all the proxies and encryption, and dumped the data regularly so that there was no way it could give anyone away. it's up to individual rebel types to do their own verification and whatnot, you can't automate that, but this allowed them to have that conversation in private.

his main hope was to let psionics avoid becoming helmsmen in the first place, with a side of eventually freeing them from slavery, but he hasn't fully thought through the consequences since he knows he doesn't have all the data.

grownup bel just wants helmsmen treated as personnel, not materiel. he thinks they should get paid and work in shifts. the idea that any troll should be allowed to just... not serve? that's beyond him.

 

i’m sleep, will reply tomorrow

 

i just remembered the important bit that i was missing in remembering their little rebellion -- they were working on a helmsrig that didn't require surgical implantation. one that was based on the induction headsets from the kind of vr used for training. iirc it didn't give the total telepresence of a helmsrig, but it was adequate to allow access to jumpspace and so on, and of course the advantage is you don't have to remove somebody's organs to make it work.

 

good luck explaining realpolitik to the teen idealist, erskin. :P

hey so, i vaguely recall that you organized the boat trolls log just before we moved it to kintsugi, and i thought i had put it up, but apparently i didn't? and now i don't know where to find it. and since all your blogs got deleted, some of it's just plain gone. please tell me that file still exists somewhere.

 

yeah, that's not ideal. i'm having a hard time thinking what they could usefully share tho. bel's clade are planning to dodge conscription and go be space pirates. what he could use is like, info on patrols around the home system and so forth. i'm not sure anything erskin has there counts as a resource for him. although maybe if erskin's like "well if you dont want these resources" and bel can be like "how are these resources tho" and erskin can explain?

 

i got so used to how well grownup bel and erskin communicate that i forgot how the teen versions can't understand each other with subtitles and a map :P

 

which is a relief to bel, i'm p sure, or would be if he could think past being upsetti spaghetti. i bet erskin could give him a lot of useful info about just how many people there are hiding and messing around outside the law even within the empire's well settled areas. i bet there's a fuck ton of that going on, considering how efficient subjugs aren't. :D

 

ok so i'm reading archives, and finally found the bit about their plans for non-slave non-tortured helmsmen. i haven't fully read through it yet, but at a glance, it looks like they're culturing a new kind of helm organism from psionic troll and lusus tissue, and i guess some inert helmscolumn cells. it feeds on all emotion, not just negative emotion. (helmscolumn feeds on pain was the big reveal of the k'thun arc, iirc.) and then they were testing it with induction headsets, trying to get the interface fast enough to handle hyperspace.

 

oh nooo i just realized how bel can break the tension; he has a phone full of pictures of rainbow kittens in tiny helmets.

 

been reading log. baby erskin's idea of reform is adorable.

 

i'd say he's extra silly in that scene cuz he's on painkillers, but frankly it didn't have much effect :D

 

i don't think bel's noticed yet, he was distracted by finding the Science Kitten. but iirc he never tweaked his own erskin about trouble reading or spelling, only about being woefully bad at computers. and putting noses in his smileys.

seebs got 'captain marvel' and is enticing me with promises of couch snuggles, so i think i'm done for the night. i'm glad we got the lads cheered up a bit.