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

HUFFS i think i wanted erskin to be kind of hapless and sloppy and careless, but instead he's mostly just overwhelmed. but i guess if he's had two or three sweeps of people depending on him all the time, he's had to learn to get with it?

anyway his ship is constantly undersupplied and treated with passive-aggressive contempt. erskin's got the rank to requisition things directly, but if he throws his weight around too much about one thing then some other thing falls apart. so he'll order more food and it'll take too long and show up spoiled, he'll order tools and gets nothing but those tools on the next resupply, or he'll demand a competent mechanic and be delivered one with an infectious disease, and he'll get fed up and shut down the docking bays for as long as it takes to fix a problem with his own ship and then find everyone's pay has been suspended for the duration. by now he's just figured that this is the normal way the fleet works and everyone else is just better at managing it.

the political reason is that a storage locker for dangerous rejects should be worked hard and kept on short rations, but the main reason is just that every social system likes a punching bag.

ANYWAY how do we get them from this point to a blackrom? because it seems as if this grown-up, responsible jack-of-all-trades erskin would be a lot more admirable to bel than the flighty clueless arrogant asshole he was as a teen.

 

ha! it would drive erskin nuts with jealous frustration and resentment. i was just going to say, i don't think he got any sort of training or education— he bombed his aptitude tests and was tossed straight aboard the sunslammer, quite probably still semi-feral and near-illiterate. he was supposed to be disposed of in a week and his lack of officer training would have been put down to a paperwork error.

so, yeah, erskin has no real sense of how the larger fleet works, how politics work, how a captain is supposed to work. he's just doing his best to do what seems to need doing. he probably has really weird priorities— hence the reputation for madness. if bel can get past the dismissive, cheerful, take-things-as-they-come attitude he's going to find that erskin is really defensive about his shitty cobbled-together super-late education. bel quoting chapter and verse of regulations would really bait him, because he doesn't know any of this regulations were a thing, no one told him before, and anyway what he's come up with works alright so who cares!!!

 

UUUGGGHHH my room gets terrible internet reception, i spent literally the last half hour trying to post a reply. I'm in another room now so things should go more smoothly.

Also should Bel see Erskin and Lainey make out at some point. I'm pretty sure they make out a lot, everywhere? Erskin is absolutely clueless about romantic overtures but he is a big fan of having sex.

Plus I just really enjoy the dynamic where in all situations Bel is like 'oh wow he's hot' immediately upon noticing him, and Erskin is like 'that sure is a person there!'. I think his rating of how attractive people are is directly related to whether or not he likes them. Maybe it's the feral thing.

Bel is probably used to turning heads wherever he goes— do you think he might be a little hurt if Erskin doesn't show a flicker of appreciation for how handsome he is for the whole entire tour?

 

in the space navy au, i really like the idea that bel keeps drawing conclusions that erskin is a sweet-natured civilian manager who couldn't fight his way out of a paper bag and is actually kind of endearingly soft and harmless— and then some serious threat crops up and he gets to see the wild boy who left his hive for an adventure at five sweeps and never made his way back.

 

it's like this:





so walls can be pulled out to chop up a big space, or several rooms can have their walls folded up to make one bigger room. this is just what makes sense to me for trolls, who expect to build their own hives, but also would all have very different size requirements. corridors and hallways would be set up between the walls of hives in pretty much the same process— you'd just make a very long and narrow room. kind of like how cubicles are created for an office? put together and placed around.

let's say the area that bel's in now is mostly medium sized rooms. if he wants a few small rooms he can chop one in half, or if he wants a big room he can join two medium rooms together. if he's hesitant about space he might just arrange a few little spaces that he can recognize as a 'cabin'? and then erskin will adjust the hallways to encircle his rooms and that will be that.

an aviary would be made by the same process, only across multiple decks so there would be vertical space for flying. space would be cleared in the same spot on several decks, then they'd cut the floors out. bel can probably build a 'second floor' by adjusting walls on the deck above him and then cutting a few hatches, but i don't think he'd want to.

does that make sense...? i'm kinda scrambling to build the world out in front of them as they wander along, haha.

 

it seems to me like he would build very cautiously and modestly at first? just the minimum. and then as he settles in and gets comfortable later on he wants to add a dining room, a game room, an exercise room, a library, etc etc. he'll probably end up in a C or a U around his dad's aviary room.

 

haha whoops wrong account. but also i guess tell me if YOU want to do some world-building? i'm perfectly happy doing what i've been doing— i like making things up and going logically from one necessity to the next and the next, but input is always great.

 

nope, he is just a complete goober and he is having fun with slideywalls.

 

ok also what if instead of a run in with lainey we have a run in with hardcase, who has maybe been rummaging around somewhere and/or trying to coerce the staff to give twitch back, and bel is like 'uh oh, diplomatic situation' and erskin just whoops with joyous fury and tears into him. cue a very impressive seadweller catfight as erskin kicks his ass all the way back to his ship and erskin afterwards being giddy and triumphant and puffed up on fight hormones and possibly letting bel help him limp back to medical for stitches.