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

i feel vaguely bad about this but bel being distracted by erskin being hot while erskin is going 'a-durp hurr i sure like grass' will never not warm my filthy little heart.

stupid sexy seadwellers!

 

haha whoops wrong account. but anyway i have definitely been trying to think of what erskin would find distractingly attractive about bel and have come up with

-unrestrained happy smiling
-unrestrained furious glaring
-doing either of those while calling him sir

i feel like when he would start getting upset with himself is realizing he's fantasizing about bending bel over a desk (while bel called him sir)

 

i think from most people he doesn't like the sir thing because it's a pointless little formality, but bel like... both insists on treating him with respect, but also lets slip these flashes of frustration and resentment about it? and that hangs erskin up a bit. they're both feeling out the weird territory of someone like erskin being the boss of someone like bel, it seems to me.

 

after a few days of shadowing erskin, bel is going to realize he's got such a nice butt because he never stops running the fuck around.

 

hm hmmm.

-tightass division crewmembers keep showing up with drinks
-tightass division crewmembers keep showing up with porn
-tightass division crewmembers kind of worried that bel is going to have a stroke or something if he doesn't loosen up
-pancho gets transferred aboard somehow? i am in favor of pancho showing up before jethro and sigmah because jethro will stabilize things too much
-erskin realizes that bel has a thing for him and starts gently flirting (i.e ramps up being a challenging dickbag)
-bel and lainey make friends?

 

oh right also i've been thinking over the Galley Situation and it's interesting because, he'd be a sort of scramble of early-game programmed-mess galley and recent-game tough-and-empowered galley.

on one hand he's still got all the conditioning programming working away at him, and on the other hand he's figured out enough loopholes, or just gotten tough enough, to sabotage things. he had about three sweeps before erskin to kill those five captains (after the original one that he also killed in the regular rp's sunslammer down incident) and be on a furious rampage / giddy powertrip, and learn that he did have some autonomy, and could be someone that people were scared of. i don't think he'd see himself as a troll again, though? more like a livewire, a piece of malfunctioning equipment that no one could get near enough to fix without being zapped. or, maybe, a revenant, a vengeful dead thing come back to plague the living.

so, he's now also had three sweeps under erskin, who not only tolerates his anger but sympathizes with it. i think erskin, in his first quarter-sweep, would also be lost and furious and feel ill-used and crazy and not at all like a real troll. tho obviously galley would do a lot of 'BOO HOO, PRXNCESS' at him, because, boo hoo, one of them is the captain and the other is full of noodles.

anyway erskin and galley forming a weird ad-hoc cahoots partnership seems likely. a sort of respectful, tentatively trusting business relationship? erskin thinks galley is too angry and mistreated not to bite a hand that feeds him should that hand make any sudden moves, and galley thinks erskin is going to eventually turn into a real captain and then he will have to kill him and he's sad and angry about this.

finally, galley's definitely got a comfier setup than an initial basic-column rig. i'd imagine a sling- or web- style arrangement, an entertainment tablet, a minifridge with some easy-to-digest snacks and drinks, grooming supplies like cleaning wipes and a comb and a mirror, a few changes of properly-fitted uniform, some pillows to arrange as he'd like. he doesn't get to unplug, but he's at least treated like, hm, like a valued workhorse rather than an interchangeable battery. he'd be encouraged to keep clean and look smart and be healthy— and now he has the option of aggressively neglecting himself. probably how tidy he keeps himself is a good indicator of how cooperative and positive he's feeling on any given day.

still, he'd be physically less of the literal-wreck bel met in the regular rp (less gaunt, less ragged, less scars) but mentally worse. hostile but like, legitimately menacing? he has a certain amount of power and reputation he actually knows how to use. how would bel respond to all this?

 

also, i think it'd be about a week since erskin managed to check in with galley— galley would be able to see he was injured protecting twitch and then worked himself until he passed out soon afterwards, but i'd imagine erskin usually checks in on galley every 2-3 days to bring him some little treat like a snack or a toy or a magazine, and ask him his opinion on things, and galley has actually sort of resentfully come to look forward to that. and is now upset that it isn't happening, and upset that he's upset. it's stupid for him to be upset because he can see erskin hasn't been in any sort of shape to do it, so he's a selfish miserable asshole, but also it's stupid for him to be upset because he shouldn't have gotten used to anyone being nice to him at all, ever, it's going to end some day, he's pathetic.

anyway i think bel would arrive to find galley's definitely worked himself up and is ready to take out all his stressfeels on the first asshole to stick their head through the door. not the situation erskin wanted them to meet in, especially bel toodling in on his own.

 

he probably would, yeah! it's entirely possible he'd also get warned that no one does this but the captain— and be like 'the captain needs to learn to delegate'— and then walk in and galley is like POW. murder in the face.

why don't you have bel get to galley's and then i'll do my best with him? we can wing it.

 

how horrifying would it be tho if it turns out, like, erskin genuinely has deligated as much as he knows how? with a crew of 200 and a two-mile spaceship that's constantly underfunded and an average of 2-3 ships in for check-ups and repairs at any one time, it does seem like most departments outside mechanics would be running on skeleton crews. erskin giving bel six people for his division could have made it, actually, one of the larger ones. kind of a case of 'the cobbler's children go barefoot'— erskin's own ship comes last when it comes to repair priorities, so while all his mechanics are at work on other ships he's kinda left to manage his own, on his own.

 

ALSO what if erskin sleeps through some new ship docking, and their captain takes it as a snub that he's not being greeted and hence gets really pissy and demanding with erskin's crew and throws basically everything he can think of on to the docket and is a big offended tantrumy shitlord—

and when erskin wakes up to a terrifying backlog of missed messages and silenced hails he is fucking furious. bel thought he knew best, again, and interfered with a situation erskin was doing his best to keep stable, again, and now the regular grunts are paying for it, AGAIN.

it would be entirely possible for erskin to be mad enough to actually physically, violently throw down with bel about this.

 

yeah, that seems reasonable! i suppose it's just, if i found out anyone had done anything with my phone while i was asleep, i'd be horrified? i'd feel kinda violated, and i'm not even in charge of anything. erskin wouldn't be worked up to a rampage level of anger if everything kinda turned out alright, but he'd still want to have a serious talk with bel about why bel keeps acting as if he's there to train erskin.

to me it seems, from bel's recent actions, that he's just got a bad case of Smartest Kid In The Room. and he probably usually is! and that's probably usually the thing that saves him and his men and the day, etc. but i don't think he's been in a situation where someone so obviously less intelligent does actually know better than him about how things have to be done, and he's not acting anywhere near as humble as he thinks he is.

also i like the idea of erskin swanning in in the most skimpy possible version of the dress uniform and being like 'terribly sorry, a subordinate found a way to sabotage my schedule, i thought you'd be here at three in the /morning/, can i make it up to you, let's go have drinks and complain about uppity dirtscrapers and i will be all earfins on how you yourself run such a tight crew. is it torture? let's talk about torture.'

and he gives the most furious YOU ARE IN FOR IT NOW, MISTER glare at bel over the other captain's shoulder

 

yes, definitely erskin isn't doing as well as he could. and once bel and erskin finally get on the same page— that erskin /can/ run things more efficiently, there /are/ better ways to learn to run things— and that bel needs to /ask/ why erskin is doing things and not assume dribbling idiocy as the first and only reason, i think they'll do really well!