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

let's go for it then. dumb sex shenanigans is fun, bel brooding tragically in the rain on the edge of a cliff is fun, murfey can possibly knock their dumb heads together later. have nice sleeps!

 

in making erskin the king of interior decorating / landscaping (shipscaping?) i am definitely indulging my kink for Stories About People Building Stuff, plus all the odds and ends of habitat construction that i eat up with a spoon in any book i find. SO I'M GONNA TALK ABOUT THAT HERE because erskin is, irritatingly, not the monologuing sort. his reluctance to deliver any exposition at all is a supreme disappointment to me.

okay SO, i think erskin's desert room is the only habitat he's constructed to a specifically alternian standard. he'd have gone and actually researched the desert he spent his last couple sweeps in, then mixed up the sand specifically, and probably went and fused the silicates to produce the necessary obsidian chunks. the desert was an ancient volcanic caldera like you might see in utah or some parts of argentina, i think, and there was a lot of volcanic salt deposits— i think he kind of got stranded in the middle of a continent, and couldn't really get his shit together to figure out where the ocean was or how to get back to it before he died. so: a seadweller in the desert, har har.

ANYWAy the tidepool biome is straight-up fantasy and looks way more like those rich dude artificial rock backyard pools than any actual tidepools, which tend to be kinda scrubby. deep pools, tall rock spires, drifts of soft sand, colorful pebbles, etc etc. the corals and critters are custom-bred to be tough, cute, and tasty in enclosures, the water is clean and perfectly salt-balanced and cycles through high and low tides via some kind of big tank reservoir. it's a seadweller playground, though probably still more scruffy and wild-looking than some seadwellers' artsy little gardens. amusingly (to me ok i'm a nerd) none of it would ever have come from a planet: the plants and animals would have been custom-bred by fleetside hobbyists, the water and rocks would have both come from grinding up asteroids, and salt is easy enough to make. erskin probably thinks it's really funny to mock up an 'ancestral habitat' purely out of space junk.

the scaffold-grown trees referenced in the earlier party are a theoretical construct. in tanuki bonsai, saplings are fitted into and around beautiful pieces of driftwood, to create the effect of much larger and more ancient trees. in the case of the scaffold-grown trees, fast-growing shrubs or even leafy vines would be stretched and trained around a fabricated tree 'shape', probably consisting of a rigid inner core with a base that bolts to the flooring, then successively less dense growing mediums like (alternian) cork, coconut fiber, and burlap mesh. after a sweep or so of fussing and pruning you'd wind up with a grove of great big climbing trees, and if you needed to ram a few more metal poles and spikes through trunks and branches for extra support, it'd be fine.

ok i ran out of thoughts because it's late. none of this is actually important for the roleplay i just really like space. and building stuff in it.

 

haha you have a Type

 

okay SO i went back and edited some of erskin's first dialogue— he doesn't have his lusus aboard, they got separated sometime in his wandering feral years. might actually be one of the factors that resulted in him going off the rails like that? and he's definitely pretty bummed out about it. he doesn't know where reggie went, if he died, if he just got lost, if he thinks erskin abandoned him, anything, and has tried to make his peace with it all but yknow, that kind of thing is hard.

anyway, what if reggie survived and wound up finding (and aggressively courting) pancho's loggan due to crazyrandom happenstance! like during a campaign in the later days of her time on alternia he just trotted all scruffy out of the wilderness and started hanging around loggan and presenting her with snacks and shiny rocks. and so pancho's kind of got the troll version of 'this is my mom, and that's my mom's weird boyfriend'.

ANYWAY since erskin is deliberately vague about his custodian, and very likely to brush-off and bury all questions about his orphan status, he and bel might not ever figure out what the fuck until pancho walks off the shuttle and the lusii come strolling out behind. then: explosive soap opera reunion.

 

ok what would pancho call reggie? also, would she interpret reggie as female? also would she have let the eggs incubate and hatch into ferocious fluffy monsters over the sweeps, or would she eat them for breakfast the next evening? pancho showing up surrounded by a small constellation of scrappy blueish fluffcheeps could be funny, especially if she's trained them to be useful. but then again she could always sell them as pets.... what do you think?

 

i looked it up and apparently it's 'itsu'. what amuses me particularly tho is wolverine's mom was 'elizabeth', which is reggie's silly middle name. maybe pancho calls reggie 'itsy' as in itsy-bitsy? loggan's dainty little princess girlfriend. reggie would certainly tolerate pancho once loggan made it clear that s/he'd better, and after a few sweeps probably be affectionate, protective, and mannerly about keeping pancho and loggan groomed. preen their hair, fuss over mud and blood, be dismayed at the existence of sawdust. claim and then portion up food to make sure to serve everyone a fair share. have opinions on the state of pancho's uniform and casual wear and go so far as drag out an iron and put it pointedly on the table when they're not up to snuff. and collect nice-smelling flowers to decorate pancho's quarters with. and always make sure to pick up an item pancho has dropped and present it to her— she probably came back from rummaging through a battlefield one day with a single uniform button that had come off, then insisted pancho wake up and sew it back on right away.

she probably spends a lot of time with loggan trying to groom the smell away. and encouraging pancho to give her lusus a bath. imagine the half hour window of loggan smelling like lavender mountain whisper and reggie just ecstatically cuddling up to her big hairy sulkball side.

ok also i am now completely enjoying the thought of bel and pancho finding out that this adorably prim, fussy, dainty little waifu turns out to be mad aspera's dad.

 

imagine pancho getting some bag of chips or candy beetles and just hearing this small, stern cough from ankle level. itsy is sitting there, front paws together, staring her down. she gives the bag of snacks to itsy. itsy selects a single item from the bag in her beak, raises up on her hind paws, and lets her have it. pancho then has to suffer itsy trotting around after her all night, holding the snack bag and giving her candy beetles one at a time. itsy also gives all her patients a candy beetle. pancho wanted to eat all of the candy beetles herself but gets pecked for it.

ETA: probably the fluffcheeps exhibit fetch-and-carry impulses right off, though what they decide is useful to fetch, and where they decide to carry it, is really variable. pancho has had to make a lot of MMM, YUM YUM, THANK YOU noises about rocks, sticks, candy wrappers, bottlecaps, and stolen pens over the sweeps.

 

the sergeant rallies her troops.

 

at least pancho knows who is trying to get out of bed too soon! she knows because seven small white hairballs just ran up to her while yelling. she finds the miscreant lying on the ground, itsy perched on their chest like a very stern cloud.