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

ok so please consider bel getting woken up one morning by erskin flicking gold coins into his recuperacoon, and then he's obnoxiously like 'well you're poor now! i have to keep you in the style to which you are accustomed."

he flicks another few coins in. "that should just about do it for your shampoo bill," he says.

 

erskin: la! i am a wounded dove. nevermore shall i pose you a challenge or a rivalry! woe is me and my fragile feelings
bel: well i still like you
erskin, in a stupid voice: hurr i still like you a-hurr durrr
erskin: *trashes room, makes fun of bel for giving a shit, makes fun of bel not liking to be made fun of*
erskin: by the way you are a shitfuck douchebeast with a head like a butt, wanna fight about it
bel: ...ok, i'm getting mixed signals here
erskin: I AM A DELICATE GODDAMN FLOWER

 

For starters, delicately sliced raw meat platters artfully arranged by hemotype to make lovely geometrical patterns (a lot of places do rainbows, but that's so last season) alongside a vegetarian version of the same thing- spicy and savory herbal plants next to various brightly-colored tubers and fleshy shoots, lots of them, all sliced paper-thin but somehow still filling.

Anyone with sensory issues had better be careful about the veggie platter, the style there swings towards Surprisingly Flavorful and they don't warn you about the wasabi.

 

At some point poor Jethro's toxin filter is going to crap out on him if he continues trying to keep pace with a highblood who can handle his booze and a seadweller who is strenuously avoiding sobriety. Poor kids.

Also I suggest Jethro and Erskin have a macking session that makes Bel have to awkwardly leave the room. (Or watch. Sweatily.)

 

ok so i'm enjoying the lighter going-around-doing-stuff activities! but i feel like on night two or three erskin would be like... significantly not ok? i don't want it to be doom and gloom and freakout misery but it seems like there should be some amount of dealing with that. like, becoming increasingly aware of what bad shape he's in physically, plus hangovers, plus whatever other cravings and psychic messed-up-ness he's got going. he's not going to grumble about the fourwheel device, anyway.

ANYWAY i was typing up a wake-up post before i thought i should check in and see if it's too dark. erskin would have a bad nightmare about cloris's death and wake up to find he was holding jethro too tightly, and they were both hurty and upset. then he'd make apologies, they'd all kind of figure that things are going to be rough for a while, and bel would maybe fly the engeneer girl in to fix his leg already, especially if it's still degrading, which it probably is considering that badly-installed bioware taking over your hip socket can't be good for you long-term. or short term.

later maybe shopping? erskin would irritably want better clothes.

....hm, maybe Lainey could diagnose, to Bel, that Erskin is coming down off some serious shit? and give Bel and Jethro some private advice on how to wrangle the kid. She runs a trashy celebrity blog, she knows from people who partied to death.

 

name suggestion: lilith clarke, lilith after the mother of demons, clarke after edith clarke, first woman to get an electrical engineering degree from MIT. she could be a bioware specialist and occult enthusiast.

also how about if she's an unpleasant jerk, socially, like sollux and karkat? the tryhard fighty meaner-than-you type of troll. i always appreciate grumpy, fractious characters, and also crude lowblood obscenities. and probably bel is used to a lot of aggro posturing and sass and bickering from the rank-and-file. i think that herding trolls must be worse than herding cats, because at least cats don't know how to set you on fire and/or crudely proposition you for any number of filthy activities.

(also someone bluntly saying to erskin 'you're an idiot, that's why you ended up like this, you are a huge fucking idiot and you prove there is no god because i guarantee you no one in the entire cosmos would want to take responsibility for the creation of such a colossal idiot, your progenitors must have thrown a handful of mud in the bucket and called it a night, look at this, look at what an idiot you are,' would probably make bel's day. and mine too.)

 

Haha, ok, my fantroll stable gains a new member. Shes re-orange and her symbol is a hex nut and shes got big ibex horns. Her handle iiiiiiis sinisterSpanner. She's very occulty--a reasonable interest for wetware technitians-- and wears a white ribbon in her ponytail. Her clothing accents and her sign are white. The white is pretty greasy and stained. She punches people in the shoulder a lot. Unusually for trolls, shes right handed.

 

theory: what's wrong with erskin's leg: it wasn't that the artisan sucked or was incompetent, it was that erskin's a victim of specific and shitty circumstances.

the bioware has to be calibrated to run on the user's hemotype. this is done by priming the connective tissue culture with close-enough blood to get it working, then it's joined on to the stump, the chitin plating is secured, it grows together, you're done. the bioware absorbs minerals and nutrients from your body to generate the additional chitin necessary that it fits you and grows with you and stuff, it's almost more of an armored limb graft than it is a robot part in the human metal-and-wires sense.

but you can't exactly order high-violet blood off troll amazon, or at least if you could it would be more expensive than printer's ink, so erskin would have had to donate blood specifically to get the leg primed. however long it would have taken, and however much blood he had to donate, at the time he had a case of gangrene, so the leg was primed with blue or indigo blood on cloris's recommendation. if erskin was blue or indigo, it would have worked out fine, he'd have healed up, the biowire might even have helped patch him together faster.

but since his blood and body temperature are cooler and slower than the biowire's set to recognize, it's sort of cancerously just kept growing in to him, trying to find where to interface. and his actual flesh has had to heal from surgery pressed against a foreign mass. and the leg hasn't been able to fit itself to the right length or width so he's got sores and bruises. the reason he's been able to use it at all is kinda like when you plug a tablet or mouse into a computer without the right driver, and it works but really stupidly. so the whole area has just been kinda.... continually fucked.

 

REGGIE IS GONNA BE OK. erskin's focusing on his crappy condition because he can actually get his head around 'ok reggie's really messed up, that's not good' while he's still '?????' about his own, significantly more fucked up condition.

 

I love this character.