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

Woke up to write down dream. Snooze time again. Feel free to get them to the shower. Erskin is not gonna want to smooch till he's gotten to rinse his mouth out tho.

 

the problem with size-difference pairings:

 

LOVE FINDS A WAY
and occasionally a step-stool

 

updated trope list!

-bodyswap
-evil twins (beforan twins?) crossover
-casteswap crossover
-they get robots in. the robots are killbots.
-alien invasion: evil mimic edition
-alien invasion: facehugger edition
-alien invasion: improbably sexy edition
-a ship comes in for repairs AND EVERYONE IS ZOMBIES
-a ship comes in for repairs and EVERYONE IS SPORE ZOMBIES
-a ship comes in for repairs and it is pretty obviously humans in makeup
-they plow through a horrorterror, everything becomes a lovecraftian nightmare for a while
-the naked time: pale orgy edition​

 

Wow ok I really like that! Yeah, humans being like WE SURE ARE TROLLS and the trolls coughing into their fists and going YEP YOU CERTAINLY SEEM TO PLAUSIBLY BE REAL PEOPLE sounds really great. It seems to me the kind of thing erskin would be interested in enough to try once— his natural enthusiasm for the dangerous and weird is, unfortunately, dampened by his nervous protectiveness of his ship and crew.

Maybe they could show up with the aquaponics, or something? Or at least a lot of stuff for it.

 

yes, this seems reasonable! especially the whole, humans being better than trolls at growing stuff on ships. i think the troll diet is largely insectivorous and they seem happy in dim hives and also are not keen on sunlight, so their ships probably tend towards the dark and bare.

though ok erskin is going to be rattled enough by reggie's appearance, i dunno if he'd care about anyone else at all with something that emotionally important happening, let alone traders that murfey and bel could handle.

 

let's put pancho off a little longer, BUILD THE SUSPENSE.

i think a zombie outbreak would be cool, though. ups the stress, lots of murders, the crew is even more short-staffed for a bit, pancho is rushed in right after because yikes. would that be fun?

 

just realized, now that bel is (tentatively) inclade, lainey is going to get pretty informal with him. as in, she wouldn't make any attempt to cover up or even stop if he found her macking on erskin, and the two of them would probably cheerfully invite bel in. lainey is a rowdy and shameless hedonist, and her moral instruction to erskin has been more along the lines of 'don't catch anyone's bulge with your teeth holy fuck' rather than 'sex is something very special two trolls share when they have very important feelings for one another'.

if bel thinks erskin is blithely promiscuous because of lainey, he's pretty much right, but if he thinks lainey is manipulating him or taking advantage of him, nah.

he's actually safe in terms of erskin not cheating on him— he's a very rare case already. erskin isn't likely to encounter any temptation, and by the time he does he'll have figured out how much fidelity means to bel. that being said, erskin is probably going to cluelessly invite bel along the next time he has a quadrantless romp with a visiting captain, like 'hey guess what's fun', and bel is going to have to do some very smooth talking to say 'hell no' in a way that doesn't overtly convey 'i am horrified at the notion of beholding the visiting captain's genitals'.

 

what if bel got bit during the zombie fiasco and it was a race against time to get pancho in with a shipment of meds that'd save him before the condition permanently melted his brain?? And like over the few days it gets harder and harder for bel to keep his shit together. Pancho could show up when he was a horrifying murderball and save everything with the power of love and a strong pappin hand haha.

That sounds hella fun to me, but idk if it'd require too much focus from you.

 

yay! okay, we could do mushroom-zombies, like bel was telling erskin about and like i wrote in that one fic with karkat/sollux. this would be a variant that amps up a troll's stress response until they're franticly violent, to spread itself via biting rather than cuddling or fucking. so, basically firefly's Reavers, only with extra shitake. berserker-strong trolls intent on biting and tearing any warm body they can get ahold of, and if you're infected it's a few nights of increasing itches, aches, fever, until the stress is too much and the troll loses their temper for the last time and goes on rampage. there's probably things that can slow the progress of the infection down, plus medicine that can burn/freeze it out.

if the mushroom thing is too gross, we could just have it be spores or slime-mold or bacteria, that would manifest near-invisibly or as dark blood poisoning lines or rotten skin or whatever.