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

The idea of a rich spoiled slimeball trying to cozy up to lainey amuses me. And will probably really amuse Lainey. She fuckin loves the princess treatment.

 

Yeah and she's already got her own sweet, cuddly pet seadweller. Whitey can offer a pleasant round of asskissing but not much else.

 

Now i wanna draw a side-by-side comparison. If whitey's grown up well-fed and safe i bet he's a LOT bigger and sleeker than erskin. Who would probably feel kinda self conscious abput that. I think he knows he's appealing in a scruffy survivalist way but the fleet beauty standard of 'rugged' is still probably a couple notches less wood-chipper-y than him.

And im sure captains in better condition never pass up a chance to negg him about it. Especially considering like... You dont survive somewhere between two and seven overt death sentences by 13 sweeps without unnerving your superiors.

 

oh, ok! i'll have galley talk from erskin's phone. the ceiling cameras wouldn't have speakers. helmsmen aren't actually supposed to be chatting freely with the crew, and galley has heretofore not wanted to.

 

beaver fact of the day (disregard if already known): their teeth are orange in the front from iron infused into the outer layer. they have organic metal teeth. a lot of rodents do. this is incredibly cool to me.

 

actually if you want to get into some NERD SCIENCE then yeah, it's a legit possibility. because like, the way chitin works (again, disregard if you know this) is on its own it's floppy, it's just a matrix of long protein fibers. the way chitin gets hard like in crab shells and mollusks is the chitin gets mixed up with calcium carbonate, which according to wikipedia produces a material less brittle than raw calcium carbonate but still, yknow, a fuckin oyster shell. i headcanon troll stuff to be made of chitin composites and alloys rather than plastic, because depending on the mix you get anything from soft chewy suede (good for joints!) to rock-hard shells, and that seems like just the thing a species as old and buglike as trolls would be interested in. alternia can't possibly have any more petroleum, at this point, if it ever did.

ANYWAY i don't think there's been, on earth, the combination of iron and chitin, but you've got iron-infused teeth in rodents, and calcium carbonate infused shells in invertebrates, why shouldn't an alien species make that work? it'd also be a cool reason for the gradient and the way old trolls have much redder horns. the concentration of iron in the material goes up the older it is, so you'd get new growth at the horntips and old growth at the hornbeds. and older trolls with much slower growth curves than lil wigglers. how cute would it be if little trolls pupated with super pale horns? very cute.

but so troll horns wouldn't grow like goat horns, under those circumstances, though. mammal horns grow from the base of the skull, not the tip of the horn. in this case the troll horn would grow up through the core and then out, like... a plant, maybe? a volcano? some earth bug i don't know about? but still which would also be great for our current schema of horns having a more tender core full of blood vessels. you'd need bloodflow to carry new material up.

 

by the way, i think galley is kinda ticked that bel treats him like a regular troll to the point it seems like he's being willfully delusional. like at first it was great that bel liked him for his personality and handsome looks and not because bel had a fetish or was a sexual predator. but now it's starting to really grate on him that bel looks past the helmsman stuff.

i think here bel's just fuzzy-headed when he's been saying stuff like 'oh you were locked in without visitors' when galley would be locked in regardless of visitors. he'd be locked in regardless of door— it could be propped wide open for anyone to look in and he'd still be tied to the ceiling by his guts. and bel forgetting that he's had a lot of body mods and can't eat much food and isn't actually supposed to be eating any food. so galley's trying to chalk it up to that, but if it keeps going on, it's going to be cumulatively a bigger and more upsetting deal each time.

because it seems to me that awhile his thoughts would be like, that bel is in love with this unreal fantasy version of galley, galley the handsome ensign. galley the security technician, galley the navigator. and that'd be miserable, because that's not him, he's a helmsman, he's never going to not be a helmsman, it's not something that can be pretended-away. like bel is skipping from point A, 'i want to romance this slave in a cute and ethical way' to point Fantasy A, 'well he's just not a slave problem solved'.

bel avoiding confronting or acknowledging that horror and unfairness would be so frustrating, because it's not something galley ever ever gets to do. pretend he's not what he is, or ignore it. he is missing a lot of shit actual trolls are missing, from his body to his brain, and he's never going to get that stuff back, and if he's gotta live it, bel's at least gotta look at it.

i think bel would be super horrified if any of this was pointed out to him. i think he's just trying to treat galley with respect! but somehow paradoxically this situation's so fucked that that circles around to disrespect. 'i don't see a machine, i see you' 'well okay but you do need to see the machine bit also,'

anyway i'm definitely prone to misinterpreting bel entirely, and i'm still unsure about galley, so please tell me what up if i'm wrong. haha it's so late i write so much shit when it's this late SORRY.

 

Latest post: galley is awkwardly shy about saying 'no, thank you'. Galley settings are either 'yessir' or 'go fuck yourself'. Erskin's very comfortable playing Wow What An Asshole with him, tho! I think he sees galley as a funny little robot.

 

for the record in the space navy AU erskin's porn tastes tend towards super cutesy fluffy romansu drawings of big fat ladies making out. he thinks it's nice.

in the regular RP he's been thoroughly kinked for amazonian vampires, which, hey, in my opinion doesn't take much doing. because amazonian vampires.

also i think in any universe he is partial towards people who are bigger than him. and he really likes being carried around but probably won't admit it.

 

it would be kind of a spectacular piece of self-deception if he had avoided that realization, yes. i think erskin just likes shoving him around because it feels like winning the blackrom sex game, and because he's a bossy-boots when he gets going. he'll probably start figuring out what kind of shoving-around bel likes in particular, soon.

i think formal bondage, with like straps and cuffs, wouldn't occur to him unless he was specifically told/shown that bel was into that, since he himself still has some issues about captivity and torture. i'm trying to write him as less wild-freakout-prone in this AU because he's older and he's had time to breathe and work through a lot of it, but i can't imagine him in any universe being happy about getting pinned flat on his back by the wrists. that's 'haha you're gonna get carved open' territory, not 'sex times now!' territory.

man tho i'm sure bel would look very pretty in leather gear. how gross would it be (or would bel consider it to be) if galley looped some of his wires around his wrists? on one hand: bright pink material plus random static shocks. on the other hand: gross living tentacle sausage, possibly slimy.

if we wanted to have more failure-sex, bel fighting back enough to actually pin and freak out erskin could be interesting at some point. though we'd have to think about how their fights would go after that, erskin's pride would be really stung if he thought bel was letting him win out of pity instead of out of boner-distraction. though i think erskin's freakout about being trapped, during an ongoing tussle, would manifest as berserker violence, not a whimpery breakdown. which might still be hot? idk.