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

i see erskin likes that.

 

plot thought of the day: during the bodyswap episode, they would, presumably, also be swapping brain structure, right? since the brain is also part of the body. so like. bel's got troll autism and erskin definitely does not. do we hash out what it feels like to suddenly be running a different operating system? it seems to me that would be even more interesting (for us) and confusing (for them) than the whole 'oh right my leg hurts a lot now' thing.

we can obviously skip that bit if you think it'd be unfun. because like, is personality even distinguishable from neurotype? and there's obviously all those dickbags being like 'if only i could remove The Autisms from my kid and have them be who they really are' or whatever, and i don't feel like going into that territory like at all.

it is just that from my perspective, i have spent the last five or six years putting different chemicals in my head and seeing what happens, and i've been a lot of different kinds of person in the process! which has been damn interesting, honestly, but left me with the conception that identity is more of a convenient story than an object, which does not seem to be a commonly held opinion. though, since i've apparently had ADD all my life and not known that till recently, i now get to figure out how much more of my identity is due to goofy stuff my brain is doing to itself. a very silly situation!

anyway i think bel wouldn't be like 'gee getting shut of my regular set of problems sure is an interesting change of pace' he would be like 'WTF IS THIS SHIT ERSKIN CAN'T FOCUS HIS SPASTIC WEASEL EXCUSE OF A BRAIN ON ANYTHING FOR MORE THAN TEN SECONDS AT A TIME THIS IS THE WORST' after he has managed, in the course of the evening, to wash three dishes, start binding a set of journals, take out and edit a few old poems, wash a cup, make a snack, check his email seventeen times, leave the snack in the bathroom, paint his toenails, chat with galley, go outside and draw a bird on his door, look for his snack, make another snack, catch a mouse, lose the mouse in the office when he goes to try and get paperwork done, go visit pancho (leaving the second snack in the office), and built a tiny fort out of tongue depressors while talking about cartoons.

 

alternate— or additional-- suggestion, what if for the body swap episode we just started writing each other's characters? that might be fun.

 

yeah take your time mulling it over, it's gonna be a while till we're actually in a position to play it through. erskin in this universe has had six or seven years to get over being Paranoid Flinches McGee but i feel like getting his sensory intake jacked up would send him right back to his little desert den like NOPE I'M OUT BYE SOMEONE LET ME KNOW WHEN TALKING NOISES STOP BEING SO UNPLEASANT

if erskin ends up running things from his den via phone because he just does not want to cope with the outside world i don't think galley would stop teasing him about it for... basically forever.

...also everyone would get to enjoy the sad disaster that is navy au erskin's texting skills. i bet he uses a ton of emojis to compensate for the fact that he doesn't know how to spell half the words he wants to say. and is still in the hunt-and-peck stage of keyboard management.

 

i'm trying to like... write down what i remember of this evening. by the way. for reference about brains.

came home from root canal, put away some groceries that i'd bought on the way home from root canal, read fanfic, ate some tuna, chatted on tumblr about dentist shenanigans, pondered ice cream, took dog for walk, looked at a stick, looked at a tree that had a stick that looked like a face, took pictures of leaves, came back home, pondered drawing some stuff with chalk, re-adjusted pumpkin porch light, had more ice cream, chatted on tumblr again, more fanfic, finished a harry potter fic rec (that i started that morning before going to get my root canal), looked up some mad max fanfic as a change of pace from kingsman fanfic, got distracted by skimming for more martian fanfic, wandered all over the apartment looking at the plants, played with the dog, considered more ice cream, finally brushed teeth, went back and opened up five tabs of mad max fanfic, thought about making tooth pendants and looked at a bunch of molars on google image search, got polymer clay, looked at dental-related things on pintrest, was especially pleased by a chair the shape of a molar, got chopstick to help sculpt polymer clay, read mad max fanfic, went and fussed around with clay until tooth shaped (while chatting with tumblr again, i think this was about when i was laughing at the hate anon), put aside for baking later because the tuna meal from earlier left the toaster oven in a gross state, washed some dishes because kino asked me to, came back to pet the dog, the dog put his feet on my feet and i took thirty pictures of that, fussed with the clay tooth more, put more groceries away, read another fanfic, checked kintsugi to see if it was my turn to RP and wrote some posts, did a sweep of the house as it occurred to me more things might need to be cleaned besides dishes, got sick of cleaning real fast and returned to computer for more tumbls, went and actually finished the dishes while listening to a podcast about vampires, had another meal ( i think? cereal?), eventually moved to bedroom in halfassed hope i might draw something, did not draw anything, tumbld and kintsugid, worked on my felt dogs a bit more, rearranged supplies, tried to load up cartoons but my internet is shit in this room, dogs now in pile on windowsill, sewing needles ALSO HOPEFULLY on windowsill. blair came home, refused offers of snack-making. kino later came home, i went and patted her snakes while catching up with her about her trip, she accepted snack making, i made her a sandwich and both of us tea. more tumbls in and around all this, mostly trying to deal with the flood of poetry links in my askbox now. i am now sitting here with lukewarm tea and several slices of felt on my leg that should be a chihuahua in about a week. i might go to bed in a bit. after some more playing around on the internet.

i do not know what your days look like, j. but this is a pretty typical evening for me. usually it involves chatting with 3-4 people online but today mostly everyone was off doing other things.

 

okay random space navy ideas while they're still fresh in my brain:

• Lu's about 8 sweeps in this AU too and met Cloris at roughly the same time she does in the original timeline: long story short, everything was fine until the Cloris Nation attacked, and when she wanted to torment Lu the most, she vanished--INTO SPAAACE. Because if she can't keep the bad dreams out on planet, maybe ejecting herself into space would fix it. (this would also give her a good reason to not want to go back to Alternia in spite of really missing the ocean and being overall freaking terrified of space)
• Lu has tried lots of different ways to keep Cloris out of her braincase while on planet, but none of them really work because after awhile she starts building up a tolerance to stuff like coffee and sleeping pills and alcohol and stuff (indigos, man) and finally she tries stardust out of sheer desperation. Part of the reason she slingshots herself into the cosmos is because what if the stardust stops working, she literally has no idea what she'd try after that. Scary!
• I imagine that by pulling some strings and cashing in a few favors and just being plain sneaky, she was able to sneak aboard some ship under a false ID (and it helps that she can use her height and blood color and big ol' horns to make herself seem older)
• Unfortunately this gig doesn't last long, and there is an unnamed Disaster that results in her losing her horns and having to jettison herself away in this little escape pood
• The escape pod has a limited supply of food and water and oxygen and fuel and stuff, and so I imagine that by the time she runs into Erskin's ship (hopefully not literally, although I imagine the dent would look funny and also annoy Galley) she is basically running on fumes. I imagine the ship picks up a distress call, and oh look, this sad little pod out in space, let's see if there's anyone alive in it.
• Lu is alive! Pretty delirious from horn pain and withdrawal and exhaustion, but alive!
• I was thinking Lu could fall head over heels for Pancho, but given their age difference and that Lu is coming down off a drug, maybe it could go unrequited, at least at first.
• This wouldn't be a tragic thing, mind, just maybe Pancho going "oh god she's cute but I don't want to be a caverobber" and Lu being all "OH LOOK I DROPPED THIS MOTHERFUCKIN' PENCIL OuO" and insisting she's an old eight sweeps and overall being very sweet and flirty and pining a little, (I have this cute idea in my head where she wakes up for the first time on the ship and goes smooch-first at Pancho in that way some out-of-it patients do X)) but not in a way that'd generate a whole lot of angst--it's more of a running event than a plot point. They're going to be seeing a lot of each other, what with how banged up Lu is when she arrives and how un-fun coming down off the stardust is going to be.
• roach suggested that maybe Twitch and Lu could hit it off pale, which I think would work for lotsa reasons given that they both have trauma they need to work through at this point and hey--Twitch can be with someone her own age!
• Lu and Galley would kind of have a pale spades thing going on
• Lu could make herself useful on the ship pretty easily--she still has the animal empathy thing going on, which might be useful for detecting illness or injury in lusii or settling disputes (I also wanna say maybe her empathy is much more developed than it is in the normal boat trolls universe, to the point where the feelings go both ways instead of just flooding her pan all the time) and she's kinda at settling down into a role, even if it's an unfamiliar one like the kind of stuff Erskin does with air and water and critters and things
• she can also cook (GRUBCAKES :D) and clean and she has a bit of experience tinkering with boat engines and the like, which aren't the same as spaceships but I think she'd still do pretty well as someone's assistant at least.
• also I had this little plot idea where Erskin and Company are interacting with a ship's captain and Lu senses that he is smuggling some highly illegal wasp queen or a clutch of eggs of some dangerous critter that's usually exterminated on sight or immediately handed over to the Empire, that kind of thing.

so yeah! I dunno, a lot of these ideas aren't very developed, so they're certainly not set in stone or anything, but I thought I'd throw'em at you :D

 

yknow we could probably work lu into the plot real soon! because like, if she's in an escape pod, she could donk into the hull at any point and they'd be like 'wtf no one's supposed to be in this sector' or whatever

 

There is absolutely no hurry, whenever is good for you guys, I'm not chomping at the bit or anything X)

 

my personal plotty plans are, at a preference, that we wrap up the zombies arc with pancho and loggan saving the day and everyone being very happy*, maybe a big ol' wake bonfire party for everyone to get closure on dead and messed-up comrades. next they cruise into the nearest crossroads / travel hub for restocking and debriefing and... whatever, and we do the miniplot where erskin gets pale-roofied by one of wavebane's agents, because why let him catch a break ever. after that if you wanna to we can stick lu in, or we could go pick another plot out of a hat.

(i am really enjoying the heck out of the space navy au CAN YOU TELL)

*except whitey, who fucks off sulkily

 

important suggestion for body swap episode: erskin rearranges all of bel's books to go in order by color, notby subject, title, or date of creation (all irrelevant compared to having the green book by the orange-grey). if bel interferes he gets bitten on the arm.

 

Id like to get back to the space navy au soon, btw. When youre feeling a little more wordsy, maybe we can hash out where you're stuck?

 

Suggestion: during the ep w the pale roofies, what if Jethro is passing thru, sees what's happening to a total stranger, and maneuvers erskin to safety? And erskin insists on macking on him after that. And later they sort of have this problem of 'that THING i had w that dude under really sketchy chemically-altered circumstances was awesome. But wow im probably just thinking that bc drugs.'

....mmaybe later, then, if jethro shows up on a transfer w sigmah, he and erskin spot eachother and its like 'OH SHIT'.

.....it has got to be implausible porno levels of circumstance that involve you having to be a medical attendant to that hot guy you met in a bar once and can't stop thinking about. And who isn't just mangled on the inside but is also physically fucked up and vulnerable. And who you're going to be seeing, a lot, under heavy sedation.

Jethro wins the I Swear I'm Not Trying To Be Predatory Creep Here Oh My God award.

Additional note i really like Gardener for (one of) erskin's main adult title. The gardener. Probably a title you see among technicians and alterniaformers, like Gardener Holdfast or Gardener Lighthand, not Captain His Grace Etc Lord Aspera the Gardener.

Hmm maybe greenfin could be the modifier. As a pun on green thumb and a extra dig at the juxtaposition of royalty and dirt-grubbing.