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

well hey, while you're doing your own thing, i'm getting plenty of time in playing with myself :^Y

 

oh btw how relevant is this to bel's personal private times

 

Noted! I get the giggles around the excessively rings-and-studs thing, esp the chest pieces w rings that are like, nipple glasses. But i am sitting guiltily on the sidelines with horuss when it comes to working-harness sorts of straps and bridles. It's pretty! And pony play does some interesting shit with redirecting function. And the gear looks elegant and meaningful rather than 'your pecs have been naughty and are now in leather jail'. Idk! Fetish stuff has so many different aspects to suit so many different tastes.

Navy au Erskin /might/ get into a taming-fantasy scenario, in terms of getting off on being the one tied up, but it'd have to be really gently done. 'You're worthy and pretty and i am tying you up to keep you to care for and employ, not to trap and torture.' Might actually help him deal with some traumas? Might actually already be doing that w lainey.

Being patted between the horns and told he's a good boy who's done a good job isnt exactly a blackrom thing but bel's starting to pick up on how deeply sincere, untrollish displays of regard affect him. Serious, direct Attention he can't wave off or joke around with or redirect to a task. Dont know if that counts as a praise kink? It'd sure keep him off balance, though, which is fun for blackrom.

Regular story erskin got a service kink installed straight into his conception of flush romance, as well as getting flushed love and sex scrambled up with a chemical high, and is still probably super vulnerable to abuse in that quadrant. He wants desperately to be useful, because being used has such a great payoff, and being alone (bereft, rejected) is such a painful, nightmare-ridden ice hell. Yay, headfuck problems!

 

I wonder if genuine relentless, ruthless praise counts as blackrom snark. X)

All this bondagey stuff reminds me of a neat restraint I saw once when I was writing a thing, where it's basically a big soft leather straitjacket for your arms. For some reason I couldn't find the picture I found a million years ago (it was of a very muscley dude posed a lot like the model below) but essentially it looks like this:

 

haha nice handbag

 

*squeaky bel voice* DAD IT'S ART, I'M TAKING AN ART CLASS

 

on a completely unrelated note, about bel and galley's thing in the navy au. in this book series, the imperial radch, the ships and stations are very advanced AIs, people, who have 'favorites', particular officers they like. the protag says about it, like, a favored officer's clothes always fit, and their tea never gets cold, and no room is ever the wrong temperature, and the doors to the lifts always open just as they walk up, and the incense they like is always freshly on hand. and all they notice of it is that they're comfortable— more comfortable on that ship than anywhere else.

galley isn't quite smooth enough, i think, or fawning, and obviously they're trolls so giving each other a hard time is expected behavior even from flush crushes. but i really like the idea that this process happens to bel, as they settle in. foods he likes get ordered and served more frequently, his computers never lag, there's never a lack of blue dye for him to use and it's in his exact cobalt, not the standard caste approximation. the coolers he's near most frequently are stocked with his preferred ice cream and sandwiches. the lighting in the blocks he uses come on as he walks in and to the exact degree he likes. his sopor's always the right temperature and concentration.

and then—word gets around on the helmsnet that galley (of all ships!) favors him, and he gets marked as a good dude, sympathetic and trustworthy, willing to bend rules unto treason to treat helmsmen as people, and firmly associated with mad aspera— this starts happening on stations he visits, too. he visits somewhere he'd been before, or meets up with a troop carrier he used to go around in, and is like 'wow this place is a lot more pleasant and efficient than i remember'.

 

in regards to erskin, i like the idea of a silent tug-of-war between captains and abused helmsmen over whether or not they've got to dock at the sunslammer. if that's the carrier that's in the area, tough shit, you'd be subject to suspicion for delaying transport to wherever you were ordered off to. even if the transport's got a reputation for fucking with captains, ignoring chains of command, killing off officers and even ensigns that were later found to be monstrous sleazebags, and confiscating any helmsman who didn't have impeccable paperwork. especially then. so a handful of honorable old battleaxes out there think the sunslammer's a fucking hoot, and the rest of the fleet officers are increasingly sweaty about never getting stuck in the same parsec. and of course the helmsmen are cautiously delighted.

it's only been a couple sweeps, though, so i think their reputation's just starting to coalesce? probably lets them keep getting the drop on assholes like hardcase with helmsmen like twitch. it'll be harder in ten years, when bad captains dock already prepared for a brawl.

 

yep it's just for fun! i can set the scene and we can get it done fast, or we can just say 'bel handled it, there was a little shouting, twitch threw a guy at the wall and was pleased with herself.' and start from them walking triumphantly back out of medbay. i'd be happy to get back to more erskin/bel/pancho stuff, frankly, because, adorbs.

 

to be a BIG NERD, sapphire and rubies are the same gemstone, corundum / aluminum oxide, just with slightly different impurities. high concentrations of chromium make for red sapphires, which get called rubies once they hit a certain hue. that's actually one of the cutest jokes about the character Garnet, i think, that sapphires and rubies are the same thing.

anyway bel would easily be able to find blue-violet sapphires. they can even be cultured, and of course asteroids can turn up with gemstones in them— olivine / peridot's pretty frequent, apparently.



when stripping asteroids for minerals and metals, they'd commonly turn up nickel and iron and tin, less commonly copper and silver, rarely platinum and gold, i believe. i don't know about zinc or mercury. the minerals would be metamorphic and igneous, varying by the history and formation of the asteroid: whether it was a chunk of magma from a planetary core, or whether it was a bunch of space dust and junk that had just gotten packed together over a billion years... water ice would be a great find, since making water is a nuisance that involves fucking around with your air supply and can also get you blown up. gas ices like hydrogen and oxygen would just go into ship circulation after some scrubbing. toxic and noble gasses would i think be too rare to worry about inhaling but don't quote me. still, the fancier the atom, the less there's going to be of it.

as for radioactivity, i don't know, it would probably vary by asteroid, but presumably trolls have some way to deal with that, because handwavium.

i forgot why i was jotting all this down. SCIENCE. science and my huge kink for asteroid mining.

 

i think galley would also be pleased to slot things into place for bel, and to have someone who appreciated precision and correctness, especially the precision and correctness galley was able to supply. not strict adherence to cruel and illogical rules, but being happy that the lights were just so and that all his appliances were maintained perfectly so as to never rattle or buzz and that his clothing orders were quietly adjusted in the make spaces so as to come out perfect and itch-free the first time, and to be perfectly color matched.

erskin definitely doesn't recognize most of his strengths and talents. he's shitty at introspection, not at all able to make objective assessments of anything, haphazardly educated, and is convinced that he's just barely hanging on to competence by his clawtips. i think he's proud of how hard he works, because he knows that he can compensate for a lot that way, and proud of being there to fix things and smooth the way for people with more technical jobs to do their work more efficiently. and he's proud of his biomes, though he doesn't really understand that the bulk of the credit is on him and not on his crew. he's inclined to see most praise as dutiful ass-kissing, while accepting most criticism as smarter people calling it like they see it.

 

ok! i think it would be fun if all the ex-infected are as sweet and mellow as bel was— maybe he went down the hardest because reasons but is popping back to normal fastest due to sturdy blueblood constitution. so all the patients are just mildly puzzled about why anyone would be unhappy about anything, in contrast to the regular trolls who are jittery, aggressive, and near-meltdown from the sudden release of more than a week's nightmare tension.

 

i conked out for an hour or two and just woke up. should probably do some work. enjoy your puppy!