Chapter Text
The first thing you think when you wake up is cod, that was embarrassin, im reely glad nobody saww that. The second thing—well, the second thing is annoyance at your appallingly bad headache, but that hardly counts as a proper thought, does it? So your second proper thought is when you get a good look at your hands, and it's roughly, Wwhat the fuck suddenly im a wwinter? After that you notice that the sun is up, which you can be excused from not picking up on right away on account of your skin doesn't feel like it's on fire, that being what ought to happen to any normal, healthy troll caught out in full sunlight.
You think you need to go have a lie down for a bit.
You peel your sorry protesting carcass up off the deck of your ship, with one last sour glance at the rigging that you fell—that tripped you, clearly, fucking traitorous rope. Surely once you get below decks and maybe pour yourself a stiff drink and fix your hair, you'll feel better about all this.
Only then you actually get into your cabin and shut the door, leaving the weirdly comfortable sunlight behind, and in its absence you discover something else: you're glowing. Your skin isn't just frosty white, it's providing your own fucking illumination as you stretch out one hand to contemplate this development. This is fucked right up, like something out of a trashy novel. You tongue your fangs a bit, but you've always had a mouth full of elegant little razors, so it's hard to tell if there's a difference. You imagine yourself ripping out the throat of some lowblood with them, and ick, honestly.
...Then you imagine yourself sipping blood out of a goblet, like a troll with class. Your digestive sac growls like the littlest horrorterror and your mouth fucking waters. Well. This could get kind of awkward, couldn't it?
Oh, fuck, you hope that thing about mirrors isn't true.
You might possibly bolt for your nearest one, just a little, and god you look like a panicky disaster with your glasses all skewed funny and your hair sticking up stiff on one side apparently because you bled into it but that's fixable, right, at least you can see yourself. You rinse the blood out and start running a comb through to see if you can tease it back into better shape. The glasses are pretty much a loss, but maybe you were about due to change your style anyhow. You're probably going to need a whole new wardrobe, aren't you? That's the kind of challenge you're happy to rise to.
While you study the current options in your closet—some of your old flarping gear would have been perfect, wouldn't it, if you hadn't grown so much in the last couple sweeps—you sort of try to put it together in your head what must have happened. You took a nasty fall in the midst of doing some maintenance work up at the top of the mainmast (tall ships have class, okay, it doesn't matter that they're fiddlier and trickier in spots than those drone-produced heavy engine monsters), and had an awfully bad landing. Given the evidence, it seems likely that what happened was in fact you died, for the first time since the lot of you won the game.
All things considered, you did a pretty smart job of it, actually. Nobody was there to see you be a broken-up mess, and now you've had a chance to put yourself back together, and is there anything more tragically romantic than rainbow drinkers? You're pretty sure there is not, given the smashing box office success of that thing Kar likes to cry over, In Which A Young Lowblood, Bored With Her Meaningless Existence, Attempts To Auspisticize Between A Repressed Rainbow Drinker And A Smolderingly Attractive Werebeast, Resulting In Both Of Them Waxing Red For Her, et cetera.
Still, you're not above admitting you might need a little bit of help.
CA: kan
CA: kan are you awwake
CA: kan you gotta help me
CA: i really need some good advvice right noww
CA: an im pretty sure youre the only one qualified
GA: Of Course
GA: Allow Me To Drop Everything And Spring To Your Aid
GA: Surely There Is Nothing More Valuable I Could Do With My Time
CA: wwoww thats the nicest thing i evver heard you say
GA: It Is Human Sarcasm
GA: Intended To Convey Bored Contempt
CA: youre too good to be still messin wwith human things kan
CA: lets just skip all that nonsense an movve on to the important stuff
CA: here take a look at these
CA: an tell me wwhat you think
CA: alternia.etsy.com/listing/612.../
CA: alternia.etsy.com/listing/102.../
CA: alternia.etsy.com/listing/413.../
GA: This Is Your Emergency
GA: You Wish Me To Help You Choose A Cape
CA: look its important ok
CA: classic part a the look an all
CA: i kinda like the second one
CA: but i cant decide if its tryin too hard havvin a bright linin like that
GA: What Classic Look Exactly Are You Attempting To Replicate
CA: romantic rainboww drinker aristocrat a course
GA: .....
GA: ...........
GA: Why
CA: the case you gavve me finally wwent full blowwn
GA: I Do Not Recall Giving You Anything Recently
GA: Except Perhaps My Attention At The Start Of This Conversation
GA: Which Appears To Have Been A Grave Error
CA: gravve error i like that
CA: you think i should be tryin for death puns
CA: that might be a nice touch
GA: I Think I Am About To Regret Asking This
GA: But Do You Mean To Tell Me You Have Become A Rainbow Drinker
CA: a rainboww drinker in need a fashion advvice kan
CA: i need a new wwardrobe ovver here
CA: an the cape is like the cornerstone a that enterprise
GA: I Wish I Were More Surprised That This Is Your Primary Concern
GA: Get The One With The Purple Lining
GA: That Shade Of Blue Would Not Work With Your Eyes
GA: Also
GA: Do Not Kill Any Of Our Acquaintances With Your New Hungers
GA: You Can Live Quite Comfortably On One Or Two Donors With Hearty Constitutions
GA: And That Will Prevent Me From Needing To Kill You Again
CA: its a nice shade a blue
CA: but i guess ill trust your judgment on this
CA: so on the subject a donors
CA: you got any recommendations howw to get somethin goin in that area
CA: i mean howwd you land vris anywway
GA: Excuse Me
GA: I Have To
GA: Go
Okay, so Kan is still too shy about her thing with Vris to give you any real hints, you'll manage on that score. At least she got you straightened out on the matter of the cape. The rest will take care of itself, right? You have practice at building swank outfits around that one perfect accessory.
You spend a little while longer shopping, and then spend some time brooding over how unfair it is that delivery out to your shiphive takes so long. The brooding's good practice, though, isn't it? Pretty sure that goes with the territory, all the romance of being tormented by your daywalking affliction. You try brooding in the mirror a bit. Oh, that's lovely.
Eventually hunger gets to you, and you realize when you go rifle through your nutrition block that you're going to have to take this blood-drinking thing seriously: there is not a damn thing in your thermal hull that looks appealing. Unfortunately your shiphive's location is inconvenient for a hunting rainbow drinker in addition to being a terrible spot for express delivery. Seadwellers tend to give each other a lot of space, given how violent you all are even when you're not ravening undead. You personally exacerbated that tendency by doing lunch duty for Gl'ybgolyb for all those perigees; by now, it's a good long haul to get to the nearest living trolls, and you're already hungry.
You swim for your supper. It is an arduous and frankly undignified affair that includes an octopus, a fat seal, and a fistfight with a shark. You don't want to talk about it.
What you have discovered, by the time you haul yourself back on board, dripping and in need of hair gel, is that you need to find a donor sooner rather than later for the sake of both your dignity and your palate. You're going to need a plan.
You are Eridan Ampora, and you are a master of plans.
You figure, step one has to be research. You knew your own abilities, your charms, before this happened. Now you just have to figure out what kind of bonus talents you get to go along with your romantic new affliction. You sit down at your husktop and queue up some movies on the subject. It's all fiction and whatever, but you can sort through it for common themes that put you on the right track, yeah?
Mind you some of the common themes are just plain hoofbeastshit. Like how the rainbow drinkers in movies don't show up in mirrors (thank fuck that one was fake, ugh) or like how they stumble around blind and mostly helpless in the dark when you know Kan doesn't have problems like that. The bit with the bewitching powers, though, that's pretty good. You wouldn't mind that, being able to gaze soulfully into someone's eyes and have them helpless in the face of your magnetism. You really will have to give that one a go.
It takes approximately three quarters of forever before all the stuff you ordered arrives. By that time you are thoroughly sick of the taste of everything that bleeds and lives near enough your shiphive to be easily hunted. You have also watched the better movies in your queue about six times each. It is about damn time you get out of here.