#2: “to show my mastery over nature i shall now keep this black mamba in a ten gallon tank”

[cthulhusstepmom]

Price is so right for chucking soaps freezer meal those things are crimes against humanity also love that gaz is an accessory to the crime 😂

BUT IMMA BE HONEST REPTILE GUY SOAP IS OCCUPYING A NOT INSIGNIFICANT AMOUNT OF MY BRAIN!! Do you think hes a snake guy? A lizard guy? Turtle dude maybe? Dude is 1000% in love w crocs and gators tho. Probably what sparked his love of all things scaly when he was younger. What do you wanna bet he was one of the kids chasing frogs and looking for tadpoles throughout childhood? Probably stumbled over a common lizard basking in the sun while glomping thru a park or something and spent the afternoon falling more and more in love.

Consumed any and every morsel of age appropriate reptile info, eventually became a dinosaur kid etc. but also carried that love of them into adulthood. Imma bet he always wanted one as a pet, but bc he enlisted so young he never got the chance. Maybe he gets inspired by the communal tank to start looking into it 👀👀

Anyways i love ur fish lore so much ❤️❤️❤️

You are(as always) right on my wavelength!!

In my head Soap's dad is a reptile person and his mom is an animal person so he definitely gets it from somewhere. When he was young, Soap's parents kept all the herps locked up, both for his safety and the reptiles' God knows Soap was an exuberant and curious kiddo. It's only after they find him in the backyard flat out on his stomach at 4 years old, hand outstretched and a wild little lizard sitting in his palm that they realize just how empathetic he is. After that he gets to play with the reptiles more, always supervised of course. But he grows up surrounded by scaly critters, the equivalent of his childhood dog is a black and white Argentine tegu named Buddy who's turning 23 this year. He spends his days running around and getting into everything, carefully bringing back his catches to take pictures of before running them back to put exactly where he found them.

One day he comes home from primary school with a bloody nose and a black eye, discipline slip clutched in his hand. At recess some of his classmates had been throwing rocks at a little frog that had wandered into the playground and, when Soap had told them to stop, threw a book and ended up killing the little amphibian and little Soap beat the shit out of them with limited success(it was four against one you gotta give the little man credit). Soap's parents show up to the meeting with the headmaster and the parents of the other students with Primrose: a 17 1/2 foot reticulated python. After that meeting they go to the zoo and little Soap declares that one day he's going to have a crocodile that he can feed bullies to.

Having enlisted at such a young a young age Soap doesn't have many animals to his name, just two. A 14 year old ball python he rescued named Martha and a 3 year old bearded dragon named Bowser, both left in the capable care of his parents.

While he doesn't have the facilities to have a reptile on base and, despite popular belief, he does have impulse control....sometimes, he somehow ends up with quite the collection. The thing about soldiers, especially stupid ass new recruits, is that they make a lot of bad decisions (I mean they are soldiers so their track record is already in the negative). And Soap can't bear to see any animal suffer from improper care so he ends up operating a rescue out of his quarters. He's taken in everything from corn snakes to baby asian water monitors and on one very memorable occasion a surprisingly chill sidewinder.

He keeps it all very top secret, the only one he trusts is Laswell she takes care of feeding everybody when he's gone. It's not that he doesn't trust his team but it wouldn't be the first time he'd had a usually rational CO go ballistic. One time when he'd first enlisted and he was missing home, he'd found a little garden snake and was playing with it when his lieutenant at the time had seen, ordered him to attention and shot the poor snake in the head laughing as he did. He's learned the hard way that machismo doesn't mix well with his hobby.

Right now he's lined up a home for a little leopard gecko and a bearded dragon both with pretty bad mbd. A little more difficult to find a place for is the lavender false water cobra he's named Hugo and the 7 foot albino labyrinth burmese python he's calling Wee Man.

With the fish tank he's starting to get comfortable with the idea of bringing the team in on his escapades. But then Ghost shares his trauma with him and it terrifies him. He cannot let Ghost see his snakes, not because he's worried his Lt will hurt them, but because they'll hurt Ghost.