Dykes in Dungeons episode 1: SCAV_crew

The following contains 18+ content - turn back if you are not of age.

In particular, Ina’s section has explicit sexual content.

…

This is the first post in a series I’ve been vaguely thinking about doing for a while now, but was spurred on by a recent itch.io bundle focused on dungeon-crawler TTRPGs. I’m calling it Dykes in Dungeons, a series of narratives about fucked up gals fighting through/like hell and making out afterward (or during). Think actual play but make it solo, low-production-value, and more lesbian.

My first, mmm, call it a serial is going to be SCAV_crew, based on the fascinating, brutalist DEATHGRIND!!MEGASTRUCTURE by Ostrichmonkey Games.

To give a short brief, this game is set in a far future of ludicrous scale, particularly a posthuman fortress called the CTY_enclave hurtling at high speeds through a much larger (galactically-sized) structure simply known as the TOWER. You play as SCAVENGERS from the CTY_enclave who go out into the various LAYERS of the TOWER to find salvage and artifacts from its creators - a dangerous lifestyle requiring characters to face down biomechanical horrors, extradimensional intruders, and the fearsome MONITORS who act as agents of the FRACTALDEATHMACHINE devouring and twisting the TOWER and all within according to its alien whims.

It’s a fairly simple setup as far as game-mechanical scaffolding goes, mostly either d6 rolls or vague flavor effects - but ooh that flavor, delectable! You really get a sense of the shadowy, crawling unnervingness of even the more ‘hospitable’ areas of the setting. And of course, given I’m going to RE_format the game into a single-player narrative rather than a GM’d system, that simplicity just serves to give me creative freedom, in balance with some guidance and inspiration.

I’ll start by establishing our characters and a bit about their places in the CTY_enclave. So without further ado, let’s begin…

analyzing...
[ERROR: Data Corruption Substantial]

YEAR: 23,8**
DATETIME: **\**, 22:00
LOCATION: CTY_enclave, approaching TOWER LAYER 5**2

searching...
POST_human designation C3 L35 T3 found:
CTY_enclave unit 606 - current designation HABITAT, trade sub-block

L35 ducks under a couple of pipes crossing the corridor at a perfectly inconvenient height, giving a slight ‘oof’ as one of the pylon spikes protruding from her spine bumps against the lower conduit. She briefly considers - why are there pipes there, what could possibly be flowing through them that’s more important than walkable halls anyway? Ah well, best move on.

She reaches a door, flicking out a key tendril to interface with the machine and get access. Once it’s open, she’s immediately greeted by the scents of machine oil and fried dough - ah, yes, the market. Proceeding through, she’s met by various merchants trying to sell her various junk, but she knows where she’s going. First stop is the only data-merchant she halfway trusts anymore, Raken’s.

The front desk clerk recognizes her right away, “go on in, he’s in the back” flashing on their face-monitor.

Mr. Raken is a large, beefy individual, if it can be called ‘beef’ when it’s covered in the plates of a chitinsteel shell. He lights up when he sees L35 walk in. Not literally for the most part, though a few sensor nodules do illuminate - no, he looks up from his tinkering and seems to get 5-10% more alive. “Hello,” he speaks in modulated chittter, “welcome in my good friend.”

“Hello Mr. Raken,” L35 responds evenly, walking up to one section of the room’s wrap-around work table. “Got something good for you today, must be since it was encrypted when I found it.” She reaches into her bag and pulls out a roughly spherical mass of hard, matte biomaterial, a little like some kind of egg, but with discontinuities visible where outer layers have been partially cracked away. “This better be worthwhile, I got turned around on my way to a terminal UNIT to crack the data.”

“Ah yes, hence your later-than-usual arrival,” Mr. Raken notes. He leans in to inspect the calcified data cyst, mouth moving through multiple expressions in sequence, as L35 extends a key tendril to his terminal to deliver her decryption logs. “At a cursory glance… I can give you 900 Mynt now, maybe more once I look through and see if there’s anything juicy on here.”

L35 knows what her work is worth, though, so she says “1,200.”

“Ah, you called me. Thiscycle’s exchange rates it would be 1,000 standard. I’m prepared to offer 1,100 though,” Raken responds. “This has the look of a fascinating specimen.”

“Deal,” L35 speaks, “You have my address for my commission on specific files.” She takes the money and leaves.

Next up on L35’s plan is one of the stalls that smells like frying oil, surprisingly enough. It’s not just for food, though Mar1ska’s recipes are delectable too. “Heyyy prettygal,” Mar1 exclaims as L35 walks up. That nickname, she’s genuinely unsure whether Mar1ska’s flirting or what.

“Hey yourself. Your best steelskin, please” L35 responds, setting down the Mynt for it. Mar1 nods with an electronic chirp. It presses out a sheet of raw dough, dispenses some silvery-bluish nanite paste into the center from a cylindrical canister, and rolls the whole thing up before putting it into the frier. L35’s mouth waters a little at the fragrant cooking, she can’t help herself, and Mar1 teases her for it. Once the frying is done, Mar1 picks the dough out of the oil with a metallic hand, pops it in a bag, and gives it to L35.

“You’ll want to eat that within the next ten minutes for the augment to be ready by the time we breach the next LAYER. Though I’m sure you would do that anyway, because my cooking is just too good,” Mar1 notes as L35 turns to leave. L35 internally admits Mar1ska has her there, it has perfected the art of cheap POST_human cuisine.

searching...
POST_human designation Azdaja 737 found:
CTY_enclave unit 2209 - current designation FACILITY

The ancient factory isn’t half-bad, Azdaja thinks to herself. Usually you hear about these places being dangerous and uncomfortable, but this one is almost pleasant compared to what she deals with as a scav. Step step step, mind the gap, down the stairs, keep going, duck under the actuators… Really nothing major. And there’s a control room! Perfect!

She’s able to get inside through a wedged-open door, finding herself in a space made significantly more claustrophobic than the factory floor by its various terminals and nexus of bio-equipment. She heads to the back and finds the emergency power, just a switch and a dial to get it active again.

As the subsector powers up, she’s greeted by an electrical whirring and something else gurgling like flowing fluid. She searches all the terminals, but can’t get any of them to activate, when a hoarse-sounding voice makes a wordless groan. Her eyes and sensor-mods flicker across the room, but there’s nobody else there, except - in the midst of the rooted mass of fleshmetal, something pulses. It’s almost recognizable, so she gets a closer look, only to realize it’s not unlike the rising and falling of a breathing person’s chest.

Suddenly, a clanking sound, and some of the metal panels surrounding the ‘lungs’ open up, revealing an emaciated human-typical face with bloodshot eyes and numerous cables linked into its cranium. It’s kind of horrible, moreso when it tries to speak, “Eemer-ghenni paowerrrrr aactivee.” The dialect is antiquated but understandable; the biomachine just sounds so sickly. It shouldn’t be able to speak right now, Azdaja realizes, after untold ages deactivated and decaying - but its protocols force it to try anyway.

“Can you put a readout of the factory floor on one of the terminals?” Azdaja asks.

The thing’s eyes shut for a moment, and it whimpers, “processsssing… Errorrrrr.” It begins launching into a trace of the specific errors encountered, but quickly breaks down into coughing. Fuck.

Azdaja has had enough of this screwed-up user interface design. As intuitively as blinking and nearly as fast, she codes up and injects a worm into its processes, probing into the bio-machinery’s lower-level data. There’s plenty of errors and corruptions to navigate around, but she’s able to put the head’s frontal lobe into what should hopefully be a pleasantly fuzzy sort of trance state free from the strictures of duty and programming. She tells the panel that hides the face to shut again for good measure, then gets to work digging through the facility database. Much of the machinery is broken or of unknown status, but she can find a nanoweaver that is confirmed more or less good to go just on the available emergency power supply.

She has that machine light up and heads out of the control room to its location. It’s not hard to find, well, not hard for a scav; she comes to a large piece of equipment with a long thin slot running through its frame. Now for the hard part - Azdaja unfolds her wings, membranes now tattered, and gets to work detaching them. It’s tough to do for something so integrated into her physiology (if she ever has the time and Mynt she should sit down and design a version with more easily replacable membrane), the wound leaks blood and a little grease, but she gets the frames popped off and cleaned of the bad material.

She takes a few canisters of plastiskin and slots them into ports in the machine, adds a cell of much more valuable TENSOR_silk too, inputs the wings’ blueprint files and some notes on advanced neotextile fabrication she found in a vault a few LAYERS back, and finally adds the wing frame. It’s simple enough to activate the machine with her still-running worm, and thirty minutes of idly sifting through looted data-nodes later it outputs her new pair of wings.

She puts them back on, dispatches her local healing nanites to the connection points, and soon she’s good to go. Now just to head back and switch off the emergency power–

And she’s interrupted by a message, a CTY_enclave-wide alert. There’s a UNIT infected by the FRACTALDEATHMACHINE, which of course has an evac order. Apparently at least one POST_human is lost in there, though - she considers for a moment, and decides her wings are getting tested out sooner than she’d planned.

searching...
POST_human designation Ina K444Z found:
CTY_enclave unit 3313 - current designation MONOLITH

Black stone, with traces of metal and light running through it - forged into one whole. It’s a thing of beauty through the eyes of a shadowed soul. Ina reflects that if she can see the beauty then maybe she’s shadowed too.

It’s unknown what exactly the Architects used the MONOLITH for, so the UNIT doesn’t get a whole lot of visitors. Still, Ina locked the doors to this particular overlook chamber behind her. As she runs fingers over the room’s various surfaces, her body leaves glowing lines of light, drawings, runes and sigils pulled from intuition beyond memory. Each node, she crests with a few projector sticks, candles or incense whose digital flame pervades the room with hazy recursive processes. She inhales, exhales; scans and transmits.

It’s quiet. Still. As her mind’s ripples fade into tranquility, she rolls out a sleeping mat in the center of the room. Autonomous motions, a calling. She lies down facing the inky obsidian of the MONOLITH itself, closing her eyes and drifting.

She knows where this is going, can feel the twinges of excitement already, but there’s no need to rush it.

Clicks and whirrs from her heart, and

she can feel her broken edges inside but

in this moment she feels whole.

…

A while passes. It’s briefly interrupted by the ping from the CTY_enclave network alerting it that they’re one hour from LAYER_breach, but the distraction is momentary.

It feels warmth and pressure, entangling urges. Realizes its perspective on itself has shifted from ‘she’ to ‘it,’ good.

It wriggles out of its top, unfolds its kerachitin armor plates. Took several LAYERS’ scavving to save up enough spare biomaterials for its breasts, it had better get its use out of them - and it does, grabbing the flesh, kneading and pleasuring, drawing out little gasps.

A slight moan. It pulls down its cargo pants, now. Fingernails slide across seams in the shell.

Ohh, it’s wet. The petals and tendrils unfurling from between its legs are slick with viscous, slightly sticky synthesized lubricant. It gets its fingers good and coated, just slowly exploring its pleasure zone. Another soft moan, both vocal and on the local transmission frequencies - it’s not thinking of it right now, too lost, but it did set up isolation for this viewing chamber on the digital level too.

As it strokes and rubs little circles, it finds impulses coming to its blurry mind. Not words, just motions, and soon it’s adorning its own torso with another sigil of both light and its own wetness.

The oldest interface. Ina didn’t do this at the MONOLITH to try to learn the thing’s secrets, but rather to learn more of its own secrets - but either way, something is reaching out to it. A shadow to a shadow. It’s not sure what’s up with that, but that’s all right, it thrives on the esoteric.

It also thrives on pleasure, though, so it decides to pick up the pace a bit. Fingers along tendrils, hips bucking into the touch, probing deep into the petals. It’s building up, moaning and breathing heavier, the approaching orgasm cutting clarity through the data-incense haze.

As it falls towards divine bliss, it feels just momentarily something else - instinctive, impulsive activation of a power it has used before. No time to figure out just what digital construct has been rendered physical, though, because it’s coming.

searching...
ERROR, data corrupted.
...rescanning
.
.
.
CTY_enclave unit 1267 - current designation DECAY

Azdaja swoops over the infected UNIT, trying to spot the poor sap who didn’t evac. FDM-spikes flare in incomprehensible patterns, eating away at the UNIT’s structure, and she knows the CTY_enclave’s immune response will begin in earnest soon. The place is looking pretty corrupted already, hallways and structures formed into meltily alien shapes, repeating on themselves in disconcerting harmony. Wait - there!

She spots her rescuee, clearly infected but still savable. Part of their arm and shoulder are growing into a MACHINE!!GOD’s birthing pod, which she slashes open with a talon, careful to avoid getting its liquid-crystal oils on her own body. One final swoop to grab them and fly them to a relatively uninfected sub-block, and she’s able to administer infection treatment. When she got the alert earlier and decided to be foolhardy, she of course picked up the relevant medical autoinjector. Only one, so it better work. She presses it to the chest, near the heavily infected shoulder, and clicks the button, sending cleansing nanites through the victim’s body.

Something roils. They’re still growing and mutating, but at least not into a MACHINE!!GOD. Teeth become fangs; a gap opens in the chest surrounded by metallic rings; the face on the side of the injection is covered in some sort of bony shell. Is this a remnant effect of the infection, or was her autoinjector faulty? She’s not sure.

The body twists further, growing into a muscular, ogre-like shape. Azdaja is a little unsure whether this one is really ‘saved,’ until its single eye opens and meets her face. It? They? groan low, then speak “don’t leave me behind” in a raspy, feminine-deep voice.

Azdaja nods. “I won’t, though I’m unsure whether my wings can carry you. I know the way out though.” She leads, they get to their feet and follow.

Then the UNIT collapses, the CTY_enclave beginning to jettison the wound. They’re nearly there, nearly to the safety of the adjacent FACILITY, but the half-beast can’t quite move fast enough on their new legs. Azdaja encourages them, and they both reach the widening fissure between UNITS; Azdaja could fly across with ease, but her rescuee doesn’t have that convenience. However, moments later a new sound joins the crashes and groans of twisting metal as the device embedded in their chest begins to spin up.

It’s glowing, whirring, little sparks shooting out as it reaches full power - and then they’re not here but there, displaced through space itself.

Azdaja leaps into flight, smiling, “oh! They can teleport…”

…

Once the danger is past, Azdaja and the half-beast find shelter in the FACILITY. “Do you remember much?” Azdaja asks.

“Not really, no. I don’t feel like… I don’t feel like that was me who walked into the DECAYing UNIT, I’m not the same,” they respond.

“So I’m presuming you don’t have a name or anything,” Azdaja notes. “Pronouns?”

“Fuckin’ pronouns… I remember a bit of what being touched by the FDM felt like. Huh, I know what the FDM is. Anyway, I feel like… I feel like a thing,” it muses, complex emotions evident in its voice. “So it/its is fine for now at least.”

“All right,” Azdaja says calmly.

“As for name…” it continues, and whirrs its teleportation core a little. “I think I’m Polly. Polly Cyclotron.”

end transcription part 1.

This was a lot of fun to write! Good game, good inspiration. Biomechanical posthuman things are such a vibe. Next time, our SCAV_crew meets up fully, and the new LAYER is breached!