Intro wall of text, there is a heavy, heavy narrative focus in this, we will be using this and music to really fill in the cracks.
It's not for most people, for sure
'Well girls, I'm heading out.' Railsette stretched her lean body into a symphony of cracking joints, then turned to the other three dollsteaks: naked, wasted, drooling, entwined like post-orgasmic cephalopods -- a writhing mural of destructive pleasures. Their warm smell lifted above the aroma of candle wax, a bouquet of well-seasoned female musk with just a dash of cheap solvent.
'The ol' somatophrenia . . . it's kinda next-level today, yeah?' Railsette zipped up her boots. She was only yakking at the metal walls of the freight elevator, at the intricate graffiti embellishing every surface, at the technicolor forest of guttered candles ringing the love pile. Just soaking up the echo. Her roommates were far too blitzed for entry-level banter right now.
'Arm's pining for a little visit to the Sisters. Only a quality hit'll do when she's like this. Dunno know if any of you caught wind . . . but a little birdie told me they've been cooking up some crazy new shit.'
Somebody moaned.
The Sisters of the Amniotic Lens: a coven of dimension witches who peddled exotic dope as a sideline. They were skeevy as hell, but they had their uses -- and the witches felt precisely the same way about their lab rat clientele. Railsette's arm was an unfortunate side-effect of this symbiosis, yet another canvas for the Sisters' distorted whims. Once flesh and bone, it was now a corded mass of green muscle made of stuff like living metal. Or was it plastic?
'By the way, any of you girls manage to unlock that bike-puzzle thing on Level 8? No? Well, I just might have an idea how to crack it. My arm's got some kinda weird affinity with the thing, you see.' She patted the cool non-flesh of her left forearm with her human hand. 'Yeah. The gift that keeps on giving. Gonna go put it to the full test. Just a jot off the path to Grandma's House, fifteen minutes max. Then we'll see what goodies the Sisters have got.'
Railsette was easy with dangerous games. She had nothing to lose, nothing she gave a shit about, anyway. Just the biological processes of another fucked-up junky chick with five famished monkeys turning cartwheels on her back. The world's a factory for 'em. Junky #17681134, junky #17681135. So yeah, let's go fiddle with dangerous toys. Let's get wasted on shit no human chemist can fathom. There's more dollsteak where I came from.
Nobody in the reeking pile had come close to regaining basic motor function, much less enough eloquence to talk her down. So Railsette stood, stretched luxuriously, and slid the door open. She hopped from the ancient, creaking elevator that had been the gang's pad for three months and landed on concrete a foot below. She pulled on the chain they'd installed, slid the door back in place. She listened to the elevator groan as it rocked slightly . . . in darker moments, Railsette had hoped it would tear loose and fall to the bottom with them all inside.
She drifted like a ghost through the dripping bowels of the concrete labyrinth, a hungry shadow merging with the darkness until the glow of the occasional LED embed burned her dark-adjusted eyes.
There. Just as it had appeared, like an omen, six days ago.
A machine stood in the half-darkness, upright on the thickness of two cyclopean tires. A massive chunk of hardware, it was obviously in some packed-up state; no seat, no windshield, no cockpit, just big blocks of hazard-striped steel taking up space between wheels. It could be nothing else but a bike, from the shape of it. A bike for a giant. Or a god.
It hummed as she neared.
Railsette held out her left arm and walked slowly forward. She could feel the green non-flesh vibrate in sympathy. Tendrils extruded from pores in the arm, began dancing, swaying like snakes to the sound . . . no longer a hum, but a modulated screeching and whining. Then one tendril formed a rippling sine-wave; another vibrated so fast it blurred; a third whipped without rhythm or pattern.
Sisters? This had been the main mission all along. Railsette smiled, her eyes glassy. The bike drew her closer, and she encouraged it.
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