Tyara Rishaad, Engineer

The Beautiful People up topside have no clue what has to happen to keep their world running. They're up there living their lives and thinking that the poorest anyone has to be is living on Stanrats (Standard Rations) and working pointless administrative jobs. They don't even think about people like you. You're a Para, like 95% of the maintenance techs, engineers, grunge-muckers and builders that work their collective asses off to keep this circle of hell functional. The job started off hard, but too much time near the reactors meant that anytime things broke down your ancestors had to fix it. Millenia of radiation and chemical exposure killed off most of you, but fecund breeding was able to replace them.

Most of you still look human, by and large, but evolution has optimized your people for replacement. Everyone's got a womb, even the men, and the women have ovipositors which are really extensions of the urethra designed for sliding into men's tiny vaginas. Everything is fairly retractable, of course, and the Beauties spend their lives trying to pretend things like that don't exist.

When the last fusion reactor failed about two thousand years ago, nobody upstairs bothered to ask where the power kept coming from. The Underking of the time, Regan Feslow, said they'd discovered a new source of more primal energy which could do all the things electricity could and more, and as an additional benefit could be stored as gelatinous Fuel for use in vehicles and portable devices. When activated, Fuel gave off a sour-sweet smelling steam that could be harnessed mechanically, electrically, or thermally. Given that there was no real alternative, society adapted and didn't ask too many questions. They didn't know, or knew and didn't care, that Fuel was the body fat of a certain type of Para, and that a typical power plant held between 900 and 1000 of them captive, force feeding them and using liposuction to draw off the Fuel for a needy society.

Your job, and those of your fellows, is to maintain the power plant by whatever means are necessary. Luckily for you your job is on the mechanical-slash-hydraulic side, maintaining the tubes and gears and pumps that keep the fat flowing. Your ability to sense and control the flow of liquids remotely, which the bigwigs call hydrodynamic telekinesis, makes you damned good at your job. Emphasis on the damned.

Your talkie squawks at you.

"Rishaad, we've got a flow reduction in sector eight, point 3724."

"On it, Chief."

You crawl through the cramped spaces, avoiding touching the tubes with the red (hot) or blue (cold) tags as you hand-over-hand through a spider web of neobrass. In older days they would have used glass to contain the highly reactive Fuel through its refining process but silica was never plentiful on Muninn and no ships had come out of Huginn (Odin II) or Sleipnir (Odin I) in living memory. Glass was now used only to repair the arcology domes on the surface, so the cheaper but more plentiful neobrass had replaced it.

Point 3274 is down near the very bottom of the refining stack, in an area where nobody in their right mind would go unless they had urgent business. Ten minutes of four-handing it through the pipes left the palms of your leg-hands sore, like it usually does. Even so, a normal human without prehensile feet would have had to go the long way around and taken about ten times as long. By the time you get down there your breasts are sweaty and tender and you're glad you dep-cream yourself from the top of your head to the tips of your leg-fingers. The damned stuff stings your cunny when you use it, but that's the price of being a woman. Your coveralls have been torn in several places by protruding bolts and screws that idiots hadn't bothered capping when doing repairs.

And then you see it; you can tell it's the cause of the problem because it has no damned right to be here.