A Whore at Dread Harbor Ch. 00 - CYOA Intro 01

Welcome to A Whore at Dread Harbor, An ongoing Choose Your Own Adventure set in the same universe as my other story on this site, Halfbreed! I'm already on the fourth choice of the main story so I wanted to get this to you guys on Literotica so you can see how it's shaping up.

This is the COYA's Prologue. My readers have already voted on the Main Character's background, but I figured it'd be fun for you to see the options they could have gone with.

Feel free to check out the work for yourself! After about a week, I tally each new choice and give you the results!

To be clear: the prologue was a one-time voting decision. While I may end up returning to write the whole of the different CYOA paths from start to finish, the character's background my readers chose is his background from now on.

That being said, now that I've given them a head start with a few choices, you will also be able to read and vote yourself. The prologue synopsis will be attached to the end of this as well.

Enjoy!

Hooky

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A Whore at Dread Harbor: Prologue

You are Deckard Pryce, a human male born on Earth in the waning days of the mass migration of Humanity known as the 5th Great Exodus. In the aftermath of the Second Galactic Civil War that ravaged the Human colonies and left billions dead in its wake, many chose to leave the core systems of humanity rather than be caught up in the conflict. Your parents fled the fighting to the farthest reaches of space, abandoning the 'civilized' galaxy for the great unknown.

Seeking a better life for themselves, your parents migrated to the turbulent, untamed regions of Wild Space, far beyond the borders of law or the tyrannical governments who now squabbled over the burnt-out remains of Earth. You were born an infant refugee on a transport freighter, spending the first years of your life moving from starship to starship, seeking someplace to call home.

Your parents finally settled on the Catian-owned colony world of Jai-Na-Yoh, selling what little they had left to share a cramped flat with several large Catian Prydes. Your father assured you that the situation was only temporary.

* * *

What was your life like growing up?

A) Your parents died young, you were adopted by a caring Catian Pryde.

The death of your parents at such a young age might have spelled doom for a young child out on the frontier. However, the feline species known as the Catians are an empathetic race, and one of the families you roomed with adopted you as one of their own. You grew up in a poor home, but a home filled with love.

With seven mothers, one father and dozens of precocious siblings, you never lacked for company. In many ways, you understand the gyno-centric Catian culture better than your own, speaking the Catian language with a fluency that shocked Catians outside of your pryde. You have often struggled to connect with your fellow Humans.

B) Your parents, desperate and in debt, sold you into indentured servitude to a Dwarven Megacorporation.

The look in your parent's eyes as they watched you be led away haunts you to this day. Though you understood their reasons, you never forgave them. Just before being shipped off-world, You managed to escape your shock-collar and ditch your pursuers in the back alleys of the slums. The experience left you with a lingering hatred of the Dwarves, and Megacorporations in general.

You spent most of your life prowling the streets of your adoptive homeworld as a homeless urchin. While life was hard, you also acquired many necessary skills for survival that you might not have otherwise had if you had lived an easier one. Over time, you managed to eventually lead your own small street gang of rough and tumble kids.

C) Your family was rich, you grew up with a silver spoon in hand.

Your father was the owner of a successful shipping business back on Earth. In Wild Space, he prospered, quickly turning your family into one of the richest in the system. You grew up pampered and with few expectations, the family wealth yours by birthright.

But you were not content with a cushy job and a handsome inheritance. With your father's blessing and a promise of economic support should the need ever arise, you set off into the galaxy with a dream of making something of yourself.

* * *

Young, ambitious, and craving adventure, you joined the Jai-Na-Yoh Colony Militia. Life for a few years was a mixture of training, drilling and guard duty. Despite the boredom, you excelled at sharpshooting and hand to hand combat. However, you didn't take well to military discipline, and you often found yourself punished for insubordination. Catians don't appreciate loners or nonconformists in their militaries, and you soon found yourself discharged.

Out of options and with no real opportunities remaining on your adopted homeworld, you bid what friends and loved ones you had goodbye and signed up with the GFP: the Goblin Frontier Patrol. Their loose command structure and desperate need for men gave you the chance to grow and thrive in a way your homeworld's militia never could. It's mission statement was to protect Wild Space from the malicious clutches of the mutated cloner species known as the Goblins. Months of extensive training on a starbase light-years from your home system followed, wherein you learned the basics of starship maintenance, piloting and engineering.

* * *

What was your secondary specialization?

D) Medicine

You were drawn to the GFP for more reasons than just hurting people. In many ways, knowing how to treat a bullet wound was more important than knowing how to make one. Your empathy for others and willingness to help those in desperate circumstances made you a natural fit. You excelled in your medical training, becoming a trusted frontline medic, with an acknowledged ability to improvise when the situation called for it.

E) Mechanics and Engineering

You were never much of a 'people' person. Zybax wrenches and starship grease, computer slicing and quantum coding were more your style. If a starship engine was leaking coolant, or a computer processor was acting up, you knew how to fix it. A minor prodigy when it came to all things mechanical, you learned very quickly that people might fail you, but machines never would.

F) Command and Leadership

A booming voice and a commanding presence made you a natural leader of men. Consequently, your assertive character also made you the kind of amiable personality who could make friends easily. Ever the popular soldier, you soon had your own informal 'squad' of fellow recruits following in your wake. Superiors took notice, and you were soon fast-tracked to the Officer program, a promising career path laid out ahead of you.

* * *

Your outstanding marksmanship and excellent hand to hand combat abilities, combined with your strategic mind and eye for technical details made you an ideal candidate for the GFP's Marine Assault Corps. After a rigorous mental and physical testing, wherein 90% of your fellow recruits dropped out, you were inducted into the Corps as a Second Lieutenant, leading a platoon of your own.

Several years passed, and aside from a few boarding actions against small Goblin pirate bands you saw little combat, patrolling the space lanes running between the numerous outposts, colonies and starbases of northern Wild Space... until one day, the Captain of the Cruiser you were stationed on, the GDF Bastion received a Priority 1 distress call from a remote starbase.

Arriving several weeks later into the abandoned system, you caught sight of a large, Dwarven-built starbase lurking inside an asteroid field. As you gazed across its shining, pale gold exterior, you had no idea of the horrors that awaited you inside.

You had arrived at Dread Harbor.

As the GDF Bastion maneuvered through the asteroid field towards the space station, you and your platoon were scrambled for an emergency mission briefing by the ship's Captain. Sitting together with your men in the holoprojector room, you listened intently as the Captain gave a grim assessment of the situation.

Despite numerous attempts to hail the station on secure channels, the only response the comms officer could get was static. A cursory scan of the starbase's interior had detected far more organic life signs than had been present during the Station's most recent census.

Worse still, the Starbase's weapons systems remained intact, indicating that the Goblins had managed to take the station completely by surprise. The size and scope of the attack was vast enough that the Captain believed that Dread Harbor had been seized in its entirety by the monstrous marauders. It was a nightmare scenario: both for those poor souls aboard the doomed station, and for your mission.

The Captain declared that a direct approach upon the starbase's formidable capital ship defenses was suicide. She told you that until reinforcements from the GFP arrived, an unsupported boarding action by assault marines was the only tactical option she was willing to consider. Given the extreme danger of the task at hand, and the inherent risks of such an attack with no immediate possibility of extraction if the situation onboard deteriorated, she asked for volunteers.

You were the first officer in the room to raise your hand.

From the moment the mission began, it was a disaster. You and your squad were scattered across a wide area of the station, disorganized and split into small isolated groups. What you found when you emerged from your drop pod was something from your darkest fantasies:

The station had turned into a charnel house of warping flesh and screaming agony. Former chromium-coated halls were painted a hellish red from blood splatters and discarded viscera.

Everywhere you went you found unspeakable illustrations of the Goblin's cruelty: torture pens laid out like a slaughterhouse assembly line, makeshift flesh-laboratories built inside formerly occupied apartment flats, piles and piles of headless, mutilated corpses stacked together out in the open like kindling atop a dead fire pit.

Worse still were the creatures who emerged shrieking out of the darkness: flesh-formed chimeras of slashing claws and spitting acid, ten foot tall hound-creatures with bulging skeletal jaws that could bite a man in two; corpulent, cancer-ridden beasts the rough shape of a humanoid with gut-sacs of superheated gas that exploded upon contact with the open air.

You had fought the hordes of cloned Goblin monsters in the past, but you had never faced something like this.

Most of your men were either killed or dragged away into the darkness within the first few minutes of desperate combat, their screams echoing in your ears as one by one the sounds of gunfire in the distance died away. Communications were scrambled, and the unexpected arrival of a small Goblin raider fleet forced the GDF Bastion to retreat out of extraction range.

The last transmission you received from your commander before the Cruiser warped out of the system was a toothless order to hold out until help arrived. Desperate, low on ammunition and surrounded on all sides by psychotic gene splicers, you began a one-man mission to liberate the station.

* * *

What did you do to try to salvage the Mission?

G) Save lives

You might have been a soldier, but you were a human being first and foremost. The suffering you witnessed on the part of the innocents on Dread Harbor was incomparable, and you would bear the scars of it on your psyche for many years to come... assuming you managed to live that long.

The men and women of this station deserved better, and you were the only one left who could help them in their time of need. If there was just one person you could manage to save from a terrible fate at the hands of the Goblins' experiments then you would consider this mission a success.

H) Cleanse the station.

Your Captain's orders to pacify the Goblin menace on Dread Harbor were well-intentioned, but ignorant of the circumstances on the ground. This wasn't just a simple raid: the Goblins had infested every nook and cranny of this station, from the top of the astralogicum to its deepest maintenance ducts.

The poor souls of Dread Harbor were already dead... or something far, far worse. There was a Goblin Fleet orbiting the station, and nothing short of a full GDF battlefleet would dislodge them from their prize - and they were weeks away at best. Your men were dead. Your mission was a failure. The only thing left to do was to overload the reactor and irradiate the entire station.

I) Collect Intelligence

Orders were orders, but you were no fool. Suicide missions were one thing, but this was on another level entirely. Without support, without backup of any kind and only a vague promise of potential rescue from your commanding officers at some indeterminate point in the future, you had to start making hard choices.

Hiding in ventilation ducts and crawling beneath floor panels might not have been glamorous or heroic, but they did help you survive when everyone else around you died. You decided to lay low and scope out the situation, gathering what intelligence you could. You took what opportunities came to you, but always with an eye on the nearest escape hatch. In time, you came to understand the method to the Goblin's madness... and stay one step ahead of their roving flesh hounds.

* * *

Days passed as you fought tooth and nail to survive the hell that was Dread Harbor. You kept to the shadows, avoiding Goblin patrols and fighting only when you had to. You ate when you could, but rarely slept. Your life became a paranoid game of hide and seek, with the stakes for failure being too horrifying to contemplate.

Given the dire state of the situation on Dread Harbor, you had assumed that you were the only remaining sentient on the ship who had survived with your sanity intact. You were soon disabused of that notion. The Goblins hadn't killed everyone. Some they had... 'preserved.' For other uses.

Days after your initial drop pod insertion, you found yourself fighting through the hospital wing of the station. Forced to take a shortcut to escape the clutches of a pursuing flesh beast, you stumbled upon the awful source of the Goblin's experiments.

The hospital was an assembly line of suffering. Men were strapped to hospital beds, twisted, drugged and fused with cybernetic prosthetics. Their genetic template was warped, shifted in unique and grotesque manners to create snarling creatures of war. What emerged from the boiling vats of synth-flesh was warped beyond all recognition by the Goblin's biotechnology. You had no choice with the poor victims you found but to put them down.

The females however, fared far worse. Turned into semi-sentient breeding stock for the Goblins and their cloned offspring, Humans, Catians, Loupians, and even Elves were physically warped and changed at the whims of their sick, twisted masters. The final step in the process was a mental 'reeducation' cocktail that, combined with hypno-psychic reprogramming would turn the unfortunate soul into an unthinking, pliant seedbed.

You stumbled across one such 'nursery' in the final stages of its conversion. You watched, horrified as a struggling Catian woman screamed for help on the operating table, surrounded on all sides by gibbering Goblin scientists. She was the final victim in the laboratory with the ability to comprehend what was happening to her. she used her last moments as a thinking being to beg for mercy. She sobbed as they prepared to administer the fatal injection, knowing that this final indignity would obliterate her thinking mind.

For the sake of the mission you should have left her. You had no way of protecting her, no easy way of transporting her safely out of this awful place.

...But you couldn't do it. You couldn't just leave her to die.

Your itchy finger caressed the trigger of your rifle, bullets roaring forth with righteous fury. A deep satisfaction in your gut as the shocked Goblins scattered like rats in all directions. You slaughtered the scientists, showing them the same boundless mercy they displayed to their victims, expending most of your remaining ammunition in the process.

The Catian froze like stunned prey, paralyzed by the sudden explosion of violence around her and mentally traumatized by the horrors she had witnessed and suffered through. Her beautiful, surgically modified eyes stared at you in shock, unable to comprehend her savior as you rushed to her side to cut her free from her bonds. The poor girl's body had already been warped in both size and bulk, cybernetically modified into a Succubus' idea of a curvaceous Catian.

You picked her limp body up off the operating table, cradling her in your arms. You whispered in her ear that she was safe now, that everything would be all right. Tears of unfathomable gratitude flowed like rivers down her cheeks, and she hugged you tight the way a frightened child would. You returned the gesture, asking for her name.

"Corani." She whispered back at you. Her shy smile made your heart warm with hope.

Despite the dramatic changes that had been inflicted on her body, Corani was still in better shape than anyone you had yet come across. She must have been only recently captured. The changes the Goblins had made to her body were extensive, and it would only be later that you would learn the true range of her alterations.

At least you had managed to rescue her with her mind still intact. You promised to find the girl a quiet place to hide until GFP reinforcements arrived to extract her. Corani protested, begging you to let her accompany you on your mission.

It was an impossible conundrum: Corani was awkward and unsteady in her new body. Her surgery scars were still fresh, and despite the brave face she put on you could tell she was in a great deal of pain. This was to say nothing of the fact that she was a civilian, untested in a firefight.

But desperate times called for desperate measures. You had barely slept a wink since you had landed in Dread Harbor nearly a week ago; by now you were running on fumes, fueled by pure adrenaline. An extra set of eyes on watch alone might mean the difference between life and death, and an extra gun in a fight was always welcome. There was strength in Corani's eyes, you could see it. But you weren't certain if that strength was enough to keep her safe from harm.

You needed to keep your wits about you in this infernal place. One wrong move, and you might end up on the operating table. You couldn't abandon her to a grisly fate, but neither could you complete your mission with an albatross around your neck. Corani held out her hand, asking for your sidearm.

* * *

You decided to...

J) Find a way to get her safely off the station.

You held on to your sidearm. You trusted the spunky Catian's determination, but you didn't trust her aim. Corani was disappointed, but she relented when you told her the new plan.

You knew you could never forgive yourself if you let this poor woman die (or worse: fall once more into the hands of her malefactors). Resolving yourself to a dangerous, potentially fatal detour, you had her lead you to one of the few hangar bays on the station still intact.