Vigilante Steampunk Sky Pirates (M for F)

[zoarster]

I am looking to play a story set in a steampunk alternate reality circa 1900 in which the rapid emergence of steampunk type technology in the mid-1800s has allowed the dominant male power structure to totally suppress the female suffrage movement, relegating women to little more than objects. While upper-class women were basically kept in gilt cages, even some middle-class women had to work as prostitutes, and the lower-class was treated as no more than sex slaves, often subjected to the darkest whims of their male oppressors. This story, however, is not the story of those oppressed women.

In 1897, a small band of women who had, in secret, been reading over their husbands' research escaped their captivity and set up a base of operations on a small island off the East Coast of the USA. While their husbands initially searched for them, their interest quickly waned as they found new playthings. Society forgot about those women until a few years later, when they came to wreak vengeance upon the male society using a technology that the rest of the world had not discovered--flight.

The women had banded together and created a flying base, a giant flying machine that could sustain them as they embarked on a quest to overturn the male-dominated society and create a freer construct for all. While they could undoubtedly use the airship in greatly destructive ways, they eschew war as a means of protest and instead turn to taking political prisoners--although they are not above turning the tables and using these prisoners as both their workforce and to satisfy their... other needs.

I'd like to play a story between these sky pirates and their prisoners. It could anything from a slow romance where a pirate befriends a prisoner and begins to convert him to their way of thinking to an extreme slavery scenario where an especially feisty and/or spiteful pirate or group of pirates submits a prisoner to the worst treatment imaginable--or it could be a scenario where some pirates are spiteful mistresses while another falls in love. Feel free to shoot me some additional ideas as well!

Here are some potential looks for the pirates as inspiration: