Team Shift Happens
Team Information and Story Start
Pre-Race Prologue: Hotel Hackery, Armed and Dangerous / Checking In, A Little Recon, Making a Big Deal for some Beer, Trade Relations, A Fine Trade for the Good Stuff, Fire, Steel, and Beer.
The last week had been brutal, chucking it down with rain just about every minute of the day. Rukari was, perhaps, the only one in Team Shift Happens who didn’t mind this, as the rain made the weather just a touch cooler, though still far hotter than the frigid arctic conditions the Valraadi was used to back home. Kaylie and Kayden much preferred it when it wasn’t raining, despite actually liking water, because the heat and the humidity was unpleasant. Malavera was miserable and very much disliked the rain as it drenched the teams’ tents, made any work on the car miserable, and barely managed to drop the temperature despite the outright soaking the world was taking.
It was then that the team woke to a sunrise, harsh light gleaming off of the remains of last night’s torrential downpour, and crawled out of their tents to make some breakfast. Malavera hauled one of the propane cylinders out of the back of the Bricksley, connected the gas line to the old trunk-mounted Karbonizer two-burner gas grill, and set about making sausages, bacon, and even a bit of toast for sandwiches. Kaylie and Kayden handled packing away the tents, while Rukari settled off to one side, smoking his pipe and meditating until breakfast was ready.
Luckily, they’d had enough time to go get the gas bottles refilled for their welding cart, and Kayden had helped Rukari put the cart back up onto the roof. Likewise, the team had refilled two propane cylinders after helping cook for the camp for the last week. In that time, it had been Rukari who surprised everyone in Team Shift Happens, and likely a few other teams, when he managed to take several mundane items and make some actually quite decent meals out of them. Rukari had said, “In the Grundzahiri, we all must do our share. Someone in camp must cook, others fix armor, others sharpen blades, it is all a warrior’s duty. In the Vyrzadoburi, I learned to do this for myself.”
Today, however, breakfast was different. It was as if something had changed in the air, like an electric current humming beneath everyone’s feet. Today, people were getting excited. Rumors had been flying for the last week about when the actual race would start, there had been speculation about the reasons why there was a delay, and even a rumor about a betting pool on whether or not they’d hear an official excuse from the people hosting the event.
When the call came through a screeching loud old speaker, asking everyone to report to a car park, however, that electric hum snapped into frenetic, wild energy. Like a LeMans start, teams scrambled for their cars, engines rasped, wheezed, and rattled into life, tires screeched and chirped to varying degrees, gearboxes crunched into gears as drivers, both well-experienced and complete novices alike, tried to be the first to the car park.
Kaylie got to the car first, remembering at the last possible second to open the door with her right hand so she wouldn’t rip the door off of the hinges, settling into the rear driver’s side seat. Kayden shoved Spots up into the middle of the rear bench before hurrying to get in as well, slamming the rear passenger side door just as Malavera got into the front passenger seat. Another door slammed as Malavera grabbed the handle and pulled, forgetting his strength for a moment as the Bricksley’s door crashed shut with more noise than a bank vault. Rukari emptied out and put away his pipe, blew smoke into the air, and then sprinted for the car, swinging the door open and leaping into the seat, making the suspension wobble ominously. Rukari had his door closed, key in the ignition, and was busy trying to get the Bricksley to start, and when it did, his lack of mechanical sympathy cried out through the exhaust system as the red, white, blue, and plastic American sedan went straight to the rev limiter.
First gear was selected, the clutch was dumped, and with the rear diff unlocked, the Bricksley did a mighty one-wheel-peel across the campground. On the way out of the campground, Rukari redlined first gear, roughly double-clutched into second, and only after winding that gear out to the moon and back, selected third. They were part of a little convoy with Team Turbolag and Team Ecowareness close by, and the other teams not that far behind to the driver’s meeting. While Team Turbolag’s car was, perhaps, faster on dry pavement, Rukari’s skill behind the wheel let him keep pace despite the terrible road conditions. Tires wailed, engines screamed, the smell of hot engines and partially-unburned fuel filled the air.
“Rukari, what’s the engine temperature?” Kaylie asked.
“Two-two-five degrees,” Rukari replied.
“There’s a fourth gear, use it!” Malavera snapped.
Rukari chose fourth gear as team Ecowareness pulled off to the side of the road to pick up a big pile of trash. Malavera looked at the pile and shook his heads. “Don’t know whether that was there to start with, or whether one of these teams decided to toss that,” he said, grumbling the whole time.
Not long after, everyone screeched into the car park for the driver’s meeting. Engines were shut down, the clinks and pings and clanks of thermal expansion and contraction started to ring out at random, and the teams clustered up for one last potential round of chatter.
It was there that Laura of team Ecowareness decided to show Kayden, Kaylie, Malavera, and Rukari her latest blog post. Kayden was bored in seconds, Rukari kept looking back to the Bricksley as if hoping someone would give him a reason to leave, and Malavera was just plain uncomfortable in public. Kaylie, on the other hand, took to Laura like the social butterfly she was, flipped open a cover on the inside of her mechanical left arm, and pulled out a somewhat chunky tube. She pulled a tab on it and a screen unfurled from inside, and she checked the same blog post, just re-formatted for her native writing style (Left to right, but from bottom to top).
“Yeah, I can see that’s quite bad. This is why you people need to really focus on nuclear fusion,” Kaylie said. “Clean, powerful, efficient, relatively safe. That, plus high-capacity super-capacitors, and you could replace all of these fuel-burning cars with electric cars that aren’t terrible for the environment. As for what we can do now…” Kaylie added, before grabbing Malavera’s left hand and pulling him front-and-center, “Malavera here is, well, he’s a hacker.”
Malavera groaned, rolled both sets of eyes, and said, “You do know, Kaylie, not everyone appreciates that talent. Plus, sure, I could possibly shut down their facility with some clever code, but we don’t need that kind of trouble right now. But, if it makes you feel any better, fine, I’ll do something.” He hefted his 20 pound, camouflage-painted military laptop, balanced it on his left arm as if it were a 2 pound sub-notebook, checked out the Polyfuel company briefly, and within seconds, gave a malicious grin. “Now, that’s really quite stupid,” Malavera said. “They have their pipeline pump control computers on their network, not air-gapped. And some idiot has ‘admin1234’ as their password, written on a sticky note in full view of a security camera. How much justice, Laura, do you want?” (@AndiD )
When Mikel approached them a few minutes later, however, Spots was the first to notice, pouncing and knocking Mikel to the ground and licking his face quite enthusiastically. Rukari grabbed Spots’ collar and pulled the 170 pound leopard off of the man, then with the same lack of effort, pulled Mikel to his feet. Before Rukari could say anything, however, Martha had to move team Turbolag’s car out of the way to let more cars in as it was parked awkwardly close to the entrance.
Then the announcer spoke up, mentioned the relatively small number of contestants, the tensions between countries, and told them all to get ready. People got back into their cars, engines roared to life again, and this time, shit happened to team Shift Happens as Malavera got into the wrong seat of the Bricksley.
“Aw, fuck!” Malavera swore, realizing he was in the driver’s seat and Rukari, adapting to the plan, sat in the passenger seat instead. “Great. How the fuck am I supposed to drive this shit-box?” Malavera said, looking over to Rukari.
“Clutch to floor, turn key until engine starts. Foot on brake, release stop stick,” Rukari said, pointing to the parking brake handle, “shift-stick toward you ahd forward, use side of foot to push loud pedal, release clutch ahd brake, car goes. Might stall time or two, but nekasi, just start engine again.”
Malavera scowled, started the engine, placed a heavy foot on the brake pedal which creaked ominously, dropped the parking brake handle, selected first gear, revved the ever-loving piss out of the turbocharged and carbureted inline four, and dumped both the brakes and the clutch at about the same time. The Bricksley scampered forward like a kicked puppy, wailing one rear tire as if in pain the whole way across the parking lot while the engine bellowed as if it were twice as big and four times as powerful as it actually was.
On the way out of the parking lot, Malavera clicked the switch on the PA system and plugged the microphone input into their stereo output. Soon, AC/DC’s “Shoot to Thrill” started blaring out of the roof-mounted loudspeaker, drowning out the screaming Bricksley 1.2 liter engine, at least inside the cabin of the sedan.
(OOC: Translations first. Ahd literally is just ‘And’ in Valraad. Nekasi literally translates to “no work” and is used, most often, like we use “No Problem”, but it can also be used, like in this situation, to say “not a problem.” Grundzahiri is a literal translation to Ground-warriors, or equivalent to the Army. Vyrzadoburi literally translates to either “Violent Walkers of Death” in plural form, or “Violent Death Walking” in the singular form. (To make a word plural in Valraad, add an ‘i’ to the end. Some words will have one ‘i’ already, so they end up with two. However, the suffix ‘ri’ is equivalent to ‘ing’ in English while the suffix ‘r’ is “to be or to do” Easiest to understand with a different word. Kasi means “work” and so a kasir is a worker, while kasiri means ‘working.’ Yes, I have quite a bit of their language created. A bit more and I could, in theory, hold conversations in it.)
As for the tag, @AndiD , I figured that it’s something Malavera would offer if Kaylie’s being obnoxious and ‘volunteering’ his services. Malavera’s somewhat like the typical Hollywood movie hacker, he’s lucky and manages to do a lot in very little time (mostly because I couldn’t hack my way out of a wet paper bag, so I don’t have any knowledge to back the subject up). As for why he’s so good, well… He’s by our standards, not just old, but ancient.
Malavera is comfortable with computers, and as Laura seems to be the one most interested in saving the planet, he’d give her the uncomfortable choice: Say yes, and she’s (indirectly) responsible for an oil company creating pollution on a massive scale having a major security flaw exploited and an expensive shutdown. Say no, and she keeps her hands clean, but loses out on getting justice for Mother Earth.
Also, apologies for the insane length. This got away from me in a hurry.
