Team Sinesian Rejects
The Team
Tolok-Javon 'TJ' Hyrteyn
Male North Idene, 24
5’10" (178cm), 159lbs (72kg). Pretty lanky build, brown eyes, spiky red hair, fur occaisionally striped with red.
Past employment: Taxi driver
Self-proclaimed mechanic and moderately skilled driver. He’s worked on cars his entire life, especially on the manky sort, with his family’s connections to the owner of a junkyard. Bit of a coward in some situations, but somewhat likeable nonetheless.
Alauran Caere
Male South Idene, 24
5’7" (170cm), 165lbs (75kg). Pretty strong for his (compared to other participants) short size, somewhat athletic build. Very dark grey fur without externally defining features, though with blue eyes and brown hair. He does however have thinner fur and skin, leading to an increased tolerance for heat, at the expense of a reduced tolerance for the cold, and being susceptible to cuts.
Past employment: Cartographer
Alauran briefly had a stint as a cartographer for a couple of years. Not because he liked maps, but more because he loved getting on the road and seeing places. Because of his experience creating maps and navigating, he will serve as one of the navigators. Additionally, he received first aid training at some point.
Ianis Solani
Male North Idene, 30
6’2" (188cm), 194lbs (88kg). Tallest of the team, and strongest. Grey fur, striped with a darker shade on his back. Brown eyes, blond hair. Quite fit, being ex-military.
Past employment: Military medevac driver
Ianis served for the military as a medical evacuation transport driver. Due to this, he’s no stranger to driving extremely fast and forgoing other’s safety to reach the destination quicker. Skilled driver because of this, if not extremely socially abrasive. Never tell him to slow down.
Jas Kan'aan
Male South Idene, 22
5’10" (178cm), 154lbs (70kg). White fur with darker stripes all across the body. Brown eyes, blond hair. Weakest of all the four, though he’s pretty precise when it comes to motoric functions.
Past employment: None
Jas really doesn’t have a role, only tagging along for the funsies. Therefore, since he never got a driving license, he will be reading the map notes that Alauran made, though there’s no guarrantee he’ll do that well either. But you know, this rally wouldn’t be complete without almost crashing in to other participants driving the wrong way!
The heck is an Idene?
Idene are, to put it simply, humans with the head replaced with animal heads. Call me uncreative and a furry, but I’m not a biologist willing to create a whole new species. Oopsie daisy.
Idene have two regional subspecies; North and South.
North Idene are characterised to resemble wolves and the like. They’re usually a bit bigger and heavier. They have longer ears and a longer muzzle. They usually are some shade of grey, rarely being red. Most have splotched colours on the fur, but some have inherited stripe patterns. (TJ and Ianis)
South Idene are characterised to more resemble big cats. Smaller and a little lighter, with the opposite of the northern variety. Triangular ears, short muzzle. Usually in some shade of black or white with stripes of some kind. Some south Idene, like Alauran, have thinner fur and skin, which increases their tolerance for heat.
Science doesn’t exactly know how they evolved, or were made, or can get on earth seemingly by choosing their breakfast, but they exist.
The vehicles
1983 Ilaris Itan Ute
The world-famous, one-and-only Team Sinesian Rejects failure-at-pink camper.
Its existence, and how well it is doing at existing
This 1983 Ilaris Itan was sourced from an Ilaris dealership. Unfortunately for it, the vehicle’s engine was hydrolocked after trying to reach a customer whose car was stuck across a river, and thus it was being sold out front for less than scrap value, since apparently the people at the dealership wanted it to continue existing after making memories in the car. Now most people working trade jobs wouldn’t care that it barely runs, but it didn’t, so we were the first to look at it and bought it right then and there for about 200 dollars. Barely any rust, just dirty and no running engine.
We tried to remove the Ilaris Service writing on the side by Jas’s brilliant idea to paint it hot pink (taking note of previous editions of Shitbox Rally). Unfortunately, he forgot that buckets of hot pink metallic paint with flake in them are expensive as all hell, and we couldn’t justify buying more of them, and thusly ran out of paint halfway through.
Now the bread and butter of the build was swapping the dead 2.6L V6 which would have made about 120 horsepower with an engine that actually ran. TJ suggested we take a peek at the junkyard, and sure enough, we found a 2010 ACR Alakis hatchback which had the entire rear end caved in. Fortunately, the engine was completely mint, and after agreeing on a couple hundred bucks for the engine, we began work fitting the 2.2L engine and modifying the engine mounts accordingly.
This new engine made 165 horsepower, noticeable improvement from the 120 of the V6. We could have looked around the junkyard for the higher-trim V8 engine, but that wouldn’t have been as much fun. Who doesn’t want to swap a completely different engine in to their shitbox ute?
Jas refuses to admit he painted the strangely phallic-shaped object on the fender. We all know he did though.
Bit of history: the Ilaris Itan is a series of coupe utility (ute) vehicles. They’re pretty basic, though this particular model was configured with a premium interior, for some reason, while retaining the poverty-spec V6 engine. Either way, they’re known for being used and abused by tradesmen across the globe, being pretty okay for their price bracket.
Ilaris Imbe Sport S 1.3
We like to refer to it as the ‘frankencar’, though that’s not the most creative thing, so we called it the ‘redhead’.
Why does it exist? What did I do to you? Why must you torture my eyes?
This…car-shaped object is two Ilaris Imbe Sport-S’s welded back together. The white car, according to the owner of the yard, had a headon collision with some large animal and then subsequently skidded off the road, sideswiped a tree, then rolled over. Now the second, red car was T-boned, and the side was caved in. Fortunately, the 100-horsepower 1.3L four-banger still ran, though we’re pretty sure it’s 80 horsepower now.
Excuse us for this, but we welded the two together, and cut out the shitty bits. We also harvested a fiberglass hood from another car, though no other parts were used from it. Since the Imbe was originally a rally car, it’s made entirely from aluminium, with steel reinforcements throughout, to make it as light as possible. Same goes for the engine, which made it have a history of engine troubles. It is still moderately reliable, the government giving it a 70.6 reliability rating. Now, you might be asking “you welded aluminium together?” and we say “yes, yes we did.” We did reinforce the welds with rivets, but this car only exists because we had money left over, and otherwise we’d have to carry around the four of us in a ute that has two seats. Not practical at all, and I’m sure we’d need spinal surgery by the end of it.
Furthermore, we added a rollcage to make sure we didn’t end up on a NBC Dateline: Consumer Alert edition by the time we inevitably rolled over, though we don’t have racing harnesses, since if we do roll over we’re going to be fucked either way, considering this car doesn’t even weigh a thousand kilos.
We also added a frunk. Because why not?
Now, the Ilaris Imbe was originally a rally car at heart. Unfortunately, they actually had to…produce consumer versions. Therefore, for lack of a better term, they engineered it backwards, removing all the rally bits and the extreme optimisations, but retaining most of the core rally heart. This made for a car that weighed just under 1900lbs (860kg) stock, and was pretty fast. Produced from 1990 to 2000, it sold pretty well, and pioneered aluminium bodies. There were four ‘sporty’ trim levels, the Imbe Sport, Sport-S (this one), GT and GT-Sport. Additionally, there was a limited production PowerStar GT-Sport model. All, except for the PowerStar GT-Sport, were front-wheel-drive, unusual for a sports car. It was well-received though, being exceptionally fun to drive, and didn’t hurt the pocket that much either.
