Team Tankered
Farra Kaya and Blinoor al Adye are a couple from mainland Dalluha, now living on the island of Walhimmula, the northwesternmost of the Al Nemra islands.
Farra is a graceful, soft-spoken pixie in her late 20s, often heard emitting a distinct breathy laugh from a wide smile framed by purple dreadlocks. Short and slight of build, a professional musician, an average and generally docile driver (2/5), she’s levelheaded but ambitious, and resilient but doesn’t especially like to get her hands dirty. She recently discovered a talent and interest in sewing and embroidery, honing her skills on a project car shared with Blinoor. Naturally curious and with a strong sense of adventure, she relishes travel and journeys. While occasionally exasperated by the hiccups frequently punctuating this particular adventure, doing it in the first place was her idea.
Blinoor is a crude, surly Amazon in her mid 30s, often heard emitting malty belches in between swears that would make a sailor blush. Medium height and built like a brick shithouse, she works as a car mechanic, at one point having served as the Chief Fleet Manager for the Onyx Palace, in charge of maintaining the vast car collection belonging to the Sultan of Dalluha. That is, when she works at all. Scatterbrained and impulsive, she keeps her mind focused with copious amounts of alcohol, riding - with mixed success - a fine line between inattentiveness and incapability. When sober, she’s an above average driver and very aggressive by default (5/5). Tough-mannered, wearing big boots figuratively and literally, she takes no crap from anyone but defers entirely to Farra, whose encouragement towards gentler driving is effective (3-4/5).
After getting fired from the Onyx Palace for an appalling attendance record, she had a minor mental health crisis that culminated in a roadtrip across Archana and Hetvesia in the Low Ryder (@karhgath) a modified 1959 DCMW Sharriallat.
On the way, they stopped to visit Farra’s older brother Metin and his wife Jenny. During that visit, Metin brought them along on his favorite pastime - a street race, where they met Metin’s friend Marko.
Marko Zora looks like he should be a metal band’s frontman, and his tax return claims so, but it’s a front. Despite his heavily decorated appearance he’s far too shy to be on stage, is secretive in general and about his past specifically. In his mid-40s, he’s medium-height and thin, with bony, jagged features and a mop of almost certainly dyed black hair. Marko’s an extremely skilled and moderately aggressive (4/5) driver, with some modest competence as a mechanic. Like Blinoor, he too is prone to being an ethanol-based lifeform, disciplined enough to not drive drunk but not to avoid that state in the first place.
Only a handful of people are fully aware of his past involvement with the Dalluhan Mafia, primarily as a car thief. He and Blinoor immediately took a liking to one another over shared interests in cars, music and art, which over a few months and many emptied bottles became a strong platonic bond between two kindred spirits. Blinoor knows of his past, doesn’t exactly approve but doesn’t let it get in the way of trusting him. Farra knows just enough that she doesn’t want to know more, senses skeletons in the closet and would not be naturally inclined to trust Marko, but because of Blinoor has raised her functional attitude to Graciously Tolerate him.
She was ultimately won over by Marko’s help, when on the return trip, Farra and Blinoor awoke one day in a motel outside Krongrad to find their Low Ryder stolen. The police report they filed wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on, but from the hotel’s security camera footage, Marko was able to identify the thief as one of the local Youngbloods gang, though not which individual, and promised to do what he could to locate the car. Despite having distanced himself from his previous contacts, he still had enough clout in Archana’s seedy underbelly to pull some strings. Simply showing his previous appearance opened quite a few doors.
Though he was unable to get the Sharriallat back, he was at least able to extract a token of apology and compensation from the Krongrad Youngbloods - a 1938 DCMW Al Sheikh that had spent several decades deep in a garage, with pristine bodywork but a ruined interior and mechanicals. While it was probably stolen, the car came with a laundered title that passed the muster of Dalluhan import bureaucrats, and also came shipped in a container all the way to Walhimmula.
Now, about a year later, Farra has managed to restore the interior, and Blinoor managed… to narrowly avoid needing a liver transplant, but accomplished little else. Oh, she did get the Al Sheikh running. Sort of. On a good day. While an engine swap like their Low Ryder came with would’ve been by far the more sensible choice, Farra’s musical ear and Blinoor’s high-proof octane for blood couldn’t resist attempting to revive the iron symphony of the octuple-carbureted V16 under the Al Sheikh’s hood. Sure, rare was the day it ran on all sixteen, but when it did…
