Sun Dec 07, 2014 6:32 am by strop
[ooc]LOL no, though that would have been pretty crazy had I fit it in. I'm sure you'll see it when you see it.
Also, seeing as I'm on call and I got called into hospital at 4am in the morning, here's the next half of the next segment before race 7. Onward to Belgium!
(With apologies to HighOctaneLove, who appears not to like seeing hookup shenanigans, and everybody else, for ruining their mental image of Tesla. Tesla's just really liberal.)
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Breath came out as fog in the excitement and the chatter of the race, the cars ticking over back in the lot. The classifications showed a certain established order, but there were some fierce battles within the order with lots of positions set to swap, and little rivalries and alliances had formed along the way.
Wishing to make haste, the Gryphon Gear van had sped off along with Jack Cossack in the Combi, to replace the several barriers they had uprooted to make way for the race. But as they approached Tetre Rouge, the first site, Jack’s mod radar started going crazy. Immediately, he radioed in.
“We have company. Looks like the locals don’t appreciate racing after bedtime.”
Sure enough, in the background, the wail of sirens was faintly heard, growing louder by the second. Instantly, Noah was on the public channel. “Everybody disperse! The police are coming!”
Hannah dropped the barrier she was wrestling with and scrambled back into the van. “Evidence is one thing, getting caught red-handed is another!” She declared as she gunned the engine and shot off, fear of the turbo on steroids forgotten.
In the car lot, chatter turned to chaos as everybody jumped back into their cars, firing up engines again, leaving tyre treads as they all piled out two and three abreast, pouring out onto the public roads again as the Peugeots, blue lights flashing, closed in on the scene. But the little city runabouts were no match for the madmobiles of the Barely Street Legal League, and in a matter of minutes, they had been left far behind without so much as a good visual, as the contestants scattered to the winds, and onwards to Belgium.
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Everything in Europe was so close to each other, Strop thought to himself as they travelled in convoy along the A11, towards Paris. It was barely an hour from Le Mans to Paris, and then maybe another hour and a half and they would be already reaching the border to Belgium. That amount of driving might have gotten him halfway to the border of his home state, and that being Victoria, was pretty much one of the smallest states in Australia. All things considered, it helped to remind himself that Australia was in fact the size of the entire US of A, or Russia, and one could fit France into Australia about a dozen times. Thus by the time they would reach Paris, it wouldn’t even be sun up yet.
At least, that’s how it would have been, if not somewhere under Strop’s hood, something had gone thunk and suddenly steam was pouring out from the vents in the bonnet. “MAYDAY MAYDAY I’VE BEEN HIT,” Strop yelled over the radio as his car suddenly lost power, and chugged to a stop on the highway. To his horror, Mephisto, Sleipnir, and the GG Transit van continued along their merry way.
“Come in, Big Bertha, I report, Peapod down! Repeat, Peapod down! Requesting assistance!” Strop radioed urgently.
What ensued was a meandering debate over whether or not the rest of the crew should turn back and help Strop. First, there was the possibility that Strop was just kidding (“That should NOT be your first differential!” Strop protested.) Then, there was the possibility that psycho supercop they encountered in Utah had blown a hole in the Peapod’s engine block using some kind of satellite rail gun, and was using Strop to lure the rest of them into a trap (for that one, Sam was cut off from energy drinks for the rest of the trip.) Then, when they finally realised that Strop’s location data had indeed indicated he was dead in the middle of the highway somewhere along L’Oceane adrift off the exit to Illiers-Combray, they had another meandering debate over who should go back and help. Kai didn’t have any tools. Sam wasn’t a mechanic, he was just a race driver. Noah pointedly asserted that steam blowing out the hood didn’t seem to be an electrical problem, so no way was he getting out of the van at three in the morning because it was goddamn cold. It took Hannah pointing out that oh, well, guess that proves that women have a greater threshold for suffering than guys, and five minutes later, all of them were parked alongside the highway, with Sam still refusing to leave his car, and Hannah and Tesla arguing over the source of the problem. After a lot of torch waving and cursing, it turned out that a seam in the makeshift intercooler hose had popped loose, and all the compressed air was leaking out instead of spooling the turbine. Thanks to the Gryphon Gear habit of cramming as large an engine block as would fit into the bay before thinking about anything else, the rather convoluted course of the intercooler hose was naturally the weakest link in what was purely to be a temporary build. The unfortunate side effect of all that was, of course, that they couldn’t fix it without taking the entire block out. That was, Tesla’s hands were too large, and Hannah’s arms too stubby to reach in without grievous bodily injury or forever being stuck under the hood of the Peapod. At one point, they stared meaningfully at Kai, but Kai shifted in his seat and showed off all the bandages on his fingers. What a wuss.
Some grumbling later, it was Noah who had his laptop plugged into the Peapod’s ECU. They’d just have to run it without turbo power until they had a chance to service it properly, which, secretly, Strop did not object to. As the night wore on, they huddled in a small throng at the side of the highway, considering their next move in the day they had before they were due at Spa.
“We should stop in Paris!” Tesla proposed.
“Yes, let’s!” Sam instantly agreed.
“NO.” Both Strop and Noah shouted unanimously.
“But we have to!” Tesla whined. “You can’t go travel through France without seeing Paris!”
“Yes we can,” Strop insisted. “You’re not even missing much. It’s all the bustle without any of the charm. You spend so much time dodging dogshit on the sidewalk you can’t even look up. Nobody gives way to anybody ever and standard parking procedure is to ram your car into everybody else’s until there’s room to fit.”
“On that note, let’s not stop in Paris,” Kai suggested.
“We must go! All the songs of wine and women are about Paris, what kind of opportunities would we be missing?” Sam begged everybody in a passionate appeal. “This trip would be for naught, if we did not stop in Paris!”
“And what, how would you even attract ze ladies?” Noah ducked out from the cabin of the car, somehow having placed a clothes peg over his nose for added nasally voice. “You don’t even know ze French, ze women will not tink to look et you if you do not talk like zis. For all intentz en purposez, you would be like the American boor, en you should know how ze French ‘ate ze Americans.” For added effect, he flapped his hands around with liberal application of haughty shoulder movement. Somehow the whole thing resembled a Rowan Atkinson stage skit, and had everybody else in stitches.
“I know plenty of French!” Sam exclaimed hotly. “Well, no, I don’t! But I know all the French that I need! How did it go…” his face scrunched up as he recited: “Voulez vous coucher avec moi?”
“Hey that’s all the French I know too!” Tesla yelped. Sam and Tesla exchanged a glance, then promptly yelled “HEYOOOOO” and high fived.
Everybody else facepalmed. “So there you have it,” Sam concluded. “We must stop in Paris.”
“Okay. Fine,” Strop fumed. “We will stop in Paris for breakfast. At a Bistro. And then we will head directly to Brussels.”
“But Brussels is so fucking boring!” Sam complained.
“Says who?”
“Says that movie!” Sam gesticulated. “In Brussels or whatever.”
“That was In Bruges,” Strop corrected him. “Which is a hundred kilometres away from Brussels.”
Sam turned his nose up dramatically. “Say what you will, I shall make my own way in Paris, and should I be delayed, run the next race without me, for I will be engaged in a long passionate tryst with a lady who swoons for my rugged charms.”
“Will it be worth having Loser tattooed on your forehead?” Kai snarked, but he was drowned out by the subsequent cacophony of gagging and retching.
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While everybody else tucked into crepes, omelettes and a croque-monsieur, Sam raced around Paris like a madman, trying to book a hotel room with no notice in order to set up a headquarters in which to get his love-on, because one had to do these things properly. But, as Strop had warned him, no place in Paris was prepared to just let you in without first speaking French, and second, without notice. So he returned, defeated and depleted of sugar, after having half a dozen doors slammed in his face, and another half dozen palms slammed into his face by Frenchwomen irritated at his lack of class.
“I don’t get it,” Sam pouted as they attempted to weave their way out of the tight Parisian streets without stalling their vehicles. “I thought this was supposed to be the city of love!”
“There there Sam,” Strop consoled him without actually sounding like he meant it. “Now you know.”
“But I was so popular in America!”
“Madames et messieurs, our Casanova has stumbled across the truth of his own conundrum!” Noah, clothes peg still on his nose, remarked sarcastically.
After an hour of wasting good petrol on shitty traffic (“I told you we shouldn’t have stopped in Paris!” an impatient Strop jibbed), they were back on the A1 on the way to Belgium, and on the freeways of France, life was good. Posted speed limits of a hundred and ten, but everybody did a hundred and eighty, except when there was a traffic jam, in which everybody would slam on the brakes and switch on their hazard lights. It was a distinctly European thing, it seemed.
Thus half an hour later, they were very confused when a bunch of flashing lights came up behind, and stayed on their tail. Speeding? Well of course, but so was everybody else. Hopefully they hadn’t been found out for their little bout of civil disobedience the other night…
“Strop! How about you handle this?” Hannah urgently radioed as they started pulling over.
“Er, why me?” Strop asked.
“Didn’t you mention you studied French in high school?”
Strop knew he was going to regret his big mouth one day, and that day was today. “Ah, merde,” he muttered as he wound down the window, watching three tall stern-looking Dobermans, all snappily dressed in uniform, approach the car. Strop hesitated, hoof hovering over the loud pedal. Even without the turbo, his car could probably outrun the cop Peugeots… if he was sure he wouldn’t damage the engine further in the process. But then again screaming over the border into Belgium with flashing lights chasing them was probably not a great idea. Neither was attempting to talk his way out of whatever trouble they were in, when he hadn’t spoken French in over ten years, but hey, what the hell. He stuck his head out the window and flashed his biggest shit-eating grin.
“Bonjour, est-ce qu c’est un probléme, Messieurs L’Agent?”
Inwardly he winced as the words stumbled out of his mouth. The police dog looked up and down impassively at the row of cars, studying something, before he finally leaned into the window and barked: “Savez-vous à quelle vitesse vous-alliez?”*
Strop blinked, only catching the “did you know” and the “what speed” bit, but it was enough to know the inference. Though arguing the point would prove to be much more difficult. “Eum… cent quatre vingts. Comme tout le-monde,” he added, twiddling his thumbs nervously.
“Heh,” the Doberman grinned toothily. “Alors, vous-ne croyez pas que vous-êtes faire un excès de vitesse?”
At this, Strop’s brain shorted out and he went cross-eyed. “Er. Plus lentement s’il vous plait? Je parle seulement un petit-peux de français.”
The Doberman’s grin widened ominously. “Would you prefer to speak in English, then?”
Ah, so much for that. At least hopefully, having made it this far, he had scored some stay-out-of-jail points. “Yes, thank you officer. How did you know?”
The officer pointed to the rear of his car. “Your international plates indicate you’re from Australia. You’re a long way from home. Mind telling us what you’re doing in France?”
Strop racked his brain trying to juggle the bits of the truth that were okay to mention, and those he better leave out. “We’re on a road trip, to Germany. A Nurburgring event. We’d just come via the Channel, because we were in England.”
The cop raised one brow. “That’s an unusual route to take.”
Strop fidgeted, “Yeah, it’s because we were being interviewed in England… I’m not allowed to tell you the details because the show hasn’t aired yet.”
Now both brows were fully raised. “Oh? Sounds like your cars are very… interesting. Would you mind stepping out of the car so we can take a further look?”
Strop gulped, but complied, asking as he did so: “What’s this all about anyway? It’s not about speeding, is it?”
“Oh no,” the cop peered around the cabin as the other cops started walking up to the other cars, much to Strop’s internal dismay. “It’s something else. This car is very heavily modified.”
“Yes, but it’s road legal,” Strop offered, well aware of the ice thinning under his hooves.
Satisfied, the cop straightened. “It’s okay. About seven hours ago, some people broke into the Circuit de la Sarthe, removed the barriers and seemed to be racing illegally, according to our callers. When police arrived on the scene, they were already leaving, but one of the cars actually turned around, and, according to the report, flew over the police cars.”
Strop shook his head. “Wait, did what?”
“Exactly.” The cop nodded. “We didn’t believe it, but the car cameras caught some visual. It was at night, so it wasn’t particularly good quality, but it clearly shows the car jumping into the air and flying by itself. We could also tell it was a hatchback, like your car, but your car clearly isn’t equipped to do that.”
“No, it’s not,” Strop pulled a face, racking his brains as to who would be so colossally dumb as to do such a thing. Then again, the league had plenty of nuttiness in it, though he wasn’t about to say that to the cop. “This is just a simple road-legal race spec car to be used in legal racing.”
“I’ll bet.” The cop chuckled to himself, then started following his colleagues up the convoy. “You may enter your vehicle again. Please wait here while we finish checking things over.”
Kai glanced sideways nervously as the cops passed the Mephisto, slowing to take a closer look at the rare race car, and the kid driving it. Fortunately, they merely said, “Elle est chouette, votre voiture,” to which he quietly replied, “Oui, merci beacoup,” and they left it at that. He relaxed visibly as they moved onto the next car, faintly hearing the strains of Sam’s booming boorishness, and the cops disgustedly shaking their heads before finally reaching their point of interest, the van.
Tesla, Hannah and Noah all watched the cops coming. “Shit, do you think they’re here about last night?” Hannah asked.
“Yeah, I’d say that’s… pretty likely,” Noah responded glumly. “Don’t suppose we can hide the tools now? Hey, you know any French, Hannah?”
“Goddamn, Noah, why are you asking me?” Hannah drew back in horror.
“Because you’re the best at talking! Say something!”
Then it was too late to negotiate anything, because the cops were rapping on the window. Hannah rolled down the window and flashed her… best shit-eating grin.
“Bonjour! Beau temps ajourd-hui, ne c’est pas?”
The cops did not smile back. “It’s okay, you can speak English-“
“J’AIME LE BABYFOOT!” Hannah made a little fist pump. “GOOOOLLLLL!”
The cop at the back shook his head and rubbed his forehead, muttering, “Mon dieu, elle est fou.”
Tesla, having now copped an eyeful of, for her purposes, what were three rather dapper, handsome uniformed cops, had a glint in her eye as she shoved Hannah aside. “I got this.” She batted her eyelids at the cops as she leaned way over. “I’m sorry I don’t speak much French. The only phrase I know is, voulez-vous coucher avec moi?”
This drew a reaction from the cops, who simultaneously drew back. “Excuse us? Do you know what that phrase actually means?”
Tesla kicked the door open and scampered around the side of the van, sidling dangerously close to the nearest cop. “YOU HEARD ME LOVER BOY. I thought this was France, so show me that passion that makes you famous around the world!”
“Madamoiselle, it is improper to proposition an on-duty police officer,” the Doberman being propositioned declared stiffly, standing as straight as he could and looking away.
“I’m pretty sure that’s going to get you arrested!” Hannah whisper-shouted out the window. Tesla merely winked, and piled it on, running her paw down the cop’s shirt. “So, does that mean if I keep going, you’ll have to take me… downtown?”
The cop turned to his colleagues, clearly flustered. “Que puis-je faire!? Elle est incorrigible!” A short whispered conference followed, from which the phrases “ne t’inquiète pas!” and “Allez-y!” could be heard, along with a lot of elbowing and shoving.
Finally, the cop turned back to Tesla. “Very well, then, I have no choice but to arrest you, for indecent conduct towards a police officer. Come with me.” Tesla was offering her wrists almost before the cop had his handcuffs out, and then he marched her to the waiting police car, accompanied by the exaggerated howling of his colleagues, and the look of horror and second hand embarrassment from everybody else: “Oh god not again.”
“Right, where were we,” the second cop said, turning back to the occupants of the van, before being interrupted by Tesla shouting, “HEY! I MEANT ALL THREE OF YOU. AREN’T YOU COMING?”
With that, the other two cops faltered, looking at Noah and Hannah in the van, before looking at Tesla waving at them, wrists cuffed together, through the window of the police car, then back at Noah and Hannah.
“We have some paperwork to do at the office, so we’ll let you go now,” the second cop said.
“Drive safely,” the third cop added, but they were already legging it back to their cars, and drove off, tyres chirping, leaving the rest of the crew wondering what on earth just happened, and trying not to think about what might happen next.
*Some things I didn’t have to use a dictionary. Some things I did. To all French speakers, I’m sincerely sorry if this doesn’t read properly, but it really has been over ten years since I spoke any French!
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MEANWHILE IN BELGIUM
Besides, her personality is what makes her so interesting. She's bold, not [too] squeamish, and still seems to pull off femininity.
Cen will be extremely pleased to see those comments, that's exactly the kind of character we were going for in both writing and visuals (right down to the pulling off femininity). Phrases that would be particularly apt include: Country bogan, and pocket rocket.
