07-30-2013, 01:03 PM
You haven’t seen anything unless you’ve circled the Garden Ring road at least at a hundred fifty kilometers per hour. It had deep roots, this stretch of pavement. Laid along where the old Moscow fortress walls once stood, and built to allow people to get around the metro smooth and fast without nuisances like stoplights, pedestrians and narrow streets. But the Garden road was short on pedestrian crossings, and between the jammed traffic at rush-hour, delays for government motorcades, and a high octane need for speed from the city’s elite, the ring roads were oh-so-affectionately known as lanes of death by locals. Simply for the amount of casualties. In Stalin’s time, property along the Garden Road was kept immaculate, but these days, the name could just as easily refer to the fake flowers slung to homemade crosses, sites marking specific fatalities.
In Stalin’s days, you needed a permit to live in Moscow proper: carry an approved permit, marry a Muscovite, or be invited in. See, living in this city was in and of itself to be a higher class of citizen, even compared to other Russians. The decline of Stalin’s Russia eventually eased those restrictions, but the pride remained. Pride that landed Jaxen Marveet in exactly the situation he now found himself.
The whirr of flashing red and blue lights blurred in his periphery. Jaxen laughed and unclenched one hand from the steering wheel long enough to flip the traffic police the finger, though he was traveling so fast it would have been impossible for them to have seen it. His heart thud in his chest, and he immediately regripped the supple leather wheel and checked his mirror.
This was not a sanctioned CCD organized race. It seemed twenty years ago that the illegal drag racing, while profitable in buy-offs for the Traffic Police, that they were unstoppable. So the CCD wizened up and started taxing the events, turning them into spectacles of sport. Once in awhile a Ring Road was closed up, lined with thousands of spectators a la Morocco, and the supercars came out.
But that only made the die-hards try harder. Where was the sport in a wide open road? Muscovites weren’t bloody NASCAR rednecks.
The colored dots faded from sight as he banked. There was no way their puny little four-cylinders were going to keep up. But their high-speed lasers were sure to have clocked him, just over two hundred kilometers per hour. But that was nothing a few hundred bucks couldn’t erase. Definitely nothing to the G’s he’d be bleeding if he lost this race.
It was pitch black out. The Ring Road was always poorly lit. But the dim red glow of taillights ahead were obvious enough obstacles. When he caught up with the next batch of traffic, he rimmed around a Jag and wove to the inner lane to take the next curve, accelerating into it.
But Sergei’s vintage Aventador was right on his tail. Hell, it was trying to circle around! Sure, the Lamborghini looked superb. But the thing was a dinosaur. It was too big; too wide to maneuver on anything short of a test track. Sure sure, any big dog, twelve cylinder Lambo sitting on five-digit repair bills counted as a supercar. But on a real road, a velociraptor could outrun the lumbering T-rex any day.
“A real supercar has to take you to dinner with the devil himself!”
Jaxen had roared the night before, brandishing the drink in his hand to men at his table -- careful not to slush a single drop, no point wasting good vodka -- and to the women: he might as well include them in the conversation. They might be mid lap-dance, but there’s no point in being rude. At the time, he was winning the argument currently in progress, regarding the very definition of supercars. “Nyet!”
He barked at Sergei’s follow-up response, laughing with that mostly drunk sort of sound that swam in a man’s stomach, erupting only at the most thoroughly amusing moments.
“Outright speed is only half of it! A supercar is absurd and impractical for the sole reason of being absurd and impractical!”
Jaxen explained.
Sergei leaned across the table, pointing a finger accusingly. “Speed is all that matters Jaxen! You tell me a Countach passes you on the beltway at two sixty kilometers an hour and you don’t shit yourself, and I will call you a liar!”
Jaxen looked offended, “I didn’t say they don’t look good!”
They went back and forth another two hours, the man from Moscow versus the man from St. Petersburg, shredding one another’s arguments while maneuvering from establishment to establishment in Moscow’s red light district. By the end of the night, the arrangements were made. Twenty-four hours later, Jaxen shifted gears and jerked hard toward Sergei’s lane, cutting him off from the pass.
A cutting edge nine hundred and ninety nine horsepower kicked into final gear and Jaxen shot forward, leaving Sergei’s clunker in a duststorm of hellfire. Twelve illegal cylinders and slick aerodynamics only got a man so far. But Jaxen’s Ferrari was not a mere piece of machinery, hell, it wasn’t even an automobile, it was a piece of technology. His car was two-hundred pounds lighter than the lambo, and featured three hundred more horsepower. Well, not his car; technically, it was a car.
His heart was pounding, but he couldn’t quite seem to stay as focused on the road as he ought. Somehow, Sergei managed to recover from the earlier cut-off and was once again side by side, but a beastly Escalade, obeying the speed limits and oblivious to the danger approaching, filled his lane ahead. Jax grit his teeth and glanced at the man alongside. Sergei flicked him a victorious smile, blocking him in. There wasn’t time to pass in front, which meant Jax was going to have to fall back behind in order to swerve.
Unless--Fuck it.
He took a breath, slightly aware he ought to be cringing, but was instead laughing like a maniac, and swerved down an exit ramp at a bridge crossing to the city street beneath. He flew over the pavement, with a psychotic inattention to cross-traffic, pedestrians, hell he could have aimed right at a bus of widows, orphans and nuns and not cared. He didn’t even look, so completely confident in his delusion of safety, and soared through the intersection and back up the opposite on-ramp to merge back on the beltway just in front of the Escalade and directly adjacent his competition.
Sergei looked pissed.
Jaxen roared with victorious thrill, immediately came back up to full speed, and shot forward.
Three hours later, car gone, since the Ferrari was the wager, and he ended up losing anyway, he was walking some back alley somewhere in Kitay Gorod near where the race ended and trying to find his goddamn hotel, puking his brains out and feeling like he was going to die.
Edited by Jaxen Marveet, Jul 30 2013, 01:04 PM.
In Stalin’s days, you needed a permit to live in Moscow proper: carry an approved permit, marry a Muscovite, or be invited in. See, living in this city was in and of itself to be a higher class of citizen, even compared to other Russians. The decline of Stalin’s Russia eventually eased those restrictions, but the pride remained. Pride that landed Jaxen Marveet in exactly the situation he now found himself.
The whirr of flashing red and blue lights blurred in his periphery. Jaxen laughed and unclenched one hand from the steering wheel long enough to flip the traffic police the finger, though he was traveling so fast it would have been impossible for them to have seen it. His heart thud in his chest, and he immediately regripped the supple leather wheel and checked his mirror.
This was not a sanctioned CCD organized race. It seemed twenty years ago that the illegal drag racing, while profitable in buy-offs for the Traffic Police, that they were unstoppable. So the CCD wizened up and started taxing the events, turning them into spectacles of sport. Once in awhile a Ring Road was closed up, lined with thousands of spectators a la Morocco, and the supercars came out.
But that only made the die-hards try harder. Where was the sport in a wide open road? Muscovites weren’t bloody NASCAR rednecks.
The colored dots faded from sight as he banked. There was no way their puny little four-cylinders were going to keep up. But their high-speed lasers were sure to have clocked him, just over two hundred kilometers per hour. But that was nothing a few hundred bucks couldn’t erase. Definitely nothing to the G’s he’d be bleeding if he lost this race.
It was pitch black out. The Ring Road was always poorly lit. But the dim red glow of taillights ahead were obvious enough obstacles. When he caught up with the next batch of traffic, he rimmed around a Jag and wove to the inner lane to take the next curve, accelerating into it.
But Sergei’s vintage Aventador was right on his tail. Hell, it was trying to circle around! Sure, the Lamborghini looked superb. But the thing was a dinosaur. It was too big; too wide to maneuver on anything short of a test track. Sure sure, any big dog, twelve cylinder Lambo sitting on five-digit repair bills counted as a supercar. But on a real road, a velociraptor could outrun the lumbering T-rex any day.
“A real supercar has to take you to dinner with the devil himself!”
Jaxen had roared the night before, brandishing the drink in his hand to men at his table -- careful not to slush a single drop, no point wasting good vodka -- and to the women: he might as well include them in the conversation. They might be mid lap-dance, but there’s no point in being rude. At the time, he was winning the argument currently in progress, regarding the very definition of supercars. “Nyet!”
He barked at Sergei’s follow-up response, laughing with that mostly drunk sort of sound that swam in a man’s stomach, erupting only at the most thoroughly amusing moments.
“Outright speed is only half of it! A supercar is absurd and impractical for the sole reason of being absurd and impractical!”
Jaxen explained.
Sergei leaned across the table, pointing a finger accusingly. “Speed is all that matters Jaxen! You tell me a Countach passes you on the beltway at two sixty kilometers an hour and you don’t shit yourself, and I will call you a liar!”
Jaxen looked offended, “I didn’t say they don’t look good!”
They went back and forth another two hours, the man from Moscow versus the man from St. Petersburg, shredding one another’s arguments while maneuvering from establishment to establishment in Moscow’s red light district. By the end of the night, the arrangements were made. Twenty-four hours later, Jaxen shifted gears and jerked hard toward Sergei’s lane, cutting him off from the pass.
A cutting edge nine hundred and ninety nine horsepower kicked into final gear and Jaxen shot forward, leaving Sergei’s clunker in a duststorm of hellfire. Twelve illegal cylinders and slick aerodynamics only got a man so far. But Jaxen’s Ferrari was not a mere piece of machinery, hell, it wasn’t even an automobile, it was a piece of technology. His car was two-hundred pounds lighter than the lambo, and featured three hundred more horsepower. Well, not his car; technically, it was a car.
His heart was pounding, but he couldn’t quite seem to stay as focused on the road as he ought. Somehow, Sergei managed to recover from the earlier cut-off and was once again side by side, but a beastly Escalade, obeying the speed limits and oblivious to the danger approaching, filled his lane ahead. Jax grit his teeth and glanced at the man alongside. Sergei flicked him a victorious smile, blocking him in. There wasn’t time to pass in front, which meant Jax was going to have to fall back behind in order to swerve.
Unless--Fuck it.
He took a breath, slightly aware he ought to be cringing, but was instead laughing like a maniac, and swerved down an exit ramp at a bridge crossing to the city street beneath. He flew over the pavement, with a psychotic inattention to cross-traffic, pedestrians, hell he could have aimed right at a bus of widows, orphans and nuns and not cared. He didn’t even look, so completely confident in his delusion of safety, and soared through the intersection and back up the opposite on-ramp to merge back on the beltway just in front of the Escalade and directly adjacent his competition.
Sergei looked pissed.
Jaxen roared with victorious thrill, immediately came back up to full speed, and shot forward.
Three hours later, car gone, since the Ferrari was the wager, and he ended up losing anyway, he was walking some back alley somewhere in Kitay Gorod near where the race ended and trying to find his goddamn hotel, puking his brains out and feeling like he was going to die.
Edited by Jaxen Marveet, Jul 30 2013, 01:04 PM.