Session 1: Ignition

The crowd surges to one side as car-after-car drives off the lot onto Thunderbird. At this time of night, at this corner of the long road that spans the width of Phoenix and some of its suburbs, the roads are light with traffic. An unsuspecting cab cross the finish line, never to know how close to death they drove.

Cars line up three across, and your coterie makes up the very back line making the initial start against the odds for anyone not trying to run some fucker off the road.

It is a pair of people who come out to stand amid the cars. They each carry bright, colorful pom-poms. The two mortals give the cars a cursory scan, look to one another...and then dip their heads and wave their pom-poms and we're off to the races.

Cars tear down the corridor, a solid third already breaking ahead of the rest of the pack while the rest jockey to maintain control. (Against the Odds for anyone rolling +Duplicity or Allure).

The race started with a clear split between those who live to ride and those who ride to die (again), much to the party's chagrin. The languid movements of the slower racers suffocated the race for the first few miles.

Perkele jostles one rider in particular to the side: a forest green 2001 RX-7 FD with a driver who was just breaking away from the pack. The car gets nudged into a spin that even Perkele might not have been expected where it swerves left and firmly off into a patch of desert, disqualifying its pink haired driver off. The last thing Perkele's sees of this driver in his rear-view is a woman stepping out and waving the bird at him before other drivers sneak up.

This includes one Thessa. For several miles Perkele and Thessa ride neck-and-neck, peeling incrementally away from the all the other racers. Ally on the other hand finds herself at the head of these deadweights, but never quite able to get an edge over them.

---

The race moves on and everyone tears down the road. About halfway through—when Thunderbird East becomes West—a sleepy cop sits at the intersection, watching the fastest racers tear through without a concern in the world. Instead, he bites into his donut and mindlessly scrolls through the latest conspiracy news when a figure darkens his window. He lowers it, makes to ask if there's a problem but as he stares into piercing eyes his own grow milky and white and a dark, ugly thing fills his heart.

A minute later, as the back-half of the racers tear through, the cop radios the race in, flips on his sirens, and joins the revelry down Thunderbird...

---

This is it. Ten more glorious miles between you and life. Perkele and Thessa can even see the taillights of the racers up head—it seems that the Black Rider takes up the rear of the top three racers and its on your approach that you realize that the hearse is skimming along air itself, making seemingly impossible weaves through the heavier traffic to close the distance. The effect of powerful sorcery to be sure.

There is a shift but this one not of gears. A quarter mile behind Perkele and Thessa is a large semitruck ramming through cars like a homing missile as it barrels towards our racers.Meanwhile, chaos reigns in the remainder of the back of the pack. Ally has managed to secure a firm lead among the three remaining drivers. An orange Hyundai a dozen feet behind rolls down its passenger window and a person with armed with...something, it's wholly unclear but it does seem vaguely gun shape. They level it on Ally's ride and a moment before it could be used, lights of red and blue arrive on scene. The Hyundai swerve, their posture hesitating as an argument erupts between passenger and driver. One of the other racers peels off Thunderbird wanting nothing to do with this.

Four. Four cops have joined the race but they do not aim to win. They'll overtake the driver in the back, and maybe even catchup with the orange Hyundai, but Ally? Unclear.

There is a pulse, faint but electric, though you do not feel it in your undead hearts. You feel it in the vibration of your rides, that charge that dances across your skins raising hairs, beating against your chest even when your heart does not.

Like twin dancers, Perkele and Thessa navigate through the traffic with ease. Car horns blare and the only pedestrian on Thunderbird at this hour is nearly struck while a car veers into a gas station lot.

He stumbles out into the street, damns the driver, damns the racers, and screams, "You nearly killed m—" before the semi runs him down.

The semi with its cab wrapped as an irridescent pearl, now marred with flesh blood. The semi with its windows so tinted as to be nearly blackout. The semi that barrels down on Black Rider who swerves out and off Thunderbird to avoid being fishtailed.

The semi which now hounds Thessa. But Thessa is her own stampede. As cars cut left, veer right, or get absolutely winged by the semi's unrelenting drive forward, the large hauler somehow gains on Thessa...

Just before her racing beast rolls onto the turn, Thessa swerves to the side, cranks the handbrake to full and begins to drift, trying to make the turn, hoping to have enough room to avoid the truck and make it drive off the road.

And off road it goes, shrieking into the night skies as it jumps a curb and rolls at nearly full speed toward a building. Thessa continues her peel as West Thunderbird becomes North Thunderbird, Perkele not too far ahead and Ally not too far behind. She can even make out Black Rider and the other top two racers: Wrencher and Echo are neck-and-neck...the Sun City church, the finish line, not too far beyond them.