OK Number 39 - New Beginnings

The phones were tingling, like free flowing toes at the end of the bed. Lelouch had just finished a curt discussion with the engine installation department, and was launched headlong into a chassis department, likely asking something banal about copyright or decision making or the administrative minutae. Lelouch felt like a firefighter, responding to his ship lurching from crisis to crisis if and when they arose to try and keep Schwarzenritter-Lamperouge time from suffering a stillbirth.

He felt like an overweight infant, Lelouch picked up the phone with a weary sense of being barely able to sustain a floating front crawl, with each stroke consuming a lungs worth of oxygen, with his two lungs barely able to pull his arm out of the water. Heavy breathing, heavy blood, heart beating slowly but with a forceful vigor, Lelouch was not unaware of these signs and what they meant.

However, Lelouch had put his health on the line for this sport before, and was prepared to do it again.

"Right, what is it you need?"

Lelouch kept one hand on the phone, pinning it to his ear as he scribbled down notes from the conversation, breathlessly whispering out his responses as he got a grasp of the situation, though this one seemed initially to defy common sense.

"Say again?"

When Lelouch made his promise to not leave the engineering department, he was not mincing words. After asking Rolo to fetch his essential equipment, essentials and a hammock, Lelouch set up his base of operations, combining a hotel room with a makeshift office which he manned almost constantly, outsourcing his supply of meals and being loath to retire for the evening, struggling to fall asleep even once he had thrown in the towel. In the several weeks he had been doing the work, he had heard some downright inspiring words and some pitiful ones.

This fell into the latter.

"I'm… I don't understand quite what you mean, you designed it, what do you mean it doesn't fit? Don't say that again, don't just say 'It doesn't fit.' to me again."

"But sir, it doesn't."

Lelouch had never been completely comfortable in the finer arts of car setup as a driver, not ever becoming quite familiar with what each component contributed, and how they should be adjusted to amend a given issue. Lelouch had always been quite jealous of Suzaku in this respect, with Suzaku having an otherworldly intimacy with the cars he drove, and an intricate mental image of how each variable contributed to the overall package. Even if Lelouch had wound up being the head of a different team, he still would have sought out Suzaku to take up the charge of giving feedback and driving the development of the car, a field in which he was only matched by the old guard of Gino and Xingke. The difference was that Suzaku was only entering his fourth season, whereas Gino had twelve under his belt. Suzaku was a prodigy, and would take a central role in focusing the direction of the team.

What all of this was to say was that Lelouch was having to learn about many of these technical details for the first time, with his head being more geared towards business than engineering. However, he in spite of this lack of any background in design he could only respond with aghast scepticism at the idea… no, he could not word it any more plausibly than the woman on the other end of the line;

"The main connector pins don't fit, the engine mount on the chassis is fifteen millimetres too narrow. It won't insert."

Shaking his head, Lelouch asked back "But you designed it. Did the engine magically get bigger? Did the gremlins get fed last night and decide to fiddle? What on Earth happened?"

"We didn't get the right specifications."

Lelouch wiped his face with his sweaty hand, before sighing and responding "Can you change the pins at all to fit it?"

"No." came the response. "They're integrated into the chassis, the engine is a stress member for the chassis. It's structurally integral, and so the connector pins are built into it rather than glued on."

Lelouch paused to consider the problem, before coming to a response.

"Look, you're hired to do your job because you know what you're doing, and I don't. I'd reckon you could try to have a word with the fluid dynamics and scanning department to digitise the frame and engine, then fabricate a sleeve that will fill the gap between the engine and mount, but I don't go around telling ye how to fix things, because I just don't know. If there's an obvious flaw in that, please try whatever you think will work. Just let me know so that I can clear out whatever administrative hurdles may arise so that you can not go too much over your deadline. We still need to get the floor in on the 20th, so if we get this done by tomorrow a lot of things become a lot easier."

"Gotcha, it'll be sorted one way or t'other. Appreciate the flexibility you're giving us, we'll sort it."

Lelouch nodded, acknowledging what it must have been like under Lloyd who surely insisted that his design, vision and intention remain as pure as he conceptualised them in the design studio, and what an atmosphere which stifled autonomy must have been like, before hanging up the phone and leaving her to her business.

With another item ticked off his list of things to see to, he moved swiftly to the next one, muttering "No rest for the wicked." However, as he moved towards writing an email towards a gold company to procure foil for the fuel cell, he got a tap on the wall just outside his office, segregated from the engineering facility by tarp and curtains. He chirped up, inviting them in with a simple "You don't need to knock. If I'm doing something private I'll be in the bogs."

The employee, who turned out to be from PR, entered undeniably sheepishly with a newspaper in hand. Lelouch could tell that he was still living with post traumatic stress from his previous employer, and so the Franc tried to visibly destress himself, taking a less tense and more open posture, and grinning, albeit tiredly, towards the man who barely looked much older than Lelouch was.

"What's your name?" Lelouch invited, clearing some space across his desk for him, trying to create an approachable image. As well as helping this individual situation, this gentleman would likely spread around how nice the new boss was to his coworkers.

It certainly seemed his injuries hadn't impeded his social engineering at any rate.

"Felix, sir." he nodded. "We've been written about, and another paper wants to hear your response."

Lelouch, who had had his nose to the grindstone for the better part of a week, could only shrug and respond "I've been busy, haven't read it."

"Assumed you hadn't, so I brought it with me so you could before they sic the journalists on you while you're behind the curve."

Lelouch nodded, picking it up and spinning it round before resting it on his lap.

"I can't promise you'll like it." Felix warned. Lelouch didn't know what this meant until he scanned over it, reading it aloud.

"Schwarzenritter… Great bunch of people… the best will in the world to them… but the wheels will never hit the tarmac. They went under for a reason, and are not likely to turn a wheel this side of the return of Christ. Why do they bother?"

Lelouch spoke the last few words with disgust, before tossing it back on his desk. After waiting a moment, Felix prompted "So, what am I to respond with?"

Lelouch shook his head, before muttering "I am going to… bloody… heh, let's not start swearing before midday, we are going to show everyone, including the… gentleman who penned this bloody galaxy brained think piece, that they're wrong. This team is going to make it even if it has to be dragged by its two front teeth. We are going to produce this car, we are going to get to the grid, and we are going to win some bloody grands prix… och, merde."

"That's a swear."

Lelouch grinned, and pointed to Felix before commenting "You'll go far. Now write back and summarise that in a more palatable way."

Felix nodded, before beating a hasty retreat. Lelouch caught his breath, and mopped his face with a wet dishcloth. Intending to follow up on a note on the rear differential team, he moved towards the phone, however he was beat to the punch by someone calling him.

Picking it up immediately, he spoke first without waiting to exchange formalities. Time was of the essence, and now that they were deep into crunch time, any time spent on non-essential communication was wasted. In his time spent trying to sleep or on the bog, he even contemplated implementing a whole new code language which would make conversations order of magnitude more efficient.

But his Newspeak fantasy had not materialised, and

"Name, number, department."

"Oliver Hughes-Holland, 2296, Fuel Cell."

"What's needed?"

Lelouch paused, before his eyes shrank to pinpricks.

After a lengthy pause, he could only whisper "C… could you say that again?"

Kallen smiled towards the crowd, all armed to the teeth with flashing cameras, barrels trained on Gino and herself, stood to either side of the car, borne of the minds that more money than God could buy, as well as the material resources the above could avail of, hidden beneath a grey fabric shroud.

The car, called the RPI-15/SC Gloucester, had begun development early in the previous season once it dawned on engineers that they would not be competing for the title that year. As such, the fundamentals of the car were built around Gino's preferences, which leant more towards a stable platform which gave reliable understeer under acceleration and braking. As Gino often said, slow was smooth, and smooth was fast. Of course, this was the exact opposite of Kallens thesis of overdriving the car and throwing it into unconventional situations to extract performance, in what was charitably described as 'roller-skating the car up the road', and uncharitably described as 'stabbing the throttle until the car has rounded the corner.'

But the influence of Fangio and Stewart marched on, and in the world according to Gino the throttle was used as an instrument to modulate understeer as opposed to rotating the car, races should be won at the slowest possible speed, and pineapple was an acceptable topping for pizza. Given that Kewell had not intended to stay with the team after he got his drive in V8 Supercars, its fundamental architecture was suited to Gino's needs.

Of course, it was a ways better than Tohdoh's situation, whereupon he was only brought back to the Rebellion team at the eleventh hour with a car designed for drivers who weren't there anymore. Which, in turn, was far better than Suzaku's situation of having a team that would not be able to produce a car in time, or at all, depending on what speculation you believed.

Of course, this reveal event, hosted in a round conference hall in north Aylesbury in the southern scarp of Britain's "motorsport valley", running from Slough to Cambridge, was not about these other teams. This event was all about revealing their challenger for this year. It still took Kallen a few moments to connect the idea of the car being 'hers'. She had spent two years with Camelot as either her primary opponent or a tertiary obstacle, and indeed one of the few constants between the two years was that Camelot had been one of the teams at the sharp end of the grid opposing her. Given how longs she had spent building herself up in practice and races to beat them, to now be one of them certainly made for some cognitive dissonance.

People did this all the time, she reassured herself. Niki Lauda, God rest his soul, was the typecast Ferrari driver until he switched to McLaren. The names Alain Prost and Renault were interchangeable until the former also moved to McLaren.

Even so, she still had to take a moment to appreciate it. She would make another attempt at the title. Driving the car in front of her. With the Camelot team behind her.

Kallen puffed up her chest, invisible though it was through the fireproof overalls, three layers thick and hot as the surface of the sun though it may have been. This was certainly not something that changed between teams; under the floodlights and roof, the thin, thick, and thin nomex layers trapping heat like layers of carbon enveloping the Earth.

But hey, at least she would be safe if the joint caught fire.

Suddenly, the lights began to dim, and she swapped glances with Gino. It was almost time. Kallen took a breath, as she prepared to present her challenger.

"Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the CEO and Managing Director of Camelot-Yggdrasil, Bartley Asprius!"

Kallen was still, not certain if she ought to join in the applause, but it seemed a moot point as all the attention was on the balding executive, who was waving as he entered by the depressed tunnel. Climbing up the steps to enter the arena like circle area just below the rowed seating, he had to swivel about on the spot to nod to all the press, and ensure they were all accommodated.

Satisfied, he placed his palms together and took in a visible breath, his chest swelling, before he released all the air and began.

"Ladies and gentlemen, welcome. I hope the porters didn't treat you too badly."

This earned a laugh, before Bartley continued.

"Over the seasons before last, we have always strived to not only be competitive, but to always build the best cars, to have the best architectures, the best structures, and to place all of these within the hands of the best pilots. At Camelot, we do not look over any element. All members of our team are carefully selected and honed, all instruments within our toolbox to ensure that we can extract the most from our package. However, last year was our second worst in a decade. We knew that change was necessary, on all fronts, to ensure we remained competitive."

"All the teams in this sport are continuing to find pace, both over a season and in the winter. To win, you must not only improve, but improve far quicker than the competition. If you fight to improve your package at every weekend, it is very possible you will only retain your current standing, as opposed to improving it. As such, no stone has been left unturned. Structure, concept, chassis, and indeed, as you can already see, driver lineup. Joining our ally of seven year Gino Weinberg is the immense talent of Kallen Kōzuki."

There was a smattering of reserved applause, but clearly muted from what it had been. There was undoubtedly the phantom of Lelouch lingering in the crowd which made Kallen uneasy. Sensing, from the pause in Bartley's speech, an invitation to speak up, she stepped forward from behind the front wing.

"Urhm…"

What should she do with her hands? Finger tent? No, that was perceived as more calculating and detached, but she couldn't just let them fall by her side! The only thing worse than that was putting her hands in her pockets, a sin that only just outstripped crossing them in front of her chest.

Arggh! What was she thinking? She was trying to command a crowd, and she was worried about her hands? Gah! She eventually decided to just clasp her hands in front of her waist, step forward even further and stick her neck out.

"Well, I do appreciate Mr Bartley's charitable description of the skills of a driver who bottled the first half of 2018 and missed an open goal at the eleventh hour, and that's not even to mention the elephant in the room."

She paused, briefly looking down to find the best way to phrase it. She was not a victim, however she wanted another chance. It was a narrow tightrope to manage, particularly on the fly. However, with a short halt, she selected the right phrasing, with something akin to a chuckle.

"I can't say I was… exactly sought after once I was let go. I would not be able to blame him if he went for one of the many talented picks he had available to him. It would have been entirely defensible. But he didn't pick them, he picked me."

Kallen looked up this time, steeling herself, before continuing.

"He saw in me… a kindred spirit. Since I parted ways with Rebellion, there has remained a sense of unfinished business. I'm not perfect, and I don't know everything, but I know that I have a ways to go to redeem myself. I failed on track, and off it; but my business with this sport was not finished, in great part thanks to Camelot, who have graciously chosen to facilitate my hopes towards this."

"In this way, Camelot possesses a similar outlook. After a decade of success, they have stumbled, and have lost face. They are seeking to reinvigorate their championship ambitions this year. Jut like me, they want redemption, a spot of vengeance after how last year unfolded. They have unfinished business, and will pull out all the stops to win, just like I will. I will work harder to stay at my peak, just as they will pursue those thousandths of seconds to make the car as fast as it can. We will be making this journey together, as one unified will. We are both seeking the same goal, in both the narrow and broad sense. We both want to win, but that's trivial in this sport. Everyone wants to win. We both want to redeem ourselves, and show that we have earned our place at the front."

Kallen then backed up, having finished her brief moment, feeling reasonably satisfied. Bartley, similarly pleased, played off it, adding "Well, we're birds of a feather in our desire to get back to the sharp end of the field. But let's not engage in historical revisionism here. You got the most Poles of any driver last year. You got the most wins even in spite of not finishing several races, and it was only in the first half you had teething issues. One you hit your stride, you chained something like six victories in a row, and brought the title fight to the last race from a forty-four point gap in the middle point of the season. Ultimately, the two drivers we put in our cars are as fundamental to our performance as tyres, brakes or suspension."

He paused, before smiling and continuing his introduction.

"With this lineup of the most experienced driver on the grid and the fastest qualifier on the grid, we plan to reassert our position at the front of the grid. With that, I am proud to reveal our third competitor for this year, the Gloucester. Kallen, Gino, pull back the cover."

Lelouch was now out of his atelier and sat at the head of the conference room. His stress, far from having abated, now seemed overwhelming. Every movement threatened to exhaust him wholly, however even so he could not help but place his sinus and forehead into the cradle of his palm, trying to wipe away vast quantities of exhaustion. Instead, it was like trying to pick up mercury with his hand, simply flowing aside and remaining a nuisance.

However, Lelouch chose to ignore it, and down a shot of an anonymous fluid before he tensed his muscles as tight and firm as he could, before allowing them to unwind. This was repeated several times to get his body back under his control, before he shook himself and prepared to get the meeting underway. He had called it as soon as his exchange with the fuel cell team was finished, and people were still hurriedly filing in, changing out of their overalls and into their shirts and ties.

Honestly, as Rolo might have put it, big mood.

Lelouch sat back, unusually fretful as the room filled up. He was responsible, and the failures of his team lay at his feet, and he believed they would share this attitude. He was not eager to bear the brunt of what he suspected would be their disappointment, however it was not only inevitable, but earned. Of course, he wasn't technically minded, nor had he deluded himself into assigning any responsibility to himself in those technical fields where he had no knowledge. However, if only he'd given them more staff, more resources, more wiggle room-

"So what's the story Lelouch?"

Lloyd was his eternally forward self, which set Lelouch somewhat at ease, before he cleared his throat. Taking a leaf out of Lloyd's book, he figured that he might as well deliver the bad news at first instance.

"So… we are not in a condition where we can run in the shakedown in any reasonable capacity. We will not be going to Silverstone on the twentieth."

Lelouch made sure to note the reactions of each employee in the room, before laughing without humour. Some things never changed, and his urge to gauge each of his colleagues' attitudes and, for lack of a better word, loyalty, certainly had not. Suzaku, oftentimes buoyed by the belief that nothing could ever go wrong if sufficiently planned and prepared for, looked down in frustration and shook his head. His solution would no doubt be to double down and work harder, which would have been all well and good he was in any way responsible for building the car, but would only contribute to pent up irritation.

Perhaps of more relevance, the engineers, who had long become accustomed to the possibility of missing the shakedown, were at least restrained in their visible responses. By contrast, Lloyd, who never even contemplated the concept, seemed shocked, only kept upright by the arms and back of his chair. Not having it in himself to roll his eyes, Lelouch continued.

"The primary issue is that our fuel cell is not installed or in a position where it can be installed. Instead, we plan to run a shakedown in Barcelona the Sunday before testing proper begins the next day at the same track. Obviously this loses us the intervening period where we could sort issues, but to head to Silverstone now would be redundant. No useful data would be gathered. Sorry to have to tell you this.

"So when will the cars be ready?"

"I don't know. If there's an issue with the design-"

"There bloody well is not."

Lelouch sighed. Lloyd was passionate about the direction he had taken this years design, running a long wheelbase for more stability as well as extracting more downforce from the floor. This passion bode well for what successes they could expect over the season, however it did narrow the flexibility of his thinking in terms of the source of difficulty. The trademark tight packaging Lloyd had made his name on proved notoriously difficult to maintain and swap out parts, with many mechanism buried deep within the bowels of the machine, with much of the body effectively shrink-wrapped around the cars organs. Choosing his words carefully, Lelouch tried to phrase his point in a less offensive manner.

"But yes, assuming hypothetically that there is an issue in the design and concept, that's one scenario. If there was one in manufacturing, that's another. If it has been warped since it was manufactured, that's also another. We would have to take the floor off to confirm these, and if there's any chance of a false negative… I don't know how long it will take, basically."

Lelouch parted his hands, laying them upwards, before concluding with "I'm sorry."

There was a pause, before Cecile mused "Hardly as if you've been slacking."

"Makes no difference." Lelouch replied. "I'm running the team. I don't- I've… I'm not going to run this team by blaming technical staff for doing their jobs and put them on blast. That's not going to foster what we want to see, a workplace that rewards sound thinking and out of the box solutions. Ultimately, it's my fault. I'm in charge, so if I can't take that on the chin I should be thrown out of this building."

This earned a laugh, before Lelouch continued.

"Ultimately, we've now got a new set of goalposts. It's the same as before. We just need to keep ahead of our schedule."

Cecile nodded, and replied "I know, we're doing our best and with all likelihood we'll get there-"

"No, not in all likelihood. We will be there. No maybes about it."

So this wasn't what I planned for.

Furthermore, even once I got to grips with my new situation, it still isn't what I planned.

Okay, perhaps I owe you an explanation.

I published the last chapter on the first of April of 2019. Today is the eleventh of September 2019. Furthermore, I had not, in April, published a chapter since early January, having up to that point maintained a reasonably regular schedule. I must apologise for getting your hopes up, but I didn't plan for what happened next.

On the tenth of April, nine days after I posted the last chapter, I was coming home by bus from university, and tried to cross the road from the bus stop to the farm I cut through to get the rest of the way home. However, while corssing the road, I was hit by a car, brow bone going into the A pillar, before bouncing back and landing the back of my head on the tarmac. I sustained significant brain damage, particularly to visual memory, alongside two bleeds on the brain which nearly brought this story to a very early end. I spent ten days in an induced coma, just over a month in an acute ward, and two months in a rehabilitation centre.

By the point I was discharged it was late July. Thinking I had already been on a non-consensual hiatus for long enough, I figured that a bit longer would be little more strain, so that I could build up my back catalogue of content, which I had hitherto been writing and publishing contemporaneously, hence the frequent spelling and grammar errors.

I have written just over two thirds of the story which remains to be told, or another 100,000 words out of 150,000 remaining words, bringing me a good bit through the 2019 season, up to the sixth to last race. Hopefully I can write as I go along to prevent the content snake from eating itself, but the college term may necessitate another, hopefully shorter hiatus, in about fifteen to twenty chapters time.

This story has sen me through a lot. It's been with me through my first boyfriend, my going to college, my first serious attempt at doing motorsports myself, and my realising a great deal about myself, that much of which I had assumed to be true was not, or at least not true or appropriate for myself.

So, with a new name, I hope you can see this story to the end with me. The perspective I began this story with has changed dramatically, and certainly many of the stories I had told before 2018 I look back on with some reservation, but the story hasn't ended. Thank you for sticking with me.

G1lles