OK Number 63 - No Rest For The Wicked

The contract was signed later in the same day, though the environment was perhaps less opulent then a skyscraper office; with the short window of time between the Wednesday morning on which they had met Tohdoh and the Thursday morning that the scrutineering and shakedown would begin, they had to move fast. With a phone call made on the way from the hospital from Naoto to Taizo, they had to hurriedly meet in a fast food joint in Mie. After a few minutes of limp wristed negotiation, a contract was signed, providing for the payment to Schwarzenritter for the buy-out clause, which given the drivers eagerness to escape would be paid in half, with Suzaku personally footing the other twenty million pounds for the pleasure of escaping France as soon as he could and coming home.

The deal was verbally negotiated, before being signed on the only writable surface they had to hand; a paper towel¸ which they pulled out of the bathroom and signed their names into in pen. Kallen was sceptical, but apparently this was sufficient to form a legally binding contract. Given how much school Kallen had not attended, she felt that this matter was definitely best left to better qualified parties.

And so, when they arrived at the Suzuka International Circuit, Suzaku was a Rebellion driver. He had been positively childlike in his enthusiasm to an extent Kallen had never seen from Suzaku, even after he had won races. He looked so genuinely delighted, which conversely made Kallen feel even more awful for wanting to take that away from him, but his excitement was infectious, and they had barely arrived at the track before he leapt towards the bathroom to try his new overalls on, genuinely sprinting over to try it on. It wasn't even his; it was spare overalls intended for Naoto, even having Naoto's name and blood type sewn into the chest, with his new overalls not going to be prepared until the Friday. However, he just had to try it on.

And, much as Kallen's Id didn't like it, Suzaku looked damn good in purple and black. It probably didn't hurt that he was wearing an uncharacteristically beaming smile.

However, Marrybel was for the second time this year left holding the bag. Now down a driver, Lelouch was forced to cave and re-sign the Canuck just months after having dropped her to make way for Rolo. At least there was a uniform ready for her, as the decision to bring in Rolo had been one made at the eleventh hour, even within the context of an eleventh hour team designing an eleventh hour car with an eleventh hour financial package. She would retain her seat, which was just, as she hadn't really done anything wrong, beyond being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Certainly, her time spent at Rosenberg with Suzaku had shown which one of them was the better driver, with Suzaku claiming a championship while Marrybel was hard pressed to seal a race win, but this once again was not a criminal offence.

It came at a very fortunate time too, as any later and many of Suzaku's native supporters would have turned up on the Sunday wearing the wrong teams attire, however there was a chance now to get fully ready for what was a return to having two Japanese Rebellion drivers, and a World Champion in the team.

Indeed, Japanese motorsports was in an incredibly emotional state in general, with the urban, working class heroes of Kallen and Naoto now both in race winning seats, and Suzaku having done what was, in the public view, something of a 'heel-face turn', with even the most cynical Rebellion diehard, who viewed him as the out of touch elitist who had been raised in Europe and only Japanese by birth, now becoming fanatical supporters, as he had began what in their eyes was a redemption arc, taking his talent to a home grown team.

Of course, any discussion of the emotionally fragile state of motorsports culture of Honshu would be incomplete without a mention of what was the functional mourning of Tohdoh, who, beyond being critically injured, had announced he would not be returning to a race seat, and was retiring. Commentators had wished him a full recovery, and there was not one person who either disrespected his achievements nor failed to understand why he was stepping down. This was beyond Naoto's injuries, and tributes flooded in by the day. Tohdoh would never race his last Japanese Grand Prix, or at least not in the knowledge that it would be his last.

However, while this would cast a dark cloud over the weekend, most had already come to terms with it by Belgium, and the nation of Japan was in a positive frenzy, with it having reached fever pitch by Friday, in spite of there being another two days until the race.

There would have been less chaos and mad flurry if someone set the entire nation on fire; Kallen, Naoto, and Suzaku, all now in seriously competitive cars, all with a reasonable chance of winning. You could not meet a human being in the country who did not have a strong opinion on which of the three they were behind, which of the three's shirts they were wearing, which of the three's flags were hung out their bedroom window, fluttering in the wind. The upcoming Grand Prix, later into the year than it had traditionally been, had become the focal point of a national furore.

On the row of apartments either side of the one the Kōzukis lived in, there was not one window without a flag; Kallen's modified Hinomaru with the five Kanji forming Kō-Zu-Ki-Ka-Ren in the four corners, Naoto's purple and red number ten, Suzaku, who was represented by his name in rōmaji stylised in bold, or just the traditional Hinomaru. This trend continued all the way to Suzuka, where every house would have a flag at full mast, and every sweaty person on the trains or in the cars would be wearing replica overalls and caps. The traffic around Koucho and Misonocho was practically at a standstill, clogged with a mass of buses, almost all of which were filled to the brim with excited fans, draping scarves and slogans out of all open windows.

What was perhaps even more remarkable from Kallen's perspective was the view of the green area surrounding the circuit, an area of thirteen square kilometres to the south of Sumiyoshi; there was not a speck of green. The entire area of rolling hills, undeveloped, was now host to a vast, sprawling mess of tents and marquees and caravans, laid out over an entire countryside. Suzuka's frequently extreme noise from the race cars that frequented their had riddled the surrounding area with sound pollution had caused it to be deemed unsuitable for residential or office zoning, with the surrounding fields largely left to nature. However, what seemed visually to be every single one of the 126 million people living in Japan had, over the week, descended on the gentle fields like teens at a rock concert. What made this even more incredible was that the accommodation around Suzuka had not been traditionally lacking, however there was overflow as far as the eye could see.

This bustling excitement was not limited to the surrounding countryside, as six new grandstands had had to be constructed to accommodate the demand, and even then, towels and deckchairs littered the hills overlooking the track, and even then, people were just sitting on the grass, simply excited to be watching the three national icons face off. The excitement, the atmosphere, the air ran so rich, so dense with a palpable sense of anticipation, of ecstatic excitement, it could be sliced cleanly through with a dull spoon without so much as a hint of resistance, such was the cleavage of the thick musk polluting the air like a drug. Beyond the pits, the radius surrounding Suzuka had perhaps the highest human density and foot traffic in the State of Japan, second only to perhaps the heart of the Tokyo metropolitan area at Ikebukuro.

And this hype was not limited to the Shima peninsula in the Kansai region. Charles had orchestrated the transition of the broadcast of the race from the premium Fuji TV One to the main Fuji channel, as well as introducing it to Tokyo Broadcasting System Holdings and Nippon Television Network System. For the first time in over a decade, the race in Japan would be shown on free-to-air television, as opposed to a subscription service. The Friday practice sessions, where Suzaku drove the Rebellion car in anger for the first time, were viewed live by a quarter of the countries population, some thirty-one million people, with accessible Japanese commentary. Given that practice was normally inconsequential, the drivers could only speculate how these numbers would rise through the event, particularly as they entered the weekend, where less people would be working. It gave the race a weight, if the flood of people hadn't already done that; all one hundred and twenty six million sweaty, beady eyes were looking into the bowl, causing such perspiration and chaos.

In the nineteen-eighties, almost two decades before the Kallen was even born, there was a means of cooking operating off of a basic physical principle; the boiling point of water varied with pressure. This allowed water to be raised to well over a hundred degrees without boiling, and food to be cooked at such a temperature safely, or at least the vague, handwavey standard that delineated whether something was safe back in the nineteen-eighties.

All the Japanese drivers felt like they were inside a pressure cooker; the heat was far beyond what they would ordinarily be able to cope, far beyond that which would normally just melt people, evaporate them into vapour as they lost all ability to function. But all five drivers (whether the others liked it or not, Nagisa Chiba and Shinichiro Tamaki were Japanese) had been conditioned to operate at heightened pressures so thoroughly and for so long that it barely registered. They were the water in the pressure cooker; hot, hot enough to boil, evaporate away, but they didn't. They just put their heads down and went on cooking.

Well, driving, but Kallen wasn't strong with metaphors. Or would that be an analogy?

Eager to avoid that linguistic rabbit hole, Kallen promptly took this brief flash of self-awareness to move to Qualifying. It was damp, neither bucketing out of the heavens nor bone dry, with some drizzle, yet no decisive downpour. There was some uncertainty as to whether it was too dry to try the intermediate wet tyres, or too wet to attempt the dry ones. As it unfolded, the track grew wetter as the day unfolded, and, with the early damp track providing more grip, it dawned on the paddock that people had to have gone out for a lap at the earliest opportunity to get into Q2, as the lap times on could extract from the track were diminishing rapidly. Most of the top runners had made a run on dries quite early on, with one exception; Suzaku Kururugi, in his first race for Rebellion, had let his natural conservative streak get the better of him, and gone out on intermediate tyres rather than the slick dry tyres, constructed without grooves to clear standing water at the expense of a reduced surface area in contact with the road. By the time he had realised his mistake, the track had become too wet to go back to slicks, and he was out; P18 he would start in in his home race, having won it the year before.

Q2 picked up the intensity, and by Q3 the heavens had opened, with volumes of water worthy of floods and waterfalls and lakes and oceans being dropped on the circuit every minute. It was like a biblical scene from the days of Noah, the world seemed to just be growing submerged as the standing water and puddles became lakes, and the valley and rolling hills surrounding the track seemed the be the walls of the bowl in which the water would just fill up and swallow them, like all the animals and men and trees that were not gathered in the ark.

However, Kallen had fully dialled into the cambers and curves of the track, able to flick the car with an instinctive rhythm, and took Pole Position for the eighteenth time in her three season career. Even as the clouds let loose a trillion drops of rain the size of golfballs, the stands were still filled to almost overflow with crowds, with even more looking on from screens in their waterlogged tents, and their cheers, their celebration, their volume, their airhorns overpowered the roar of the engine as she waved them by on her way home, triumphant.

Of course, Kallen had been on Pole the previous year, and was keenly aware, given the disparity between her eighteen Poles and her twelve wins, that the job was only half done. The work was for Sunday, and Kallen was acutely aware her aggressive, hyperactive way of manhandling the car, while it had the highest ceiling, meant the concentration required to keep the level of performance at this ceiling was almost impossible compared to the relatively straightforward, yet limited ceilings of more race-oriented setups, which could run near full speed through most of the race without being mentally or physically taxing, or at least not to an unreasonable degree. These would generally have lower levels of downforce, lowering the speed you could take fast corners at, but allowing you to go faster on the straights, which was the primary focus in a race environment.

She would have it all to do to get her first home win.

She had had two tries at it, though the first instance had been her very first Grand Prix. Her second one had ended with a trip to the hospital after she ploughed into the back of Xingke, who was ironically now leading the championship. Combined with it being the site of Naoto's crash where he broke his legs, the Kōzukis historically had very poor luck at their home race. However, Kallen was in the form of her life, and Suzaku, in spite of a new lease on life and a disgracefully fast package in race trim, was down near the back of the pack, and nobody had climbed up to the lead from that far back since the 1983 United States Grand Prix West. Everyone else, Kallen could deal with, particularly if it was wet in the race.

Kallen had set her car up fully for qualifying trim, given that she planned to run the entire race at around a qualifying level of intensity. This meant ramping up the downforce, which killed straight line speed. Given that her closest competitors, Naoto, Gino, and perhaps Rolo, did not feel confident that they had the pace to outqualify Kallen regardless of how aggressive the set up the car, and so they had gone in the complete opposite direction, throwing away qualifying entirely to set up a good race car. This was part of the reason Kallen would have such a big task.

However, if it rained, the lowered high speed grip would disproportionally affect those who were running marginal levels of downforce and grip, as opposed to extreme ones, and Kallen would storm ahead.

Before she went to sleep, she considered doing a little rain dance to give the weather a bit of encouragement.

She decided against it.

Twenty minutes later, following unrest and discomfort, she relented and did a rain dance.

In truth, that didn't help either. Beyond the sheer noise coming from just beyond the circuit where the campsites were littered from what Kallen suspected was an impromptu concert or music gig, she doubted any driver would be able to sleep even in a soundproofed room.

There was just such a musk, such a palpable anticipation, as if they were all in a traffic jam, shuffling at stop-start pace towards an inevitable destination, just slow enough to feel irritated at the clock not moving faster, but just fast enough to keep one on edge, to give one glimmers of progress. You could never take your mind fully off it, as it was undeniably moving forward, undeniably approaching, but it was taking its sweet ass time, constantly frustrating in how it had perhaps moved centimetres in the last hour, or how it moved only ten minutes in the last one hundred.

It was the longest night, as the weight of an entire country sat on top of the mattress. Kallen had to have four showers through the night for how much sweat was gathering, and how dank the air ran.

By two in the morning, she gave up, left her trailer and tried to run laps of the track, just to try and tire herself enough for sleep. She had done three laps, just under eighteen kilometres, by the time she collapsed on a couch in the garage, and finally got some sleep.

She snorted awake to a bright light, a roof mounted cold batten of LED's, lighting the environment with a cold bright that stung her eyes. She shook her head, feeling wet and cold and sore in the head, as if afflicted by a hangover without even having had the pleasure of getting piss drunk.

As she took a cold shower to fully wake herself up, she heard that it was nearly twelve o'clock, with the race starting at two. Almost as soon as she became cognisant and aware of the context she found herself in, whatever anticipation had been constricting her chest the night before had tripled, suffocating her, as she felt her mind asphyxiate, waning in function with each drying cell.

But she would put these things aside. There was only the race, all else, all the rest of the world was gone. The seven thousand square feet the circuit was contained within was all that existed, one could well walk just beyond the property and fall into an eternal black void. These emotions, overwhelming, were instructed to fall away, as Kallen deliberately misapplied techniques from anger management. For the next three hundred and five kilometres, she would be nothing, she had to only focus on the road, only focus on the lines, only focus on securing track position. Layer by layer, she stripped away her flesh until all of her skin was like her hands; red, vile, and by necessity exposed. She just let the world wash over her. She would not be affected by it, the spirit of the place, the overwhelming, intense high-octane emotionality, which would normally cause sensory overload for even Kallen. Instead, she had to become like the bomber pilot, or the bus operator.

In 2009, research was underway into the mentality and common factors underlying every champion back to 1998. It reached the following conclusion;

"They have unbelievable concentration, they just do not get distracted. It's about personality types. In World War Two, they invented a test to find bomber pilots who could concentrate for long periods of time without what are known as 'involuntary rest pauses', or lapses of concentration to you and me. They found that there was a link between introvert and extrovert on that. The more introvert a personality you are, the longer you can concentrate. Many bus companies found that disproportionally many accidents happen with extrovert drivers at the wheel, so they now do personality tests and choose introverts."

Kallen may have been someone who enjoyed moments of isolation to gather her thoughts, but she picked up a lot of her energy from interactions with others. Whether it was from Naoto, Suzaku, or Euphemia, the ebb and flow of Kallen's energy and performance was linked with the attitudes of those around her. However, this source was not reliable, hinging on the help of others. She had to disentangle herself, become less dependent on the emotional aid of others to reach this state, a state where she could just exist as a tool, she could just exist as a cog, or a gear, or some other, another part in the machine, running automatically to try and get round the track as fast as possible.

She had to remove herself, wipe any remnant of Kallen Kōzuki, the five foot seven young upstart from the inner city of Tokyo, off the face of the planet. She had to wholly obliterate herself to rebuild a better one, reshaped and new. She ignored the context, ignored the national spotlight, and just emptied her mind. She was a blank canvas.

She was ready.

She shooed away any press who would approach, eager to secure and maintain this view. She looked up to the horizon, formed by rolling hills blocked at times by grandstands. There was nothing past that. There was only the next three hundred and five kilometres.

She felt entirely relaxed, her muscles loose and her chest almost limp, her limbs falling like a puppets. She would completely reshape herself, abandon anything she was or had ever been, let it all fall away like a weight, so that she would enter the car no heavier than air. She was not Kallen Kōzuki, icon of the urbane Japanese working class, or Kallen Kōzuki, fighting for the world championship, or Kallen Kōzuki, who was being watched by almost half the country. She was anyone else, driving in any other race, with no eyes, no championship, no politics, nothing.

As she slid the car into the grid slot, she was empty. There was no distraction. She was at the scope of a G4M1's bomb bay, surveying the ocean for the American battleships and aircraft carriers she was to deliver the bomb over, knowing if she took her eyes off the reticule for one moment the blink-and-you'll-miss-it chance to drop the payload would have been lost. She was the bus driver, tunnel visioned on the road ahead without a single blink, and a blink could take her eyes off the road for three tenths of a second, which was the difference between Pole and second place on this occasion.

As she waited for the rest of the grid to form up, she glanced up to the skies, and they were a little bit… too familiar. The clouds were foreboding, holding in their grey ambiguity the threat of rain. It look exactly like it had for her first Grand Prix two years previously, though it had been much earlier in the schedule then. Lelouch had made the decision to make the change to wets before the race began. Should she have done it now? Would she regret it?

No, this was no time for that. This was no time for emotions, or regrets, or anything other than the five lights and the first corner. In both of the two years she had driven this track, she had lifted through 130R, still remembering what had happened to Naoto, and making up for this time elsewhere as everyone else took the corner flat out. She just wasn't confident in her car after Naoto's suspension had failed.

She would not be lifting today. All fear, all nerves, all anxiety and worry had been stripped back leaving just a corpse behind the wheel, as she extracted the last shreds of herself with the slamming down of her visor, completely immersing herself in the commitment to the fight.

Kallen had disappeared.

There was only the red light. The second red light. The third, the fourth, the fifth, red, light.

And then there was nothing at all.

Suzaku in a Rebellion eh? We do love to see it, though Kallen, healthily concerned about the biggest threat to her title run getting a race-winning seat, might not be as removed a spectator to events as we are. She absolutely has a material interest in Suzaku's future, one that crops up in that little bit of your brain that considers the prize.

But the prize of the championship is still a ways away; right now, there is the 2019 Japanese Grand Prix, at Suzuka Circuit, and it is time for the show.

~G1ll3s