Season 1.0 - Race 2 - Placid

Sixth to dock. Again. And this time none of the Re-Aw members of her roster had shown up. Not a single one.

So she had fleeted with reds, in one of her flashes of temper. She did seem to have a quicker temper whenever she was in her racing clone. But this time she didn't regret it one bit. She'd be damned if she was going to toss aside her personal beliefs plus her racing family and then be made to race alone.

Facing Ciarente wasn't going to be pleasant, but right now it didn't matter one bit how much she liked her CEO. Kayleigh Jamieson-Read was feeling both angry and betrayed, and not one bit repentant.

Daredevil's

One of the ways in which she might stave off the nightmares, she realised, was to go back to frequenting the Daredevil's Lounge.

No, not to drink herself into oblivion and make a fool of herself. The jin-mei figured it might instead be a good idea to avoid being alone in her apartment for long periods of time at night, to keep busy, to see people and fill her mind with random sights and sounds and sensations. Flying in person to Crielere to be there in the flesh would be but a minor inconvenience.

Daredevil's was no longer the loud, boisterous meeting point for fast pilots with quick tempers - and sometimes itchy trigger reflexes - which Kayleigh remembered from the League days. The twins still worked there, and the multiple screens still showed fast action sports, but the general mood was quieter, calmer... slower.

It fitted Kayleigh's current mood. Someone within the corp had pinned the title of "Speedster" on her - she suspected Kalahari had had an influence on that - and Ms Kohiko Sun had taken to calling her Speedy, which she secretly loved. It never failed to bring a smile to the jin-mei's lips. Despite all that, Kayleigh didn't feel fast anymore. She felt rusty and slow. Perhaps even old. You've just turned twenty-five and you're feeling old. That's depressing, Kay.

So far, the plan wasn't turning out too badly. In the past few days Daredevil's had provided her with opportunities to meet some of her newer corp mates face to face. Namely Laria and Adeste.

She wasn't yet quite sure what to think of the younger pilot. For a Gallentean, Laria Raven had seemed too analytical, too stiff, perhaps. And then Kayleigh had bumped into her at the Lounge and her initial perception had gone straight out the hatch, so to speak. The poor girl had already been rather tipsy by the time Kayleigh had entered the scene, and all the racer had seen instead was a vulnerable young lady trying so hard to fit in with all these new people. It was actually rather endearing.

Adeste was a different case altogether. They had been team mates, of a sort, if only for a single race back in... Season three? Was it? Goodness, Kay, you really are getting old if you can't even remember this anymore. Anyway, it had all been part of the protection detail Duty had been hired to keep on the then-defending champion. It all had been a very hush-hush operation. That had been how Kayleigh had come to meet Jude. She only vaguely remembered Adeste from that night, but remember she did. Now, years after the fact, they were going to be corp mates.

Kayleigh would have been intimidated by the civire, had she not spoken to her first via corporate channels. Seeing her in the flesh.. the woman was tall! And yet she had this hilarious easy banter going on with Jude, which made Kayleigh want to burst into fits of giggles. Adeste seemed so expansive, so nice and warm that she had simply cut through any of the jin-mei's walls of shyness and propriety, and made her open up as if they had been friends for years. No mean feat, that.

The thought of Adeste, curled up sleeping on the couch back at Daredevil's made Kayleigh smile. Maybe tonight she'd sleep soundly like that. And perhaps the nightmares would stay away, if only just for one night.

Anticlimax

The day had come. Intel from just about all over New Eden seemed to agree that Kuvakei was going to make a move on Yulai. Electus Matari had readied response fleets.

After agonising a few moments on what to wear - or what to fly, rather - the jin-mei had picked the longest-range ship she had, in accordance to what Jude was requesting. She had boarded a Nemesis hull, the Requiem. She wasn't quite sure who the requiem would be playing for once the dust would settle, but stealthbombers were ships she felt comfortable in, despite their notorious paper-thin hull, so she undocked with head held high and the will to inflict damage on the Sansha.

Still, she couldn't help feel tiny and vulnerable alongside the other ships in the fleet, composed for the most part by battleship hulls. While the fleet gathered at the rally point Kayleigh took the time to trim down all she could on her interface filters, focusing on the task in an attempt to still her heart beating so fast.

It was silly, really. It was not like she had never been in a fleet before or shot anything before. Yet apparently that flutter in her stomach would still be there each time she prepared to take off with a fleet, no matter if it was her team undocking to race through low-sec or her alliance undocking to kick some proverbial ass.

And of course it didn't help that intel was reporting sightings of war targets already at Yulai. Kayleigh was psyched, determined to prove her worth in this fleet. And then Yulai happened.

Everything had gone well until the moment the fleet had been ordered to jump to the sun in Yulai, following a confirmed sighting of Sansha wormholes. But once the Requiem landed there, everything stopped. Kayleigh couldn't quite figure out if the little stealthbomber had overloaded, if spatial phenomena were interfering with all her sensors or if it was her own brain which was unable to process all that information. The end result, however, was that the Requiem simply sat there.

It sat. Helpless. Instruments seemed to indicate its cloak hadn't even been broken, but neither could the Nemesis move or fire or indeed warp away. Kayleigh had no choice but to watch the battle around her coming in through occasional stills from her camera drones, listening to her fleet mates engaging Sansha, then PIE, then Sansha again... and all the while she just sat there.

After what felt like many agonising hours, the fight was finally over and still her ship was overloaded trying to process information. Kayleigh had to attempt full systems restart twice, before the little frigate finally gave signs of life. By that point the fleet was already getting evac orders. The sun, they said, might go supernova. The CONCORD station, they said, was no more.

Shocked, feeling helpless and useless, Kayleigh rejoined her fleet once traffic control let her through to Ourapheh - she had become rather the expert at harassing gate operators into letting her through, considering all the racing she'd done in her life, and it was coming in handy right then.

She could have slipped off to Alenia, only two jumps off of Yulai, where she might have curled up in her old apartment and try to comfort herself out of the overwhelming wave of uselessness she was feeling right now, but in the end, she had come here with the fleet and she was going to leave with the fleet. Shame or no shame, one didn't leave one's friends to fend for themselves even if the way back home would likely be clear.

She sighed miserably. She could just feel a huge headache coming on.

An Embarrassing Start

So, things on her first night could have gone a little better.

She realised she was a little rusty - undocking once a week to redistribute planetary production between planets and make a trade run to the nearest trade hub didn't exactly demand much flight technique. Even so, she hadn't realised just how rusty she was, or indeed that even her ships might be a little rusty.

The fact that the Verdigris II, a veteran of many missions in the past, had seized up and frozen so badly it needed a whole systems reboot, had made it painfully obvious. By the time it was done rebooting it was too late to turn on the dual repairing modules. The Ishtar hull had crumpled under the combined firepower of a dozen or so Cartel ships.

Best not to mention that little detail to Nakatre.

And that was how Kayleigh Jamieson-Read found herself in a pod, blushing with embarrassment and waiting to be rescued by a corp mate on her very first night as a Re-Awakened Technologies pilot. Racing star, flying for over 4 years (many of which working for agents throughout New Eden) and here she was, the proverbial damzel in distress. What sort of a first impression was she going to leave on her new corp mates, like this?

Now, two days later, a new shiny Ishtar was ready to go. Older hulls she had brought over from Alenia were undergoing scrutiny by a slew of mechanics. Hopefully she wouldn't embarrass herself quite so badly anytime soon.