[color=blue][b][u]The Case of the Super Sprinters[/u][/b][/color] ---------------------- Super C here. While Wildcat City used to be mocked for not having a professional sports team in baseball, soccer, football, basketball, or ice hockey (or some of those other sports such as lacrosse), we did have professional sports, one of which was (and still is) the FSL (Furry Skating League), Danger Dawg’s roller derby league that plays like the old-school banked track game, but does not allow for scripted bouts or fabricated storylines in the mode of professional wrestling. We also had multiple professional racing leagues based out of our city to add to the motorsports varieties such as NASCAR, Formula 1, the Indy Car League, and NHRA. One league was the Hero League, a real-life adaptation of the 1988 Konami video game “Checkered Flag” (or “Chequered Flag” as an alternative spelling), and the Mad Racers, a real-life adaptation of the SEGA video game “Hang-On” and its sequel, “Super Hang-On.” Though not as mainstream as the other ones, the Hero League and Mad Racers did get nationwide coverage on both WBC and other networks ranging from ESPN to the Speed Channel. (The Speed Channel closed down in 2013. Many of its programs once found on the channel can now be found in the United States on CBS Sports Network, MAVTV, and Velocity.) These leagues were developed in cooperation with SEGA and Konami, who share in the profits as well as work with others to help with international broadcasting; they’ve also organized races in Japan. ------------------- We now had a third league that was finally getting nationwide coverage: the Super Sprinters league. Atari is the video game company that made the games this league is a real-life adaptation of: “Super Sprint” and its sequel, “Championship Sprint.” In these games, up to three players drive simultaneously on a circuit against opponents controller by the computer, which the game calls “drones.” The circuits are viewed from above and always fit on the screen, so that the game never scrolls. After three laps, the winner advances to the next circuit; finishing second place or lower ends the game unless the player inserts another coin. There are a grand total of eight circuits, but the game only ends if the player makes it to race 85, where the bonus Super Speedway Circuit is played. As the player goes to higher levels, more obstacles appear on the track, such as oil puddles and tiny moving tornadoes. If the player touches one of those, they lose control over the car for a short time while it slides and spins. Driving into a wall at high speed or falling off one of the bridges results in the car’s destruction, but a helicopter will appear to replace it. The game’s cars can be customized by collecting wrenches that appear on the track. The player can exchange three wrenches for improved traction, better acceleration, a higher top speed, or bonus points. (In “Championship Sprint,” the player also has the option to make the helicopter go faster.) “Super Sprint” has a 3-wide player cabinet with Player 1 driving the blue car, Player 2 driving the red car, and Player 3 driving the blue car. “Championship Sprint,” which has several different tracks on the game (but with the same bonus on race 85 if I am not mistaken), just two players, blue and red. The computer always controls the fourth car, which is green. Each race is only three laps long. ---------------- So how does the “Super Sprinters” league work, then? Well, there are four color-coded cars just like in the game, and each color has one driver driving that car. Like the games, there are only four cars on the track. Unlike the games, crashing into a wall could be quite fatal, so the league has strict rules about how to pass each other and jockey for position; any sort of contact is prohibited, although accidental contact is sometimes forgiven. Each team has a sponsor, and all of the sponsors coincidentally happen to be fast food restaurants: Culver’s™ (blue team), McDonald’s™ (red team), Long John Silver’s™ (yellow team), and Subway™ (green team); note that these are the current sponsors. There have been multiple sponsors over the years. The teams, however, always display a different video game company as well, because that represents the success of Wildcat City’s motorsports leagues based on these video games. The game companies are SEGA (blue team), Nintendo (red team), Konami (yellow team), and Atari (green team). Each season is subdivided into three Super Sprint sessions and the season-ending Championship Sprint session. The various tracks are based on the tracks in the games, although the races run longer than the video games. Sometimes multiple races do happen in the same day, though, because the races are still short enough to allow the cars to finish the race on one tank of fuel. As such, there is no drive into the victory lane like there is in NASCAR. The sessions have eight races in total. ------------------ The real leagues obviously don’t have wrenches lying on the ground, of course, and it doesn’t have the racers begin from a standstill start with a waving of the green flag. Instead, the tracks are modified to allow the drivers to start from a different section; once they hit the main track, however, the road is closed off. The league uses arcade-style starting lights to allow for a “3, 2, 1, GO!” start. There are alarms that sound to go with the lights. However, the starting lights are standard traffic lights placed horizontally. The red light lights up on “3” and “2;” the yellow light lights up on “1,” and as you might have guessed, the green light lights up on “GO!” The positions on the starting grids are determined by a random draw for the first race; each subsequent race begins with the positions determined by where the driver finished in the last race. In other words, if you won the first race, you begin the second race in pole position. --------------- Finishing a race earns points for the teams as follows: • First place: 1,000 points • Second place: 750 points • Third place: 500 points • Fourth place: 250 points. A DNF (did not finish) or DSQ (disqualification) result scores nothing. [b]NOTE:[/b] if three of the drivers are unfortunate enough to accumulate either a DNF or a DSQ, the fourth driver wins the race by default. Amazingly, that only ever happened once in the history of the whole league; the green car’s driver went ahead and drove the remainder of the race at a slower pace since there were only a few laps left. He also did this as a sign of respect towards the other three drivers. Fortunately, no one was hurt. -------------- The prize money is kept secret from everybody, but it is awarded to the racers and their teams. --------------- At the end of a session, the driver with the biggest amount of points wins bonus money. Scores are reset to zero at the end of each Super Sprint Session, even though the grand total points are added together. The grand totals determine the starting point values for the Championship Sprint session; where the point values are worth double. The driver with the highest score at the end of the Championship Sprint session wins the entire championship for the year. The cars these drivers driver are open-wheel cars modeled after the cars used in Formula 1. -------------- The teams have plenty of humans working on the pit crews and racetrack facilities, but the four star drivers are all furries (by coincidence, I am sure). The drivers are, from least experienced to most experienced, Nathan McManus (a tiger driving for the blue team), Brad Orbison (a bulldog driving for the red team), Lonnie Peterson (a lion driving for the yellow team), and Lukas Wallenstein (a gray wolf driving for the green team). Lucas was a legend in the league, while Nathan was the sport’s most successful rookie. The other drivers came somewhere in between. When there are only four drivers in the league, it’s easy to tell who’s who, given their statistics. Lukas was (and is) the most successful Super Sprinter of all time, with a record 15 championships. Brad has a total of five, while Lonnie has four, and Nathan has yet to win a championship, although he did win the league’s rookie of the year award for winning the most individual races of his first season, even though he finished in second place by the end of the championship session. (It was a close competition between him and Brad, but by the very last race, Brad managed to just edge him out.) Nathan had also met one the other famous Nathans in this world, Nathan Knight (Cripto), on the day where one of the racetracks in the Hero League rewarded the latter for beating Hypatos in a crazy car race with a day out at the track. (The other major members of the G-52s and their allies are Nathan Knox, known as the famous cowboy Nickelback Nathan, and Nathan James McDowell, better known as WARCAT, head of the Gunsquad. The former is a wildcat while the latter is also a tiger; apparently, the name Nathan is a good name for tigers.) Cripto drove a time trial in one of the open-wheel cars, and then followed it up with a run on a sport-racing bike; the track gave him the bike and motorcycle racing gear as a gift, and he subsequently applied for a license so he could legally drive it on the streets. (A few years later, he sold the bike and gear to someone else.) --------------- The new season’s second Super Sprint session was underway, but the current race had to be delayed until two days later because of the heavy rain. “At least there’s no thunder or lightning,” Brad commented. “I hate having to drive in that.” “Me, too,” said Lonnie. “Any updates, by the way?” “Not yet. The commissioner hasn’t made any discoveries yet.” Brad and Lonnie were referring to the previous race, which Nathan had won on a technicality as a result of Lukas accidentally making contact with him. It almost spun Nathan out, but he amazingly kept control of the car and managed to finish in second place. Due to the contact rule, Lukas scored zero points for that race and was given a DSQ. Nathan was subsequently given 1,000 points for the win, while Brad got the 750 for placing (second place), and Lonnie 500 for showing (third place; the league likes to use the words “win,” “place,” and “show,” for first, second, and third, respectively, even though it forbids gambling). A mysterious masked man that the public assumed was one of the tabloid terrorists angry over losing his job when the tabloids all suddenly closed up shop forever without warning had been caught by police and arrested, but not before he managed to attempt to sabotage the race. Some of the security guards took their jobs too seriously, however, and as a result, they prevented a few of the Mad Racers—Levi Parris (a lion), Tim Keaton (a tiger), Brad Archer (a bulldog; Brad is just as popular a name for bulldogs as Tom, Tim, or Nathan is for the tigers), Willie Jolt (a wolf), and “Chargin’ Charlie” Chassis (a cheetah)—from trying to report that there was an intruder on the premises. (Because of the way the league is set up, Charlie races as a solo rider, while Levi, Tim, Brad, and Willie are team captains of their respective teams.) “STAY OUT, OR YOU WILL BE BANNED FOREVER; YOU ARE NOT WELCOME HERE!” the security guards had bellowed. “If you want to keep your jobs, then do something about that masked man!” Charlie argued. “You wouldn’t stop the G-52s from apprehending him, would you?” Tim echoed. “Super C made us allies to them; why are you stopping us?” (Indeed I had made the Mad Racers allies to the G-52s after they helped us beat the old version of Bendraqi.) “ORDERS ARE ORDERS! NO SPECTATORS ALLOWED!” the guards replied. “NOW GET OUT!” “Oh, I never…!” Levi huffed. “Wait until your boss hears about this!” The masked man’s intentions were to sabotage all four drivers and their cars, but he only managed to get to the green team before he was arrested. Because of this, Lukas suffered a flat tire on the last lap of the race, resulting in him making contact with Nathan, and overtaking him to finish the race first. (As mentioned above, though, the win went to Nathan. Lukas didn’t complain; while the league’s rules allowed him to protest a decision made by the race officials, he and his team decided that because of how far he was ahead on points, it was better to let the decision stand. It was the right decision in the end, as Lukas went on to win that session.) The Mad Racers called me over the G-52 app to complain, and I helped the police apprehend the criminal. I then spoke severely to the security guards, showing that I had indeed made the Mad Racers allies to the G-52s, and the commissioner fired them for their incredibly idiotic incompetence, and for allowing a criminal to sabotage his league. Can you guess what happened next? Yes; you guessed it. Their spouses all filed for divorce and won custody of the kids; their parents disowned them and wrote them out of the wills as well. This still bothers me; there’s no reason to apply such extreme consequences to everything. Yet this is proof of the aftereffects of CNG, which the C.I.D.F. have said will take tens of thousands of years to wear off, showing how powerful it truly was. Make one mistake, and your life has come to an end, even if you live to be 100. Now these men are spending the rest of their lives wearing orange or yellow jumpsuits and picking up trash along the sides of the road, in the park, or wherever trash needs picked up. Only one of them managed to be able to find a new job, but he works at a Walmart Neighborhood Market (which is the closest one to where I live), and he’s a maintenance man. “I should have been working here in the first place,” he said to himself. “I could have had these benefits a lot sooner.” Note that this man is also the exception to the rule because both his parents, I’m sorry to say, died in an automobile accident before they could disown him and write him out of the wills, and so he still inherited everything. ----------------- Because I had tickets to watch this race in person as a thank-you from the league (they sold tickets at 40% off normal price to the G-52s and their allies), the new security guards that replaced the old ones allowed me into the pit stop area, where I was able to talk to the drivers. I just had to brave the rain to do so. “Thanks for getting here so fast,” the drivers all said to me as soon as I got myself back onto dry territory. Then they threw me a towel so I could dry off. “Thanks for the towel,” I said. “I’m sorry we couldn’t apprehend the guy sooner; those motorcycle competitors tried to help out, but the guards didn’t believe them.” “I do admit,” said Lonnie, “that I wished Leo the Patriotic Lion had been here. Then they would have believed everybody.” (As another aftereffect of CNG’s actions, Leo’s presence alone is enough to scare the world back in line. The same is true for all his parallels, but especially Lennart the Viking Lion. I don’t have to tell you why that is, do I?) “Leo doesn’t appreciate CNG doing that to the world,” I said. “He wanted everyone to live their lives as God intended, and not sacrifice all their Constitutional rights and freedoms just to make him happy. Even little kids are saying America isn’t what it used to be, but it’s the America we deserve. ‘We aren’t the United States of America anymore,’ one child said to me. ‘We have become the United Empire of Leo!’ I guess you can be the judge of that.” “No; I don’t agree with that either,” said Brad. “It’s not fair to Leo. Anyways, let us confirm to you now that the intruder only managed to sabotage Lukas. Lonnie and I had been lapped a couple of times; we were just having a bad day behind the wheel, really, thanks to it being really windy.” “The wind may have also played a factor into the way Lukas bumped me,” Nathan added, “and I ended up winning the race by default, so to speak. It wasn’t the way I planned it, but sometimes you’ve got to just go with the judges.” “How did he sabotage your car?” I asked Lukas. “I think he tried to tamper with the engine, and he also messed with the steering. The fact I got a flat tire came from hitting a rock; there was debris on the track, but the wind did that, not the criminal. What I can’t figure out is why the car waited until the final lap to go berserk on me. It was a bit embarrassing because up to that point, I had never gotten any DNF or DSQ, and I was hoping to retire without one on my records.” “Didn’t make it, huh?” “Did not make it; no. I couldn’t lose considering the number of points I had scored, though, so I felt it was best to let the decision stand. I was never afraid to argue with the judges or appeal to them, but I never had a reason to do so.” The crews then showed me some photos of what the car looked like after the criminal had tampered with it. Then they showed me the car itself in person, which was now 100% fixed and fully operational. “We weren’t able to test it because of the weather, but we would have had Lukas drive a few laps around to test it,” they said. “We hope the rain stops so that we can do this.” “I hope so, too,” I said. “I know there are times where drivers use wet tires so that they can still race, but this downpour is too heavy.” --------------- Later, the commissioner arrived. “Thanks for coming by, SuperCat,” he greeted. “Thank you for having me,” I replied. “I just wish your security guards had paid more attention. They were too busy keeping spectators out to notice they missed the vital intruder. Has that ever happened to you before?” “No; it hasn’t, and I hope it never happens again. I thanked the Mad Racers for trying to help us restore law and order to the tracks by giving them free season passes for this year, although their racing schedules may come in conflict with ours. I just wish we had known about the man sooner. There’s been too many security breaches lately, even with the latest advanced technologies.” “I know a thing or two about that,” I said. “Some idiot stumbled onto the forbidden island that contains the castle of Lennart the Viking Lion and dumped a ton of resident mice he had kidnapped, hoping to get them in trouble with the laws for being on forbidden territory.” “What did the judges say about the mice? Guilty or not guilty?” “That we don’t know yet. We’re still waiting on the results of that. They’re doing the trial behind closed doors, and nobody is filming it with anything.” “Oh, wow. Personally, I vote ‘not guilty’ for them.” “So do I. They wanted to get away from the kidnapper, but they forgot about the fact CNG let them do the same portal trick Lennart can do. Once they got in the castle, they lost part of their memories. That was a CNG aftereffect.” “Oh, dear.” ------------------ A few days later, it was bright and sunny again, and the Super Sprinters were able to have their race as planned. The bulbs for the starting light had to be replaced, but that was due to a natural case of the bulbs having expired. A few tests were done to ensure it was in sync with the alarms, and it was. Then the drivers took their places to begin after drawing lots to determine the start positions. The race announcer called, “Drivers, start your engines!” The officials activated the starting signal, and this time, the race went as planned without any interruptions, and without anything being sabotaged, or anything getting in the way. It was only coincidence that the drivers ended up finishing in the same race order as the previous race (prior to the DSQ ruling): Lukas, Nathan, Brad, Lonnie. This time, however, because everything went as planned, Lukas received the full 1,000 points. Nathan earned 750, Brad earned 500, and Lonnie earned 250. “I think you definitely redeemed yourself,” I said to Lukas after the race. “I’ll be honest, though; I almost thought that Nathan was going to win this one; it went back and forth between the two of you.” “I’m just glad there was no contact this time,” Lukas replied, “but, yes. Nathan’s a tough competitor. I’ve got my work cut out for me. If this were the Hero League, he would easily be the hero driver going solo, a bit like how Charlie is the solo rider for the Mad Racers. I am also glad we could do the race here in town.” ------------------ At the police station later that evening, we found that the masked man was, in fact, one of the tabloid terrorists, but he also was planning to join a group known as the Anti-Sports Society, a group that never materialized because of the profanity its initials spell out. The main goal of that group would have been to put all sports leagues around the world out of business, because all sports, as they saw it, “have overpaid crybabies who are not worth a quarter, and the money they are getting should have been used to pay off our national debt.” (The man had no idea that the nation was out of debt, and that it was Cripto who bailed us out of debt.) “The sports athletes need to give everything they’ve earned to the governments and then work real jobs.” “How would you like it if you suddenly had your job taken away from you because your own kind (humanity) decided it wasn’t worthy of running the globe?” the man faltered. “Leo is not the world dictator.” “I do agree that this is no reason to lose your job,” I said, “but being angry about what happened in your past isn’t going to solve anything, and neither is unfairly sabotaging an entire sports league. Do you know how much damage you might have caused, and how big of an angry mob you could have had go after you because of this?” The masked man said nothing. “No, you don’t,” Sheriff Crackshot commented. “I swear you terrorists are getting dumber and dumber!” --------------------------- The masked man is now spending the rest of his life in solitary confinement, although that’s due to the outstanding warrants he already had on him. The prison holding him, however, is not in the United States. It is located just off the coasts of Prince Edward Island, up in Canada. “Why did they send him to Canada?” I asked. “No prison in the U.S. wanted him because no prison in the U.S. wants these tabloid terrorists,” the commissioner explained to me. “That’s what they said on the news.” “That’s not what I would have done.” I shrugged my shoulders. ------------------- Unlike the prisons in the Republic of Ireland, which are apparently too incompetent to keep the AIRAF’s members in prison, this prison had no problem keeping its prisoners inside the prison, so we can assure you that man will never get out. In the meantime, the three sports leagues continued to race as usual, and the crowds they were drawing in seemed to rival the amount of people NASCAR typically draws in. ---------------- I made sure to get a good night’s sleep that night, and the next day, I welcomed the Super Sprinters to my gym for the very first time. ----------- [color=red][b]THE END[/b][/color]