BUILDING BLOCKS: Backdrop
A LIMIT GEAR Prologue, part 1
Limit Gear's plot takes place in postmodern Tokyo. During the daytime, it looks like most other cities do - a busy center of commerce and activity, where businesses, businesspeople, and business-wary people conduct their lives. Traffic jams up on the commutes, and life carries itself on, as most assume it does.
Things are different, though, when the sun sets.
They come from all over: the mountains, the bay, the affluent homes and the urban neighborhoods. They line the parking lots into the night and gather together to share fellowship, to share their lives, and to race. Decades of racers - family lines full of legends, upstarts with something to prove, the veterans, the Davids, and the Goliaths - all descend each night upon the magnificent and immense stretch of asphalt, concrete, and cement that is the Wangan.
Decades before, Tokyo was initially blown away by their prowess. They dominated the highways at night, dazzling onlookers with displays of horsepower and talent that were unbelievable - and dangerous. As the Wangan racing presence grew, so did the pretenders to the throne - racers who thought all they needed was a solid car with fast parts. They were initially annoying, but ultimately a danger to themselves and others, not possessing the skills necessary to carve up the sometimes tight, twisty roads. Capitalizing on this, the police began strictly enforcing the law on the highway.
At first, they came down hard, impounding and arresting anyone who dared to race on their watch. Races began to become more and more rare, and a feeling of relief finally began to move back into the Tokyo lifestyle. But it would not last forever. Slowly, and with steady force, racers began confounding the police force's best efforts to curb street racing. The police became a laughing stock in their eyes, and as they became more and more skilled, run-ins with the law became more annoying than serious. A year had passed.
In the public eye, the police had failed to permanently end highway racing. Tokyo resigned itself to reality - the racers were not going anywhere, and they wanted the Wangan for themselves. With deep regret and ultimate dissatisfaction, the Tokyo metro police ceased midnight runs against highway racers.
But all those who earned their victory payed a heavy price. Instead of jail time, racers known for their talents on the Wangan dropped in status in society, eventually being relegated to the status of undesirables. They were blamed for the ills of society. People took to street justice to recompense their lives for what the racers did to them and their families. Street violence erupted whenever racers bumped into people who hated them. While the police were ultimately able to restore a strangely peaceful truce, society wanted nothing to do with the racers anymore. Virtually ostracized from society, it was a wonder highway racers were able to maintain financial income, let alone any sense of love or mental sanity. Years rolled into decades as Tokyo turned its back on a people they had once admired.
From the wounds inflicted by both sides, a group of racers founded an organization that spoke of a return to the original passion of highway races. Mysteriously funded, they began to repay society, one debt at a time, for the injustices committed by racers, maintaining themselves as a group determined to restore honor to their own lives. The Feudal Racers, as they began to be called, represented reconciliation for society, and hope for those born to the passion of racing, that someday a resolution could be reached that would bury the past, and fuse the two warring worlds back together.
3 years passed. Society somewhat re-accepted racers and racing back into its lifestyle, but was quick to enforce its boundaries. Realizing that Tokyo would never really hold Wangan racers in high regard again, the midnight wanderers, racers, and pretenders of the past buried any hope of true reconciliation along with their feelings for society at large. Some left racing altogether, and some embraced racing as their life, working just enough to support their rolling homes: sleeping where they could, racing where they could, living for the smell of gasoline, the whistle of turbos, and lights flashing against a night sky.
The third generation of highway racers came up into a world torn apart. Society wanted the allure of racers of the past, but did not want the pain that came with them. Being called a racer was sometimes still a dirty word. Eventually, though, people exhausted themselves of talk of racing and turned their attention to other things. Wangan wanderers breathed a small sigh of relief as indifference became their final reconciliation. Not fame, not regard, but a Tokyo that was finally indifferent to the addiction of the road. For some, it was a new beginning. For others, it meant the end of the mission of the Feudal Racers, a road that never got them the success they wanted.
From then on, highway racers divided families, wanderers became legends again, and the Wangan became a historic road - a living reminder of the civil unrest of all of humanity, and the promise and hope of peace and forgiveness. Off the Bayside Road, law was still law, but on the Wangan, when the sun went down and the lights came on, for just a few moments, the innocence of the first races returned, and legend said that people could hear the first Wangan racers still talking in parking areas, still tweaking their cars in abandoned garages, still hoping for a day when theirs would be a recognized sport.
Not long after, racing teams began to proliferate the Wangan once more, vying for superiority, reveling in brotherhood, enjoying within their small group the fellowship of the road.
This is the Tokyo into which Limit Gear is born - a world of competition, talented drivers, and a dying quest to reunify a people scarred and torn apart.
Continue on to Part 2: