Juno fixes the car, not the people who crash it
Valmora is full of people the will forgot. The first one you can save is a mechanic in a flooded garage in Lowmarsh. On rescue missions, a tow truck and a crew that rides with you.
Wade and Vee start the race with nothing: no money, no friends, a borrowed car and a dog. By the end of the road they will have a crew. Each member of it is somebody the will forgot, found in trouble somewhere along the Long Spine and pulled out of it at speed.
The first is Juno Marsh.
The rescue
Juno rents a garage in Lowmarsh from the Vane estate. When the flood comes, she is still in it, and so is her tow truck, and the water is rising faster than she would like.
Little help! She’s sinking and so am I!
The rescue is a race against the water rather than against the family: two and a half minutes to get her tow truck out before the water reaches the cab. Open the gate, hook the front, pull. It sounds simple. It is not, because the flood does not care which order you do it in, and the truck is very heavy and very attached to the garage.
Hook the front! The front, cowboy!
Cowboy. She’s met you for nine seconds.
Why rescues
Most of the game is about wrecking people. We wanted a second kind of race in the middle of it, one where the job is to save somebody, against a clock, with the same car and the same skills. It changes the rhythm of a chapter: after two races of noise and spite, a rescue is a race for someone. Players drive differently in them. More carefully, and then, when the clock gets short, much less carefully.
The crew
Once she is out, Juno joins you. She rides along, mends what she can and has opinions about how you treat the car. Every rescued crew member changes something: the car, the route or the odds. Juno’s speciality is keeping the Black Tie in one piece, which is a full-time job.
Welcome aboard. Sit in the back.
Further down the road there are others: a quarry blaster in the jungle, a rancher with a barn full of horses, an air-show pilot, a pirate disc jockey. Each of them is in a spot of bother. Each of them has a reason not to trust a man who drove for Cornelius Vane. We will introduce them as we build them.