The street steps back to the wall

A rain-wet seaside street in watercolour, café tables under striped awnings, a small band by a house wall and a black sedan splashing past. — Café tables, a band, a sedan in a hurry. The band keeps playing. Pre-alpha: the awnings are still a little too clean.

Until today the streets of chapter one were a stage set with a few people standing on it. Today they got jobs. Along the road there is now a juggler, a painter at an easel, a café with its tables out, anglers on the edge of the water, a clerk, a band, a film crew that has picked a poor afternoon, and, this being Rally Mortis, a funeral that is not yours.

You see all of it from the race, at speed, which is the point. Nobody stops for you. They are busy. A few onlookers gather when something burns, but not too many, and only where you can see them.

Life goes on

Manners at the kerb

The people of Valmora now have a sensible first instinct. When a car comes at them, they step back to the nearest house wall, sideways out of its line if they need to. The dash for a front door is a last resort: only when there is no clear wall, or not much time, or the car plainly has not changed its mind.

It sounds like a small thing. In practice it makes the streets feel lived in rather than populated, and it means a near miss now looks like a near miss: a coat pressed flat to the plaster, a hat in a puddle, a lot of language. We also asked everyone to keep a few metres clear of the things you are meant to drive through, so the street and the race stop getting in each other’s way.

Mind the bonnet. Mind the band. Mind the soup.

The town got some new odds and ends to go with it: coats, gulls, bins, crates, nets, tubs, awnings, café tables and puddles with proper edges. Out on the water off Port Saffron there is now a ferry, far enough out that you will not hit it, though we suspect somebody will try. In Lowmarsh the fog drifts across the road in thin wisps, which is exactly as unhelpful as it sounds.

A wet seafront promenade at sunset, a wreath on a bench and a car parked by the railings — The promenade, pre-alpha. It now has rather more people on it, most of them standing well back.

Things to break, and ways round

The second half of the day went on the roads themselves. Chapter one now has things in it that are there to be dealt with:

Gates and banners. Light gates and banners you can tear through, heavy gates that want a proper run at them, and spare banners for when someone has been there first.
Swinging obstacles on cables, which swing whether you are ready or not.
Ramps, lifts and the tide. The spring tide now covers the climbing road too. Until this morning it politely stopped at the bottom of the hill.
Shortcuts and a few things hidden off the line, for people who look at the edges of the road instead of the middle.
Challenges: speed, jump, drift and smash, each with a painted sign by the road that shows your best.

The signs were upside down. They are not now.

Most of the fixing was in the details. A gate used to stop a car dead if it hit at exactly the wrong moment; now it gives way the instant it is beaten. One shortcut ran into a yard we had, at some point, walled off, so it moved to a yard you can actually reach. Another ran along a beach that slid into the sea, so it now runs along the top of the bank. We then drove every shortcut at speed to make sure none of them end in masonry.

Your records for all of this are kept, with a few new medals for the cabinet. It is pre-alpha, so the numbers will move, and some of the gates are still heavier than gates have any right to be. But for the first time the road has opinions, and the street has somewhere to stand.