crime steven || 3f

Look, I'm not much of a silver linings kind of gal but there are definite upsides to your district getting blown to shit:

1. Spare parts

2.

Okay. Still trying to come up with 2. But there's plenty to be said for a veritable free-for-all on semi-functional components and mostly-usable scrap.

That's not a half-bad consolation prize for parents KIA and MIA, a childhood spent in perpetual duck-and-cover, and all of the usual boring wartime shit.

Besides, I'm not really much of an orphan these days. It's your classic found-family-meet-cute story: Like any respectable vaguely-tech-savvy junior gutter punk, I was doing salvage for cash — trying to pick the best parts out of whatever busted battle tech looked least likely to explode in my hands, hawking it to whoever would pay. I spotted a mostly-in-tact rebel comms drone still dangling out of a pylon about forty feet up, someone spotted me spotting the drone and decided to race me for it, I won. She remarked that rebel tech was contraband and asked if I knew that I was doing crime, so I said I am crime, and then she invited me to come get some dinner and disassemble it with her and her family, and I was a twelve-year-old with a knife (i.e. functionally invincible) so I agreed. That's the story of how I didn't get mugged and wound up joining the House of Steven.

I'm not sure how the racing league started, actually. It just kinda happened. Steven built rotors during the war, I think. Something like that. He knows way too much about gyroscopes, which probably makes him some kind of witch, but I'm not about to interrogate anyone over it. He must've seen some shit — I guess we all did — and decided he wouldn't build things for anyone else again. Eventually him and his cousin flying drones around a warehouse turned into a little robotics club, then someone put cameras on the drones and it merged with a sort of AV-club, and before too long there were half a dozen cadres of kids with nowhere better to stay or nothing better to do. It's nice. I never had siblings before.

What I do know is that after it got semi-official, what started as No Rules Drone Racing quickly became Some Rules Drone Racing — mostly thanks to me. Don't think I'm some kind of life-long hall monitor type, trying to lobby the league board to make things less fun — my middle name isn't "Doesn't Pay", I promise. But sometimes your sister has a narrow lead and your opponents are gaining, and sometimes you know that the casing around her hydrogen fuel cell you scavenged from a wrecked Capitol survey drone is flimsy, so sometimes you — allegedly! — fly your scarlet lady Ruby into a support pillar. You couldn't've actually known that the resulting fireball would take out the nearer half of the pack, and you definitely couldn't've known that it'd burn a hole in the warehouse roof. But hey, take it from me — it's a point of pride to get a rule named after you.

It's not like I didn't get the benefit of the doubt on that one — I'm not exactly the best drone pilot. At least not until they start incorporating my coolest crashes award suggestion. Statistically speaking I'd win that one for sure. If I'm gonna lose, I may as well do it in style.