Trying my hand at speed-writing story fragments from single images by concept artists. Going to start with a piece from my “Pretty Pictures” post. Challenge Modifiers: No Adverbs, Maximum One Adjective Per Noun.

Teddy Vyshaev sat on the barrier at the outer edge of turn 7, feet hanging over the hundred-foot drop. The smell of ozone lingered even this high above the track. The suburbs of Athens sprawled outside the Varytidromio Attiko, houses melting into a sea of light and stucco beyond the hangars of the race complex. The sun had set, but the sky wasn’t yet dark. Thin clouds glowed orange against a purple backdrop lined with stars. The wind carried with it the sound of a low-orbit shuttle cruising somewhere past the horizon.

Inside the open door of a hangar far below, Teddy’s racecraft sat in the glare of the pit crew’s worklights, held in place by hydraulic clamps. Without them, the smallest fluctuation in local gravity would hurl it into nearby buildings, and the automated security system at the edges of the complex would have to vaporize it before it reached the city. Gravity racers were the size of airliners, their engines couldn’t be shut down and they were capable of such violent acceleration that their top speeds were only theoretical. Safety precautions were strict.

The meter-high Cyrillic lettering on the racer’s left side was streaked with carbon burns running from a gash in the fuselage. Teddy was unharmed, but the collision had cost him the race. Dennis had scolded him for overdosing. Teddy was convinced he hadn’t pushed himself hard enough.

Teddy had felt a little off for the past several races. When Fatima left him, he’d buried a part of himself. He thought he wanted to forget the pain; most of the time he just wallowed in it. The melodrama was comforting, but it distracted him from racing. He experimented with the amphetamine solution, trying to find a concentration that would help him overcome the self-inflicted misery. He began to hate his emotions. They worked against the frictionless machine of his mind, delayed his reactions, cost him precious seconds on each lap.

The high was different now. Whenever he reached his performance threshold and opened the IV, he didn’t feel submerged anymore. Where before the world had slowed to a crawl, giving him all the time he needed to maneuver and react, now something stayed behind. No matter how far he opened the valve, he wasn’t sharp enough.

When Teddy had pushed too far in training, the world had just stopped and he regained consciousness in the infirmary. Now, he’d become aware of something beyond that boundary. Some place he could only reach past the point of stopping the world. It was a shadow of an idea in a blind spot light-years ahead. But with every lap, with every microliter of solution, it came closer. He knew there was a secret there, and he chased it harder than he had ever chased the record time trial.

In the final laps of the last race, he had opened the valve all the way. Buzzers pinged in the cockpit, warning him that he was in danger of cardiac arrest. The world beyond the canopy froze. The only thing that moved was an approaching light, emerging from nowhere, visible in front of everything but further away than Teddy could measure. As it neared, it grew. It reached for the edges of his peripheral vision. And then it was switched off.

Teddy opened his eyes, still sitting on the barrier. Deep gouges stretched for half a kilometer along the wall of turn 7, ending in an angular dent where the racer had come to rest, internal stabilizers straining to hold the engine steady until the pit crew could haul it back to the hangar and secure it.

He thought he should feel angry, but Teddy was over it. He put the cap back on the bottle of painkillers and walked to the stairs, descending thirty stories toward the hangar on the tarmac. The sky was dark. The lights of an airliner passed overhead, blinking red and green over the horizon.