[b][center][h2]Joel Nicolosi[/h2][/center][/b]

Joel took a seat in the old leather sofa of the lobby beneath the banner of the racecar and took a small cup of the free coffee to drink with his protein bar. The old seat was well worn from years of regular use and he sunk down to what nearly felt like the floor. Running a hand through his sweaty hair, he took out his phone and decided to check a few messages before heading back to the shop. 

Of all the mail, email and voicemails he received since winning the Grand Prix, only a few were [i]really[/i] important to him. With Sio’s help, they’d sifted through the majority of it, though even weeks later it was still trickling in at a regular pace. As he worked, she’d read aloud the mail and summarize the voicemails to which he’d reply [i]keep[/i], [i]toss[/i], [i]delete[/i], [i]maybe[/i] or just laugh and make some off-color remark and leave her to make a decision or surprise him. He thumbed through some of the emails, making his way to the one he fancied the most: A correspondence from [i]Rebellion World Rally Team[/i]. Named for the extremely popular [i]Rebellion[/i] energy drink, the email featured the well-known neon orange and black of the company logo along with a neat picture of a built Subaru rally car in mid-drift, slinging dirt through some heavy woods. The email was from the team’s Operations Director asking Joel if he’d be interested in meeting and perhaps trying out a few rounds on a test stage they were building in the mountains to the east at one of the old abandoned lumber mills. 

Joel hadn’t forwarded the phones at Apex Designs since the race weekend and let everything go to directly to voicemail, but after a couple weeks he was willing to take a risk while he was out just in case they called his Google number. He’d called the Director back and left a message around 3am and he glanced up to check the time seeing that most “normal” people were awake and was hoping for a call back. The concept of the rally was different from anything else he’d done and the inherent danger in it piqued Joel’s interest. Normally one incorrect flick of the wheel or a split-second wrong decision was punished with devastating results. He’d seen enough videos where mistakes usually resulted in the car rolling no less than six times, sometimes down a mountainside, or hitting a tree or some other immovable object and flipping end over end. The danger of it felt exhilarating and the near possibility of sudden death was appealing to him. 

Killing a little time, Joel was enjoying an article about secret military bases on the dark side of the moon before the phone began vibrating in his hand with a call alert. The number displayed as [i]unknown[/i], which made him mildly irritated, not only because his reading was interrupted, but for whatever reason, when the calls were forwarded, the original number would get lost in translation from time to time. He complained about it before, however the Google rep explained to him that it had to do with the “ancient” phone network of Southside to which Joel could offer no retort. Normally he would have let it go straight to voicemail, but not wanting to miss the call he’d been anticipating, he answered in his classic, regular tone, cutting the name short: “Apex, this is Joel.”

[@MissCapnCrunch]