The Trike Pit

Imagine a vast pit, an abandoned quarry several hundred feet across with a floor of thick churned mud. A long ramp winds down to the mud along three-quarters of the pit’s circumference, wide enough for several massive dinosaurs travel abreast.

Which is lucky, because this is the Trike Pit, home of the most outrageous sporting event in the islands.

Every few months, various members of The Moorage Council and other wealthy citizens sponsor great triceratopses, three-horned riding beasts with savage tempers and tendency to stampede at the slightest provocation, to compete in the wildest race ever conceived.

Each race sponsor enters a riding beast, and also a rider. The riders are famous throughout Vargas and beyond, and treated like high nobility. There is no doubt they are brave, and skilled in a wide variety of arts — for this is a race where not just winning, but simple survival is a question of desperate odds and heroic action.

When the gun sounds, the trikes (the colloquial form of triceratops) are sent stampeding down the ramp. Their riders, not yet on board, must touch a particular stone monument at the top of the ramp, and only then make their way to their designated beast (already in motion), scramble aboard, and then hang on as best they can.

The trikes plunge down the ramp (those that aren’t driven over the side by their maddened herd-mates) and into the mud, plow a wide circle around a massive post in the middle of the pit, and then charge back up the ramp.

The first trike to reach the top of the ramp with an eligible rider (that is, someone who touched the Starting Stone after the gun sounded) on board is declared the winner.

Those familiar with races will note that these rules do not say that the rider who finishes on the winning trike need be the rider who started on that trike. It is common in the race for riders to switch from one trike to another, and bloody duels have been fought on the backs of plunging, bellowing triceratopses as riders seek the honour of guiding the winning trike to the finish.

Some sports boast of having no rules except “No edged weapons.” The Trike Race has not even that much civilization. The riders are each and every one dangerous warriors, skilled acrobats and are, by any reasonable standard, completely insane.

Of course this event is wildly popular.