Ellie will take care of that.

Okay. 

Anakin is ready shortly after they all get to the starting area. 

As is Ellaita.

Ellie makes sure the seating and observation spells for the non-participants are all set up, then counts Ellaita and Anakin down with color-changing sparkles and a loud bang to start.

She settles into a deep focus as she's flying, mind wrapped in the Force, anchored in her body -

It's been a very, very long time, but there's a laughing swirl to the Force like there used to be, an eddy she can never forget the feel of, and it says let's go faster. 

Anakin's racer springs forward, zipping through the narrow, jagged canyons at speeds the racers their vistors were watching earlier were afraid to reach on wide open straight-aways. She adjusts for turns she hasn't seen yet, racer skimming so close to the cliff walls that the wind of her passing kicks up roiling clouds of rock and dust. The river drops underground - Anakin follows it rather than the longer, safer above ground path marking where the river used to flow before the ground under it collapsed - and pours through deep caverns; there's a place it empties out away from the path, and it'd cost Anakin time to follow all the way - her racer flits through cracks in the limestone not much bigger than it, soaring back to the surface and swinging into the track proper. 

(It's a very long track, and that is far from the only ridiculous stunt Anakin pulls.)

Ellaita stays on the surface, though she's tweaked her engines to give her enough acceleration on the relatively open path that she's still neck and neck with Anakin when she pops back up. (Her starfighter is faster yet than this, and she thinks nothing of threading an ImpStar's superstructure in it.)

As they rocket around the next turn, she slaps the afterburners on and pushes up onto the canyon wall just in time to avoid a rogue boulder that would have been sitting directly in her course.

Anakin had swerved up even before the turn, and now that gives her some lead to pull ahead - she's definitely doing better with curves than straightaways - she twists back down to duck under an outcropping, and then the path spills into a maze of pillars and jagged cliff fragments slashing into the sky, and Anakin pulls rather ahead - but there's flats past that, then a long loop back towards the mountains -

And Ellaita is getting faster and faster as they go. It's going to be tight but she's pretty sure she timed her fuel to run out just at the finish line so she's carrying the minimum possible weight at all points.

She gets ahead of Anakin on the flats - the path back to the start curls up into the mountain, through a deep switchback canyon, and Ellaita is ahead of Anakin when she hits it - 

Anakin slams her racer as fast as it'll go then yanks it up, shifting - podracers hate going vertical but she hits the angle exactly right to deflect off the cliff walls every time the racer tries to collapse back - and bounce up out of the canyon, skipping the entire switchback, racer dropping in beside Ellaita's -

Human senses, at least, can't tell which of them crosses the finish line first. 

That... was a truly impressive bit of racing.

Anakin brings the pod to a safe stop and jumps out. 

"Would magic help figure out who won?" she calls to Ellie, laughing. "Didn't think we'd be that close."

Ellie is poking at the remnants of the finish line with her shorter wand.

"...I think that was actually just a tie, straight up."

"Does that mean we both win?"

"I think so," Anakin says. Then, a bit teasingly: "You're too damn good a pilot for that to count as a mutual loss."

Hee.

"So both forfeits are in play?"

"I, for one, won't complain!" 'Hema calls over. 

She laughs. "Think so."

"Do you want to collect now, or wait until we go back?"

"Well... With Lily's delicate eyes in the crowd, perhaps we should get back home first."

"Fair enough."

Smirk.

She accepts congratulations from her daughter, teases Lily a bit - then, back to the house. Where do they want to collect their forfeits? (And who wants to be present?)

Dungeon seems like a good place for it. Ellaita will be there, and Fay and Ellie, obviously.

Elesse would like to be as well.

"There is no way you're leaving me out of this."