Rowe Warrior

The "future alter ego" of Stacy Rowe at the end of Is It College Yet? never fails to inspire. The mousy yes-girl of yesterday has transformed herself into a winning stock-car driver, gaining endorsements from fashion-product companies. You can't say some sort of change wasn't coming, given her depiction in the fifth season of Daria, but a race-car driver?

It's appealing, though. Several fanfics have taken this idea and run with it, most famously in Richard Lobinske's Falling Into College series (see "A Daze at the Races" and "Four Friends, Four Winds") and Milderbeast's wonderful "Moon over Daytona." A similar theme appears in "Stacy and the Lamp." True, Stacy did get killed in a car wreck in Austin Covello's aptly titled "The Death of Stacy," but generally speaking, that alter ego has made her into a minor legend in fanfic.

A folder rests in my computer's hard drive with the provisional title "White Line Nightmare." ("Daylight" was the more likely title, however.) It contains notes for an unfinished Road Warrior-like story in which a future Stacy drives across a wasteland America after a nearby supernova blasts away Earth's ozone layer. (And all this time people thought I was kidding about that.) I had in mind giving her some kind of grossly souped-up stock car (I was leaning toward a rebuilt '71 Barracuda) with various armaments and armor, UV radiation protection, and so forth. She travels the country alone on the Interstates, ferrying news, medicine, and mail between colonies of survivors. Then one day in the wasteland she meets someone from her past . . . and that was as far as I got with it. The story was barely started before it ended.

Anyone else have some good "Racy Stacy" stories to tell? You can use anything I mentioned above, it's not like I'm going to start writing on that anytime soon. Party on.