Free Solarversia: The Year Long Game by Mr Toby Downton, Mrs Helena Michaelson Page A

you’re doing? Stop right there. You’re not asleep, you stupid girl, you don’t need wake-a-nating. I command you to stop right now.”
    Before she could stop, six pairs of mechanical arms and hands sprang to life and dragged her, screaming, into the machine. They brushed her teeth with vigour, pulled a comb through her hair and splashed water on her face. She couldn’t help laughing when little puffs of perfumed air blew in her face to dry her, and was almost enjoying the experience when she realised that the machine would at any second try to undress her of her ‘pyjamas’ and put her in an arkwini uniform. There was no way she was going to allow her avatar a moment of nudity in front of this lot. She slipped down to her knees and crawled forward on her belly until she was out of the machine and out of harm’s way.
    “That was not ,” Arkwal said, “part of the tour. I don’t know why I bother sometimes, I really don’t. You wait until the Emperor hears about this. He’s deducted health points from players in the past, you realise? It certainly wasn’t my fault, that much is clear.”
    He stopped muttering, patted his suit down and then turned toward the group in an officious manner.
    “Right then, it’s time for the next part of the tour. We’re heading through the skylight over there. No dillydallying at the back. And certainly no playing the fool,” he added with a glare in Nova’s direction. The group followed Arkwal out of the skylight and assembled around him on the roof of the cube.
    “Earlier I mentioned the structure of Castalia, and the fact that abutting each face of the Magisterial Chamber there is a large hemisphere. The architecture of the palace is based on fractal geometry. On each of the six hemispheres are six smaller hemispheres, and from each of those, six even smaller hemispheres blossom. This regression continues indefinitely; hence its fractal nature. It’s the six large hemispheres that you need to know about. We were just inside the one on the roof — the Overdome. Next we’re going to investigate the Eastdome.”
    Arkwal got the tour group to line up along the edge of the roof, which looked down on Alpha Island, from here a dining-plate sized ‘A’ in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. He stood at one end of the line and bent over the edge so that everyone could see him. Glancing between Arkwal and the ocean far below, Nova felt quite nauseous.
    “You might think that if you leaned too far over the edge, you’d plummet to your death,” Arkwal yelled along the line.
    He held his arms out by his sides, put a leg out and stepped forward. Nova’s hands shot to her mouth; around her, the tour group gasped. But instead of falling to his death, Arkwal flopped over the side and confidently stepped onto the east face of Castalia, sticking out from its side like a nail in the wall.
    “Well, you’d be wrong. Not sure if I mentioned it, but the Emperor’s a master of space and time. He can do funny things with gravity. He designed Castalia so that the six outer faces have a gravitational pull equal to that on Earth. You can walk around the outside of the palace, from face to face, without falling off. In fact, you couldn’t fall off if you tried. Takes a bit of getting used to, mind. Right then, your turn.”
    Nova exchanged a worried look with Burner. They were so high that some of the birds below them looked nothing more than pulsing black dots. But as the group followed Arkwal’s lead one by one, her confidence grew. She reached out, grabbed Burner’s hand, and together, they flopped over the edge.
    She couldn’t help but grin when her foot stuck safely to the side. Ahead of her the horizon appeared as a vertical line. The ocean wasn’t below her, it was to her right; the sky — filled with clouds whose face-like shapes had now been distorted by the wind — to her left. She walked back to the cube’s edge to flop onto the roof, seesawed back and forth between the roof