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

and the east face for a bit, and then walked along the edge itself at forty-five degrees, pretending to balance like a tightrope walker.
    When she got to the cube’s vertex she discovered that she could navigate three faces just as easily. She skipped from face to face, playing her own game of gravitational hopscotch. Then she knelt down, put her right hand on the tip of the vertex, used her left to spin herself around and slowly raised her body above her head so that she performed a spinning one-armed handstand on Castalia’s tip. She spun for a while, taking the world in from this unconventional angle, before she heard Burner shouting for her.
    “Come on, Scotia, we’re on the move. You don’t want to get in trouble again.”
    She lowered herself back down and ran to join the assembled throng who were gathered round Arkwal, standing by a skylight that looked into the Eastdome.
    “The domes affixed to the four sides of Castalia all play extremely important roles,” Arkwal said. “The Eastdome and its counterpart, the Westdome, are the places where all of Solarversia’s game items are spawned before they’re won by a player somewhere. As you can see, keeping the items sufficiently stocked is a mammoth undertaking. Only the fastest, hardest-working arkwinis are eligible to work in the East- and Westdomes.”
    Nova pressed her face against the skylight and gawped at what she saw. Inside, hundreds of arkwinis in forklift trucks and exosuits were hurrying around sorting, cataloguing and arranging a multitude of items in the largest warehouse she had ever seen.
    Game items were stored in huge crates on shelves that reached right the way to the ceiling: teleport tokens, weapons power-ups of every kind. An arkwini sped toward the skylight in his forklift, performed a handbrake turn, hurriedly stored the box that he was transporting on the end of one of the shelves, removed the forks from under it and whizzed off back down the aisle.
    A stamp on the side of the box declared that it contained sixty jars of Skidz. Within seconds the rectangular space below the content information on the box flashed into life. It displayed the profile information for a player who had just won a jar after spinning a Tweel of Fate somewhere, and the inventory number ticked down to fifty-nine. Hundreds of boxes and crates flashed in a similar manner until they were empty, whereupon they were replaced by a tired-looking arkwini. Arkwal took note of the wide-eyed expressions of the tour group.
    “Don’t even think about trying to break in, by the way. There’s always one thinks they’re being original and clever. They get in their plane, land on one of Castalia’s faces and try to blast their way in, thinking that they’re about to pull off the heist of the century. Even if you managed to break into the dome — which is highly unlikely in the first place — the anti-heist mechanism would prevent you from escaping.”
    Arkwal retrieved his telescope from his pocket, performed a few calculated twists of its cylindrical sections and then walked away. Nova went to follow him, and, finding that her feet were well and truly stuck to the ground, nearly fell over on the spot before reaching out to Burner to steady herself. Around her, everyone in the group had been similarly affected and remained glued in place until Arkwal shook his ’scope, reversing the mechanism.
    “Remember — the Emperor’s a master of space and time. His palace, his rules. Next stop: the Underdome.” The chimp marched down the face of the cube, flipped himself ninety degrees forward at the bottom edge and disappeared to the underside of Castalia. Nova elbowed Burner hard in the ribs — revenge for the Wake-a-nator incident — and chased after Arkwal.
    If walking on the side of the palace had been a curious experience, walking on its underside was stranger yet. Nova looked up to see Alpha Island in the Atlantic Ocean and down, over the edge of the palace, to the great