The Copper Hall
Lore
The Copper Hall is the second Russian arena to join the league, and the assessment team reports it arrived with the settled air of an institution that had merely been waiting for the paperwork. The ice is of the givre form. Under the Kick designation, each period opens with a two-minute surge of home-team speed before subsiding—brief, real, and, the assessment team notes, quite enough. The Mules are heavy, immovable, and untroubled by fatigue. Their supporters are described as not subtle, which Le Council includes verbatim because Le Council could not improve on it. The Mules do not chase the game. The game is brought to them, eventually, and they are still standing when it arrives.
The Building
Clad entirely in copper, unlacquered, and eleven months into a patina that has reached the color of an old kettle on the south face and nothing like it anywhere else. The hall is a plain rectangle on the outside and a fluted drum on the inside, ringed by 19,600 seats in two tiers with a broad standing gallery between them. The interior fittings are copper as well—rails, stair treads, the frames of the benches—and are warm to the hand in a building the facilities office keeps at four degrees. Sound in The Copper Hall carries in a way that flatters a full house and exposes an empty one, which has not been an issue. The clock at the northern end is mechanical, oversized, and audible from the ice. It is wound before every fixture, by hand, by someone Le Council has not been introduced to.