The Floating Canal
Lore
The assessment team reports that a canal city was given a rink and that no one in the canal city appeared surprised. Under the Tolerance designation, every penalty at The Floating Canal is reduced by one tier—a major becomes a minor, a minor becomes a warning—on the operating principle, per the assessment team, that Amsterdam has seen worse. The ice is of the givre form, pale and layered. The Aardvarks are methodical, persistent, and mildly impossible to move. Their supporters arrive by bicycle and heckle with what the assessment team described, at some length, as aggressive courtesy. The Aardvarks are patient the way water is patient, and the city was built by people who lost that argument.
The Building
The building floats. It is moored, not founded—a broad steel pontoon carrying a brick-clad hall in the manner of the warehouses along the same water, gabled, hoist-beam and all, and it rises and falls with the canal by a margin the facilities office measures in centimeters and describes as within tolerance. The 17,400 seats are arranged in three shallow tiers with a standing terrace at the eastern end. The Almighty Ice surface is dead level at all times, which is not a property the hull around it shares, and Le Council has received the relevant engineering report and understood roughly a third of it. Bicycles are racked along the entire quay, four deep, and are not locked. The penalty box has a window onto the water. It is generally the most comfortable seat in the building.