The Garden Dome
Lore
Le Council notes that one of the most ordered cities on earth has been given an arena in which controlled chaos occurs on a schedule. The ice is of the verglas form, clear and exact. Under the Fine designation, any physical event against a visiting player is charged, immediately, to the player who committed it—no review, no discretion, no interval in which anything might be reconsidered. The Scorpions do not exploit this. They do not need to. They sting once, in the correct place, and they do not miss. The assessment team's report on The Garden Dome is the shortest it has filed on any arena and was returned twice for being, in Le Council's phrasing, insufficiently uncertain.
The Building
A glass geodesic dome set in cultivated garden, climate-sealed and immaculate, with 21,000 seats arranged in a perfect ring and no obstructed sightline anywhere in the building. Inside the shell the planting is real and tropical and kept at a temperature the plants tolerate and The Almighty Ice, for reasons the facilities office has abandoned investigating, does not object to: orchids on the concourse rails, ferns in the vomitories, a canopy of green pressing against glass six meters above the upper tier. Everything is signposted. Everything is on time. The penalty box is glass on all four sides and lit from below, positioned so that it is visible from every seat in the building, which Le Council's records indicate was a deliberate specification and not an accident of the dome. Nobody has ever had to ask who was in it.