The Gulf Waters
Lore
At The Gulf Waters the desert meets the sea, and The Almighty Ice, per the assessment team, arrived and took both. The ice is of the givre form. Under the Depth designation, once per game every active modifier on both teams is suspended for a full period—the Gulf strips everything away and leaves each side alone in the water. The Orcas play with a patience the assessment team found genuinely unsettling: they circle, they wait, and they strike from a depth the visitors did not know the arena had. The Orcas are calm until the Depth arrives. Then everyone is calm, and only the Orcas are used to it.
The Building
White stone and carved shutters, low and wide, set where the mountains come down to the water with the sea on one side and rock on the other and nothing at all in between. The roof is a series of shallow domes, and the 16,800 seats sit under them in a bowl that is open along its seaward edge to a colonnade and then to the Gulf. The interior is plain to the point of severity: no advertising, no color beyond the stone, and lighting from concealed sources that leaves no visible fitting anywhere in the building. Once per fixture, the house lights drop to a level the facilities office has confirmed is not on any cue sheet, and hold, and come back. Nothing else in the building changes. Everything on The Almighty Ice does.