The Lock
Lore
The world's most important passage was given a rink, and Le Council notes that The Almighty Ice has always understood transit. The ice at The Lock is of the verglas form—clear, hard, fast. Under the Transit designation, every modifier a visiting player carries is amplified to one and a half times its strength, for good and for ill alike: everything passing through Panama is made larger. The Pangolins roll up and wait. Then, at the least convenient moment available to them, they unfurl. The Lock opens when the Pangolins choose. Visitors are welcome to time their arrival. Visitors are not, per the assessment team, permitted to time their departure.
The Building
A working chamber. The building is a concrete lock, full-scale and structurally genuine, with the gates at either end intact and operable and The Almighty Ice laid across the floor of it where the water would be. The 18,600 seats are cut into the chamber walls in steep banks, so that the whole crowd looks down at the ice from above the old waterline, and the acoustics are those of a concrete box, which is to say total. The gates are opened for the teams and closed behind them. Le Council's facilities office has confirmed that they are opened again afterward. The mechanism is original, is maintained, and is loud enough that the horn at The Lock is largely ceremonial. Nothing in the building is decorated. Everything in the building works.