Solarversia: The Year Long Game Read Online Free

of his wrist, the baton extended into a full-length telescope, the height of an arkwini.
    The spotlight followed him as he walked up to the wooden crate. He tapped it with the telescope then stepped away as it collapsed outward, revealing an object shaped like a miniature space shuttle with streamlined cylindrical thrusters pointed at the heavens. Arkwal stowed the compressed ’scope back in his pocket, strapped on the jetpack and clamped his thumbs down on the thrusters.
    The stadium erupted with sound and light as the holographic jetpack roared into life, firing a wild array of sparks down at the podium. He looked skyward, saluted the crowd and blasted off into the heavens. Nova flicked her visor back down. Every gamer knew that flying was far more enjoyable when you were totally immersed. The top of her display transformed into a dashboard that displayed a whole host of counters and instruments, including the distances from various landmarks: the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and their destination, Castalia, the flying palace.
    She stuck her arms out in front of her and tilted left and then right, mimicking Arkwal’s motions as she followed him through a virtually rendered night sky. Headsets like hers used voice and thought commands combined with special audiovisual processing to move her avatar around in the virtual world. When she held her hands out in front of her, the camera on her headset translated her movements into the virtual world in real time. Digital natives like Nova, Burner and Sushi could move around in the virtual world as adeptly as they could in the real, running, jumping and fighting their way through whatever game makers threw at them.
    She accelerated to a speed that blurred her surroundings beyond recognition, leaving the figure of Arkwal as the one thing that remained in focus. Before long, she watched as he deployed a giant parachute, slowed to cruising speed, and then ejected the device. It fluttered away, a new passenger on the South Atlantic trade wind express. A short way ahead of them a floating palace was coming into view.
     
    ***
     
    Arkwal hit Castalia at such a high speed that he smashed straight through its north face, showering bricks, debris and dust everywhere. He skidded along the marble floor of the Magisterial Chamber for fifty metres or more, and then slowed to a halt. He picked himself up and brushed himself down, and stopped for a few seconds to examine his elbows, which had taken the brunt of his crash landing.
    The Chamber was an enormous cube, the length of a football pitch in every direction. Hanging from the ceiling were thousands of multicoloured vines of varying length, some of which were swaying from side to side, following the recent disturbance. Still coated in a smattering of dust, Arkwal took his position in the centre of the room. With his arms outstretched above his head, he yelled, “Ladies and gentlemen, here’s Gorigaroo, master of the gong.”
    Far away on the other side of the chamber, a figure with the head and powerful upper body of a gorilla and the abdomen and mighty hind legs of a kangaroo could be seen, swinging from vine to vine. As he reached the southwest corner of the chamber, he let go, landed briefly on the marble floor and bounced up again, high into the mess of tangled creepers overhead.
    Finally he came to rest beside a golden gong suspended by several of the vines. He pulled a wooden club out of his pouch, leaned back, and then struck the gong with immense force. When the sound waves reached Arkwal, they troubled the floor around him, causing the patterned marble to vibrate.
    He bent his knees, leapt up to the closest vine, swung away from the pulsating ground, let go to perform a somersault, and landed at the edge of what was now a circular hole in the centre of the room. “And now, ladies and gentlemen, the time has come for me to introduce His Royal Highness, Emperor Commissaire de Spielen, von Unglai D'Acheera Nakk-oo,