2025-05-17 02:21:21
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Ch. 49 The Victory Party
Maverick dodged, rolling to one side, and a new compartment in his chest sprang open, ejecting a net woven from synthetic kelp fibers. The net tangled one of the Leviathan’s claws, slowing it, and the crowd roared approval.George’s pulse steadied. Maverick was holding his own, but the Leviathan’s armor was thick, its titanium plates deflecting the tridents’ thrusts. George knew what came next. “Get serious, Maverick,” he whispered. As if hearing him, Maverick retreated a step, his right arm whirring as another hidden panel opened. Out slid his deadliest weapon: a monofilament-edged sword, its blade so thin it was nearly invisible, its edge capable of slicing through most armor like whale milk cheesecake. The crowd hushed, sensing a shift. Even Anemone leaned forward, her breath catching. “What’s that?” she asked.“His best shot,” George said, pride swelling. He’d spent weeks perfecting the sword’s edge, using nanotech to align the monofilament’s molecular structure. It was science at
Ch. 48 Maverick vs. Leviathan
George slipped back to his seat, the clam shell box heavy in his pocket. The crowd’s roar surged as they cheered the action from the day’s first scheduled fight, which had just started. Maverick vs. Leviathan was the second scheduled match. A starfish bot parried a claw swipe from a crab-like bot, its pincers sparking against one of the starfish bot’s steel arms. Anemone leaned close, her eyes bright. “Is everything okay with that guy? He seemed… scared.”“Yeah, it’s complicated,” George muttered, his mind racing. Shark’s warning—They’re coming to get me—echoed, and the box felt like a ticking bomb. He glanced at his learning pad, where Maverick’s diagnostics blinked green, but his focus wavered.“Boss, I could follow Shark and find out where he’s going, who he’s with, and what he’s up to. This is your big moment with the team. This is your day. Let me handle this other business for you.”Starstorm was on Anemone’s lap, curled up like a cat. Those two had hit it off right away. George
Ch. 47 The Clam Box
The roar of the crowd at the public-pool-turned-combat-arena washed over George like a tidal wave, thousands of sea elves had come, more than had been there on the first day when the ill-fated Kraken versus Nautilus match had taken place. George gripped the edge of his seat, his learning pad forgotten in his lap, its screen still glowing with Maverick’s diagnostic readouts. The Barolias Festival was back in full swing. The arena was a spectacle of red and gold streamers, their colors rippling under bioluminescent lights that mimicked the ocean’s depths.The mood was jubilant enough on the surface. George supposed it seemed like the atmosphere of Barolias Festival Week any other year, but there were a few serious faces in the crowd, worried faces. After breakfast at Nereia’s, George had made his way across Wonderdome as fast as he could. As he had made this way through the city, he had noticed that, if one stepped away from the music and cheering and dancing, and listened to the talk
Ch. 46 The Morning After the Break-up
The next morning, George had gotten barely two hours of sleep when the dutiful Starstorm was in his hair, literally. And in his his face, and on his back, and on his chest, and tugging at his arm, while George tried in vain to push him away. “Boss! Boss! It’s the robot rematch day! You’re gonna be late if you don’t get up now!” George sucked in a big breath, trying to get oxygen to his starving brain. “This is like when you used to wake me up for school in Sutter’s Village when I was a kid if I had stayed up too late the night before, only worse.” “You are still a kid, but this is way worse. Boss, are you hung over? Be honest now.” “I’m not hung over.” “Well I wouldn’t be surprised if you were with that Sirena. She’s always trying to corrupt you. Alcohol was bound to be next. She’s been trying to get you into things that aren’t good for you.” “You have no idea. Anyway, she’s gone now. We broke up. And I think I have a new girlfriend now.” George rubbed his tired eyes. “Whoa!
Ch. 45 The Statue and the Staff
George was about to run in fear as the towering stone figure stepped off its pedestal toward him. What stopped him was that he saw that the statue was bending down, reaching toward him with its palms open upward, offering him its staff. The expression on the statue’s face did not change. It didn’t speak. It only moved to offer him the staff and then stopped, waiting for him to take it. George thought the staff must be impossibly heavy, for it looked like it was made of the same kind of stone as the statue, coral limestone with nacre inlays, and it was proportioned for a person of the same unrealistically large size as the statue. George reached out for the staff anyway. When his hands clasped it, the staff shuddered. It shrank down to a proportional size for him. It also changed in composition from coral limestone to wood, honest to the gods wood, like from a tree in the surface world. The staff also made spluttering noises, as if a person had been deeply asleep and was being rouse
Ch. 44 Barolias
George and Anemone talked and talked for hours. At one point, they decided to swap contact information in their learning pads. It was then, on his learning pad, that George noticed what time it had gotten to be. It was so very late! If he didn’t get to bed soon, there would be no time for him to get any sleep at all before the day that the robot gladiator competition resumed.He remembered what time it had been when he had left Nereia’s house to begin what he thought would be an evening with Sirena. With the intense events of the evening, coupled with the Barolias Festival’s blurring of the Periods of Family and Sleep as so many Wonderdome denizens didn’t go home for either of those periods, but stayed up all night, as humans thought of day and night, there had been no external cues to clue George in to how late it had really been getting.When George expressed his urgency to leave and why, Anemone told him she’d like to come see Maverick fight if he didn’t mind. George said he’d lik
Ch. 43 Finally, Some Whale Milk Cheesecake!
Outside the building containing the Genetics Institute, Floor 118, and the animal pit fighting arena, George’s head began to clear. Barolias Festival Week was going on, so even though it was either the end of the Period of Family or the beginning of the Period of Sleep, distant music could be heard from block parties with dancing and merriment. Dancing and merriment. George wondered how those things fit into Sirena’s theories about power as an end in life and not merely a means. He’d been dancing with her. He knew she enjoyed beauty. Or did she? George turned and followed the music, finding a block party of Festival revelers. The live band had begun a slow love song. Couples swayed to the gentle, haunting sounds of the instruments, some vibrating strings made from carefully treated whale sinews, some giant hollow shells reverberating with deep percussive sounds when struck, and other shells either naturally shaped as or carefully crafted into sonorous horns. George recalled the dan
Ch. 42 Sharkcruncher
George’s stomach churned as Sirena led him through the golden double doors, her ponytail bobbing with authoritative grace. The lobby’s raw seafood hors d’oeuvres and cloaked revelers, including the ones with the voices of Prime Minister Moray and Riptide, faded behind them, replaced by a cavernous arena pulsing with bioluminescent light. The air was thick with a metallic tang, like the Genetics Institute’s labs but laced with something primal, like the sea hag’s shark-devouring grin from months ago. Wonderdome’s glittering promise felt distant here, buried beneath one-hundred nineteen floors of secrets.The arena was a sunken pit ringed by tiered benches, packed with sea elves in reveler’s cloaks, their murmurs a low tide of anticipation. Below, a reinforced coral enclosure shimmered with biotech runes, its sandy floor stained with faint, dark smears. George’s human eyes strained in the dim glow, but Sirena’s sea elf gaze was sharp, guiding him to a private balcony overlooking the pi
Ch. 41 Golden Doors and Hors d'oeuvres
Sirena took George by the hand to guide him in the dark since they would be using a bank of elevators different from the one that they normally used to ascend to Floor 118, a bank of elevators set off an inner hallway away from the Wonderdome city lights coming in through the windows. With his human eyes, once they left the illumination provided by the windows, George needed the assistance. George realized that they had never once used interior lights on Floor 118 and he didn’t even know where the light switches were located on the walls if he ever wanted to. Each floor of the skyscraper was laid out according to a similar pattern until Floor 118. Floor 118 broke the mold. This new bank of elevators didn’t correspond to the layout of the other floors. Once they got inside, the elevator was lit so that George could see the control panel only had buttons for Floor 118 and above, and for five basement levels below the entire building. There were no buttons for any of the building’s ‘n
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