She was right, wasn't she? There wasn't anything to it all.She was right, wasn't she? There wasn't anything to it all. It was just another roadtrip. He'd met important people before, right? Ken Shardik was just another one of those. "Okay, everybody, onto the SDisk," Nickolai said. Kiza stepped first, then Furry. Garth went third and Nickolai last. "Lex, I want to go the Shardik Castle." The world blinked. Garth was never going to get used to that. And resolved itself into a beach. Garth looked down to find himself standing on water. "Come on," Kiza said. "Before the circle disappears." She ran for the beach; Garth recovered her wits enough to follow her. "Made it!" she said. "Made what?" "Sometimes people program those things to fade on you," she said, pointing to the SDisk that hovered, then vanished into the water. "It's a nasty trick because you'll find yourself floating on the water one second, swimming in it the next." Garth nodded, then looked around. The shadow behind him first caught his eye; it had been what he had been expecting when they had first arrived. Shardik Castle hovered overhead without visible means of support, a column of water falling from the center of the bottom face to the small body of water underneath. Shardik Lagoon. Or, when on the Castle Grounds, just "The Lagoon." The Castle itself looked made from segmented rectangles of sandstone intermixed with dramatic pieces of some silvered metal or glass. Here and there were the open porches of residencies, but they didn't stand out quite like the general color of earthen yellow and steel. The lagoon itself was covered in pale yellow sand, similar in color to that of the Castle. Where they stood was the largest patch, a wide expanse of sand that ended in the stone walls of the crater in which Shardik Castle sat. Garth knew that few of the plants and short, stubby trees that lived in or lined the walls of the crater were native to either Pendor or Terra; The popular news media seemed eternally entranced by Aaden Shardik's "alien garden. |