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You’ve managed to avoid staring at every new wonder and mind-boggling display of architecture, or at least avoid doing so with a slack open jaw. If you are being honest, your first day was probably spent more staring in amazement at your surroundings than it was actually scanning the long halls and high ceilings for intruders or what-have-you. Sir Ibram caught you off-balance once when came up behind you during the change to patrols that break up the monotony of standing sentry, but the man was congenial enough about it and merely slapped you on the shoulder and said that all the new recruits take a few days to get over the ‘palace shock’ as he called it. According to him, it is a testament to human nature that a man can just about adjust to anything and treat the extraordinary as the new ordinary if given enough time.
There is an enclosure so thick with foreign lush greenery that you cannot imagine anyone could see what it contains. The plants are like nothing you have seen before, all thick broad leaves, moss covered fallen trunks or abnormally large flowers of vibrant size and colours that would put the fashions of the Port Bounty Ball to shame. Compared to the towering marble halls, the pen is pleasing to the eye and gives off a sweet scent, but despite the attractiveness of the environ you notice the passing guards and servants give it as wide a berth as the direwolf’s enclosure if not more so. Antoninus isn’t here to translate the Cathagi lettering on the stone pavement in front of it, so you’ve nothing to go on as to what is contained within, if there is anything, or even if the plants themselves are the exhibit. Still, you see no good reason why you’d let idle curiosity take you within arm’s reach of that gladed enclosure for a closer look.
There is another enclosure covered entirely in gossamer webs, thick as the rigging on any ship and constantly attended by a menagerie slave whose sole purpose it seems is to saw with a long pike-looking instrument through any of the strings that start or end above a red line about halfway up the enclosure walls where a weird sheen on the stone begins. No one explains what the difference in the stone is above the red line, or what is within creating those webs, and you do not ask. Similarly, you’ll probably never know what swims within the enclosure filled with murky water. There is one exhibit where the entire top of the enclosure is covered in glass, clear glass! You’d shake your head at the wild expense in maintaining these habitats if you weren’t on duty.
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