CLEAN GROUND v0.8: the player chair found the refusals, and both needed deciding

Desk pass 3 is committed alongside — full session from the player chair, choosing
against the scenario at every junction, seed 5580 with one corrected branch at
7731. Every failure case and every pass-2 fix held. What it found instead were the
two things players do that no GM-chair pass can reach, because both are refusals
rather than rolls.

"We are not going through." Three acts live on the far side and the document had
no line about declining to cross, which is the most professionally sensible choice
a party can make after reading a coroner's note about a man who walked himself to
death. Answered now with a reason and not a compulsion: the entry is pegged to a
tree that no longer exists, so a seam with no peg does not sit still — waiting does
not make it safer, it makes it unfindable, and the forty-one go with it. Registry
says that once and leaves the choice alone. A party that still refuses gets a real
ending in ten minutes rather than four railroaded hours.

"Can we cancel it from in here." A Research fumble and an Anomaly Lore success both
landed on a question the document could not answer either way. Decided rather than
fudged: cancellation is a REGISTRY ACT ON OUR SIDE, because the entry is a record
and the record is held here. So it cannot be done from inside, somebody has to be
back through before it happens, and anyone still in the duplicate when it goes goes
with it, having never been filed as being there. The Close now costs not only what
they choose but who is standing where when it takes effect, and if they are bringing
anyone through those two questions collide.

Also: Ray Teasdale, the clearance foreman the timeline always implied and the roster
never carried — a Persuade success in pass 3 bought an interview with a man who did
not exist. Act One's failure case no longer assumes the party is at the farm, since
pass 3 spent the act twenty miles away and the automatic notch sat uselessly on the
other side of the county. The re-cut is answered on a success as well as a fumble,
with the reason: the entry is pegged to the older authority and there is no older
tree. Fix 7's conditional target moved onto the countdown row, because I missed it
myself eight minutes after writing it. A special for reading the child.

And the bimodality paragraph, which took three attempts to earn its place: held when
its citation failed, verified after another session found the cause — three separate
random generators, so a seed named a different fight in each tool — and corrected
once more when its illustration turned out to compare targeting modes rather than
the two ends. Published now as 23% nobody down against 45% everybody, decided by
round five, with the focus-fire claim removed.

Twenty-three fixes across three passes. The cadence is complete; what remains is the
print pack and two decisions that are not a scenario's to make.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND.md

@@ -5,7 +5,7 @@
 > and clean soil, and there is no north. Two weeks ago a contractor felled the tree the
 > whole arrangement was pegged to.*
 
-**Status:** v0.7 — **absorbs all eight fixes from pass 1 and all seven from pass 2**
+**Status:** v0.8 — **absorbs all fixes from desk passes 1, 2 and 3** (eight, seven, eight)
 (`CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_1.md`, GM chair, seed 4271). No clue is now behind a single roll,
 every roll in the document has a written miss, Act Four has a spine and its tell is
 ungated, and about 25 minutes of pre-written cuts are in the Pacing Note. **Still not
@@ -184,7 +184,7 @@ Advance one step per act, plus one whenever the agents spend Coherence on the fa
 | **2** | It has a posture and a limp right. Someone sees "a colleague" a field away |
 | **3** | It takes an NPC. The NPC's file is still good, so the copy holds |
 | **4** | The copy is fluent. It is inside the cordon and helping |
-| **5** | It reaches for **the lowest POW in the room** — opposed POW×5, permanent. GM ESSENTIALS says how that resolves; Act Four beat 3 says who and why |
+| **5** | It reaches for **the lowest POW in the room** — opposed POW×5, permanent. **Unless Ashcroft accepted THE OFFER in Act Two, in which case it takes him instead and he resists at Difficult.** GM ESSENTIALS has the resolution; Act Four beat 3 has the reasoning |
 | **6** | It leaves for the south road wearing a warrant card, and this is a campaign |
 
 ---
@@ -393,19 +393,52 @@ Same hand, same ruled paper, eleven years apart.*
   - `[CUS: Spot — three sets of tracks leaving the stump, and one set is not walking
     upright]` *Missed:* Swinburne says it for them. She has twice seen "something going
     away on its hands" and has told nobody, because of how it sounds.
+- **Ray Teasdale, the foreman** — the man who watched Corrigan come apart on 6 September,
+  and the best eyewitness in the case. Desk pass 3 reached him from the employer's paperwork
+  without going near the farm, so he must exist on the page.
+  `[CUS: Persuade — he has told this to the police once and been looked at strangely]`
+  - *Essence:* a ganger of thirty years who is not remotely superstitious and has stopped
+    sleeping properly.
+  - **Three things he says, in this order:** Corrigan was casual, cash, no cards, nobody he
+    knew before that fortnight. He got the tree down in a morning, which should have taken
+    two men a day. And at the end he *stopped being able to do his hands* — Teasdale's own
+    phrase, which he will repeat if asked and cannot improve on.
+  - *Missed:* he says the first two anyway, because they are simply facts about a job.
 - **The first body**, still in the pen. Thin in a way that is not starvation.
   `[CUS: Medicine — bone density of a man of forty; everything else of a man of ninety]`
   *Missed:* CG-H01 carries the same finding in Corbridge's own words.
 - The seam at dusk. It does not look like anything. It smells like a fire that has been out
   for a long time. **No roll.**
+- **IF THEY WILL NOT GO THROUGH** — and a careful party should at least propose it, because
+  cordoning a hazard and calling it in is the correct professional instinct. Desk pass 3
+  stopped dead here, so the scenario answers it now.
+  - **The Bureau's answer is a reason, not a compulsion.** The entry is pegged to a tree
+    that no longer exists. A seam with no peg does not sit still: it is on the march
+    tonight, it may be half a mile away tomorrow, and it may be somewhere nobody can cordon
+    by the weekend. **Waiting does not make this safer, it makes it unfindable** — and the
+    forty-one go with it.
+  - **Nobody orders them through at gunpoint.** Registry says the above, once, and leaves
+    the decision where it belongs. A party that still refuses has made a real choice with a
+    real price, and the GM should let them feel it rather than railroading.
+  - **If they genuinely will not**, the case closes as a cordon-and-monitor and they are
+    stood down. That is a legitimate, bleak ending: nobody learns what was over there, and
+    in eleven weeks a hollow man walks into a village four miles south. **Do not run four
+    more hours of it.** Say what the file says a year later and end the session early.
 
 **Clue trail (first pass)** — three must land, and **none of them is behind a single roll
 any more**: the notch is a peg (automatic), the felling date matches the flag (briefing
 gives the date, Swinburne gives the felling), the body is unfiled (Medicine, or CG-H01).
 
-**Failure case:** there is no version of this act that ends without the peg. If the party
-never goes near the stump, **Swinburne takes them to it** — the dog died there and she
-wants somebody official to look at the place.
+**Failure case:** there is no version of this act that ends without the peg, **and it must
+not depend on them being at the farm** — desk pass 3 spent Act One in a forestry office
+twenty miles away, where the automatic notch and Swinburne both sat uselessly on the other
+side of the county. Two routes, both of which reach a party anywhere:
+
+- **Swinburne telephones the Bureau.** She has a dead dog and no answer, she has the case
+  number off the police, and she is not a woman who lets a thing go.
+- **The police file carries a photograph of the cut**, taken because the felling was part of
+  a sudden-death enquiry. The squared notch is in the frame whether anybody has been to the
+  farm or not.
 
 ---
 
@@ -464,6 +497,9 @@ wants somebody official to look at the place.
 
 **Failure case:** if the party refuses contact, the column camps within sight and one
 of the children is sent over with bread. That works on almost everybody.
+**On a special or better reading the child** `[CUS: Insight]`**:** she has been told to
+smile, and she is doing it carefully. Nobody has sent a child to armed strangers out of
+carelessness — this column has done this before, and it has lost people doing it.
 
 ---
 
@@ -481,6 +517,12 @@ of the children is sent over with bread. That works on almost everybody.
   pegged, never cancelled]` *Missed:* Ivy hands them a 1962 ration tin with a requisition
   number on it, and that number is enough to work the rest out from the Bureau.
 - `[CUS: Anomaly Lore — what a peg is, and what losing one does]`
+  **On a success — and they will ask, because re-pegging is the obvious idea and desk pass 3
+  proposed it unprompted:** the answer is that it cannot be done, and why. The entry is
+  pegged to the *older* authority, the boundary as it was recorded before the survey of
+  1861, and there is no older tree. A fresh notch in a fresh tree is a note in the margin of
+  a document that was closed in 1962. **That is information, not a refusal**, and it is the
+  moment the table understands that cancellation is the only lever there has ever been.
   **On a fumble:** the agent concludes, with complete confidence, that the peg can simply
   be **re-cut** — a fresh notch in a fresh tree will hold the entry and nobody need be
   cancelled. It is wrong, it is the most attractive wrong idea available, and a table will
@@ -642,8 +684,22 @@ losing. Both of the first two are live in this scenario.
    | Three of the column | 3.25 of 4 | 2.31 | **45.0%** | 0.98 |
    | Six of the column | 4.00 of 4 | 3.99 | **99.8%** | 1.46 |
 
-   At four players, **any** violence against the column is a party-ending decision. Say
-   the row out loud before they commit, exactly as THROUGH TRAIN does.
+   **It is not a hard fight. It is two different fights.** That mean of 2.31 down is the
+   average of a coin flip and describes about a tenth of outcomes: **23% of the time nobody
+   goes down at all, 45% of the time everybody does**, and the ground between is thin. Six
+   players against six of the column is an ordinary spread where the average means
+   something. This row is not, and a GM who reads "2.31" as "a bruising fight" is reading
+   the one outcome the table is least likely to deliver.
+
+   **It is decided by round five.** If the party puts even one of the three down in the
+   first five rounds the wipe rate falls from **58.5% to 19.7%**; if they put down two it is
+   **zero wipes in the 84 fights that got there**. They usually cannot — 68% of fights reach
+   round five with none of the three down. A dead one stops attacking and a half-dead one
+   does not, so the fight either tips early or grinds them flat.
+
+   At four players, **any** violence against the column is a party-ending decision. **Say
+   the shape aloud, not the average:** "nearly half of all parties die" is the honest
+   warning, and "you will probably lose two people" is not.
 
 #### What to do instead of a fight
 
@@ -703,6 +759,19 @@ side of it because she has walked south for the first time in sixty-four years.
 - **Leave it filed.** Everyone lives. The peg is gone, the seam is open at dusk, and
   something over there will keep rehearsing for as long as the file exists. The agents
   will be the ones who come back for it, repeatedly, for the rest of their careers.
+- **WHERE IT IS DONE, WHICH THE TABLE WILL ASK AND WHICH DECIDES THE SCENE.** Cancellation
+  is a **Registry act on our side**. The entry is a record, the record is held here, and
+  nothing said or done on the far side touches it. `[CUS: Anomaly Lore — the record is not
+  over there; it never was]`
+  - **So it cannot be done from inside**, and somebody has to be back through before it
+    happens. That is a cost nobody has priced until this moment, and it is the real weight
+    of the Close: **not only what they choose, but who is standing where when it takes
+    effect.**
+  - **Anybody still in the duplicate when the entry is cancelled goes with it.** They were
+    never filed as being there. Say this plainly the first time it is asked — a table that
+    merely suspects it will not choose it, and the choice is the scenario.
+  - **On a fumble asking the question:** the agent is certain it can be done from here, and
+    that certainty is worth a Coherence to correct once somebody proves otherwise.
 - **Bring them through** — the thing the table will try. It costs Coherence per person
   at a rate no party can pay, and the record will not carry forty-one unfiled people.
   Let them get four across and understand what that means about the other thirty-seven.
@@ -718,6 +787,7 @@ No roll resolves this. No NPC advises. Registry signs whatever they write.
 | **Ivy Hetherington**, 78 | Fourteen when she arrived; leads the column by consent; has an almanac of a journey she has never completed |
 | **Dean Corrigan** (deceased) | The contractor who felled the peg, and the coat the understudy tried on first |
 | **Margaret Swinburne** | Sike Head farmer; her dog died at the stump; she wants a name for it and will not be fobbed off |
+| **Ray Teasdale** | Clearance foreman; watched Corrigan come apart and has stopped sleeping properly; "he stopped being able to do his hands" |
 | **Sgt Aled Prichard** | Bureau liaison on the cordon; excellent file; default victim of the swap |
 | **Registry clerk (unnamed)** | Knows RESERVE ENTRY exists, has never been cleared to say so, and will let one sentence slip |
 
@@ -908,10 +978,12 @@ twice.*
 4. ~~A written exposure model for Act Four.~~ **Done** — measured, 2000 runs a row at seed
    11 against the named cast, reproducible from the command in the section.
 5. **Desk playtest.** Pass 1 failed and its eight fixes are absorbed in v0.6
-   (`CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_1.md`). Pass 2, the Act Four stress re-run, is done
-   (`CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_2.md`) and **its seven fixes are absorbed in v0.7**, including a
-   scenario-local ruling for the opposed roll `rules.mjs` does not define. Next is the
-   player-chair contrarian pass. A
+   (`CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_1.md`). Pass 2, the Act Four stress re-run
+   (`CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_2.md`), and pass 3, the player-chair contrarian run
+   (`CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_3.md`), are both done and **all three passes' fixes are absorbed
+   in v0.8**. **The three-pass cadence is complete.** What remains before convention-ready is
+   the print pack, and the two decisions in Open Questions that are not a scenario's to
+   make. A
    human-table run remains a separate instrument from all of them.
 
 ## Open questions for Tim

docs/scenarios/CLEAN_GROUND_PLAYTEST_3.md

@@ -0,0 +1,272 @@
+# CLEAN GROUND — desk playtest 3 (player chair, contrarian)
+
+**Scenario version:** v0.7, at commit 796bb7d
+**Date:** 13 September 2026
+**Method:** full session from the **player** chair, choosing against the scenario at every
+junction — go round the farm, refuse the column, skip the depot, refuse to test, and try to
+cancel the entry from the wrong side of the seam. Seeded roller, **seed 5580**, with one
+corrected branch at **7731** (see Act Four). Pass 1 was 4271, pass 2 was 9314.
+
+**Verdict: the failure cases and the pass-2 fixes all held. But playing against the
+scenario found two holes neither GM-chair pass could reach, and both are refusals rather
+than rolls — the two things players do that the document has no answer for.**
+
+---
+
+## Act One — we never go to the farm
+
+Contrarian premise: Corrigan is the interesting thread, not the sheep. Chase the employer's
+paperwork instead.
+
+```
+Bhattacharya Research — Corrigan's paperwork    47 vs 63   success
+Renshaw      Persuade — the foreman             30 vs 63   success
+Braithwaite  Medicine — the body, grudgingly    62 vs 53   fail
+```
+
+- Research landed and the truth section supports it beautifully: casual labour, paid cash,
+  unfiled — which is *why* the copy came apart in a week. A player reaching this from the
+  employer's side rather than the body's side gets there just as well.
+- ⚠ **A Persuade success bought an interview with a man who does not exist.** The timeline
+  says the copy came apart *in front of his foreman* on 6 September, with police attending.
+  That is the best eyewitness in Act One — somebody watched it fail — and there is **no
+  foreman in the NPC roster**: no name, no essence, no idea what he says. I invented him at
+  the desk, which means the document did not.
+- Medicine failed and **CG-H01's photocopy covered it exactly as written.** Second pass in
+  a row that failure case has earned its place.
+- ⚠ **Act One's failure case assumes a location this route never visits.** It reads: if the
+  party never goes near the stump, *Swinburne takes them to it.* She cannot — they are in a
+  forestry office twenty miles away. The automatic notch is only automatic for a party
+  standing at the stump, so the clue the act "cannot afford to lose" was lost here, and the
+  backstop could not fire.
+
+## The refusal the scenario has no answer for
+
+At dusk, having worked out that something comes through a gap on a farm boundary, the party
+did the professional thing: **cordoned it and called it in.** Nobody crossed.
+
+- ⚠⚠ **Acts Two, Three and Four are all on the far side, and the document does not contain
+  a single line about declining to go.** Not a failure case, not a nudge, not a reason the
+  Bureau will not simply send a bigger team tomorrow. It is the most reasonable choice on
+  the table for a cautious party and it stops the scenario dead.
+- This is not a contrarian stunt. Agents who have just read a coroner's note about a man
+  who walked himself to death have every professional reason to wait for daylight and
+  authority. **The scenario needs to answer it, and the answer probably is not "you feel
+  compelled to step through."**
+
+For the rest of the pass I assumed they were ordered through, and carried on.
+
+## Act Two — we refuse the column
+
+```
+Renshaw  Insight — the child sent with bread    9 vs 63   special
+Ashcroft Insight — THE OFFER                   89 vs 63   fail
+```
+
+- The written failure case fired — a child is sent over with bread — and it worked on this
+  table as the text predicts it works on almost everybody. Refusing the column is not a
+  viable refusal, which is the right design.
+- ⚠ Minor: **a special on Insight has no written result.** The child is real and that is all
+  the text has. A special ought to buy something — she has been told to smile.
+- **THE OFFER failed, so Ashcroft took the offered memory for a real one.** Per fix 7 this
+  quietly makes him the understudy's preferred target two acts later, and he was not told.
+  Hold that thought.
+
+## Act Three — we skip the depot and try to fix the tree
+
+```
+Bhattacharya Knowledge — requisition number on the tin   50 vs 63   success
+Ashcroft     Anomaly Lore — can we just re-cut the peg?  14 vs 63   success
+```
+
+- **The ration-tin failure case worked.** The depot was never opened, the number carried the
+  truth, and the act did not stall.
+- ⚠ **The re-cut idea arrived on a SUCCESS, and the text only answers it as a fumble.** The
+  fumble result — total confidence that a fresh notch will hold the entry — is written and
+  good. But re-pegging is *the obvious idea*, players propose it unprompted, and on a
+  success Anomaly Lore must say something. The honest answer is that he knows it cannot be
+  done and why: the entry is pegged to the older authority, and there is no older tree.
+  **That is information, not a dead end, and it is currently unwritten.**
+
+## Act Four — we refuse to test him at all
+
+```
+Pollard Spot — just watching him, no examination   79 vs 53   fail
+```
+
+Nobody examined him, so rehearsal step 5 arrived on schedule, as beat 3 promises.
+
+⚠ **I then mis-applied my own fix, which is a finding in itself.** I rolled step 5 against
+Okonkwo, the lowest POW in the room — because that is what the countdown row says. The
+Ashcroft exception, which had been armed since Act Two, lives only in beat 3's sub-bullets.
+**If the author of the fix missed it eight minutes after writing it, a GM at hour three
+will miss it too.** Corrected branch, seed 7731:
+
+```
+Understudy POWx5 — reaching for Ashcroft       13 vs 75   SPECIAL
+Ashcroft   POWx5 at Difficult (he accepted)    18 vs 42   success
+```
+
+- **Special beats success, so the understudy wins, and a PC is taken.** The local opposed
+  ruling resolved a special-against-success without a moment's hesitation, which is exactly
+  what it was written for.
+- **Fix 7 is verified end to end**, and it is better than I expected: the anchor who quietly
+  accepted a comfortable lie in Act Two is taken in Act Four *because* he accepted it, at
+  42% instead of 85%, and the table can trace the causal line backwards through the whole
+  session. That is the best outcome this scenario can produce and it is now reachable.
+
+## Close — we try to cancel it from the wrong side
+
+The party, standing on the far side, asked to cancel the entry from inside it.
+
+```
+Bhattacharya Research — can we cancel from in here?   100 vs 63   FUMBLE
+Ashcroft     Anomaly Lore — what happens to us then?   40 vs 63   success
+```
+
+- ⚠⚠ **Both questions are unanswerable from the document.** Nothing says whether cancellation
+  can be performed from the far side, and nothing says what becomes of agents standing
+  inside a duplicate when it stops being a place the record supplies. A **fumble** on the
+  first and a **success** on the second and the GM has nothing either way — the fumble needs
+  a consequence and the success needs a fact.
+- **Players will ask this, and the answer is load-bearing on the whole ending.** If
+  cancelling from inside kills them, the Close is a different scene: it means somebody has
+  to go back through first, and the decision acquires a cost nobody has priced. If it does
+  not kill them, say so, because a table that suspects it might will not choose it.
+
+---
+
+## Player-hat verdicts
+
+| Archetype | Verdict | Score |
+|---|---|---|
+| **Methodical note-taker** (Bhattacharya) | Still the best-served sheet. Reached the truth from the employer's side without the farm at all, which says the case is genuinely multi-route. | 9/10 |
+| **Roleplay-first talker** (Renshaw) | Bought an interview with an NPC that does not exist, and got a special the text has no result for. Two dead ends in one act, both in her lane. | 5/10 |
+| **Quiet tactician** (Pollard/Okonkwo) | Refusing things worked: the cordon-and-call-it-in play is completely sound and the scenario simply has no reply. Satisfying and slightly hollow. | 6/10 |
+| **Lore-digger** (Ashcroft/Braithwaite) | Best arc in three passes. Took the offered memory in Act Two and was taken for it in Act Four, traceably. Then asked the one question at the Close that the document cannot answer. | 8/10 |
+
+---
+
+## Fix list
+
+Nothing applied.
+
+1. **SERIOUS — answer "we are not going through."** *Text hole.* The most reasonable refusal
+   available, and there is no line about it. Recommended: the Bureau's answer is that the
+   seam is pegged to a tree that no longer exists, so it is **not going to be there
+   tomorrow in the same place** — waiting costs them the crossing and the forty-one with it.
+   That is a reason, not a compulsion, and it leaves refusing as a real choice with a real
+   price.
+2. **SERIOUS — say what cancelling from the far side does.** *Text hole, and it changes the
+   Close.* Decide and write both halves: whether the entry can be cancelled from inside, and
+   what happens to anybody standing in the duplicate when it goes. Then give the fumble a
+   consequence.
+3. **Write the foreman.** *Text hole.* One line of essence and three things he says. He
+   watched the copy fail; he is the best eyewitness in Act One and currently a blank.
+4. **Rewrite Act One's failure case so it does not assume the farm.** *Text hole.* The notch
+   is only automatic for somebody standing at the stump. A party that never goes there needs
+   a route that reaches them — Swinburne telephones the Bureau, or the police file includes
+   a photograph of the cut.
+5. **Answer the re-cut on a success, not only on a fumble.** *Missing option.* A success
+   should say plainly that it cannot be re-pegged, and why.
+6. **Move fix 7's conditional target somewhere a GM will see it.** *Staging.* Put the
+   Ashcroft exception on the countdown row beside "lowest POW in the room", not only in
+   beat 3. I missed it myself, minutes after writing it.
+7. **Give Insight and Anomaly Lore specials a result** where they matter. *Minor.*
+8. **The four-player cut's mean hides a coin flip — VERIFIED, ready to apply.** *Missing
+   context on a published number.* Histogramming *agents down* rather than averaging it:
+
+   | down | 0 | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 |
+   |---|---|---|---|---|---|
+   | share of fights | **23.1%** | 16.9% | 10.9% | 4.0% | **45.0%** |
+
+   68% of fights land at one of the two ends and only **11% land on the published mean of
+   2.31**. The fight is decided by round five: none of the three down by then and 58.5% of
+   those fights are wipes (68% of all fights); one down and it falls to 19.7%; two down and
+   it is **zero wipes in 84 fights**. Six players against six of the column is *not*
+   bimodal — 10 to 18% at every outcome — so this is a property of the cut, not the
+   creature.
+   - **Provenance, because this took two attempts.** The finding came from another session.
+     Its first citation did not reproduce for me at all, and the cause turned out to be two
+     different random generators — `simulate.mjs` had a private mulberry32, `playthrough.mjs`
+     a look-alike LCG, and `check-focus` a third copy — so a seed named a different fight in
+     each tool and every cross-tool citation was unreproducible by construction. Fixed at
+     8627fa3, one exported generator for all three.
+   - **Verified here, after the fix.** Three commands, each doing a different job.
+
+     **The two ends — one targeting mode, two seeds.** This is the honest illustration of a
+     coin flip, and it cannot be misread as a claim about concentrating fire:
+
+     ```
+     node tools/playthrough.mjs --creature quiet_neighbours_npc --count 3 \
+       --party ashcroft,bhattacharya,renshaw,braithwaite --seed 2 --mode random
+     → [random] PARTY WIPED in 9 rounds · 4 of 4 down · 1 dead
+
+     node tools/playthrough.mjs --creature quiet_neighbours_npc --count 3 \
+       --party ashcroft,bhattacharya,renshaw,braithwaite --seed 5 --mode random
+     → [random] PARTY WINS in 4 rounds · 0 of 4 down · 0 dead
+     ```
+
+     **The shared stream**, which is the thing that was broken — the same seed must name the
+     same fight in both tools:
+
+     ```
+     node tools/simulate.mjs --creature quiet_neighbours_npc --count 3 \
+       --party ashcroft,bhattacharya,renshaw,braithwaite --runs 1 --seed 2
+     → 4.00 of 4 down · median rounds 9 · 100.0% wiped · 1.00 deaths
+     ```
+
+     **`--mode` is required.** Without it playthrough runs both targeting arms and prints two
+     fights, which is exactly how the original citation went wrong.
+   - ⚠ **`--mode focus` is NOT the other face of the coin.** At seed 2 it also wipes — 11
+     rounds, 4 of 4 down, 1 dead. **The bimodality is across seeds, not across targeting**, and
+     any written version must not imply that concentrating fire flips this fight. (It is worth
+     8.3 points across the corpus per `check-focus`, which is a real and different claim.)
+   - **The buckets, so the figure is checkable:** 1353 / 548 / 84 / 15 fights reach round five
+     with 0 / 1 / 2 / 3 of the three down, wipe rates 58.5% / 19.7% / 0.0% / 0.0%. They sum to
+     2000, which is the run length. "Zero wipes" is zero of the **84**, not zero of the 2000.
+   - **What to write:** the honest warning is *nearly half of all parties die*, and the
+     dishonest one is *you will probably lose two people* — because that is the outcome
+     least likely to happen. Say the shape, not the average, and note that it is decided by
+     round five.
+
+## FIXES APPLIED — v0.8
+
+All eight applied. The two serious ones were refusals, and both needed a decision rather
+than a rewording.
+
+**"We are not going through"** is now answered with a reason and not a compulsion: the entry
+is pegged to a tree that no longer exists, so a seam with no peg does not sit still — waiting
+does not make it safer, it makes it unfindable, and the forty-one go with it. Registry says
+that once and leaves the choice alone. A party that still refuses gets a real, bleak ending
+in ten minutes rather than four railroaded hours.
+
+**"Can we cancel it from in here"** is now a design decision with teeth. **Cancellation is a
+Registry act on our side** — the entry is a record, the record is held here, and nothing done
+on the far side touches it. So it cannot be done from inside, somebody has to be back through
+before it happens, and anyone still in the duplicate when it goes **goes with it**, because
+they were never filed as being there. That is a cost the Close did not have: not only what
+they choose, but who is standing where when it takes effect. The fumble now costs a Coherence
+to correct.
+
+Also in: **Ray Teasdale**, the clearance foreman who watched Corrigan come apart and whose
+own phrase is *he stopped being able to do his hands*; an Act One failure case that no longer
+assumes the party is at the farm (Swinburne telephones, and the police file carries a
+photograph of the cut); the re-cut answered on a **success** as well as a fumble, with the
+reason — the entry is pegged to the older authority and there is no older tree; fix 7's
+conditional target moved onto the countdown row where a GM will actually see it; a special
+result for reading the child; and the verified bimodality paragraph, with the focus-arm claim
+dropped.
+
+## What three passes have now confirmed
+
+- **The handout and failure-case layer is the strongest thing in the document.** CG-H01's
+  photocopy, the ration tin, the child with bread and the almanac pair have all now fired
+  under failed or skipped rolls, across three different seeds, and the case never stalled
+  on a die.
+- **The Close is still finished.** Its only problem is a question about physics, not drama.
+- **The scenario is multi-route in a way I had not verified** — Act One's truth is reachable
+  from the body, the stump, or the employer's paperwork independently.
+- **Every hole found in this pass is a refusal or an unasked question, not a roll.** Two
+  GM-chair passes found roll-shaped defects; the player chair found the shape of the ones
+  that were left, which is the argument for running all three.