Decided rather than worked around. Four passes measured Act Two's floor at about
66 minutes against a budget that said 55; the alternative was twelve minutes out
of the sick bay, which is where Revelation 3's best route lives. The slot moved,
because 3h00 was an assumption and the sick bay is not.
2h50 of play in three acts of 45 / 65 / 50 plus the break, in a 3h15 slot. Act
Two is budgeted at the 66 pass 4 actually measured with every cut taken, not at
the 56 the retry fix predicts, because nothing has measured the fix. The
twenty-five minutes of slack are deliberate: the house standard says a scenario
landing to the minute with zero slack is a fail for a table of strangers, and
every figure came off a desk pass run by a GM who already knew the document.
THE CUTS ARE NO LONGER DEFAULTS, which is the real answer to pass 4's finding
rather than a workaround for it. They existed because Act Two had to lose twenty
minutes it did not have. At 3h15 the correct number to plan for is zero — and
that retires the trap where the cheapest default cut hollowed out the price of
the likeliest ending.
AND THE REBUDGET EXPOSED AN OLDER DEFECT. The Countdown put step 3 at +1h20 and
step 4 at +2h00, measured from the blast door — so under every budget this
scenario has ever had, both fired AFTER Act Two ended. Both are backstops for
Essential revelations: step 3 is the second road to the sum and step 4 is
Revelation 3's last resort. They were arriving too late to back anything up. The
whole table is re-timed inside the act at +15 / +35 / +45 / +60, the reference
point is stated, and Act One's Stealth roll moves step 2 within that window
instead of pushing Teague past the end of the act.
The act checkpoints were trailing their own acts too — the signing one left five
minutes for the decision. A checkpoint is a point you can still correct from, so
the sum is wanted at 1:40 with twenty minutes of Act Two left, and Act Three's
is ten minutes in. Running times are printed so they mean something.
All twenty-one guards pass. What is left is human beings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
