The pass three passes had not run: an honest session at six players, no
contrarian choices and no forced branches, with the Pacing Note's cuts taken
exactly as written. Seed 6620. Nineteen minutes cut — pipe room folded, Kit
Marlow to the corridor, census dropped.
THE CUTS DID NOT CLOSE THE GAP, AND ONE RETRY UNDID MOST OF THEM. Act Two asks
for six rolls whose failure case was "ten minutes and a second attempt", roughly
two fail in an average session, and a single failed Research handed back ten of
the nineteen minutes that had just been cut. The Pacing Note's arithmetic was
sized against the act's length and never against its variance, so it could not
hold. A failed roll on a filed clue now costs a SCENE instead — Pennyfeather
fetches it while the party do something else — which keeps the roll meaningful
and costs nothing on the clock.
THE CHEAPEST CUT GUTS THE LIKELIEST ENDING. The Pacing Note priced moving Kit
Marlow to a corridor at "the drawings". This pass took that cut and then reached
the narrow row of ending 3 — the likeliest one, since it needs a single dossier
item — whose entire price is that the sixty-one stay unrecorded. Kit is the
sixty-one made into a person and her own entry says she must be a person before
she is a price. The cut is re-costed honestly, and the corridor version now has
to do her one job: she shows them a drawing and asks whether she got the blue
right.
The blanket Act One failure case named Joan for all seven clues, and Joan does
not go down the adit. Clues 6 and 7 now have their own: time, never access,
because the door has never been locked. Joan herself is at the farm AND walks up
with them, so the moor walk has somebody in it. And 13b came off the dice after
a 98 lost the reason the proper channel failed — the thematic centre of the case
— which is now written at the bottom of Pennyfeather's own sheet.
Act Two's floor is about 66 minutes against a budget of 55, measured across
three passes at 75 uncut, 70 uncut and 66 fully cut. The retry fix should
recover most of that and nothing has measured it. THE REMAINING QUESTION IS A
BUDGET DECISION AND IT IS TIM'S: move the slot to 3h15, or take twelve minutes
out of the sick bay and lose Revelation 3's best route. Written up in Open
questions and deliberately not decided here.
All twenty-one guards pass. Four passes, every content defect they found fixed.
What is left is human beings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
