Design Round 7 · Deliverable 5 · Ally maintenance + the making of Scenes · renders canon 2026-07-11 · July 11, 2026

The other two jobs — shaping your ally, making places

Ally maintenance as conversation with inspectable cards, never settings forms (5a); the three authoring paths to a Scene — words (5b), the generative middle path and the upload path for crafted art (5c); and the sim flag on a Move — what it structurally disables (5d).

Maintaining your ally — conversation, then cards you can inspect

Moto maintains Taro by talking to Taro. The state that talk produces is held as three inspectable cards — the Contract, the grounding, what it knows. The cards are read-only renderings of the conversation's outcomes: you change them by saying so, never by editing a field. Instruction comes only from the Source; this room is where that instruction happens.

Kiduna Studio · Chat-only posture Taro · Source: Moto

the conversation

What do you actually know about the Lightbrush deal terms?

Three things, each cited: the institution agreement (recorded 07-02), the usage-distribution configuration (recorded 07-05), and your conversation with Moe about the audio system — which I hold at private, so it never leaves talk between us. The knowing card shows all three.

Forget the audio conversation — that was thinking out loud, not for keeping.

Forgotten — removed, not hidden. The knowing card no longer shows it, and nothing I say will draw on it.

the cards · inspectable, never editable

the Contract

Taro speaks as itself, never as Moto — except package status inside the Lightbrush integration (changed 07-11, by Moto's word) · Taro holds what Moto tells it at the level Moto states · Taro takes instruction from Moto alone.

every sentence shows who said it and when · changes only by conversation

grounding

The spec (11 tracks) · The Ceremony Machine's wisdom · the dispatch protocol · Moto's working notes since May. Weighted by source, like everything.

what it knows · by level

public 214 · private 37 · secret 4 · personal 12 — ask "what do you know about X" and the answer cites; forgetting is a said thing.

desktop 1440 (shown scaled) · Chat-only posture — ally maintenance is language work, the ground stays away (02 · 2a) · counts are in Goudy because they're live

A settings form would let anyone with the keyboard change the ally. Conversation-then-cards means the ally changes only when its Source says so, and the cards prove what was said.

No gold here: shaping your ally is stated trust between you and it — the R6 rule stands. The Contract card timestamps every sentence instead.

Words to a bounded Scene — the sentence is the floor plan

Make a rehearsal yard for the Ceremony Machine — an open floor, a tool wall on the north side, room for about eight people, one gate to the Commons.

Drawn — exactly your sentence, nothing more: open floor, north tool wall, capacity eight, one gate. It's bounded to The Ceremony Machine; who enters is its grants, not its walls.

tool wall · north

gate → the Commons

drawn live · from your words

the on-the-fly grade is a full authoring path, not a fallback — many Scenes will live their whole lives here

The law of the drawn-live material: nothing renders that the sentence didn't state. Ambiguity comes back as a question in the thread, never as an invented detail. The sentence is kept with the Scene — it is the Scene's source, citable like any Record.

Bounded means owned: a Scene belongs to its container (an org, a Project, a relationship). Its edges are grants made visible — the gate to the Commons exists because the sentence said so and the grants allow it.

The middle path and the crafted path — generate, or upload real art

the generative middle path

Dress the rehearsal yard — festival workshop, night, warm light, keep my layout exactly.

Generated four dressings over your layout — walk them in the Field and keep one, or none. Each is versioned; the words-and-pixels original stays underneath, always.

the chip on a generated Scene says "generated · from the yard's own words" — provenance never falls off

generated — rapid, versioned, replaceable; the member chooses by walking, not by thumbnails alone

the crafted path · upload

drop Lightbrush's tile set anywhere in the yard

Digital Dolly's export · 48 tiles, 12 sprites · it lands where you drop it and organizes into the graph

Read the set: 48 tiles matching the closed tile grammar, 12 sprites — 2 outside the sprite classes. Those two become a proposal to grow the set (a versioned Studio design act), or they stay out. Which way?

crafted art must still enter the closed vocabulary — growing the set is deliberate, named, everywhere at once, never per-scene improvisation (R6 law)

crafted — real materials by real hands, entering under the same grammar as everything else

Three paths, one ladder, one rule: every grade states what made it, and climbing never moves the work.

The paths compose: words make the room, generation dresses it, craft replaces the dressing where it matters. The Lightbrush integration's own workroom (02 · 2c) walks this exact ladder.

A Move gets its sim flag — and what that structurally disables

Moves are authored experiences. The sim flag is set at authoring time, in conversation, and it is structural — not a label but a different wiring. Elias drafts "Crew Call," a practice Move for running a Ceremony Machine show crew.

move · sim-flagged

practice ground

Crew Call — run a show crew, for practice

disabled by the flag, structurally:

· real gold — signatures inside render hollow: press-and-hold completes, no embers, no haptic, nothing recorded beyond practice

· real money — the Move's currency is named in-fiction (Rig Scrip) before any wallet renders; no path to real Compute or treasury exists in the wiring

· real Records — outcomes live inside the Move's own memory; nothing enters any organization's record

· real grants — nothing practiced here changes any actual access, anywhere

kept by the flag: everything else — the full HUD, real presence, sentences-not-scores, the debrief told once as story. Practice is real practice; only consequence is simulated.

mint-dash-hollow is the whole visual grammar of sim: dashed mint bounds, hollow gold, in-fiction currency names — the R6 law, now shown at authoring time

Set in conversation, hard to unset: the flag is declared when the Move is drafted ("this one's practice"). Removing it is a redesign, not a toggle — the Move re-enters review as a real Move because its wiring changes.

Numbers may exist inside the fiction — Crew Call can count rigs and cues all it wants. They never rank people, and they never leave the Move. The debrief tells the outcome once, as story (R6 law, unchanged).