// SC-101 — The Card at the Desk. Opening candidate hooks. // // Brief, beats, checks and the reasoning behind every rule below: // writing/scenes/sc101-the-card-at-the-desk.md // // Rules that bind while editing THIS file — all six are deliberate, none is a // leftover. The brief says why; this is the short form so you do not have to // leave the file to avoid breaking it. // // 1. Scene files stay thin: set the stage, <> into hook nodes, return. // 2. Evidence balance — one object / testimony / document / intuition per // candidate. Never stack types. See Assets/Candidates/candidates.json. // 3. Beat order is fixed: STANDING ORDER -> HOUSE POUR -> FACEWORK -> // CONFLUENCE. Never <>-guard a hook on another hook having fired, on any // $self_lean_*, or on skill_rank(...). // 4. Passive pattern for a clue-bearing hook: one voice, from the candidate's // attached pair; the line is that voice's argument, never a report; exactly // one $self_lean_* write, with $found_ set alongside it. // 5. Four voice introductions, against the handbook cap of three. Deliberate, // SC-101 only — one voice per pair. Do not correct it down, do not copy it. // 6. The body stays neutral: no lean, no candidate attachment outside the hooks. title: Start position: -17,-276 --- <> === title: SC101_Desk position: -19,-36 --- <> <> Narrator: The mahogany doors are too heavy for the hinges someone recently, badly, tightened — you feel the extra half-second of resistance before either side gives. Beyond them: a hall built for four hundred people politely disagreeing about tariffs, hosting perhaps sixty, none of whom look like they've read the programme. Narrator: Someone left a card with your name on it at the registration desk three hours before you decided to come. You don't remember deciding. <> <> <> <> Narrator: You're drawn toward a seat — toward a waiting conversation you didn't agree to have yet. <> === title: SC101_Hook_MadeAsset position: -40,567 --- CONFLUENCE: One: the seating chart's alphabetical. Two: one gap in it, held open past the start time. Three, and three is the one, {$player_name}: whoever printed this knew you'd be late to your own arrival. Which means somebody in this room has already met you, {$player_name}, and you're the only one who doesn't know it. <> <> === title: SC101_Hook_Journalist position: -299,452 --- FACEWORK: His hands gave it away before his face did — a flinch toward you, checked, turned into reaching for a drink that wasn't there. That's not a stranger's hands. What did you do to earn that flinch? <> <> === title: SC101_Hook_Inheritor position: 335,366 --- STANDING ORDER: You are standing in a doorway, {$player_name_full}. That's the whole of what's certain. Build outward from there — a person who starts anywhere else is a person coming apart in public. <> <> === title: SC101_Hook_Neutral position: 87,310 --- HOUSE POUR: Cigar smoke, spilled aperitif, and under it — cold, sharp — the ammonia bite of a floor mopped in a hurry, love. Someone's trying to make this room smell like money. It smells like panic with good cologne on top. ===