Narrative Layer, Cases 3–8
What the six authoring passes flagged for your eye, 3 September 2026. Every case now carries brief, case facts, event window and closing, and every thread carries headline, account, exhibits and insight. The corpus validator is clean and the leak checker finds nothing.
Where the source material went. Every suspect-level note in Game-Content-and-Ideas (claimed whereabouts, motive, post-pour contact, gear set, network rate) was already on the roster as visible facts. The mockups' intro paragraphs became the briefs; their solution paragraphs became the closings, rewritten to the corpus's numbers where the mockups were stale. The READMEs' route reasoning has no player-facing field and stays in content_notes.
What was inferred. Five cases had no event window. Each was derived from the case's own facts and is named as inferred in the entry's content note. They are the first thing to confirm.
| Case | Window | Derived from |
|---|---|---|
| CASE004 | Movement window: 7:10–7:18 p.m. | lobby badge interval, collar run, photo burst and scanner times |
| CASE005 | Contamination window: 8:07–8:24 p.m. | first documented glass contact to first symptoms |
| CASE006 | Sabotage window: 6:40–6:49 p.m. | drain start to the corrected cabinet session |
| CASE007 | Drafting window: 11:43–11:47 p.m. | appendix access to the draft minute |
| CASE008 | Collision: 9:18 p.m., in rain | the collision time itself |
One structural thing that recurs. Cases 4 through 8 keep their raw facts as numbered sentences rather than keyed values, and the game hides the fact table once a thread has tiles. So the per-suspect lists a thread needs (five access windows, five distances, five cargo models) now live in the account prose, because three tiles cannot hold them and the roster does not show them. That holds up, but it is the accounts carrying weight the fact table used to carry.
Two chips I removed after authoring. “Three clues is the floor” (CASE006) and “Two routes to one driver” (CASE008) describe the mechanic rather than the case, and the second reads as a hint.
CASE003 · The Glass That Never Broke
A $3.8 million painting left a gallery wall during its own preview, and a forgery hung in its place before anyone looked twice. A second-floor window lay in pieces, which is the shape an outside job takes. Five people were close enough that night to have made the swap: a guest artist, an installer, the curator, a photographer and a collector. What the evening left behind is measurable: a file transfer, a route on foot, a badge clock, a photograph, a ladder, an invoice and four time-stamped records.
For review
- E03: the corpus does not say where the badge reader is. correct_log says the corrected scan lands 'into the prep corridor', so the account places the reader on the prep corridor. If the reader is somewhere else and the corridor is an inference from timing, the account's first sentence needs changing.
- E04: the corpus does not say who took the 7:47 photograph, so the account leaves it unattributed. painting_px 900 is treated as the painting's height, since the choices compare it against heights.
- E01: the gigabyte-to-gigabit conversion (x8) appears only in the confidence note, never in raw_facts. The insight states 'a little over nineteen gigabits'; the account and tiles avoid it.
- E05: the account calls the ladder 'the only other way down' from the roof, taken from Bruno's visible_facts ('the exterior ladder is the only descent'). The insight extends that to 'seals the roof', which is what the corpus's clears for S04 rely on.
- E07: the source JSON's version of this thread had only the mic feed as the answer; the corpus has the mic feed and the guest Wi-Fi session. Written to the corpus. The Wi-Fi session is Hazel's per her visible_facts; the corpus raw_facts key guest_wifi_session does not name her.
- Brief: no gallery name or victim exists in the corpus, so the brief says 'a gallery wall'. The '$3.8 million' figure is from the premise.
Closing, as authored
Natalia Petrov had admin access to the print room and the fastest uplink on the guest list, 240 Mbps against the 200 the forgery file demanded. Her badge scan, once the clock's ninety seconds of drift come off it, puts her in the prep corridor at 7:48:30, inside the window the 7:47 photograph opened while the original still hung. Gabriela's 40 Mbps device could not have carried the file, and her stage mic ran unbroken across the swap. Hazel's 25 Mbps guest Wi-Fi could not carry it either, and her session ran unbroken from 7:44 to 7:55. Tomas was at the loading dock at 7:49 and would have had to hold 20.8 miles an hour on foot, after 85 seconds of doors and elevator, to reach the wall by 7:52. Bruno was on the roof with the stair locked from 7:40, and the 14-foot ladder beneath the window tops out at 12.6 feet against an 18-foot sill, more than five feet short. Nobody came through that glass; it was broken to point at a thief who never existed, and the framer's invoice was simply an invoice. One story fits every clue, and it is hers.
CASE004 · The Vanishing of Scout
Scout, a nationally known therapy dog, vanished from a children's-hospital fundraiser minutes before he was due on stage. His activity collar kept transmitting after he was gone, and it recorded a mile of service road without a single stride. Five people working the event had a vehicle on site and a story about where they were. What they left behind is measurable: a collar track, a crate, a platform reading, a scanner clock, a camera's metadata.
For review
- event_window is inferred. The entry carries none; 'Movement window: 7:10–7:18 p.m.' is taken from E07's badge interval (7:10 to 7:18), which brackets the collar's 4 min 40 s run, E05's burst from 7:14:20 and E04's corrected scan at 7:15:30. E04's correct_log and clears rest on a 'key movement window' the entry never states; the author should set event_window explicitly so the E04 clear has a stated interval to land in.
- E08: the given 'bumper adds 2 inches on each side' shares its number with the answer '2 inches', and no wrong choice or the prompt carries 2. The account and the tile spell it 'two inches' to pass the answer-only rule. This is a dodge, not a fix. Either put the bumper figure in the prompt ('the 2-inch bumper') or change the bumper width so the given and the clearance differ.
- E02: the five cargo-opening models (w = 35.7 − 0.25h and the rest) live only in raw_facts. The game draws tiles instead of the fact table, so a player sees 'On file · 5 cargo-opening models' with nowhere to read them; the roster's 'Cargo opening in' values (25, 30, 20, 46, 32) do not come from the models at any single height (Ryan's line never reaches 46). The models need a home the player can see: a figure keyed on question.mode, or the roster carrying the model rather than a single width.
- E01: the 0.6 mph tolerance sits in the account rather than a tile (the distance, the elapsed time and the zero stride count took the three slots). The player can answer from the account, but if the fact table is hidden it is the only place the tolerance appears.
- Source narrative with no home: the HTML's 'Find Scout. Identify who moved him.' ask line and the resolution's 'Scout recovered' heading. The closing assumes recovery without saying so; if the resolution view has a heading slot, 'Scout recovered' belongs there.
Closing, as authored
Ryan Cole drove the cargo van the service road clocked at 14.2 mph, inside the collar's tolerance; his van's opening still measures 32 inches at the crate's height; and at 126 lb he put the platform load squarely inside its recorded range. He was the logistics lead, with the loading dock as his post and a dolly to hand. Mara's hatchback made 8.6 mph, far short of the collar's pace. Tess's sedan made 6.1, her opening closes to 23 inches, and her weight leaves the platform under its floor. Jon's SUV narrows to 26.3 inches at 30, too tight for an upright crate, and the corrected scanner clock puts him at the vet station at 7:15:30. Amir, at 181 lb, would have sent the platform past 266. One story fits every clue, and it is his.
CASE005 · The Last Toast
Board chair Julian Hart collapsed at a children's-hospital foundation gala minutes after the ceremonial toast, and the lab found the compound C-17 in his glass and not in the shared carafe it was poured from. Five people had motive, access, or both: the sommelier who ran the toast service, the business partner at the sponsor table, the coordinator running the program, the catering captain in the corridor, and the board member among the donors. What the evening left behind is measurable: a carafe and five glasses, an onset curve, a corridor and a blind spot, two computers running fast, a camera that saw a lanyard and no face.
For review
- event_window is inferred. The entry has none. The medical timeline's 8:10–8:16 p.m. ingestion interval is E02's own finding, so drawing it as a chip before E02 would hand the player that thread's arithmetic; the window used instead runs from the first documented contact with Julian's drink area (8:07, E02 raw fact 04) to first symptoms (8:24). Swap to 'Ingestion window: 8:10–8:16 p.m.' if giving E02 away is acceptable.
- Emilia's contact time disagrees between surfaces: E02 raw_facts say 8:07, her visible_facts say 8:08 ('Adjusted the garnish on Julian's glass at 8:08'). Both fall outside 8:10–8:16, so the elimination holds either way; the narrative follows E02 (8:07) because the closing and the insight are written to that thread's numbers.
- E09+E10 clearing Gavin rests on an unstated premise. His documented glass contact is at 8:11, inside the ingestion interval, and the podium interval 8:13:15–8:14:00 does not overlap it; nothing in the entry says the glass was dosed during the 70-second blind spot or that the blind spot fell inside the podium interval. The E10 insight and the closing state the linked finding as the entry states it (at the podium, away from the table) and go no further.
- E01's answer-only number is 7.2 (36 is in the prompt, so it is shared). Julian's glass amount therefore cannot appear on E01's tiles or in its account, even though raw fact 03 states it; the tile carries the 36-unit hypothetical instead and the account says 'carried the compound'. E04's tile does show 7.2 units, one thread earlier in player order.
- E05's answer-only number is 9, so the seating diagram's '9 inches from the left edge' (raw fact 03) cannot be shown before the answer; the account says the diagram records where his setting was meant to be and the insight gives the figure.
- E06: $16,064 cannot appear pre-answer ('064' is answer-only), so the invoice total is absent from the tiles; the player meets it in the choices. E08: '00' is answer-only (from 8:17:00), so its account avoids '8:00'.
- Per-suspect values for E02 (contact times) and E03 (one-way distances) are listed in the accounts because the roster does not carry them and claim_choice draws no figure; if the framework adds a figure for those modes the lists can come out of the accounts.
- Source narrative with no home in the seven fields: the README's 'Alternate route' framing and the content note that the E09+E10 route is a recovery costing about 195 points below the clean line. The E10 insight says only that the pair costs more than the corridor would have; the point figure belongs to the reveal, not this layer.
Closing, as authored
Celia Monroe is on every list that matters. She is one of three people documented with a hand on Julian's glass after the pour; her contact at 8:14 falls inside the 8:10–8:16 ingestion interval the onset curve fixes; and at 125 feet from his table, the corridor model gives her 68 seconds, inside the 70-second blind spot. Julian had ordered an audit of the invoices she approved. Emilia touched the glass at 8:07, three minutes before the compound could have gone in, and the corridor would have let her through for nothing. Gavin moved the glass at 8:11, inside the interval, but stood 180 feet away and needed 90 seconds of a 70-second dark, and the podium camera and the corrected cue sheet together put him at the badge-locked sponsor podium from 8:13:15 to 8:14:00. Arthur's contact at 8:16 fits the curve and his 58 seconds fit the corridor, but he handled the tray before the pour and never touched the glass afterwards. Farah never touched it at all, came near at 8:19 after the interval had closed, and was 102 seconds from the table. The invoice added up, the melted ice matched the lab, the balcony photo put the glass at Julian's place, the elevator counter named a badge and not a rider, and the ballroom clock set Farah's slide at 8:17. One story fits every clue, and it is hers.
CASE006 · Dead Circuit
Minutes into the championship run of a national robotics competition, Team Axiom's autonomous rover pulled hard left and went into a safety barrier. Nobody was hurt. Inspection found two things that do not happen on their own: an abnormal controller reset and a drive gear that did not match the build. Five people had some combination of access, motive and technical knowledge, and what the arena kept is measurable: a charge curve, a cabinet log, a gear ratio, a frame count, a vest code.
For review
- event_window was inferred, not copied: the entry has none. 6:40 is the start of the abnormal drain (E01), 6:46 the reset, and 6:48:20 the corrected cabinet session (E02), so the chip reads 6:40–6:49 p.m. The end time is a derived value from E02; it does not answer E02 (which is about who could reach the cabinet), but the author may prefer 6:40–6:50 p.m., the end of the last access window, to keep the chip on givens only.
- The game draws tiles instead of the raw fact table, and the suspect board carries gear sets and known positions but not access windows or cabinet distances. The E01, E02 and E03 accounts therefore carry the five-suspect lists verbatim so the player can answer; the accounts run to three long sentences as a result.
- E06: under the strict number rule 272 is answer-only (only choice A carries $1,272), so no tile or account may print the invoice total. The player meets the total only in choice A. Adding the total to the prompt would make it a shared number and let a tile carry it.
- 'practice' is on the UI-banned list, so the E05 and E09 headlines and accounts say 'the field'. The corpus titles 'Practice-Field Video' and 'Practice Video' and the raw facts still say practice; if the admission test is ever run over titles they will trip it.
- E07: raw_facts say three authorised mentors were connected to the mentor network but never say Marisol was one of them. The account states only her role. If the stronger fact is intended, add it to raw_facts so the closing can say it plainly.
- E04: 4.8 metres appears only in the prompt, not in raw_facts. The 'Error reached' tile carries it on the strength of the prompt.
- E09 and E10 insights each say the thread rules out nobody alone and names the other as the missing half. The content_notes point that the pair is a four-open recovery route that cannot earn Prime Instinct is a scoring fact with no narrative field to hold it.
Closing, as authored
Marisol Serrano had unobserved pit access from 6:43 to 6:49, which covers the 6:46 reset the telemetry gives. She was 250 feet from the control cabinet at 6:47 and needed 62 seconds to reach it and open it, well inside the 80 the corrected clock allows. The gear set in her kit, 18:72, is the 1:4 ratio that put the rover at 11.25 metres a second. She had been quietly removed from Axiom's paid consulting contract, and twelve of the eighteen packets sent to the controller came down the shared mentor network, a route open to a competition software mentor. Simone was in the pit when the controller reset but stood 420 feet from the cabinet, 96 seconds away with 80 to spend. Quentin was under observation from 6:43, three minutes before the reset. Darius carried a 20:60 gear set, a 1:3 ratio, and his locked vest M-7 stood beside the practice-field controls at 6:46:10 while the pit controller was resetting. Keira was under observation from 6:42, could not reach the cabinet in time, and carried a 16:56 set. The invoice adds up, the backup battery is 13% below its rating, and the drift model gives eight seconds to the barrier; none of that names anyone. One story fits every clue, and it is hers.
CASE007 · The 11:47 Message
At 11:47 p.m. an anonymous message reached biotech founder Corinne Walsh: authorize a $240,000 payment before midnight, or the confidential merger documents go public. The archive attached to it holds a board appendix that only a small group could reach, and five of that group were still in the building. What the message left behind is measurable: a timestamp from a workstation that keeps bad time, an upload interval, a route through the records room, a frame of hallway video, a badge registry. Each one narrows the field before anyone is named.
For review
- event_window inferred: the entry carries null. Drawn from E03's raw facts, appendix access at 11:43:00 and the draft at 11:47:00, as 'Drafting window: 11:43–11:47 p.m.'.
- E06: the given 'Remaining balance shown: $200,000' cannot appear in the account or a tile, because only the correct choice ('Yes — $200,000 is correct') carries 200 and no wrong choice or the prompt does. The tile reads 'Find · Whether the balance line holds' and the player meets the figure only in choice A. Putting the figure in the prompt ('Is the $200,000 remaining balance mathematically consistent?') or rewording choice A to 'Yes — the balance is consistent' would let the tile show the sheet's own line.
- E10: the Registry tile carries the whole registry, C-12 · Vivian included, because the registry is the thread's given and the game hides raw_facts when tiles are present. The checker accepts it (the correct choice's text is not a substring). The ask's trap is choice C's overreach, so the assignment itself is not the finding, but the author should confirm that reading.
- E09 and E10 insights say the message was not drafted in Conference Room E. The entry implies this through linked_clears (badge in Conference Room E clears Vivian from the workstation) but never states where the drafting workstation is. A raw fact or visible_fact pinning its location would make the pair's logic explicit.
- Nolan's claimed location is 'a conference room' and E09 is about Conference Room E; the entry draws no link and none was drawn here.
- content_notes ask the reveal to describe E09+E10 as a recovery route that costs a fourth open. The closing names the pair as a second way to place Vivian, but the cost of taking it has no home in the seven fields.
Closing, as authored
Emmett Rios had the drafting workstation to himself from 11:45 to 11:49, which covers the corrected draft time of 11:47; his desk is rated at 205 Mbps, above the 200 the 72-second upload required; and his 980-foot path through the records room fits inside the 240 seconds between the appendix opening and the draft. The merger would have handed his division, and most of his authority, to the acquiring company. Nolan's unobserved window closed at 11:43, four minutes before the message was written. Audrey's workstation could push 95 Mbps, less than half what the upload needed. Vivian's route ran 1,110 feet, 247 seconds against a limit of 240, and the camera and the registry, read together, put her badge C-12 through the door of Conference Room E at 11:47:05. Laurel's window opened at 11:50, her desk topped out at 160 Mbps, and her route was the longest of the five. One story fits every clue, and it is his.
CASE008 · Four Seconds of Headlights
At 9:18 p.m. a car struck cyclist Beatrice Lindholm at a rain-darkened intersection and drove on. She survived, but the driver was gone before anyone could describe the vehicle, and a convenience-store camera kept only four seconds of headlights and silhouette. Five drivers were on the road nearby that night, and each had a grievance with Beatrice on file. What the scene left behind is measurable but never exact: a lane marking in a video frame, a braking trace on wet asphalt, a set of routes and speed logs, each a modeled range rather than a match.
For review
- event_window inferred: the entry has null. The collision is a single moment (9:18 p.m.), so the chip reads "Collision: 9:18 p.m., in rain" rather than a span. The garage clip starts 9:16:00 and the controller window is 9:15–9:20 if a span is preferred.
- E06 Body-Shop Estimate: the total $2,124 cannot sit in a tile. The checker tokenises the wrong choice "$2,124.50" as 124.50, leaving 124 answer-only, so the total reaches the player only through choice A. The game validator counts raw_facts as shared and would allow it; if the tile is wanted, either relax the checker or reword choice C.
- E08 Rain Gauge: the gauge's end reading (0.30 inch) is numerically the answer (0.30 in/hr), so the tile and account carry the 0.12-inch rise instead of the end reading. The raw fact table itself telegraphs the answer; consider changing the readings.
- E03 Route Reconstruction: the five distances and available times exist only in raw_facts 04. The roster's visible_facts carry vehicle length and speed log (used by E01 and E02) but not these, and the game draws tiles instead of the fact table, so the account carries all ten values in prose. Adding them to visible_facts or a figure would be cleaner.
- E10 Parking Permit Registry: 18 is answer-only ("by 9:18" appears only in the correct choice), so the collision time is absent from E10's account and tiles; it is in the brief and the event window.
- E09 and E10 insights are written per content_notes: neither alone rules out Oscar, and E10's insight says the garage route costs two threads where the routes cost one, without mentioning points.
- Suspect vehicle and height_in are null for all five; lengths and speeds ride in visible_facts as "Vehicle length ft: 14.6", which reads as raw on the board.
- Chip "Two routes to one driver" surfaces what the mockup's intro card states ("the dossier contains another valid route"). Drop it if that is considered a hint.
Closing, as authored
Chandra Iyer's car is 14.9 feet long, inside the half-foot the convenience-store frame allows around 15.0. Her speed log of 45 mph puts her braking distance at about 70.9 feet, inside the 67 to 76 the trace on the wet road records. Her 2.7-mile route models at 6.0 minutes against the 7.0 she had before 9:18. She is the only one of the five who passes all three. Martina Fabbri's 16.2-foot vehicle and Felipe Sandoval's 17.1-foot vehicle are too long for the silhouette, and Felipe's 52 mph would have left nearly 95 feet of braking where the road shows 67 to 76. Rashid Okonkwo's 39 mph gives about 53 feet, well short of the trace. Oscar Halvorsen fits the frame and the trace, but his 4.8 miles model at 9.5 minutes against the 7.0 he had, and the campus garage camera puts his permit H-27 at the interior gate at 9:17:30, 2.1 miles from a collision thirty seconds later. Beatrice had documented the safety violations at one of Chandra's buildings, and Chandra was driving between two of them that night. The dimmed streetlight, the rain, the mirror fragment, the signal counter and the body-shop estimate describe the scene; none of them names the driver. One story fits every clue, and it is hers.