The job is smaller than it looks. Every formation already carries its fault in plain language, written and checked:
Sammie (L) is in the front row — she is never front row, in any rotation or phase.
That is the teaching content, and it is done. What is missing is the wrapper — the way a teammate would actually say it. So you are not writing eighteen bespoke messages. You are writing a small kit of reusable lines that compose with facts I already have.
The handoff said to pull real texts from the team group chat. I now think there is a better answer, and it is worth a minute before you start collecting.
BestHave Stella write them. She is thirteen, she is a native speaker of exactly this register, and she is the only person whose voice has to be right. It sidesteps the awkwardness of harvesting other girls' messages entirely — and it makes her a co-author of the thing she is meant to open on her own, which is worth more than any line she writes.
GoodStella plus a friend, out loud. Read her a formation, ask what she'd text about it, write down what she says. Two of them together will produce better material than either alone, and you get the back-and-forth rhythm a thread needs.
LastHarvest the group chat. Works, but you would be lifting other people's kids' messages into a file. If you do go this route, take patterns — how questions get asked, what punctuation habits look like — rather than pasting conversations.
The one thing not to do is write these yourself imagining how a thirteen-year-old talks. Your own handoff names it: "Guessing teen voice from outside is a known failure mode here — don't invent phrasing wholesale; source it." That is still right. Everything below is designed so you are transcribing rather than composing.
A chat implies somebody on the other end. Six rotating senders reads as noise; one reads as thin. Two is the recommendation — one who asks and one who confirms, so the thread has a back-and-forth instead of a monologue.
Natural pick: Avery, who plays the other outside slot and is the one whose spot interacts with Stella's most — plus one more. But this is a call about real friendships and it is yours, not mine.
| Slot | Who | What she sounds like — two or three words |
|---|---|---|
| Sender A · asks | ||
| Sender B · confirms |
The message that arrives with a formation, before Stella answers. It has to work for any formation, right or wrong, so it can never hint at the answer.
These are drawn at random and reused across all eighteen formations, which is why a dozen covers it. The only hard rule: an opener must never lean. "wait this looks wrong" gives the game away before she has looked.
The immediate reaction. Short. No teaching — the fact comes next, separately.
Same job, other direction. This is the bucket that most needs to be sourced rather than invented, because the difference between "gently ribbed by a friend" and "corrected by an app" lives entirely in these eight lines.
Nothing here should sting. She is thirteen and the whole app exists because being wrong in front of people is the thing she is trying to avoid.
The wrapper that carries an authored fact. I substitute the fact in; you write the frame around it.
Six frames × eighteen formations is why this bucket is small. The fact changes; the frame recycles.
For the twelve formations that are correct. "Yes, that is ours" in her friends' words.
The placeholders above are deliberately blank rather than filled with my guess at teen phrasing. If I wrote examples you would anchor to them, and my version of a thirteen-year-old's text message is exactly the failure mode this brief exists to avoid.
Print this, or just number lines in a note. Bucket number then the line — I do not need anything else.
| # | Bucket | Line | Who says it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | |||
| 2 | |||
| 3 | |||
| 4 | |||
| 5 | |||
| 6 | |||
| 7 | |||
| 8 | |||
| 9 | |||
| 10 | |||
| … |
class: flavor entries in the guide — the same class Drive Corps
uses for its transmissions, so they export as content and stay editable without touching code.One thing I need you to decide, not source. Does the thread know it is a game? A teammate who texts formations at ten at night is a slightly odd friend. The alternatives are that the thread is explicitly a study group they set up, or that nobody acknowledges it and the fiction just holds. Both work — they need different openers, which is why it matters before you write them.