major opus rewrite

Story/Worldbuilding.md

@@ -112,3 +112,66 @@ Composition tip: **do not try to reconcile the three.** The frame should feel sl
 - **Noname** is **presumed male** for prose pronouns (default-he policy) regardless of in-canon gender being unknown.
 - **Agate** uses **`she/her` exclusively** in all public-facing prose, narration, and writer-meta. Trans MTF in canon; the writer's private pattern-lock reads her as male, but the public film respects her preference. Never `he/him/his` for Agate in any committed file.
 - This rule applies to all `.md` character notes, the `.fountain` script, and any future writing in `Story/`. Verbatim quotes in **Evidence** sections may keep their original pronouns.
+
+---
+
+## 8. The Bubble Arena (BattleRoyale-specific)
+
+The `0BattleRoyale` film stages its survival act inside a single large prop: a **spacetime-warp bubble** seated on the colosseum's sand floor. This section is the production-facing spec for that prop and the mechanics that ride on it. The genre touchstone is Hunger-Games arena structure — closed ecology, gamemaker oversight, a contracting border — rendered in StreamUniverse visual language.
+
+### 8.1 Physical description
+
+- **Shape:** oblong (rugby-ball / American-football silhouette). Long axis horizontal.
+- **Material read:** crystal-ball clear. Imagine a polished quartz egg at industrial scale. No haze, no refraction tint; the interior is visible from outside, though the warp makes it read as much smaller than the inside actually is.
+- **Edge treatment:** a **blue holographic bleed** at the aura-line — roughly fifteen to thirty centimeters of soft blue chromatic-shimmer hugging the surface, brightest where the warp is most active. The bleed is **stronger at the poles** (ends of the long axis) and softer at the equator.
+- **Mount:** a **Catmull-Baroque iron cradle** — low-poly gilded ornament bolted to poured-concrete substrate, per the court's standing Brutae-vs-Catmull-Baroque rule. The cradle reads as ceremonial furniture, not machinery.
+- **Physical dimensions on the stadium floor:** roughly ten meters long, six meters tall. The interior, via warp, reads as **~1km × 0.5km oblong wilderness.** The warp ratio is the whole trick.
+
+### 8.2 Coverage: jumbotron + bug-drones
+
+- **One Catmull-Baroque jumbotron** suspended above the sand floor. Gilded ornament framing a dead-black panel. Off until the contestants enter the bubble, then live for the duration.
+- **Bug-drones** — microscopic brass-baroque mechanical insects with a **blue rim-light at the wing joints**, swarming through the interior for close-up coverage. They live in a brass-latticed hive at one upper corner of the colosseum when idle. During the match they stream into the bubble through the access aperture, disperse, and cover every surviving contestant individually. When a contestant poofs, the drones around that body rise in a small blue cloud and redistribute.
+- Drone swarms also cover **wall events** — wherever the shrinking aura is actively overtaking geography, a lighter drone presence tracks the edge for atmosphere shots.
+
+### 8.3 The threshold / access aperture
+
+- The bubble is entered through a **door-shaped aperture** that opens on command in the wall of the shell. The aperture is not a literal door; it is a vertical seam where the warp thins enough to permit crossing. Visually: a sheet of blue breath, faintly distorting the forest colors on the far side.
+- Crossing the aperture **warp-rescales** the contestant into the interior world. One step out, one step in. No transition VFX on the contestant themselves; the scale shift is shown by cutting from the outside wide (contestant next to a ten-meter bubble) to the inside wide (contestant next to a full-size forest tree).
+- The aperture seals behind the last crosser. During the match it does not re-open. Reconstituted dead contestants emerge from a separate **recovery bay** accessed via a side door on the colosseum wall, not via the bubble.
+
+### 8.4 The shrink mechanic (Fortnite, reskinned)
+
+- **Onset:** approximately **gametime hour 8** (~halfway through the 24-hour cap). No earlier.
+- **Mechanic as seen by audience (stadium-external view):** the **bubble physically scales UP** on its cradle. What was a ten-meter oblong becomes twelve, then fourteen, then more. The iron cradle creaks. Ornament flickers as the warp compresses. The aura-bleed brightens as the warp ratio tightens.
+- **Mechanic as felt by contestants (interior view):** the **world inside appears to shrink.** The aura-wall — previously a faint blue shimmer at the horizon — visibly closes in. Trees, stumps, folly-ruins, anything unlucky enough to be at the aura's leading edge, dissolve upward in a small blue poof as the wall rolls over them. Contestants experience this as walls marching inward.
+- **Pace:** exponential. Barely noticeable at first; accelerates; by the last act the wall is advancing meters per second.
+- **Narrative function:** forces converging geography. Late-act survivors are funneled to whatever shelter is closest to the bubble's shrinking center — typically the cave at the east cliff base in this draft. The shrink is the arena's only gamemaker intervention; Rain triggers it and otherwise does not interfere.
+- **Visually:** the bubble on the stadium floor is always growing; the world inside is always shrinking; both statements are true and describe the same event from opposite sides of the warp.
+
+### 8.5 Death VFX: the mist-poof rule
+
+- When a contestant is killed inside the bubble, the body **dissolves into a soft poof of blue-holographic mist** — the same color as the aura-bleed — which **disperses upward** into the aura and is carried (by narrative convention) to the recovery bay for reconstitution.
+- The mist **briefly holds the silhouette of the contestant** — for roughly one second after the dissolve begins — before the column lifts. Each character gets a stylized silhouette-hold appropriate to their render language: Agate's wings at full extension, Starboy's galaxy-eye wink, Jenni's clean anime-linework, Adrian's portrait-realistic profile, Beanie's beanie hat holding one extra beat at the top of the column, Azure's JoJo-ink pose flourish, Ubear's ragged bulk, Noname's face unchanged.
+- **The rule that matters:** **mist-poof = confirmed dead. Absence of mist-poof on defeat = still alive.** Rain states this rule aloud in his ascent monologue so the audience registers it on-record.
+- **The rule is withheld exactly once in the film:** when Ubear throws Rooster off the northern cliff. No mist rises. No drones stream down to cover the elimination. This is the twist seed. Every other death in the film must show a clean, unambiguous mist-poof so the audience has a reliable baseline against which Rooster's missing poof reads as a clue.
+
+### 8.6 The recovery bay
+
+- Concrete gallery backstage. **Catmull-Baroque ornament bolted to structural slabs** at shoulder height and up; upper reaches still raw Brutae per standing aesthetic rule.
+- **Eight restoration niches** along one wall — stone alcoves framed in low-poly gilded arches, each with a soft blue pulse at its base. Contestants reconstitute standing up in their niche, wearing exactly what they wore at the moment of death, unharmed.
+- A large mirror-bright panel on the far wall streams the jumbotron feed throughout the match so the dead can watch the rest of the round. Rain can cross-cut to this panel for the verdict.
+- Seating / lounging furniture is minimal — the bay is a restoration facility, not a hospitality area. The dead are rattled, whole, and waiting, not comfortable.
+
+### 8.7 The time cap
+
+- **Twenty-four gametime hours**, or until the field is one contestant — whichever arrives first.
+- The shrink is calibrated to force the finale before the clock runs out; the cap is a stated rule that does not, in this film, actually fire.
+- If the bubble closes on more than one contestant simultaneously, no one wins, and Rain is obliged to run the match again — played as a threat in the ascent monologue, not a real narrative possibility.
+
+### 8.8 Writing-time rules for the bubble
+
+- **Every confirmed death shows a mist-poof.** Do not elide it. The rule is load-bearing.
+- **The hood on Rooster never comes down**, inside the bubble or out of it, at any point in the film. See `Story/NotoriousRooster.md` Identity.
+- **The bubble does not speak.** It is not sentient, not a character. It is a device. Heart and Mind visiting the interior is a separate mythic event, not a function of the bubble.
+- **Rain does not enter the bubble.** Ever. He observes from the throne; the jumbotron feed is his window in.
+- **The Gumball Rule still applies inside the bubble.** Each contestant renders in their native style against the wilderness; the forest itself is painterly (matching Rain's and Agate's native idiom by coincidence, not design). Do not homogenize.

TODO.md

@@ -6,6 +6,6 @@
 
 - [ ] rewrites
   - [X] tweak adrian's character - he's too bored
-  - [ ] major rewrite - the battle royale should be, yknow, a battle royale, not a 3-task contest.
+  - [X] major rewrite - the battle royale should be, yknow, a battle royale, not a 3-task contest.
   - [X] never use 'they' in the singular, always he or she. default to 'he' or oscillate between he and she for the androgynous characters like rooster.
   - [ ] need more detail on beanie's aesthetic