The pitch hierarchy

# The pitch hierarchy

0. **Company:** Meridians is a creative studio working the art and science of **fate**. The tagline is
   *"Explore the fate. Live the one you chose."*; the premise beneath it is *because everything is
   recorded, everything can be replayed.*
1. **Hook:** explore the fate of a world, then live the one you chose — the causal exploration of fate,
   delivered as explorable visual novels with many routes and many endings.
2. **Audience:** the roleplay-minded reader who would rather decide inside a story than watch one resolve.
   The pitch is an alternative to reading, not a better reading experience.
3. **Category:** the competitor is the book. Replayability, immersion, and POV richness are properties a
   printed path cannot have.
4. **Will is injected from outside:** the world computes consequence and interpretations; it never quietly
   chooses either the governing lens or the commitment. A reader at a fork, a group at the card table, a
   Director, or an agent through MCP selects and moves, and the record keeps who did so and from what
   vantage — which is why a branch is a parallel world with an author rather than a model's continuation.
5. **Search, not authorship:** branches are found by Readings that cut a fan of futures from an as-of
   vantage and price them by prior — cheap exploration, selective production, and rarity that means
   something because it was improbable and taken anyway.
6. **Three mediums:** you decide in a Scenario, read an Experience, and wander a World at a chosen moment
   in its history. Peers, not a ladder — and only an Experience is free to consume.
7. **Production property:** a prepared world does not generate while you read it. Text and images are
   produced once; reading serves finished assets, so cost per reader is hosting rather than inference.
8. **Recall:** preserve a Domain's source, structure, provenance, and history while bringing forward only
   the signal that materially changes the live read.
9. **Utility:** Research gathers current sources; the maintained Domain turns them into inspectable
   actors, systems, evidence, relationships, commitments, and open questions.
10. **Actors:** evidence is not a fixed character essence. Production → Actors turns entity evidence and
    Frame or Control dynamics into explicit, time-specific State and Dynamics interpretations, so one
    continuing entity can be performed through several defensible readings without rewriting its record.
11. **Play:** Scenario is the decision substrate—visible as light asynchronous card-led play, or wrapped by a slow,
   immersive live Episode. An accepted Scenario scene can also be rendered as an Episode.
12. **Social depth:** trusted friends can take different seats, receive different public/private context,
   and return at a humane cadence without treating Meridians as a high-attention MMO.
13. **Mechanism:** a graph-world of programmable System, situated World, and open Fate.
14. **Depth:** topology governs context and information flow, so different seats genuinely inhabit
   different realities.
15. **Experimental sandbox:** a mature branch may be rendered as a World — tourable at a chosen moment,
   possibly livable later; replay, economies, and MMO-scale possibilities remain open experiments rather
   than the product lead.
16. **Boundary:** direction is labelled as direction; a fictional or parallel world is not a claim of
   authority over the reality that inspired it.

## Delivery truth

**What ships now:** Domain extraction, the three stored forces (World/System/Fate), Theme analysis, the
deterministic Thread closure projection (Causality's trace), Production → Actors and its
State/Dynamics Entity Interpretation storage and selection, acting-aware entity chat, Scenario, and
Perspectives context, inspectable canon and causal structures,
Threads, Streams, Reasoning Graphs, branches, readings and priced futures, scenes, the Program, Positions,
the Script scaffold, image generation, Scenario primitives, the canonical record, Stories, Studio, Hosted,
MCP, and custom configurations of that working substrate.

**What is specified and not built:** the dedicated visual-novel reader (transport, saves, backlog,
auto/skip, flowchart), budget-bounded exploration across a fan of branches, and asset production —
sprites, expression sets, location plates, and event CGs — for branches that earn promotion. These are
written up in [the visual-novel specs](../../../specs/visual-novel/README.md). The World medium's map
traversal, moment cursor, and situated roleplay are written up in the
[World concept contract](../../../specs/world/README.md) and are earlier still — a working concept rather
than an implementation contract. Public copy may describe the direction; it may not imply a reader exists.

**Grain of the analysis.** Everything the instrument reads today is **macro delta analysis**: each force is
measured as what a scene changed relative to the scenes before it — slots landed, questions moved, Flags
set — and the grade, shape, scale, density, and pacing reads are functions of those deltas. This is the
big picture, and it is where Meridians is strong: where an arc builds, stalls, or turns, and what depends
on what. It does not read *inside* a scene. The stated direction is **micro sonic analysis of prose**: a
scene of roughly five hundred words treated as a composition heard in the reader's head, with metre,
cadence, motif, dissonance, and resolution measured through a western music ontology, so the same
decomposition used across scenes can guide elegance within one. Authors are textual musicians. This is
direction only — no ontology, measure, or surface exists — and public copy may describe it as direction,
never as capability. Micro is in service of macro: its purpose is engagement and conveying the big
picture into a reader's attention, so its north star is the push and pull of attention across a scene,
with the music ontology as one candidate instrument. Public copy may say both halves of the ledger
plainly — *the board is mastered, the screen is not* — and may call the whole **a chess engine for
narrative fates** as the intuitive name for the causal simulator, provided the chess difference is kept
honest: the board here is open, multi-agent, and partially observed, and the engine never chooses.

**Rights boundary.** Adapting an existing canon requires rights we hold or are granted. Public copy names
public-domain works, or the general formulation "a canon you own or have the rights to" — never a licensed
franchise as an available world.

**What is being built and proved as the primary next form:** catch-up Episodes through Stageplay:
reusable sprites, environments, sound, dialogue, deterministic direction, strategic puzzles, and
infographics that turn accepted Domain/branch state into an immersive passage.

### Stageplay promotion gate

This remains an experimental production program, not a near-term capability label. It graduates only when
SFX Studio repeatedly sustains engaging long-form online animation and storytelling across productions.
Short proofs and technical receipts establish components; they do not establish audience competitiveness.
Iteration should hill-climb the current audience bottleneck while leaving a reusable performance, motion,
location, sound, editing, or direction capability behind.

**What is being prototyped alongside it:** live Episodes at branch tips—wrapped Scenario resolution,
seat-shaped public/private perspective delivery, critical order/plan hand-offs, governed branch actions,
advance-preparation validation, and staged continuation. Textual harnesses can exercise these first.

**What follows separately:** Worlds deployed from sufficiently mature branch coordinates. They inherit the
story's ontology and production assets, may begin as tours, and may later host persistent activity or
economies without silently advancing the source branch. Replayability remains open.

**The grove and the VNMMO.** Once a Domain has branches it is one causal tree developed by MWS
([The grove](../../foundations/GROVE.md)): futures that hold consequence and earn return thicken, the rest
thin and are kept as history. The far form that tree grows toward is the **VNMMO** — a visual-novel world
that persists between visits, where a small community's commitments are causally binding on one shared
history. It is the populated World in its social form, and the reason the space-travel framing matters:
a long passage is the clearest case for a kept world that people return to. A grove view for tending
many timelines (prune · graft · train · keep, each an attributable act of Will) is directional and
unbuilt. Public copy may name the VNMMO as direction; it may not imply one runs.
The primary roadmap is **Causal MCTS VNs**; VNMMO is a stretch goal on a separate roadmap.

**Economies are part of System, not a bolt-on.** A World's tool ecology, resources, prices, and trade are
rules in force — the same force that holds institutions and cadence. Economies inside Meridians worlds
(what a seat can hold, spend, and exchange, and what that does to consequence) are a declared later
design; nothing about them is specified yet, and no copy should imply real-value exchange.

**What remains a larger horizon:** community-operated story Worlds, agent lobbies, licensed living
universes, MMO-scale participation, public discovery and ranking, and externally valuable economies.
These depend on evidence from satisfying Episodes and coherent branch-derived Worlds. Scores will be published only with
their world, ruleset, perspective, interval, and limits.

The scalable design claim is composition rather than one giant mode: reusable definitions and packages,
small typed capabilities, stable identities, explicit lifecycle, typed events, and clear execution
boundaries can serve many World instances and explanatory instruments. “Everything is staged” means every
surface is an orchestrated perspective over state; it does not mean every interaction is a fixed rail or
that Stageplay owns the world state underneath it.

## The worldview

The category enemy is the disposable answer and the explainer whose lesson vanishes when the panel closes.
Meridians answers with total recall without total attention: the Domain remains recoverable across source,
structure, provenance, and time, while the operator is asked to attend only to material movement.
Meridians lets the same structured world support direct rapid play, immersive seat-shaped consequence, and
later lived presence without confusing any projection with canon.

Acting applies the same discipline inside an entity. The record preserves evidence; it does not claim to
contain the one final person or role. A Director may bind different evidence-grounded interpretations at
different branch moments, and those selections shape performance wherever the entity appears while the
canonical record remains available and unchanged. Continuity therefore means accountable history, not a
single frozen characterization.

This does not require every World to live forever or run continuously. A world may be a short experiment,
a season, or a long-running universe. It may sleep overnight and on weekends. Continuity means that what
happened still matters when the next turn begins.

Reality can seed or inject material into a Domain. Meridians does not thereby claim that a World predicts
the source world. Licensed fictional canon can support a living universe only where the rights and
operating agreement permit it. Real-value stakes require separate legal and integrity design.

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