You hold a City Key ποΈ β a small file, not an account β that records your standing in the City of Mages. These four rooms let you walk it, prove it, turn it into a portrait that carries itself, and gather many under one night. No server holds your identity at any step; everything below happens in your browser, checkably.
Every meaningful thing you do in the City β a workshop entered, a ceremony walked, attention genuinely staked β lands somewhere specific: one of 64 states, each a six-bit address across the six sovereignty dimensions (π‘οΈ Protection Β· π€ Delegation Β· π Memory Β· π Connection Β· β‘ Computation Β· π Value). Your key is the compressed record of where you've stood and what you've done there: a palette you chose, vertices you've lit, descriptions you've earned, focus you've poured, laps you've walked. A whole standing, a few kilobytes, yours as a file.
In the Swordsman's register each state is a blade, and the tiers cut the strata: Null (stratum 0 β total exposure, one state) Β· Light (1β2) Β· Heavy (3β4) Β· Dragon (5β6 β full sovereignty, the mathematical closure). The ceremony's trust tiers (blade β light β heavy β dragon) climb the same strata; vertex 63, all six dimensions held, is the full blade.
The loop is the point: the key is a claim when minted and a record after walking. Time spent in the geometry becomes proof nobody attested to β it's just arithmetic about where you stood.
Both ends now speak ΞΊ: /city stamps the ΞΊ at mint and re-derives it at charge β a reading, never a gate; a mismatch is reported, not punished. And when only the proof should travel, /lattice exports a β‘ charge pass β trace, witness and ΞΊ, nothing else. Inscriptions, palette, focus amounts and identity stay home; /city charges it exactly as it would the full key.
Before a key is minted, the standing inside it is built β and the Game of 42 is how a group builds one together. It is the ceremony that fills the lattice with real work, so what the key later carries is earned, not declared.
Two spaces, one board. A governance position answers two questions: which axis do you serve, and which faculties do you bring. The six axes are the six sovereignty dimensions you already met β π‘οΈ Protection Β· π€ Delegation Β· π Memory Β· π Connection Β· β‘ Computation Β· π Value. The faculties are three β head, heart, hands β and their seven non-empty combinations are the seven stations of a heptad. Six axes Γ seven stations = 42.
The heptad of seven. Each axis is one heptad β seven seats, each read from the faculty it holds:
The three head-holding seats. Hitchhiker advisors who turn a vision into the buildable questions β they read as paths before they are positions, so they arrive first.
The three making seats β lead, caring, and steward builders. They do the work the advisors framed; a heptad cannot seal on vision alone.
The one centre seat holding all three faculties β the keystone. Only the part that holds all three can hold the whole, so the guide alone can carry a child game.
The keystone seals last. The guide cannot even begin until the other six seats are verified β βnothing seals until the keystone, and the keystone cannot be laid until the rest is true.β
Multiplicative collapse. There is no partial seal. If any single axis is short even one seat, the whole board stays open β the any-axis-zero-zeros-the-whole rule, made into a gate. A standing is whole, or it is not yet a standing.
The seal becomes a key. When the board folds, one SHA-256 over all 42 edge-labels plus the geometry becomes the group seal β and that seal drops straight in here as a City Key: its six axes light on /star, its proven seats show on /lattice, /sigil re-derives its ΞΊ (verified), and /city charges it for πͺ’ mana. A forged game is carryable proof.
Many games, one sky. Because every sealed game is just a key bearing a seal and a six-axis bitmask, any number of them can rise together on /skye β each placed by its ΞΊ, gold threads for lineage (one game forged from another), teal threads for the ground two games share, computed blind so the overlap shows and nothing else.
The 3D boundary: the star-tetrahedron core inside the 64-vertex lattice. Import your key, set your stance on the console (the manifold's shape β it travels in the key), play the succ cycle, walk your lit vertices, save the trace. F for the cinematic orbit Β· S snaps a portrait that carries your key.
walk β π§The flat codex: all 64 states, each openable β its stratum, its six bits, its reflections. Focus you poured at /city glows gold here; walking the cycle discharges it, vertex by vertex, until the witness is minted: focus claimed, then made real by presence.
prove β πͺ¬The bytes: watch the key's name β its ΞΊ β be recomputed from its exact content and checked against what it claims. Then see the name drawn: 64 hash glyphs on 64 vertices, your constellation. Compare two keys: shared ground in teal, divergence pulsing.
derive β πThe night of many keys: add any number β yours, friends', your own key's ancestors, and sealed Games of 42 β and each rises as a star placed by its ΞΊ. Gold threads are lineage (the prior chain); teal threads are common ground β drawn locally, or computed blind with a friend via a two-file π€ exchange that reveals the overlap and nothing else. πΈ snaps the whole night as one image carrying every risen key.
Hash the key's exact bytes and you get its ΞΊ-label: kappa = "sha256:" + H(canonical form). This is a fingerprint, not a transformation β your key's content is untouched; the ΞΊ is one extra line, derived from the content. Delete it and the key still works. Recompute it and you get the same answer back if β and only if β nothing changed. Every import, on every page, re-derives it and shows ΞΊ verified or β ΞΊ mismatch. The rule underneath: identity is content, not location β a key is what it says, wherever it travels, and nobody has to take its word for it.
Your palette β the four gems you picked. Expression. Two bearers can share it; you can change yours tomorrow. The voice.
The manifold parameters ride in your key: six petals, one per dimension β your stance β engraved vertex by vertex with the work you actually did (focus, lit, witness, inscription). And once the City measures your figures, the shape stops being chosen: it's read. The posture.
Which vertices glow comes from the ΞΊ. You cannot choose it or fake it; it moves only when your content moves β and then it moves everywhere (~60 of 64 glyphs on one edit). The fact.
A forged sigil doesn't fail quietly in a log somewhere. It looks wrong β in your own colours, on your own shape.
Export the sigil (or snap /star with your key loaded) and the entire key rides inside the image β in a standard, labelled PNG metadata chunk, with the ΞΊ caption visible in the pixels. Every image viewer shows the constellation; every room here (and /city's charge) reads the chunk and gets your key back byte-for-byte. Zoom in, crop, snap mid-orbit β any framing is the full record, because what you framed and what you carry are different layers of the same file.
The architecture is two agents and a gap. The βοΈ Swordsman was forged and then forgot β his private key burned at the ceremony, by design: he guards the boundary precisely because he can't be made to reveal what he was never told. The π§ Mage remembers β the graph, the deeds, the library; at spellweb the key itself now equips her graph, and her export rides back out as the same ΞΊ-stamped file, round-tripping to every room here. The key carries what he may not hold and what she must not lose; importing it anywhere re-equips both, separately. And the First Person π β you β are never in the file. What travels is everything around the gap. The gap survives every round trip because it was never encoded.