Bubbling Toddler — v0.2

Current draft

She is four and the smallest kid on the block. The cloud is her silhouette: a slowly expanding volume of soap-bubble iridescence, holding no color, three or four times her own width and always centered on wherever she has wandered. Inside it she is a powder-blue terry sun-romper, opaque and loose, a matching sun hat with a chin strap, and a plastic bubble wand held over her head at arm's length. She is somebody's little sister. Whose remains deliberately unresolved rather than invented to look complete.

There is a butterfly, and she is following it; teams have never come up. The smokescreen she lays across the Wagon Bomb's approach and the Wizard's remote is entirely accidental. Nothing on the block will soak her, and she has never noticed that either.

What changed

• Grew a casting-sheet seed into a kid: four years old, White, female, size XS, no myth analog.
• Changed her equipment from the v0.1 bubble-mower push toy to the casting sheet's plastic bubble wand.
• Made the cloud her silhouette rather than a trailing wall, centered on her wherever she wanders.
• Assigned the signature palette: soap-bubble iridescence with no hue, over an opaque powder-blue terry sun-romper.
• Established the street's protection of her as a rule the kids invented, never supervision and never jeopardy.
• Established that hiding the Wagon Bomb and shorting the Wizard's remote are accidents she never notices.
• Left whose little sister she is an explicit unknown.

Why it changed

A bubble mechanic with a toddler attached is not a kid. This revision builds the four-year-old the casting sheet describes, gives the protection rule to the kids who made it rather than an adult, and keeps her ignorant of all of it, because the moment she knows she is protected the joke is over.

Evidence and playtest marginalia

• docs/characters/roster-mix-v1.csv row 14, "Bubbling Toddler": age 4, White, female, size XS, "Can create a bubble smokescreen," "weak, slow, meandering," and the seed line, "nobody's willing to be the kid who soaked a toddler."
• artbook/content/roster.yml and decisions.md (2026-07-26): she is a public combatant seed added that day and Claira approved the public name. Charter v8 §8 lists thirteen combatants and does not include her; no §8 citation is invented here.
• docs/scouting/meijer-summer-aisle-2026-07.md: the bubble-smoke rule — "inside a cloud, a kid cannot be targeted" — plus the slow soak that makes a cloud a timer, not a home, and the Wagon Bomb's deep-fog lurk. It costs the whole feature behind S3.1.
• Nothing has been built for this kid. No cloud radius, drift path, emission rate, or targeting system to hang them on exists in sim/. Every figure a reader might expect here is absent rather than proposed, and provenfinding is null for the same reason.

Rejected or alternate directions

• A toddler in jeopardy.
• The v0.1 bubble-mower push toy as her silhouette.
• An adult on the lawn behind her.
• A saturated hue anywhere on her.
• Any awareness on her part of the protection.
• A knowing look between two older kids over her head.
• Bubble solution as a refillable ammunition resource.
• The whole war halted around her.
• Her fear, her tears, or a lost-child search.
• A named older sibling.
• Deliberate tactical cooperation with the Wagon Bomb.

Still unresolved

Featured question: does the street's refusal to soak her read as a rule the kids invented, and never as jeopardy?

Secondary unknowns:

• whether she is commandable, a neutral wandering actor, or a selected kid who goes autonomous on the block;
• whether the block's protection is an absolute rule or a strong convention;
• whose little sister she is;
• whether bubble concealment survives the S3.1 pass;
• whether an iridescent cloud with no hue stays legible in the low-poly lane.